Three neoclassical symphonies

Simone Menezes: Music by Prokofiev, Villa-Lobos & Poulenc

The up-and-coming Brazilian conductor Simone Menezes has matched three symphonic works in an album about neoclassicism, one of the most interesting and important components of the modernist revolution in the music of the first half of twentieth century. As a musical lens neoclassicism offered a new way to look at the past, sharpening and bringing into focus at times, distorting at others. But more important is what it illuminates about the modern world and the composers that lived in it.

The revolution of the new, modern music of Stravinsky, Debussy & Ravel was just as frightening as the fractured visual arts ushered in by Picasso & Braque. It's no wonder that in 1917 both Sergei Prokofiev and Heitor Villa-Lobos should throw a lifeline back to 18th century Vienna to help keep their bearings as they wrote their music of the future. Prokofiev's model was Haydn's symphonies, while Villa-Lobos looked to Mozart's operatic music. The former created a masterwork in his "Classical" Symphony, while Villa's First Sinfonietta, "In Memory of Mozart" has made much less of a stir in the century since. It's a nice little piece, a clever piece, which shows how quickly the Brazilian composer could pick up an entirely new musical vocabulary thousands of miles away from its Parisian epicentre. Villa-Lobos spent years playing the cello in the pit of the Rio de Janeiro opera house, and his Sinfonietta is a deconstruction of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro and the Magic Flute. But Villa had a different European forebear; his true personal voice didn't emerge until he came to terms with the music of Bach.

Simone Menezes has been pondering the similarities between the Classical Symphony and the Sinfonietta #1 for quite a while. Here's a video from back in 2018 where she explains how similar the two works are, though one was written in Rio, the other in St. Petersburg/Petrograd:

The Sinfonietta of Francis Poulenc, meanwhile, was written thirty years later, in 1947. A decade younger than Villa-Lobos & Prokofiev, Poulenc was actually more closely aligned with the musical avant garde, writing modernist works beginning in the late 1910s. As the post-WWII era began, his own neoclassical symphony adds a second layer of looking back: to the 18th century Viennese masters, but also to the younger Poulenc himself, writing such works as the Concert champêtre for harpsichord & orchestra in 1928. His Sinfonietta is suffused with nostalgia, but unsentimental in nature. Earlier I called neoclassicism a lens; in this work Poulenc is using it as a kaleidoscope. Scenes shift, and the ostensibly trivial work becomes a sophisticated compendium of earlier times. As Simone Menezes says in her excellent liner note essay, "... the work transcends its apparent lightness, approaching a symphonic dimension not through development, but through accumulation and contrast."

This recording is greater than the sum of its three parts; each symphonic work is enhanced by its relationship with the others, and the place of each in musical history makes listening as instructive as it is enjoyable.

Instrumental music from Meredith Monk

 Meredith Monk - Realms

This valuable album includes Meredith Monk's only string quartet, Stringsongs, a work written in 2004; Backlight, written in 1999 & revised in 2015 for a small ensemble of piano, winds and strings; and the title piece, Realms for six voices & a small group of instruments, from 2012. In the conversation Monk has with Phillip Granell in the liner notes,  she talks about how these three pieces are related: "... all the pieces are sonic landscapes, each a different one. Each piece explores new colours and textures." Together they make a substantial, challenging and appealing hour of music.

An almost completely instrumental album is a first for Monk, who has always worked primarily with the human voice. For the "Phantom Strings" movement of Stringsongs, "I actually wrote it by laying tracks with my voice. I even sang the cello part!" It's perhaps for this reason that the work doesn't have the String Quartet Common Denominator sound, with Joseph Haydn still lurking in the background of so many works in that form. As well, we should note that the string players - violinists Phillip Granell & Chihiro Ono, violist Richard Jones and cellist Sergio Serra - provide the rich and full sound of a superb madrigal ensemble, recorded in a churchlike acoustic.

Backlight, scored for five woodwinds, piano, violin and cello, was conceived by Meredith Monk to evoke nighttime in New York City. It's a noir piece that's built on a modernist chamber music sound rather than the romantic Hollywood orchestral scores of the great film noir composers Miklós Rózsa, David Raksin and Bernard Herrmann. The cinematic nature of the work is especially evident in the third & final movement, where the city awakes. It reminded me of a comment Debussy made about Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben: "He definitely thinks in colored images. Ein Heldenleben is a book of images, cinematography even." Backlight is the noir version of this.

Realm Variations brings back the human voice, but as Monk notes, "In Realm Variations, while there are voices, I think of them as instruments and the instruments as voices." This is an important work, from one of the most important musical voices of this century.

The cover image is by Kyungwon Yi.

Futurism without tears

Francesco Balilla Pratella & Marco Anzoletti - Music for Viola & Piano

In February 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published his Manifesto of Futurism. Futurist ideas flourished in poetry and the visual arts, but they were also taken up early by the Italian composer Francesco Balilla Pratella. Pratella wrote his own Manifesto of Futurist Musicians in 1910, with more polemic work to follow.

Martinelli had said that "Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice", but there's little evidence of those futurist traits in Pratella's Viola Sonata, written in 1917. This work seems to toe the standard modernist line; if anything, it's romantic and often pretty. A lovely work, in fact, but hardly violent or cruel. Other works by Pratella seem to veer more towards the savage side, but it seems that the true music of futurism would have to wait for Luigi Russolo and his acoustic noise generators, which he called intonarumori.

This album, performed by violist Federica Cardinali & pianist Lisa Redorici, also includes the 7 Compositions for Viola & Piano by the Italian composer Marco Anzoletti (1867-1929). These undated character pieces are short passages with varying moods: march-like, passionate, pastoral, mock heroic, antique, rustic and satiric. The final piece, the "Serenata Maligna", is a wonderful scary trifle that features the viola pizzicato; it fits the upcoming season well. I listened to it again & again, and thought it would be perfect in Wes Anderson's next movie. It makes for a wonderful encore for this slightly puzzling but hugely entertaining recital.

The cover features a painting by the Italian abstract painter Osvaldo Licini.

This album will be released on November 6, 2026.

 

Baroque music from Leicester

Robert Valentine: 12 Sonatas for Recorder and Basso Continuo

When you think of music from Leicester, does the post-punk group The Apollinaires come to mind?

Or perhaps you immediately think Baroque: Robert Valentine was born around 1674 in Leicester, moved to Rome, & died in 1747. He was one of the most prolific composers of music for the recorder in his time (his contemporaries include Henry Purcell in England, and the Italians Antonio Caldara, Francesco Durante & Alessandro Scarlatti). Valentine's twelve sonatas for recorder & basso continuo, op. 11, were published in Rome in the first half of the 18th century, as part of Antonio Parensi's Sinfonie dei varij autori. This new album from First Hand Records (FHR) includes all twelve of the op. 11 sonatas, on two discs.

The first page of one of Valentine's F major sonatas for recorder & continuo, from Sinfonie dei varij autori.

The ensemble on this album - Heidi Fardell on recorder, Lynda Sayce on lute & guitar, Poppy Walshaw on cello & Robin Bigwood on harpsichord - are able advocates for this music. Valentine does his part to keep things interesting, with different dance rhythms and contrasting musical textures. The musicians attack these pieces with energy and style. Some of the most interesting passages come from the continuo group, a tribute both to Valentine's composition and the ensemble work of the four musicians. Certainly listening to two discs worth of recorder sonatas at once might be fatiguing, but remember, musical ergonomics is important. Take a break, and enjoy this infectious music in moderation.

The album cover photo is by Emma Spellman. By the way, this album will be released Real Soon Now, on October 16, 2026.

And here it is:

Determined music from a high powered trio

 Michel Petrucciani Trio - Jazz Club Montmartre, 1988

The great Danish jazz label Storyville has released a wonderful album recorded at Copenhagen’s Jazzhus Montmartre on July 3rd, 1988, 37 years ago to the day, assuming I get this review done in time! 

The French pianist Michel Petrucciani is joined by bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Roy Haynes. The music this high-powered Trio performed is a mix of standards - "My Funny Valentine", "In a Sentimental Mood", "Autumn Leaves", "Someday My Prince Will Come" - and songs written by Petrucciani, Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane. There's plenty of energy here, communicated to the enthusiastic, but not intrusive, crowd. I've often commented on how ardent and seemingly knowledgeable Danish jazz audiences were back in the day; Copenhagen is clearly a great jazz town!

The sheer technique of the three players is what stands out, but each of them also seems to be listening to the other two. These are highly musical performances, for all the virtuosity.

In his article on Michel Petrucciani in the New Republic, "Keys to the Kingdom", David Haju quotes Michael Zwerin, who tells this wonderful story:

We were sitting there wondering what to play. It was kind of hot. And Michel said, ‘Anybody know “Giant Steps”?’ Neither Louis [Petrucciani] nor I wanted to admit we didn’t really know it. So there was this great silence. And Michel said, ‘Well, I do!’ And he pounded into a solo version of it at a very fast clip, and it was really amazing. That to me is Michel--’Well, I do!’ Man, a confidence you wouldn’t believe.

As it happens, Petrucciani, Peacock and Haynes play Coltrane's "Giant Steps" on this album, and it really is impressive. A "fast clip" is here in this performance, and the three masters gallop through this hugely influential composition, but there's no hesitation or stops and starts (as there apparently were for an underprepared Tommy Flanagan in Coltrane's original recording); all three are completely confident in this music. Speed is not the defining characteristic of this album, though. It's true that the Trio speeds up Joseph Kosma's ballad "Les feuilles mortes", aka "Autumn Leaves," but Petrucciani, like his hero Bill Evans, keeps the sadness and introspection in the foreground.

Michel Petrucciani's life story itself is so sad and so inspiring. He was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, the “glass bones” disease, and lived his entire 36 years in terrible pain. And yet he had a remarkable career as a jazz pianist, with a very large recording legacy. As Haju says, "He was as fragile as his art was robust, his life as tenuous as his music is durable." The design on the cover of this disc, by Finn Nygaard, shows the pianist, under three feet, and weighing around 50 pounds. In a wonderful conceit, Nygaard shows the pianist rising above the piano, as he rose above his terrible suffering to create wonderful sounds with remarkable colleagues.

I've just come across some photographs that were taken at a Jazzhus Montmartre concert in July 1993, by the great Danish jazz photographer Jan Persson. So great to see Petrucciani in action!

Thoughful orchestral music from a true original

 

Charles Koechlin: Symphony no. 1

Charles Koechlin's First Symphony began in 1916 as a String Quartet - his Second - and was reconfigured for full orchestra by the composer in 1927. He adds orchestral colour in such a tasteful way; nothing garish, but subtle touches here and there, especially from the brass, opening things up from chamber music to a full romantic symphony orchestra experience. This is a modernist sound that also hearkens back to French music before Debussy and Ravel: one of his teachers at the Paris Conservatoire was Jules Massenet, and his fellow students included George Enescu and Florent Schmitt. Later he studied with Gabriel Fauré, along with Maurice Ravel, and it's Fauré who had the greatest influence on him. There isn't a lot of drama or incident in the symphony, but rather a thoughtful development of attractive themes. As with so much French music of the period, one can also hear the echoes of Richard Wagner, but strained through a French, and specifically Parisian, sensibility. This is music that deserves more attention, and it has a wonderful advocate in conductor Ariane Matiakh and the Württembergische Philharmonie Reutlingen.

In the eight years between 1935 and 1943, Koechlin produced his 4-volume Traité de l'Orchestration (available to download at IMSLP here). Surely he made good use of his experience in adapting his String Quartet for full orchestra in the creation of this major project. Besides this work and his own compositions, Koechlin is known for his biography of Fauré (the first), and his significant work as a teacher. Among his pupils were Germaine Tailleferre, Roger Désormière, Francis Poulenc and Cole Porter.

There are two additional works on this album: the Symphonic Poem Au Loin, op. 20, from 1900; and 3 Mélodies, op. 17, written in the period 1895-1900. The latter are orchestrated by Robert Orledge, and sung beautifully here by soprano Patricia Petibon. Au Loin, as its name suggests, has a far away feeling, a high Romantic piece sounding more of the 19th century than the 20th. Both this and the songs owe a lot to Fauré, and I'm sure the teacher was proud of his student's work.

Charles Koechlin is such an appealing character: a fine composer embedded in the French conservatory tradition who charted his own course in his compositions. He was a passionate cinemaniac, writing his Second Symphony, "The Seven Stars" (also recorded by Ariane Matiakh) as an homage to the great Hollywood idols of the time. I love this portrait of the composer from 1948, two years before his death at 83. A wonderful playoff beard! A highly recommended recording.

Koechlin by Boris Lipnitzki, 1948

Vital reinventions of early music

Electric Fields: Music by Hildegarde von Bingen, Barbara Strozzi, Francesca Caccini, Bryce Dessner & David Chalmin

The Audio CD and streaming versions of this Alpha disc are now available. I'm reviewing the 180 gram double-LP version of this release, which is due to be released on June 6, 2025.

Photo by Umberto Nicoletti

Electric Fields is a project of this good-looking crew: soprano Barbara Hannigan, composer and electronics performer David Chalmin, and the duo-pianists Katia and Marielle Labèque. It's based on the music and texts of the remarkable medieval polymath Hildegarde von Bingen, as well as music by two women composers of the early Baroque: Barbara Strozzi and Francesca Caccini. This music becomes the raw material for improvisations of the team, as well as original compositions by Chalmin and Bryce Dessner.

These are more than mere pastiches; they're serious 21st century reinterpretations of early music. Though there's an immersive feel to all the music here, especially with the warm sound of vinyl, this project is not built in the studio, but rather through live performances. That gives a vital pulse to the music, with even a hint of swing in the improvised pieces. Of course Barbara Hannigan is thoroughly familiar with Historically Informed Practice when it comes to the music of Strozzi and Caccini, so we're on solid ground when it comes to reinterpretation in a new idiom.

Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia Harmonie Celestium Revelationum", published in modern facsimile by Alamire

You have to be of a certain age to look at this score of Hildegarde von Bingen and think immediately of IBM punch cards, but that was my first response. Hildegarde wrote this music some 850 years ago, so there's an element of translation involved in any performance. With the lack of any performance tradition in the intervening centuries, Hildegarde is a strong candidate for a true reinvention in modern times. Besides her skills as a musician, she had an interest in scientific analysis and even cryptography. There are two pieces on this album - by Bryce Dessner and David Chalmin - that use Hildegarde's "Lingua ignota", her invented language. The intellectual curiosity of this one-of-a-kind 12th century woman lives on in these two tracks, but one can also say that something of her spirit has also survived.

It's Heitor Villa-Lobos's modern reinvention of Bach in the mid-20th century that I kept coming back to when I listened to this music. Villa's Bachianas Brasileiras reinvents Bach's music in the light of Brazil's popular music traditions, of the Amerindians of the Amazon and the urban choros musicians of Rio de Janeiro. Like the Bachianas, Electric Fields is a vital hybrid of old and new, erudite and popular.

It's all grist for the mill:

• The Labeque sisters' recordings of Mozart, Schubert, Gershwin, Philip Glass, Moondog and many others;
• Bryce Dessner's contemporary classical compositions and collaborations with people like Sufjan Stevens and Nico Muhly, as well as his experience in the rock group The National; 
• Barbara Hannigan's operatic singing, especially in the Baroque repertoire, and her move to become an important conductor, with wonderful recordings of Nono, Messiaen, Berg, Ligeti and others;
• David Chalmin's production work in jazz and classical music, his electronic composition and live electronic performance, as well as his collaborations with the Labeque sisters.

There seem to be no barriers for these wonderful musicians. They've produced an album that will reward multiple listens and close study, but which is also just there in its particular groove, inspiring wonder.