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.
On November 30, 1949, Charlie Parker recorded a 10" Mercury LP for producer Norman Granz, with Stan Freeman on piano, Ray Brown on bass and Buddy Rich on drums. Jimmy Carroll arranged six standards for Parker and his trio, with five strings and a harp, plus an oboe, played by future A&R man and conductor Mitch Miller. The album, which featured an iconic David Stone Martin cover, was so successful that a second 10" LP was recording the following summer, with 8 standards, arranged this time by Joe Lipman.
On June 12, 2005, Phil Woods presented his new arrangements of Parker's famous standards in Zurich, with a much larger string section: 24-30 strings rather than the original 5. This fine 2-disc set from Storyville Records also includes new standards with similar arrangements.
Parker's albums were always controversial: the jazz cognoscenti thought he was selling out, both for the lush arrangements and the fact that he was playing standards exclusively. But the jazz-with-strings genre that began with this project has always been a popular one. I've always enjoyed the Charlie Parker albums; I played this music a lot during my CD-player days! So there's certainly a bit of nostalgia mixed in when I listen to Phil Woods' album, but I appreciate this project on its own merits: for Woods' playing as well as that of his sidemen, and for the gorgeous sound of the full complement of the Zurich Chamber Orchestra's strings. This is very highly recommended!
Here is a video of Woods playing "I'll Remember April" with the Zurich Chamber Orchestra, from 2005.
And this is the original: "I'll Remember April", from Charlie Parker with Strings, July 1950:
Villa-Lobos: Piano Trio #1; Turina: Piano Trio #1; Ponce: Trio Romantico
These three composers were near contemporaries; Joaquin Turina and Manuel Ponce were both born in 1882, while Heitor Villa-Lobos was born in 1887. Of the three piano trios on this disc, those of Villa-Lobos and Ponce are both early works, dating from 1911 and 1912, respectively. As appealing as both of these pieces are, neither is really representative of the mature work of either composer. Ponce called his work "Trio Romantico", and Villa-Lobos's first Trio also has a very Romantic sound. Ernest Chausson or César Franck might be cited as influences. Significantly, these trios have little of the folkloric sounds of Mexico and Brazil that would soon become so important for both composers, and no trace at all of the modernism that Ponce and Villa-Lobos would embrace as each spent more time (often together) in Paris later in the teens and 20s.
On the other hand, Turina's Piano Trio #1 is a mature work, dating from 1926. This wonderful piece is a fascinating amalgam of modernist influences, especially from Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky; dances from Galicia, Northern Europe, the Basque country, Aragon and Turina's native Andalusia; and even hints of jazz.
It's no surprise that the most successful performance here is of the Turina Trio; violinist Simón Gollo, cellist Horacio Contreras and pianist Ana María Otamendi have the measure of this music, swinging a bit when Turina nods to Ravel and winks at jazz, and presenting the dance rhythms without making this music into a travelogue pastiche. But a less serious touch might have improved the rest of the programme, especially the Villa-Lobos. It's a natural impulse to play up a weaker early work by a composer, even ones as accomplished as Ponce and Villa-Lobos, but not making a meal of these pieces might give a better chance of revealing their charms.
Beethoven: Leonore Overtures, Fidelio Overture, The Ruins of Athens
Terry Pratchett, whose aphorisms are on the same level as those of Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde, once said, "Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong." Beethoven's orchestral music is so dramatic, but he only managed to write a single opera, and for that he came up with four different overtures, in a remarkable display of compositional dithering. What failed to fail to go wrong in Beethoven's operatic career?
First of all, Fidelio is a remarkable work, though Beethoven laboured mightily to complete it in a version he felt good about, creating lots of hard feelings along the way. It's not as if Beethoven's compositional career has any dead spots in it. If he didn't write a great deal of vocal music, he obviously made up for that with instrumental, chamber, orchestral and sacred music at the highest level. So here's the first answer: he was busy writing other kinds of music.
Secondly, there's a difference between dramatic music and theatrical music. Opera is a collaborative art, and Beethoven is the least likely person to succeed in working with others. It's maybe only because we have Mozart's example at hand that we think Beethoven should have produced other operas besides Fidelio. It wouldn't be until Wagner that someone as self-centered as Beethoven succeeded in creating both quantity and quality in his operas. But Wagner is perhaps sui generis, and besides, he had Beethoven as a musical model.
Listening to the three Overtures to Leonore, I thought about those DVD "deleted scenes" commentaries, where movie directors explain why scenes were cut. When he moves from the 2nd to the 3rd Overture, Beethoven tightens up his material and jettisons everything that doesn't move things along. This isn't to save time, but to allow him to introduce a very dramatic recapitulation (the two pieces are virtually the same length - around 14:20 - on this recording). In any case, with the Leonore Overtures we have three splendid concert works that refer to the dramatic feeling of Fidelio, without in any way becoming a potpourri of themes or "opera without words".
In 1980 Vox released a 3 LP VoxBox set of Beethoven's orchestral music for the stage played by the Minnesota Orchestra, conducted by Stanislaw Skrowaczewski. This was one of the projects produced and engineered by Marc Aubort and Joanna Nickrenz of Elite Recordings, who made some of the most impressive sounding classical discs ever. We finally have one of those LPs - comprising the 3 Leonore Overtures, the Fidelio Overture, and the Overture and some incidental pieces from The Ruins of Athens - available on CD, transferred in 192 kHz, 24 bit High Definition sound, from the original analogue tapes.
Though I don't call myself an audiophile, I certainly appreciate the lifelike orchestral sound presented in this project. And I definitely think that this is Beethoven playing of the highest order. In Leonore 2 and 3, Skrowaczewski has his musicians hitting on all cylinders; he takes things at a feverish pace at times, sure that his fine musicians can follow. I've focused on those two works, but the others on this disc are wonderful as well. There are a couple of bonus tracks that are really fun: the Turkish March and March and Chorus "Schmückt die Altäre" from The Ruins of Athens. The latter features the choir of the Bach Society of Minnesota.
This is orchestral virtuosity of the highest order. I look forward to more of these splendid Vox Audiophile recordings in the near future.
Grazyna Bacewicz wrote wonderful music for string orchestra, and it has shown up, in various combinations, in quite a few CDs in the past ten years. Here's a new disc from Poland with a full program of some of the Polish composer's best music.
Stefan Kisielewski called the Concerto for String Orchestra, from 1948, "a modern Brandenburg Concerto" - it really is a masterpiece of the neoclassical idiom. The conductor Lukasz Blaszczyk and the Primuz Chamber Orchestra bring a lighter touch to this work than either of the other performances I know, discs from Naxos and Hyperion. This brings with it a certain loss of majesty; overall this is an accomplished if slightly superficial interpretation.
I prefer this performance of the Symphony for String Orchestra from 1946; Kisielewski hasn't smoothed out any of Bacewicz's rough edges here. There is plenty of rough energy in the opening movement, and the pathos of the second movement Adagio is quite moving. The passacaglia-like third movement Allegretto is one of Bacewicz's most impressive inspirations, flirting with positive feelings, veering into sorrow and despair, and ending with quiet resignation. The Theme and Variations finale starts slow, quiet and gloomy, then slowly builds to more energetic and dramatic passages. I like how Kisielewski has structured this entire Symphony; it has a satisfying arc here.
The rest of the disc is filled with an early work, the Sinfonietta from 1935, and a late one, the Divertimento from 1965 (Bacewicz died in 1969). These two pieces demonstrate her evolution from a relatively uncomplicated neoclassicism to a much more advanced and difficult approach to composition. I love the Divertimento, but I'm afraid this version is outclassed by another recent recording, from the Amadeus Chamber Orchestra of Polish Radio under Agnieszka Duczmal.
A mixed bag, then; an outstanding Symphony, with perfectly serviceable but not top class Concerto, Sinfonietta and Divertimento. How gratifying that the Grazyna Bacewicz discography is getting large enough that we can begin to make these distinctions, rather than just be happy to have one or two recordings!
I happened to finish this review on Grazyna Bacewicz's birthday; she was born on February 5, 1909. I love this portrait by Irena Jarosińska, from 1968, the year before the composer died.
Though John Milton was blind when he wrote Paradise Lost, his description of God in Book 3 makes use of visual - indeed painterly - images:
Amidst the glorious brightness where thou sit'st Thron'd inaccessible, but when thou shad'st The full blaze of thy beams, and through a cloud Drawn round about thee like a radiant Shrine, Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appeer
It's that chiaroscuro effect of Milton's that Missy Mazzoli took as her theme in 2018 when she wrote Dark With Excessive Bright, a concerto for contrabass and string orchestra.
"'Dark with excessive bright', a phrase from Milton’s Paradise Lost, is a surreal and evocative description of God’s robes, written by a blind man. I love the impossibility of this phrase and how perfectly it describes the ghostly, heart-rending sound of strings."
When Mazzoli adapted her original version for violinist Peter Herresthal, she replaced the contrabass with a violin, "... essentially flipping the original work upside-down." It's instructive to compare the two versions; in a way, this new version for violin is almost like a negative image of a photograph. The clever synaesthetic effects, mixing light and dark with high and low sounds and contrasting musical textures, still remain, with this new variation only deepening the total effect of this music. Here is Mazzoli's version for contrabass, as recorded by Maxime Bibeau and the Australian Chamber Orchestra under Richard Tognetti:
There's an additional chapter to this, though. Mazzoli also wrote a version of her original work for contrabass and string quintet, and likewise, then, for this new version for violin and string quintet. This underlies the contrasts between the concertante and ripieno parts, and makes all the string textures more transparent. Both orchestra and quintet versions are included here, and it's fascinating to compare the two. Herresthal is a wonderful violinist, and a fine musician; the shift from virtuoso concerto to more of a chamber music sound is subtle, but finely judged. Likewise with the orchestral players: Jim Gaffigan conducts the Bergen Philharmonic's string forces in the full version, and Tim Weiss conducts players from the Arctic Philharmonic in the chamber work. It's all beautifully played. The BIS engineers provide suitable open and natural acoustic spaces for each version, highlighting all of Missy Mazzoli's subtle effects of texture and sound. This is fascinating music!
Mazzoli's Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) has as one of its themes the Pythagorean concept of the "music of the spheres". This concept, popular in the Renaissance, appears often in Paradise Lost, where Milton, whose father was a composer, can indulge in something closer to his own experience than the visual imagery that relied upon his imagination and memory. But Mazzoli adds another spin here (pun intended), for Sinfonia also refers to the old Italian name for the hurdy gurdy; the "orbiting sphere" becomes more homespun: the hand-cranked rosin wheel of the instrument juxtaposed with the planetary orbits of the neo-Platonists.
These Worlds in Us, from 2006, takes its title from James Tate's poem "The Lost Pilot", about his father's death in World War II, and is dedicated to Missy Mazzoli's own father, who served in the Vietnam War. This is no Spitfire Prelude & Fugue by William Walton; this music is more contemplative than stirring, more about fatherhood than patriotism.
The two-part suite for orchestra Orpheus Undone has a serious program; it's about the moment when Orpheus loses Eurydice. "I have used the Orpheus myth as a way to explore the ways traumatic events disrupt the linearity and unity of our experience of time." This serious concept might have swamped a 16-minute piece for orchestra, but Mazzoli balances a heavy weight with finely drawn themes and slender orchestral effects. In the past few years I've had first-hand experience of how time is bent and tortured during the grieving process, and I found this music both understandable and somehow consoling.
Vespers for Violin, from 2014, was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Classical Composition in 2019. It's played here with panache by Peter Herresthal. This is such an evocative piece; in only six minutes it builds an impressive architecture of yearning and hopefulness. This is one of the finest albums of new classical music I've heard in a long time!
I must mention the wonderful essay by novelist and poet Garth Greenwell included in the liner notes. "This is music of intense drama, pungently gestural," he says, "but Mazzoli’s gestures are never orphaned, leading nowhere, as in so much contemporary music (and contemporary writing, too) that aims for drama." Greenwell praises Mazzoli for "using every resource at her command to think her life and her world at the highest intensity." There's so much here: from a blind poet's imagining of light and shade on a canvas to the entire range of sound available to the 21st century composer, and Missy Mazzoli brings it all to life with such grace and imagination.
Der Silbersee was Kurt Weill's European swan-song; premiered in Berlin in February 1933, it was banned by the Nazis in March, and Weill was forced to flee, first to Paris, and then to New York. The text, by Georg Kaiser, is as strongly satirical as anything by Bertolt Brecht:
Raise a tower with walls of stone around you, You won’t hear the wretched cries outside. Be blind, be deaf, never write off a debt, You’d lose your money and the gains from it. Don’t ever deny the greatest of all profit: Interest and compound interest.
Weill's music for Der Silbersee reminds me of his great musical theatre works with Brecht: The Threepenny Opera (1928), Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930), and The Seven Deadly Sins (1933). "The Song of the Lottery Ticket Seller" from the first act, "Was zahlen Sie für einen Rat?", uses the same tango rhythms we know from those works. There's a jarring contrast between the pungent text (beautifully projected here by HK Gruber) and the lovely orchestral accompaniment that perfectly sums up Weill's best music. There are only a few excerpts from the score, but they're choice.
When Kurt Weill made his way to Paris in 1933 he began work with Brecht on The Seven Deadly Sins, and you can hear echoes of this work in his Symphony no. 2, which was completed in 1934. This marvellous Symphony is close to the top of my list of obscure orchestral works that deserve to be programmed and recorded much more frequently. He's taken the accessible theatre music which had become his hallmark, and neatly slotted it within the classical symphony form of Haydn and Mozart. What a shame that the critical pans that followed its premiere at the Concertgebouw under Bruno Walter pushed Weill to swear off concert music for the rest of his career.
Before any of these works mentioned, back in 1921, Kurt Weill had written his Symphony in One Movement (his First). His characterization of it: "By Mahler, out of Strauss, trained by Schoenberg." Weill cleverly melds the neo-romantic tradition with leading edge serialism. This is more than juvenilia; it's an accomplished work in its own right. Weill has the compositional skill this early in his composing career to produce music that has value a century later.
HK Gruber is a fascinating person: a one-time child chorister with the Vienna Boys Choir, he became a virtuoso of the double-bass, a composer and conductor. He's also an outstanding singer and actor, and a great advocate for the music of Kurt Weill. Gruber's own view of Weill:
"He brought complexity and popular music under one hat. It makes no difference between light music and serious music — just a kind of music which is simply honest."
This project is a perfect example of honest performance of great music; with stellar support from the musicians of the Swedish Chamber Choir, we have here an outstanding contribution to the Weill discography.
The wonderful cover photo of The Lichtburg cinema in Berlin is by Martin Höhlig, from 1929.
Bach: Violin Concertos; Pärt: Fratres, Spiegel Im Spiegel
"The slow movement from Bach’s A Minor Concerto was the reason that, at the age of four, I knew I wanted to play the violin for the rest of my life. Of course, I had no idea at the time what that would really mean — but I was so overwhelmed by the beauty and depth of Bach’s music that there was no question for me: I simply had to become a musician!"
Playing the Guarneri del Gesù ‘Sainton’ violin from 1744, Arabella Steinbacher provides a luscious sound, rich and full, that focuses one's attention completely, almost ignoring the to-and-fro of the orchestral and solo parts, and even of the beautiful melodies that Bach provides. It's remarkable how an instrument made that long ago could be used to play music that's three centuries old and sound so fresh and alive. I've long been a fan of Steinbacher's; I've raved about her playing in a wide variety of repertoire: Bartok, Brahms, and Hindemith and Britten. Here she plays two Bach Violin Concertos: in E major and A minor, and a Bach Concerto for Two Violins in D minor, with another fine violinist, Christian Kontz. Once again Pentatone provides fine accompaniment: the agile and stylish Stuttgarter Kammerorchester.
J. S. Bach's manuscript score of the violin part for
the slow movement of his A minor Concerto
Two Arvo Pärt pieces bookend the three Bach concertos. His Fratres comes in many versions; this one, for violin, string orchestra and percussion, is from 1992. This is a suitable prelude to the meat of the programme: hushed and reverential, but in the end as dramatic a curtain raiser as a Rossini overture. The final piece, Spiegel im Spiegel, in its original 1978 version for violin and piano, acts as a kind of valedictory encore. Once again, Arabella Steinbacher has a fine partner, in pianist Peter von Wienhardt.
The wonderful photo of Steinbacher on the album cover is by Co Merz.
