Music of unbridled joy for #Beethoven250

Beethoven: The Complete Piano Concertos

"The sonatas were pursuits of inner truth, the symphonies pursuits of the highest qualities in humanity, the piano concertos pursuits of unbridled joy." In a heartfelt essay in the liner booklet, Stewart Goodyear notes that he waited to record the Beethoven Piano Concertos: "... it had to be at a time when I felt that I knew deeply what universal joy and delight felt like." This joy and delight is clear to hear in this 3-disc album with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Andrew Constantine, from Orchid Classics.

When we think about joy and Beethoven, it's Friedrich Schiller's Ode to Joy that comes to mind:

Joy, beautiful spark of Divinity,
Daughter of Elysium,
We enter, drunk with fire,
Heavenly One, thy sanctuary!

Schiller's poem was published in 1785, and revised in 1808. In between, Beethoven wrote the first four of his piano concertos; the fifth was begun in 1809. Beethoven's own apotheosis of joy came, of course, with the Schiller setting in the last movement of his Ninth Symphony in 1822/24. But I love Stewart Goodyear's characterization of this wonderful music as being in some way essentially joyful. It's the serious, grumpy stereotype of Beethoven himself that Goodyear is fighting here. Unlucky in love, navigating family difficulties, grappling with political disasters that seem as dire as our own today, experiencing the vagaries of the "gig economy" as one of the very first freelance composers, and stricken with deafness in this very period; we can feel for Beethoven today. We can even imagine a black cloud hanging over his head. Especially with the late sonatas and string quartets to come, we look to Beethoven for spiritual and aesthetic resolutions to his own pain and suffering. "The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing",  Walter Benjamin once said. But listen to the music, especially in these performances, and you'll hear incredible verve and passion, as Beethoven reaps the harvest of his own "pursuit of happiness" in his art, if not in his personal life. Perhaps it was the Mozartian model - Beethoven's 3rd Concerto in C minor owes so much to Mozart's C minor Concerto K. 491 - that helped Beethoven get over his own hump on his way to happiness.

These are special performances by this team assembled by Orchid Classics: the assured and stylish playing of the BBC National Orchestra Wales shows that conductor Andrew Constantine and this fine Canadian pianist (why are there so many fine Canadian pianists, by the way?) are on the same page. I look forward to listening to these discs in regular rotation during this Beethoven Year, along with the amazing set from Richard Goode & Ivan Fischer, the equally fine recordings of Mitsuko Uchida & Kurt Sanderling, and, of course, the Wilhelm Kempff & Ferdinand Leitner set which was my first experience of this marvellous music.



This album will be released on March 13, 2020

British drama and pastorale beauty

I was pleased to see this new Chandos series from conductor Rumon Gamba and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Their two British Overtures discs from 2014 and 2016 were excellent, beautifully presented and played. They were made up of many solid, well-written pieces by late Victorian and Edwardian composers; the usual suspects, mainly, but with the odd gem by people like Ethel Smyth and John Ansell. Volume I in the new series, due to be released March 17, 2017, has mainly rather longer works, with the exception of William Alwyn's lovely little 5-minute piece Blackdown: a Tone Poem from the Surrey Hills. As you'd expect from a title like this, along with rhapsodies and an idyll, from Gloucestershire and Berkshire and The Solent, the focus is more on good old English Pastorale, one component of the Overtures discs, and less on the other component, the English Light Music tradition. The disc is well-filled - 76 minutes - and it shows how much I enjoy that English Pastorale style that my interest didn't flag at all. I've taken to listening to this music quite often; it's often soothing, yes, but the best Pastorale pieces - besides the Alwyn, Frederic Austin's Spring and Ivor Gurney's A Gloucestershire Rhapsody - are somehow almost bracing, with some of the objectivity of the naturalist to go along with the more sentimental artist. Sense and Sensibility.

My favourite piece on the disc, though, is a more dramatic piece that takes us away from the rich farmland of the English countryside. It's Sir Granville Bantock's setting of Shelley's The Witch of Atlas, and it's full of incident and pictures. You can see the scope of setting this poem from a sample stanza, which Bantock takes full advantage of.

VI.
And first the spotted cameleopard came,
And then the wise and fearless elephant;
Then the sly serpent, in the golden flame
Of his own volumes intervolved; -- all gaunt
And sanguine beasts her gentle looks made tame.
They drank before her at her sacred fount;
And every beast of beating heart grew bold,
Such gentleness and power even to behold.

Though he's a generation younger than the Pre-Raphaelite painters, this piece reminded me of the extravagant detail they so often included in their paintings. John William Waterhouse's The Magic Circle (Tate Britain, 1886), is a good example, with a witch protagonist, if not Shelley's.

Rumon Gamba and Chandos are doing great work in opening up British music of the 19th and early 20th centuries. I look forward to Volume 2 in this series.

Rule, Britannia!

So, I'm on a British music kick lately. I just finished reviewing the excellent 2-CD re-issue of British Cello Concertos, with Raphael Wallfisch, and I've lined up a couple of other discs from the excellent Chandos label. So I'm sitting here with a glass of stout (Seaport Vanilla Stout from the excellent local Lighthouse Brewing Company) and imagining myself at our local pub, which happens to be in Hammersmith, 6,500 kilometres away.

The Dove from the river jetty. Public Domain. Photo: Fin Fahey

The Dove is a historic pub on the Thames, close to Hammersmith Bridge. You can sit on the deck and look out on the river just as James Thompson did when he wrote the words to the 1740 song Rule, Britannia!, or so says Wikipedia. All he needed next was Thomas Arne to write the tune, and one of the great British songs was born. That song shows up in more than one of the Overtures on this disc, the second volume in a series of some of the best British light music you could hope to hear (volume 2 will be released later this month). Alexander Campbell Mackenzie's Britannia Overture is based on the tune, but even better is the delightful Plymouth Hoe, by John Ansell. There are other nautically themed works here: Walton's Portsmouth Point and the great Ethel Smyth piece The Boatswain's Mate. I've always loved Eric Coates, ever since a portion of his Three Elizabeths Suite was used as the theme song for the BBC adaptation of The Forsyte Saga, and his overture The Merrymakers is reliable light entertainment. And I'm also a big fan of Roger Quilter, who wrote some great songs, as well as the superb Christmas entertainment Where the Rainbow Ends. His Children's Overture seems so familiar to me. This kind of music was often used as a television or radio theme song, so I expect it's from some long-forgotten puppet show from the days when the only TV station we got was CBC.

I've read more than one review of the first volume in this Overtures from the British Isles series that ended with a wish for a second volume. So here we are; this is everything we could hope for, with more great playing from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, under the baton of someone who knows British light music backwards, and provides it with the best possible advocacy. Bravo to Rumon Gamba for his mastery of this perfectly British music, and bravo to Chandos for providing us with more.

To end on a sad note, James Thompson, who should be celebrated by music lovers not only for his Rule, Britannia lyrics, but also his poem The Seasons which was set by Haydn, met his end not far from The Dove. As Samuel Johnson tells the tale, in his Lives of the English Poets, "...by taking cold on the water between London and Kew, he caught a disorder, which, with some careless exasperation, ended in a fever that put end to his life." The next time I'm at The Dove, I'll make a toast to Thompson: 

The Muses, still with freedom found,
Shall to thy happy coast repair;
Blest Isle! With matchless beauty crown'd,
And manly hearts to guard the fair.
"Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:
"Britons never will be slaves."

Rule Britannia

It's British Music week here at Music for Several Instruments. I'm listening to three new Chandos discs: a 2-CD re-issue of British Cello Concertos with Raphael Wallfisch, volume 2 in the Overtures from the British Isles series from Rumon Gamba and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and another volume 2, in Tasmin Little & Piers Lane's British Violin Sonatas series. Before we get started, then, just a reminder of what went before, or as they say on TV,

Previously, on British Music from Chandos....

The first disc in the Tasmin Little/Piers Lane series, released in June of 2013, is marvellous, and this model bodes well for the new disc, due to be released in June 2016. The full-blown pastoral yumminess of Howard Ferguson's Violin Sonata is presented to its best advantage, without sentimental flourishes or ironic winks. Benjamin Britten flexes his muscles in his early Suite for Violin and Piano; grown-up music from a 21-year-old. This is definitely a Continental side-trip for Little and Lane - it was chosen for a Barcelona Contemporary Music festival by Anton Webern and Ernest Ansermet - and they provide the requisite sophistication here. The William Walton pieces are a bit in both camps, looking back with nostalgia and ahead with spikes out, but again the shift in tone is handled very well, with sensitivity to this more introverted, cerebral music.

The first of the Rumon Gamba Overtures discs, from January 2014, was also a real success, and with some quite obscure music:

This disc got rave reviews from Britain - I'm not sure it was heard much anywhere else.  These are well-crafted late Victorian overtures, and together they conjure a time when classical music, of the lighter variety, to be sure, was truly popular. We're all off to the concert!

A useful collection of Ginastera orchestral music

From July 28, 2010:

It's interesting how many of the orchestral scores of the very greatest Latin American composers were written for the ballet. The Brazilian Villa-Lobos wrote more than a few, as did the Mexicans Carlos Chavez & Silvestre Revueltas, and most of these works are of very high quality. But perhaps the most impressive ballet scores come from the Argentine composer Alberta Ginastera. This disc includes a wide range of ballet scores, from the first, Panambi, op. 1, to his very last work, Popol Vuh, left unfinished at his death in 1982. As well, this fine new Naxos disc includes an extended suite from one of Ginastera's finest works, Estancia, a nostalgic evocation of the fast-disappearing gauchesco world; the Suite de Danzas Criollas, in a new orchestration by Shimon Cohen; and Ollantay, a post-war score based on an Incan poem.

As with the recently-released Naxos disc of Revueltas music, we have here a collection of fairly recent and older recordings from various orchestras, all conducted by the excellent conductor Gisele Ben-Dor. Naxos has packaged 1997-2006 recordings made in Wales, Israel, and Abbey Road, though there are unfortunate overlaps with other CDs. Still, at a bargain price this may not be a major disadvantage.

For me the most interesting work here is Popol Vuh: The Mayan Creation. The original commission for the work, from Eugene Ormandy & the Philadelphia Orchestra, goes back to 1957, though Ginastera didn't begin work on the piece until the early 1980s. It's interesting that Ginastera should have set Popul Vuh for his ballet, since this is the same text used by Edgard Varese in his avant-garde classic Ecuatorial (1933). While Ginastera's music isn't as cutting edge, these creation stories have called forth some of his most impressive orchestral sounds. That's saying a lot, since Ginastera is a master of the orchestral palette.

Once again we tip our hats to Gisele Ben-Dor, and hope that she's in the recording studio again soon, with more premiere performances of such great Latin-American music.