True gold, glittering

Berlioz: Les Nuit d'Ete, Ravel: Sheherazde, Debussy orch. John Adams: Le Livre de Baudelaire

When early in his career as a composer Maurice Ravel began to set some poems by Tristan Klingsor, he had the poet "recite his verses repeatedly in order to absorb their rhythms and tone," according to Paul Schiavo's illuminating liner notes to this new release. The result were the three Shéhérazade songs, sung beautifully here by Ian Bostridge, with the Seattle Symphony providing their patented exotic, shimmering, multi-Grammy-winning sound to back him up. Each of the works on this album demonstrate the special bond that music and poetry can share, when geniuses of each genre are matched up at the right time. Schiavo points out that Hector Berlioz's setting of poems by Théophile Gautier as Les nuits d’été was the first important song cycle for voice and orchestra. Bostridge's passionate, suave interpretation along with the support of Ludovic Morlot and his Seattle players, 100% in the groove with this music, helped me overcome a lifelong prejudice against Berlioz. It's hard to imagine a better interpretation of this gorgeous music.

The John Adams orchestral transcriptions of the Debussy settings of poems by Charles Baudelaire are as beautiful as a great painting by John Singer Sargent - The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit in Boston, let's say. In both the music and the painting there are profound meanings that are, paradoxically perhaps, hidden by the surface beauty.

In the words of another artist:

"If you want to know about Andy Warhol, then just look at the surface of my pictures, and there I am."

And John Singer Sargent himself:

"I don't dig beneath the surface for things that don't appear before my own eyes."

Which brings me to one of my favourite quotes, from that great aphorist Hugo von Hofmannsthal:

"Depth must be hidden. Where? On the surface."

The more gold that is mined, the more beautiful the surface seems, from Baudelaire's exquisite verse to Debussy's elegant melodies, to John Adams' sumptuous orchestral harmonies and textures. This true gold glitters most perfectly in this performance: Bostridge's lovely voice with a great American symphony orchestra at the top of its game.

A mixed bag: from oddness to greatness

This is the second 6-CD set from Profil of recordings made by Yevgeny Mravinsky with the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, largely live recordings from the 1940s and 50s. It's very much a mixed bag, with some oddly shaped and accented Mozart, Berlioz and Bizet, thin sounding in the bargain. A bit better is the Richard Strauss Alpensymphonie, though one cannot put it in the top class. But the high end is high indeed.The standouts are, naturally, music by Russian composers.

The Stravinsky ballets on the third disc, Petrushka and The Firebird, are completely alive, fresh and airy but also cruel and barbaric. Remastering has delivered impressive sound considering the vintage and recording sources, though of course there isn't quite the presence of the best new recordings. The Prokofiev works, the 2nd Romeo & Juliet Suite and the 6th Symphony, sound even better, in performances of style and again some considerable violence. Romeo & Juliet has a paranoid edge; after all, orchestral musicians as well as composers must have worried about official disapproval of "degenerate modernism". The same is true of the 6th Symphony. "Now we are rejoicing in our great victory, but each of us has wounds that cannot be healed," the composer said when he wrote this music in 1947. The pain and loss in this music comes from a sharing of those wounds, with many personal losses I'm sure. This is an affecting document as well as an artistic statement of considerable merit. I've only rarely heard as impressive a Pathetique Symphony as Mravinsky delivers here, taut with menace but finely and delicately balanced, and in the end heartbreakingly sad. This is Tchaikovsky laid bare, stripped of false sentimentality. Mravinsky and his wonderful musicians demonstrate that this is indeed one of the greatest of all 19th century works of art.

(Over?)-refined Berlioz

From November 27, 2012:

One sits up & pays attention to Leonard Slatkin in this new Naxos disc of the Symphonie Fantastique, his first recording from his new gig as Music Director of the Orchestre National de Lyon. Orchestral colour has always been a key in the orchestras Slatkin has built over the years, and in his choice of music. But for all the melodrama in the program, Berlioz's piece has a very French formal logic, and Slatkin's purposeful forward thrust reminds us that we're listening to a symphony written just a few years after Beethoven's death. Slatkin's approach is a bit drier and ironic, more matter-of-fact, than the intense, almost lurid versions of Munch or Bernstein. In cinematic terms, Slatkin's version would be closer to Wes Anderson than Bazz Luhrmann. The differences are ones of taste, though I wonder if Slatkin has taken too much fun out of the work. I suspect Berlioz himself would have wanted a more full-blooded approach. Over-refined or not, there's no questioning the excellence of the musicians or the clarity of the recording