Greatness in musical partnership

Mravinsky Edition, volume 3: works by Tchaikovsky, Bach, Weber, Wagner, Scriabin, Kalinnikov, Bruckner, Shostakovich

I've come to historic recordings fairly late, but I've had such good luck with recent releases that I'm beginning to search them out. This 6 CD set, the 3rd volume in Profil's Mravinsky Edition, is a superb example of well-documented remastered recordings of special significance. It's easy enough to filter out sonic shortcomings when the performances are so vital. Mravinsky had a lifelong relationship with the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, and it's fascinating to hear the development of their musical partnership from 1938 to 1961. The obvious highlights in this package are the Tchaikovsky Symphonies #4 and (especially) #5 and a blistering performance of the Shostakovich 8th Symphony. But I was completely bowled over by Mravinsky's take on Bruckner's 8th Symphony, which I've been listening to a lot lately. In my review of Mariss Jansson's recent recording, I talked about the balance in Bruckner 8 between what Vincent Van Gogh referred to as "Tranquility of Touch" and "Intensity of Thought". It's no surprise that Mravinsky comes down on the intense side. Shostakovich biographer David Fanning describes just this intensity:

The Leningrad Philharmonic play like a wild stallion, only just held in check by the willpower of its master. Every smallest movement is placed with fierce pride; at any moment it may break into such a frenzied gallop that you hardly know whether to feel exhilarated or terrified.

An outstanding production all around.

The Mravinsky Edition covers feature a monochrome detail of his portrait by Lev Russov. Here it is in colour:

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.

A special Ring Cycle continues

Following a well-received Das Rheingold release last year, we now have the second release in the live concert recordings of the Ring Cycle from Hong Kong, with Jaap van Zweden. The new Die Walkure, to be released November 11, 2016, features some really special singers and outstanding playing by the Hong Kong Philharmonic. This is a concert presentation of the opera, with only gestures and facial expressions available to the singers in the way of acting, so the focus is definitely on the music. Nevertheless the expressive abilities of Michelle DeYoung as Fricka, Heidi Melton as Sieglinde, Petra Lang as Brunnhilde, Stuart Skelton as Siegmund and Matthias Goerne as Wotan come through. With one's headphones on and eyes closed, this is much more than a string of concert arias, but a compelling dramatic experience. Much of the credit for that goes, of course, to van Zweden, whose grasp of the theatrical and musical arcs of this great work is confident and sure.

For me the most affecting relationship in all of Wagner is between Wotan and his disobedient daughter Brunnhilde. Matthias Goerne sang a stand-out Wotan in Das Rheingold, and he's even better here. He's matched with Petra Lang, whose first recorded Brunnhilde was in the Pentatone recording of Marek Janowski and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester, from 2012. Lang had carefully managed her voice during her career, making the transition from mezzo to soprano while turning down big roles that might damage her voice. When she was ready for the role, this recording revealed a star. I've just finished listening to Act III, and was so impressed with her performance. Here's a chunk of a great review of the Pentatone recording by Jim Pritchard, from 2013:

This CD is an important document as it reproduced Petra Lang’s memorable first complete Brünnhilde, a role she is currently singing on stage for the first time in Geneva. The soprano - as we should perhaps start calling her rather than mezzo - has previously sung Valkyries, Fricka and Sieglinde in this opera. Here she adds the Die Walküre Brünnhilde to her repertoire - with the others in the Ring to follow in coming years. Lang’s voice is distinctive and virtually unique in the current generation for the extraordinary vocal range that she can offer to the great soprano and mezzo-soprano roles in Wagner operas. Here she goes from the vibrancy of her top notes and the Act II ‘Hojotohos’ that might possibly have been equalled but rarely bettered on CD, to the contralto-like intonations of the 'annunciation of death' scene that hold no fears for her. She undertakes this great journey employing all the tricks of her consummate vocal technique almost with ease. In Berlin it was only the first time Lang had sung this role in its entirety and she was already a very good Brünnhilde. It could only get even better … and it has. In her recent Geneva performance in this opera she was an even more credible pouty teenager who matured into a woman totally in control of her fate at the end. 

As Pritchard says, "it could only get even better", and once again it has. Lang and Goerne are heart-breaking as a daughter and father locked in a struggle both must lose. Unfortunately, there are no scenes with Brunnhilde and Wotan together among the video clips Naxos has posted on YouTube, but here is the most sorrowful and beautiful "Der Augen leuchtendes Paar" ("Those bright shining eyes") in which the grieving father says farewell to his favourite daughter.



So now we wait for Siegfried, which I expect will come along at some point in 2017. I look forward to that, and of course to a Gotterdammerung which will end van Zweden's pre-New York Philharmonic period. In the meantime, I know what you all really want is to watch this:

A Grand Tannhäuser

Tannhäuser is precariously balanced on the sacred and profane axis, both in its subject and in the tortured history of its productions in the musical capitals of Europe. The pure musical tradition of German song is contrasted with the decadent Grand Opera of Paris, with its focus on crowd-pleasing effects and Jockey Club-sponsored ballerinas. Wagner's theme may be redemption - his theme is always redemption - but his heart is in the spectacle. That's why I enjoyed this production so much; it turns renunciation and atonement into pageantry.

Musically this is quite outstanding. Daniel Barenboim, conducting of one of Europe's great orchestras, sets the stage for a great evening of theatre. In the overture and the introductions to Acts II and III the way that the camera pans through the orchestra, looking over Barenboim's shoulder, is as dramatic as anything on stage. When he stands to bring out a particularly thrilling phrase it's electric. The singing is really excellent as well, with a dramatically assured Peter Seiffert grounding the opera, between the two poles of slinky mezzo Marina Prudenskaya as Venus, and soprano Ann Petersen, radiant in a Grace Kelly gown, as Elisabeth. Rene Pape as Hermann, and especially Peter Mattei as Wolfram von Eschenbach are superb singers and equally good actors.

Wagner sweated bullets trying to integrate the ballet conventions of the Paris Opera into his story of Minnesingers. This production by Sasha Waltz (is there a better name for a choreographer?) is no where close to being consistently successful, but when one of her many dance or dramatic ideas works, it works big-time. The Venusberg Scene in Act I takes place within a metal tube that looks like an eye. Partially-clad dancers cavort inside, looking like something from the cutting room floor of Woody Allen's Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex, but Were Afraid to Ask. Then the lighting changes, and the scene is reminiscent of a James Bond credit sequence. But at some point things come together, and all of a sudden the scene becomes fabulously sexy and incredibly beautiful. What happened? I was just snickering a minute ago! When Prudenskaya and Seiffert come sliding down the tube, we have a moving presentation of Tannhäuser's long dream of sensuality.

This is such an eclectic production, and it's all the better for it. There's a natural shift from Venusberg to the Minstrel's Hall on the Wartburg, and Waltz sets us up in a brightly lit Art Deco Hollywood set that's full of one per centers looking elegant. Here is where the integration of dance really pays off. The story of the musical competition can come across as a dullish Medieval German episode of Glee, but Waltz turns on her inner Busby Berkley, and everything sparkles. I don't know if this is deliberate, but when groups of singers and dancers stand frozen for a while, I was reminded of Alain Renais's Last Year at Marienbad. Both that film and Wagner's opera ground their drama in deeply ambiguous dream states.

Waltz abruptly shifts the tone from the bright Hollywood/Middle European spectacle of Act II to film noir in Act III, monochromatic and misty on an empty stage, and all of a sudden mystical, with Wagner's soaring choral hymn of atonement and redemption. The dancing is once again sublime. When the stage turns blood-red with the return of the Venusberg music (and the welcome return of Prudenskaya), we have a superb example of the dramatic potential of dance.

I'm so pleased that BelAir Classique makes generous clips of their productions available on YouTube. This will give you a good feel for the style of the production and its high musical standards, if not the final excellence of the Blu-ray disc.

Wagner in the Middle

This is a recording where the whole is somehow not as great as the sum of its parts. The orchestral playing is impressive. Listen to the great mythic drone of the Prelude; it shows first class playing, but also careful control by conductor Jaap van Zweden, especially considering this is a live performance (or rather the best bits of two performances). The singing is also very good, and at times outstanding. Matthias Goerne is excellent as Wotan, providing glimpses of the complex character the ruler of the gods will become in the next three operas. I trust he’ll be singing throughout the Naxos Ring as future discs are released. I was impressed by tenor Kim Begley in his performance as Edrisi in the Royal Opera’s recent King Roger, and he sings a very good Loge here.  Some of the other singers are perhaps a bit generic, though I’d have preferred somewhat less bite from Peter Sidhom’s Alberich. That’s a quibble, though. Singing: check. As to sound, this recording shows off Naxos’s technical strengths. In this case it’s Phil Rowlands who’s in charge of both production and engineering. Any classical music producer worth his salt probably has John Culshaw’s Ring Resounding on his bookshelf, or even next to his bed, and any recording of Das Rheingold should have the producer taking extra care. So what’s missing? I think the clue is my use of the word ‘careful’ when talking about van Zweden’s conducting. It’s assured enough, but always in the middle any time there’s a musical decision to be made. Right down the middle, and Wagner’s greatness only comes out on the edge. I hope van Zweden takes more chances in Die Walkure, which is scheduled for recording later this year.

Here's the promotional video from Naxos:

The Producers

When I began reading George Martin’s 1979 memoir All You Need Is Ears, I immediately thought of an earlier book which covers some of the same ground, generally speaking, John Culshaw’s 1967 Ring Resounding: The Recording of Der Ring Des Nibelungen. The common ground is one of profession, since both Martin and Culshaw were record producers during the post-war period, but the two shared as well a certain type of Englishman: well-read and cultured but not highly educated or of anything but the solid and stolid middle-class, modest but not unassuming, since each was well aware of his special talents.

The two really did have parallel lives. Culshaw was born two years before Martin, and while they both attended Grammar Schools, Culshaw in Southport and Martin in Bromley, World War II interrupted what might have been stints at University. As teenagers both ended up in the Fleet Air Arm, in 1942 (Culshaw) and 1943 (Martin), though neither saw combat service. After the war both began long stints with record companies, but by different routes. The musically self-educated Culshaw became a classical musical journalist and went to work with Decca in 1946 as a writer. Martin had a more academic musical education at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and he took a job with EMI in 1950.

The creative partnership between Martin and the Beatles is, of course, the key story in Martin’s book, and he has lots of interesting stories to tell about the work he did with the group from 1963 to 1971. The problem is that we’ve heard pretty much all of those stories so many times. Even so, I never complain about Beatles stories. I’m one of those people nagging Mark Lewisohn on Twitter to for God’s sake hurry up with the 2nd book of his Beatles biography. But the period before, when Martin worked with people like Peter Ustinov, the Goons, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller, and Michael Flanders & Donald Swann, is fresher and the stories are just as interesting. The post-Beatles period is interesting to me mainly for Martin’s break-away from EMI along with the most talented of his colleagues. It’s a great story, akin to Don Draper’s new agency start-ups in Mad Men, and just as entertainingly told.

Culshaw’s book isn’t quite the same as Martin’s, since it’s the story of a particular recording project rather than a memoir. For that you need to read his posthumously published 1981 autobiography Putting the Record Straight (as do I: I’m waiting for it to arrive on Interlibrary Loan; I’ll report on it here after it arrives). But the story of the ground-breaking stereo recording of Wagner’s Ring in Vienna from 1958 to 1966 is fascinating. Culshaw is a much more accomplished writer than the team of Martin and his co-writer, the journalist Jeremy Hornsby.  Culshaw’s cast is every bit as interesting as Martin’s: Georg Solti, Kirsten Flagstad, Birgit Nilsson, Hans Hotter, Gottlob Frick, Wolfgang Windgassen, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Régine Crespin are all amazing artists, but their human foibles and frailties result in many entertaining stories. There’s a really interesting connection between Martin’s experiments with new recording technologies and the creation of new sounds with the Beatles, and the work of Culshaw in the previous decade. Martin’s experiments were mainly ad hoc, and came out of the Beatles' musical curiosity, while Culshaw’s were based on his idea of recordings as “a theatre of the mind.” Martin may have revolutionized popular music recording with his work on Revolver, Rubber Soul and Sergeant Pepper, but as Edward Greenfield said in his Gramophone obituary in 1980, Culshaw “… transformed the whole concept of recording.”

Understanding the world of music will always be a challenge for non-musicians. Learning about the technologies of sound production and reproduction is an important piece of the puzzle, while descriptions of the interactions between musicians and musical technicians give important musical issues a human face. Both Culshaw and Martin have given me a much better appreciation for and understanding of the great music I listen to every day.

Shear vulgarity

My favourite thing about ‘Eurotrash’ opera productions - radically political and elaborately trendy remixes of 18th and 19th century works that began life with breastplates, horned helmets, well-fed singers and real-life trees on-stage - is the YouTube comments that accompany the trailers. One complained about the ‘shear vulgarity’ of a new production (which I extravagantly praised) of Rameau’s Les Indes Galantes. This new Tannhauser will surely bring its own tsunami of outrage, but then outrage is nothing new when it comes to a work Wagner wrote with controversy in mind.

The culture wars have always been with us, and Wagner trolled the comfortable bourgeoisie with the best of them. The bait was always taken, though the biggest splash at the 1861 Paris premiere came from the Jockey Club, who objected to the ballet occurring at the beginning of the opera, rather than after the interval when their members usually arrived. Baudelaire saw Wagner’s not-too-well-hidden meaning right away, saying “…barbarity always has to have its place in the drama of love, and sensual enjoyment has to lead, by a satanic logic, to the delights of crime.” If the composer could see what’s happening at his sacred Festspielhaus in the 21st century of course he’d himself be shocked, but surely he would have been pleased by the strong response. This is, after all, an opera about sex.

I always like to go with the flow with these kind of spectacles. I tend to be open to experimental dramaturgy, and I like what’s happening here in that regard. Sebastien Baumgarten’s production, which centres around Joep van Lieshout’s imposing industrial installation, is focussed on Tannhauser as experiment. To go with this, though, musical standards must be high, and the singing especially needs to be strong. This production passes that bar easily, with outstanding singing and acting from Michelle Breedt as Venus, Camilla Nylund as Elisabeth, and especially Torsten Kerl as Tannhauser. Conductor Axel Kober provides more than capable support with the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra & Chorus, and the entire experience is communicated with excellent sound, video, lighting and camera work.

So bottom line: I’m shocked just a bit, titillated just a bit, impressed a lot.

Salacious note: People buying this DVD without reading the comments (Caveat emptor!) might not realize what they're getting. Look at that cover above! Here's the good stuff: enjoy!