Dip Your Ears, No. 119 (Grażina Bacewicz Concertos)

G.Bacewicz, Violin Concertos, Kurkowicz / Borowicz / Polish RSO CHAN 10533 (63:47)

In time for Grażina Bacewicz’ 100 anniversary (read about the composer in my anniversary tribute), Chandos—already among the labels that have done Bacewicz proud with fine releases—added an important recording of three of Bacewicz’ seven violin concertos to the discography.

Joanna Kurkowicz, already responsible for the violin sonatas on Chandos, doesn’t just contribute with tautly-beautiful playing in Concertos № 1 (ebullient like an excited, neo-classical puppy), № 3 (weltering in lyricism + Bartok) and № 7 (sophisticated complexity), but also lucid liner notes; a respite from the self-indulgent treacle some colleagues are guilty of. The Polish-American soloist is supported by the (Wroclaw) Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra under their new Artistic Director Łukasz Borowicz, a former assistant to Iván Fischer and Antoni Wit.

The three concertos provide a nice cross section of Bacewicz’s work for her own instrument and their dates of composition—1937, 1948, and 1965—show off her various and continuously evolving styles. Together with Krystian Zimerman’s recording of the Piano Sonata № 2 and the Piano Quintets (forever delayed and finally released April 2011 on Deutsche Grammophon), this is the most important Bacewicz release on a major label.

Dip Your Ears, No. 118 (Fantasy-Lied von der Erde)

G.Mahler, Lied von der Erde, K.Nagano / C.Gerhaher, K.F.Vogt Sony

Some people play Fantasy-Football, others Fantasy-Das Lied von der Erde. Restricting myself to active artists, I’d cast the Concertgebouw Amsterdam or the Munich Philharmonic (the latter gave the premiere performance), I’d want Pierre Boulez or Daniele Gatti to conduct. In the unthankful, difficult tenor part I’d want to hear Jonas Kaufman or Klaus Florian Vogt (just to see how his choir-boy voice could ring above the orchestra without having to push too hard). There might be several mezzos I could imagine adding magnificently to it, but for the version with two men singing there is only one baritone I’m really keen on seeing cast in Das Lied: Christian Gerhaher.

Sony comes awfully close to fulfilling my wishes: Klaus Florian Vogt and Christian Gerhaher perform together with Kent Nagano and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal. Not an orchestra I would admittedly have thought of, but like Kent Nagano—whose recordings I often prefer over his live performances (terrific Mahler 8^th)—they turn in an atmospheric, sensitive account that is the most pleasant surprise. Gerhaher is his usual self: The most self-effacing baritone of our time, natural, clear, and incredibly unaware of just how good he is. Perhaps not everyone will be impressed as much as I by his voice, it’s not the most powerful instrument, after all. But it is the most intelligently used, and has a vibrato that Gerhaher uses like string players used to: Only to emphasize certain points. If violinists strive to sound like certain sopranos, cellists should listen to Gerhaher.

If there was anything at fault with this disc to keep it from a straight shot into the “Best of 2009” list (which it made), it's Klaus Florian Vogt: I still think he could be ideal, in his own, certainly idiosyncratic way. There is nothing that need keep his detached, nasal, treble-ish voice from navigating Mahler’s score with the greatest success. He hints at it enough on this recording, too. But at times Vogt sounds so incredibly uninspired that it can’t be shrugged off as just an introverted interpretation. Instead, it sounds like he phoned his contribution in. Actually, he did, in a way: not in perfect health at the concerts, he recorded his parts later, in Munich. But I’m not sure why Vogt’s blandness should be the result of dubbing his part in, a month after the live performances.

I can accommodate myself with his stiff “Drunkard in Spring”, but it keeps the entire effort from being closer to idel than any recording of this work I’ve yet heard. And whether Vogt’s contribution pleases or displeases, the disc must be heard for Gerhaher’s “Farewell” alone, which suffices to make it the Mahler-recording of the year. (The booklet notes are detailed and useful, but money was saved by not including the text.)

Mahler Survey on ionarts at this link.

Mahler Songs at Clarice Smith

Charles T. Downey, Asher Fisch leads National Orchestral Institute in Mahler lecture-recital
Washington Post, June 29, 2012

Lamenti (Hasse, Haydn, Handel), S. Irányi, Hofkapelle München, M. Hofstetter

Song and symphony are opposites in many ways on the spectrum between simplicity and complexity. Gustav Mahler not only composed almost exclusively in these two genres; he combined them seamlessly, transforming both by hybridizing. The young musicians of the National Orchestral Institute, at the University of Maryland, are preparing for a performance of Mahler’s third symphony on Saturday. Their guest conductor for the week, Asher Fisch, sought to give his players some background with a lecture-recital on some of the composer’s songs on Wednesday night at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center.

The distance between song and symphony is mirrored by the divide between vocalists and instrumentalists, who often know relatively little about the music their counterparts perform. Fisch presented his ideas on Mahler with authority and charm. He referred more than once to concepts the NOI orchestra had worked on in rehearsal, making connections to the simple folk style of Mahler’s poetry and that of the “Des Knaben Wunderhorn” collection, explaining how Mahler quoted from or adapted the songs in the symphonies, and analyzing some of the more striking harmonic progressions. [Continue reading]

SEE ALSO:
Robert Battey, McTee’s ‘Double Play’ stands out in NOI concert led by Slatkin (Washington Post, June 18)

Andrew Lindemann Malone, Playing with Fire: National Festival Orchestra at the University of Maryland (DMV Classical, June 17)

Poppea: In Munich with Ivor Bolton

C. Monteverdi, L'Incoronazione di Poppea, A. C. Antonacci, D. Daniels, K. Moll, Bayerische Staatsoper, I. Bolton Farao B 108 020 | 2h49

British conductor Ivor Bolton cut his teeth at the Glyndebourne Festival, before leading a celebrated series of productions at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich -- he now conducts the Mozarteumorchester Salzburg and the newly formed Dresden Music Festival Orchestra. Bolton's Poppea came across my desk a couple years ago, in a re-release, and there is much to enjoy, beginning with the title role in the dramatic hands and shattering voice of soprano Anna Caterina Antonacci. Her Italian diction and sense of the flow of the role, shifting so effortlessly between recitative and metered pieces, are impeccable.

This cast also featured a countertenor as Nerone, in this case the excellent David Daniels, but the role, created originally for a rather high soprano castrato voice, stretches Daniels (and Philippe Jaroussky, reviewed yesterday) to some shrill unpleasantness at the top. The musical requirements seem to justify the less satisfying solution dramatically in this case, casting a woman as Nerone. Ottone, a lower role, works better for countertenors, but not really for Axel Köhler here. Dominique Visse makes an acid-voiced Arnalta, Kurt Moll is a woolly, dignified Seneca with some puissant low notes. Other high points include Dorothea Röschmann as a manic, cute Drusilla, and the innocent sound of a child treble, from the Tölzer Knabenchor, in the role of Amore. There are enough disappointments in the other bit parts that go against this version, as well as tenor Claes-Håkan Ahnsjö, who as Lucan has an unattractive duet with Daniels in the second act.

David Alden staged this production (more about that later), recorded live at the Munich Opera Festival in 1997 in not outstanding sound. There is lots of rustling of costumes and clatter of shoes caught by the mikes, and too much distance and room in the overall sound. To be fair, that was one of the aims of the Farao label, according to a booklet note by Peter Jonas, Intendant of the Munich State Opera. Bolton leads an excellent reading of the score, conducting from the harpsichord, with fine variation in the sound of the continuo section, with none other than Christina Pluhar on harp and Baroque guitar. That variation of the continuo sound is a principal attraction of the Christie recording, too, which helps cut down on the monotony of the recitative. Unlike Christie, Bolton uses only strings plus his varied continuo group (Christie gave some parts to recorders -- the score says next to nothing about the instrumentation), and he takes some unusual but striking liberties, like the glacial tempo of the opera's glorious concluding duet ("Pur ti miro"), which gives the piece a sensual quality rather than making it stall.

Poppea: 'Di questo seno i pomi?'

C. Monteverdi, L'Incoronazione di Poppea, D. de Niese, P. Jaroussky, Les Arts Florissants, W. Christie (released on April 3, 2012) Virgin 07095191 | 180' E. Rosand, Monteverdi's Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy

Claudio Monteverdi is the father of opera, and L'Incoronazione di Poppea, his final opera, is a twilight masterpiece, the Magic Flute, the Falstaff, the Parsifal of the early Baroque period. The problem is that, while no one doubts the ingenuity and dramatic force of this opera, it may not be by Monteverdi at all. As Ellen Rosand has written in her masterful survey of Monteverdi's Venetian operas, the source situation for Poppea is by far the most complicated of any Venetian opera of the period -- two distinct and rather different manuscripts, multiple versions of the libretto. The libretto's approach to characterization, its moral ambiguity, strikes us now as particularly modern, and the proliferation of productions and recordings of the opera in recent years (René Jacobs, Emmanuelle Haïm, William Christie at the Opéra de Lyon, David Alden, to name just a few) has only amplified the study of the work. As Rosand puts it, "no modern performance could be attempted without coming to grips with the numerous variant readings" of the score.

A number of new recordings of Poppea have crossed my desk recently, the first to consider being this DVD of a staging by Pier Luigi Pizzi, recorded at Madrid's Teatro Real. It is another production featuring Les Arts Florissants and William Christie in the pit, which means that the playing and the scholarly consideration given to the score are a known quantity (here using a new edition of the Venetian version of the opera, edited by Jonathan Cable, who plays violone in christie's continuo group). Christie returned again to Danielle de Niese for the title role, after grooming her for the role in his production in Lyon in 2005, and for once Christie's taste in voices seems way off base. On one hand de Niese, a beautiful woman, is an obvious choice to play Poppea -- according to Tacitus, one of the most beautiful women of her age but also one who would focus her lust on whatever object was most to her advantage. Poppea has to seduce the viewer, yes, but more importantly she has to seduce the listener, and de Niese's voice, if not her looks, falls short -- too many mannerisms (straight tone popping into vibrato, as if she were singing Whitney Houston), questionable Italian pronunciation, and shallowness of tone. De Niese also starred as Poppea at Glyndebourne, where she is now mistress of the house, a performance released on DVD by Decca a couple of years ago (with Emmanuelle Haïm conducting a production by Robert Carsen) and with the same issues.

There are other problems, too, beginning with the rest of the casting, a group of high-profile names that do not really mesh with one another, beginning with the boyish Nerone of countertenor Philippe Jaroussky (in Lyon, Christie cast Nerone as a tenor rather than a countertenor), who strikes no sparks with de Niese. This is at least partially due to the ridiculous costuming and makeup (design all credited to Pizzi) that in the first act makes him look like a Goth vampire-gorilla, but here Nerone's most sultry duet is not with Poppea but in the little scene with Lucano in the second act, where Nero is supposed to be rhapsodizing in poetry with his court poet (Lucan) -- about Poppea -- interpreted here as its own sort of love scene, with the two men singing the words to one another. Bass Antonio Abete, who has an odd way of singing out of one corner of his mouth, is a sententious Seneca, while the Ottone of Max Emanuel Cencic and the Ottavia of Anna Bonitatibus are sharp-edged and sometimes shrill, musically satisfying in a way but not creating much sympathy for either character. In the uneven supporting cast (so many bit parts!), countertenor José Lemos has a charming turn in en travesti role of the Nurse (matched by the less vocally attractive but high-kitsch Arnalta of Robert Burt, in a bright purple Dame Edna moment in the bizarrely timed comic scene near the end of Act III). The one standout is soprano Ana Quintans as a coquettish Drusilla, the sort of clean but potent voice that would actually make a much better Poppea. The set, a sort of Baroque version of Rome, with modernized costumes, is somber and mostly nondescript.

Leslie Amper @ NGA

Charles T. Downey, Pianist Leslie Amper offers a slice of the soundtrack to George Bellows’s era
Washington Post, June 26, 2012

Henry Cowell Plays His Own Piano Music

Can we re-create the sound world of a previous era? That was the goal of pianist Leslie Amper in a concert hosted by the National Gallery of Art on Sunday evening. In conjunction with the museum’s exhibition of the works of American painter George Bellows, Amper performed American music from the first quarter of the 20th century, when Bellows was active, and Chopin’s music admired by the painter’s pianist wife.

In terms of technical or interpretative accomplishment, there was not much to inspire wonder, but the American selections, rarely heard in concert, proved worthwhile. Amper dived into Henry Cowell’s “Tides of Manaunaun,” creating a vast rumble of waves on the elbow-to-fist left-hand clusters under an almost trite, vaguely Celtic right-hand melody. Amper grouped this daring work with more tonal selections, Edward MacDowell’s “Joy of Autumn” and Amy Beach’s “Honeysuckle” (from her collection “From Grandmother’s Garden”), the latter a sort of Chopinesque polonaise. The more demanding sections of Charles Griffes’s piano sonata were rough around the edges, including a couple of memory slips. But the “Thoreau” movement from Charles Ives’s “Concord” sonata had an idyllic dreaminess, wandering amid half-voiced echoes and wistful rhythmic freedom, albeit without the optional flute part that Ives added, a ghostly evocation of the instrument that Thoreau often played while boating on Walden Pond. [Continue reading]

Leslie Amper, piano
Lecture and Concert
National Gallery of Art

Screening of The New York Hat, a 16-minute silent short by D. W. Griffith, made just three years before The Birth of a Nation, starring Mary Pickford and Lionel Barrymore

Recital program:
Charles Griffes, Piano Sonata
Henry Cowell, The Tides of Manaunaun
Charles Macdowell, New England Idyls
Ives, Piano Sonata No. 2 ("Concord, Mass., 1840-60") -- fourth movement ("Thoreau")

From Thoreau's Flute by Louisa May Alcott:
"Then from the flute, untouched by hands,
There came a low, harmonious breath:
'For such as he there is no death;
His life the eternal life commands;
Above man's aims his nature rose.
The wisdom of a just content
Made one small spot a continent
And turned to poetry life's prose'."

George Bellows @ NGA

Yesterday afforded the opportunity to take in the relatively new George Bellows retrospective at the National Gallery of Art. George Bellows (1882-1925) has been eclipsed in recent years by Edward Hopper, the other famous student of Robert Henri, who led what was later called the Ashcan School in New York. Hopper hit his stride in the late 20s, just around the time that Bellows died -- prematurely, from complications arising from a burst appendix -- when Bellows, in fact, seemed poised to make a breakthrough. What Bellows was able to create ranges from unforgettable to regrettable, and this exhibit of over a hundred prints, drawings, and paintings makes clear that it is perhaps not only for painting that he should be remembered.

Pierre Henri pushed his students to go back into art history beyond Impressionism, and the influence of Manet and the Realists weighs heavily in Bellows's work. The many fine lithographs and ink drawings in the exhibit are the best examples of how Bellows brought the satirical and political leanings of Daumier and the graphic shock tactics of Goya to his focus on the common man in New York City in the early 20th century. A well-meaning socialist, Bellows documented the squalor and hunger of the tenements like a journalist: the urchins in street fights or run-ins with the law, a brawl in Times Square on the night of a New York gubernatorial election, the grueling excavation to build Penn Station, hungry stray dogs prowling for scraps on a garbage heap, the hardships of prison, and the grim view of executions both state-sponsored and vigilante. Bellows achieved a Rembrandt-like intensity in many of these works, which he was not always able to transfer to paint, but he also crossed the border into bathos with a series of sensationalist propaganda images relating the human rights abuses perpetrated by German soldiers in Belgium in World War I.

Where Daumier loved the stage and performers of all kinds, it was the boxing ring that most memorably caught Bellows's eye. It was here that he was best able to catch in paint the newspaper-like immediacy he accomplished in lithographs, especially in Stag at Sharkey's, a boxing portrait that is one of his best paintings, grouped in the exhibit with two other less familiar boxing portraits and complimented by lots of print images on the subject (the NGA has quite a collection of the boxing works, including the lithograph of Stag at Sharkey's, which is even better than the painting). Bellows was also particularly moved by the plight of children in the poor neighborhoods of New York, a subject that he caught so memorably in the Corcoran's Forty-Two Kids, capturing the rubbery bodies of poor kids at the industrial river's edge with beautifully brushed loops and whorls of paint. The same subject is explored in a selection of other paintings from private collections and museum loans, including River Rats and Hals-like portraits of these tough-nosed urchins -- Paddy Flanigan and Frankie the Organ Boy (an orphan organ grinder) -- who might later become the blood-spattered pugilists of the private boxing clubs.

Other Reviews: Peter Schjeldahl, Young and Gifted (The New Yorker, June 25) ---, Audio Slide Show: George Bellows (The New Yorker, June 21) Rupert Cornwell, Streetwise scenes with plenty of punch (The Independent, June 18) Philip Kennicott, National Gallery takes a holistic view of George Bellows’s art and career (Washington Post, June 7) Kevin Nance, Another Round for a Realist Contender (Wall Street Journal, June 1)

Working in paint, Bellows seemed to be distracted by the possibilities of color, a part of what caused the linear clarity of his lithographic approach to become indistinct on canvas. The landscapes and seascapes in the show are beautifully composed but often unbalanced by the bright color palette: without the edgy subject matter, that love of the marginalized, Bellows lost his punch in most cases. The human figure likewise fared poorly under Bellows's brush, when a single body, and especially a single face, becomes the focus of a painting, at least until the final paintings of the 20s. In the works shown in the exhibit's final room, the influence of newer modernist styles was shaking up Bellows's approach.

The George Bellows exhibit will remain on view at the National Gallery of Art through October 8, after which it will travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (November 15, 2012, to February 18, 2013) and the Royal Academy of Arts in London (March 16 to June 9, 2013).

In Brief: Waldbühne Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to online audio, online video, and other good things in Blogville and Beyond.

• Watch René Jacobs lead Concerto Vocale, the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, and the Konzertchor der Deutschen Staatsoper Berlin in Emilio de' Cavalieri's Rappresentatione di anima et di corpo (or you can listen to audio only from France Musique). [Cité de la Musique Live]


• Listen to the finalists of the singing competition of the Concours Musical International de Montréal earlier this month, with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal conducted by Alan Trudel. [France Musique]


• Daniel Barenboim leads the Berlin Staatskapelle in Bruckner's fifth symphony at the Wiener Festwochen. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• From the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, pianist Makoto Ozone joins the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris under the direction of Thomas Zehetmair, for a concert of music by Haydn, Ravel, and Mozart. It concludes with Ozone's improvisations on themes by Mozart. [France Musique]


• Also from the Festival Mozart at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Jérémie Rhorer leads an all-Mozart program with Le Cercle de l’Harmonie, including the Coronation Mass. [France Musique]


• More Mozart from the Festival de Saint-Denis, as Colin Davis conducts the Orchestre National de France and the Chœur de Radio France, in the Requiem Mass and other works. [France Musique]


• Also from the Festival de Saint-Denis, the Chœur and Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, under the baton of Daniel Harding, perform Schönberg's Verklärte Nacht and Schubert's B-flat major Mass, D. 950. [ARTE Live Web]


• Kyrill Karabits leads the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, in music of Rachmaninoff and Walton. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Charles Dutoit leads the Dresden Staatskapelle, with Yuja Wang as soloist, in music of Prokofiev, Debussy, and Respighi. [France Musique]


• There is a new exhibit of work by Laurent Grasso at the Musée du Jeu de Paume: take a look at some images. [Le Monde]


• Hear the Borodin Quartet play Tchaikovsky and Brahms at the Wiener Musikverein, as part of the Wiener Festwochen. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Live from the Parc André Citroën, a banner concert for the annual Fête de la Musique, with the Orchestre National de France. [France Musique]


• A 1983 performance of Wagner's Das Liebesverbot in Munich, with Wolfgang Sawallisch conducting Hermann Prey and Wolfgang Fassler. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• From Les Chorégies d'Orange, a concert of operatic excerpts featuring Joseph Calleja and other singers with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo. [France Musique]


• From London last September, the Royal Opera's performance of Gounod's Faust, with Vittorio Grigolo, René Pape, Angela Gheorghiu, and Dmitri Hvorostovsky. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• From Vienna last year, pianist Till Fellner and the Minetti String Quartet perform music by Dvořák, Szymanowski, and Mozart. [France Musique]


• Jean-Claude Casadesus and the Orchestre National de Lille celebrate the 150th birthday of Claude Debussy. On the menu are Le Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, La Mer, Les Nocturnes, and a suite version of the orchestral interludes that Debussy added to Pelléas et Melisande to cover scene changes. [ARTE Live Web]


• Les Cris de Paris performs the world premiere of Johannes Maria Staud's Le voyage, as well as music by Jonathan Harvey and Marta Gentilucci. [France Musique]


• Andris Nelsons leads the Berlin Philharmonic in today's annual outdoor concert at the Waldbühne, with music by Tchaikovsky including the fifth symphony and the 1812 Overture. The live broadcast begins at 2:15 pm EDT. [ARTE Live Web]

Briefly Noted: Chris Fitzgerald-Lombard

Passiontide: Holy Week in the Courts of Europe, 1600-1745, C. Fitzgerald-Lombard, Apollo Baroque Consort, J. Waggott (released on June 12, 2012) Convivium CR015 | 48'

The solo motet was one of the more important, and now less understood and known, genres of the the Baroque era, the sacred counterpart of the operatic aria. This little disc is a worthy debut for the recently formed ensemble known as the Apollo Baroque Consort, bringing together three longer works that are all mostly solo settings of important texts associated with Holy Week: the penitential psalm Miserere mei deus by Michel-Richard de Lalande (1657-1726); the sequence Stabat mater dolorosa, in the Pianto della Madonna by Giovanni-Felice Sances (1600-1679), last heard on a recording by Philippe Jaroussky; and a section of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, proper to Good Friday, by Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679-1745). The composers' life spans cover most of the Baroque period and three different geographic and stylistic areas: the elegant and expressive French style, the more florid Italian, and the more polyphonic and complex German. The solo motet will work only with a beautiful voice that holds the ear, which this disc has in tenor Christopher Fitzgerald-Lombard, who founded Apollo Baroque Consort with Joe Waggott last year; Waggott ably provides most of the accompaniment on continuo organ (plus cello and theorbo), in keeping with the relatively simple style of the solo motet, sometimes in alternation with a small chorus. Only the Zelenka, the most complicated score by far, requires a larger, but still relatively small, consort of instruments. Minor technical blemishes (intonation, perhaps overdone French-inflected Latin in the Lalande) may limit my recommendation, but the combination of unusual repertoire and generally beautiful sound, recorded this past February at St. Alban the Martyr in Highgate, Birmingham, make for an accomplished debut.

Christian Gerhaher, Othmar Schoeck – A Love Story

On the occasion of Christian Gerhaher's release of Schoenberg's "The Book of the Hanging Gardens" (Sony, June 26 2012), here's a rescued and republished article from the WETA column:

What does “romantic” in music really mean? It is easy to use to describe music as ‘romantic’, precisely because it is such a broad concept that it is almost never wrong. From Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony via Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, to Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg, “romantic” is the word. Now add an organ symphony by Widor, ChopinÉtudes, a Tchaikovsky opera, a Rachmaninoff concerto… “romantic” all. It’s easy to see the phrase as a cop-out, even when enriched with clarifications like “French-” or “Classical-” or “late-romantic”. But it remains a ubiquitous phrase all the same, because it does have its uses. It’s at the very least a broadly common denominator that reader and the struggling music-journalist share. If the composer died before 1830 and his music is described as romantic we know not to expect some Amadeus-come-lately; if he was born after 1890 we need not fear strict atonality or aleatoric music.

Schoeck: Notturno – 1. Ruhig – Mertens & Minguet Quartet (excerpt)

Describing Othmar Schoeck’s Notturno (1931-33) as romantic is fairly useless in the sense that it won’t prepare one for what the music actually sounds like… it would mislead. But describing the work for string quartet and baritone (a rare combination very likely inspired by Schoenberg’s 1908 String Quartet op.10) as romantic is essential to understanding it. Notturno is the epitome of extreme, late romantic music; the squeezing of chromaticism and the stretching of our common harmonic understanding to, and often beyond, the breaking point.

Schoeck: Notturno – 2. Presto – Gerhaher & Rosamunde Quartet (excerpt)

The difference is similar to describing Webern’s Langsamer Satz as ‘romantic’ (it still, very obviously, is) and the contemporaneous Berg Sonata op.1 as ‘romantic’. (It certainly is, but not at all so obviously.) What makes the difference between perceiving Berg’s op.1 as an early exercise in pantonalism and perceiving it as an achingly beautiful, wistful romantic statement heavy with the airs of Viennese coffee-house atmosphere, is the ability to keep the notes ‘in the air’, in your RAM(Random Access Memory) if you will, and recall them when the notes that give them their proper context finally arrive. It’s chromatic, but with incredibly long, intertwined lines. I can think of no better analogy than a thoroughly constructed, impressive German sentence the length of two paragraphs (think Kant) where, to paraphrase Mark Twain, you won’t know the meaning until the writer, who dives into a sentence, emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb between his teeth.

Schoeck: Notturno – 3. Unruhig & Bewegt – Gerhaher & Rosamunde Quartet (excerpt)

Read more »

Operatic Threesome, Damrau Glitters in 'Ory'

This article was first published at The Classical Review on June 19, 2012.

Rossini, Le Comte Ory, J. D. Flórez, D. Damrau, J. DiDonato, Metropolitan Opera (production by Bartlett Sher), M. Benini (released on April 3, 2012) Virgin 0709599 3 | 153' Libretto (.PDF) Score

Rossini’s penultimate opera, Le Comte Ory, is the comic counterpart to his tragic masterpiece Guillaume Tell -- both were premiered within a year of each other, in 1828 and 1829, after which Rossini did not complete another opera for the remaining 40 years of his life.

He created Ory for the Académie Royale de Musique -- that is, the Opéra de Paris rather than the Opéra Comique -- but in spite of being very serious comedy, it has fallen into near-obscurity. The Metropolitan Opera, for example, had never performed the work until last year, in this production directed by Bartlett Sher, captured on video for the company’s HD simulcast to movie theaters and for transmission on PBS’s Great Performances series.

The slender libretto by Eugène Scribe and Charles-Gaspard Delestre-Poirson was based on their own play, a send-up of medieval farce, from a decade earlier, itself based on a collection of medieval ballads made by Pierre-Antoine de la Place in the 18th century, including a melody quoted by Rossini in the opera. Rossini reused a good portion of his score for Il Viaggio a Reims, an occasional piece created for the coronation of Charles X and never published after a few performances in Paris. The music that Rossini added, however, is some of his most charming, leading Liszt, who sponsored a production in Weimar in 1850, to call it “the champagne opera.”

It is the music one remembers, like the Act I finale, an unaccompanied ensemble for 14 voices, described by scholar Richard Osborne as “music in the Italian church style -- using an a cappella church ensemble to celebrate not some Christian rite but rather the unfrocking of an imposter priest is rather a nice joke.”

The story opposes two seducers, a libertine count and his amorous page -- a replay of the Count and Cherubino from Le nozze di Figaro -- both of whom are in love with a countess who has sworn not to take a lover. The Count disguises himself, first as a holy hermit and then as a woman on pilgrimage (not actually a nun, in spite of the way it is staged here), to worm his way into the locked Castle of Formoutiers and its bevy of beautiful women, all waiting faithfully for their husbands to return from the Crusades. The page, Isolier (a trouser role), helps Ory’s tutor, who has been searching for his wayward charge, find him and foil his plan, but not before Ory finds his way into the countess’s bed, only to find a surprise there in the form of his own page who has preceded him (the splendid trio ‘A la faveur de cette nuit obscure’) – a man dressed as a woman seducing a woman in bed with a man played by a woman, if you are keeping score.

The principal attraction of this staging is what the French call a distribution d’enfer, with three knockout singers in the three leads, the sort of combination one usually finds only at celebrity gala concerts. The cast is led without a doubt by soprano Diana Damrau, who gives a blockbuster performance as La Comtesse Adèle, with flawless coloratura technique in the showstopping ‘En proie à la tristesse’ in Act I, ending on a blistering high E flat. Mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato is boyish and charming as Isolier, with equally fine fioriture and some fiery high notes of her own.

Few tenors working today are as accomplished in the Rossini operas as Juan Diego Flórez, and he plays Ory with a devilish wink, a striking ease and agility in difficult melismatic passages, and ringing high notes – the role has a number of high Cs and Ds. That he made it onto the stage at all that day was something of a miracle: as it was widely reported, he was with his wife, who was giving birth to their first child at their apartment only a little over a half-hour before curtain up.

Shortcomings are due mostly to the staging by Bartlett Sher, which tries a little too hard, setting the action in a 19th-century theater rather than in the Middle Ages. Looking for an intimacy hard to achieve in the cavernous theater of the Metropolitan Opera, the sets (designed by Michael Yeargan) reduce the stage space, putting the playing space on a little platform, with many old-school effects viewed in the ‘off stage’ space and interfering with the action.

The theatrical mise en abyme technique -- a performance within the performance -- is now so common in operatic productions that it is becoming a little tired. The effect is made worse by the manner of the Met HD simulcasts, which invade the backstage and, while showing an often unseen side of how an opera is staged also puncture the aura of mystery, because they present opera in a way it is not meant to be seen.

The cinematic close-up makes sense in film and even theater, when the main form of emotional communication is through subtlety of facial expression, but not in opera, where it is supposed to be about singing and music seen and heard from a distance. The Met camera (video directed by Gary Halvorson) focuses in far too much on individuals, and often the wrong ones.

For example, we get glimpses of a supernumerary character, a sort of stage manager for the little show within a show, whom we see manipulating little bird puppets around the singers and, at times, mugging directly at the viewer through the camera. For a Flórez high note in the Count’s opening cavatina, the camera pans upward awkwardly to catch the same servant wagging the birds above the singer’s head, which utterly deflates the excitement of hearing the note sung. The camera also catches members of the chorus mugging, looking vacant, darting a glimpse at the conductor – all things one is not meant to see, and almost certainly would not see from a seat in the house.

Perhaps unfortunately, the DVD keeps some of the feel and format of the HD broadcasts, opening with the introduction by host Renée Fleming, while most of the intermission interviews are kept for a bonus section on the second DVD. The interview features, where the host catches one or more of the singers right after the last note of the finale, are often uncomfortable. The best outcome is to spoil the musical effect, when you just want to be with your memory of the last notes and not have the illusion burst by seeing the singer rather than the character. The worst is embarrassment for the singe.

Other elements are out of place, too. In the supporting cast, Suzanne Resmark’s tone was a little off-color and under pitch as the Comtesse’s servant, Ragonde; Michele Pertusi rushed through some of the fast passages as the Gouverneur; but Stéphane Degout had a patter-quick turn as the count’s servant, Raimbaud. At the podium, Maurizio Benini was far from stellar, too matter of fact, and the performance suffered from some of the coordination issues that Anne Midgette and other critics noted on opening night, still there two weeks into the run.

The switch of focus one can discern at the Met, away from musical concerns to visual ones, is evident not only in the way the production was realized and filmed but in the choice of score: as Alex Ross pointed out, the performance did not take advantage of the new critical edition of this opera, which restores some of the portions of the two finales cut for later revivals. Then again, neither does this DVD’s main competition, a DVD from Glyndebourne, from a performance in 1997 with Annick Massis, Marc Laho, and Diana Montague.

SEE ALSO:
Glyndebourne production

Alex Ross, Le Comte Ory; or, missed opportunities (The Rest Is Noise, March 26, 2011)

Anne Midgette, Fizzy “Ory” at Met Opera charms its public (The Classical Beat, March 26, 2011)

Richard K. Fitzgerald, Frolics and Frippery: A Roll in the Hay with Rossini (Ionarts, July 22, 2006)

Anthony Tommasini, With Rossini’s Mix of This and That, the Met Finds an Excuse for a Romp (New York Times, March 25, 2011)

Peter Gelb, Theatrical Nuance on a Grand Scale (New York Times, March 25, 2011) -- an "advertorial" as Anne Midgette put in, run by the paper on the same day as its own review of the production

À mon chevet: 'Bel-Ami'

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

Suddenly, the Swiss guard struck the pavement three times with the wooden part of his halberd. All those assembled turned with a long swish of skirts and a scraping of chairs. The young woman appeared, on her father's arm, in the bright light of the opened portal. She still looked like a child's doll, a white toy with orange flowers in her hair. She stayed for a few moments at the entrance, and then when she took her first step into the nave, the great organ pushed forth a powerful cry, announcing the entrance of the bride with its great metal voice. [...] All the while, the great organ was singing, pushing through the enormous edifice the purring rhythmic accents of its shining throats, crying out to heaven the joy and the pain of mankind. [...]

The bishop ended his oration. A priest clothed in a golden stole climbed to the high altar, and the great organ began again to celebrate the glory of the newlyweds. Soon it was shooting forth a prolonged clamor, enormous, swelling like waves, so sonorous and so powerful that it seemed it must be raising up the vault and making it jump to expand into the blue sky. Its vibrant noise filled the entire church, made flesh and soul shiver. Then all of a sudden it calmed; fine notes, alert, ran through the air, tickling the ear like soft breaths; these were little, gracious songs, tiny, bouncing, that fluttered like birds; and suddenly, this coquettish music broadened anew, again becoming terrifying in strength and breadth, as if a grain of sand was being transformed into a whole world.

Then human voices rose up, passing over their bowed heads. Vauri and Landeck, from the Opéra, were singing. Incense spread a fine odor of benzoin, and on the altar the divine sacrifice was accomplished; the God-Man, at the call of his priest, came down to earth to consecrate the triumph of the Baron Georges du Roy. Bel-Ami, on his knees next to Suzanne, had lowered his head. He felt at that moment almost like a believer, almost religious, full of thanks for the divinity that had thus favored him, that had treated him with such respect. And without knowing exactly whom he was addressing, he thanked it for his success.

-- Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami, pp. 565, 567, 570-71 / (my translation)

These passages come from Georges Du Roy's final wedding, which takes place in the Église de la Madeleine in Paris. At the time when this wedding was taking place, the grand organ in that church was rather new, completed by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll in 1846. Although it does not quite fit with the time frame of the story, it seems likely that Maupassant, in describing the music at this most magnificent wedding, had in mind the playing of none other than Camille Saint-Saëns, who was organist at La Madeleine from 1857 to 1877. What the characters are hearing, in fact, sounds like one of Saint-Saëns' epic improvisations, which were the talk of Paris. Liszt, who enjoyed a life-long friendship of mutual admiration with Saint-Saëns, wrote to him, "You use the organ as an orchestra in an incredible way. The most proficient organists in all countries have only to take their hats off to you." When Maupassant moved to Paris as a young man, working as an impoverished clerk (much as Georges Duroy first appears in Bel-Ami), it was at the tail end of Saint-Saëns' tenure at La Madeleine.

Briefly Noted: Marlis Petersen Eternally Feminine

Das Ewig-Weibliche (Goethe-Lieder), M. Petersen, J. Springer (released on March 13, 2012) HMC 902904 | 58'52"

About the time that this disc was released in the United States, I listened to a live recital by the artists, soprano Marlis Petersen and pianist Jendrik Springer, from the Mozart-Saal of the Wiener Konzerthaus, through the Web site of Austrian radio (Österreichischer Rundfunk). Countless composers have set Goethe's words to song, and Petersen and Springer get top marks here for not selecting any of the expected choices, the songs that get performed all the time. This is true even for some of the most familiar poetry: Gretchen's spinning song is presented in the setting of Richard Wagner, and Mignon's Kennst du das Land in that of Alphons Diepenbrock (1862-1921). Six settings of the poem Wandrers Nachtlied II ("Ein Gleiches") -- which Goethe wrote on the wall of a Thuringian hunting-lodge near Ilmenau on a visit to the Kickelhahn -- punctuate the recital, and apart from the first, by Robert Schumann, none is particularly familiar.

Beyond those few obvious choices, the texts are hardly familiar either, words spoken by or about several Goethe characters: in addition to Gretchen and Mignon, Stella from the 1775 play Stella, Klärchen from Egmont, Suleika from Marianne von Millemer, Philine (also from Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre), and Helena in Faust. The composers represented include, besides the expected ones like Robert Schumann, Hugo Wolf, Franz Schubert, and Franz Liszt, names like Ernst Krenek, Walter Braunfels, Wilhelm Kempff, Hans Sommer, Charles Ives, Nicolay Medtner, and Manfred Trojahn. Petersen came onto many American listeners' radar when she served as a whirlwind replacement for Natalie Dessay as Ophélie in Hamlet at the Metropolitan Opera in 2010, but she deserves your attention on her own artistic merits. It is not a voice of infinite warmth and largesse, noteworthy more for its clarity and piercing qualities than being the sort of voice you just want to wrap yourself up in, paired here with the sensitive accompanying of Jendrik Springer.

A faultless sense of intonation and a certain adventurousness make her a natural fit for the challenging music of Manfred Trojahn, which Petersen has championed a number of times. His substantial monologue on the Helen of Troy texts from Faust, composed in 2008 and recorded here for the first time, is a fine contribution to this body of music. It makes a good pairing with the Stella monologue by Krenek that opens the disc, also receiving its first recording along with the Braunfels song Der Trommel gerühret and two of the Wandrers Nachtlied songs. Marlis Petersen will give a version of this recital at Carnegie Hall on October 26, an event unfortunately not being replicated by Vocal Arts D.C. At least not yet.

Briefly Noted: 'Silfra'

Silfra, H. Hahn, Hauschka (released on May 22, 2012) DG B0016798-02 | 52'02"

The PR on this new disc has been in full force, so you have surely heard of it by now. The fruit of a collaboration between the violinist Hilary Hahn and the prepared piano player Hauschka (AKA Volker Bertelmann), it is a set of tracks improvised in Iceland. The music was inspired by a place named Silfra, in the Þingvallavatn Lake, where the rift between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates is located. The style of music hovers between rock drive and New Age meditation, with both players creating some unexpected and generally attractive sounds on their instruments. Readers in Washington already know that we have recommended the duo's performance tonight, at The Birchmere in Alexandria (June 18, 7:30 pm), part of a national tour to promote the album.

So, this is obviously an important release, and it marks a departure of sorts for Hilary Hahn, who has many accomplishments but is not generally thought of as an improviser. In fact, as Anne Midgette has written in a fine piece for the Washington Post, improvisation is an area that most classical musicians avoid -- with notable exceptions among historically informed performance musicians and organists. In fact, if you are looking to hear what a top-notch classically trained musician can do as an improviser, the first thing to do would be to attend a service at certain churches -- Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, for one, and the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the National Cathedral, and St. Patrick's in the City to name just a few local examples. The problem is that Hahn is a dabbler, even though this project was not her first foray into improvisation, and that is evident in the recording. Improvisation is actually something that requires a lot of work (this from someone who has only dabbled in it, and the hours of transcribing other people's improvisations, so that I could play them note for note, were excruciating), at least to make it more than just a sort of parlor trick, to be able to make music that is not only pleasing, that hits the chord changes and generally makes musical sense, but that also holds one's interest beyond just the moment.

Silfra, for me at least, does not do that. Over several listenings, it became less and less interesting each time. It has some lovely, atmospheric moments -- the cold, still air of the opening track, the crackling energy of Bounce Bounce and Sink, the sort of underwater world of Rift -- with musical ideas that evoke cracking ice, whale calls, volcanic bubbling, dripping water, and a whole moonscape of otherworldly sounds. It has been no secret at least as far back as Henry Cowell and John Cage's first experiments with the prepared piano that the instrument can be forced to make all sorts of unusual sounds. Hauschka pulls out a whole bag of tricks in this department that provide most of the musical interest in the collaboration. As much as it tickles the ear the first couple times around, the disc just left me cold, but it will still be interesting to find out what impression this odd couple makes in live performance.

Will Robin has much more in-depth thoughts on this disc at his blog, Seated Ovation.

SVILUPPO:
Anne Midgette, Hahn and Hauschka at Birchmere (Washington Post, June 20)

In Brief: At the Lake Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to online audio, online video, and other good things in Blogville and Beyond.

• From London's Royal Festival Hall, Marin Alsop conducts pianist Stephen Hough and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, in music by Martinů, Liszt, and Dvořák. [France Musique]


• From the Wiener Festwochen, Rudolf Buchbinder joins Concentus Musicus Wien and Nikolaus Harnoncourt for music of Mozart. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Listen to violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann join the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra for a program of music by Wagner, Dvořák, and Mendelssohn. [France Musique]


• Hear Kalevi Aho's recent concerto for timpani trombone and orchestra, part of a concert by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• From the Festival de Radio France et Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon, a recital by pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, with music by Haydn and Debussy. [France Musique]


• A recording of Mozart's Idomeneo, made at Glyndebourne in 1964, with Luciano Pavarotti, among others. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• From the Göttingen International Handel Festival, a concert by soprano Eugénie Warnier and Les Talens Lyriques, with music by Couperin, Montéclair, Handel, Lambert, and more. [France Musique]


• Gleb Ivanov plays a recital of music by Liszt and Schubert, in the Auditorium du Louvre. [France Musique]


• The Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, under conductor Jean Deroyer, celebrate the 60th birthday of composer Philippe Manoury, plus the world premiere of Yann Robin's Inferno, a new work for orchestra and electronics based on Dante. [France Musique]


• The Quatuor Zemlinsky and pianist Varduhi Yeritsyan perform chamber music by Beethoven, Webern, and Dvořák at the Dominican Church of Guebwiller as part of the festival "Les Musicales de Colmar." [France Musique]


• Also from Colmar, soprano Kiera Duffy, Marc Coppey, and seven other cellists perform a concert of music by Villa-Lobos, Bruno Mantovani, Pierre Boulez, and Jean-Louis Florentz. [France Musique]


• Lang Lang performs a concert, with friends, to celebrate his 30th birthday. [ARTE Live Web]

À mon chevet: 'Bel-Ami'

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

The inspiration and true editors of La Vie Française were a half-dozen deputies interested in all the speculations that moved or sustained the director. In the newsroom they were called "Walter's Band," and they were envied because they were supposed to earn money with him and through him. Forestier, the political editor, was only the straw man of these business men, the one who executed the plans suggested by them. They whispered important articles to him, that he was going to write on his own to be at peace, he used to say. But, in order to give the newspaper a literary and Parisian sheen, they had attached to it two famous writers in different genres: Jacques Rival, a chronicler of news, and Norbert de Varenne, a poet and fantastical writer, or rather story-teller, following the new school. Then they had acquired, at bargain prices, critics of art, painting, music, theater, a crime editor, and a horse-racing editor, among the mercenary gang of do-everything writers. Two worldly women, "Pink Domino" and "White Paw," sent in worldly bits, on questions of fashion, elegant living, etiquette, savoir-vivre, and put to paper indiscretions about great ladies. And La Vie Française "navigated on the deep and even deeper," guided by all these different hands. [emphasis mine]

-- Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami, pp. 154-55 (my translation)

Has so much really changed about how a newspaper is run since the time of Guy de Maupassant? The recent film adaptation of this excellent novel, reviewed last week, left out far too much of Maupassant's narrative, including the vivid monologue by Norbert de Varenne, spoken to Duroy as they walk to his home from a dinner party, about the agony of old age, no longer ascending the mountain as young men but passing the summit and descending the other side toward death, as well as a vivid portrayal of a somewhat ridiculous but terrifying duel that Duroy fights with a journalist from another newspaper who has accused him of lying. The film may not have been that good, but I thank those who made it for getting me started on a Maupassant kick this summer.

Avi Avital and the Miraculous Mandolin

Charles T. Downey, Mandolinist Avi Avital
Washington Post, June 15, 2012

J. S. Bach, Concertos (arr.), Avi Avital (mandolin), Kammerakademie Potsdam

The mandolin is an odd instrument on which to build a solo performing career as a classical musician, but Avi Avital seems poised to do just that. Born in Israel and trained there and in Italy, he has experimented with crossover ventures, but his first solo album with Deutsche Grammophon, released this week, is devoted to transcriptions of Bach concertos.

As revealed at a concert Wednesday at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue, presented by the Washington Performing Arts Society, Avital is an accomplished musician but will probably remain a specialty act. The mandolin’s sound had considerable charm, helped along by discreet but still slightly canned amplification, but it has limitations in holding the ear’s attention over a sustained period. It worked best in music closest to the instrument’s home repertoire, a revelatory performance of Bartok’s “Seven Romanian Dances.” Composed on the piano and later arranged for orchestra, these folk miniatures became hypnotic when arranged for the mandolin, the little dissonant inflections seeming to make perfect sense. [Continue reading]

Avi Avital, mandolin
Washington Performing Arts Society
Sixth and I Historic Synagogue

June Chamber Festival II

This review is an Ionarts exclusive.

The annual June Chamber Festival at the Kreeger Museum comes to its conclusion this week. We managed to get there for the second of the three concerts, on Tuesday evening, and while the results from the American Chamber Players have improved from last year, the impression remains that the main draw of these concerts is the unusual repertoire and the beauty of the venue. Cellist Stephen Balderston had to withdraw from this year's concerts, following a shoulder surgery, but he was replaced quite ably by Israeli-born cellist Inbal Segev.

The evening opened with Mozart's Duo in G Major for violin and viola, K. 423, a piece recently noted in a disc of duo sonatas by Rachel Podger and Jane Rogers. It is a pleasing piece under most circumstances, only solo passages did reveal some infelicities in both soloists. It was paired with even less substantial fare, Kuhlau's Trio in G Major, op. 119, a piece interesting to hear if less interesting to hear again. The problem in this performance came from the fact that the work was created for two flutes and piano, requiring Segev to curtail her sound quite severely in this arrangement for flute, cello, and piano (by Nicholas Louis, as it turns out), so as not to overwhelm the generally fine playing of flutist Sara Stern. It worked in most places, but in others the two instruments were unbalanced. Pianist Anna Stoytcheva continued to be the most musical player in the group, with just one minor slip, expertly recovered, in the Kuhlau.

Other Reviews: Stephen Brookes, American Chamber Players’ soothing program comes with a punch (Washington Post, June 11, 2012) Charles T. Downey, June Chamber Festival at the Kreeger Museum (Washington Post, June 12, 2011)

The second half yielded far greater interest, beginning with an unusual trio for flute, viola, and cello by Albert Roussel (op. 40). The unexpected combination of instruments is outpaced by the work's musical eccentricities, with moods ranging from happy-go-lucky (the sunny first theme) to sultry (the sensuous second movement) and obsessive, with some truly odd passages, like the squeaky harmonics in the last movement. The evening concluded with Bedřich Smetana's Piano Trio in G Minor, op. 15, composed in response to the death of his eldest daughter, Bedřiška, in 1855. (It was a decade of tragedy for the composer, as he lost two younger daughters and eventually his wife in the same period.) The first movement had considerable heft, with themes steeped in tragic sadness, airy sweetness (Smetana once remarked that the ethereal second theme was related to a tune beloved of his daughter), and heroic resolution, while neither of the other two movement seems quite able to decide if it is a slow movement or something else. After many interesting formal diversions, however, the work comes to a somewhat unsatisfying conclusion, with a heavy-handed funeral march and a surprise major resolution.

The June Chamber Festival at the Kreeger Museum concludes this Friday (June 15, 7:30 pm), when the American Chamber Players are joined by harpist Elizabeth Hainen, for music by Dvořák, Debussy, Donizetti, and Dohnányi.

Beethoven Sonatas - A Survey of Complete Cycles Ronald Brautigam's BIS Cycle

Supplemental post to my Survey of Complete Beethoven Sonata Cycles:

Overview of Ronald Brautigam's Beethoven Cycle of the complete works for piano, including all 38 [sic!] Sonatas, all the Variations, Bagatelles, and other addenda - published and unpublished. Performed on the gorgeous instruments of Paul McNulty this is a Beethoven cycle decidedly for all Beethoven-lovers, and in no way only for those usually interested in historical instruments and historically informed performances.

[continued below the break]

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Briefly Noted: Mourning Michael Howells

H. Howells, Requiem (inter alia), Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, S. Layton (released on April 10, 2012) Hyperion CDA67914 | 64'09"

Most of the people who love the music of Herbert Howells (1892-1983) are those who have performed it. The music on this disc has already been recorded many times, often pairing the English composer's setting of the Requiem Mass with some of his other service music or with another composer's Mass or Requiem setting. The theme of tragic personal loss unites this movingly programmed disc, devoted entirely to the music of Howells. Howells was diagnosed early in life with Graves Disease, a misfortune that spared him from military service in World War I, although he was not left untouched by that conflict, as indeed was no one in Great Britain at that time. Devastation came to Howells later, in 1935, when his son, Michael, then only nine years old, died of polio. (His daughter, Ursula, became an actress and promoter of her father's music.) Howells composed his Requiem Mass, for unaccompanied voices, in 1932, but it soon became the basis for his expanded Hymnus Paradisi, a work dedicated to Michael's memory. It is also likely, as argued in fine liner notes by Paul Andrews, that Howells had the text Take Him, Earth, for Cherishing -- an English translation by Helen Waddell of a Latin hymn by Prudentius -- in mind for a memorial to Michael when he used it instead for his contribution to a memorial service for President Kennedy. The disc closes with the Howells hymn All My Hope on God Is Founded, again composed before Michael's death but given the tender name MICHAEL when Howells published it in 1936. (The only regret here is a tacky descant, by John Rutter, of course, added to the final verse.)

The disc is rounded out by the Hymn for Saint Cecilia, on an ecstatic text by Ursula Vaughan Williams, a poet who was the second wife of composer Ralph Vaughan Williams; two settings of the Evensong canticles, the Gloucester Service and the St. Paul's Service; and the popish Salve regina, which is a gem in Howells output. The last of these dates from his student days at the Royal College of Music, where Charles Stanford, one of his teachers, recommended that Howells and his other students go to hear the outpouring of Catholic liturgical music then being revived at London's new Westminster Cathedral under that notorious Catholic convert, R. R. Terry. The performances here are all top-notch, from the mixed undergraduate choir (women instead of boys, that is) of Trinity College, Cambridge, under Stephen Layton, with blistering contributions by organ scholars Simon Bland and Jeremy Cole. The generally excellent Hyperion sound (engineering by David Hinitt) captures all of the dynamic range, subtlety, and acoustical reverberation of the rooms in Ely and Lincoln Cathedrals where the tracks were recorded. The next person who raves to me about the pedestrian music of Eric Whitacre will be assigned Herbert Howells for correction.

Childlike, not Childish Siegfried: Munich's Ring Cycle

I am taking in Andreas Kriegenburg’s Ring at the Bavarian State Opera piecemeal. Das Rheingold in February (review here), now Siegfried. Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung still awaiting. There’s a lot to look forward to with those two remaining operas, because much like with Das Rheingold, there is plenty good in Siegfried – and more promise, still. For one, Kriegenburg’s Siegfried is funny and adorable, childlike but not childish. When did you last feel that way about a Wagner opera?!

Kriegenburg’s concept of using bodies as the basic building blocks for Wagner’s world continues. But where he puts them to more metaphorical use in the first installment (depicting with them the Rhine, forces of earth, Valhalla), Siegfried sees them employed more literally, with up to 50 extras populating the stage. These little helpers, spirited trolls of childlike disposition and whim, spell out and underline the actions and interactions of Mime and Siegfried and the humor therein. In little brigades they melt down Notung via paper shredder, pump oversized bellows, rummage about in large tubes to symbolize the forge’s ventilation, and rhythmically pump (actual) air into the tinsel-filled anvil every time Siegfried re-strikes his sword. The happy sparks fly high and wide: glitter and be gay, indeed!



Act 1 becomes their playground and Siegfried – the most truly humorous of Wagner’s operas—attains a droll, exuberant air. It’s terribly good of Kriegenburg to let it out, to strip away the pathos, the awfully serious layers and layers of Wagnerian self-importance in this Ring. Elsewhere the artistic-acrobatic use of suspended extras—as trees for the forest bird to fly about or as a looming, oversized-dentures-wielding Fafner-as-worm—looked more like La Fura dels Baus, but with Kriegenburg this was part of a concept and a touchingly personal way to tell a story, not the-thing-itself, as is the case with La Fura dels Baus’ spectacular, maddeningly vapid Valencia Ring. A particularly neat touch: visual references to Das Rheingold, timed to the relevant leitmotifs during the elaborate Six-Questions scene of act 1. Only the magic fire around the rock was a visual disappointment: 30 yards of illuminated cling-film looked more like the Rhine at sundown than an imposing fire.



I had never seen a Siegfried where the most lasting impression was made by the little woodbird—until now. And that’s not damnation of the major roles by way of praising a lesser part. In fact Lance Ryan’s Siegfried—powerful, enthused, believably youthful and untiring—headed a fab-four along with Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke’s stupendous greasy Mime, Catherine Naglestad’s gravely ravishing Brünnhilde, and Wolfgang Koch’s regal Alberich. But Anna Virovlansky and her physical manifestation Anna Ressel (who danced along in unison with a little self-balancing birdie on a stick) were so charmingly staged (and well sung) that it, she, or they absolutely made the second act. Jill Grove and Rafal Siwek (Erda, Fafner) had less opportunity to show off and while Thomas J. Mayer as Wanderer/Wotan had that opportunity, he didn’t make use of it. He performed well enough, but the voice—even as it opened up in the third act—was underpowered next to his commendable colleagues. Kent Nagano led a seamless, gorgeous account of the score that lends itself less to the elegant-Italianate style he had displayed Das Rheingold. Free of actual or artificial highlighting, Nagano reigned over an orchestra that exuded perfection even more than it did enthusiasm.

Not every Wagnerian will appreciate Kriegenburg for turning the Ring into entertainment, toying at the edge of naïve and goofy. But most attendees seemed reasonably happy and since it wasn’t opening night, and the cast was in superb form, there was only cheering, no jeering after five and a half hours.

Pictures courtesy Bavarian State Opera, © Wilfried Hösl

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'Idomeneo'

Charles T. Downey, A valiant but flawed ‘Idomeneo’ from In Series
Washington Post, June 11, 2012

Mozart, Idomeneo, R. Croft, B. Fink, Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, R. Jacobs

No one can accuse the organizers of the In Series of not being ambitious. To close their season of small-scale operas, they went for grand with an abridged version of Mozart’s “Idomeneo,” heard on Saturday night at the Atlas Performing Arts Center. It was hard not to admire the guts it took to aim so high, even if the results were found wanting on many counts.

At the head of a variable cast was soprano Randa Rouweyha, noble and ardent as Ilia, the Trojan princess in love with Idomeneo’s son, Idamante. The best of the three tenors in the opera was Joseph Haughton, who had the strongest and most beautiful sound as the counselor Arbace, followed by Peter Boroughs’s oddly nasal Idamante, a castrato role in the 1781 premiere that Mozart rewrote for tenor at the 1786 revival. Soprano Jennifer Suess was a spitfire Electra, but the role’s demands stretched her voice to the breaking point. The score was already trimmed of about an hour’s worth of music, and it would have been better to cut Idomeneo’s showcase aria “Fuor del mar,” as well, since it was beyond the abilities of the singer. [Continue reading]

Mozart, Idomeneo (critical edition by Daniel Heartz)
In Series
Atlas Center

PREVIOUSLY:
Metropolitan Opera DVD

Opera Lafayette in 2006

Ionarts-at-Large: Magic Salonen. Also Brahms, Schumann

To write a solo work for four horns is an audacious way of asking for trouble. As if the spotlight didn’t shine on them enough as it is, exposed, lyrical, and betraying every little mistake, now four of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra’s horn players stood on the front edge of the stage in Munich’s Philharmonic Hall, left of Esa-Pekka Salonen, tackling Schumann’s Konzertstück in F, op.86.

The BRSO is one of the few orchestras with a brass section where Norbert Dausacker’s suggestion that the seven horn players drew lots among them as to who would get to play the concert sounded plausible. (Even if I don’t believe that for a second.) To shift the burden of the Konzertstück’s demands more evenly from first horn Eric Terwilliger, they performed an amalgamated version that trades notes accordingly. Half way through the first movement, the front four were in the zone and Salonen pulled the work through all three movements as if on a string, with nary a slacking moment along the way.

Schumann, Reger et al., Piano Concerto, , H.Blomstedt, Dresden StaKap Profil Hänssler E-P.Salonen, Piano Concerto, , Y.Bronfman / E-P.Salonen / LA Phil DG E-P.Salonen, Violin Concerto, Nyx, L.Josefowicz / E-P.Salonen / Finnish RSO DG

It was an apropos overture to an evening that stressed the horn section—albeit different players, with the front four getting a deserved rest. They’re up front in Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Nyx, an orchestral piece half the way to a clarinet concerto that opens with a rising, marimbaphone-supported horn statement: delicately, with underlying agitation, before the entire vast orchestra chimes in homophonously.

Cutting to the chase: Nyx is a great, great work. Without being literal, it’s palpable, image-inducing music, belly music rather than brainy musical theory. It’s music that grabs you by the lapels… possibly lower. It lures, it beguiles, it makes luxurious use of quiet, it brings out militaristic tones, and it’s not a second longer than the music it contains. Nyx communicates with refreshing American efficiency and directness, but sounds really like the modern continuation of Debussy, if there hadn’t been a period of ideological disorientation on contemporary ‘notational music’ in-between. If others hear Ives or Stravinsky in it, I was repeatedly reminded of Mahler. On one level how it wasn’t like Mahler at all… but much more straight forward, less convoluted, less cloying (and I say that as a Mahler aficionado). In another way it felt like the appropriate modern substitute for Mahler, a great symphonic movement that pushed all the right buttons and hit all the right keys. I sat at the edge of my seat, greedily taking it in, and afterwards, I was in no mood to have the impression ruined by the B-flat Brahms Piano Concerto (no offense to Yefim Bronfman) that would follow after intermission.

Alas, I came back, realizing that the sandwich-position of the Salonen piece was the only feasible way to program the work: If you flip the halfs and program Brahms first, the Konzertstück would be exposed as terribly superfluous opening the second half… and you might have a few concert goers trickling home early, ready to stay away from a—heaven help—contemporary piece. Just Salonen in the second half (though its musical content would fully justify that) would have attracted even fewer folk—aside: one doesn’t want to miss out on showing off your own players in the Schumann. The gutsy (=ruinous) programming choice might have been to do Salonen’s own concerto instead of Brahms. The soloist after all, to whom it was dedicated, already has it in his repertoire. But then there would have been 300 enthusiastic music lovers around me in the Gasteig, instead of 2300.

All that said, the Brahms—smothering the sonic Salonen-memory though it did—was quite terrific. The second rank of the BRSO horns showed again the stuff they were made of, and long-time Salonen collaborator Bronfman took such a clean, pleasantly understated way with the work (and a gorgeous slow movement, where first cellist Sebastian Klinger shone, along the way) that it went some way in re-kindling my appreciation for the artist which had cooled over the course of my exposures in D.C. and Baltimore. This was swift artlessness at its best, with the orchestra and conductor ideally suited to match it. Perhaps predictably, the audience appreciated this interpretation more than the creation earlier... which is perhaps as emblematic for the troubles of classical music as was the dead-silence, pockmarked by coughs, after the furious finale of the Brahms Concerto's first movement.

You can hear the concert “on demand” on the BR Klassik website here.