Other than sounding like it was recorded in a high school gymnasium (lots of echo), when you cut through the sound clutter, the performance is excellent.
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (by Misha Donat):
Beethoven published his first three sonatas, Opus 2 (1-3) in 1796, when he was in his mid-20s, and dedicated them to his former teacher Haydn.
Two decades and two dozen piano sonatas later, he began work on what was to be his final group of five sonatas. For some time he had been attempting to find German equivalents for the traditional Italian musical forms; and in 1817, he instructed his publisher to use the term “Hammerklavier” instead of “pianoforte” for all his future piano works.
His instruction was, however, unambiguously carried out only in the case of Opus 106 – the second of his late sonatas. As a grand sonata in four distinct movements, the Hammerklavierstands apart from its companions. It is a work of unprecedented scope, with the broadest slow movement Beethoven ever wrote for the piano, and a finale consisting of a colossal fugue – which makes huge demand on performer and listener alike.
Like the Sonata Opus 111, the Hammerklavier was dedicated to Beethoven’s staunchest patron, Archduke Rudolph of Austria, and its fanfare-like opening phrase was designed to fit the words, “Vivat, vivat Rudolphus!”
Opus 111 was Beethoven’s last sonata, and also his final work in his characteristically dramatic key of C minor. This time there are only two movements; the first begins with an intense slow introduction, out of which the Allegro explodes with force.
The finale is a set of variations on a serene ‘Arietta.’ The variations gradually increase in intricacy until they reach a long-sustained trill, and the sonata comes to a close in an atmosphere of profound calm.
TRACK LISTING:
1-4: Piano Sonata in B flat Major, Opus 106 – “Hammerklavier”
5-6: Piano Sonata in C minor, Opus 111
FINAL THOUGHT:
I used to love with my new copy of BBC Magazine would come in the mid-1990s with the CD glued to the cover. The glue would tear the cover of the magazine off until they decided (after the first few issues and probably thousands of complaints) to put the CD in plastic. The performances were always hit or miss but I have a nice nostalgia for all those discs in my collection.
Zino Francescatti, Violin; Robert Casadesus, Piano
Recorded in France (Sonata No. 5, 1961 – Sonata No. 9, 1958) (CBS Records)
ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
And the hits just keep on coming – ah, nice.
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES:
No liner notes on this budget disc but it’s such a pleasant recording you really don’t need to know anything about it – just sit back, get a glass of wine and relax.
TRACK LISTING:
1-4: Sonata No. 5 in F Major for Violin and Piano, Opus 24 – “Spring”
5-7: Sonata No. 9 in A Major for Violin and Piano, Opus 47 – “Kreutzer”
FINAL THOUGHT:
The easiest review I’ve had to do thus far. I like it. Whenever I hear this recording, I can’t help but think of the scene in “Love & Death” where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton play the opening strains of the Spring Sonata.
If you want the hits, you’ve got the hits – this is one classic recording – a great performance by Wilhelm Kempff on Piano.
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (by Joan Chissell):
“L’adolsecent, l’homme, le dieu” was LIszt’s description of Beethoven’s successive stages of development so patent in the 32 piano sonatas completed between 1795 and 1822, a series as remarkable for the composer’s constant quest for variety of pattern within the traditional sonata mold as his response to the challenge of the piano itself in crucial days of the instrument’s development in strength, compass and colour.
The Grande Sonate Pathetique, as its publisher first issued it, dates from 1798-99. Never before had Beethoven extracted more drama from C minor, always his most faithful key, than in the turbulent opening movement starting with an imposing Grave introduction twice recalled in the course of the sonata-form argument (like Clementi and Dussek he had already tried out a similar device in a sonata written at eleven).
It is no surprise to learn from letters that already in the later 1790s he was secretly tormented by early symptoms of deafness. Assuagement comes in the idyllic, recurrent song melody of the Adagio cantabile in A flat, through tension mounts in two contrasting episodes. The finale is an urgent sonata-rondo back in the home key of C minor.
Composed in 1801, during an ill-starred romance with its youthful dedicatee, the Countess Giulietta Guicciardi, the C sharp minor Sonata testifies to Beethoven’s tireless pursuit of formal adventure: like its predecessor in E flat it carries the subtitle “quasi una fantasia.”
His boldest stroke was in opening with an Adagiososenuto, music sufficiently hypnotic in its calm to remind the poet-critic Rellstab of moonlight on Lake Lucerne – hence the nickname apprended after Beethoven’s death.
For the Allegretto, a grecious old-style minuet and trio following without sharp break. Beethoven slips enharmonically into D flat major. The finale in the home key is a passionately disturbed Presto agitato in sonata form.
Following hard on the heels of the “Moonlight” in the same year of 1801, the D major Sonata reverts to a traditional four-movement sequence. The nickname “Pastoral”came from the publisher Cranz. But the music exudes enough of the relaxation and simple joy Beethoven always found in the country (openly confessed in the Sixth Symphony) to make it easy to believe Czerny’s contention that the sonata was one of the composer’s favorites.
Repeated low Ds, like a rustic drone, support the opening tune of the sonata-form Allegro. The lilting main theme of the sonata-rondo finale, again with a drone-like accompaniment, is still more redolent of the village green.
Though the D minor-major Andante, with its regular, march-like tread, is tinged with regret, the Scherzo is one of the composer’s most playful.
Beethoven was in his 40th year when composing the F sharp major Sonata in 1809, after four years away from the genre: in total contrast to its story F minor predecessor, the “Appassionata,”this gracious work in only two movements was dedicated to the Countess Therese von Brunsvik, who though no longer accepted as his legendary “immortal beloved,” was one of the few closest to his heart whose character approached his own exalted ideals of womanhood.
With the unpredictability of genius Beethoven rejects heart-searching, after only the briefest Adagio cantabile introduction, to write a radiantly lyrical Allegro non troppo in concisely expressed sonata form. In the scherzando-like concluding Allegro vivace, also in (for him) the unusual key of F sharp major, he springs constant surprises of tonality, register and dynamics.
TRACK LISTING:
1-3: Piano Sonata No. 8 in C Minor, Opus 13 – “Pathetique”
4-6: Piano Sonata No. 14 in C sharp Minor, Opus 27 No. 2 – “Moonlight”
7-10: Piano Sonata No. 15 in D Major, Opus 28 – “Pastorale”
11-12: Piano Sonata No. 24 in F sharp Major, Opus 78
FINAL THOUGHT:
Like a warm blanket or a favorite pair of shoes, these sonatas will never let you down. A great recording.
BBC National Orchestra of Wales – Mark Elder, conductor (BBC Music)
Recorded: Live at St. David’s Hall, Cardiff, Wales – January 11, 1992
ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
For some reason, I thought Bluebeard was a pirate story – but, in reality, he is a violent guy who keeps marrying and murdering his wives – and then brings the next potential wife to his castle (think Sweeney Todd with less of a motive).
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES:
The early years of this century witnessed radical developments in Hungarian music and literature. Endre Ady and Bela Balazs achieved significant reforms in poetry and drama, and Bela Bartok joined forces with his friend Zoltan Kodaly to explore the riches of Hungarian folk music.
Balazs dedicated his one-act play Bluebeard’s Castle to both Bartok and Kodaly, but it was Bartok who responded more readily to Balazs’s potent symbols and storyline.
The idea of male secrecy challenged by female curiosity must have greatly appealed to him: he was, after all, a profoundly private individual whose life was underscored by powerful infatuations and deep-rooted relationships.
All three of Bartok’s stage works – Bluebeard’s Castle, The Wooden Prince and The Miraculous Mandarin – deal with some aspect of man’s relationship to woman.
Bartok wasn’t the first composer to set the story of Bluebeard to music: Gretry, Offenbach and Dukas preceded him. But the Bartok/Balazs collaboration is unique – in its narrative simplicity, the psychological force that lies behind the characters and in its very personal symbolism.
The drama is internalized, its outward manifestations merely the guides to a whole range of repressed conflicts. The descriptive power of the music equals, indeed surpasses, most other works of its kind; seven doors and seven meaningful spectacles behind them, all reflected in orchestration that is so startlingly graphic that a physical stage set hardly seems necessary.
It is for this reason that Bluebeard’s Castle relies less on its theatrical production than on its musical interpretation.
Although its musical language is firmly rooted among the somber woodlands of Debussy’sPelleas, Bluebeardhas its own spicy tang and graphic impact.
Bartok revised his original score before the 1918 Budapest premiere and continued in effect minor changes up until the Thirties.
In its final form, Bluebeard’s Castleis unquestionably one of the century’s most magnetic operatic masterpieces.
TRACK LISTING:
1: Prologue: auguries of darkness and desire [3:16]
2: The arrival [15:21]
3: First Door: the torture chamber [4:41]
4: Second Door: the armory [4:17]
5: Third Door: the treasury [2:17]
6: Fourth Door: the garden of flowers [4:52]
7: Fifth Door: expansive domains [6:46]
8: Sixth Door: the lake of tears [13:52]
9: Seventh Door [9:47]
FINAL THOUGHT:
It’s pretty dark, disturbing stuff – now some of those pictures of Bartok (from previous blogs here and here) make a little more sense.
Chicago Symphony Orchestra – Sir Georg Solti, conductor (London)
Recorded: Orchestra Hall, Chicago – January 1981
ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
Yeah, now we’re talking – that’s SIR Georg Solti to you, buddy – close personal friend of Mr. Bartok!
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES:
Bela Bartok, A Personal Note (Georg Solti, London, 1981):
“When I was studying music in Budapest, I was lucky enough to encounter Bela Bartok in very varied circumstances. He was a calm and introverted man, who spoke little, but who greatly enjoyed the company of young people and who was enormously touched by their admiration. Above all things he hated intolerance, dictatorship and fascism, which drove him from the native Hungary he so loved.
First of all, I was in his piano class for a short time. He was a marvelous teacher, who never interrupted his pupils, but let them play through to the end and then took their place to show them how the piece should be played!
A little later, as a member of the jury for the Liszt Academy’s composition examinations, he had occasion a number of times to judge my compositions, which must have been particularly horrible to him!
In 1938, I turned pages for him at the first public performance of his Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, which he played with his wife. This took place at the Budapest Opera, but sadly only the young people in the audience applauded the work and saw the true importance of such a masterpiece.
It was also at the Budapest Opera that I was able to watch him while he was supervising the production of The Miraculous Mandarin. He was very meticulous and I remember how he would stand in the hall, his metronome in his hand, checking the tempi.
When preparing these two works for the recording, I was determined that the tempi should be exactly as Bartok wrote and this led me to some extraordinary discoveries, chief of which was in the second movement of the Concerto for Orchestra. The printed score gives crochet equals 74, which is extremely slow, but I thought that I must follow what it says.
When we rehearsed I could see that the musicians didn’t like it at all and in the break the side drum player (who starts the movement with a solo) came to me and said “Maestro, my part is marked crochet equals 94,” which I thought must be a mistake, since none of the other parts have a tempo marking.
The only way to check was to locate the manuscript and through the courtesy of the Library of Congress in Washington, we obtained a copy of the relevant page, which not only clearly showed crochet equals 94, but a tempo marking of Allegro scherzando (the printed score gives ‘Allegretto scherzando).
Furthermore, Bartok headed it ‘Presentando le coppie’ (Presentation of the pairs) not ‘Giuocco delle coppie’ (Game of the pairs). I was most excited by this, because it becomes a quite different piece.
The programme of the first performance in Boston clearly has the movement marked ‘Allegro scherzando’ and the keeper of the Bartok archives was able to give us further conclusive evidence that the faster tempo must be correct.
I have no doubt that thousands of performances, including my own up until now, have been given at the wrong speed!”
BARTOK: CONCERTO FOR ORCHESTRA (Notes by: Lionel Salter):
While Bartok was ill in the USA in 1943, Koussevitzky came to his hospital room to offer him a commission for an orchestral work; in reality this had been urged by Szigeti and Fritz Reiner in an effort to alleviate the composer’s impoverished condition and his feelings of frustration, though this had to be kept secret from him, as his pride would not have allowed him to accept anything that smacked of charity.
The outcome was the Concerto for Orchestra – his last orchestral work except for the Third Piano Concertoand the unfinished Viola Concerto– which was completed in eight weeks and called for a very large orchestra, instruments often being treated “in a solostic manner,” as he said in his initial analysis.
Its first performance in Boston on December 1, 1944 was an instant success. The gratified composer wrote in a letter, “Koussevitzky is very enthusiastic and says it is “the best orchestra piece of the last 25 years’ (including the works of his idol Shostakovich‘).” The last words refer to Bartok’s pique that, while he himself had been neglected, Shostakovich’s“Leningrad” Symphony, with its “ridiculous” march theme, had, owing to wartime feelings, been widely welcomed: the Concertobears evidence of his understandable reaction.
The andante opening of the Introduzionebegins mysteriously with a characteristically Hungarian theme in the bass, built up on the interval of the fourth (which is to pervade the entire work and assume basic importance). A rhythmic theme of declamatory character develops from a flute phrase, and a rising five-note scale spanning a tritone appears, persists, and turns into the opening bar of the ensuing Allegro vivace, which is in orthodox sonata-form.
The first subject contains, in addition to the tritone scale, two rising fourths; and these (the second filled in with the intermediate notes) become the basis of a trombone theme, which is later to be taken up in two fugati.
The actual second subject, first heard on the oboe over a string drone, vacillates between two notes in a curious way. The movement as a whole is full of ingenious contrapuntal resource – including elaborate strettos and canons both forwards and in reverse – and culminates in a blazing statement by the brass of the early trombone theme.
The gay scherzo, in the printed score entitled Giuoco delle coppie, is in fact, int he composer’s manuscript, headed Presentando le coppie. A side drum without snares (in a rhythm about which the autograph reveals that Bartok had at first been undecided) ushers in the instruments, which trip on in pairs; the bassoons in sixths, the oboes in thirds, the clarinets in sevenths, the flutes in fifths, and the (muted) trumpets in major seconds.
The brass, accompanied by the side drum, then pronounce a benediction over the couples in the form of a short chorale (the opening notes of which are ingeniously derived from the closing line of the first movement) after which the instruments return in the same order as before, but this time fructified by additional instruments of their own (or similar) kind pattering along beside them, mirroring their activities or interlocking with them. A final cadence combines all the original instruments, in their initial relationships into a single chord.
The Elegiaharks back to the start of the Concerto, and uses among its kaleidoscopically-presented, folk-like material both the motif in fourths and the “declamatory” theme from the Introduzione.
The scoring is impressionistic – an example of the “night music” which consistently obsessed Bartok – and at the end of the solo piccolo’s repeated single notes recall the repeated xylophone notes in the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.
The fourth movement is basically an Intermezzoin which two folk-like melodies of flexible, wayward shape alternate. But halfway through comes a rude interruption. The clarinet forgets itself so far as to wander into a burlesque of the notorious march-tune in Shostakovich’s“Leningrad” Symphony (with a half-recollection of The Merry Widow at the back of its mind): it is greeted with jeers and catcalls from the orchestra, which then strikes up a German-band oom-pah bass over which the violins join in with the tune and are rowdily mocked by the wind; the tuba gives a final elephantine echo of the clarinet’s original lapse of taste.
Order being restored, the serene Intermezzois resumed and, after short flute cadenza, ends with fragments of the first theme.
The Finale, the most considerable and brilliant movement of the Concerto, begins (after a brief horn-call) with a bustling perpetuum mobile in the strings, and throws off numerous thematic motifs, the most important of which is a trumpet theme that is extensively developed: it becomes the subject of a fugue, and is treated in inversion, stretto, augmentation, diminution and every other contrapuntal ingenuity.
There is an abbreviated recapitulation, and the movement ends with a short coda after the trumpet theme has been hammered out in triumph by the full brass.
BARTOK: DANCE SUITE:
The Dance Suite dates from exactly twenty years earlier. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the amalgamation of the towns Buda and Pest, works were commissioned from three Hungarian composers (each in his forties at the time).
These were played at a concert on November 19, 1923, which began with the Festival Overture by Dohnanyi, who conducted on that occasion: his piece has sunk virtually without a trace, but the other two works stand among the brightest jewels in their native repertoire.
Kadaly’s masterpiece, the Psalmas hungaricus, besides evoking a period of tragic strife in his country’s history, also expressed something of his own bitterness at his treatment by politically-motivated adversaries; but Bartok, who had suffered similarly from hostile attacks, and who moreover was in the midst of emotional crises in his domestic life, rose above these to produce a composition whose joyousness and immediacy of impact – not to speak of its brilliant construction – have ensured its lasting popularity.
It was soon taken up very widely – in Cincinnati, Prague, London (at a Henry Wood Promenade Concert) and throughout Germany – and when Vaclav Talich conducted it with his Prague orchestra in Budapest in 1926 the entire work, at the public’s insistence, had to be encored.
TRACK LISTING:
1-5: Concerto for Orchestra [I – 9:00; II – 6:05; III – 6:30; IV – 4:01; V – 9:30]
6: Dance Suite [15:52]
FINAL THOUGHT:
If you read through that (very informative, I thought) you definitely don’t want to read anything further from me. Go on with your lives! A brilliant recording and ANOTHER 88!
Maurizio Pollini, Piano – Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Claudio Abbado, Conductor) (Deutsche Grammophon)
Recorded: Chicago, Orchestra Hall, February 1977
ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
After nothing but a diet of Bach for the past couple of weeks, a little Bartok at his chaotic best is just what the doctor ordered – this is an excellent recording.
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (by Paolo Petazzi – translation, Gwyn Morris):
Bela Bartok’s first two piano concertos, dated 1926 and 1930/31, belong to two different stages of the period when he was formulating the musical language of his advanced maturity – a synthesis in which an original reassessment of certain aspects of the European cultural tradition (Bach, Beethoven, Debussy) combined with stimuli and influences resulting from the study of Hungarian and Balkan folk music: in assimilating rhythmic and melodic elements foreign to Western classical music, Bartok did not use them in an ornamental, “exotic” way but as an integral part of a new language.
Concerto No. 1, composed between August and November 1926, immediately follows other important piano works like the Sonataand the “Out of Doors” Suite, to which it bears a strong affinity; these works mark a revival of Bartok’s creative activity after three years of almost total silence.
In a famous statement he made to the musicologist Edwin von der Null, Bartok himself stressed the presence of new stylistic characteristics in the Sonataand the First Concerto, pointing out the fruits of his interest in Baroque music, such as a more striking use of counterpoint than was apparent in his previous compositions.
Concerto No. 1 can also be seen as Bartok’s personal response to certain trends in the 1920s, from neo-classical objectivism to the vogue for solid construction and Bachian counterpoint. But Bartok’s style remains alien to the ironic taste for “pastiche” and “square-cut music”: in its harsh, severe, rigorous conception, Concerto No. 1 reveals a unity and force that are quite singular.
In the solo part, the more strictly percussive aspects of Bartok’s piano style predominate in a quest for violent sonorities, biting harshness, combinations of sounds conceived more as blocks than chords in the traditional sense.
And already in the First Concerto this type of piano writing spurs Bartok to probe the potentialities in the relationship between piano and percussion: in this respect there are clear anticipations of the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937).
The use of ostinatos, insistent motor rhythms sustained by constant propelling energy, are what chiefly link the Concertoto other experiments of the ’20s; but Bartok’s way is a highly personal one, a deliberate choice of discourse in the first person (and thus poles apart from Stravinsky and neo-classicism).
The balance between soloist and orchestra, only theoretically akin to that of the Baroque concerto, is brought about within a severe conception in which the orchestral colour is mainly sober and tends more to an essential chiaroscuro (excluding, therefore, innovations in sonority) than to a wide variety of colour, in keeping with the compact form of the entire work, its obsessive unity and the violent, barbaric energy which bursts forth from the harsh, hammering writing.
In the introduction to the first movement, which immediately defines some essential characteristics of the music, there emerges a basic melodic cell to which a great part of the material of the composition is related.
Immediately after the introduction, the soloist states the first theme, the only one which stands out strongly in relief; those that follow are less broad and more like brief thematic nuclei. Hence, even if one recognizes in the first movement sonata-form construction (exposition-development-recapitulation), the logic which determines it is profoundly different from the Classical conception, in its combining and elaborating of the thematic material within a closely-knit, contrapuntal web and its frequent use of the ostinato technique.
The Andante, where the strings are silent, begins with a dialogue between piano and percussion. New and subtle relationships of timbre in this austere meditation open up regions of astonishing originality and profundity.
In the central section of the Andante, clearly constructed in A-B-A form, the piano repeats an ostinato figure which acts as a background to a crescendo traced by the woodwind. A brief transition with grotesque trombone glissandi links the second to the third movement, which is more animated and lively throughout.
A string ostinato accompanies the statement of the first theme; the successive ideas which support a structure tending to the episodic are all variations of a single nucleus. It is possible to detect connections between the thematic material of the first and the third movements, even though these are not constructed systematically as in Concerto No. 2.
In an article which appeared in 1939, Bartok wrote: “My First Concerto… I consider it a successful work, although its style is up to a point difficult, perhaps even very difficult for the orchestra and the public. And so I decided, a few years later, in 1930/31, to compose my Second Concerto with fewer difficulties for the orchestra and more pleasant themes. This aim of mine explains the more popular and easier character of the greater part of the themes…”
This statement should not be taken too literally, but it points to the different style of the two concertos. In the roughly five years that separate them, Bartok had written, among other works, masterpieces like the Thirdand Fourth Quartets and the Cantata profana, and their proximity is discernible in the inspiration of the Second Concerto.
Here, there are certainly no compromising concessions to “easy music,” but it is true that the thematic material presents a more clearly recognizable profile and the quality of expression is more fluid in comparison with the harsh tension of the First Concerto.
Similarly, the orchestral writing provides a greater variety of colours, more lively and vivid – especially in the third movement, the only one in which the whole orchestra is featured (in the first movement, the strings are silent; in the Adagio, the woodwinds are excluded from the first and third sections).
The relationship between soloist and orchestra is also one of slightly less rigorous integration, allowing space for cadenzas in the first movement. The overall construction of the Second Concerto is similar to that of the Fourth Quartet: the first and third movements, with their internal similarities, are symmetrically placed around the central movement, which itself has a ternary construction – Adagio-Presto-Adagio.
In the Allegro, the first theme is obviously inspired by Stravinsky: the melodic shape of the first notes corresponds to the beginning of the horn theme at the start of the finale of The Firebird. Other analogies can be drawn with Petrushka. Such occasional affinities can also indicate how differently Bartok and Stravinsky – in his Russian period – used popular themes.
In Bartok, we note an underlying sense of moral conviction, of familiarity bred of a long and intense study of folk music – in other words, an involvement leading to results far removed from those produced by Stravinsky’s dry stylization.
In any event, Bartok turns to advantage in a most personal way the “Stravinsky” theme in the Second Concerto.
In the sonata-form construction of the first movement (where the recapitulation presents the inversion of the themes in the exposition), there is a lavish variety of invention and modes of expression.
The Adagiois another specimen of “night-music” based on a completely different range of timbres from that of the Andantein Concerto No. 1. In a kind of tense and mysterious dialogue, we hear by turns a slow-paced chorale rendered by the pallid sonorities of the strings and the meditative comments of the piano with arabesques of intense evocative force.
After the first Adagio, a real Scherzo(Presto)leaps into action, light and pungent, with extreme and fantastic mobility; then, the opening episode returns and the Adagiofades away in an atmosphere of uncertainty.
In the third movement, the first theme – with its incisive energy, its hammering, barbaric force – seems to lead back to the mood of the First Concerto.
It is the only really new thematic element in this section, and acts as a refrain whose appearances frame the other episodes, all based on variations of the thematic material in the first movement (it is not difficult, on listening, to recognize the transformations of the “Stravinsky” theme); the movement takes shape as a fantastic, animated and richly coloured sequence of changing inventions articulated in an incisive, synthetic and energetic fashion.
TRACK LISTING:
1-3: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 1 [9:06; 7:52; 6:23]
4-6: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 2 [[9:37; 11:45; 6:04]
FINAL THOUGHT:
There is some truly frightening moments in these pieces and must say, I got a little scared listening to this late night alone in my office. There is something about piano and percussion that just makes a person a little jumpy.
New York Philharmonic – Leonard Bernstein, conductor (CBS Records)
ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
Come on, it’s good – it’s just another one of those ‘Greatest Hits” packages from the vaults – not quite sure why I filed this one under ‘B’ – I suppose for Samuel Barber.
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (uncredited):
Although four of the five works presented here were written in the twentieth century, it is not incorrect to entitle this album “Romantic Favorites.”
(A correction is perhaps due because the full orchestra, and not just strings, performs the Fantasia on ‘Greensleeves.’)
The lush string lines and harmonic and melodic fluidity in many ways fall well within the flavor of the Romantic era, and certainly each work has long been popular with concert audiences.
Composed in 1936 by Samuel Barber (1910-1981), originally as a slow movement of a string quartet, the “Adagio” is built on a single lyric subject stated at the outset of the movement. Canonic treatment follows, leading to a fortissimo climax and tranquil close.
This piece was chosen by Arturo Toscanini for its first performance in 1938 and again for programs during a South American tour, the only American work to be so favored by the Maestro.
Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) completed his First String Quartet in D Majorin February 1871, and it was premiered that month in Moscow. The second movement, “Andante cantabile,” was the main reason for its great popularity and was Tchaikovsky’s first composition which incurred wide success outside of Russia.
In 1876, a special concert was held at the Moscow Conservatory to honor Tolstoy, who was moved to tears by the movement.
The “Andante cantabile” is in three-part form and is based on the Russian folk tune “Vanya Sat on the Divan” that Tchaikovsky obtained from a carpenter in Kamenka, Russia.
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) completed his five-movement Fifth Symphony in 1902. The brief fourth movement “Adagietto” (only 103 bars long), marked Sehr langsam (very slowly), is scored for strings and harp. It is in great contrast to the more turbulent music heard before it in the Symphony.
After its premiere in Cologne in October 1904, Mahler wrote to his wife, Alma, “Performance excellent! Audience immensely interested and attentive – despite all their puzzlement in the early movements! After the Scherzoeven a few hisses! Adagiettoand Rondoseem to have won the day.” The “Adagietto”is perhaps the most immediately accessible of all movements from Mahler’s symphonies.
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) wrong Fantasia on “Greensleeves”in 1929 for his opera Sir John with Love, based on Shakespeare’sThe Merry Wives of Windsor.
“Greensleeves”was a hit song of the late 1570s, and Shakespeare mentioned it more than once in his plays. It was even rumored to have been written by Henry VIII, a composer of many similar tunes. The Fantasiaalso incorporates as a middle section another English folk tune, “Lovely Joan.”
Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis:Thomas Tallis (1505-1585) was one of the most distinguished of early English musicians, a predecessor both of William Byrd and John Wilbye.
Tallis wrote a set of eight tunes (found in the Metrical Psalter of Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury), one on each of the ecclesiastical modes. These date from 1567. The theme utilized by Vaughan Williams is the third in the sequence, in the Phrygian mode.
According to Vaughan Williams’s wife, Ursula: “He took this tune as a theme for a fantasia, using the strings of the orchestra grouped as a solo quartet, a small string band, and a larger body of players: with the Norman grandeurs of Gloucester Cathedral in mind and the strange quality of the resonance of stone, the echo idea of three different groups of instruments was well judged… The audience in the Cathedral that September evening had come to hear Elgar conduct Gerontius, but before that work Ralph stood in front of them, looking taller than ever on the high platform, dark haired, serious, inwardly extremely nervous, and the grave splendour of the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis was heard for the first time.”
TRACK LISTING:
1: Samuel Barber: Adagio for Strings, Op. 11 [9:56]
2: Ralph Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis [18:12]
3: Ralph Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on “Greensleeves” [4:56]
4: Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky: “Andante Cantabile” from String Quartet No. 1, Op. 11 [9:24]
5: Gustav Mahler: “Adagietto” from Symphony No. 5 in C-Sharp Minor [11:05]
FINAL THOUGHT:
This is indeed one of those lights-down-glass-of-wine (or four) discs that we all love to play once or twice a year.
Recorded at 30th Street Recording Studios, New York City – May 1981.
ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
Brilliant (but can someone please stop that infernal humming in the background…kidding)
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (uncredited):
In 1955, a young Canadian pianist made his first recording for what was then Columbia Masterworks. At that time he was not well-known to concert audiences and was completely unknown to the record market. But after the recording sessions of June of that year, in Columbia’s famous 30th Street Studios in New York City, and after the release of his first album, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Glenn Gould became world-famous.
His performance of Bach’s 1742 collection of “keyboard exercises” created an international recording sensation and achieved the unique distinction of becoming an album that, from its original release data to the present, was never absent from the active catalog of Masterworks recordings.
In 1970, Glenn Gould completed a recording session at the 30th Street Studios and decided that in the future he would record exclusively in Toronto, where his television and film activities were center. He did not again return to this musically historical building until 1980 when he began making his first digital recordings for CBS Masterworks – the Six Last Sonatas of Haydn and the Goldberg Variations.
Why did Glenn Gould, who seldom records a piece twice, choose to re-record a work that had received a definitive performance at his hands 27 years ago?
Gould has offered only the explanation that new technology plus his own desire to reexamine the work in terms of its “arithmetical correspondence between theme and variation” led him back into the studio for this recording.
Any more complete explanation of this new approach would, according to Gould, entail a complete written analysis, in an almost book-length essay, of the “thirty very interesting but independent-minded pieces” that make up the Variations– a fascinating prospect, to be sure.
Samuel H. Carter, who co-produced the Last Six Sonatas of Haydn, also worked on the new Goldberg Variations. Following are some of his observations of the last recording sessions:
Sometime past midnight on Saturday, May 27, 1981, the doors of CBS’s famous 30th Street Recording Studios in New York closed on the last official recording session to be held there by CBS Masterworks.
Out of those doors walked a man – assuredly only after a “cool down” period and change of shirt – a man whose illustrious recording career began there a little over a quarter century before. With an appropriateness that is usually found only in fiction, the last notes played by Glenn Gould that night were from the same work of Bach – the Goldberg Variations – with which he had first transfixed the music world in the summer of 1955.
Now the Studio, once a kind of mecca for some of the world’s greatest musicians, was to be sold, victim of the changed fortunes of an industry that has become as multinational as any other and as competitive.
For Glenn Gould and for those of us whose association with “Columbia” covers a long span of years, the old church is a place where many ghosts walk in an atmosphere so laden as to be almost claustrophobic, in spite of the soaring reaches of the ceilings.
Glenn Gould may have quietly come out by the same door wherein he entered but while he had been inside he stirred things up more than a little. Pablo Casals once said that Bach is “a volcano,” speaking of course of the emotional content of the music that traditionalists tried so hard for so long to deny.
Gould, too, is something of a volcanic force. He is the embodiment of musical sophistication in that he seems always to know what he intends the music to do. He almost never lets the music happen to him – he happens to it. That is what made many musicians who nominally “knew” the Goldberg Variations feel that they had just discovered them when the 1955 album appeared.
May I suggest that, with this new recording, many additional “discoveries” will be made. The nature of these will doubtless be as many and various as the number of listeners.
I think of Glenn Gould as an artist of strong intentionality. He shapes and molds a musical line in its breadth and in its detail with breathtaking awareness. As he has often told interviewers, he will try to make each performance different, yet this firm intention is always present so that however different the “take” there is never any tentativeness or absence of character.
Having worked extensively in both mediums as performer and producer, Glenn was almost instantly aware, in seeing and hearing a playback, of what takes or portions of takes were suitable for the film and recording and which for the film only. I often felt that he was being excessively nit-picking, only to discover in the intensive listening and editing sessions that followed that he had known precisely the difference he wanted in ever case.
He is a man who is very reluctant to accept anything short of the absolute attainment of his artistic goal.
TRACK LISTING:
1 – Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 [51:00]
FINAL THOUGHT:
“I don’t know know much about classical music – for years I thought the Goldberg Variationswere something Mr. and Mrs. Goldberg did on their wedding night.” – Woody Allen (Stardust Memories). Of course this recording gets my highest rating!
Isaac Stern, English Chamber Orchestra – Alexander Schneider, Conductor (CBS Great Performances)
ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
One of the best recordings of J.S. Bach’s music ever made (as long as you ignore all the annoying audience noises in the background).
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (uncredited):
Most of the concertos of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1759) – including the six Brandenburgs– were composed in the years 1717 through 1723, the period of his tenure as court organist and director of the orchestra for Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cothen.
Apart from his prowess as organist and conductor, Bach was an accomplished violinist who had, according Albert Schweitzer, “learned from Vivaldi the perfect violin technique, the art of writing ‘singably’… For him there was really only one style that naturally suggested by the phrasing of the stringed instrument – and all other styles are for him only modifications of this basic style.
In view of Bach’s predilection for the violin, it is all the more disappointing that only three of his works specifically written for the violin have been left to us.
On the often inaccurate basis of stylistic analysis, scholars have postulated that the majority of Bach’sharpsichord concertos are arrangements of concertos originally written for the violin.
True or not, we have to content ourselves with the two Concertos for Violin and Orchestra and with the Double Violin Concerto.
However, this can scarcely be regarded as a hardship. The Double Violin Concerto is a masterpiece, and the two solo violin concertos are like twins divinely blessed.
The very fact that there are only two has worked in their favor. We do not have to contend with the disappointing knowledge that there are some 350 others, equally good and not strikingly dissimilar, vying for our attention – as in the case of Vivaldi, who, legend says, composed violin concertos even during meals.
And it was Vivaldi who was probably the moving force behind Bach’s violin concertos. Bach had already paid the Venetian master the not inconsiderable compliment of transcribing a number of his published concertos for solo keyboard, and, further, he turned a Vivaldi concerto for four violins into a concerto for four harpsichords.
Curiously, all these transcriptions show Bach rethinking idiomatic violin music in terms of the keyboard. When he came to compose his own violin concertos, the harpsichord – with its self-sufficient contrapuntal possibilities and its quick, unsustained brightness – was entirely forgotten.
Bach’s violin concertos are not virtuoso showpieces, as Vivaldi’s tend to be, but are conceived completely in violinistic terms.
In form, Bach takes over Vivaldi’s characteristic three-movement, fast-slow-fast pattern. The final movements of both solo concertos, as with Vivaldi, are giguelike dances. The slow movements are again a favorite Vivaldi device – long candilenas over a recurring ground bass.
Only in his first movements does Bach depart somewhat from the practice of Vivaldi and his fellow composers. The general form is the same.: The orchestra is given a distinctive theme, heard at the beginning and end of the movement and also, in abbreviated form, throughout its course; this orchestral ritornello alternates with passages for solo violin.
But while the solo passages in Vivaldi are often merely brilliant displays of virtuosity with small relationship to the ritornello, in Bach the soloist fully shares the thematic material with the orchestra.
The A-Minor Concerto opens with a playful melody, aerated with well-calculated pauses. In this movement, the solo violin is also lighthearted, moving through a rather conventional series of sequential passages with enviable bounce and aplomb.
The Andanteis an ostinato piece. The ground bass constantly returns to its thrice-repeated low C, giving it an earthbound quality in contrast to the floating solo violin.
The final giguehas a French grace about its endlessly spun-out triplets. The soloist is given real opportunities here in whirling-dervish speedups of the basic rhythm.
The Violin Concerto in E Majoropens with an Allegroin the solid commanding style of the Brandenburgs, with three proclamatory chords that echo persistently throughout the movement. The soloist plays in real dialogue with the orchestra; there is no rigid separation of tutti and solo.
The Adagiobegins and ends with the low strings stating a long, rather melancholy, ostinatobass. Over this, the violin sings a tender song in phrases that seem endless and are virtually devoid of cadential points.
The Allegro assaiis one of Bach’s business-like finales – staid, self-assured, rather “fat” in instrumental texture. The movement, with its alternation of ritornello and solo, comes closer to the Vivaldi ideal of Baroque concerto writing than does the first movement.
The Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins and Orchestra was also written during Bach’s Cothen period when the nature of his appointment forced him to concentrate on instrumental music.
It holds a unique position among the many compositions that he wrote for the Court band of some eighteen pieces, for the possibilities of contrasting two solo instruments removed this work substantially from the customary concerto type.
This is particularly true of the slow movement, in which the discourse of the two violins reduces the orchestra to a very subordinate position.
Back too full advantage of the aptitude of the violin for melodic beauty. He set the two instruments against each other in a veritable dialogue, with the orchestra providing harmonic and rhythmic background.
As in many of Bach’s concertos, the slow movement is the point of gravity of the entire composition, flanked by two fast and more or less conventional sections.
TRACK LISTING:
1-3: Concerto in D MInor for Two Violins and Orchestra, BWV 1043
4-6: Concerto No. 1 in A Minor for Violin and Orchestra, BWV 1041
7-9: Concerto No. 2 in E Major for Violin and Orchestra, BWV 1042
(Sorry, I found no video of the Isaac Stern / Itzhak Perlman recording. Those two hacks above will have to do.)
FINAL THOUGHT:
The “Double Concerto” is featured in one of my favorite movies – Woody Allen’s “Hannah & Her Sisters.” The opening strains of the piece take me immediately to the scene where Sam Waterston is giving Dianne Wiest and Carrie Fisher an architectural tour of New York. This CD is a great workhorse classic and has many of Bach’s “hits” that most people will recognize immediately. It is a well-earned “88” on my piano scale!
London Baroque (Ingrid Seifert – violin; Richard Gwilt – violin, Charles Medlam – cello; Richard Egarr – clavecin) (Harmonia Mundi)
ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
J.S. Bach had 20 children (10 survived to adulthood) – C.P.E. Bach is one of the survivors and he also composed music like his dad, just not quite as good (the chick on the CD cover pretty much says it all).
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (by Hans-Gunter Ottenberg – translation by Derek Yeld):
One of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s earliest compositions was a Trio Sonata which has unfortunately been lost. I twas not without a tinge of pride that the remark, “compiled collaboration with Johann Sebastian Bach,” was added to the catalogue of Bach’s posthumously published works (1791).
It cannot be a coincidence that at the beginning of his career as a composer J.S. Bach’s second son had to come to terms with one of the most commonly practiced instrumental forms in Baroque music, considering that the Trio Sonata demanded “that there shall be all the parts, but especially in the upper voices, a steady singing line and a fugal development” (J.A. Scheibe). Moreover, the “concertante” setting-out of the Trio and particularly the techniques of the thorough-bass could be tried out in this, “one of the most difficult forms of composition.”
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach composed a total of twenty-five Trio Sonatas, seven in his Leipzig and Frankfurt periods, and the others in Berlin, mainly around 1747 and 1754.
In the worlds of the Berlin period the technical standards of the composition of the Trio Sonata, as described in a work like Sulzer’sAllgemeine Theorie der Schonen Kunste (1771-1774) had long-since been attained.
It is remarkable how C.P.E. Bach builds the theme of the first movement of the Sonata in F major, W.154/H.576 written in 1747 in the spirit of a gradual opening-up of the sound space. This shaping of the theme can probably be explained, in the first place, from the point of view of performing techniques, since they were played in Berlin by obviously accomplished violinists.
Through the use of different layers Bach achieves greater melodic variety. According to his natural tendency the main theme is kept open, that is, it wants to keep going; in the immediately following development section its motivic substance is treated polyphonically, consequently the second melodic instrument enters at the interval of a fifth.
In the Andantea more expressive mood predominates communicated to the listener by the gesture of a delicately sensitive melodic line.
In the last movement the motivic ideas are of such vitality that there is a change of musical scene in virtually every bar. This constant fluctuation was understood by his contemporaries as the prevalence of a rhetorical principal.
And, in fact, the opening movement of the Sonata in E minor, Wq.155/H.577, also written in 1747, does lead us into a conversational situation in which the alternation of an emotional and a gallant tone results in the domination of a dialogue-like structure.
Sulzer, in a generalization of a peculiarity of the “Berlin Bach’s” keyboard works (“Most of them are so eloquent that one does not think one is hearing tones, but a comprehensive language”), said of the Trio Sonatas that they were “veritable passionate musical conversations.”
In the slow movements, too, Bach occasionally makes use of the galant manner by indicating a faster tempo – here Andante. The concluding Allegrogives the impression of having been inspired by a dance, with its dotted motives and series of triplets arousing a cheerful mood in the listener.
The Sonata in B-flat major, Wq.158/H.584 of 1754, also demonstrates how Bach already introduces disparate expressive values within the theme itself, which then go on to mark the further progress of the movement: four bars of a plaintive motive, and four bars of triplet figures. If one were to seek the general theme of the dialogue suggested here, one could speak of a “fashionably galant expressiveness” (A. Durr).
The slow movement, Largo, con sordini, is the traditional position for a piece of musical Empfindsamkeit. All the activity is focused on the melodic line. Eloquent pauses and sudden exclamation underline the emotionally laden gesture of this movement, which once more bears witness to Bach’s sensitive handling of the variation form, for instance where he changes the direction of the movement of theme.
As in the opening movement, the concluding Allegrois also formed of heterogeneous elements: an introductory phrase that insistently turns around the note and gives rise to octave interval structures in the end phrase. And again they evoke an ambivalent expressiveness.
The manner in which Bach treats the two upper voices of the Sonata in A minor, Wq.156/H.582(1754) shows him on the way to a new understanding of the genre.
The second voice is reduced to a mere accompanying function. It moves along in thirds and sixths beneath the melody of the top voice without intervening in its motivic construction. Occasionally it drums out the same quaver figure as the bass.
Sulzer knew this type of Trio Sonata, which is derived from the symphony and demands “an extremely charming and expressive melody in the upper voice and strange and artful modulations in the scoring.”
There is no ample cantilena, but rather a capricious mood in the highly varied dynamic nuances of the Andantino. Neither does the amusing Tempo di minuetto erect any barriers against the growing number of music-lovers of the second half of the 18th century.
This was also the aim the new chamber music form practiced by Bach in his “Clavier Sonatas with a Violin and Violincello Accompaniment” of 1776 and 1777. Here the thorough bass is finally replaced by the keyboard part. The individually written melodic line is taken up by the treble in the keyboard. The violin and the violincello seem dispensable – but not for long.
In the hands of the Viennese classics and their piano and string trios equal rights would soon be restored to all of the instruments involved.
TRACK LISTING:
1-3: Sonata in A minor, Wq.156 (H.582) [10:17]
4-6: Sonata in F major, Wq.154 (H.576) [13:58]
7-9: Sonata in E minor, Wq.155 (H.577) [15:08]
10-12: Sonata in B-flat major, Wq.158 (H.584) [13:46]
13: Sonata in D minor, Wq.160 (H.590) [8:06]
FINAL THOUGHT:
It’s tough to be the son of a genius. I realize there many music scholars that would through C.P.E. Bach into the genius bucket – but I just don’t get it. C.P.E. Bach is kind of like Frank Sinatra, Jr. to me. Sure, he can carry a tune and even looks like his dad a bit, but when you watch him in some cheesy small room lounge in Las Vegas, you know you’re not seeing the real Ol’ Blue Eyes.
London Philharmonic Orchestra – Malcolm Arnold, conductor (Phoenix)
ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
This recording is all about one little 3:45 piece, Scottish Dance No. 3 – Allegretto(simply beautiful) – the rest of the disc? Meh.
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (by Paul Affelder):
If versatility is what is needed for success in the contemporary world of music, then Malcolm Arnold should fill all the requirements most commendably. As a matter of fact, he has made an enormous success of his versatility. Though his may not be a name too familiar to the average listener, that same person may, without knowing it, be humming or whistling one of Arnold’s works.
Arnold was born on October 21, 1921, at Northampton, England. Until he was thirteen, he was educated at various schools in the vicinity; then for the next four years he studied privately.
In 1938 he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London, where he majored in composition under the guidance of the accomplished composer and orchestrator, Gordon Jacob. Meanwhile, he took trumpet lessons from Ernest Hall, solo trumpeter of the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
Arnold’s work at the Royal College of Music earned him the Cobbett Composition Prize in 1941. That same year, he began his career as a professional musician, joined the London Philharmonic Orchestra as third trumpeter. By the time another year had gone by, he had graduated to the first chair in the trumpet section.
He was called to military service in 1944, but received a medical discharge the following year, at which time he became second trumpeter of the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
In 1946 he returned to the London Philharmonic as first trumpeter, remaining until 1948. Since that time he has devoted his talents principally to composing. While he was still in the Philharmonic, however, he gained considerable help in conducting from Eduard van Beinum who was also one of the first important conductors to give recognition to Arnold’s music.
The music covers an exceptionally broad field. In addition to three symphonies, a sinfonietta and a serenade for orchestra, Arnold has to his credit such well-known works as the English Dances, Scottish Dances, Tam O’Shanterand Beckus the Dandipratt Overtures, and the music he wrote for the Sadler’s Wells – now the Royal – Ballet’sHomage to the Queen.
He has composed concerti for flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, organ, harmonica, and piano solo or duet, also a seranade for guitar and strings, choral music and piano pieces.
He has also been exceptionally active as a composer for the films. Included among his works in this medium are Hobson’s Choice, 1984, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness and the immensely popular Bridge on the River Kwai.
Writing in the London Musical Times, Donald Mitchell had some pertinent and revealing comments to make about Arnold’s music:
That he has, as it were, sat inside an orchestra is very evident from the natural feel of his instrumentation,” wrote Mitchell; “yet throughout his scores it is not only his intimate experience of the potentialities of an orchestra that is explicit, but also the judgment of an unusually discriminating and original ear. The pure sound of Arnold’s music is, to a degree, an expression of his exceptional musical practicality – practicality, that is, raised to the very high level of virtuosity. There is no doubt that Arnold enjoys writing music. The enjoyment he takes in his own skill he communicates to his audiences with a complete lack of inhibition. Arnold, indeed, is probably the most uninhibited of all our contemporary composers, both in what he says and how he says it. His refreshing, immodest freedom of spirit – his high spirits – are well known. It is almost impossible to write about his music without using such adjectives as ‘gay,’ ‘vital,’ ‘breezy,’ ‘humorous,’ ‘witty,’ and so on. They all, in fact, apply…”
Arnold has supplied his own notes for the music recorded here. Of the Four Scottish Dances, he writes: “These dances were composed early in 1957, and are dedicated to the BBC Light Music Festival. They are all based on original melodies but one, the melody of which was composed by Robert Burns.
“The first dance is in the style of a slow strathspey.” (The Harvard Dictionary of Music defines Strathspey as “a slow Scottish dance in 4/4 meter, with many dotted notes, frequently in the inverted arrangement of the Scotch snap. The name, derived from the strath (valley) of the Spey, was originally coterminous with reel; later, the term reel was given to somewhat quicker dances in a more smoothly flowing rhythm, lacking dotted notes.)
“The second, lively reel, begins in the key of E flat and rises a semitone each time it is played until the bassoon plays it, at a greatly reduced speed, in the key of G. The final statement of the dance is at the original speed in the home key of E flat.
“”The third dance is in the style of a Hebridean Song, and the attempts to give an impression of the sea and mountain scenery on a calm summer’s day in the Hebrides.
“The last dance is a lively fling, which makes a great deal of use of the open strings of the violins.”
Of his Symphony No. 3, the composer had this to say: “This symphony, which was composed between 1954 and 1957, is written for normal symphony orchestra without harp or percussion. It is in three movements.
“The first movement has two main subjects, the first of which is played by the violins, violas, flutes and bassoon at the very outset of the piece. Later, the second subject is first stated by the oboe accompanied by violins. Towards the end of the movement the tempo abruptly changes and the same material is developed as a scherzo.
“The second movement, elegiac in character, is a set of variations based on a series of chords more than a melodic theme.
“The last movement is based on three main themes and could be loosely described as a rondo.
“The symphony is dedicated to the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Society.”
TRACK LISTING:
1: Scottish Dance No. 1 – Pesante [2:26]
2: Scottish Dance No. 2 – Vivace [2:04]
3: Scottish Dance No. 3 – Allegretto [3:45]
4: Scottish Dance No. 4 – Con brio [1:13]
5-7: Symphony No. 3, Op. 63
FINAL THOUGHT:
Malcolm Arnold’s talent was as a film composer (Bridge on the River Kwai, et al) and not as a symphonic composer. There’s not much to love in Symphony No. 3 (or the other eight, in my opinion). I realize some consider his symphonic work his most important – I’m not one of them. The highlight of this CD is the simplest tune of them all – Scottish Dance No. 3 – the Allegretto – a truly gorgeous melody.
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment – Nicolas Kraemer, Conductor (BBC Music)
Recorded at Studio 1, Maida Vale, London, October 16-17, 1995
ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
Early English Opera – oh, yeah, let’s get this party started right!
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (by Jonathan Keates):
Thomas Arne’sAlfred, first produced in 1740 as a masque and later adapted for production as an English opera in 1753, is based on the story of the Saxon king Alfred’s resistance to the invading Danes during the ninth century.
Act 1 opens with the discovery, by the shepherd Corin and his wife Emma, of King Alfred asleep under an oak tree. The king has taken refuge from the Danes, and the pair now offer him shelter in their cottage. Left alone, Alfred despairs of recovering his kingdom and appeals to the ‘genius’ of Britain for help. His wife Eltruda and son Edward enter and the three go into the shepherd’s cottage.
In Act 2 Emma consoles Eltruda for Alfred’s absence by comparing her plight with that of the lovelorn Edith, whose sweetheart has gone to the wars. Alfred returns and promises to take proper care of Eltruda. Spirits arise and address Alfred as ‘father of the state,’ urging him not to despair. Eltruda offers further encouragement to her husband. Alfred and Edward begin their assault on a Danish fort, and a dirge is sung for those who die in the battle.
Act 3 begins with the shepherds celebrating Alfred’s presence among them. Eltruda summons guardian angels to protect her, but news soon arrives of Alfred’s victory. Soldiers parade triumphantly to a ‘March with a side drum’ and the opera ends with the festive odeRule, Britania.
TRACK LISTING:
1: Overture [6:30]
2: The shepherd’s plain life [3:33]
3. Sweet valley say [2:01]
4: Let’s not those who love complain [4:00]
5: Love’s the tyrant of the heart [3:32]
6: From the dawn of early morning [5:44]
7: Hear, Alfred, hear [2:29]
8: Gracious heav’n, O hear me [5:30]
9: Vengeance, O come inspire me! [6:15]
10: There honour comes [2:28]
11: Ah me, what fears oppress… Guardian angels, O descend [3:02]
I love early English opera as much as the next person (there are vocal runs in those operas that would make singers on The Voice say to tone it down), but, Jesus Christ, this was a slog. Thank God for Rule, Britania at the end to liven things up a bit.
Schonberg Ensemble with Percussion Group The Hague and Netherlands Chamber Choir – Reinbert De Leeuw, Conductor
Recorded March 9, 1990 at Muziekcentrum Vrendenburg, Utrecht, The Netherlands
ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
If you like the sound of metal scraping against human bone, you’ll loveDe Tijd.
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES [EXCERPT] (by Elmer Schonberger):
‘mirando il punto a cui tutti li tempi son presenti’ (“… fixed on that point thy sight to which all times as present appertain”)
Dante, The Divine Comedy (Beatrice in ‘Paradisco’ 17th canto, line 17 – translation: J.W. Thomas)
When Louis Andriessen was about two thirds of the way through composing his newest work De Tijd (Time), he played what he had written through, and he suddenly realized that if he managed to conclude it successfully he would have succeeded in doing something that he had wanted to achieve since 1972.
He remembered visiting a friend one evening ‘full of plans for big works – this was well before De Staat (The Republic) and very excitedly I shouted: “I want to compose a piece – nothing but terrifying blue columns. Very long. Bangs. Silences.”‘
Nine years later the work acquired its definitive form and title: De Tijd.
It was the third in a series of large instrumental-vocal pieces which began in 1976 with De Staatto a text by Plato, and continued three years later with Mausoleumto a text by Bakunin.
In De Tijd the ‘blue columns’ took the form of a drawn-out series of chords which supported a vocal cantus firmus; the ‘bangs’ constituted a second layer made up of strongly attacked chords which articulated the eternal present of the blue columns, imbuing the music with the present, past and future.
The ‘silences’ became bars of rest which functioned as interims – sometimes for all the musicians (as in the beginning of the ninth minute), at other times for the choir alone, such as when eternity (aeternitas) is mentioned for the first time – eternity of which it is ultimately said that ‘ever still standing it determines both past and future time, although itself neither past nor future.’
De Tijd ended up being a long pieces: 41 minutes in an unchanging tempo of 48.
In contrast with De Staat which was rooted in a musical vision, De Tijd is the musical image of what was originally a non-musical impression, once described by Andriessen as ‘a unique experience which gave me the feeling that time had ceased to exist, the feeling of an eternal moment.’
The desire to transpose this experience into a work of ‘sustained exalted musical motionlessness’ spurred the composer on a quest into the scientific, historical and philosophical labyrinth of time, which began with Dijksterhuis’s classic De mechanisering van bet wereldbeeld (The Mechanization of the World Image)and Dante’sDivine Comedy, ending up two years later with Saint Augustine, and the same work by Dante which was to provide the superscription for the piece.
In the meantime, the composer’s journey extended from Florence – where he was researching into a particular philosopher who was a contemporary of Dante’s – to Tunisia where in December 1980, more or less by coincidence, he wrote the last bars of the short score of De Tijd hardly sixty kilometers from Saint Augustine’s birthplace.
‘Quid est ergo tempus?’is the famous question Saint Augustine asked himself: ‘What, then is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.’
Entirely at odds with his original intentions, Andriessen ended up writing music that measure time rather than expression the ‘eternal moment,’ and in contrast with this he used a text with a metaphysical import.
TRACK LISTING:
1 – De Tijd [42:56]
FINAL THOUGHT:
This is not cocktail party music. And really terrible for some sort of outdoor picnic or wedding reception. This is first rate haunted house music or perfect to set the mood at a creepy art installation. The listener may very well need a little bit of early Mozart to get the pounding, disturbing, dissonant clock strikes out of your head.
If Alkan do it – so can you (actually you probably can’t but Marc-Andre Hamelin comes pretty damn close in this brilliant recording)
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES [EXCERPT] (by Francois Luguenot):
Charles-Valentin Alkan: A Life’s Works
The Grande Sonate and Sonatine, brought together on this recording, are Charles-Valentin Alkan’s first and last masterpieces for solo piano and illustrate two extremes in the composer’s aesthetic development.
In many respects, the Grande Sonate Op. 33is one of the pinnacles not only of Alkan’s output but of the entire Romantic piano repertoire.
In writing a piano sonata, Alkan was reviving and preserving a form which was not merely undervalued by the French but was even described by Schumann as being “worn out.”
In the hands of this extremely discreet composer, it could almost claim to be a manifesto: composed in the wake of the 1848 Revolution, and dedicated to his father, it is prefaced by what constitutes one of the rare official examples of the composer’s taking an aesthetic stand on an extremely controversial matter: programme music.
His text is not to be overlooked:
Much has been said and written about the limitations of expression through music. Without adopting this rule or that, without trying to resolve any of the vast questions raised by this or that system, I will simply say why I have given these four pieces such titles and why I have sometimes used terms which are simply never used by others.
It is not a question here, of imitative music; even less so of music seeking its own justification, seeking to explain its particular effect or its validity, in a realm beyond the music itself. The first piece is a Scherzo, the second an Allegro, the third and fourth an Andante and a Largo; but each one corresponds, to my mind, to a given moment in time, to a specific frame of mind, a particular state of the imagination. Why should I not portray it? We will always have music in some form and it can but enhance our ability to express ourselves: the performer without relinquishing anything of his individual sentiment, is inspired by the composer’s own ideas: a name and an object which in the realm of the intellect form a perfect combination, seem, when taken in a material sense, to clash with one another. So, however ambitious this information may seem at first glance, I believe that I might be better understood and better interpreted by including it here than I would be without it.
Let me also call upon Beethoven in his authority. We know that, towards the end of his career, this great man was working on a systematic catalogue of his major works. In it, he aimed to record the plan, memory or inspiration which gave rise to each one.
The composition and publication of the Grande Sonate occurred at a crucial moment in the composer’s life.
During the summer of 1848, when the Revolution was not yet over, Zimmerman, Alkan’s teacher, resigned from his position as Professor of Piano at the Paris Conservatoire.
It would seem natural enough that Charles-Valentin, his most brilliant and promising student, should succeed him; but in the troubled climate of the time, and as a result of some predictable intrigue, it was in fact a second-rate musician, Antoine Marmontel, who was to gain the post.
This was a particularly bitter pill for Alkan to swallow; he was to fade gradually further into obscurity and renounce all public and official posts.
The Revolution was also to harm any publicity which might have surrounded the publication of the Grande Sonate; although it was well heralded in the music magazines, it would appear that there was not one single review of the piece, nor one public performance thereafter.
The British pianist Ronald Smith is fully justified in thinking that he brought the piece to life in America in 1973 when he gave it its first public performance!
TRACK LISTING:
1-4: Grande Sonate ‘Les Quatre Ages’ Op. 33 [38:48]
5-8: Sonatine Op. 61 [18:05]
9: Barcarolle Op. 65 no. 6 [3:41]
10: Le Festin D’Esope Op. 39 no. 12 [8:40]
FINAL THOUGHT:
Seriously, if you’ve heard the Grande Sonate ‘Les Quatre Ages’you would feel as I do – completely stunned that this great piano work didn’t have its public premiere until 1973. Alkan got screwed.
Concerto for Jew’s Harp, Mandora and Orchestra in F Major
Munich Chamber Orchestra – Hans Stadlmair (Orfeo)
Recorded July 31, 1984 – Studio II des Bayerischen Rundfunks – Munich
ONE SENTENCE REVIEW:
Finally, a Jew’s Harp concerto worth listening to.
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (including same spelling and grammar) (by Dieter Kirsch):
For many music-lovers this recording may come as something of a surprise. It is certainly a curiosity.
Who would have thought that a “common folk instrument” like the Jew’s harp (or Guimbard) had had classical concertos written for it, and by Beethoven’s teacher of composition at that!
And what is a mandora anyway?
A glance at the history of the Jew’s harp will soon make us realize, however, that here we are dealing with an instrument of long and venerable lineage.
Old surviving specimens, pictures, sculptures that this is one of the most ancient and widespread of all musical instruments.
During the 19th century in Europe it even enjoyed a brief heyday outside the confines of folk music, with its own virtuoso exponents and repertoire of written works.
No other musical instrument has borne so many different names: in English Jew’s harp or Jew’s trump (origin of name unknown), in German Maultrommel (“mouth drum”) or Brummeisen (“buzzing-iron”), in Latin Crembalum, in Italian Aura (“breeze” or “breath”) and Harmonica or, again as in the poem by the minnesinger Friedrich von Hausen, “Summer” (“buzzer” or “vibrator”). This later reference would appear to be the earliest written evidence of the Jew’s harp in Europe.
From the 14th century onwards there are numerous pictorial representations of the instrument, showing it mainly in the hands of simple peasant folk but also occasionally in more august surroundings.
The cultural movement most fascinated by the sound of this strange instrument was that of the German Romantics.
After the 1800 we find more and more reports of travelling virtuosi (Kunert, Koch, Eulenstein) who were able to play on up to 16 different instruments and also in two parts. Several of the Romantic poets and novelists were so moved on hearing these excellent artists that they immortalized the instrument in their writings (e.g., Jean Paul in his novel “Hesperus”).
Justinus Kerner, the Swabian poet, physician, occultist and player of the Jew’s harp, wrote of his instrument: “Fortissimo and piano dolce can be expressed on the Jew’s harp most magnificently, and it is excellently suited for playing fantasies of one’s own; suited to convey outpourings of pure feeling in tones from better worlds, as the Aeolian harp conveys the feeling of Spring or a starry night.”
The name mandora has cropped up several times during the course of musical history.
Although the mandora of the Middle Ages is quite a different instrument from the 18th century mandora, they have one thing in common: they are both “little sisters” of the lute.
The mandora for which Albrechtsberger wrote his concerto with Jew’s harp is described in his textbook on composition (1790) under the heading “percussion instruments” as being “A small kind of lute, played in just the same manner, but tuned differently. It has only eight courses made of sheep’s gut.”
The lower four courses (pairs of strings) were tuned differently each time according to the key in which the piece was to be played. The simplification of the instrument in this way (the lute proper is an extremely difficult instrument to play) naturally results in a corresponding lack of musical substance: the player is often merely required to strum a few basic accompaniment patterns.
The similarities to the classic guitar are obvious. It is not surprising that the mandora had its greatest following among those groups of people who wanted to enjoy some convivial music-making without having too many technical demands made on them. Hence the reason why most of the surviving copies of music for mandora have been found in monastery libraries.
The history of the concerto recorded here can likewise be traced back to a monastery. In 1765, returning from his coronation in Frankfurt, Joseph II sojourned at Melk Priory.
Here he heard Father Bruno Glatzl, renowned for his virtuosity on the Jew’s harp. In the prior’s diary we can read: “lusit coram Majestatibus on two Jew’s harps. Namely, he played the Primus and the Secundus both at once, making from the notes minuets, concertos and a thousand other fine artistic things…”
A mandora provided the accompaniment.
At the time a Melk Priory scholar whose duty it was to play the organ on such festive occasions, Albrechtsberger is sure to have been present. His proficiency as an organist finally took Albrechtsberger to Vienna, where in the years that followed he composed his concertos for Jew’s harp, mandora and strings.
Judging from the numberings, Albrechtsberger must have written at least seven such concertos.
Three of them have survived, those composed in the years 1976, 1770 and 1771, and are preserved today in the Budapest National Library Szechenyi (Ms.mus 2551-2553).
All the “concerti” are autographed and prescribe the use of several Jew’s harps functioning at different pitches, whereas for the lower part Albrechtsberger employs letters without indicating exactly which octave pitch is intended. In the case of the E major concerto there exists a handwritten “viola prima” part, which, as it includes all the chief melodic material of the mandora part, is obviously intended as an alternative to this. (Dieter Kirsch – Translation: Avril Watts).
TRACK LISTING:
Concerto for Jew’s Harp, Mandora and Orchestra in E major
Concerto for Jew’s Harp, Mandora and Orchestra in F major
FINAL THOUGHTS:
If you can own only one Jew’s harp recording, make it this one!
Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827)
His instruction was, however, unambiguously carried out only in the case of Opus 106 – the second of his late sonatas. As a grand sonata in four distinct movements, the Hammerklavier stands apart from its companions. It is a work of unprecedented scope, with the broadest slow movement Beethoven ever wrote for the piano, and a finale consisting of a colossal fugue – which makes huge demand on performer and listener alike.
Emily Sachs – President – Manka Music Group (A division of Manka Bros. Studios – The World’s Largest Media Company)
