Reviews and occasional notes on classical music "Music, both vocall and instrumental, so good, so delectable, so rare, so admirable, so super excellent, that it did even ravish and stupifie all those strangers that never heard the like." - Thomas Coryat, after hearing 3 hours of music at the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice, 1608.
This DVD is a reissue of a highly-praised film from German Television of a 1979 performance by Fischer-Dieskau and Alfred Brendel in the Siemensvilla in Berlin. It definitely shows its age, with low definition video and audio that's fine but shows neither brilliance nor bloom. This is a shame, because the great baritone's slight loss in vocal quality from his salad days in the 1960s is more than made up for in his dramatic presence. HD video would have showed that off beautifully, whereas now you have to squint a little to see his expressions. On the plus side, TV director Klaus Lindemann has staged this with admirable restraint and dignity, and he keeps camera movement to a minimum. The focus is on Schubert's powerful music and on Fischer-Dieskau's portrayal of Wilhelm Müller's sombre protagonist. Of course, Alfred Brendel's musical contribution is immediately and continuously apparent. There are subtitles (in English, German, French, Spanish & Italian) for the songs, but unfortunately not for the 56 minute Rehearsal documentary. This looks absolutely fascinating, but alas, I don't understand German!
I don't review too many jazz albums here, but Darcy James Argue's new disc with his Secret Society certainly impressed me. Real Enemies just received a well-deserved Grammy Nomination.
I'm beginning to pay more attention to historical re-issues. This release from Somm is an outstanding investigation of the music and technology of Edward Elgar, a recording pioneer.
Two discs of sublime music from Charles Munch and his great Boston players, sounding pretty good considering the age and provenance of some of theses recordings. Kudos to Urania for this release.
This 1981 Mozart concert from the Amerikahaus in Munich contains piano playing of the highest order from the legendary Friedrich Gulda. Here's a perfect coda to a pretty good year in recorded music.
Arthaus Musik has packaged a 2009 documentary from the Van Gogh Museum, directed by Eline Timmer, into this two-DVD set. It's impressively multi-lingual; commentary and subtitles are available in English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch and Italian. Though there's nothing especially stylish about this in film terms - it follows the standard slow pan across paintings, expert talking heads, voice-over letter reading format of many an art history documentary - the value of this film is the authenticity and authority of its source: the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. I was especially interested in the actual letters between Vincent and Theo that play such a large role in Van Gogh's life; the sketches positively jump off the pages. Has there ever been an artist who was so enthusiastic about art? It makes his low patches and final decline even sadder. The HD sound and picture makes learning about an artist a pretty good second place to making the trip to Amsterdam.
Arthaus Musik has collected the late Nikolaus Harnoncourt's three Da Ponte operas of Mozart on three Blu-ray discs. The operas, recorded around the turn of the century (1996, 2000 & 2001) at the Zurich Opera House, are all directed by Jurgen Flimm, and the casts include some big names. But as impressive as some of the singing is, I was not at all taken with Harnoncourt's overall conception of the music or the drama. His tempi tend to drag, and then he'll make up for it with a whirlwind rush through an especially tender or psychologically significant aria. There's little verve or spark here, which is damning considering the music. Neither did I take to Flimm's staging; everything seems under-lit, and the sets, the schoolroom in Cosi, for example, dingy.
But let's not forget the soloists. Cecilia Bartoli and Liliana Nikiteanu are outstanding in Cosi, both as singers and as actors. They make you believe in the characters; you feel that the stakes are real, and high. In Don Giovanni Bartoli shines as Donna Elvira, as does Nikiteanu as Zerlina. Nikiteanu completes the hat-trick as an absolutely amazing Cherubino in Le Nozze di Figaro. This is one of Da Ponte's most original characters, and it naturally drew from Mozart sublime solo and ensemble music. As to other characters, I was impressed enough with Rodney Gilfry's Don Giovanni, as both an actor and a singer, but when you think of Marius Kwiecien's towering Don, there's no comparison. A major disappointment!
So who's the coolest performer ever? Sinatra, in about 1953 with Nelson Riddle? How about Miles Davis in 1959, or better yet Bill Evans in the early 1960s?
I vote for Friedrich Gulda in 1981, the time this concert film was made, at the Amerikahaus in Munich. Experience the coolness in this superb Blu-ray disc from Arthaus, Mozart for the People. He was perhaps already something of a cult performer, but he's hardly playing to the crowd. Rather, he seems bemused by the whole concert experience. He's wearing a dark blue shirt/sweater just like the ones I bought at Costco, except I wouldn't tuck in mine like he does, especially if I wore my trousers pulled up as high as he does. I can't imagine anything more nerd-awkward than Gulda's aimless wandering about the stage between sonatas. He seems unaware that there's an audience; you can almost hear the gears in his head turning as he plans his strategy of attack for the great F major sonata, K. 332. Everything - everything - is focused on the playing, on Mozart. He has a direct pipeline to Mozart the way another eccentric pianist I love, Glenn Gould, has to Bach.
This film has been criticized for the odd camera angles chosen by video director Janos Darvas, but his camera moves and switches have the cumulative effect of immersion in the concert experience. In the great Fantasia in C minor K. 475 there's an extraordinary sequence that begins about an hour and six minutes into the film. Darvas watches Gulda's face carefully as Mozart gets really dramatic. There's no hint of tension there, no drama in the face. It's all in his fingers, in the music. Then Darvas moves to watch over Gulda's left shoulder. The pianist leans over to the right, into the light, then left back into the shadows. Then (about 1:07) Darvas begins a slow zoom into a close-up, as Gulda builds to a climax in the music. As he moves in to a profile view of Gulda's face, the pianist again moves into the light, and you see his expression: complete concentration, but now there's wonder there. And at 1:08:00, it's a halo of light, and complete enlightenment. All this, I'm sure, without any theatricality, or even knowledge on the part of Gulda about what was happening on the screen. Some credit should go to the director and his camera operators, for sure.
Gulda, like so many pianists, was always a perfectionist, and he was loathe to sign off on his recording going to the record presses. I love his look of absolute glee after he finishes K. 332. He knows he nailed it, and tells the audience so.
Gulda's encore piece is outstanding. It's his own paraphrase of Sarastro's aria "In diesen heil'gen Hallen" from The Magic Flute. This is a deeply moving performance of a beautiful piece, and considering that Mozart's operas are a primary door into Gulda's sonata interpretations, a fitting end to this marvellous concert.
One of the highlights of my Christmas last year was the moving Bach Christmas Oratorio choreographed by John Neumeier and danced by Hamburg Ballett. That Blu-ray disc will be lined up with all our other favourites in 2016: Father Christmas, A Wish for Wings that Work, Desk Set and A Muppet Christmas Carol. This Blu-ray disc of the St. Matthew Passion by the same dancers, instrumentalists and singers has all the advantages of the previous disc, with an additional major plus. This music is even greater than the cantatas that make up the Christmas Oratorio. It's more dramatic - in John Elliot Gardiner's words, "Bach's was essentially dramatic music: music intended to appeal to - even occasionally assault - the senses of his listeners." Thus the Passion lends itself more naturally to interpretation through dance. This will give you an idea of the variety of effects Neumeier comes up with to match (again quoting Gardiner) Bach's "stark new juxtapositions of texture and sonority."
As beautiful and striking and thought-provoking as this is - and it's all of those things at a consistently high level for 3-1/2 hours - I wonder if this is somehow less than what Peter Sellars and Simon Rattle achieved in their ground-breaking 2010 production in Berlin. This small bit of that performance perhaps gives you an idea of a more personal, more human, more intimate Bach.
As good as the orchestra and choirs conducted by Gunter Jena in the Hamburg Ballett recording are - for the record they're the St.-Michaelis-Orchester und -Chor, Knabenchor Hannover and Knabenchor St. Michaelis - they're not in the same league as Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, Rundfunkchor Berlin, and a lineup of star soloists headlined by Mark Padmore as the Evangelist. But a greater difference is that we are necessarily a passive audience for a ballet - these fit good-looking young people are a different species from the people sitting in the seats at the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, not to mention those of us on the couch at home. But when Peter Sellars puts the camera - i.e. the audience - amongst the singers and instrumentalists, he involves us more fully in the action. When the choir are active participants in the ebb and flow of that performance, we are closer as well, since choir members are our proxies. Indeed, the congregation would have sung along with the Chorales they knew, like at a midnight showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Again, Gardiner provides insight:
Bach took his cue from Luther, who, knowing from direct experience what it was like to be persecuted, insisted that Christ's Passion 'should not be acted out in words or appearances, but in one's own life'. That is exactly what Bach does - by addressing us directly and very personally, by finding new ways to draw us in and towards acting it out in our own lives: we become participants in the re-enactment of a story which, however familiar, is told in ways calculated to bring us up short, to jolt us out of our complacency, while throwing us a lifeline of remorse, faith and, ultimately, a path to salvation. *
Now I know that Sellars and Rattle touch me more directly in their production than Neumeier and Jena do in theirs, but this is very much a personal view. I'm still very enthusiastic about this version after my first run-through, and I expect I'll find it resonating with me even more when I watch again.
I'm a big fan of the classical music documentaries Ken Russell made for the BBC's Monitor program in the 1960s. I agree with John Bridcut that the 1968 Delius film Song of Summer was the best of these, but there are so many: about Prokofiev, Bartok, Debussy, and, another favourite, Elgar. Here is the Delius film; Max Adrian's portrayal of the invalid composer is a comic masterpiece.
When the success of his feature films brought him larger budgets (Women in Love, for which he was nominated for a Best Director Oscar, was only 2 years after the Delius film), he unleashed his imagination and began filling his films with an endless series of Russell tropes: Nazis, naked women, fire, crucifixion. It wasn't long before he was officially Over the Top. Here's a typical scene, from 1974's Mahler.
There's a point to this clip, of course, but it goes on rather long. At least Russell's sense of humour is still in operation here; it goes on and off during his career. It can take a long time for Hollywood to run out of patience with a wayward director, but by 1983, when he was once again making classical music films for television, this time for ITV's The South Bank Show, the bulk of the money had run out. So Ken Russell's View of The Planets is a low-rent affair. A (very fine) recording of The Planets from The Philadelphia Orchestra and Eugene Ormandy is matched with "found", or stock footage, cleverly edited.
Finally available on DVD and Blu-ray, the Holst film shows how far Russell had come since The Music Lovers, Mahler and Lisztomania in the 1970s. The means are very slender now, but Russell's imagination is often lit up. All the same obsessions are there, this time in a low-tech environment not too different from a YouTube amateur of today. There are still flashes of humour: the great Barbie Doll ending of Venus, and the surfing beginning of Mercury are both fine gags. But there is also great artistry in his Saturn sequence, a brilliant environmental satire of planned obsolescence. This is another flawed film with fine bits, by a director who specialized in just that.
There are fine bits in the official trailer from ArtHaus for the DVD/Blu-ray as well:
