Shiny new Mendelssohn

Mendelssohn: Piano Concertos 1 & 2; Works for Piano Concertante

I was excited when I saw that Ronald Brautigam was making a new recording of Mendelssohn's piano concertante music for BIS. I loved the recording he made in 1995 with Nieuw Sinfonietta Amsterdam under Lev Markiz, also for BIS, but I knew that performance styles have changed in the past 25 years, and that Brautigam has been working long enough with Michael Alexander Willens and Die Kolner Akademie to create a special partnership. Their Mozart piano concertos series for BIS is really outstanding.

As it turns out there isn't as big an interpretation gap between the two versions as I presumed would be the case, which goes to show how far ahead of his time Brautigam was at the end of the last century. These are bright and light and bouncy, but also as passionate and romantic (rather, Romantic) as Mendelssohn's mature music should be, but we could hear this in the earlier recording as well. Rather, there's a new polish to this music; it shines just that bit brighter. I've always wondered why these two concertos weren't more popular, and this new BIS CD has me even more puzzled. Very highly recommended!

A Christmas gift, for next year

Telemann: Christmas Oratorios

This disc came just in time for Christmas; for me, that is. Unfortunately for you, though, it has a release date of January 4, 2019. So you'll need to remember this review for next Christmas, and definitely buy or stream this marvellous music next year. In the three oratorios on the disc Telemann has added operatic flourishes to his cantata style, and turned up the footlights to express himself dramatically. This is really impressive music even today; I can hardly imagine its effect in the Hamburg Cathedral on successive Sundays during the Advent season. The cantata Und das Wort ward Fleisch is also richly ornamented, and includes a lovely interlude: the ancient song In dulci jubilo.

This music is newly discovered, and recorded for the first time, which I find astounding. Is it possible that there's even more spectacular music like this still waiting for first performances and recordings? Alexander Willens has done a spectacular job in presenting Telemann's music, and works by many other Baroque composers, with his amazing Kolner Akademie and superb soloists. Once again CPO provides excellent recordings and complete documentation for music of the very highest quality. This is a Christmas gift that's so good it will still be outstanding next year!

Top Drawer Recording of Middle School Mozart

The final album in the great BIS series of Mozart Piano Concertos with Ronald Brautigam and Die Kolner Akademie under Michael Alexander Willens contains Mozart's least important works, but it says so much about the players that there's so much to enjoy in this release, due on October 14, 2016. These four concertos from Mozart's pre-teen years are pastiches of sonata movements written under the guidance of Dad, but they show a real flair. Let's not forget that the keyboard concerto was in its infancy. There's a natural dramatist working with this mainly banal material, punching up contrasts and adding zest and heart to galant stereotypes. I'm sure Papa helped join the dots, but there's little evidence of a natural dramatist in what I've heard of Leopold Mozart's published works.

I've always liked another very fine disc with the fortepiano, on Decca with Robert Levin and the Academy of Ancient Music under Christopher Hogwood. But I know this music best as played by Murray Perahia on a piano, and conducting the English Chamber Orchestra. I used to have an audio-cassette of this, and played it in my car in the days before we could get CBC Radio2 in Red Deer. Listening to it now, though, was a major disappointment; compared with the light and grace of both Levin and Brautigam, I found Perahia bloated. The Andante from the 2nd Concerto K.39, based on a lovely movement from a violin sonata by Schobert, has always been my favourite piece from this set. Here's Perahia's version:



Both Levin and Brautigam play this music as a somewhat brittle precursor to the slow movement of K. 467, written 14 years later. But Perahia adds a bit too much weight, I feel, perhaps more than the slight music can bear. By the way, in the later concertos I'd cheerfully listen to Perahia; his concerto series is awesome, but with this one exception.

Levin or Brautigam? I'll choose Brautigam here, by a bit. He makes the most of this charming music. So much of the credit goes, of course, to Willens and Die Kolner Akademie. Their thoughtful, musicianly partnership has made the BIS series a joy from start to this marvellous finish.

Light and alive; tasteful and thoughtful

The Mozart piano concertos are, along with Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, my absolute go-to music. I play them when I'm feeling low, or when I'm especially happy. Or when I'm feeling somewhere in between; you get the picture! Few cycles have given me as much pleasure as the one which is only now coming to a close. It began in November 2010, when BIS recorded fortepianist Ronald Brautigam and Die Kölner Akademie conducted by Michael Alexander Willens in their first disc of the series. The series was front-loaded, with the best concertos already recorded by the end of last year. This penultimate disc, released this week, and the final disc which I presume will come this fall, are bound to be a trifle anti-climactic. But early Mozart has its charms, and this repertoire has an extra interest I'll get to in a moment. This isn't profound music, but it has a very real, if slightly superficial, appeal.

The numbering of the piano concertos is a bit complicated. The two- and three-piano concertos are included in the standard list of 27, and numbers 1-4 are actually arrangements by Mozart of contemporary piano sonatas by other composers. Those four, by the way, will be included in the final disc in the BIS series. The current disc thus includes the first piano concerto Mozart actually wrote, number 5, K. 175. It's a marvellous trumpets-and-drums romp with a flashy solo part Mozart wrote for himself. One of the things that impresses me the most about this work is its effortless distillation of opera buffa into a concert work. Comedy, they say, is hard, but for a 17-year-old to make such a comic soufflé without it collapsing: astounding!

Of course Brautigam and Willens and the Cologne musicians have their part to play in keeping things so light and alive. They shine as well in the sixth concerto, K.238, which is much less flashy and a trifle more erudite. This is a tasteful and thoughtful performance of a work which begins to show the more serious side of Mozart's music.

Finally we come to three intriguing pasticcios, as they were termed, arrangements of three solo sonatas by a close musical mentor of Mozart's in London, Johann Christian Bach. These are not the arrangements I mentioned before, and they have no official numbers in the series of 27, but their Köchel number of 107 gives an idea of where they fit in Mozart's catalogue. They have considerable charm, and it's worth listening to both the originals and Mozart's arrangements.  Back in 2007 Hanssler Classic released a disc with pianist Gerrit Zitterbart that combined the three concertos and sonatas, making it easy to compare the music. Brautigam easily out-classes Zitterbart, by the way, though I regret the loss of the "Scotch snap" in his version of the Theme and Variations second movement of the G major concerto. I've always loved hearing that Hibernian lilt in English music of the 18th century.

One of the things I discovered when I listened carefully to the J.C. Bach sonatas was the high quality of this source material. These are important works, just below the level of Haydn, and deserving careful attention from pianists and listeners. It's no wonder Mozart wanted to rework this music to make an impression with connoisseurs. I recommend both Sophie Yates on Chandos and Rachel Heard in a new Naxos CD in this repertoire (Mozart arranged number 2, 3, and 4 of Bach's six sonatas). Here's Heard with the Scotch snap!

The Romantic classicist

When I started listening to the new Naxos CD of music by Anthony Burgess for review (coming soon), I began to wonder about other writers who were also musicians. I think the best is still Paul Bowles (a new CD of whose I praised last week), but E.T.A. Hoffmann gives him a run for the money.

It's interesting how Hoffmann, who helped to popularize the whole idea of Romanticism, is more of a classicist when it comes to his music. "Haydn shall be my master," he said, and you can hear the strong influence of Haydn's London Symphonies in the main work on this disc from 2015. There are novel effects, to be sure, but this work written in Warsaw in 1806 seems more from the 18th century than the 19th. The two overtures on the disc, to Hoffmann's operas Undine and Aurora, were written in 1812 and 1814. This is about the same time as Hoffmann's famous article "Beethoven’s Instrumental Music" (1813), one of the greatest pieces of writing about music.

Just as Orpheus’ lyre opened the gates of the underworld, music unlocks for mankind an unknown realm—a world with nothing in common with the surrounding outer world of the senses. Here we abandon definite feelings and surrender to an inexpressible longing....

Thus Beethoven’s instrumental music opens to us the realm of the monstrous and immeasurable. Glowing rays shoot through the deep night of this realm, and we sense giant shadows surging to and fro, closing in on us until they destroy us, but not the pain of unending longing in which every desire that has risen quickly in joyful tones sinks and expires. Only with this pain of love, hope, joy—which consumes but does not destroy, which would burst asunder our breasts with a mightily impassioned chord—we live on, enchanted seers of the ghostly world!

Romantic taste is rare, romantic talent even rarer, and perhaps for this reason there are so few who are able to sweep the lyre with tones that unveil the wonderful realm of the romantic.

But listen to the overture to Undine; it mainly looks back to Mozart and Gluck, though if you squint, you can see it looking ahead a bit to Weber and Mendelssohn.



Not that there's anything wrong with that. That Hoffmann's musical world was a bit more limited than his broad-ranging literary universe, based on his nearly boundless imagination, is only to be expected. Hoffmann was a very practical man of the theatre. Besides writing operas, he designed scenery, conducted the music, and helped in the operations of the opera house business. Add to all of this his musical journalism, his legal duties, and a significant dabbling in the visual arts (including very fine work as a caricaturist), and you can cut the guy some slack. I find Hoffmann such an appealing bloke; I'd love to go down to the pub and share a tankard of ale with him some time.

Besides his musical & literary talents, Hoffmann was a fine draftsman.

I should mention a couple of other things. First the coupling of Friedrich Witt's Sinfonia, written in 1809. This is a well-crafted work, again very much in the Haydn style. I find it interesting that Haydn loomed so large at the time, Mozart seemingly forgotten, and Beethoven passed by without remark in this symphony. If Witt had the extra-musical connections that Hoffmann had we'd all know his music much better, and I'd give him more space than this postscript.

As to the performances on the disc, they are exemplary, as one would expect from the Die Kölner Akademie & Michael Alexander Willens, who have presented so many stylish recordings, most especially the superb BIS cycle of Mozart Piano Concertos with Ronald Brautigam.