My music growing fainter

Salieri: Piano Concertos

"Mozart’s corpus of piano concertos remains one of the most perfect achievements in all of Western music, on a par with Bach’s cantatas. That’s the miracle of this music." 
     - Andreas Staier

"Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art."
     - Peter Shaffer, Amadeus 

Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus, made into a wonderful film by Miloš Forman in 1984, has given us a very particular, and not at all accurate, picture of Mozart's rival, Antonio Salieri. It's a tribute to Shaffer and Forman, and most especially F. Murray Abraham, who played Salieri in the film, that this portrayal is the first thing I thought of when I came across this new disc of Salieri Piano Concertos. Chances are you did as well.

F. Murray Abraham as Salieri. Photo by Phil Bray, 1984

What this means is that even before we listen to this record for the first time, we've lined up Mozart's Piano Concertos on one side - pieces that everyone, most especially including Abraham/Shaffer's Salieri, agrees are miraculous works of art. On the other side, is the unfortunate Salieri, the second-rater who came up against Mozart, who he feels is God's Beloved. 

"He killed Mozart and kept me alive to torture! 32 years of torture! 32 years of slowly watching myself become extinct. My music growing fainter, all the fainter till no one plays it at all, and his..."  

Back to the real world: The two Salieri piano concertos recorded here were written in 1773, when he was only 23. They're both confident, melodious and written in the latest galant style. The composer must have been proud of both of them; think of the smug performance of F. Murray Abraham early in the film. He had every right to be smug: he was at the top of his game, soon to be the maestro di cappella of the Imperial Court. 

One thing that's clear from listening to these two piano concertos, and those of composers like Joseph Haydn and Bach's sons, is that the 18th century galant piano concerto is a marvellous creation, providing operatic drama, tunefulness and opportunities to wow the musical cognoscenti of the time. They're just fun to listen to, and from the evidence of this recording, to play as well.

These are fine performances: conductor Giulio Arnolfi keeps things moving briskly, and gets stylish playing from the excellent musicians of the Accademia d'Archi Arrigoni. Pianist Constantino Catena provides elegant, assured, singing tones from his piano. He and Arnolfi are in synch, and together give us a pretty fair picture of Salieri at his best. By the way, both conductor and pianist get their chance to shine alone: in the Sinfonia in D Major "La Veneziana", a short work that shows how much at home Salieri was in the opera world. And for solo piano, a Sonata in C Major that sounds an awful lot like Scarlatti or Haydn, which is high praise. Wonderful stuff!

Both the C major and B-flat Major Piano Concertos have many felicities: some up front and obvious, especially both slow movements, which are lyrical without being overly sentimental. Though there aren't any really memorable themes in either opening movement, these are well-constructed, dramatically successful musical journeys, largely skirting the banal.

When I first heard the Menuetto of the B-flat Major Concerto I thought it was clunky, but in fact Salieri is doing this deliberately; he immediately provides relief with witty passagework for the solo piano. And he keeps us on our toes throughout, with mock-heroic themes, operatic pauses and flourishes, along with more elaborate passagework. In this movement the composer is closest to C.P.E. Bach or Haydn, the composer as magician.

So in the year 1773 things are looking pretty good for Salieri on the piano concerto front. And then, in December, disaster strikes. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who's only just turned 17 (he's six years younger than Salieri), writes his first real piano concerto, in D major, K. 175. No contest. Game over. No más!

Okay, so Salieri wrote some perfectly fine piano concertos, but he was blindingly eclipsed by a teenager on his first try. He still had much more fame and acclaim in his life than Wolfie, who died a largely unappreciated pauper. In his Book of Friends, Hugo von Hofmannsthal tells this story:

When someone mentioned to Kapellmeister Schwanenberg, a friend of Salieri’s, the rumor that Mozart had been poisoned by the Italian, Schwanenberg replied: “Non ha fatto nulla, per meritar tal onore. [He did nothing to merit such an honor.]”

I come away from this fine new recording, and the research I've put into this review, with a new appreciation for Salieri the composer. He isn't the mediocrity that I've lazily assumed him to be. And yet, somehow, the next time I see a new recording by Salieri (and it won't be for a while, I expect), I'll be right back where I started, with F. Murray Abraham's powerful performance overwriting everything we've learned about the unfortunate Salieri.

Ransom Stoddard: You’re not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?
Maxwell Scott: No, sir. This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
     - from John Ford's 1962 film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence 

 

The Certain and Uncertain Symphony

 Molécule - Symphonie no. 1, "Quantique"

"This symphony is an imaginary and symbolic representation made up of probabilities, intuitions, certainties and uncertainties. It is an artistic adventure charged with encounters, openness, benevolence and learning; its cardinal point is love for sound and its vibrations."
- Romain De La Haye-Serafini, aka Molécule

"All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff."
- Frank Zappa 

This fascinating new symphony by the electronic musician Molécule was made in remarkable way. The composer attended rehearsals of the Orchestre National de Lille over a period of two years, recording everything: 

"... the sliding of strings, harmony, the cracking of instruments, silences, melodies, musicians’ breaths, the inaudible frequencies of a double bass... I wasn’t looking for perfect notes, but for a collection of sounds that would give me enough material to start composing."

This gave Molécule his sound palette. He took those sounds, manipulated them, and then recombined them into the standard four-movement symphonic format we all know and love. After he had created his soundscape, it was transcribed by Sinan Asiyan into standard orchestral notation, and played by the 83 musicians of the orchestra, led by its conductor Alexandre Bloch.

Molécule's earlier works involved a more adventurous sound recording stage; he gathered sounds in Arctic Greenland, and at the legendary huge waves of Nazaré in Portugal. But as he says in this video, the project with the Lille orchestra had its own artistic risks:

Molécule's sound-gathering is the most interesting and innovative part of both his earlier work and the Symphonie project. It might be analogous to Bartok or Villa-Lobos's ethnomusical forays into the Hungarian countryside and the Amazon rainforest. Meanwhile, the classical sound collage has been a staple of post World War II avant garde music: Mauricio Kagel's Ludwig Van, from 1969, is a good example:

But as cool as the process is, the proof of this particular pudding is in the music itself. There are certainly some impressive moments in the finished works, and I was swept up in some peak passages throughout. The problem with this kind of pastiche is also its strength: the best-sounding bits are the least original. There are plenty of modernist clichés and avant garde clichés and movie soundtrack clichés in this work. But of course, the parts that sound the most like John Williams or Howard Shore also sound like those composers' (acknowledged) forebears: Gustav Holst and Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss. Though Molécule actually samples particular works - for example, Debussy's La Mer and Holst's The Planets in Mouvement II, No. 3: 335 398 400 - most of the source material has been massaged so that only echoes of the original music can be heard.

Symphonie no. 1, in the end, can stand on its own as a success of outstanding process and workmanlike structure. Listen for yourself:

A rich new Goldberg Variations

 Nevermind - Bach Goldberg Variations

If your idea of diversity in the Goldberg Variations universe is to occasionally swap out the 1955 and 1981 recordings of Glenn Gould, you might want to expand your horizons and listen to this new arrangement of Bach's perennial best-seller, by the talented young musicians of Nevermind: Anna Besson, transverse flute; Louis Creac'h, violin; Robin Pharo, viola da gamba; and Jean Rondeau, harpsichord and organ.

You'll find the sounds of Nevermind's four instruments, in various combinations, throughout Bach's works: his sonatas for violin, for viola da gamba, and for flute, and in passages from the Passions and Cantatas. The Paris Quartets of Telemann and Les Nations by François Couperin are among the other models used in this transcription.

The spell that the Goldberg Variations weaves seems to mess with one's internal clock. I can never believe that so much happens in the 38 minutes of Glenn Gould's first version, or that even his more measured 1981 recording is still only 51 minutes. To be sure, Gould isn't generous with repeats, but there is still a feeling of time standing still in many of the variations (and in the 1981 version, of the Aria itself). Here we have the opposite effect; instead of time slowing down, there seems to be a disconnect at the end of the Aria da Capo. Surely, that hasn't been 100 minutes (over two CDs, if you're still listening on physical media)! One is carried along by the internal engine of the music, its logic, and by the often dramatic, even operatic, effect of the instrumental timbres. In his notes to his 1955 recording, Gould called this "... music which observes neither end nor beginning, music with neither real climax nor real resolution." We may have ended up where we began (time being, as we learned from True Detective, a flat circle), but what a rich experience it was!

Listening to the Goldberg Variations in a special performance on the piano or harpsichord can feel like a singular communication with the performer and the composer. This, though, is a more communal experience, not only with the four musicians, but with Bach's European network of performance practices and the traditions of music-making from the 18th century until today. For me, though, it was still a private experience that touched me deeply.

This is a journey well worth taking!

The cover photo is by Clement Vayssieres.

A vivid picture of a 15th century composer

 Alexander Agricola: Masses

Alexander Agricola was a Netherlandish Renaissance composer who lived and worked in France, Italy and the Low Countries from the 1470s until his death in 1506. This makes him a contemporary of Josquin des Prez, though his earliest music was written under the influence of Johannes Ockeghem, who was 30-40 years older than Agricola and Josquin.

Agricola's eccentric mixture of dense polyphony, "athletic" voice parts, rhythmic virtuosity and an often playful shifting of the musical norms of the day places him in the category of musical innovators/oddballs that includes De Lasso, Gesualdo, Biber, CPE Bach, Satie & Ives. At the same time, this is music of strange beauty and obvious religious feeling, written at a time when the religious stakes in Europe were very high indeed.

It also makes for a good match with Beauty Farm, the excellent group of six male singers who have presented, on the Fra Bernardo label, so many fine albums of Netherlandish and French Renaissance music: by Ockeghem, Gombert and Obrecht, among others. Agricola's masses on this album, the Missa Malheur me bat and the Missa in myne zyn, make for two well-filled CDs of music from a little-known master.

"Malheur me bat" is a three-part rondeau by an unknown composer; it's an example of the Phrygian mode, one of the eight church modes, which is known for its emotional character. Agricola was not the only composer to make use of this source material; there are works by Obrecht, Ockeghem and Josquin based on the same rondeau tune. But it's clear that Agricola has made a very personal work out of this common source.

Missa in myne zyn, Agricola's final mass, is based on a popular Dutch tune. I know this work from the 2010 recording on Ricecar with Capilla Flamenca under Dirk Snellings, which is also a wonderful recording. But Beauty Farm brings out a touch more character and individuality in their version, There's no holding back in the weird, and weirdly beautiful, Agnus Dei III.

There are many gaps in our knowledge of Agricola. We don't have a clear idea of when all of his major works were written, or even where he was in Europe at any given time. But the music on this disc speaks so eloquently we have a vivid facsimile of what kind of person he was. That's a tribute to both the artistry and the scholarship of Beauty Farm.

The wonderful cover image is by Muntean/Rosenblum, the collaborative artist duo of Markus Muntean and Adi Rosenblum. See more of their artwork here.

Let's Dance!

Unexpected America: music by Paul Schoenfield, William Bolcolm, Camargo Guarnieri, Aaron Copland, Mike Mower

Put on your dancing shoes for a well-chosen mix of South and North American music for violin and piano, from violinist Oscar Bohórquez and pianist Frank Braley.

The programme begins with a suite of Four Souvenirs for Violin and Piano, by the Detroit-born composer Paul Schoenfield, written in 1990. An opening Samba, with a slow interlude at its centre, is followed by a sultry Tango. As often happens at a dance, when a slow song comes up, things get steamy! The ghost of George Gershwin is then brought out for Tin Pan Alley. This is top rank pastiche; I definitely use that word in a positive sense! Schoenfield's finale is Square Dance, one of the most lively bits on this album. It's sad to learn that Schoenfield died just under a year ago, in April 2024, at 77 years of age. This wonderful performance makes for an elegy and remembrance of a fine composer.

William Bolcolm's lovely ragtime "Graceful Ghost" is a standout. Bolcolm really shows as well as tells; this is as graceful as any piece I've heard. The themes are so lovely, which is important in this form. With so many repetitions in a ragtime,  each of the tunes must be embraced on its return. Bolcolm's six minute piece never wears out its welcome; this is salon music of the highest level.

Mozart Camargo Guarnieri's Violin Sonata no. 4 is a substantial work in a standard classical music form, but even here one feels the built-in rhythms of the choros, the urban popular music of Brazil. Written in 1956, while his (and every other Brazilian composers') master, Heitor Villa-Lobos, was still alive, Guarnieri's Sonata looks back to Villa's three violin sonatas of the early 1920s, which made such a stir at the Semana de Arte Moderna in Sao Paulo in 1922. The typically Brazilian version of nostalgia - saudade - is evident in the lovely Intimo slow movement, though Guarnieri really lets loose in the raucous Allegro appassionato finale, which has Villa's fingerprints all over it. By the way, Mozart was really Guarnieri's given name; his brothers were Bellini, Verdi and Rossine. A tough act to follow, on top of the Villa-Lobosian elephant in the room, but Guarnieri never seems to have lacked for self-confidence. His music always displays complete self-assurance and equanimity.

Aaron Copland's Nocturne, from 1926, is another slow dance in a modernist idiom. Perhaps it's the context of this programme, but this American music heard through a Parisian lens, with Nadia Boulanger's fingerprints this time, very much feels at home in South America as well. Copland made many personal and professional connections among Latin American musicians through his involvement in Nelson Rockefeller's Good Neighbor initiative of the WWII years, but that was still in the future.

The last work on the disc is the beguiling Bossa Merengova from the British composer Mike Mower's Sonata Latino, from 1994. This clever mix of the Brazilian bossa nova and the Cuban merengue shows the underlying connections between the various dance traditions of Latin America. Again with a wistful element to go with the sprightly rhythms, this is a wonderful way to end a wonderful programme.

Bohórquez plays a Guarneri del Gesù violin on which he produces a beautiful tone; his familiarity with the various musical traditions of Latin America results in completely idiomatic performances. He and pianist Frank Braley really swing this music when required; it's important to stress the folkloric component of this music, especially in a work like the Guarnieri Violin Sonata, with its erudite, academic, component.

The Right Stuff in 18th Century Music

 The Age of Extremes: Music by W.F. Bach, C.P.E. Bach & G. Benda

"We were exploring the frontiers, we were out at the edges of the flight envelope all the time, testing limits...."

- Neil Armstrong

The 18th century was a period of enormous change, with wild swings between reason and emotion, or, as Jane Austen had it, sense and sensibility. These swings are obvious in the music that came after the death of Johann Sebastian Bach in 1750 and George Frideric Handel nine years later. It was Bach's son Carl Philip Emmanuel (CPE) who perhaps best exemplifies the new Empfindsamkeit (take your pick of sensibility, sentimentality or sensitivity) in German music. But CPE didn't reject the craft of his father to explore new emotional opportunities in music; rather, he adapted established forms but tested their limits.

Harpsichordist and conductor Francesco Corti has put together a fascinating programme of music by CPE, his brother Wilhelm Friedemann, and their Bohemian colleague Georg Anton Benda, that shows musical and emotional envelopes being pushed. There are hair-raising moments in this music: the Allegro second movement of WF Bach's Sinfonia in D minor begins with a fugal passage that explodes with energy, especially since it follows a melting Adagio that's almost the definition of Empfindsamkeit, looking back at Corelli and ahead to Mozart. And in his Variations on Les Folies d'Espagne, CPE becomes a musical test pilot and breaks the supersonic barrier. Corti shows his virtuoso chops here! Georg Benda's Harpsichord Concerto in B minor has its own surprises amidst its many felicities. Even the pretty and proto-romantic slow Arioso movement is revolutionary in the way it wears its heart on its sleeve. And the flighty Allegro finale, which ends this programme, wraps everything up. Barriers are down, genres are busted. And a good time was had by all.

The orchestral playing on this album is exemplary, as one would expect from the wonderful group Il Pomo d'Oro, who I know from their new complete Mozart symphonies project with conductor Maxim Emelyanychev. Corti plays a harpsichord made in 2001 by Keith Hill in Manchester MI, after an anonymous German instrument from around 1700. It has a robust sound, and is well balanced, not too forward but much easier to hear than in the bad old days of wimpy Early Music recording. This is such an enjoyable release, and highly recommended.

Here is the repertoire on the disc:

The great photo of Corti on the cover is by Leonardo Casalini.

Chamber music between Impressionism, Modernism & the Avant Garde

 

André Jolivet, Chamber Music

The instrumentation of the music in this fascinating program of André Jolivet's chamber music by the Danish group MidtVest might make one think of his slightly older contemporaries, the composers of Les Six. He was only six years younger than Auric and Poulenc, for example. But Jolivet's music is in most cases less pastoral, less nostalgic, hearkening back to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, rather than that master's neo-classical works. 

Jolivet was a pupil of Varèse and a friend of Messiaen, and after World War II he experimented with modal music and complex rhythms. At the same time, though, the one-time "outsider" artist entered the Parisian musical establishment, when he became the music director for the Comédie-Française, from 1945-1959. Jolivet is a fascinating composer who straddles various trends in French music, bouncing between pastoralism and urbanism, between impressionism, modernism and the avant garde. He ends up being a kind of compex avatar for a fairly broad range of music in the middle of the century.

The Petite Suite for Flute, Viola and Harp utilizes the same instruments as Debussy's 1915 Trio. Though World War I was already underway when he began, Debussy's sound-world seems one of innocent joy compared with Jolivet's piece, which was written during the German Occupation of Paris in 1941. The mood is grimmer and the music is sometimes gritty and desperate. But we take what consolation we can in music - especially in French music - and Jolivet ends with a lusty peasant dance, though one that's perhaps more than a bit manic.

In his very helpful liner notes, Paul Griffiths explains what's happening in Jolivet's Controversia for oboe and harp, written for Heinz and Ursula Holliger in 1968.

He employed glissandos (straight and trilled), bisbigliandos (rapid alternations between normal fingering and an alternative giving the same note as a harmonic) and multiphonics (sonorities of two or more notes together – here two a fifth apart – again produced by special fingerings). At the same time he introduced harp sonorities he had learned from Carlos Salzedo, such as ‘timpani sounds’ made by tapping on the soundboard and quarter-tone tuning, or glissandos elicited by sliding the tuning key on the string, these soon joined by ‘timpani sounds’.

Oboist Peter Kirstein and harpist Gesine Dreyer are outstanding in this piece, which seems both timeless and completely rooted in the late sixties. As Jolivet said on his first visit to America in 1964, "I wrote atonal music for thirty years. Nobody suspected it until I told them. There are only two ways of writing atonal music. Either you shout it from the housetops, in which case it ceases to be music, or you just use it."

It's part of the genius of French music and the magic of Christmas that something as beautiful as André Jolivet's Pastorales de Nöel for Flute, Bassoon and Harp could have been written in the dark year of 1943. It's about the birth of Christ, but with his Crucifixion never far from mind; the music balances hope and despair. This entire disc, played with French flair by these fine Danish musicians, gives a wonderful picture of a composer who plotted his own personal path through the always changing world of mid-20th century music.

The cover painting is Landscape from Bretagen (1889) by Paul Gauguin.