Anguish, solace, beauty

Allan Pettersson's music comes from a place of pain and anguish - a hard childhood under a brute of a father and the lifelong burden of a chronic, debilitating disease - but it's also full of the solace and beauty which comes from the Northern landscape and from reserves within himself. With incredible discipline and strength of purpose Pettersson built an awesome symphonic legacy which rivals that of the great 20th century masters Nielsen, Sibelius, Shostakovich and Prokofiev. "No one in the 1950s noticed that I am always breaking up the structures," he said later in the decade, "that I was creating a whole new symphonic form." By the mid-1970s Pettersson was creating long, complex music in a style of his own that veered between the Sibelian model, atonality, serialism and neo-romanticism, with layers of meaning for those willing to make the effort.

This BIS release is part of The Allan Pettersson Project 2013-2018, a joint project with the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra and conductor Christian Lindberg that will create a complete cycle to go alongside those by Sergiu Comissiona and Alun Francis. This series is well on the way to establishing supremacy, due to Lindberg's command of Pettersson's underlying structures, his players' virtuosity and musicianship and the clear and lifelike sound provided by BIS.  This disc drops on March 3, 2017; it is very highly recommended.

Transcendental modernist masterworks from Australia

The third volume in Sir Andrew Davis's Charles Ives series for Chandos includes my favourite Charles Ives work, and my favourite American symphony, "The Camp Meeting", Ives' Third. A cherished RCA Red Seal LP from 1969 began this crush: Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Then came Leonard Bernstein, Michael Tilson Thomas, Andrew Litton - my goodness, Ives is very well-served on disc!

Davis has everything in hand, Ives-wise, with his musicians Down Under. After a pretty solid beginning, each new disc has been better than the last. Davis runs through Symphony no. 3 at a brisk pace, a bit zippier than Ormandy and much quicker than the reverent Leonard Bernstein NY Philharmonic recording from 1983. But there's no lack of weight to the Melbourne Symphony's playing, though their string sound isn't quite up to the New Yorkers or the Fabulous Philadelphians, helped as it is by the typically full and warm Chandos sound.  Nearly all of my favourite music has some sort of nostalgic sadness or saudade, as they say in Brazil. Davis brings this out beautifully, especially in the 1st movement: "Old Folks Gatherin'". This helps to underline the humorous passages, never far away in Ives, that pop up later in the symphony.

In the amazing 4th Symphony Davis has an ace in the hole: pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, who is blazing a luminous trail for Chandos in a wide variety of music: Mozart, Beethoven, Bartok, Stravinsky and more. This is nothing as orthodox as a piano concerto, but it calls for all of Bavouzet's virtuosity and musicianship. The French pianist has a particularly light touch, which is welcome, as the piano comments on the action, occasionally egging the orchestra on to furious action, or going off on jazzy tangents of its own. This amazing work takes hard-core New England Transcendentalism, runs it through Ives's one-of-a-kind imagination, and ends up as a completely home-grown Modernist masterpiece. That's one heck of an accomplishment that I can hardly believe even as I listen to it. Sir Andrew Davis deserves a lot of credit for taking Ives out of his flinty New England soil and have it sound so right and natural in Australia.

This disc is due to be released on March 3, 2017.

Awesome beauty, incredible strangeness

This new disc of Gesualdo madrigals from Philippe Herreweghe and his Collegium Vocale Gent highlights the awesome beauty and incredible strangeness of the music of the powerful and cruel Italian Prince. This is music of an oddly superficial beauty, but there are clearly intense emotions under the surface. All of this is presented with Herreweghe's customary calm, clear, polished, focussed musicality.

I've long been more than a bit squeamish about the tone of many writings about Gesualdo's life, and
I definitely take umbrage with the liner notes written for this disc by Jens van Durme. He writes of Gesualdo's murder of his wife in this fashion:

The extramarital freedoms that Maria allowed herself culminated in outright tragedy in the early morning of 17 October 1590, when she was lured into a trap by her husband, caught in flagrante delicto with her lover Fabrizio Carafa, and horribly murdered. The reputation of Carlo Gesualdo as a psychopath was born. Yet, according to local custom, he had not only the right but also the duty to settle this matter of honour as he did.

And that's the end of the matter, right? Nothing about Gesualdo's mutilation of the corpses after he had done the deed. A Prince who did his duty. I'll discount some of the unproven tales of his other outrages, which are outlined in Werner Herzog's 1994 film Death for Five Voices, and still call him a murderous psychopath.

Here is the beauty that comes from the psychopath. It's a mystery.

A new Bohemian symphonies series from Naxos

Leopold Koželuch is comfortably in the second rank of composers who look up - a fair way to be sure - to Mozart and Haydn. He rubs shoulders with Gluck, Michael Haydn, Rossetti and Kraus. He wrote a great deal of serious and accessible music, characterized by some melodic charm and honest craftsmanship. Occasionally lightning strikes and Koželuch produces something really memorable. I've been following Kemp English's complete piano music series for Grand Piano, and am more and more impressed as he gets to Koželuch's later sonatas. The composer's forays into Sturm und Drang are fascinating; Koželuch seemed to have his finger on the pulse of musical trends in Europe.

I know Koželuch's symphonies from two recordings: by Concerto Köln from 2001 and The London Mozart Players from 1999. Both came from series that presented music by Haydn and Mozart's contemporaries: Leopold Mozart, Josef Myslivecek, Anton Salieri, William Herschel, Carl Stamitz and the like. Both of these series are absolutely superb. From them I learned so much about 18th century music - and incidentally about Haydn and Mozart themselves.

This is volume one of a projected series of complete symphonies. It also carries the subtitle Czech Masters in Vienna, which I hope will point to more music by other Czech composers at work during Mozart and Haydn's lifetimes. The symphonies chosen here show the Bohemian composer veering between Haydn-like fun and Mozartian theatricality. The G minor Symphony is really outstanding; this is the closest Koželuch comes to Wolfgang Amadeus. The London Mozart Players version is hard to beat:

Indeed, the new version is pitched at a lower dramatic temperature from the beginning. Marek Stilec leaves something in reserve for later in the movement. Alas, Koželuch is no Mozart, but the soft passage just before the end of the movement is very affecting and effective, and the new recording shines at that point.

So now we have the beginnings of two very promising symphonic series from the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice and Marek Stilec, of Michael Haydn and Leopold Koželuch. I'm really looking forward to future releases in both.

Modernism & the Avant Garde in Brazilian piano music

Aleyson Scopel's complete series of Cartas Celestes by José Antônio Rezende de Almeida Prado is of great importance in terms of both Brazilian music and piano repertoire. Volume 2 continues the series with three meaty but by no means unmusical pieces that use a multitude of piano sonorities and compositional techniques. Almeida Prado began his multi-year opus after returning from studies in Paris (with, among others, Olivier Messiaen and Nadia Boulanger) and Darmstadt (with both György Ligeti and Lukas Foss). But as I discussed in it my review of Volume 1, one hears just as much the modernist works of Heitor Villa-Lobos in this fierce and complex music for piano. The ground-breaking Rudepoema which Villa-Lobos wrote in the early 1920s is like a presence just behind much of Cartas Celestes 4-6. Nor does Almeida Prado neglect, in this avant garde music, the folklore and dance rhythms that give life to Villa-Lobos and indeed all the music of Brazil.

Brazil has a glorious tradition of great pianists, from Guiomar Novaes to Nelson Freire, and from the evidence of these two discs we can now add the young Aleyson Scopel to the rolls. His technique is outstanding, but he also has the intellectual and emotional discipline to communicate Almeida Prado's massive structures as something more than clever mathematical constructs. Volume 2 will be released on February 10, 2017.

José Antônio Rezende de Almeida Prado

Music of solace and contemplation

Every release from Noel Edison's Elora Singers is to be treasured; they're Canada's most accomplished choir. Their new Patrick Hawes disc shows the 22 voice group in fine form, obviously lifted up by the very fine music of British composer Patrick Hawes. Nearly all of the music on this well-filled disc is brand new: the major works Revelation and Beatitudes, and five smaller but no less impressive pieces. All of these are world recording premieres. There's a bonus piece as well, one which I expect will end up on virtually every Hawes choral disc in the future: the sublime Quanta Qualia from 2004, which has become Hawes' calling card, like Barber's Adagio or Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasileiras no. 5. Edison has chosen the arrangement Hawes made for Voces8 for their 2013 album Eventide, for choir and alto saxophone.  This is music with varied and distinguished precursors, from the Tudor composers to Vaughan Williams, Geoffrey Burgon and Ennio Morricone. This ecstatic, soaring music is a fitting climax to a satisfying program of serious music which provides solace and enhances contemplation. It's well-timed to provide relief from the lunacy and danger the past few months have brought to the world.

Besides the repertoire and the singing, there's another major plus here: the husband and wife production team of Norbert Kraft (who also engineers) and Bonnie Silver (who also edits) deliver a living, breathing choir without apparent artifice. And what a choir!

Here is Patrick Hawes travelling to the island of Patmos, the place where St. John wrote his Book of Revelation, the inspiration behind Hawes' own Revelation.

Early Beethoven with the right touch

I really enjoyed the third volume in TrioVanBeethoven's complete Piano Trios series from Gramola, which came out just last summer.  Here we have the fourth disc, in a format similar to the first and third releases: a Trio from Beethoven's ground-breaking Opus 1, another Trio from later in his career, and a filler to round things out. This program has a major plus: the C minor is my favourite, and probably the best, of the three op. 1 trios written in 1793. On the other hand, we've run out of mature works (one of each of the two op. 70 works and the Archduke, op. 97 highlighted the first three discs), so we have to make do with the piano trio version of op. 11, written in 1797. This is a pleasant piece written in an unusually accessible style, but it's hardly a great work. And finally, the Variations op. 44, in spite of the late opus number, are from earlier in Beethoven's career, probably written before his op. 1. "It is not the desire for fame", says Marcel Proust, "but the habit for work that allows us to produce a masterpiece." Fame came to Beethoven with op. 1, and that was something that he dearly sought. But it would be a few years before the true masterpieces came. Luckily for us, Beethoven was his era's version of "the world's hardest working band."

The thing I liked best about TrioVanBeethoven's previous releases is their light touch when it comes to the op. 1 trios. One cannot take the drama in these works entirely at face value; a musical grin here and there keeps things from getting too fraught. Here we have a composer whose reach exceeds his grasp. As Browning says, "that's what heaven's for," and heaven was to come soon enough for Beethoven. But the musical experience improves when there's some (but not too much) detachment from the players. Oddly, things are reversed in op. 11, in which Beethoven writes down a bit to his audience, or to his publisher's idea of what his audience wanted. This is rarely a good idea for any artist, and it's a rare occurrence for Beethoven, but there's no harm done. We have pleasant tunes and a certain amount of charm, and again the three young musicians of TrioVanBeethoven have judged their playing just right. Incidentally, as much as I love the clarinet, I've always preferred the piano and strings version of op. 11, perhaps because one is less likely to compare it with Mozart.

So the series comes to an end. TrioVanBeethoven and Gramola should be proud of their accomplishment: a beautifully played four and a half hours of music that shows a distinctive sound, and presents Beethoven in all stages of his career at his very best.