For these distracted times

The Long 17th Century: A Cornucopia of Early Keyboard Music

Occasionally an artist will construct a programme for a concert or a recording project that illuminates and instructs at a very high level, providing an aesthetic and scholarly experience that rivals the performance itself. Pianist Daniel-Ben Pienaar has provided just this in his new two-disc album of music from the "Long 17th Century." "Perhaps a sensibility informed by the combined push-and-pull of present and past", he says, "is fundamental to finding common ground with the music of the 17th century now; that is, as a departure point for making the music familiar but also contemporary to us – and not a mere theme-park visit to a distant world."

Variety is one of the key concepts here: Pienaar has chosen for his Cornucopia 36 works by 36 different composers. But it's the common ground within this broad musical array that allows Pienaar to build a programme of similarly-sounding music written in the period from the last three decades of the 1500s, the entire 1600s, to the beginning of the 1700s. His version of the "Long 17th Century" is thus analogous to popular music in the 1950s extending into the pre-Beatles Sixties: the motto of Spielberg's American Graffiti was "Where were you in '62?"

A number of these composers are at least fairly well-known - Peter Philips, Matthew Locke, Georg Muffat, Giles Farnaby, William Byrd, Dietrich Buxtehude, John Bull. But there are also many names that are completely new to me: Pablo Bruna, John Coprario, Juan Bautista Cabanilles, Antonio Correa Braga, Gaspard Le Roux. Pienaar draws a parallel between the modernizing tendencies of the 17th century and his own adaptations of the music for the modern piano, referring to "the pragmatic and free-spirited tradition not only of the 17th century but also of our own time." This project is a model for scholarly presentation, but it has the freshness & verve of a couple of long sets in a jazz club.

Thomas Tompkin's "A Sad Pavan for these distracted times" is a sad little piece with a perfect title, which echoes back and forth through the centuries. It made me think of T. S. Eliot's Burnt Norton:

Neither plenitude nor vacancy.  Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before time and after.

This album can act as a soundtrack for 2020, as we all dodge the distractions of our over-busy lives and our over-watched screens. It might help, or so one hopes, to bring meaning and the consolations of true art to our lives, "whirled by the cold wind."

This album will be released on February 7, 2020.

Some special music from Estonia

Artur Lemba: Piano Concerto no. 1; Artur Kapp: Symphony no. 4; Mihkel Lüdig:Orchestral Works

I've loved the First Piano Concerto of Artur Lemba ever since I first heard it, on a fine Finlandia disc of Estonian concertos recorded late in the last century. It was so nice to see it on this new disc, again with the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, but this time conducted by the esteemed conductor Neeme Järvi. Lemba was trained at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, and his music is solidly in the Russian Romantic tradition. His Concerto is from the same period as Rachmaninoff's 2nd and 3rd Piano Concertos, and it shares the lyrical feeling of those works, though one can hear as well the influence of Tchaikovsky's concerted music, not to mention Anton Rubinstein's once celebrated 4th Piano Concerto. Pianist Mihkel Poll provides all the virtuosity that Lemba puts into his music - he was as celebrated as a pianist as he was a composer - but the emphasis here is quite rightly on the music's lyrical content. Lemba really brings his own special sound to this music, as he does to the only other major piece of his I know, his Symphony in C Sharp Minor, also recorded by Järvi, and available on a special album from Chandos. Alas, that's largely it for this fine composer on disc.

Though none of the other music on this album quite matches Lemba's piece, it's all quite marvellous. Three short orchestral works by Mihkel Lüdig are lovely, though they perhaps don't stick in the memory for very long. I was quite impressed with Artur Kapp's Viimne piht (The Last Confession), in an arrangement for violin and orchestra that features the violinist Triin Ruubel. Kapp's Symphony no. 4 comes from 1948; its dedication to the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League made me think it might have a Shostakovich sound, but this is music from an earlier time. One of its subtitles is "Classical Symphony", but even Prokofiev's 1st Symphony, from 1916, has a more advanced sound. Kapp's Symphony harks all the way back, I think, to Tchaikovsky's Mozart-inspired orchestral works. The great symphonies of Edward Tubin, memorably recorded by Järvi, show a much richer and vital strain of Estonian music than this light fare, as pleasant as it might be.

As always, Neeme Järvi presents the music of his country in its best light. Authenticity is the keynote of this entire project. Chandos provides its usual full and warm sound, and excellent documentation of this unfamiliar music in a full multilingual liner booklet. Fine production values all around, from one of my favourite labels.

I love the album cover; the design is based on a photograph by Stanislav Rabunski taken in Tallin, Estonia. I managed to track down the original; what a special place!

This disc will be released on February 7, 2020

Fresh Beethoven takes from a fine conductor

Beethoven: Symphonies 5 & 7

All right, 2020 is indeed the Beethoven Year, marking the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth. But I wasn't planning on turning Music For Several Instruments into an all-Beethoven blog. We'll see how things go in January, but in the meantime I'm really enjoying listening to the Big Guy as we see out the year and the decade: the Late String Quartets from The Brodsky Quartet, the superb complete Piano Sonatas by Igor Levit, and now this fine new disc of Symphonies from the NDR Radiophilharmonie under Andrew Manze.

Back in 2010 Manze talked with Michael Cookson about his transition from conducting while playing the violin in Baroque repertoire, where he made his early reputation:

But there comes a point with the repertoire when you cannot do that anymore. For me the point came with Beethoven and so to go any further meant I had to put the violin down and conduct. I was always interested in a wide repertoire, not everything, but a wide repertoire.

A decade later, Manze is settled in with the superb NDR Radiophilharmonie, and he's indeed exploring a wider repertoire: most notably the Mendelssohn symphonies in a marvellous series for Pentatone. In this new recording of two of Beethoven's greatest symphonies you can almost hear the pre-figured Mendelssohn echoing in the background. Manze is driving the two-way street between the Classic and Romantic here, proving once again Jorge Luis Borges' axiom: "Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future." This doesn't mean that Manze adds Romantic excrescences to Beethoven, any more than he transfers anything more than a feeling of lightness and an extemporaneous freshness from the early music with which he was once almost exclusively connected. The Fifth Symphony has plenty of drama, but light and dark have equal weight in the great slow movement. One has the feeling that Manze is leading his fine instrumentalists through Beethoven's score without any special agenda of his own; hence his fresh takes sound organic rather than contrived.

Peter Ackroyd, in his marvellous book Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, sees this point of view as something typically British:

What manner of imagination is this? It is one that eschews purity of function for elaboration of form, that strays continually into anecdote and detail, that distrusts massiveness of conception or intent, that avoids 'depth' of feeling or profundity of argument in favour of artifice and rhetorical display.

Manze's Beethoven, I would argue, is firmly in this British tradition of pattern and elaborate decoration, and thus outside the 'profound' tradition of Beethoven conductors, German especially (Furtwangler, Klemperer, Karajan). But as Hugo von Hofmannsthal once said, "Depth must be hidden. Where? On the surface." The fact that Manze is leading a German orchestra down this different path - not radically different, but different nevertheless - shows the close bond he has built with his NDR players since he took over the band just over five years ago. One looks forward to more Beethoven from the same source, as well as more varied repertoire in the future. Which repertoire? Surprise us, Maestro!

This disc will be released on January 10, 2020.

Transparent, pure and crystalline

Beethoven: Late String Quartets

Slowly, slowly, the melody unfolded itself. The archaic Lydian harmonies hung on the air. It was an unimpassioned music, transparent, pure and crystalline, like a tropical sea, an Alpine lake. Water on water, calm sliding over calm; the according of level horizons and waveless expanses, a counterpoint of serenities. And everything clear and bright; no mists, no vague twilights. It was the calm of still and rapturous contemplation, not of drowsiness or sleep. It was the serenity of a convalescent who wakes from fever and finds himself born again into a realm of beauty. But the fever was 'the fever called living' and the rebirth was not into this world; the beauty was unearthly, convalescent serenity was the peace of God. The interweaving of Lydian melodies was heaven.

 - Aldous Huxley, on the third movement of Beethoven's String Quartet op. 132, in his novel Point Counter Point

2020, the Beethoven Year commemorating the 250th anniversary of his birth, begins at the very apex of the composer's music, his late string quartets, played by the very fine Brodsky Quartet. This is a group that has often put together innovative programs on disc and in live performance, but here we have just the works themselves, albeit with a most substantial bonus, the 11th String Quartet, op. 95, from Beethoven's middle period. In a 1989 Gramophone review of Beethoven Quartet cycles, Robert Layton once talked about the late quartets as "the Alpine heights of the repertory which few traverse unscathed." He felt that technical finesse and superficial beauty that had pushed recordings of earlier Beethoven works forward might prove as impediments in the interpretation of these great works crafted within the composer's total deafness. Layton quotes Basil Lam, who said "in the last quartets Beethoven is as indifferent to communication as he is to self-expression." In space, no one can hear you scream.

These performances tread a middle ground between the more mystical interpretations of the Lindsay or Végh Quartets and the solid (but by no means stolid) German tradition of the Amadeus Quartet, whose early 1960s LPs were my first exposure (along with Huxley's novel) to this music. Though Beethoven had long left behind the musical tropes and attitudes of the 18th century Enlightenment, there is a residual classical feeling in much of this music, which the Brodsky performance often underlines. As Huxley says, "no mists, no vague twilights." There are no radical differences between the music on these three discs and a hypothetical average of the spectacular run of great recordings of late Beethoven quartets, from the early Busch and Hollywood sets to the Quartetto Italiano, the Cleveland and Melos Quartets. Paradoxically, this approach points most decidedly to the absolutely radical nature of Beethoven's music itself. In the rarefied air of Beethoven's music of the mid-1820s, everything has changed.

This album will be released on January 3, 2020.

Top Ten Discs for 2019

Welcome to my fifth Top Ten Discs post for Music for Several Instruments.
Here are the lists from last year, 2017, 2016, and the one from 2015.

Grief and consolation and branding

The Alinde Quartett perform Mendelssohn's final quartet, a dark portrait of raw grief over the death of his sister Fanny. To change things up, they looked for "a light-hearted contrast", and came up with some lovely, clear and bright Fantasies that Purcell wrote originally for a consort of viols. Hence the title of the album: "Lichtwechsel" = "Change of Light". This is by no means light as in cheerful or happy-go-lucky, but more the civilized Enlightenment that is best expressed in music from Purcell to Haydn.

Into the abyss

The Allan Pettersson Dream Team, Christian Lindberg and the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra, with violinist Ulf Wallin in a completely convincing performance of the controversial 2nd Violin Concerto. The unfinished 17th Symphony, the last music Pettersson wrote before his death, is as moving here as the Lacrimosa from Mozart's Requiem or the unfinished final music of Bach's Art of the Fugue.

Woke Rameau

"I like people," said Voltaire, speaking about Jean-Philippe Rameau, "who know when to drop the sublime in order to banter." Gyorgy Vashegyi's Budapest-based Purcell Choir and Orfeo Orchestra continue their superb string of recordings for Glossa with this superb release, with its tone perfectly calibrated. Great choral and solo singing, led by soprano Chantal Santon-Jeffery, contributes to a boisterous experience.

The International Style in 18th Century Music

Simon Murphy's latest theme album with the New Dutch Academy tells the story of 18th century musicians as if they were from the mid-20th century Golden Age of Travel: "classical glitterati" going to the musical capitals of Europe to show off their wares. This is such clever presentation, but it's about more than glitz and glamour; these are very fine performances of music by Abel, Reichardt, Zelter, Mozart, Storace and Paisiello.

Another winner from the Emerald City

Richard Strauss's Alpine Symphony and the Prelude to Rued Langgaard's Antichrist are both full of completely, ravishingly, beautiful music, and both are ravishingly played by the Seattle Symphony under Thomas Dausgaard. This is music that plays to the strengths of the Seattle Symphony: rich and powerful brass, sumptuous strings, lithe and subtle woodwinds, everything ready for Dausgaard to put together into a rich orchestral tapestry.

Handel's Transcendent Realism

Handel's oratorio is one of a number written in the 18th century based on Barthold Heinrich Brockes's controversial, even lurid, libretto. This performance by the Academy of Ancient Music, under Richard Egarr, is intensely emotional and darkly coloured by pain and suffering. Watch for this release to show up in lots of Best Of 2019 lists and awards. It's my top album this year.

Beethoven for the Big Year

Igor Levit's complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas are full-blown masterpieces of the art of performance and recording. This is a stunning set from Sony, setting us up in the best way possible for the big celebrations - for Beethoven's 250th Birthday - next year.

A spiritual performance without sentimentality

Following an outstanding recording of the Missa Solemnis, Masaaki Suzuki gives us a transcendent Beethoven Ninth Symphony, with spirited playing and singing from the Bach Collegium Japan and a quartet of very fine singers.

São Paulo's Villa-Lobos recording revolution

A very welcome disc in Naxos's new series The Music of Brazil takes on the first of Villa-Lobos's commissioned concertos from the last decade of his life, along with some important chamber works. Manuel Barrueco is superb in the Guitar Concerto, and José Staneck is very fine in the Harmonica Concerto. I was especially impressed, though, with two chamber works: the Sexteto Mistico from Villa's modernist period, and the late Quinteto Instrumental, a lovely exercise in nostalgie for the Paris of Villa's earlier years.

Fresh chansons from another world

The chansons of Johannes Ockeghem, written in the second half of the 15th century, sound so fresh and new in this marvellous release from Scott Metcalfe and Blue Heron that the intervening centuries feel like some sort of illusion. This recording is part of Blue Heron's project Ockeghem@600, a multi-year project to perform the complete works of this great composer. It will be complete in 2021, around the time of the 600th anniversary of Ockeghem's birth.

More outstanding orchestral music from Iceland

Concurrence: Music by Icelandic composers

Five years ago we moved from the Prairies to Canada's Banana Belt: Southern Vancouver Island. That means horrific cold weather and tornados are a thing of the past, but we don't live a worry-free life by any means. No one here can (or at least should) ignore the very good chance of a devastating earthquake happening at any time. Indeed, Victoria is right in the sweet spot for the coming Big One. So Páll Ragnar Pálsson’s Quake scared the bejesus out of me. It's performed here, by Daniel Bjarnason and the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, with such urgent presence that even someone on more solid ground is apt to feel at least uncomfortable. All four of these fairly long pieces present the primeval forces that made, and continue to re-make, this amazing island in the North Atlantic. Besides its outstanding physical beauty, Iceland is well known for an astounding range of world-class artists of all sorts, in the performing, literary and visual arts. The painter Gudrun Kristjansdottir is a good example; her 1999 painting "Red Hillside" is featured on the cover of this new 2-disc release, the second in Sono Luminus's ISO Project of Icelandic orchestral music.

The only composer I know of the four on this album is Anna Thorvaldsdóttir. Her Metacosmos was premiered by the New York Philharmonic in 2018, and was also featured in last summer's Proms. This new recording is another step on the way to its becoming a 21st Century orchestral classic. María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir's Oceans is a natural extension of Thorvaldsdóttir's schema into the vast seas. Finally, Haukur Tómasson's Piano Concerto No. 2 fits well with the other three works. The piano part has more of an obligato role than a virtuosic one, and the music textures have so much interest, which it shares with the rest of the entire hour-plus in this fascinating release.

Beethoven from The Original Odd Couple

Beethoven: Complete Works for Cello and Piano

Pierre Fournier is, for me, the Beethoven cellist. I first heard this music - two early sonatas, two late, and one in between, with three delightful sets of variations - on Deutsche Grammophon LPs with Fournier and Wilhelm Kempff, from the mid-1960s. But I didn't know this earlier Fournier set, also from DGG, recorded in 1959 with one of my favourite pianists, Friedrich Gulda. The elegant Fournier, who in his mid-50s was at his peak, forms a true musical bond with an unlikely partner, the brash 29-year-old piano iconoclast from Vienna. In these recordings Gulda actually plays it rather straight, by his standards. Indeed, a Gramophone reviewer says in a 1993 review, "... it is Kempff who sounds as if he might have one foot in the jazz camp." But though Gulda doesn't act out in this high-profile gig, it certainly doesn't mean there are any deficiencies in his Beethoven playing. Just the opposite: he and Fournier make a great team, with Fournier's lovely tone and Gulda's perfectly judged contribution, not too bold, not too reticent, and definitely not too eccentric.

It's only been a few years since I've developed a real taste for historic re-issues. I really appreciate the work that Urania has done in bringing great music like this back into general circulation. They may not provide the highest level of documentation, in the style of Somm Recordings, but their re-mastering is solid, and, most importantly for me, their repertoire and artist choices are often first-rate. This release is especially recommended.

A note on the Urania cover: the Milan-based artist Gianmario Masala re-mixes his landscape photographs to add a patina of history and mystery. This is well-chosen to match the drama of Beethoven and the performance by Fournier & Gulda.

Christmas with Henry & Elizabeth

A Tudor Christmas: music by Gibbons, Byrd, Weelkes, Holborne, Ravenscroft, Tallis, Tye, Dowland, Taverner

My own Christmas traditions tend to have three main sources: mid-20th century nostalgia from my own childhood (think Charlie Brown and Vince Guaraldi); Victoriana (everything Dickens); and earlier English traditions, many of which went back to pagan time, but which peaked during the reigns of Henry VIII (reputed composer of Greensleeves) and Elizabeth I. This album from the Trinity Boys Choir and the viol consort L'Armonia brings such a fabulous mix of sixteenth century music from the Tudor and early Stuart times. The superb eight boys' voices are enhanced by the contributions of Katharine Fuge & David Swinson, and the viol consort provides a nice variety of musical textures. These performances are based on current Historically Informed Practices, but the scholarship is worn lightly, and musical values come to the fore. Fans of Wolf Hall and The Tudors will enjoy this music, but also fans of Christmas!

This album will be released on December 13, 2019