Reviews and occasional notes on classical music "Music, both vocall and instrumental, so good, so delectable, so rare, so admirable, so super excellent, that it did even ravish and stupifie all those strangers that never heard the like." - Thomas Coryat, after hearing 3 hours of music at the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice, 1608.
Respighi wrote this delightful Sleeping Beauty opera for the puppeteer Vittorio Podrecca in 1922, and though the composer later adapted it as a full-blown opera, it still has all the charm of a puppet production for children. Charm is the driving force in this production from Sardinia, beautifully presented on Blu-ray by Unitel and Naxos. When Coleridge talked about the "willing suspension of disbelief", he said that a fantastic story requires "human interest and a semblance of truth". This is amply supplied by Charles Perrault's classic story, left intact in the libretto of Claudio Guastalla, and enhanced by Respighi's music. The visual spectacle and stage effects are impressive, but it's the gorgeous music that makes this special, both as fantasy and real human interest. Though it's full of musical in-jokes - references to Wagner and Stravinsky and popular music - there's no need to worry too much about detective work, since Respighi piles up beautiful melodies one on top of the other. The grace and glamour of the whole package makes this an opera everyone - even children - can enjoy.
In March of 1927, the American pianist Aline Van Barentzen performed, in the Salle Gaveau in Paris, a new work dedicated to her by Heitor Villa-Lobos: the Second Book of A Prole do Bébé. Along with Rudepoema, dedicated to Arthur Rubinstein and also played in Paris that year, these nine short pieces represent some of the most important modernist works of the entire piano repertoire. It's marvellous to hear this music, recorded in 1956 for Pathé, in a fine re-mastering. Barentzen recorded the eight pieces of the First Book as well; these are much better known, but less adventurous in terms of harmony and rhythm. Though the subject of this music relates to childhood, this is way too virtuosic to be undertaken by any child who isn't a full blown prodigy. As can be expected, Van Barentzen has complete control over these pieces; she must have consulted with Villa when he first presented them to her in 1925, and again thirty years later, when both pianist and composer spent a lot of time in the Pathé recording studios.
Program: Museu Villa-Lobos
Two years later, in 1958, Van Barentzen recorded Villa-Lobos's Choros no. 5, subtitled Alma Brasileira, the Soul of Brazil. The following year the composer was gone. This is a very fine version of a very special work, with the tricky rhythms properly lined up, but always sounding surprising. There's more rubato here than you'll hear in most performances today, but the composer is almost looking over her shoulder (he was in Parisian recording studios throughout the late 1950s). Outstanding Villa-Lobos!
I'm most interested in the Villa-Lobos, of course, but there is much more very fine playing on this two-disc set from APR. As I mentioned, the 1950s Pathé recordings sound great; we have here pieces by Liszt (Un Suspiro is quite lovely) and Chopin (the D-flat major Nocturne is a stand-out). The earlier recordings are understandably less easy on the ears: I wasn't especially convinced by Van Barentzen's Brahms, recorded by HMV in the 1940s. The most interesting recording from a historical perspective goes all the way back to June of 1928. In his informative and entertaining liner notes, Jonathan Summers tells a great story about how this recording came about:
Barentzen’s first recording happened in unusual circumstances. She met Piero Coppola, conductor and director of French HMV, at a reception at the French piano firm of Gaveau in June 1928. He asked if she knew Falla’s Noches en los jardines de España, as Ricardo Viñes who was due to make the premier recording of the work in three days time was ill. Barentzen told Coppola she knew it, although in fact she did not. She learnt it in the three days and was later told by de Falla that he was very pleased with the recording.
While sonically limited, the freshness of the piano playing and the sitcom circumstances make this a must-listen. What a fascinating release!
Almeida Prado: Piano Concerto no. 1; Aurora; Concerto Fribourgeois
The latest release in the marvellous Naxos series The Music of Brazil features the great composer José Antônio de Almeida Prado (1943-2010). One of the most important recording projects of Brazilian music in the past decade was Aleyson Scopel's survey of Almeida Prado's complete Cartas celestes for the Grand Piano label. Though these works were mainly for piano solo, there were three in the official series of 18 that added other instruments (#7 is for two pianos and symphonic band, #8 for violin and orchestra, and #11 for piano, marimba and vibraphone). As well, after he completed the first work in the series, in 1975, he wrote Aurora, for piano and orchestra, which he called an "unofficial Cartas celestes, because it’s not numbered in the same series, but does share the same universe, the same heart, the same élan." What a marvellous work this is, especially as well played as it is by Sonia Rubinsky, the pianist known to most of us as a Villa-Lobos specialist.
There are two other important works for piano and orchestra here: the Piano Concerto no. 1 is the only numbered piano concerto by Almeida Prado. It's a one-movement work from the early 1980s that takes a four-note motif and mashes it about in the Beethoven manner. Rubinsky's virtuosity is required, and in evidence, here, as are the Minas Gerais Philharmonic's players' considerable skills. Fabio Mechetti's task is to ensure both a steady pulse and a sense of coherence across a complex of shifting rhythms, timbres and other sound events.
My favourite piece, though, is the Concerto Fribourgeois, written in 1985 to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Bach's birth. It's a post-modern take on neo-classicism, with appearances of musical guests both unlikely (Stockhausen, Messiaen and, once again, Beethoven) and likely (Bach himself, of course, including the famous B-A-C-H motif, but also Villa-Lobos in his Bachianas mode). This is as much fun listening to as it was, I am sure, to play. Bravo to these fine musicians, and to Naxos for this well-researched and beautifully recorded program.
Here's a short documentary on Almeida Prado from 2019, featuring Sonia Rubinsky and Fabio Mechetti.
Few composers are more reliable at lifting one's spirits than Georg Philipp Telemann, so this is a well-timed release for a difficult time. Montreal's Arion Orchestre Baroque presents a program that's full of the felicities for which Telemann was celebrated, at least in his own time, and again in the past three or four decades. His reputation was in a major slump in the centuries in between, but thank goodness we've gotten past that dark period. Vincent Lauzer plays the flûte à bec (recorder) in a solo concerto in C major, and with Mathieu Lussier's bassoon, in a double concerto in F major, both of them in the slow-fast-slow-fast format of the sonata da chiesa. The double concerto is especially impressive. It opens with a lovely, graceful Largo that brings to mind scenes of shepherds and shepherdesses by Watteau or Fragonard. A frisky Vivace keeps a lively pace, with the two instruments taking turns to embellish themes and breathlessly add new ones. The dramatic Grave builds up some real tension, which is released in the joyful rush of the Allegro finale.
The two concertos, by the way, were recorded in November of 2019, with Mathieu Lussier, Arion's newly appointed Artistic Director, leading the orchestra. The other half of the program, the Overture in G major, dates back to 2015, with Alexander Weimann at the podium. Remarkably, Telemann wrote 200 Overtures, or Suites, of which some 125 survive. Telemann helped to develop a new multi-cultural style that synthesizes the many dances of all the countries of Europe into a pleasing blend. This largely French-flavoured piece once again is in the pastoral style, this time with oboes and bassoon, placing us in a mythic landscape that seems the perfect place to retire to from today's social isolation.
Benny Carter, alto saxophone
Kenny Drew, piano
Jesper Lundgaard, bass
Ed Thigpen, drums
This is a re-issue of a 1982 Storyville LP of a Copenhagen concert from August 17, 1980. This is very fine, swinging jazz, from a city that always seemed to bring out the best in visiting American musicians. It's partly due to the warm reception they received, but also because of the very fine Scandinavian sidemen who often played with visiting jazz stars. Here we have the great bassist Jesper Lundgaard, as well as drummer Ed Thigpen, famous for his long tenure with the Oscar Peterson Trio. Yes, Thigpen was born in Chicago, but he made a permanent move to Copenhagen in 1976 to take advantage of the fine music scene there. Both Lundgaard and Thigpen show up on another Storyville release I reviewed this month: a Teddy Wilson Trio disc also recorded in 1980. And there's another expatriate in the group: pianist Kenny Drew, originally a New Yorker, moved to Paris in 1961, and then to Copenhagen a few years later. What a jazz town!
These are fine sidemen, and they play exceptionally well together, but it's all in support of Carter's legendary alto sound. With more than fifty years of recording behind him at the time, this is tried-and-true music, but never tired or merely routine. Remarkably, Benny Carter went on recording into the 1990s, and it's not surprising when you hear such warmth, vitality and joy in this music.
I should mention a fun interlude right in the middle of this 45 minute concert: it's All That Jazz (not the Kander & Ebb song from Chicago, but the great song by Benny Carter, with lyrics by Al Stillman). It's perfectly sung by Richard Boone. Have a listen:
This album of early Polish Baroque music from the Ensemble Giardino Di Delizie is a true garden of delights. None of the composers' names rang a bell for me, but these two discs worth of music are full of marvellous tunes, infectious dance rhythms and a wide range of moods, from dark and brooding to bright and lively. Here is La Pazza,Sonata a 3 in D minor by Kaspar Förster, the Danzig-born composer who served for a time as kapellmeister to Frederik III of Denmark in Copenhagen. The fact that he manages to provide a small drama within these seven minutes of music is evidence of his studies with Giacomo Carissimi, and his visits to Venice, where he would likely have heard Monteverdi and Gabrieli, though both were from a previous generation.
All of these pieces have their charms, partly because of a careful choice amongst available sources, I'm sure, but also due to the scholarship of Ewa Anna Augustynowicz and the lively musical camaraderie she fosters among her ensemble. The blue jeans on the album cover are the sign of a relative informality that's always welcome in the sometimes buttoned down world of Historically Informed Practice. It's a delight!
Two LPs' worth of music by Archie Shepp + The New York Contemporary Five were recorded at the Montmartre jazz club in Copenhagen in 1963. A previous CD tried to include both, but a track had to be dropped because of lack of space on the disc. This reissue of the second volume is welcome; short measure at less than forty minutes, but this remastering is excellent, and it wouldn't do to leave out any music this amazing. This may be jazz of an avant garde variety - post-bop or hard bop, on the way to free jazz - but it gets under your skin after a while. I guess that's what was intended!
This was the swan song for The New York Contemporary Five, with this lineup, at least. Soon Shepp and others in the group began to work with Ornette Coleman, making new kinds of jazz history. Here, from the Montmartre session, the group plays Coleman's Emotions.
This concert, recorded in Copenhagen on June 15, 1980, is an exercise in nostalgia, as Teddy Wilson plays tunes from his time with Benny Goodman in the mid-1930s. What's amazing is how fresh this music sounds. That speaks volumes about Wilson's professionalism and his amazing technical skills, but it's a tribute as well to his very fine sidemen: bassist Jesper Lundgaard and the amazing Ed Thigpen on drums. The Copenhagen concert is coming up to forty years in the past, while the original Goodman sessions they refer to were just over forty years old at that time. We're looking into a mirror that shows us something even farther away, and each nostalgic bounce provides its own pleasures, no matter how bittersweet. "To memory", Jacques Roubaud says in The Great Fire of London, "everything is present, everything distant; this is the axiom of intertwining."
I never (okay, I rarely) get tired of Rachmaninov, Brahms and Beethoven Piano Concertos, but I often think that perhaps it's time to expand the repertoire with a few fresh pieces. Here are two that fit the bill, beautifully played by the marvellous young Polish pianist Julia Kociuban. Alexandre Tansman's Piano Concerto no. 1 is from 1925; he wrote a second two years later, the year he turned thirty. It has every evidence of Tansman's melodic gift, which was to serve him well in his Hollywood years during WWII. But what it mainly sounds like is Modernist Paris, the fresh and lively milieu of Ravel and Stravinsky. At this point his music isn't especially Polish. It's telling that Honegger and Milhaud pressed him to join Les Six; he declined because he wanted to maintain his independence. But this Concerto at least would fit in perfectly with the avant garde French group's music of the day.
Grazyna Bacewicz also spent time in Paris, studying in the 1930s with Nadia Boulanger. However, her Piano Concerto, from 1949, is very much Polish in style, with folkloric sounds and Polish dances. Again, Kociuban is outstanding in both the virtuoso passages as well as more contemplative ones. She knows Bacewicz's music well, having played the great Piano Sonata no. 2 in the 2015 International Tchaikovsky Competition. She receives spirited and completely authentic support in both works from the Łódź-based Arthur Rubinstein Philharmonic Orchestra. Both Tansman and Bacewicz are Łódź natives. Plus, how often does an orchestra named after a great piano virtuoso get to play piano concertos? What a marvellous recording!
