Keep CPE Weird

CPE Bach: Piano Concertos

This has been an exceptionally interesting early NFL season when it comes to quarterbacks. With the rise of the gifted young Kansas City QB Patrick Mahomes, we're hearing a lot about the rare quarterback who can work within a "system" drawn up by the coaching staff, but also have great results improvising when things break down. Which brings me to CPE Bach, the Aaron Rodgers of 18th century composers. A dutiful son to Johann Sebastian when his father was still alive, Carl Philip Emmanuel tended more often than not to go off in interesting directions when writing his own works. His knowledge of music from before and during his father's time was profound, so he could play well from inside the pocket, as it were. But as one of art's gifted eccentrics, like Gesualdo, Caravaggio, James Joyce and Werner Herzog, CPE Bach often went his own way, pulling the music of his time along with him.

More than half of these keyboard concertos are in minor keys, and all exhibit to a some degree Empfindsamkeit, which is more or less "Sensibility," used Jane Austen-style. In many ways this "sensitive" and "sentimental" style prefigures Romanticism, starting a line which goes through Haydn and Mozart's minor key symphonies, sonatas, concertos and opera arias, to Schumann and Chopin. Every year or two since 2010 Hännsler Classics has released the individual discs in pianist Michael Rische's cycle, but it's so nice to have this four CD set of the collected works. These are highly characterized performances, played on a modern instrument that highlights the composer's forward-looking style. My admiration for this particular Bach Son has never been higher!

This disc will be released on November 8, 2019

Very fine American music played by superb British musicians

Erich Korngold: Symphony in F Sharp, Theme & Variations, Straussiana

"Out of the stuff of film music," said Alex Ross in a recent New Yorker article about Erich Wolfgang Korngold, "he fashions what may be the last great symphony in the German Romantic tradition." This new disc from John Wilson and the Sinfonia of London provides the most compelling version I've heard of Korngold's Symphony in F Sharp. I learn from the very fine liner notes by Brendan G. Carroll that Korngold worked on the Symphony during a holiday in Canada, but doesn't give any more details. I'll consult Carroll's 1997 biography The Last Prodigy to see if his Canadian itinerary is available, and report back here. In the meantime, I can fill in some plausible Canadian landscapes for a post-war holiday from Hollywood. Perhaps scenes from my neck of the woods: Victoria and Vancouver Island, and a train journey through British Columbia to beautiful Jasper National Park.

As it is, Korngold's usual movie-scene milieu is very much in evidence in the entire disc. Besides the usual Warner's back-lot, there are the Californian hills, forests and islands that stand in for Spanish, English and the Mediterranean adventure. One shouldn't have to apologize for film-score sourcing of "serious" classical music in the 21st Century, where very fine symphonic music is heard in every Multiplex, but alas, I've already read a number of reviews of this disc that are excessively patronizing. This is a Good Symphony by any standards (and a Very Good one in my view), and it's a serious error of categories to think it illegitimate because it comes from "the movies."

Besides the Symphony, there are two additional works on the disc. Both are appealing and accessible, and though they were written for the American School Orchestras Association, there's no lack of musical interest on the listening end. This new Korngold disc is something we've come to expect from John Wilson on Chandos: very fine American music played by superb British musicians in a completely authentic way.

Handel's Transcendent Realism

George Frideric Handel: Brockes-Passion

"Never before had naturalism transfigured itself by such a conception and execution. Never before had a painter so charnally envisaged divinity nor so brutally dipped his brush into the wounds and running sores and bleeding nail holes of the Saviour. Grünewald had passed all measure. He was the most uncompromising of realists, but his morgue Redeemer, his sewer Deity, let the observer know that realism could be truly transcendent. A divine light played about that ulcerated head, a superhuman expression illuminated the fermenting skin of the epileptic features. This crucified corpse was a very God, and, without aureole, without nimbus, with none of the stock accoutrements except the blood-sprinkled crown of thorns, Jesus appeared in His celestial super-essence, between the stunned, grief-torn Virgin and a Saint John whose calcined eyes were beyond the shedding of tears." 

- J. K. Huysmans, on Matthias Grünewald's Crucifixion at Cassel, from the first chapter of his novel Là-Bas

Even today Matthias Grünewald's Large Crucifixion has the power to shock us. The work was painted in 1523-24 (it's now in the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe), and having looked at it through the intense lens of J. K. Huysmans, one realizes that one cannot understand life without looking closely, without flinching, at pain and suffering. And it's especially those rare artists like Grünewald that help us to a deeper understanding through their transcendent art.

Two hundred years later, in 1712,  Barthold Heinrich Brockes published a passion libretto nearly as naturalistic and graphic as Grünewald's painting. Coming as it did in the midst of the Enlightenment, it was perhaps even more shocking. Many of the critics found it objectionable, or at the least in poor taste. "Viewer discretion is advised", or the 18th Century equivalent. But it was a big hit with three great artists who understood its emotional power, and were anxious to bring their best music to the task. Georg Philipp Telemann set the Passion in 1716, Georg Frideric Handel wrote his some time before 1719, and Johann Sebastian Bach used a number of Brockes' texts in his St. John Passion of 1727. Bach also performed the Telemann and Handel Passions in Leipzig.

This recording by the Academy of Ancient Music, under Richard Egarr, is intensely emotional and darkly coloured by pain and suffering. It provides an almost cinematic experience; I'm thinking of here of artists such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Francis Ford Coppola and Carl Theodor Dreyer. For that, we can thank Egarr, his choir, solo singers and instrumentalists, and the sound engineers of AAM's own label, but also Handel and Brockes.

This is also a major scholarly release, based on a new edition of the work. The third disc provides alternative readings, but you needn't worry about untangling versions. Handel's endless invention provides passionate arguments, profound sorrow and pity, and redemptive uplift that always somehow entertains, as only the greatest of opera composers - Mozart, Verdi, Wagner - can. And to do all this while working in the bailiwick of the greatest of Passion composers, J. S. Bach,  well, that's really some accomplishment!



This album will be released on October 4, 2019.

A great musical partnership

The Complete Beethoven Sonatas for Violin & Piano; Sonatas by Fauré, Franck & Debussy

Here are more classic Beethoven recordings to lead us into the Big Beethoven Year of 2020, the 250th Anniversary of his birthday, on December 17, 1770. The Beethoven sonatas are studio recordings from 1958 and 1961, and it would be hard to find a better-matched duo for this repertoire. When Zino Francescatti and Robert Casadesus swap the lead and support roles at the beginning of the Spring Sonata, op. 24, you're hearing a marvellous musical partnership unfold.



The keynote here is freshness. Though the temperature is rather low, as likely to be measured as fiery, the two musicians always sound spontaneous, and even, when the music allows, joyous.  I was always convinced by their decisions, and swept along by the music. And what lovely music this is! Perhaps the violin sonatas aren't as serious and profound as the string quartet cycle, but my goodness, there are so many felicities in melody and rhythm, and such inventive conversations between the instruments. When you have two such impressive musicians as Francescatti and Casadesus, so intelligent, so sensitive, so lively, you can be sure you're hearing this music as the composer intended.

The three Beethoven CDs sound exceptional, as one would expect, since Holger Siedler, who did the remastering, had fine source tapes to work with. The fourth disc is much more of a mixed bag, sound-wise, though the music and the performances are wonderful. These sonatas by Fauré, Franck and Debussy are live recordings from 1947 to 1956. The bonus disc is much more than just an encore; it makes a perfect album even more impressive!

Beethoven for the Big Year

Beethoven: Complete Piano Sonatas

Next year Beethoven fans around the world will be celebrating the 250th Anniversary of the composers birth, on December 16, 1770 (or the 17th; Charles Schulz makes reference here to the uncertainty about the actual date).

I'm planning a full year of merrymaking in 2020, but it never hurts to get a good head-start for this, and here we have a marvellous project to get the festivities rolling. Igor Levit's complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas are full-blown masterpieces of the art of performance and recording. In the three op. 2 sonatas Levit sets the perfect tone. The 25-year-old composer is attempting to make his first piano sonatas much grander than his models, mainly Haydn, and he worked hard to present his music in a completely assured way. And surprisingly he very nearly succeeds. There's a certain coltish awkwardness in these early sonatas, though, that Levit underlines in an appealing way. The Adagio of the 1st Sonata is charming, but also more than a bit sentimental, and Levit is engaging as he shows Beethoven, not for the last time, exposing very personal feelings, in this and all the storm and stress of these works. This

Sony released the late sonatas (op. 101 to op. 111) back in 2013, when Levit was only 25 himself. These are astonishingly performances, so far removed from any youthful callowness, or any lack of nuance or indeed the spiritual component of these great works of art. With their complete context in place - all 27 sonatas written before 1816 - these five sonatas seem even more impressive as part of the complete set.

It's hard to believe that the Beethoven Bicentennial was 50 years ago. In 1970 I began my serious introduction to classical music, with the DGG set of 85 LPs arriving in the mail, 5 discs every month, via Time-Life. The great Wilhelm Kempff played the piano sonatas; it was the perfect way to listen closely to this music for the first time.

I was, and am today, completely won over by Kempff's measured approach and a deeply humanistic feeling that seems very much to be a fellow-feeling with Beethoven himself. Igor Levit seems to be very much there in Kempff's court, along, perhaps, with Alfred Brendel in between. The many times I've listened to Levit's Beethoven in the past month is just a start; I'm sure I'll be listening just as carefully, and appreciating his artistry, throughout the Big Year, and beyond.