Berg and Ravel: a happy combination

I'm listening to more of The Juilliard String Quartet's 15 CD set The Early Columbia Recordings 1949-56.

Alban Berg: Lyric Suite; Maurice Ravel: Quartet in F Major

The Early Recordings set continues with two 10" LPs combined in one CD. The Berg was recorded in August of 1950, while the Ravel is from February of 1951. Unfortunately, the CD is included here in the Berg slipcase, mimicking the LP sleeve, so there's a cover and liner notes for that work, but not the Ravel. I was able to track down the Ravel front cover from an eBay listing, but haven't come across the back cover. 

The Juilliard Quartet recorded the Berg Lyric Suite at least two other times: for RCA in 1961 (with works by Webern), and a live Italian Swiss Radio-Television recording with Beethoven's final Quartet, op. 135. More than one reviewer for these three recordings has commented that the Juilliard's emphasis is very much on the lyrical side of this music, rather than the more emotional, expressionist side. I was captivated by this recording, the Juilliards' first recording!

As to the Ravel, the standard LP coupling is of course, the Debussy String Quartet, and that's what Columbia released from the Juilliard Quartet in 1971. This coupling is a propos because Ravel's model was the Debussy Quartet, and instructive because of how different the two works sound in the end, each composer going in a different direction from a common beginning. Meanwhile, back in 1950, the Juilliard's recording of the Ravel Quartet on the 10" LP is remarkable. Perhaps it's partially because of this juxtaposition with the Berg, but this music sounds fresh and alive and modern. This is one of my favourite CDs in the Early Recordings set.

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.

Two great quartets, plus a potent "trou"

String Quartets by Debussy, Tailleferre, Ravel

The Debussy and Ravel String Quartets have been paired for so long on records - one to a side on LPs, and then side-by-side on CDs - that they begin to resemble each other, like old couples or dogs and masters. Once the two works were matched as twins of the "Impressionist" family, but now the challenge is to differentiate them: each a classic, to be sure, but representing two very different composers. The Stenhammar Quartet clearly contrasts Debussy's whole tone scales with Ravel's Basque-inspired tonality; Debussy's ambiguous rhythms with Ravel's strongly accented folkloric ones; and Debussy's colourful ambiguity with Ravel's precision and clarity. These are two highly characterized works, well-paced, and played with style and wit.

In the serious world of French gastronomy, it's customary to serve a glass of Calvados between courses of an elaborate meal. "Le trou Normand", it's called; the idea is to create a "hole" in the stomach to make room for the delicacies to come. More than a mere palate cleanser, the String Quartet of Germaine Tailleferre is short but as potent as the fiery apple liquor, digging a hole in our musical repast to allow the proper perspective on our two major works. Tailleferre and her colleagues of Les Six inhabit a faster, more modern world than the pre-World War I quartets of their elders, but they are their true heirs. This is clever programming by the Swedish group, with a sparkling performance reinforcing Tailleferre's rising reputation.

A brilliant musical partnership

Palimpsest: Music for marimba & clarinet by Bach, McKinley, Piazzolla, Ravel & Zorn

Darius Milhaud introduced the marimba into the classical orchestra with his extraordinary 1947 Concerto for Marimba and Vibraphone, and composers from Leoš Janáček to Steve Reich were quick to introduce the striking colours this marvellous instrument can add to chamber and orchestral works. This new disc from marimbist Mike Stoltzman and her husband, clarinettist Richard Stoltzman, provides a great overview of various styles ("from Bach to Zorn" is a great way to talk about a wide range of music!)

Mika Stoltzman's own adaptation of Bach's perfectly adaptable Chaconne, from his D minor Partita for Solo Violin, shows the musical and emotional range of the instrument, as well as her own brilliant playing. Ravel's Pavane pour une infante défunte is another work that's made its way into many, many arrangements, and Richard Stoltzman's version for marimba & clarinet sounds exotic and familiar at the same time, in other words, just right for this kind of music.

For me the highlight of the album was the John Zorn piece which provides the title of the project. Richard Stoltzman describes the work in the liner notes:

Mika begins by playing quite tonal music, and then the clarinet jumps in with something abstract and arrhythmic, with crazy leaping intervals, almost as if Ornette Coleman had stepped into the room, and it keeps in conflict with the steady metre of the “old manuscript” underneath Mika’s part. It’s really fun to play, and it has been a surprise hit with audiences.

So many of the pieces here (including the Bach arrangements) are jazz- and blues- inflected. The Piazzolla works seem so natural, partly because the great composer from Argentina worked in his own jazz/classical idiom, but also because of the groove that the Stoltzmans and bandoneonist Pedro Giraudo are in throughout.

Mika and Richard Stoltzman play John Zorn's Palimpsest

Another brilliant musical document from post-war Berlin

Quartetto Italiano: The Complete RIAS Recordings

The Quartetto Italiano was the first of the new post-war groups that inaugurated a new golden age of String Quartets: the Quartetto Italiano was formed in 1945, the Juilliard String Quartet and LaSalle Quartet in 1946, and the Janáček and Amadeus quartets in 1947. Audite here brings us three CDs worth of fabulous recordings for RIAS ("Radio in the American Sector" of Berlin). The RIAS studios were excellent, and their engineers highly accomplished, so we have (as with the Amadeus Quartet album I reviewed late last year) an excellent idea of how these musicians sounded, in this case between 1951 to 1963. The group's repertoire is interesting, especially considering the period: Donizetti, Malipiero and Cherubini provide an Italian antipasto, if I may be permitted a metaphor (pun!) in questionable taste (taste!). Their 1959 Ravel interpretation is searching, and sometimes fierce; maybe even more so than their late recordings of core repertoire. This is a standout performance, though it's perhaps less than Gallic. The early String Quartet no. 8 by Schubert, from 1963, has the characteristic QI sound of their studio recordings of the Viennese masters: it's taut and tight and intense, eschewing sentimentality and emphasizing structure over story-telling. The first of the Haydn String Quartets op. 77 is the earliest recording here, from 1951. It's sunnier and more fun (to listen to, and I expect, to play) than the more disciplined Haydn the Quartetto Italiano developed later in their recording career. These recordings are at a higher level in both sonics and interpretation than your average historic releases, and the excellent documentation and the fact that a number of the works have never been released, make this a must-listen for chamber music fans.

This album will be released on May 3, 2019.

True gold, glittering

Berlioz: Les Nuit d'Ete, Ravel: Sheherazde, Debussy orch. John Adams: Le Livre de Baudelaire

When early in his career as a composer Maurice Ravel began to set some poems by Tristan Klingsor, he had the poet "recite his verses repeatedly in order to absorb their rhythms and tone," according to Paul Schiavo's illuminating liner notes to this new release. The result were the three Shéhérazade songs, sung beautifully here by Ian Bostridge, with the Seattle Symphony providing their patented exotic, shimmering, multi-Grammy-winning sound to back him up. Each of the works on this album demonstrate the special bond that music and poetry can share, when geniuses of each genre are matched up at the right time. Schiavo points out that Hector Berlioz's setting of poems by Théophile Gautier as Les nuits d’été was the first important song cycle for voice and orchestra. Bostridge's passionate, suave interpretation along with the support of Ludovic Morlot and his Seattle players, 100% in the groove with this music, helped me overcome a lifelong prejudice against Berlioz. It's hard to imagine a better interpretation of this gorgeous music.

The John Adams orchestral transcriptions of the Debussy settings of poems by Charles Baudelaire are as beautiful as a great painting by John Singer Sargent - The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit in Boston, let's say. In both the music and the painting there are profound meanings that are, paradoxically perhaps, hidden by the surface beauty.

In the words of another artist:

"If you want to know about Andy Warhol, then just look at the surface of my pictures, and there I am."

And John Singer Sargent himself:

"I don't dig beneath the surface for things that don't appear before my own eyes."

Which brings me to one of my favourite quotes, from that great aphorist Hugo von Hofmannsthal:

"Depth must be hidden. Where? On the surface."

The more gold that is mined, the more beautiful the surface seems, from Baudelaire's exquisite verse to Debussy's elegant melodies, to John Adams' sumptuous orchestral harmonies and textures. This true gold glitters most perfectly in this performance: Bostridge's lovely voice with a great American symphony orchestra at the top of its game.

Debussy with fire, wit and a touch of swing

Piano works by Debussy, Faure and Ravel

Under the alternating fires of two spotlights, a very young man, with troubled eyes and flaming hair, was seated before the black mass of a piano. And, alone, confronting a considerable public, delirious or collected, and who filled the vast ship of the room of the Opera of the Champs-Elysees.

This spectacle still besets my memory.

- Henry Malherbe

The very young man was Marius-Francois Gaillard, and he was in the midst of playing the complete piano works of Claude Debussy, spread over three concerts in March 1922. In 1928, 1929 and 1930, French Odéon recorded a significant subset of Gaillard's Debussy, enough to fill a generous CD, and spill over onto a second. This is outstanding playing; though the sound is of course thin and restricted, there is a full palette of tonal colour. Gaillard supplies fire, wit and just a touch of swing, rare in a Debussy performance from any period, but a revelation if you haven't heard this marvellous music played in such a way. This is a recording to listen to while reading Proust, and drinking vintage French champagne, preferably the 1985 Krug Brut, if you have any left in your cellar.



APR Recordings fills the second CD with more marvellous piano playing from the 1930s, by Carmen Guilbert. Recorded by Pathé well after the Gaillard, the sound isn't as life-like, but her playing of Debussy, Faure and Ravel still communicates musicality and authenticity through the hiss and cramped acoustic. Such a fine release!

Profound music from a teenage prodigy

Martha Argerich: The Successful Beginning: Ravel, Bartok, Chopin, Liszt, Prokoviev, Brahms, Schumann, Beethoven, Mozart

A new bunch of important historic recordings is being released by Profil's Edition Günter Hänssler on August 19, 2018, including a promising David Barenboim release, which I'll be reviewing soon. But I'm most excited about this 4-CD set of music by a talented teenager from Buenos Aires, Martha Argerich. Argerich shot to worldwide fame when she won the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 1965, at age 24. But she was already a star-in-the-making when most of these recordings were made in 1960 and 1961, having won both the Geneva International Music Competition and the Ferruccio Busoni International Competition in 1957, at 16 years of age.

As a pupil of Friedrich Gulda - Argerich went to Vienna in 1955 to study with him - one would expect something special from her Mozart, but the performances of two great middle-period sonatas are quite astounding. The first movement of the A minor sonata K. 310 begins briskly, but Argerich soon draws back a curtain to show the composer working out dramatic themes that will soon blossom into The Abduction from the Seraglio and then his other great stage works. Argerich's control here is exemplary; she doesn't tip her hand too early, but she's ready to turn up the temperature when required. And the final section of the slow movement is played with a delicacy that rivals her teacher. The B-flat major sonata K. 333 has the same calm surfaces with hidden depths, but at a higher pitch. The slow movement of this work is a miracle: like a Watteau painting it seems at first to be something of exquisite prettiness, but it is soon exposed as something so much greater: the most perfect and awesome beauty.

Of the two concertos included, it's again the Mozart that impresses, and luckily Argerich here has the stronger support of the two, from the Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester under Peter Maag, a favourite conductor of mine who showed up a lot on disc in those days. This is also from 1960, so Argerich is still a teenager, but she sparkles throughout, and makes this great concerto about so much more than glittering runs and soft-focus pastoral scenes from Elvira Madigan.

Argerich has the huge advantage of being teamed up with the great Ruggiero Ricci, the Centennial of whose birth we've celebrated this month. Ricci was in his prime when these Bartok, Sarasate and Beethoven works were recorded (which made him 41 or 42, if my calculations are correct). While the violinist has the spotlight on himself in the Sarasate, the other two works are more balanced, and Argerich definitely doesn't let down her partner. This is the beginning of a great career as a chamber music player, to go along with an equally great one as a soloist.

Naturally the last disc in the set is largely Chopin, and everything we've heard from her Chopin in later years is present in embryo at least. A 1955 Buenos Aires Etude has dreadful sound - the only really bad sonics on the disc - but even there you can hear Argerich's power and control and delicacy. What a great opportunity to be in at the beginning of this marvellous pianist's Odyssey!

Scotty, beam us up

Beethoven: Symphony no. 3; Ravel: Valses nobles et sentimentales

Giuseppe Sinopoli, the great Venetian conductor, has a reputation for cool and aloof interpretations, but I'm always as aware of his passionate undercurrents as I am of the cerebral arguments with which he builds his interpretations.  Back in 2015 I noted the dramatic tension in his Schubert Unfinished Symphony with the Philharmonia Orchestra, contrasting it with a slightly underpowered version from Philippe Jordan. Sinopoli's white-hot recording of Schumann's 2nd Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic (one of my all-time favourite discs) is another example. It was his experience in the opera pit, I believe, that provides the dynamic force of many of his orchestral recordings, and we hear it again in this release of a recording from Tel Aviv on October 28, 1993. There's plenty of drama in Beethoven's Eroica, but few recordings are as dramatically, indeed theatrically, shaped and shaded as this performance with the high-performing musicians of the Israel Philharmonic. Though Ravel's Valses nobles et sentimentales might seem at first glance to be more about music (in this case, Schubert's waltzes) than anything dramatic or theatrical, or indeed anything extra-musical at all. But after the composer orchestrated his original piano work, it was soon adapted as a ballet, Adélaïde, ou le langage des fleurs, with a plot taken from Dumas's La Dame aux Camélias. As one of the greatest interpreter's of Verdi's La Traviata, Giuseppe Sinopoli certainly knows his way around that story!

Sinopoli's day job may have been at the podium, but he had an astonishing range of interests and expertise, from medicine and criminology to anthropology and art collecting. There's a popular misconception that someone with a sophisticated intellectual life must be cold and analytical. It's like the common misinterpretation of the character of Spock in Star Trek's many iterations as exclusively cerebral. The half-Vulcan and half-human Spock is Gene Roddenbury's stand-in for all of the thoughtful people who pay attention to, and believe passionately in, the arts and culture and philosophy. To hold these not-at-all contradictory sides of our nature in balance is a worthy goal for us all, and the recordings of Giuseppe Sinopoli are powerful models.

This disc will be released in North America on September 7, 2018.

Intensity and tranquility in music of genius

Berio: Sinfonia; Boulez: Notations I-IV; Ravel: La Valse

The Seattle Symphony under the direction of Ludovic Morlot perform Berio's Sinfonia, Boulez's Notations I-IV and Ravel's La Valse on this new disc from Seattle Symphony Media.  Though built on a complex maze of literary and musical allusions elaborately folded many times over upon themselves, it's the expressive power and intensity that strikes one about Luciano Berio's Sinfonia. This is especially true of the 2nd movement, O King, which makes reference to the April 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Sinfonia, written for the 125th Anniversary of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1968, is a work for 8 voices and orchestra, and it was the great Swingle Singers who performed the work at its premiere on October 10, 1968, under the direction of Leonard Bernstein. The raw emotion that is evident in the great Columbia Masterworks recording is perhaps somewhat muted in this new recording, made fifty years later, but I think the superb singing, whispering and murmuring of Roomful of Teeth, Morlot's conception of the work, and the expert playing of the Seattle Symphony musicians maybe result in an even more complex and convincing performance. Then there's the added bonus of the 5th movement, which Berio added to the work in 1969, after the New York recording was already in the can.

In a discussion between John Cage and the late art critic & scholar Irving Sandler, in his fabulous memoir A Sweeper-Up After Artists, Cage expressed a preference for Mark Tobey's White Writing paintings over the works of Jackson Pollock. "We would meet," Cage said, "and he always complained that I didn't like his work enough, and I didn't." Sandler said "But what about the intensity, the excitement?" and Cage replied:

Oh, none of these aspects interested me. They're precisely the things about abstract expressionism which didn't interest me. I wanted to change my way of seeing, not my way of feeling. I'm perfectly happy about my feelings. I want to bring them, if anything, to some kind of tranquility. I don't want to disturb my feelings, and above all, I don't want somebody else to disturb my feelings. I don't spend my life being pushed around by a bunch of artists.

What is fascinating about the programme Ludovic Morlot has chosen on this disc is the balance between intensity and tranquility, which coincidentally was the focus of my recent review of Mariss Jansson's Bruckner 8th Symphony from Munich. This is more than just a contrast between hot Berio and cool Boulez, though that's the obvious line to be drawn here between two vitally important works that in some way exemplify two major thrusts of 20th Century music. There are also ebbs and flows of expression in both of the Sinfonia and Notations. Berio added a fifth movement to make the "narrative substance" of Sinfonia more explicit. It's this story-telling device of adding a coda to bring better balance to the overall story which speaks to these expressive contrasts even within this work.

Ludovic Morlot's own coda, as he tells a story in this programme, is Maurice Ravel's La Valse, a sad and savage reworking of the Viennese waltz, an avatar for the old world forever lost on the other side of the chasm of World War I. After two great works of immense complexity and beauty this is a superb end to a programme that explores and explains the beauty and horror of the 20th Century.

Mark Tobey, White Writing, 1959

Jackson Pollock, White Light, 1954, MOMA, New York

This disc will be released on July 20, 2018.

I wrote such beautiful music

Rautavaara: Fantasia; Szymanowski: Violin Concerto no. 1; Ravel: Tzigane

Anne Akiko Meyers brings her awesome technique and even more awesome instrument to bear in this beautifully romantic program. The disc includes a very fine performance of the first violin concerto of Karol Szymanowski, which is quite well represented on disc, but I was more interested in the opening work by Einojuhani Rautavaara that gives this CD its title. Fantasia, commissioned by Akiko Meyers, was one of the composer's final works completed before his death, a year ago in July. I love her stories about visiting the Rautavaara in his home to play through the work:

"After I played Fantasia, he looked at me and repeatedly said, 'I wrote such beautiful music!'"

This is, of course, the World Premiere recording of this piece, which I expect will soon become popular on the concert stage. With a significant encore in Ravel's own orchestral version of his Tzigane, this outstanding disc - and especially Rautavaara's Fantasia - will regularly show up in playlists on my computer and phone.

Here is the trailer from Avie Records:


To be released on October 6, 2017.

Delightful Ravel

From January 9, 2014:

Leonard Slatkin has been really busy recording for Naxos in the past few years, completing a Rachmaninov series in Detroit, and playing French music with the Orchestre National de Lyon. This is the second disc of Ravel's orchestral music, to go along with music by Berlioz. I found Slatkin a bit cool in the first disc, though I praised the playing of the orchestra and the sound provided by the Naxos engineers. This disc has the latter strengths, with strong playing from the Lyon woodwinds and brass especially, and lifelike sound that perfectly sets off Ravel's Gallic charms. As to the direction of the music, Slatkin is perhaps feeling more at home with the orchestra, or these three works - the Valses nobles et sentiment ales, Gaspard de la nuit in Marius Constant's orchestration, and Le tombeau de Couperin - have captured his interest more than those in the first disc. Or maybe I'm warming to Slatkin's reserved approach. In any case, this music is captivating, and provides a delightful and welcome respite from the daily grind.

Disengaged Ravel

From December 7, 2012:

A new Ravel disc follows the first Naxos recording from the Orchestre National de Lyon under their new music director Leonard Slatkin, a perhaps overly-disciplined reading of Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique. This CD has the same strengths and failures as that disc. On the plus side, the orchestral playing is marvellous, powerful and subtle. Slatkin provides a unified concept of grace and colour for a varied group of occasional pieces and more consequential works by Ravel. Naxos production and engineering shines once again.

However, the overall feeling is one of disengagement. The Lyon musicians provide completely idiomatic French sounds, but Slatkin runs through things without enough emotion, especially in what should be a hair-raising piece: Bolero. We're left with a Gallic shrug. In this repertoire, that isn't good enough.

Another excellent Daphnis from Haitink

May 1, 2012:

Bernard Haitink recorded this score more than a few times, with orchestras in America and Europe. Besides this live London recording from 1979 (from the BBC archives), I was very impressed with another more recent live recording, with the Chicago Symphony on CSO Resound in 2007. This newly-remastered CD from the London Philharmonic Orchestra's own label is welcome. The concert recorded at Festival Hall shows the orchestra and the John Alldis Choir in fine form, and the engineers have captured both the music itself and the excitement of a special live performance. This version is a bit more expansive than the tighter Chicago version, and the sonics don't quite compare. But in this instance Haitink and his musicians make a strong case for slowing this gorgeous music down just a bit.

I agree with Amazon reviewer Daniel Coombs that the Montreal Symphony version of Daphnis Et Chloe with Charles Dutoit is very special. It's both my favourite version of this great music, and one of the outstanding CDs I own. But Ravel's masterpiece has many facets, and Bernard Haitink is an outstanding guide, whether the journey starts in London or in Chicago.

Outstanding new disc of 20th Century piano concertos

From January 28, 2011:

Following a well-reviewed debut CD of meaty Russian music for solo piano, Anna Vinnitskaya returns with a very strong concerto disc on the Naive label. The Prokofiev 2nd Piano Concerto has had its share of fine versions on disc; Martha Argerich, and Horacio Gutierrez stand out for me. The new performance of this concerto master-work is not at all out of place in that company. And in the Ravel, a special favourite of mine, Vinnitskaya is right up there with Argerich, and even Michelangeli.

Reading Vinnitskaya's reviews from her major competition triumphs beginning in 2007 to her recent concerts and recordings, it wasn't surprising to hear such accomplished playing, with the widest range of power and delicacy. I was also impressed, though, with the orchestral accompaniment of Gilbert Varga and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchestrer Berlin, especially in the Prokofiev; and with the sound provided by the Naive producers and engineers. While the real focus of the Prokofiev work is in the piano part, the Ravel Concerto is as much about the virtuosity of the orchestra as that of the pianist. Though Varga lets the energy falter just a bit in the middle of Ravel's brilliant first movement, this is a fine performance overall, with excellent playing from both individual instruments and the whole orchestra.