I know it was you, Michael. You broke my heart.

Michael Haydn: Violin and Flute Concertos

I've never warmed to Michael Haydn, who I always connect in my mind with Fredo Corleone from The Godfather 2. In the shadow of his older brother Franz Joseph, he always seems to underperform what one might hope for, considering his bloodline and the obvious advantages he must have had. So, seeing this new disc from a group which I really admire, the Capella Savaria from Hungary, under Zsolt Kalló, who also plays the solo violin (the flutist is Andrea Bertalan), I set aside my prejudices, and tried to give Michael Haydn a chance.

In his wonderful liner notes to a disc of music by Luigi Boccherini that I recently reviewed, Emilio Moreno says,

"His musical language is possessed of a 'recognisably unidentifiable' quality, that Ciceronian 'nescio quid' to which his Enlightenment era contemporaries would always describe by employing the hackneyed 'no sé qué', when owning up to their inability to define the experience, within the limits of the expressible, of the beauty, loftiness, ease, sprezzatura, lightness, spirit and inventiveness which all seem to come together in the semantic range of the 'je ne sais quoi' and 'non so che' of philosophers and aesthetes when they wanted to explain the music of the brilliant and distinctive, often misunderstood, outsider who was 'Don Luis Boquerini'." 

It's this 'no sé qué' that I've almost always found missing in Michael Haydn's music. And the mid-18th Century was a particularly dangerous time to do without a special sauce, since the galant schemas of the time were so strong and universal across European music. Without it there are only a series of hackneyed devices strung together in hackneyed ways.

I'm pleased to report that I did discover that 'no sé qué' in this album, though not where I expected it. The mature Violin Concerto in A major, probably written in 1776, is a decent piece of music, sounding more like Mozart than brother Franz Joseph. But even though there are some fine melodies the piece never takes off. Neither do the two Flute Concertos, both from around the same time. I hasten to say that this is not the fault of the excellent soloists, the orchestral players, the conductor, or indeed of the Hungaroton producer or engineers. I can't imagine more vital performances of this music, but the fact remains that these three concertos are all rather pedestrian.

It's the earliest work on the disc that impressed me the most: the Violin Concerto in G major, probably from 1764. This music is so strong that it was once mistaken for Joseph Haydn - a common enough situation at the time, to be sure, since Franz Joseph's musical brand was the most important in Europe. I believe that the big brother would have been proud if he had heard this music, especially played as well as it is here. Beauty: check, loftiness: check, ease: check, sprezzatura: check, lightness: check, spirit: check and inventiveness: check. Mozart would probably add a final quality: taste. I think we can check that one off as well.

Good work, Fredo!

Here is the first movement of the G major Violin Concerto:

Music from a year of crisis

1923: music by Bartok, Krenek, Toch & Weill

The year 1923 was a year of crisis in Germany; inflation was heating up and far right-wing parties were jockeying for power. In October, the first broadcast of public radio in Germany took place from the "Berliner Funkstunde" station on Potsdamer Platz. This provocative new disc from the Choir and Symphony of Bavarian Radio includes four works written a hundred years ago by a group of innovative composers who all made use of the new, disruptive technology of radio.

Kurt Weill's Frauentanz is a suite of seven medieval songs, scored for soprano, flute, viola, clarinet, horn and bassoon. Weill helped to create the familiar soundtrack for Weimar Berlin, and this performance by Anna-Maria Palii and the fine instrumentalists of the Bayerischen Rundfunks orchestra provides the authentic feel of a society that was becoming increasingly decadent and hysterical in 1923 and beyond.

Ernst Toch's Dance Suite is another clever and imaginative piece with interesting orchestration: flute, clarinet, violin, viola, double bass and percussion. The Berlin sound is also evident here, something a bit harsh and raw, in contrast with the softer-focussed, more lyrical and pastoral modernism of Paris.

The Ernst Krenek work is a bit of a surprise: his 3 Choruses for a cappella choir . The 'antique' sound of these pieces remind me of two of my favourite works: Vaughan Williams' G minor Mass, from 1921, and Heitor Villa-Lobos's Missa São Sebastião, from 1937. All three provide old wine in new bottles: ancient cadences with a modernist twist.

The final work on the disc is probably the best known: Bela Bartok's Dance Suite for Orchestra. This is an orchestral showpiece, a kind of try-out for his Concerto for Orchestra written more than two decades later. Both pieces treat orchestral instruments in a solistic, virtuosic way. The source material might be folkloric, but this is definitely written in a modernist idiom.

Inflation, far right-wing agitation, disruptive technology: yes, we're talking about 1923, not 2023. And the music on this disc is as fresh and forward-looking as some of the best music written today.

 

Disruptive music by Boccherini

Luigi Boccherini: Six Symphonies à Quatro, op. 35

Earlier today, I was listening to a symphony by Muzio Clementi that impressed me by its complete blandness, and I thought how wonderful it is that at one point in the late 18th Century there were three absolute geniuses writing music at the same time: Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. The gap between these composers and Clementi seems too large to bridge. But luckily, there's a second tier of composers in between, including Bach's sons, the Bohemians Franz Benda, Carl Stamitz & Christoph Willibald Gluck, and an Italian who spent most of his life in Spain: Luigi Boccherini.

These Six Symphonies are billed as being in four parts, but they're actually in five: two violins, viola, cello and bass. They could be played one to a part, but here, with the wonderful Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, we have a small chamber orchestra: five first and four second violins, three violas and cellos, and a double bass and harpsichord. Boccherini was of course a master of chamber music, but this music sounds exactly right in this orchestral guise.

The two discs begin with the Fourth Symphony in F major, which in its first movement takes off immediately in an exciting gallop. Clearly, unlike Clementi Boccherini has something positive to say, and an exhilarating and original way of saying it. In his fine liner notes, Emilio Moreno compares Boccherini's op. 35 Symphonies with Mozart's Haffner Symphony, K. 385 and Haydn's Symphonies 76-78, all of which were written in 1782. (Beethoven, meanwhile, was only 12 years old; his first orchestral music was well in the future). Moreno doesn't hear much Haydn or Mozart in this music:

"Boccherini conceives of a discourse very close to that of the divertimento in which the unconventionally emotional goes beyond the structural and the Dionysian goes beyond the Apollonian, without its formal and harmonic ease of construction corresponding to predetermined models and schemes."

Boccherini disrupts the galant schemas, whereas Haydn, and especially Mozart, work their special magic largely within the structures that have come to be called classical. Boccherini worked, at least in 1782, in what Friedrich Schlegel called the 'poetry of the frenzied', as opposed to the 'poetry of the sober.'

The slow movement of the Sixth Symphony is quite wonderful, and it's played here with grace and style, with passion occasionally bubbling up from beneath the surface. This movement brings to mind the wonderful music Geoffrey Burgon wrote for the 1981 TV version of Brideshead Revisited; I don't know if Burgon knew Boccherini, but I hear in both a nostalgic sadness: Charles Ryder's for Sebastian and the Brideshead of the past; Luigi Boccherini's, perhaps, for his Italian homeland to which he would never return.

Vaughan Williams the Conductor

My favourite Vaughan Williams Symphony is no. 5, so I was pleased to see this new historic release from Somm Recordings with two complete versions conducted by the composer: the world premiere performance on June 24, 1943, and a Proms performance on September 3, 1952. What a great way to end the VW150 year!

The 1943 performance, recorded off-air from the BBC radio broadcast, sounds surprisingly good. Somm's audio restoration and remastering is always great; we have Lani Spahr to thank for finding fine music-making within low-fidelity source material. As to the performance itself, it's perhaps a bit hesitant, which is to be expected considering the uncertainties of the period. Still, Vaughan Williams' uplifting music must have been a great consolation for those listening in the performance hall and on the air; perhaps better times were indeed on their way. More problematic are the periodic missing bits that come about due to swapping out of acetate recording discs. But the historic nature of this performance trumps this technical issue; Nick Barnard, in a fine review, comes up with a good way to describe these lacunae:

"The best analogy I can come up with is when viewing an ancient fresco or mosaic which has been damaged over the centuries; you can see where parts of the original artwork are missing but the sense of the total magnificence of the original remains."

I have no reservations at all concerning the performance of Symphony 5 at the 1952 Proms. This is indeed one of the great Vaughan Williams recordings. That's partly due to better technology; this was recorded direct to long-playing acetate discs, so there are no side-breaks to cut up the music.

There are two other recordings here: a scintillating Dona Nobis Pacem from 1936; and a fine 2nd Symphony, from 1946. Again, there's an important bonus for authenticity and historic importance, but both performances are wonderful in their own right.

This is another fine release from Somm, with detailed liner notes that illuminate both the music and the recording and restoration processes. Perhaps most importantly, there's the great cover photo, by Dudley Styles from 1948, of the composer with his cat Foxy.

Here's the 1952 performance of the 5th Symphony: