Quirky joy from a revolutionary pianist

Friedrich Gulda: Piano Concertos by Mozart, Beethoven & Strauss

In October 1950 the 20-year-old Friedrich Gulda made his Carnegie Hall debut, to significant acclaim. Six years later he was playing at another iconic New York venue, The Birdland, with a high-powered sextet put together especially for Gulda by producer John Hammond. I'm especially interested in how Gulda managed his two parallel music strands - classical and jazz - throughout his career. I'm listening, then, for any jazz influences in these piano concertos by Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn and Richard Strauss, recorded by Südwestrundfunk from 1959-63.

Gulda has sympathetic conductors with fine orchestras here. Joseph Keilberth conducts the Stuttgart RSO in Mozart's great K. 491 Concerto. Hans Muller-Kray leads the same orchestra in one of Gulda's signature pieces, the Beethoven 4th Concerto. Muller-Kray conducts the same orchestra in the Haydn and Richard Strauss works. Finally, Hans Rosbaud conducts the South West German Radio Symphony Orchestra, Baden-Baden in Mozart's K. 449 and 488 Concertos, two of my favourites. SWR's remastering of their original tapes is exemplary; these are very lifelike recordings.

And the influence of jazz on Gulda's classical music? It's a cool coincidence that I recently reviewed another 1959 recording by Gulda: his Beethoven Cello Sonatas with Pierre Fournier. I note in my review that Gulda largely plays it more or less straight, even more so than Wilhelm Kempff, who also recorded Beethoven with Fournier. Gulda is rather more relaxed in some of the concertos here, but he's still paying these great composers the compliment of respecting their scores. Remember that this was a time when Mozart concertos were sometimes played with sickly sentimentality and dubious ritardandos. But it's Gulda's surprising cadenzas that stand out as great examples of dramatic improv. It's instructive that some of the most interesting Mozart piano concertos of today are played by Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, who often plays Gulda's cadenzas. In a review of a recent release from Bavouzet's great Manchester series I say "Gulda lurks behind these, and other, concertos in the Mozart series; there is the same spirit of quirky joy here. I couldn't possibly give much higher praise." It's not jazz harmonies or rhythms, or anything more than a certain "swinging" feeling now and then, that informs Gulda's playing here, but a perpetual feeling that he is discovering something new in the music that surprises him as much as it does us. This happens in Gulda's classical music recordings as much, or even more, than in his jazz.

I'm a big fan of SWRmusic's historic re-issues, based on the really interesting musicians they've recorded, their meticulous re-mastering, and their excellent documentation. Classical music on the radio has a grand tradition, and German regional radio has been a real leader over the years. I look forward to more like this.

This album will be released on February 14, 2020.

Nat and Julian take Stuttgart

Cannonball Adderley Quintet: Liederhalle Stuttgart, 1969

Julian Cannonball Adderley, alto sax
Nat Adderley, trumpet
Victor Gaskin, bass
Roy McCurdy, drums
Joe Zawinul, piano & keyboards

Listening to the reaction of the crowd in the Liederhalle Stuttgart on March 20, 1969 you can tell that something important is happening.  The musicians are obviously energized by this enthusiasm, and play with urgent inspiration, which of course gets passed back to the audience. From today's vantage point this concert at the end of the 1960s can seem like a kind of coda to a genre that emerged from 1940s dance bands to become a great International Style, the musical counterpart of the New York School of Painting, practiced and appreciated as much in the Liederhalle as on West 52nd Street in New York.

The rises and falls of history only become apparent after the fact, of course, and especially in peak moments like this hour of music one is completely in the moment, blind and deaf to the power of musical entropy that would transform jazz in the 1970s. Pianist Joe Zawinul had spent most of the 60s with Cannonball Adderley, but was only a year away from the creation of Weather Report with Wayne Shorter. Cannonball contributed to the transformation of jazz in the early 70s - he continued to play with both Miles Davis and Bill Evans in this period, but by 1975 he was gone, tragically early. His brother Nat carried on the Adderley tradition for the rest of the century, as a band leader and, increasingly, as a teacher for new generations. But this hour of music remains as a beacon, sending light into the past and the future, as inspiring today as it was for those listening fifty years ago in Stuttgart.

In memoriam; In space

Wolfgang Rihm: Lichtzwang (In memoriam Paul Celan), Dritte Musik, Gedicht des Malers

DO NOT WORK AHEAD,
do not send out,
stand
inward:
transgrounded by the void,
free of all
prayer,
fine-fugued, according to
Writ’s pre-Script,
not overtakable,
I take you in,
instead of any
rest.

 - The final poem from Paul Celan's Lichtzwang ("Light-duress"), in Paul Joriss's translation, published in 1970

Wolfgang Rihm's Lichtzwang, written during the period 1975-76, is a memorial to the great poet Paul Celan, who drowned himself in the Seine in Paris on April 20, 1970. It's one of the great elegaic works for violin and orchestra, in the same class as Alban Berg's Violin Concerto of 1935, written "To the memory of an angel", Alma and Walter Gropius's daughter Manon, who died of polio at 18. It's encouraging to see a new, and extremely fine, recording of this work, by the young violinist Tanwa Yang, and the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz under Christoph-Mathias Mueller, an indication perhaps that this work is entering the core repertory as the Berg has. I know the most recent recording, also from SWRmusic, on a 2008 Hanssler Classic disc with Janos Yegnesy and the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg under Sylvain Cambreling. Both recordings are sterling.

This really is a most amazing piece, which begins with an angry clash of percussion, but spends most of its time in a yearning, unsettled space that sounds almost neo-Romantic at times. The violin plays mainly in a high register, while the orchestra attempts to pull it down, almost like the cold current of the Seine. One of the defining characteristics of the work is its use of silence; the action stops cold more than a few times, with complete silence before a reboot, almost like black-outs in the theatre. The final silence is shattering. Yang and Mueller have the measure of this music; I found it a profoundly moving performance.

Rihm's Dritte Musik, his third violin concerto, from 1993, also has its contemplative moments, but overall it has a wider range of emotions, and features the instruments of a very large orchestra as much as the solo instrument. Rihm's most recent violin concerto, from 2014, is his Gedicht des Malers (Poem of the Painter).  The painter is Max Beckmann, an important figure in Rihm's music; his earlier works include Versuchung (Hommage à Max Beckmann), from 2008-09, and Der Maler träumt, from the same period, set to Beckmann’s On my Painting. "Music", wrote Rihm, "is indeed maybe painting or architecture, in time, depending on one’s viewpoint. For me rather painting, but certainly in space, not restricted to one and the same surface." In Beckmann's 1921 painting Self Portrait as Clown, the painter holds a violin bow as a kind of analogue for the painter's brush, and it's this conceit that Rihm expounds on in this piece. It's all rather fanciful, but though this is a stereo rather than a surround-sound recording, I can easily imagine this performance taking place in a three-dimensional space, as Rihm says: "in space". What a wonderful album!

Max Beckmann, Self-portrait as a clown, 1921, Von-der-Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal

TGIF

Les Vendredis is a selection of 16 pieces for string quartet gathered and published by Mitrofan Petrovich Belaieff in 1899. The name comes from Belaieff's every second Friday musical salons where composers like Lyadov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Glazunov presented new works. I was rather surprised to find out how often these pieces have been recorded, though I guess at 75 or so minutes the set is all set to fill a CD. I listened to selections from the Quatuor Ravel set on Skarbo (2002), the Vertavo String Quartet on Simax Classics (2004), the Alcan Quartet on ATMA Classique (2005), and the Silzer Quartet on SWR Classic Archive (2014). It became clear from this immersion in late 19th century Russian salon music that the focus is on salon: this isn't usually challenging or searching music. It is occasionally a bit erudite - there's a prelude and fugue by Glazunov and a canon by Sokolov. At the same time, though, it's more middle-European and less folkloric than I would have expected. Charm is the keynote, and the Szymanowski Quartet brings the charm. Every recording has a different order of the pieces, but this recording seems to be in publication order. In any case, there's plenty of variety in mood and tempo, and it all makes for a very pleasant hour and a quarter. Recommended. The disc is due to drop on April 14, 2017.

Masterpieces of British choral music

I first came across Marcus Creed’s SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart when they released an outstanding 2011 CD of choral works by Heitor Villa-Lobos. It’s part of an impressive series of recordings of music from around the world in uniform editions with simple but attractive standard design, published by Haenssler Classics from 2008 until last year’s America album. The latest recording is a joint production of Naxos Deutschland Musik and SWR Media Services, so I presume the Haenssler connection is gone, but this CD is definitely another winner. The programme is well chosen to represent relatively recent British choral composers, from Benjamin Britten, who died in 1976, to two still-living composers and another two only recently passed.

The Alleluia for 13-part a cappella choir by James Macmillan was written for the Oregon Bach Festival to commemorate the 80th birthday of conductor Helmuth Rilling, and it’s fittingly full of Bach references. This is complex music with gorgeous textures, and it shows off the versatility of the Vokalensemble and the beauty of their voices, as well as the excellence of the engineering. This was recorded in the reverberant acoustic of the Christuskirche Ganscheide in Stuttgart, as was the Schuon Hymnen of John Tavener, another piece of great beauty and a mystical vibe written to sacred texts. The rest of the album comes from the more restricted acoustic of the SWR studio. Both Jonathan Harvey’s boisterous How could the soul not take flight and Peter Maxwell Davies’ irreverent Corpus Christi with Cat and Mouse are full of complex sounds that would be lost in a cathedral acoustic. The eight short hymns and carols that make up Britten’s Sacred and Profane, op. 91, are distinguished by their beauty or ingenuity: of vocal line, rhythm or harmony. Creed’s singers have the measure of this music. This is a highly accomplished and beautifully presented programme that compares well with any UK choral recording I’ve heard in this century.

A new edition of the B minor Mass

From October 6, 2015:

Bach’s much revised Mass in B minor has always been problematic, since the composer was still tinkering with the work when he died and the manuscript sources are not completely clear. Bach’s son Carl Philip Emmanuel made significant changes after Bach’s death to create the work as we know it from many performances and recordings, some of which were based on different compositional and performance practices that aren’t considered ‘authentic’ today. The new edition published by Carus in 2014 represents the current state of the art as to what JS Bach might have wanted his great work to contain, including the parts Bach prepared for a performance of the Kyrie and Gloria in Dresden in 1733. This is the first recording to incorporate this new scholarship.

The final result, except for some movements in the Gloria, is subtly different from what we’re used to, rather than a major revision. The second CD contains recordings of these movements in their conventional form so we can compare and contrast. Once the initial surprise over the changes passes, one can see that both versions are very musical, and that the differences are of taste rather than one version being better than another.

The performance by Hans-Christoph Rademann, the Freiburger Barockorchester, the Gachinger Kantorei Stuttgart and the solo singers is very capable indeed. Rademann takes some movements at quite a fast pace, and there’s a lightness and grace to both the playing and singing throughout. I very much like the way the voices and the instruments blend; there are many times when I was amazed by moments where the musical texture seemed special. Of course, this is a hard work to listen to in any kind of detached way; Bach always surprises and impresses, and then he turns around and just knocks you to the ground. This is a very fine version of one of the greatest works of art the world has known.

The deluxe version of the recording includes a fascinating DVD with all sorts of scholarly information and insights as well as a live performance of the Kyrie I. Also, the discs are enclosed in a handsome book-format case with an extended version of the printed notes. In this time of streaming audio, it’s still nice to get an optical-disc version of a recording that looks good on a bookshelf.

Here's a short trailer, in German, for the project: