Another Bang on a Can Marathon coming soon!

Bang on a Can's next ALL LIVE Bang on a Can Online Marathon takes place on Sunday, June 14, 2020 from 3pm-9pm ET.

The Marathon will be streamed online at http://marathon2020.bangonacan.org, featuring 25 live performances from musicians' homes in the USA, Canada, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Scotland, Italy & Ireland plus ten world premieres of newly commissioned works.

The Marathon begins with a performance by Rhiannon Giddens at 3pm and concludes with a performance by Terry Riley. Additional highlights include performances by Roscoe Mitchell, Nico Muhly, Conrad Tao, Pamela Z and many more. The 6-hour live Marathon will be hosted by Bang on a Can Co-Founders and Artistic Directors Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe, who will interview composers and performers in between pieces throughout the performance.

Bang on a Can presented its first online Marathon on May 3, 2020. According to The New York Times, it “approximated what our critic cherishes about going to live performances,” and highlighted the event's “genial vibe and leisurely pace." Until concerts can resume in a normal way, Bang on a Can will continue to present online Marathons periodically.

The Marathon will be free to stream and all Marathon performers and commissioned composers are being compensated by Bang on a Can.

The marathon kicks off with composer, singer, songwriter, historian, archivist, and activist Rhiannon Giddens. She has dedicated her life to exploring American roots – where our music and our culture come from, the debts we all owe to our forebears and to each other.

A core feature of the program will be ten world premieres of newly commissioned works:

Leila Adu New Work (world premiere) performed by Mark Stewart
Aaron Garcia New Work (world premiere) performed by Ken Thomson
Susanna Hancock New Work (world premiere) performed by Nick Photinos
Carla Kihlstedt New Work (world premiere) performed by Carla Kihlstedt
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė New Work (world premiere) performed by Robert Black
Shara Nova New Work (world premiere) performed by Shara Nova
Helena Tulve New Work (world premiere) performed by Arlen Hlusko
Ailie Robertson New Work (world premiere) performed by Gregg August
Tomeka Reid New Work (world premiere) performed by Vicky Chow
Kendall Williams New Work (world premiere) performed by David Cossin

The marathon will conclude with Terry Riley, live! The man and the myth, minimalist godfather Terry Riley joins us in an early celebration of his 85th birthday.

Here is the complete schedule for the Marathon:

3pm (EDT)
RHIANNON GIDDENS
HELENA TULVE Without love atoms would stop spinning (world premiere) performed by ARLEN HLUSKO
AARON GARCIA disconnect. (world premiere) performed by KEN THOMSON
SHARA NOVA New Work (world premiere)

4pm
ALVIN CURRAN Shofar Rags XXL
TED HEARNE Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job
ŽIBUOKLĖ MARTINAITYTĖ Abyssal Zone (world premiere) performed by ROBERT BLACK
NIK BÄRTSCH

5pm
IVA BITTOVÁ
ROSCOE MITCHELL
PAULA MATTHUSEN of an implacable subtraction performed by DANA JESSEN
TOMEKA REID Lamenting G.F., A.A., B.T., T.M. (world premiere) performed by VICKY CHOW
NICO MUHLY

6pm
SUSANNA HANCOCK EVERYTHING IN BLOOM (world premiere) performed by NICK PHOTINOS
DON BYRON
AILIE ROBERTSON New Work (world premiere) performed by GREGG AUGUST
TIM BRADY At Sergio’s Request (world premiere)

7pm
JUDD GREENSTEIN In Teaching Others We Teach Ourselves performed by NADIA SIROTA
PAMELA Z
ALEX WEISER Music from ‘and all the days were purple’ performed by ELIZA BAGG
KENDALL WILLIAMS New Work (world premiere) performed by DAVID COSSIN

8pm
CARLA KIHLSTEDT New Work (world premiere)
FREDERIC RZEWSKI Which Side Are You On? performed by CONRAD TAO
LEILA ADU Black-Crowned Night-Heron (world premiere) performed by MARK STEWART
TERRY RILEY

Hope, and a call to action

Violins of Hope: Music for violin & piano by Dauber, Bloch, John Williams, Chajes, Farber, Laks, Perlman, Ben-Haim, Ravel


The Violins of Hope project was founded by Amnon Weinstein and his son Avshalom Weinstein, Israeli luthiers who collect the actual instruments that have survived from their time in the camps of the Holocaust, refurbish them to concert quality, and bring them to communities all over the world. James A. Grymes documented this in his 2014 book Violins of Hope: Violins of the Holocaust - Instruments of Hope & Liberation in Mankind's Darkest Hour.

Niv Ashkenazi is the only violinist to have one of these instruments on a long-term loan. "In most Violins of Hope events, musicians have a limited time with each instrument. I have been given a unique opportunity to develop a relationship with this special instrument and its voice." Ashkenazi goes on to introduce the reason for his new album Violins of Hope:

One of the missions of Violins of Hope is to help silenced voices be heard again. This album is intended to create a permanent chronicle of that voice so it is never again silenced.

Ashkenazi has chosen a beautiful programme of pieces by composers from the early 20th century to today, many of whom were affected by the Holocaust. He begins with the Serenade by Robert Dauber, a lovely short, sentimental piece of light music that becomes almost unbearably sad when you learn that Dauber survived stints in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, only to die in Dachau just before the end of the war.



Other highlights from this album include the Trois pièces de concert, by Szymon Laks, the concert-master of the  concertmaster of the Birkenau Men’s Camp Orchestra in Auschwitz, and the moving Nigun by Ernest Bloch. I never tire of John Williams's Theme from Schindler’s List, written for Itzhak Perlman to play in Steven Spielberg's film. All of these are beautifully played by Ashkenazi. He gets a full, sweet tone from his instrument, built in the first third of the 20th century in Germany or Eastern Europe, and plays with passion, but also grace and style. Also, when called for, wit and humour. The fine pianist Matthew Graybil provides superb support.

The most substantial piece, and one that repays multiple listening, is the Triumph movement from Sharon Farber's Bestemming. Farber herself made this arrangement for piano four hands and narrator, and plays the second piano part herself. Tony Campisi is the narrator in this performance, providing a perfectly nuanced, subtle commentary to the heartbreaking story told by a master composer.

We need hope more than ever today, as a new wave of fascism begins to break over the world. May this inspiring project provide us with a new will towards action. According to Alain De Botton, "In order to be effective, political art can't simply say that something is wrong; it needs to make this error feel vivid enough to generate the emotion necessary to stir us into reform." This amazing album is a perfect example.

Grace and glamour

Ottorino Respighi: La bella dormente nel bosco

Respighi wrote this delightful Sleeping Beauty opera for the puppeteer Vittorio Podrecca in 1922, and though the composer later adapted it as a full-blown opera, it still has all the charm of a puppet production for children. Charm is the driving force in this production from Sardinia, beautifully presented on Blu-ray by Unitel and Naxos. When Coleridge talked about the "willing suspension of disbelief", he said that a fantastic story requires "human interest and a semblance of truth". This is amply supplied by Charles Perrault's classic story, left intact in the libretto of Claudio Guastalla, and enhanced by Respighi's music. The visual spectacle and stage effects are impressive, but it's the gorgeous music that makes this special, both as fantasy and real human interest. Though it's full of musical in-jokes - references to Wagner and Stravinsky and popular music - there's no need to worry too much about detective work, since Respighi piles up beautiful melodies one on top of the other. The grace and glamour of the whole package makes this an opera everyone - even children - can enjoy.

A fascinating release, with outstanding Villa-Lobos

Aline Van Barentzen: Piano music by Villa-Lobos, Chopin, Liszt, Falla, Brahms

In March of 1927, the American pianist Aline Van Barentzen performed, in the Salle Gaveau in Paris, a new work dedicated to her by Heitor Villa-Lobos: the Second Book of A Prole do Bébé.  Along with Rudepoema, dedicated to Arthur Rubinstein and also played in Paris that year, these nine short pieces represent some of the most important modernist works of the entire piano repertoire. It's marvellous to hear this music, recorded in 1956 for Pathé, in a fine re-mastering. Barentzen recorded the eight pieces of the First Book as well; these are much better known, but less adventurous in terms of harmony and rhythm. Though the subject of this music relates to childhood, this is way too virtuosic to be undertaken by any child who isn't a full blown prodigy. As can be expected, Van Barentzen has complete control over these pieces; she must have consulted with Villa when he first presented them to her in 1925, and again thirty years later, when both pianist and composer spent a lot of time in the Pathé recording studios.

Program: Museu Villa-Lobos

Two years later, in 1958, Van Barentzen recorded Villa-Lobos's Choros no. 5, subtitled Alma Brasileira, the Soul of Brazil. The following year the composer was gone. This is a very fine version of a very special work, with the tricky rhythms properly lined up, but always sounding surprising. There's more rubato here than you'll hear in most performances today, but the composer is almost looking over her shoulder (he was in Parisian recording studios throughout the late 1950s). Outstanding Villa-Lobos!




I'm most interested in the Villa-Lobos, of course, but there is much more very fine playing on this two-disc set from APR. As I mentioned, the 1950s Pathé recordings sound great; we have here pieces by Liszt (Un Suspiro is quite lovely) and Chopin (the D-flat major Nocturne is a stand-out). The earlier recordings are understandably less easy on the ears: I wasn't especially convinced by Van Barentzen's Brahms, recorded by HMV in the 1940s. The most interesting recording from a historical perspective goes all the way back to June of 1928. In his informative and entertaining liner notes, Jonathan Summers tells a great story about how this recording came about:

Barentzen’s first recording happened in unusual circumstances. She met Piero Coppola, conductor and director of French HMV, at a reception at the French piano firm of Gaveau in June 1928. He asked if she knew Falla’s Noches en los jardines de España, as Ricardo Viñes who was due to make the premier recording of the work in three days time was ill. Barentzen told Coppola she knew it, although in fact she did not. She learnt it in the three days and was later told by de Falla that he was very pleased with the recording. 

While sonically limited, the freshness of the piano playing and the sitcom circumstances make this a must-listen. What a fascinating release!

This post also appears at The Villa-Lobos Magazine.

Piano concertos from an important Brazilian

Almeida Prado: Piano Concerto no. 1; Aurora; Concerto Fribourgeois

The latest release in the marvellous Naxos series The Music of Brazil features the great composer José Antônio de Almeida Prado (1943-2010). One of the most important recording projects of Brazilian music in the past decade was Aleyson Scopel's survey of Almeida Prado's complete Cartas celestes for the Grand Piano label. Though these works were mainly for piano solo, there were three in the official series of 18 that added other instruments (#7 is for two pianos and symphonic band, #8 for violin and orchestra, and #11 for piano, marimba and vibraphone). As well, after he completed the first work in the series, in 1975, he wrote Aurora, for piano and orchestra, which he called an "unofficial Cartas celestes, because it’s not numbered in the same series, but does share the same universe, the same heart, the same élan." What a marvellous work this is, especially as well played as it is by Sonia Rubinsky, the pianist known to most of us as a Villa-Lobos specialist.

There are two other important works for piano and orchestra here: the Piano Concerto no. 1 is the only numbered piano concerto by Almeida Prado. It's a one-movement work from the early 1980s that takes a four-note motif and mashes it about in the Beethoven manner. Rubinsky's virtuosity is required, and in evidence, here, as are the Minas Gerais Philharmonic's players' considerable skills. Fabio Mechetti's task is to ensure both a steady pulse and a sense of coherence across a complex of shifting rhythms, timbres and other sound events.

My favourite piece, though, is the Concerto Fribourgeois, written in 1985 to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Bach's birth. It's a post-modern take on neo-classicism, with appearances of musical guests both unlikely (Stockhausen, Messiaen and, once again, Beethoven) and likely (Bach himself, of course, including the famous B-A-C-H motif, but also Villa-Lobos in his Bachianas mode). This is as much fun listening to as it was, I am sure, to play. Bravo to these fine musicians, and to Naxos for this well-researched and beautifully recorded program.

Here's a short documentary on Almeida Prado from 2019, featuring Sonia Rubinsky and Fabio Mechetti.



This review is also posted at The Villa-Lobos Magazine.

This album will be released on May 8, 2020.

Music to lift our spirits

Telemann: Recorder Concerto in C major, Concerto for Recorder & Bassoon in F major, Overture in G major

Few composers are more reliable at lifting one's spirits than Georg Philipp Telemann, so this is a well-timed release for a difficult time. Montreal's Arion Orchestre Baroque presents a program that's full of the felicities for which Telemann was celebrated, at least in his own time, and again in the past three or four decades. His reputation was in a major slump in the centuries in between, but thank goodness we've gotten past that dark period. Vincent Lauzer plays the flûte à bec (recorder) in a solo concerto in C major, and with Mathieu Lussier's bassoon, in a double concerto in F major, both of them in the slow-fast-slow-fast format of the sonata da chiesa. The double concerto is especially impressive. It opens with a lovely, graceful Largo that brings to mind scenes of shepherds and shepherdesses by Watteau or Fragonard. A frisky Vivace keeps a lively pace, with the two instruments taking turns to embellish themes and breathlessly add new ones. The dramatic Grave builds up some real tension, which is released in the joyful rush of the Allegro finale.

The two concertos, by the way, were recorded in November of 2019, with Mathieu Lussier, Arion's newly appointed Artistic Director, leading the orchestra. The other half of the program, the Overture in G major, dates back to 2015, with Alexander Weimann at the podium. Remarkably, Telemann wrote 200 Overtures, or Suites, of which some 125 survive. Telemann helped to develop a new multi-cultural style that synthesizes the many dances of all the countries of Europe into a pleasing blend. This largely French-flavoured piece once again is in the pastoral style, this time with oboes and bassoon, placing us in a mythic landscape that seems the perfect place to retire to from today's social isolation.

This album will be released on April 17, 2020

Warm, joyful jazz from Copenhagen

Benny Carter Quartet: Summer Serenade

Benny Carter, alto saxophone
Kenny Drew, piano
Jesper Lundgaard, bass
Ed Thigpen, drums

This is a re-issue of a 1982 Storyville LP of a Copenhagen concert from August 17, 1980. This is very fine, swinging jazz, from a city that always seemed to bring out the best in visiting American musicians. It's partly due to the warm reception they received, but also because of the very fine Scandinavian sidemen who often played with visiting jazz stars. Here we have the great bassist Jesper Lundgaard, as well as drummer Ed Thigpen, famous for his long tenure with the Oscar Peterson Trio. Yes, Thigpen was born in Chicago, but he made a permanent move to Copenhagen in 1976 to take advantage of the fine music scene there. Both Lundgaard and Thigpen show up on another Storyville release I reviewed this month: a Teddy Wilson Trio disc also recorded in 1980. And there's another expatriate in the group: pianist Kenny Drew, originally a New Yorker, moved to Paris in 1961, and then to Copenhagen a few years later. What a jazz town!

These are fine sidemen, and they play exceptionally well together, but it's all in support of Carter's legendary alto sound. With more than fifty years of recording behind him at the time, this is tried-and-true music, but never tired or merely routine. Remarkably, Benny Carter went on recording into the 1990s, and it's not surprising when you hear such warmth, vitality and joy in this music.

I should mention a fun interlude right in the middle of this 45 minute concert: it's All That Jazz (not the Kander & Ebb song from Chicago, but the great song by Benny Carter, with lyrics by Al Stillman). It's perfectly sung by Richard Boone. Have a listen:

A true garden of delights

Gems of the Polish Baroque: music by Mikolaj Zielenski, Adam Jarzebsky, Marcin Mielczewski & Kaspar Förster

This album of early Polish Baroque music from the Ensemble Giardino Di Delizie is a true garden of delights. None of the composers' names rang a bell for me, but these two discs worth of music are full of marvellous tunes, infectious dance rhythms and a wide range of moods, from dark and brooding to bright and lively. Here is La Pazza, Sonata a 3 in D minor by Kaspar Förster, the Danzig-born composer who served for a time as kapellmeister to Frederik III of Denmark in Copenhagen. The fact that he manages to provide a small drama within these seven minutes of music is evidence of his studies with Giacomo Carissimi, and his visits to Venice, where he would likely have heard Monteverdi and Gabrieli, though both were from a previous generation.



All of these pieces have their charms, partly because of a careful choice amongst available sources, I'm sure, but also due to the scholarship of Ewa Anna Augustynowicz and the lively musical camaraderie she fosters among her ensemble. The blue jeans on the album cover are the sign of a relative informality that's always welcome in the sometimes buttoned down world of Historically Informed Practice. It's a delight!

Making jazz history in Copenhagen

Archie Shepp + The New York Contemporary Five: Vol. 2

Archie Shepp, tenor sax
Don Cherry, cornet
John Tchicai, alto sax
Don Moore, bass
J. C. Mose, drums

Two LPs' worth of music by Archie Shepp + The New York Contemporary Five were recorded at the Montmartre jazz club in Copenhagen in 1963. A previous CD tried to include both, but a track had to be dropped because of lack of space on the disc. This reissue of the second volume is welcome; short measure at less than forty minutes, but this remastering is excellent, and it wouldn't do to leave out any music this amazing. This may be jazz of an avant garde variety - post-bop or hard bop, on the way to free jazz - but it gets under your skin after a while. I guess that's what was intended!

This was the swan song for The New York Contemporary Five, with this lineup, at least. Soon Shepp and others in the group began to work with Ornette Coleman, making new kinds of jazz history. Here, from the Montmartre session, the group plays Coleman's Emotions.

Songs from the past, bittersweet

Teddy Wilson Trio: Revisits the Goodman Years

This concert, recorded in Copenhagen on June 15, 1980, is an exercise in nostalgia, as Teddy Wilson plays tunes from his time with Benny Goodman in the mid-1930s. What's amazing is how fresh this music sounds. That speaks volumes about Wilson's professionalism and his amazing technical skills, but it's a tribute as well to his very fine sidemen: bassist Jesper Lundgaard and the amazing Ed Thigpen on drums. The Copenhagen concert is coming up to forty years in the past, while the original Goodman sessions they refer to were just over forty years old at that time. We're looking into a mirror that shows us something even farther away, and each nostalgic bounce provides its own pleasures, no matter how bittersweet. "To memory", Jacques Roubaud says in The Great Fire of London, "everything is present, everything distant; this is the axiom of intertwining."

Spirited and authentic piano concertos

Grazyna Bacewicz Piano Concerto; Alexandre Tansman Piano Concerto no. 1

I never (okay, I rarely) get tired of Rachmaninov, Brahms and Beethoven Piano Concertos, but I often think that perhaps it's time to expand the repertoire with a few fresh pieces. Here are two that fit the bill, beautifully played by the marvellous young Polish pianist Julia Kociuban. Alexandre Tansman's Piano Concerto no. 1 is from 1925; he wrote a second two years later, the year he turned thirty. It has every evidence of Tansman's melodic gift, which was to serve him well in his Hollywood years during WWII. But what it mainly sounds like is Modernist Paris, the fresh and lively milieu of Ravel and Stravinsky. At this point his music isn't especially Polish. It's telling that Honegger and Milhaud pressed him to join Les Six; he declined because he wanted to maintain his independence. But this Concerto at least would fit in perfectly with the avant garde French group's music of the day.

Grazyna Bacewicz also spent time in Paris, studying in the 1930s with Nadia Boulanger. However, her Piano Concerto, from 1949, is very much Polish in style, with folkloric sounds and Polish dances. Again, Kociuban is outstanding in both the virtuoso passages as well as more contemplative ones. She knows Bacewicz's music well, having played the great Piano Sonata no. 2 in the 2015 International Tchaikovsky Competition. She receives spirited and completely authentic support in both works from the  Łódź-based Arthur Rubinstein Philharmonic Orchestra. Both Tansman and Bacewicz are Łódź natives. Plus, how often does an orchestra named after a great piano virtuoso get to play piano concertos? What a marvellous recording!

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

A post-modern pastiche redeemed by music

Leos Janacek: From the House of the Dead

Leos Janacek's final work was From the House of the Dead, his opera based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel. It wasn't premiered until 1930, two years after his death. Opera companies have had to make do with a version by Janacek's pupils that added a happy ending, but the recent publication of a new edition provides something more closely aligned with what Janacek originally intended. This new score has been responsible for quite a few new productions in the past couple of years, including this one from Munich. Reading reviews of the productions in Wales, London and Paris, it's probably not surprising how different each one is. Opera today often seems to be focussed less on the music, the drama, and even the personality of the singers, and has become primarily a tabula rasa upon which clever (and sometimes genuinely innovative) stage directors overwrite their own aesthetic and political ideas. That's certainly the case with Frank Castorf's intriguing staging involving on-stage videography, complex picture-in-picture sequences, and anachronisms from Trotsky to Adidas. Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Masculin Féminin was famously about "The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola". Castorf's vision of this opera is a similar melding: this time of the Czarist Eagle, the rites and symbols of the Orthodox Church, and a big neon Pepsi sign.

This is more or less standard post-modern pastiche, and it's often to the point, tragic and/or funny. But it can also be occasionally too much on the nose, and when it's not deliberately obscure, it is sometimes only banal. The main problem is that the opera is rather short; it runs only 90 minutes, without an intermission. The secondary problem is that neither Dostoevsky nor Janacek bothered with any overarching story, but rather strung together a series of episodes which happen in the Siberian prison location. A confusing jumble of images might be the by-product of this remix; it might even be by Castorf's design. Having the opera on Blu-ray does allow one to re-watch and gain new insights, pausing along the way to do some Wikipedia sleuthing. I admit that the work seemed more coherent the second time around. But there must have been some head-scratching an hour and a half after the curtain rose at the Staatsoper.

What sells me on Janacek's opera, though, is his music. If one can follow the dramatic sense of a scene, it's absolutely staggering what beautiful, poignant, haunting, terrifying sounds Janacek provides, over and over again. What he has done through the music is to wordlessly re-introduce the most important theme of this, and of all Dostoevsky's novels: redemption.

The Munich production shines in this regard. Simone Young's conducting of the Bayerisches Staatsorchester and Chorus is outstanding; the music is taut and naturally evolving, even as the stage action gets run through Castorf's blender. The singing, and within Castorf's limits, the acting, of the principals is marvellous. Evgeniya Sotnikova is outstanding as Aljeja in her various guises, while standouts in the otherwise all-male cast include Peter Rose, Ales Briscein and Charles Workman. I believe this production will improve each time I watch it; there's no doubt in my mind, though, that this is one of the greatest operas ever written.

A fascinating musical world to explore

Sandbox Percussion: And That One Too

I've been thinking a lot lately about musical arrangements and re-compositions. My last review, of songs by Meredith Monk, is definitely in the latter category. This new album by Sandbox Percussion begins with an arrangement that completely transforms the sound of the piece, but whose basic character remains very much the same.

Here's the original version of the second of Andy Akiho's Six Haikus, written for trumpet, trombone, bass clarinet, and baritone voice, and performed by the contemporary music group Loadbang in 2011.




And here is the same piece, arranged in 2019 by Akiho and Sandbox Percussion for tuned ceramic bowls, metal pipes, wooden slats, a metal pot lid, a glass bottle, and a piece of scrap metal.




The performance video is very cool, because it helps to illustrate the clever structure of Akiho's piece. Ian Rosenbaum explains:

This work has no text, but it observes the 5-7-5 form of a haiku musically. The rhythmic structure of each measure consists of a group of 5 sixteenth notes, then a group of 7, then another group of 5. The larger metric structure is also based on the 5-7-5 of a haiku - the material is played 5 times, then 7 times, and then 5 again. When one returns to the beginning of the cycle again, each player in turn leaves their pitched instrument and moves to an unpitched sound, until by the end, all that is left is a dense hocket among the four players.

That's a lot to include in a piece of music of less than four minutes! The great thing is that the more you watch and listen, the more you get out of it.

The other three pieces are equally interesting, though all written originally for percussion ensemble. Music for Percussion Quartet, by David Crowell, includes complex polyrhythms, expressing two different musical landscapes: a busy urban one, and a serene countryside. Amy Beth Kirsten's she is a myth comes out of her 2017 project QUIXOTE, a fully-staged work about literature and reality, love and chivalry. Kirsten herself sings each of the three voices in the piece, with more fabulous sounds from Sandbox Percussion. Finally, with not only that one but that one & that too, Thomas Kotcheff provides a kind of Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, except for the whole range of percussion instruments played by the four members of Sandbox Percussion. Each movement highlights a different category: wooden instruments, drums, & pitched metal instruments, and each features an individual virtuoso member of the group.

A fascinating musical world to explore!

Inspiration for the Apocalypse

Meredith Monk, with the Bang on a Can Allstars: Memory Game

These Meredith Monk songs, which date from 1983 to 2006, are expanded, refined, opened up, multiplied and divided in new orchestrations by the Bang on a Can All-Stars. This is authentic Meredith Monk, with her own vocal contributions, as well as those of her Vocal Ensemble: Theo Bleckmann, Katie Geissinger, & Allison Sniffin. But there are very impressive contributions as well from the Bang on a Can All-Stars: much more than simple arrangements and instrumental accompaniment, they're closer to re-compositions. Monk's music is rich and diverse enough to play the role that Bach plays in Heitor Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasileiras.

The highlight on the disc is Waltz in 5s, originally written in 1996. This vocalise with a quirky rhythm is a kind of hybrid of Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasileiras no. 5 and Paul Desmond's Take Five. Many of the pieces, whether they're inspired by musical theatre (Memory Song) or Weimar Berlin (Totentanz), are haunting and often disturbing, no matter how light and frothy they may sound. But in spite of this, there is still an optimistic, uplifting note. As Monk says in her Composer's Notes:

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, I made a number of apocalyptic pieces that were a reflection of the fragmentation, violence and speed of the time. Soon after that, I realized that instead of stating the problem, it would be more useful and inspiring to return to the notion of offering an alternative. I wanted to create a musical world in which members of the audience could have a pure, direct and immersive experience.

In the middle of our own apocalyptic time there is much inspiration and encouragement to be found within this intriguing album.

This album will be released on March 27, 2020.

Perfectly judged performances

Beethoven: Piano Trios op. 1 no. 3 and op. 70 no. 2

The three piano trios that Beethoven published as opus 1, and especially the third in C minor, constituted an announcement to the wide world that a new composer was about to enter into the top echelon in Vienna, the musical centre of Europe at the time. It's astounding that this obscure young man from Bonn, without connections, should be interacting with Joseph Haydn, the world's most famous composer, and having his new music premiered two years later at the home of Prince Lichnowsky. I'm not sure which disparity was more pronounced: the social distance between this impoverished newcomer and the one-percent Viennese aristocracy, or the professional gap between a freelancer with barely any gigs on his resumé and Europe's top musical superstar at the peak of his powers. Perhaps this social mobility came about because of the recent revolutionary events in France, though I'm sure at least as much was due to Beethoven's outsize talent and his pure strength of will - chutzpah in a word.

When Haydn, shocked by the new sounds of the C minor Piano Trio, advised Beethoven to abandon the work, the young composer was devastated. His pride hurt, he put the criticism down to Haydn's jealousy. Thus did Beethoven's relationship with his true musical father enter its full Oedipal stage. Haydn's relationship with his other protégé, Mozart, had always been cordial, though Mozart, of course, had his own fraught relationship with his own musical, and actual, father. So from now on it would be this: Beethoven against the world!

I'm impressed with the way the London-based Sitkovetsky Trio give us some idea of just how new the C minor trio might have sounded to those who heard it for the first time at Prince Lichnowsky's musical gathering, without leaning in too hard towards the revolutionary, after the fact as it were. I've heard some groups anachronistically make too much of a meal of this work. While Haydn and Mozart had recently overhauled the piano trio, freeing it from its salon music roots, this was still within a rather narrow, civilized band. If one considers this relatively sedate landscape, then Beethoven's dramatic effects and new harmonic and rhythmic devices can sound a bit disconcerting, even considering the two centuries of musical innovation to come.




The Sitkovetsky Trio usher us into a completely different soundscape with their performance of the second Piano Trio of Beethoven's op. 70 set, from 1809, the period of the Second Symphony. Gone is the chip on his shoulder. We know that life was no easier for the composer, in spite of some significant successes, but the quiet confidence and grace of the first movement is perhaps a sign of maturity.  Haydn died on May 31st of that year; perhaps this work, in a genre that Franz Joseph had truly made his own, is a tribute to Beethoven's true musical father.

Tucked away between these two works is a little gem that Beethoven wrote in 1812, the Allegretto, WoO. 39. This may be a simple piece, designed for the ten-year-old Maximiliane Brentano, the daughter of a friend of Beethoven's, but the degree of difficulty to bring about such a perfect result is very, very high. Here again is evidence of the sensitivity and musicality of the Sitkovetsky Trio. This entire program is remarkable, and bodes well for future volumes.

A musical, scholarly and cultural triumph

The Other Cleopatra, Queen of Armenia: Arias by Hasse, Vivaldi, Gluck

This remarkable album is more than a classical music recording; it's also a work of original scholarship and an effective cultural advocacy project. I hasten to add that it works especially well musically. Isabel Bayrakdarian is in fine voice, and she receives stellar support from the very fine conductor Constantine Orbelian and the excellent Kaunas City Symphony in Lithuania. As a bonus, the superb harpsichordist Jory Vinikour is on hand to add special zest to the continuo parts. He and Bayrakdarian are especially fine partners in the recitatives.

In the 18th century Abate Francesco Silvani wrote a libretto based on the story of King Tigranes II, the greatest king in Armenian history, and his wife Cleopatra of Pontus. It was set by a number of composers, including three who feature on this album: Johann Adolph Hasse, Antonio Vivaldi and Christoph Willibald Gluck. Bayrakdarian put this program together as part of her research at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is Associate Professor of Voice and Opera,  choosing these arias and recitatives, which fit her "voice and temperament". There are some exciting moments here: "Squarciami pure il seno" by Vivaldi and Gluck's "Presso l’onda" are stand-outs. But even better are the slower, more contemplative, moments: Hasse's "Parte, parte" and "Presso a l'onde", and Gluck's "Priva del cara bene". This is lovely, graceful music. Even more impressive, though, is Vivaldi's aria "Qui mentre mormorando", introduced by the recitative "Lasciatemi in riposo". It's music worthy of the mature Mozart, full of sadness and pathos, but always dramatic. Like Mozart, Vivaldi has a keen sense of the psychology of his characters. So it doesn't matter what actually happens with the plot (alas, Abate Silvani was no Da Ponte!); what is key is how the music helps us to understand what the character is feeling. And, of course, that communication also requires a singer of some psychological awareness as well as technical and dramatic skills, and we are indeed lucky to have in this project such a remarkable soprano as Isabel Bayrakdarian. I couldn't recommend this album more highly.

This album will be released on March 30, 2020

Prize-winning jazz from Denmark

Roy Haynes: My Shining Hour

Roy Haynes, drums
Tomas Franck, tenor sax
Thomas Clausen, piano
Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, bass

This album is from a concert in Copenhagen on the occasion of Roy Haynes winning the 1994 Jazzpar Prize. The prize, organized by trumpeter Arnvid Meyer from 1990 to 2004, came with 200,000 Danish Kroner (worth then, I believe, around $30,000), from the sponsorship of the Scandinavian Tobacco Company. Haynes is in fine form here, obviously enjoying the attention, and the spirited playing of his Scandinavian side-men. All three are standouts, with impressive playing from Swedish tenor player Tomas Franck, sensitive work by one of the top Danish pianists, Thomas Clausen, and most importantly, the superb bass support of Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, known to many jazz lovers as NHØP.

Europe has been a major destination for American jazz greats for a long time. It was a welcome respite from Jim Crow for African-American musicians, and from the 1960s on, a return to what it was like when jazz was truly a popular music. You can tell from the audience response at the end of the final track that these are dedicated, even rabid, fans. It's great to have such an important concert easily available, very well mastered, and documented with Storyville's usual thoroughness.



This album will be released on March 13, 2020, which just happens to be Roy Haynes' 95th birthday!

Reliably great music from Budapest

Michel Pignolet de Montéclair: Jephté, Tragédie, Paris, 1737

I'm so excited every time I see a new recording on Glossa that features the Purcell Choir and the Orfeo Orchestra, conducted by Gyorgy Vashegyi. I've reviewed four in the past: Rameau in 2019, and again in 2018; and Mondonville in both 2017 and 2016. I've come to expect the highest level of both choral and solo singing, the most stylish, Historically Informed orchestral playing, with superb engineering and really excellent supporting documentation, including libretti and good English translations.

Now it's the turn of Michel Pignolet de Montéclair, and I can encapsulate my review in a single phrase: more of the same! Montéclair is hardly a household name, and I admit never having heard his music before. I know: I don't spend enough time listening to the music of the French Baroque, which is quite surprising considering how enamoured I am of Rameau, Lully, Charpentier and Mondonville. In any case, this is a superb tragic opera, a huge hit from its first performance in 1732 through many revivals (over one hundred performances at the Paris Opéra and the Queen's Concerts at Versailles, over thirty years). And it's no wonder, considering the splendid orchestral and choral effects the composer produces. As well, there was some controversy driving the strong interest in this work, the only operatic work from the periodf based on Biblical stories. I never worry too much about the story in these kinds of stage spectaculars, since there's so much great music to move things along.

This album will be released on March 6, 2020

Not this time

Joseph Anton Steffan: Concertos for Harpsichord

Josef Antonín Štěpán, known in Vienna as Joseph Anton Steffan, was born in 1726, six years before Haydn, and died in 1797, six years after Mozart. He's part of the extraordinary composing flowering in Bohemia in the 18th century, with greats like the Stamitzes, the Bendas, Richter, Dusek, Mysliveček and Rosetti, not to mention the great Christoph Willibald Gluck. After listening to these four rather slight concertos, I wouldn't hesitate to relegate Steffan to a second tier in the Bohemian Composers' League. This is in spite of their fleeting charms and occasional erudite flashes. Perhaps it says at least as much about the very high level of his countrymen's music than any deficiencies of Steffan's. Harpsichordist Edita Keglerova and the Hipocondria Ensemble give their best efforts, which are significant, but they're eventually undone by the slightly washed-out music, which a few times veers close to the banal.

Everyone hopes to hit gold when they come across an obscure release like this; I know I do. Hope springs eternal, but I have to say, yet again, "not this time".

This album will be released on March 6, 2020.

A heroic interpretation of the spirit of Bach

J. S. Bach: The Art of the Fugue

Tatyana Nikolayeva is a legendary pianist with a bit of a cult following, especially for her Bach and Shostakovich (the two were close friends; he wrote the great Preludes & Fugues op. 87 for her). This is a live recording from the Sibelius Academy in Helskini on April 26, 1993, a month before her 69th birthday. Nikolayeva had a huge repertoire: "Sometimes I think I know practically everything that has been written for the piano!", she says, laughing, in a 1991 interview. On top of this, she had the habit of playing by memory. This shows in this recording, not necessarily in the few minor flubs, but because there is a real feeling that there's a well-thought-out, cohesive plan to her interpretation, the result of significant mental as well as physical work. This plan involves the pianist taking full advantage of the capabilities of her Steinway, without any special attention to Historically Informed Practices, but complete and absolute attention to the spirit of the music.

Just over six months later, in November 1993, Nikolayeva was playing the Shostakovich Preludes & Fugues at a recital in San Francisco, when she suffered a stroke. Remarkably, she managed to play until the intermission, but she was dead ten days later. This recording, with its poignant final fugue unfinished at Bach's own death, is a superb memorial.

Photo: Co Broerse, Amsterdam, 1990

This album will be released on March 6, 2020

Dizzy Con Alma

Dizzy Gillespie Quintet: Live at the Liederhalle Stuttgart, Kongresshalle Frankfurt, 1961

The jazz archives of SWR include thousands of hours of audio (plus video) of jazz concerts recorded in Stuttgart, Baden-Baden, Mainz and other German cities, and it's encouraging that more of this music is making its way onto disc and the streaming services. I'm especially interested in jazz from the 50s and 60s, so this new release is right up my alley. It includes songs from two concerts: at the Liederhalle Stuttgart on November 27, 1961, and the Kongresshalle Frankfurt two days later. The band is Dizzy Gillespie's great ensemble with Lalo Schifrin on piano, Leo Wright on alto sax & flute, Bob Cunningham on bass and Mel Lewis on drums.

This is absolutely marvellous music. Duke Ellington's The Mooche is an excellent song to introduce these concerts, since it gives each of musicians a chance to shine, and together to show off their tight ensemble. There's transcendent cool from Leo Wright's flute in Willow Weep for Me, ably supported by Schifrin, Cunningham and Lewis. Dizzy brings soul to a very fine version of Vernon Duke's I Can't Get Started*, occasionally making way for Wright's alto sax, and allowing Schifrin to put down some really interesting piano chords along the way. Dizzy's own composition Kush gets a hard-driving, percussion-heavy arrangement that sounds more than halfway to something from Dizzy's Big Band. Kudos here to Mel Lewis, but of course so much of this comes from the energy and passion of Dizzy's trumpet. Dizzy provides comic relief in his fun novelty number Oops-Shee-Be-Doo-Be.

It's the two takes of Con Alma that impressed me the most, though. In his introduction to the version from the Frankfurt concert Dizzy makes a great joke: he says "the name of this tune is Con Alma, which means, In Spanish." - beat - big laugh from the audience. It actually means, of course, With Soul, and there's plenty of that here: soul and musicianship and passion.

Lalo Schifrin & Dizzy Gillespie in 1961, at the Monterey Jazz Festival.
A great photograph by Jim Marshall

* Ira Gershwin wrote the lyrics, by the way

This album will be released on March 20, 2020.

Music of unbridled joy for #Beethoven250

Beethoven: The Complete Piano Concertos

"The sonatas were pursuits of inner truth, the symphonies pursuits of the highest qualities in humanity, the piano concertos pursuits of unbridled joy." In a heartfelt essay in the liner booklet, Stewart Goodyear notes that he waited to record the Beethoven Piano Concertos: "... it had to be at a time when I felt that I knew deeply what universal joy and delight felt like." This joy and delight is clear to hear in this 3-disc album with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Andrew Constantine, from Orchid Classics.

When we think about joy and Beethoven, it's Friedrich Schiller's Ode to Joy that comes to mind:

Joy, beautiful spark of Divinity,
Daughter of Elysium,
We enter, drunk with fire,
Heavenly One, thy sanctuary!

Schiller's poem was published in 1785, and revised in 1808. In between, Beethoven wrote the first four of his piano concertos; the fifth was begun in 1809. Beethoven's own apotheosis of joy came, of course, with the Schiller setting in the last movement of his Ninth Symphony in 1822/24. But I love Stewart Goodyear's characterization of this wonderful music as being in some way essentially joyful. It's the serious, grumpy stereotype of Beethoven himself that Goodyear is fighting here. Unlucky in love, navigating family difficulties, grappling with political disasters that seem as dire as our own today, experiencing the vagaries of the "gig economy" as one of the very first freelance composers, and stricken with deafness in this very period; we can feel for Beethoven today. We can even imagine a black cloud hanging over his head. Especially with the late sonatas and string quartets to come, we look to Beethoven for spiritual and aesthetic resolutions to his own pain and suffering. "The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing",  Walter Benjamin once said. But listen to the music, especially in these performances, and you'll hear incredible verve and passion, as Beethoven reaps the harvest of his own "pursuit of happiness" in his art, if not in his personal life. Perhaps it was the Mozartian model - Beethoven's 3rd Concerto in C minor owes so much to Mozart's C minor Concerto K. 491 - that helped Beethoven get over his own hump on his way to happiness.

These are special performances by this team assembled by Orchid Classics: the assured and stylish playing of the BBC National Orchestra Wales shows that conductor Andrew Constantine and this fine Canadian pianist (why are there so many fine Canadian pianists, by the way?) are on the same page. I look forward to listening to these discs in regular rotation during this Beethoven Year, along with the amazing set from Richard Goode & Ivan Fischer, the equally fine recordings of Mitsuko Uchida & Kurt Sanderling, and, of course, the Wilhelm Kempff & Ferdinand Leitner set which was my first experience of this marvellous music.



This album will be released on March 13, 2020

Two 21st Century Classics

Afterimage: music by Christopher Ceronne, Jacob Cooper, Paganini, Pergolesi

"A story is an operation on duration, an enchantment that affects the flow of time, contracting it or expanding it." In his fourth lecture in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino discusses "Quickness", and finds in literature a motive force that speeds up and/or slows down our perception of time.

"A writer's labor involves keeping track of different times: Mercury's time and Vulcan's time; a message of spontaneity obtained by means of patient, meticulous adjustments; a flash of insight that immediately takes on the finality of that which was inevitable; and also time that flows for no reason other than to allow feelings and thoughts to settle and ripen, unfettered by any impatience, any fleeting contingency."

If literature involves these temporal operations, how much more can music do, entwined as it is with its own built-in passage of time. When Jacob Cooper wrote Stabat Mater Dolorosa (2009), his gloss on Pergolesi's great 18th century choral work, he was thinking in particular of Tachypsychia, the alteration of the perception of time due to various physiological states, most notably life-threatening events, when time can seem to stand still. Cooper stretches out Pergolesi's beautiful phrases, exaggerating the already meditative music until it sounds almost like a kind of hallucinatory chanting. I'm sure that Cooper was aware of the legend that Pergolesi wrote the Stabat Mater on his own deathbed, and that none other than Johann Sebastian Bach wrote his own remix of the Pergolesi original: his parody cantata Tilge, Höchster, meine Sünden. So the composer is doubling down, and in doing so has created a classic work for the 21st century. This performance of Cooper's work, along with the first movement of the Pergolesi original, is so impressive. The String Orchestra of Brooklyn, under the sensitive direction of Conductor Eli Spindel, are completely solid in Cooper's long, long phrases, but properly stylish in the Pergolesi. The two vocal soloists, soprano Mellissa Hughes and mezzo-soprano Kate Maroney, likewise navigate with aplomb these stylistic changes, from Pergolesi's idiosyncratic mixture of the operatic and the sacred, to the other-worldly swoops of Cooper.




Another pair of works make up the rest of the album: Christopher Cerrone's High Windows (2013), along with one of its sources, Nicolo Paganini's Caprice no. 6 in G minor, "The Trill". High Windows is another classic work, which besides its trilling violin reference includes a reference to an earlier Cerrone piece, Hoyt–Schermerhorn. This is no simple pastiche, though, but a work of complex allusions organized in what might seem from a contemporary music perspective to be a surprising way, as a 17th century Sonata. Like a work with which it shares a beautiful aural texture, Edward Elgar's Introduction & Allegro, Cerrone's piece is written for string orchestra and string quartet, and is beautifully played here by the Argus Quartet and the SOB. The title of the work refers to a Philip Larkin poem of the same name, which, like the music, is about dreams and ultimate transcendence. What a challenging, and satisfying project from the String Orchestra of Brooklyn!

A thought-provoking, and entertaining, post-modern opera

David Lang: The Loser, an opera after the novel by Thomas Bernhard

Thomas Bernhard's The Loser is one of my favourite novels; it's the oddest combination of extremely challenging post-modernist structure and real readability. The fact that one of the three characters in Bernhard's story is (a highly fictionalized) Glenn Gould is a real feature for both the novel and the opera. There's also a streak of wry humour which runs through Bernhard's novel, and remarkably it survives in Lang's libretto, and in the outstanding performance of baritone Rod Gilfry. Everything from despair to hilarity is heard in Gilfry's voice (and seen on his face in the very good video clips from Red Poppy Music available on the web). Gilfry's very special vocal performance is ably supported by pianist Conrad Tao, who plays Lang's clever obbligato piano part, which comments on the action throughout; and by the Bang on a Can Ensemble (viola, cello, bass and percussion) led by Lesley Leighton. This is highly recommended for fans of David Lang, whose Pulitzer Prize winning Little Match Girl Passion is a highlight of 21st century opera, as well as for everyone who adores the quirky prose of Thomas Bernhard.

This album will be released on February 7, 2020.

Handel: dramatic and refined

Handel: Concerti grossi op. 6, no. 7-12

This is the second of three Handel albums from the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin under Bernhard Forck. I loved the first, which included the Concerti grossi op. 6, no. 1-6, and very much look forward to the op. 3 album, hopefully coming soon, which will complete the set. This is a group that has Handel figured out like Van Gogh figured out sunflowers; these marvellous concertos have never sounded better. They've hewn to a middle road between refinement (the Academy of Ancient Music under Andrew Manze) and full-out drama (Il Giardino Armonico under Giovanni Antonini). The latter had always been my preferred version, but I find myself more inclined to choose this new release for my Desert Island Handel.

This fine portrait of the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin by Uwe Arens shows the full richness and joy you can expect from these Handel discs from Pentatone.

This album will be released on January 17, 2020.

Two charming string quartets

Friedrich Gulda, Glenn Gould: String Quartets

What is rather shocking about this album made up of String Quartets written by Friedrich Gulda & Glenn Gould - the bad boy twin pianists of the 20th century - is how normal both works sound. That both works are actually very appealing to anyone who knows late Romantic music and isn't allergic to a tasteful bit of the Second Vienna School, is not at all surprising, considering the immense personal charm of both musicians. Gould wrote his Opus 1 String Quartet between 1953 and 1955, just before Fame hit him with his recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations. Gulda wrote his String Quartet in F sharp minor in 1950-51, after his 1946 Gold Medal win at the Geneva Competition, and around the time of his Carnegie Hall debut in 1950. Both perhaps had to leave behind composition dreams for careers in piano performance (Gould more so than Gulda, who kept his hand in with composing rather more than his Canadian colleague), and on the evidence of these two works there was perhaps something lost because of that. As slight as both works are in the context of the careers of two of the most interesting pianists of the 20th century, I'm really appreciative of the efforts of Gramola and the Acies Quartett to bring this music to our attention. It makes a nice change from hearing yet again about the (non-musical) antics of a couple of tricksters.

This album will be released on January 10, 2010.

A prayerful Passion

Bach: St. Matthew Passion

A new decade is a time for new beginnings, so this release is well-timed: it's a second recording of the St. Matthew Passion from Masaaki Suzuki and the Bach Collegium Japan. The first version, from 2000, was generally well received. Robin Tuttle's Classical Net review pretty well sums up the critical consensus: "Suzuki takes us gently by the hand and shows us Bach not at his most imposing, but at his most humane."

The new album needs only 2 CDs instead of 3, but this isn't because of any speeding up; the new recording is actually a couple of minutes longer. This time around BIS jams everything into two 80-minute plus CDs. The main difference between the two recordings is in the vocal soloists. Gerd Türk followed Suzuki's meditative approach as the Evangelist in the first version, while the equally strong Benjamin Bruns is somewhat, but not a lot, less dramatic this time around. I was especially impressed with the great Nancy Argenta in the first recording; this time around I loved Carolyn Sampson. Suzuki has doubled down in the new recording, with more even more gentle arias and prayerful chorales; the keyword here is definitely "devotional". This might seem to be a small change, but the cumulative effect is awesome, almost breathtaking. Here is the end of the Chorus "Kommt Ihr Töchter":

The new year is fraught with danger and portents of doom; we need the consolation of Johann Sebastian Bach more than ever. The most reliable purveyors of this are, in my opinion, Masaaki Suzuki and the musicians of Bach Collegium Japan.

This album will be released February 7, 2020.

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.

Music from a mysterious centre

Mozart: Piano Concertos K.175, 238, 246, 271; Overtures

This is the fifth release in the "Mozart, made in Manchester" series from Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and the Manchester Camerata under Gábor Takács-Nagy, and we have a double helping of Mozart-y goodness here: two well-filled discs with four early piano concertos and five (!) overtures. This is becoming my favourite Mozart piano concerto series with a modern piano (Bavouzet plays a 9-foot Yamaha concert grand). Bavouzet and Takács-Nagy have great chemistry, and their easy, slightly swinging give-and-take continues here. It's a huge plus in this particular repertoire, since the charm of the four concertos Mozart wrote between December 1773 and January 1777 would be irreparably harmed by brusqueness on the one hand, or over-delicacy on the other. In the words of Karl Barth, "Knowing all, Mozart creates music from a mysterious centre, and so knows the limits to the right and the left, above and below. He maintains moderation."

I've always enjoyed concert programs and recordings that connect Mozart's piano concertos with the stage, whether it be concert arias or, as we have here, overtures to Mozart's operas. Some of these pieces are slight, but none of them is small, each making its dramatic points in Mozart's natural home, the operatic stage. With these four concertos (and a fifth from the same period, the triple concerto K. 242 from 1776) Mozart created a new genre, which brought the broad comedy, pathos and complex emotional power of opera to the concert stage. The big advantage of having these five overtures included is the chance to have the focus shifted to the very fine instrumentalists of the Manchester Camerata, who of course play brilliantly in the concertos as well. These works extend the range from two operas written in 1772 (Il sogno di Scipione and Lucio Silla) all the way to 1779-80 (Zaïde, written just before Mozart's great run of the 1780s).

These recordings were made at The Stoller Hall, Hunts Bank, Manchester, in May of 2019. It's been called "... the most acoustically advanced concert hall in the country." The sound here is definitely up to Chandos's high standard, and its clarity and depth certainly suits - and enhances - this music.

Mozart in concert at The Stoller Hall. Photo: Anthony Robling

What a great way to begin 2020!

This album will be released on March 6, 2020.