Air From Another Planet

 I'm listening to more of The Juilliard String Quartet's 15 CD set The Early Columbia Recordings 1949-56.

Arnold Schoenberg: String Quartets #1-4; Berg String Quartet; Webern Five Movements for String Quartet

The Juilliard String Quartet recorded the complete Schoenberg String Quartets over a dozen sessions at Columbia's 30th Street Studio in 1951 and 1952. They were released on three LPs in 1953, with fabulous covers designed by Abstract Expressionist James Brooks. Brooks was a friend of Jackson Pollock & Lee Krasner; when they relocated to East Hampton, he moved into their Greenwich Village studio.

These paintings are very much apposite to the music on these records, which emphasize the expressionist, highly emotional flavour of the first two quartets. Other more recent recordings, by the LaSalle or Arditti Quartets, for example, make what I think are slightly more convincing versions of the last two, 12-tone quartets. But the Juilliard's recordings are faithful, I think, to the spirit of the composer, who died in July of 1951, just before these recordings began. The 3rd and 4th Quartets are much more than mathematical constructs, and require emotional commitment as well as precision and clarity. The Juilliard Quartets bring it all to the last two, but are, I think most outstanding in the great 2nd Quartet.

Schoenberg's 2nd String Quartet is a landmark work in classical music. He wrote this music while caught up in a horrible domestic drama - he discovered his wife was having an affair with his close friend, and when she eventually returned to Schoenberg, the friend committed suicide. To help work through these events, Schoenberg introduced a soprano in the third and fourth movements, singing songs set to two poems of Stefan George:

I feel air from another planet.

The faces that once turned to me in friendship

Pale in the darkness before me.

The pain Schoenberg suffered is translated to his music in the most expressionist way, while suddenly, hundreds of years of tonal music unravels before our ears.

"Surprisingly, without any expectation on my part, these songs showed a style quite different from everything I had written before.... New sounds were produced, a new kind of melody appeared, a new approach to expression of moods and characters was discovered."

Schoenberg's use of the passive voice here is quite astounding. It's as if his revolutionary move to atonality was done without his own volition. The system he eventually created to move on from traditional music was forged in the fire of jealousy, pain, grief and guilt.

This is an outstanding performance of this work. Soprano Uta Graf and the Juilliard Quartet are especially good in the fourth movement, capturing perfectly its sense of ecstatic mystery. Arnold Schoenberg, completely steeped in the over-emotional, over-ripe world of Zemlinsky, Mahler and Richard Strauss has his crisis, and bravely moves on to the thin air of atonality and the coldly precise "Method of composing with twelve tones which are related only with one another." And the Juilliard String Quartet are there to guide us in following Schoenberg's epic journey.

Berg and Ravel: a happy combination

I'm listening to more of The Juilliard String Quartet's 15 CD set The Early Columbia Recordings 1949-56.

Alban Berg: Lyric Suite; Maurice Ravel: Quartet in F Major

The Early Recordings set continues with two 10" LPs combined in one CD. The Berg was recorded in August of 1950, while the Ravel is from February of 1951. Unfortunately, the CD is included here in the Berg slipcase, mimicking the LP sleeve, so there's a cover and liner notes for that work, but not the Ravel. I was able to track down the Ravel front cover from an eBay listing, but haven't come across the back cover. 

The Juilliard Quartet recorded the Berg Lyric Suite at least two other times: for RCA in 1961 (with works by Webern), and a live Italian Swiss Radio-Television recording with Beethoven's final Quartet, op. 135. More than one reviewer for these three recordings has commented that the Juilliard's emphasis is very much on the lyrical side of this music, rather than the more emotional, expressionist side. I was captivated by this recording, the Juilliards' first recording!

As to the Ravel, the standard LP coupling is of course, the Debussy String Quartet, and that's what Columbia released from the Juilliard Quartet in 1971. This coupling is a propos because Ravel's model was the Debussy Quartet, and instructive because of how different the two works sound in the end, each composer going in a different direction from a common beginning. Meanwhile, back in 1950, the Juilliard's recording of the Ravel Quartet on the 10" LP is remarkable. Perhaps it's partially because of this juxtaposition with the Berg, but this music sounds fresh and alive and modern. This is one of my favourite CDs in the Early Recordings set.

Deity is in this Place! Numen Inest!

 I'm listening to more of The Juilliard String Quartet's 15 CD set The Early Columbia Recordings 1949-56.

Darius Milhaud: Cantate de L'Enfant et de la Mère; The Household Muse

This was one of the first albums from the Juilliard String Quartet recorded by Columbia; it was released in June of 1950. It contains two works by Darius Milhaud with a special authenticity: the Cantate de L'Enfant et de la Mère is narrated by Madeleine Milhaud, Darius's wife, and conducted by the composer. The Household Muse for solo piano was played by Milhaud himself.

I'm trying to put myself in the position of someone listening to this LP at his or her grammophone back in 1950. This was contemporary music in the sense that Milhaud was still alive; the Cantata was written in 1938, while the piano work was only five years old. And it might have sounded "modern" to some ears, though Milhaud's most challenging modernist phase was well in the past by then. I wonder if it would have seemed fresh and new in 1950, or merely old-fashioned and a bit sentimental. I love this music so much, but it's hardly leading edge. The performers sell this in just the right way: sentimental, but not mawkish, homespun but with the numinous power of the household gods of ancient Rome:

"A religion of usages and sentiment rather than of facts and belief, and attached to very definite things and places—the oak of immemorial age, the rock on the heath fashioned by weather as if by some dim human art, the shadowy grove of ilex, passing into which one exclaimed involuntarily, in consecrated phrase, Deity is in this Place! Numen Inest!—it was in natural harmony with the temper of a quiet people amid the spectacle of rural life, like that simpler faith between man and man, which Tibullus expressly connects with the period when, with an inexpensive worship, the old wooden gods had been still pressed for room in their homely little shrines."

- Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean

I guess I have something of the same feeling myself when it comes to this music. The Deity is in the LP itself, somehow. The record album is a "homely little shrine", even more a fetish object today than it was 70 years ago. That's why I'm not listening to this Juilliard String Quartet set streamed on Spotify, but on these CDs stamped with the sacred marks of the Long-Playing Record of 1950.

Speaking of sacred marks, the beautiful album cover design isn't credited, but I'm fairly confident that it's by Darrill Connelly. He did the covers for the three Bartok albums that were released immediately after this record. 

 

 

Bartok String Quartets in a masterful recording

Dennis Stock's photograph of the Juilliard String Quartet;
undated, but it looks to be from the mid-50s

I'm listening to more of The Juilliard String Quartet's 15 CD set The Early Columbia Recordings 1949-56. What a marvellous project this is!

In two New York concerts, on February 28 and March 28, 1949, the Juilliard Quartet performed the six string quartets of Béla Bartók, to enthusiastic audiences. This was less than a year after Columbia Records unveiled the Long Playing record - the LP - at a press conference in the Waldorf Astoria on June 21, 1948. Soon thereafter, the ensemble was in the 30th Street Studio recording all six of these wonderful works, producing fine records but also setting the stage for the many comprehensive sets of the LP era. To market the three individual discs as a set, the three LPs shared a single, excellent but uncredited liner note essay, and three wonderful album cover designs by Darrill Connelly. And all three LPs (three double 78rpm albums as well) were released the same day: August 14, 1950.

Though Olin Downes gave a very positive review in the New York Times of those first two concerts, already by 1952 the Times reviewer R.P. wondered, in a review of a second Juilliard Bartok cycle concert series, whether "the playing could have been a trifle over-refined." 

The precision of ensemble was wonderfully exact. the balance of tone and the blending of timbres was exemplary, and there was fine integration in the approach of the four men. But for one listener the note of human passion sounded a little thin.

This criticism will, I'm sure, come up many times before we finish all 15 of these CDs. I would normally be a bit skeptical of this, but in the Bartok case I think it's at least partly apropos. In their second recording from 1998, the Takács Quartet, which I know the best in these works, doubles down on the "human passion", emphasizing Bartok's folkloric sources. The Juilliard, by contrast, focus more on Bartok's hard, streamlined modernism. Both are obviously contained within the score; this is a matter of emphasis only. These are still excellent versions, and remarkable for both interpretation and recorded sound, not just for 1950, but today.

Legendary recordings from a great String Quartet

Juilliard String Quartet: The Early Columbia Recordings, 1949-56

The 1950s were a great time for classical music recordings; so many special recordings were made in Columbia's 30th Street Studio in New York. This marvellous set of 15 CDs from Sony Classical brings it all back: the wonderful abstract designs - many by Fred Houseman - and the great, detailed liner notes. It's all here, if shrunk down a lot, right down to the CD itself looking just like a 12" LP.

I was excited when I opened the box, and I decided right away that I would review each of the 15 discs separately, one every few days. So get ready for a wonderful trip back to the 50s, to hear some wonderful music, beautifully played.

__________

The first CD I played from the set was their Mozart disc, recorded in April & May of 1953. 

At that point the group had been together for seven years, and these two quartets show the cohesion of four musicians who were well aware of each other's abilities and quirks. As well, the Juilliard Quartet were obviously at home in Columbia's 30th Street Studio by this time; there's a real intimacy in these beautifully-recorded pieces. One can imagine one is eavesdropping on the original String Quartet Supergroup that first played these works: Mozart himself playing viola, with Johann Christian Bach, Joseph Haydn and Johann Georg Hoffmeister. The pitfalls of too careful synchronization are avoided; each of the Juilliard musicians - Robert Mann and Robert Koff playing violin, Raphael Hillyer on viola and Arthur Winograd on cello - plays as an individual, with their own personality shining through. Winograd shines in the Quartet no. 21, K. 575, one of the works Mozart wrote to curry favour with the cello-playing King of Prussia, Frederic Wilhelm II.

I love the Fred Houseman design from the original LP cover. And the liner notes by Charles Burr are detailed and informative. It's odd, though, how Burr keeps pointing out how American the group is. He even quotes the critic Thomas Archer, writing in the Montreal Gazette, saying "from which vantage point he can be assumed to write with disinterest." I'm not sure whose shoulder this particular chip is on: Burr's or Columbia's. I can't imagine that the four musicians are out to prove anything; they're just making great music. "We can play Mozart just as well as any dumb European Quartet!" Doesn't sound likely to me. Nearly 70 years later, it all seems a bit silly. We've known for a long time that this was a world-class group. The music sounds fabulous; this is Mozart playing that I adore.

Here is the slow movement of the K. 575 Quartet by Mozart, as played by the Juilliard String Quartet:

 

Fear and Admiration

Beethoven: Symphony no. 5

Watch this amazing video of MusicAeterna playing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony under the direction of Teodor Currentzis. With the Sasha Waltz Dance Company & Guests at Radialsystem Berlin, January 2016.



The same mystery, drama and physical movement which inspired Currentzis' interpretation of this amazing music remains in this new recording, to be released four years later. Only now there is even more of each of those components, and it results in one of the most exciting new Beethoven recordings I've heard this century.



Robert Schumann's comments on the Fifth Symphony are especially a propos in this case:

No matter how frequently heard, whether at home or in the concert hall, this symphony invariably wields its power over people of every age like those great phenomena of nature that fill us with fear and admiration at all times, no matter how frequently we may experience them.

Currentzis' high energy level, his brisk tempi, and his pointed dynamics might seem to some exaggerated, but I was completely swept along and swept away, almost, but not completely, against my better judgment. Yes, he's faster than a speeding Toscanini, more powerful than a Von Karajan locomotive, he leaps over tall buildings Klemperer walks around.

I recognize my own tendency to enthusiastically embrace shiny new things, and occasionally I come back with sober second thoughts. Let's see how this works out for me!

This album will be released on May 8, 2020

Beethoven for the Big Year

Beethoven: Complete Piano Sonatas

Next year Beethoven fans around the world will be celebrating the 250th Anniversary of the composers birth, on December 16, 1770 (or the 17th; Charles Schulz makes reference here to the uncertainty about the actual date).

I'm planning a full year of merrymaking in 2020, but it never hurts to get a good head-start for this, and here we have a marvellous project to get the festivities rolling. Igor Levit's complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas are full-blown masterpieces of the art of performance and recording. In the three op. 2 sonatas Levit sets the perfect tone. The 25-year-old composer is attempting to make his first piano sonatas much grander than his models, mainly Haydn, and he worked hard to present his music in a completely assured way. And surprisingly he very nearly succeeds. There's a certain coltish awkwardness in these early sonatas, though, that Levit underlines in an appealing way. The Adagio of the 1st Sonata is charming, but also more than a bit sentimental, and Levit is engaging as he shows Beethoven, not for the last time, exposing very personal feelings, in this and all the storm and stress of these works. This

Sony released the late sonatas (op. 101 to op. 111) back in 2013, when Levit was only 25 himself. These are astonishingly performances, so far removed from any youthful callowness, or any lack of nuance or indeed the spiritual component of these great works of art. With their complete context in place - all 27 sonatas written before 1816 - these five sonatas seem even more impressive as part of the complete set.

It's hard to believe that the Beethoven Bicentennial was 50 years ago. In 1970 I began my serious introduction to classical music, with the DGG set of 85 LPs arriving in the mail, 5 discs every month, via Time-Life. The great Wilhelm Kempff played the piano sonatas; it was the perfect way to listen closely to this music for the first time.

I was, and am today, completely won over by Kempff's measured approach and a deeply humanistic feeling that seems very much to be a fellow-feeling with Beethoven himself. Igor Levit seems to be very much there in Kempff's court, along, perhaps, with Alfred Brendel in between. The many times I've listened to Levit's Beethoven in the past month is just a start; I'm sure I'll be listening just as carefully, and appreciating his artistry, throughout the Big Year, and beyond.

A perfect American pops concert in Vienna

2019 Sommernachts Konzert: music by Bernstein, Johann Strauss II, Gershwin, Max Steiner, Sousa, Barber, Ziehrer, Dvorak, Copland

Gustavo Dudamel has chosen a great program for an American-themed Sommernachts Konzert with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Like every great pops concert, this has something for everyone. The Candide Overture of Leonard Bernstein is a great opener; it still sounds fresh after hearing it so many times during last year's Centennial. And it sounds absolutely fabulous as played by this great orchestra. That, by the way, goes for the entire 70 minutes of this CD. Other highlights for me include the 8-minute suite from Casablanca, prepared, I believe by the composer Max Steiner. The suite begins with the great Warner Brothers Fanfare, which is probably Steiner's greatest work. Steiner's own, relatively modest, atmospheric music for the film is soon forgotten every time the two great non-Steiner songs appear: La Marseillaise and Herman Hupfeld's As Time Goes By. Umberto Eco's summary of Casablanca applies very much to this musical pastiche:

It is a hodgepodge of sensational scenes strung together implausibly; its characters are psychologically incredible, its actors act in a manneristic way. Nevertheless, it is a great example of cinematic discourse, a palimpsest for the future students of twentieth-century religiosity, a paramount laboratory for semiotic research in textual strategies.

If I were choosing an American-themed pops concert, I would have kept going with this movie theme; Dudamel has done such a great job over the years presenting the music of John Williams, Bernard Herrmann, and other great film composers. But there are fine pieces from the concert repertoire as well: Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings sounds predictably sumptuous when played by the Vienna string players, and it provides a serious centre of gravitas in the middle of the program. An American work with a central European flavour is a natural for this venue: Antonin Dvorak's New World Symphony. And if there's not enough star power with just The Dude, how about Yuja Wang playing a vivid, sparkling Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue?

Of course, you can't have a Sommernachts Konzert without some waltzes. Dudamel leads the orchestra (or do they lead him?) in two fetching works by Johann Strauss II and Carl Michael Ziehrer. A final encore of Aaron Copland's Hoe-Down from Rodeo ties things up with a red-white-and-blue ribbon. This was fun! Bravo to these fine musicians.



This disc will be released on August 16, 2019

An arresting new cello concerto

Esa-Pekka Salonen: Cello Concerto

Esa-Pekka Salonen's impressive new Cello Concerto had its origin in his 2010 work for solo cello "knock, breathe, shine".

I decided to use some phrases from my 2010 solo cello work knock, breathe, shine in the second and third movements, as I always felt that the music of the solo piece was almost orchestral in its scope and character, and would function well within an orchestral environment.

As it happens, I've been listening to a brand-new recording of Salonen's solo cello music, by Wilhelmina Smith. It's fascinating to hear that piece opened up, like a stage play made into a fine film. Along the way Salonen adapted the second movement, "breathe", as the lovely Dona nobis pacem for unaccompanied children's choir. The transformation of this material in the Cello Concerto is a more subtle metamorphosis. "I imagined," the composer says in his illuminating liner essay, "the solo cello line as a trajectory of a moving object in space being followed and emulated by other lines/ instruments/moving objects." The Concerto is certainly no pot pourri of previously used material and virtuosic pyrotechnics, but something much more organic. Yo-Yo Ma is of course the star of the show here, but the orchestral score is also written for virtuoso players. Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic players know each other very well, of course, and there is a feeling of inevitability about this recording project. It was meant to be, and exactly the way it sounds here.

The secret of wonderment

Chopin: Ballades & Nocturnes

"This is about the greatest music there is for the piano. It’s just extraordinary, the colors, the writing, the surprising form of the pieces, the enigma, the diversity of expression."

Leif Ove Andsnes's praise for these seven short pieces, the 4 Ballades and a selection of 3 Nocturnes by Frédéric Chopin, is extraordinary, and from a lesser pianist it might be a warning sign that these often delicate works have been swamped by bloated seriousness on the one hand, or overblown expectations on the other. But extraordinary things come in small packages: the Mona Lisa is, after all, only 30 by 21 inches. The stories to be told in each of Chopin's pieces are truly epic, and if you think an epic has to be 4,000 pages (with many more to come, in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire), don't forget about The Great Gatsby at 180 pages. Chopin's genius is in his economy as well as the scope of his narrative and the nuances within. Economy is, indeed, where Andsnes shines. Not every gesture needs italics, much less an exclamation point; not every dramatic moment needs a bright spotlight. What is needed instead is the "surprise and delight" that André Gide, in his marvellous Notes on Chopin, asked of the Chopin interpreter:

Each modulation in Chopin, never trivial and foreseen, must respect, must preserve that freshness, that emotion which almost fears the surging up of the new, that secret of wonderment to which the adventurous soul exposes itself along paths not blazed in advance, where the landscape reveals itself only gradually.

One of the keys to Leif Ove Andsnes as an artist is his ability to communicate; this happens mainly, of course, with two hands on the keyboard, but you can see from this short video about the 1st Ballade how engaging and insightful he can be. "Suddenly a door opens!"



Here, by the way, is Gide on that same reveal: "... after a few indecisive measures in F where only the tonic and the fifth are given, Chopin unexpectedly sounds a deep B flat which suddenly alters the landscape like the stroke of an enchanter’s wand." Whether through a door or a wand, the secret of wonderment is revealed.

Fully Romantic Bruch without sentimentaliy

Max Bruch: Scottish Fantasy, Violin Concerto no. 1

Joshua Bell was only eleven years old when he learned his first major concerto, the Bruch Violin Concerto no. 1, and only 21 when his premiere recording with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields under Neville Marriner (Bruch no. 1 plus the Mendelssohn) was released in 1988 to great acclaim. Thirty years later Marriner is gone, but Bell, who took over as Music Director of ASMF in 2011, is back playing Bruch with his band. This time he's included the Scottish Fantasy, my favourite Bruch piece (and my Mom's). While the new recording of the Concerto follows Sir Neville's tempi in the outer movements, Bell is brisker with the middle Adagio, though there's no lack of sentiment in the new recording. More importantly, Bell eschews any sentimentality in both Concerto and Fantasy, keeping to the classical bones of these great works while tending to the Romantic flesh. This is a highly recommended release.