title: Vivaldi for the nostalgics of the 1960s

text:
Vanguard 08 2006 71, European edition,  bringing back an LP published at the end of 1964, Vanguard/The Bach Guild BG 665 (mono) / Stereolab BGS (stereo) 70665, “Concertos for diverse instruments”, all performed by I Solisti di Zagreb under Antonio Janigro. Contents are:

- Concerto for 2 Mandolins RV 532 with Anton Ganocki and Ferdo Pavlinek
- Concerto for Flute “La Notte” op. 10-2 RV 104 with Julius Baker (flute) and Karl Hoffmann (bassoon)
- Concerto for strings RV 158
- Concerto for Bassoon RV 495 with  Rudolf Klepack
- Concerto for Violin & double string orchestra “Per la Ss Assunzione di Maria Vergine” RV 581 with Jelka Stanic.

The Concertos weren’t attributed any catalog number back then, but the presence of the solo bassoon in “La Notte” makes it unmistably the Chamber Concerto version of that work, RV 104, and not the Concerto version, RV 439. Note that the continuo harpsichordist is Herbert Tachezi, better known as the harpsichordist of Harnoncourt and his Concentus Musicus Wien.

This is Vivaldi from the mid-1960s; then. Back then, in the realm of Vivaldi interpretation, reigned ensembles like I Musici, Renato Fasano's I Virtuosi di Roma, Angelo Ephrikian and his Orchestra della Scuola Veneziana. Many among the older generation of music lovers grew up with that, but in the 1970s new groups appeared who became great Vivaldi champions, like Claudio Scimone’s I Solisti Veneti and Neville Marriner and his Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields (and I Musici continued), and they were superseded by the first period instrument ensembles in the early 1980s, Trevor Pinnock’s English Concert, Christopher Hogwood’s Academy of Ancient Music, Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s Vienna Concentus Musicus, and even they were the springboard to new generations of Vivaldi interperters that emerged in the 1990s, many of them from Italy, like Il Giardino Armonico or Fabio Biondi’s L’Europa Galante.

So, other than the nostalgia effect on those older generations, how does Janigro’s Vivaldi hold up today? Not too well I'm afraid. It sounds like Vivaldi in the 1960s.

Heard on its own, without any references, this kind of Vivaldi playing may, at its best, seem convincing. After all the music is beautiful, sunny, buoyant, colorful. But as soon as you start comparing, it appears, even at its best, as a bit too thick, a bit too ponderous, a bit too proper and solemn and lacking true jubilation, a bit too overtly sentimental in the slow movements: and Concerto for strings RV 158 is very typical: there’s so much life and dynamism with Concerto Köln ([[ASIN:B000001WM0 Antonio Vivaldi: Concerti For Wind And Strings / Concerto Koln]])  (and Tachezi’s loud and clanging harpsichord doesn’t help either in the saccharine Andante). Julius Baker in “La Notte” (CD 1 tracks 4-7) is not to blame but - to limit myself to recordings of the chamber concerto version, RV 104 - Camerata Köln in 1988 ([[ASIN:B00000E6VA Vivaldi: Flute Concerti Op. 10 - Camerata Köln [Deutsche Harmonia Mundi]]]), and even more Il Giardino Armonico in 1990 ([[ASIN:B000000SEM Antonio Vivaldi: Concerti da Camera, Vol. 1 (Concerti, Op. 10) - Giovanni Antonini / Il Giardino Armonico]]) have brought so much more expression, imagination and drama in that work - and revealed how much the work gains being played one to a part: Vanguard’s La Notte is pretty, theirs takes my breath away (and don’t miss, on You Tube, flautist Sebastian Marq and Jean-Christophe Spinosi live on Mezzo in the "full concerto" version, RV 439, played one to a part: this is not “classical music” anymore, it’s rock & roll!). Compared to Klaus Thunemann with I Musici in 1994, [[ASIN:B00000133A Vivaldi: 7 Bassoon Concertos]], Rudolf Klepac and I Solisti di Zagreb sound positively trudging. Klepac’s tone is fine enough, but Thunemann ornaments profusely and imaginatively, and it sounds great.

The Concerto for 2 mandolins RV 532 (tracks 1-3) sounds again colorful, but pedestrian in the outer movements, too grand and heavy in its orchestral textures and too loud, verging dangerously on the solemn at the expense of the jubilant, Vivaldi in St. Marco rather than at Ospedale della Pietà. But the middle Andante – a beautiful “raindrop” movement – is still today entirely valid, despite the higher pitch and hence more crystalline sounds of the two mandolins compared to the one is accustomed of hearing now, and the Finale of the same concerto is taken with a drive and enthusiasm that leaves even modern period-instrument ensembles behind and that I’ve seen emulated only by Il Giardino Armonico. The two mandolinists, Anton Ganocki and Ferdo Pavlinek, are superb, and wouldn’t disgrace a period-instrument ensemble of today.

But sometimes, you don’t even need to compare to anything else to sense that something is wrong, as in the Violin Concerto with two antiphonal orchestras RV 581 (tracks 14-16): thick textures, heavy and trudging basses. This feels like, “ouch”. And go to Fabio Biondi – one of his first recordings, not with his Europa Galante ensemble but with counter-tenor Gerard Lesne’s Seminario Musicale, [[ASIN:B00000DNW5 Vivaldi - Salve Regina / Biondi · Il Seminario musical · Lesne]] – and hear not a big, juicy romantic tone like Jelka Stanic’s, much leaner, but hear also imaginative violin playing, going way beyond the written notes, adding wild improvisation at the cadential points in the first movement… and letting you fantasize what it might have been with Vivaldi himself played it. Giuliano Carmignola, [[ASIN:B0000245ZI Antonio Vivaldi Vivaldi: Violin Concertos / Concerto for Strings]], is much more score-bound than Biondi in the outer movements, but his violin playing is still way more interesting than Stanic’s; but his middle Largo is even wilder than Biondi, a long and ornate improvisation over Vivaldi’s melodic line. But, to be entirely fair, there is something to be said also in favor of Stanic’s simplicity there, just playing the notes as written. But the few individual moments or movements that still hold up today aren't enough to make this style of Vivaldi interpretation still valid today.

So, ultimately, who is this for? Nostalgics of the 1960s, people who grew up with that style of interpretation, learned their Vivaldi that way and want to stay there. But sometimes "before" is not better, and, in matters of Vivadli interpretation at least, I'm personnally glad to be "today".

TT 53:00. The US edition of the same CD, Vanguard OVC 2006, is here, [[ASIN:B0000023A8 Vivaldi: Concerti for Diverse Instruments]], and there's another one on a budget series from Vanguard Europe, [[ASIN:B000025LCR Vivaldi: Concertos for Flute, Mandolin, Bassoon and Violin]], plus the one made under license by the Musical Heritage Society, [[ASIN:B000K2NFFA Antonio Vivaldi: Concertos for Diverse Instruments]], which at the time of writing sells cheapest. See the commentrs section for more links to other editions.


title: Vivaldi for Queen Marie-Antoinette, hello, goodbye

text:
I was happy when I found this CD at an affordable price, Vivaldi’s “complete works with lute” played by Michel Amoric and an instrumental ensemble led by violinist Jean Estournet, a release from the French label Ades dating from the early years of the CD (released in 1986 – the recording itself is from 1981) and, for that reason, hard to find, because not even listed on most Amazons, and hardly anywhere else.

It was well-received back then by the Vivaldi critics that I read and, in 1981, it was considered by some to be “state-of-the art” in interpretation. Although the back-cover credits mention “string instruments from the 18th century”, I’m not sure they are period strings, but it’s a small ensemble nonetheless with five solo strings and woodwinds. Yet, at one point while listening to the CD, I started wondering : “why is the music so unexciting?”. I mean, it’s Vivaldi, his wonderful works for lute  – Concerto RV 558 (with in addition to lutes has mandolins, and much more), RV 540, RV 93, Trios RV 82 and 85 – it should be colorful, playful, touching, exciting, no? But here it sounded so… proper (as in “Victorian proprieties”), elegant, stately, music sounding serious rather than having fun.

So I pulled out of my shelves Il Giardino Armonico’s recording of [[ASIN:B000000SK4 Concerti per Liuto e Mandolino]], which shares the three concertos and two trios offered by the Adès disc and adds two more concertos (the two marvelous RV 425 for Mandolin and 532 for 2 Mandolins) and and the one by The Parley of Instruments, [[ASIN:B000002ZI4 Music for Lute & Mandolin]], with the two trios and Concertos RV 93 and RV 540 (+ the same two Mandolin Concertos). And, oh, wow.

Going from Amoric-Estournet to Il Giardino Armonico in the first movement of RV 558 (which opens both discs) is like from going from your old, puffing sedan to a Formula 1 – or going down the roller-coaster as opposed to going up. Fasten seat-belt, stiffen your neck for the acceleration and be ready for your hair to fly! At first, I had thought that Amoric and friends’ cautious tempi might have something to do with the limitations of the plucked instruments, whether mandolins, lutes or theorbos: after all, there’s just a number of strings you can pluck within a second. But if such technical limitations, they clearly don’t apply to the performers of Il Giardino Armonico! RV 588 a fabulous work, a late concerto of Vivaldi and one of his best (among many great ones), and, as it’s original title rightly puts it, it is not so much a concerto “for” mandolins as a concerto WITH two flutes, two theorbos, two mandolins, two chalumeaux (salmoè), two marine trumpets (actually a string instrument of the violin family) and a cello, all getting their share of the limelight, a “concerto for orchestra” ahead of time. But that greatness you will immediately perceive listening to Il Giardino Armonico, not so with Amoric & friends, if even you perceive it at all. I don’t want to be unfair to them: to their credit, I love the sound of their chalumeaux, sounding less like clarinets than like the sound you imagine would come out of one of those big-sized sea-shells or “conch”. There’s also a nice touch in the andante: it is scored for violins and mandolins playing in unison, and frankly the mandolins, even in Il Giardino’s version, can hardly be heard, just soft punctuations under the violin line. So the Adès players repeat part of the movement with mandolins playing alone: not prescribed by Vivaldi, but very welcome. Still, it’s not enough to offset the rest, and if I had a sense of lack of excitement hearing them the first time around, it is true boredom after Il Giardino.

Difference in choice of tempo isn’t as pronounced in the Concerto for Viola d’amore and lute RV 540 – the march-like outer movements rely more on energy than speed - but even there, as soon as the first movement, Il Giardino Armonico scores, because its basic tempo IS slightly more animated, because its strings phrase with more muscularity and because its two solo instruments sound fuller. And their Finale sounds like a Finale, e.g. more animated than the first movement, where Amoric & friends adopt exactly the same beat, wich is not only wrong but makes the music sound stately and unexciting. Very typical is also the way the respective viola player phrases the chords indicated as “arpeggio” in the score (at 2:30 on Adès): two eighth-notes per beat for Adès’ Jean-Philippe Vasseur, vs dazzling spiccato arpeggios (and remember: at a faster tempo) for Giardino’s Enrico Onofri (at 2:10). Paul O’Dette and The Parley of Instruments are also preferable though not as convincing as Il Giardino, with an apparently more reduced ensemble and a more astringent tone. They too adopt the same beat in first and last movements, but that’s because their first movement tempo is faster. And I like their fastish and unsentimental approach to the Largo. Amoric and friends take it the slowest of all, but it’s okay, the music here can take a variety of approaches.

But if sometimes it’s not so bad, sometimes it’s even worse. Going from Il Giardino, and even The Parley of Instruments, to Amoric in the Chamber Concerto RV 93, my jaws drop with a big boink! I was braced for the worst, but it’s even worse than that, they stroll at such a trudging tempo in the first movement that this wonderfully lively composition is deprived of any life. If I stretch my understanding abitilites to their maximum, I guess there is a certain  nonchalant elegance to the approach, one that would make Vivaldi suitable for young maidens of the nobility in galant 18th century France - when under surveillance of their duegna, I mean. No wonder I was bored on first hearing! I have nothing against their flowing tempo in the middle Largo, but there’s so much more imagination in the ornamentation of Il Giardino’s Luca Pianca. To Amoric’s credit, though, the improvised cadenza at the end of that Largo, and the Finale is fine, not as animated as Il Giardino’s and with Amoric’s instrument sounding more metallic and less virtuosic, but not inferior to the Parley’s. Would this have been the rule and not the exception! Same with Larghetto and Finale of the Trio RV 82, or with the complete Trio RV 85 (with there too a very flowing Larghetto, and, for once, a nicely racing Finale): despite Amoric’s somewhat metallic tone, they compare well to The Parley’s; but in tonal luster, technical ease and interpretive imagination, Il Giardino is in another dimension, and nowhere more than in the middle Larghetto of RV 82, where they turn a very pretty Larghetto into one of Vivaldi’s most sublime inventions (see my review for more details on this).

Il Giardino is Vivaldi for the Venetian tavern, a Vivaldi of blood, sweat and tears. Amoric & friends is Vivaldi transplanted in France and played at the Versailles salon of Queen Marie Antoinette, surrounded by her infamous sheep: prim, proper, elegant, Vivaldi for the ladies of the court – and their duegnas! Nothing to lose your head about. Despite the CD’s rarity value and the few nice touches of interpretation, this one is not staying in my collection, hello, goodbye.


title: MHS edition of a 1983 recording that has been since made obsolete by Il Giardino Armonico's version of a decade later

text:
The Musical Heritage Society's edition of a recording from 1983, licensed from Erato, whose original CD edition is here: [[ASIN:B0018KRYZA Vivaldi: Concertos for Mandolin]], together with my extended review.

In capsule, I Solisti Veneti had been at the cutting edge of Vivaldi interpretation in the 1970s, but then came the period-instrument ensembles of the Harnoncourts, Pinnocks and Hogwoods in the late 1970s and 1980s, themselves superseded in the 1990s by a new generation of period-instrument performers, many of them Italian, like Il Giardino Armonico and L'Europa Galante. Does it mean that Scimone's recording retains no more than an archaeological interest now? Not entirely so.

First, especially when you compare these recordings and Scimone/I Solisti Veneti's previous recording for Erato in 1969 ([[ASIN:B00000E6IS Vivaldi : Mandolin Concertos : Concertos Pour Mandonines]]), you can hear that they benefited from listening to those period-instrument ensembles, or at least participated in the general stylistic trend towards leaner textures and more animated tempos. The Concerto for 2 mandolins RV 532 and Concerto for mandolin RV 424 are particularly effective, and so are the middle Andante of RV 558, or the Largo of RV 93.

But not everything is on the same high level, and in the outer movements of RV 558 or RV 93 I Solisti Veneti’s approach in 1983 remains a very gentle and sweet one, compared to Pinnock’s greater muscularity and energy in 1986, at a tempo that is not significantly faster, and not even to mention Il Giardino Armonico.

Anyway, whatever beauties contained in Scimone’s 1983 recording, it is no match, in expressivity, invention and joy, for Il Giardino Armonico’s version from a decade later, [[ASIN:B000V1V0XE Vivaldi: Ctos for Lute & Mandolin]], and neither are most of the competitors I’ve heard in those works. Il Giardino Armonico’s recording brought Vivaldi interpretation in another dimension. Teldec also adds two more works, the Trios for lute and violin RV 82 and RV 85, for a TT of 65 minutes compared to Erato’s stingy 44.

But Scimone retains an interest for those who’d find Il Giardino too over-the-toop, too energetic, too enthusiastic, too imaginative, or those adverse to period-instruments (any such listeners left now?) and who’d want these works gatherered on a single disc rather than scattered in collections of miscellaneous concertos, as with Pinnock. But you may want to look at the Erato editions for a better price, the original one already linked above and the next CD reissue, [[ASIN:B000005E5W Concerti Per Mandolini]] There's also a subsequent one on Warner's series Apex, which sells very cheap at the time of writing, [[ASIN:B00021SUHC Vivaldi: Ctos for Mandolin]].

Fine stereo separation between the two mandolins in RV 523, a lot of traffic rumble in the background throughout.


title: I Solisti Veneti's earlier recording - of little more than archaeological interest

text:
This is another edition of a CD first published by Erato on its budget Bonsai collection, ECD 55013, [[ASIN:B00000E6IS Vivaldi : Mandolin Concertos : Concertos Pour Mandonines]], as of today selling much cheaper than this edition, and it is also the case with this next CD reissue: [[ASIN:B000009JYX Mandolin Concerti]] (but there's a botch with that latter entry, the review I posted there explains it).

Now, buyers, beware. What you need to know is that all these editions are NOT of Scimone and I Solisti Veneti's recording of Vivaldi's Mandolin Concertos made in 1983 with mandolinists Ugo Orlandi and Dorina Frati and first published on CD, here: [[ASIN:B0018KRYZA Vivaldi: Concertos for Mandolin]]. It is their earlier recording, from 1969, with Bonifacio Bianchi and Alessandro Pitrelli, first published on LP on Erato ERA 70545.

That recording - and, hence, the CD reissue - had only three of the four works performed in 1983: the Concerto for 2 Mandolins - back then referred to as P133, now as RV 532 -, the Concerto for mandolin RV425 / P 134, and the Concerto "for many instruments" (including two mandolins and two theorbos) RV 558 / P 16. Left out was the Chamber Concerto RV 93, and with some good reason: it isn't a work for mandolin, originally, but for lute and two violins.

But as a filler, back then and on the CD reissue as well, Erato added the Concerto RV 583 for scordatura violin and two antiphonal orchestras ("a due cori"), and to those four, the CD reissue adds again RV 581 "Per la Santissima Assuzione di Maria Vergine" for violin, and RV 552 "con violino principale con altro per eco in lontano" ("with a solo violin and a violin in distant echo"), for a generous TT of 73:22. The former is played by Piero Toso, the "historical" fiddler from I Solisti Veneti, and came out in 1976 on Erato ERA 70968 with three other “Solemn Concertos” (RV 212 "Fatto per la Solennità della S. Lingua di S. Antonio di Padua", 289 "Per la Solennità di S. Lorenzo", 579 "Funebre"); the latter, with both Toso and Giuliano Carmignola, was recorded in 1978/79 and first came out on Erato STU 71233 (with three concertos for flute performed by René Clemencic). At least (and at last), Erato has here corrected (most of) the botches of its previous editions, by which it did not give the now customary PV catalog numbers of the mandolin works, only their old Pincherle (P) catalog numbers, mislabled RV 552 into 522 (which would have made it "L'Estro Armonico" op. 3 No. 8) and didn't assign any catalog number, right or wrong, to RV 583. But you still won’t know, of the two mandolinists, who plays RV 425: it’s Bianchi. The original LP came with extensive liner notes by Scimone himself. All are gone from the CD reissues.

And with all that, and added to the fact that it's somewhat frustrating to have only tidbits from those two other LPs (the four "solemn concertos" have been reissued in Japan with one more from another LP, [[ASIN:B00005HI78 ヴィヴァルディ:教会暦にちなんだ協奏曲集]]), this is not the version of the Mandolin Concertos you should favor, and not even the version of the Mandolin Concertos by I Solisti Veneti.

I Solisti Veneti’s interpretation in 1969 may have been revolutionary in its time - in particular, Scimone boasted in his liner notes that it was the first time that Concerto P. 16 / RV 555 was heard in its original guise, with the so-called "violini in tromba marina" played by violins and not... trumpets, as (claimed Scimone) the previous editions and recordings had done, based on a mis-interpretation of Vivaldi's indication on the manuscript score. He's obviously referring to the Casella edition, which also substituted Heckelphones (!... a double-reed instrument of the oboe family, invented in 1904) to the salmoès (a simple-reed instrument and ancestor of the clarinet) and harps to theorboes, and for the recordings he may have had in mind those of Thomas Schippers with the Alessandro Scarlatti Orchestra of Naples, Schippers' first orchestral recording (said the ads), published on Columbia 33CX 1451 / Angel 35335 in 1956, and Bernstein's on Columbia ML 5459 / MS 6131 from 1958 (the latter reissued on [[ASIN:B0000062E5 Vivaldi: Four Seasons / Concerto for Diverse Instruments]]). But for the salmoès ("a wind instrument that doesn't exist anymore today"), Scimone used clarinets playing at the upper octave.

But independent of those considerations, Scimone's interpretation in 1969 is firmly anchored in the Vivaldi interpretive traditions of the 1960s and 1970s: a little too trudging, a little too thick, a little too solemn. By 1983 and with an almost entirely new personel (besides the conductor, only harpsichordist  Edoardo Farina and flautist Clementine Hoodendoorn Scimone - Mrs Claudio - remain from 1969), they took on the interpretive lessons of the period-instrument ensembles that had emerged in the meanwhile, Harnoncourt’s Concentus Musicus Wien, Trevor Pinnock’s English Concert and Christopher Hogwood’s Academy of Ancient Music, or maybe it was only that they participated to the same stylistic trend towards leaner textures and more animated tempos. Their 1983 recording is better in all compartments, and it adds RV 93, originally a chamber concerto for two violins, lute and continuo, but played by them as a mandolin concerto. The slow movement of the Concerto for two mandolins RV 532 was very beautiful in 1969, but in 1983 the two new mandolinists add wonderful ornamentation in the repeats. There was a very nice touch in the slow movement of RV 558, where the mandolin trilled all his notes (played unisono with the violins) rather than simply plucking them, something not explicitly called for by Vivaldi but much more effective; but it’s there again in 1983. And then the 1969 Mandolin Concerto RV 425 was ruined by I Solisti Veneti’s choice NOT to follow Vivaldi’s advice that “the violins can all play pizzicato”. And you just need to compare that and the 1983 remake, where they do follow the advice, to realize how much more beautiful the pizzicato version is, turning an ordinary concerto into one of Vivaldi’s most sublime inventions.

So if it is the mandolin concertos that attracted you here, by all means, of the two, you should favor the remake. That is, if it is I Solisti Veneti’s version you want. Because in 1992 came Il Giardino Armonico, and they sent the interpretation of these works in another dimension, with more energy, more enthusiasm, more liveliness and joyfulness, more poetic imagination in the phrasings, more sonic presence, more everything, making all the previous versions, even those on period-instruments, more or less obsolete. About this, see my review, [[ASIN:B000V1V0XE Vivaldi: Ctos for Lute & Mandolin]].

For all those reasons, this one is of no more than archaeological interest.


title: ...and then came Il Giardino Armonico...

text:
Recorded in December 1984 and published on CD in 1986, this program of Concertos and Trios with Mandolin(s) and/or Lute(s) was overall very satisfactory when it came out. But, in 1992, the competing recording by Il Giardino Armonico was published by Teldec, [[ASIN:B000000SK4 Vivaldi: Concerti per Liuto e Mandolino]] - and there was no going back.

First, Teldec adds the very substantial Concerto RV 558 for 2 recorders, 2 “tromba marinas” (contrary to what you’d expect, instruments of the violin family), 2 mandolins, 2 theorbos, 2 salmoes (a predecessor of the clarinet) and one cello, one of Vivaldi’s greatest concertos (among many great ones), and for a more generous TT of 65 minutes vs 58 for Hyperion.

Second and more important, in the absence of anything better, the interpretation of The Parley of Instruments would have overall given ample satisfaction, and did. Tempos are always lively and sprightly in the outer movements, even  their middle movements are occasionally animated, which avoids any waling sentimentality while, to my ears, losing none of the music’s beauty and dreamy tenderness, and the lean tone, astringent even, produced by what seems to be a very small body of strings, apparently one to a part, would not have been a major deterrent; on the contrary it is an entirely acceptable approach in that music, and it’s probably not a coincidence that it is in the chamber concerto RV 93 (two violins, lute and continuo) and the two Trios RV 82 and 85 that, in comparison to Il Giardino Armonico, The Parley of Instruments hold up their best.

But now we have Il Giardino Armonico. And (with, playing by ear, a somewhat larger ensemble) they produce so much more energy and excitement - not so much a matter of tempos as of attack, mass, drive -, and show so much more imagination in their phrasings, articulation and ornamentation. I’ve compared Il Giardino’s Vivaldi to a roller-coaster – going down. The Parley of Instruments is a charming boat ride on the canal.

But it’s not just, or not always a matter of drive and energy. It’s also the poetic imagination brought to bear by Il Giardino in the slow movements, and nowhere is this better illustrated than in the Larghetto of Trio RV 82: as beautiful as it is in itself with the Parley of Instruments, Il Giardino is simply in another dimension, through two incredible touches of imagination and freedom: playing the lute’s grace notes as glissandos, and playing the continuo and solo violin pizzicato, changing the music into raindrop or tear music – and really, turning a very pretty Larghetto into one of Vivaldi’s most sublime inventions. In the same vein, that, in the middle Andante of Concerto RV 532 for two mandolins, the choice of Parley of Instruments to play the basso continuo arco rather than staccato, may be a matter of edition – the old Malipiero edition indicates staccato here, but I don’t know what the original score says – but even supposing it is more “urtext”, it’s unfortunate, because again, as shown by Il Giardino Armonico, playing it staccato creates again one of those mesmerizing raindrop effects. And that The Parley’s two mandolinists, Paul O’Dette and Robin Jeffrey, don’t trill in RV 532 (or anywhere else) where Vivaldi indicates to do so (and unlike every other performers I’ve heard in these works) must also be counted among the unfortunate casualties of their recording.

But the most objectionable (and I’m even tempted to say: the worst) happens in the Mandolin Concerto RV 425. There, even the Malipiero edition indicates that the manuscripts requests that “if possible the violins should play pizzicato”. With The Parley, they don’t. Just listen to Il Giardino to hear how beautiful, how Venetian the effect is, like some giant cimbalom in the first movement, and with a truly breathtaking restraint in the Largo, drops of mandolin against a few punctuations from the strings. The Parley’s unfortunate interpretive choice here turns into a nice, but no more than ordinary (for Vivaldi) concerto one of the Pretre Rosso’s most sublime (again) inventions.

Nonetheless the Hyperion recording can still earn a guarded recommendation – as a complement to Il Giardino for those ready to go on the roller-coaster, and as a possible substitute for it for those whose heart condition would bar them from doing so; but they need to know that they’ll be missing something truly unique.

Check out the recording's other entries for the best price.


title: And Amazon manages to botch things up again....

text:
BEWARE. Amazon has again botched up things by automatically linking three different editions of a same recording, so that reviews posted under one will appear under the other, and buyer is likely to be mislead about what he is buying.

This program of English Songs of the Middle Ages was recorded in 1987 and originally published in 1988 by Deutsche Harmonia Mundi when it was still distributed by EMI, ASIN:B004U5R6QM [[ASIN:B004U5R6QM English Songs of the Middle Ages]], It's the edition I have, and it came with erudite liner notes and texts of songs with translations. My review of that edition appears on its rightful Amazon page together with my review for the Musical Heritage Society reissue. I've asked Amazon to unlink but these incompetent (or wifully deceitful?) axes have refused.

After DHM's takeover by BMG the recording was reissued in 1989 in the mid-price collectio Editio Classica, both in an American edition, 77019-2-RG, which gets its "autonomous" entry on Amazon, [[ASIN:B000001TW9 English Songs of the Middle Ages]], AND in a European edition, GD77019, ASIN:B000026NE9, [[ASIN:B000026NE9 English Songs of the Middle Ages]], which ALSO gets conflated thanks to Amazon's inept and/or deceitful handling of things with the licensed reissue by The Musical Heritage Society, ASIN:B0009K7EIW, [[ASIN:B0009K7EIW English Songs of the Middle Ages]]. I cannot publish an autonomous review of GD77019 because my review of the MHS edition overrides it. If anybody half-way competent was running these things, Amazon would have been much better-inspired to link both Editio Classica editions: other than label number and barcode, they are identical.

I can't certify but I assume that the original liner notes came with the Editio Classica reissue. The MHS edition cover seems to indicate that it is the direct reproduction of that BMG/Editio Classica reissue, rather than the original DHM/EMI edition. In other cases where I've been able to compare, those MHS editions looked and sounded exactly like their originals, but again I can't certify that it is the case with this one. But, personally, when I find an MHS edition selling for significantly cheaper than the original edition of a CD I want, I'll go for it. There's also a Japanese edition, [[ASIN:B0014W8T1K English Songs of the Middle Ages]].

OK, with those discographic minutiae sorted out: It's a lovely recital, comprising the earliest extant English songs from the Middle Ages, not those one customarily finds in programs with similar titles that come from the late Middle-Ages, 14th and 15th century, but from the 12th to 14th. "English songs" meaning here not just songs written by English composers, but songs composed to texts in the English vernacular language of the time (as opposed to Latin, or even French, which was the language used by the upper class after the Norman conquest). There are also four instrumental dances. Sequentia is here comprised of four performers, two male vocalists (including ensemble founder Benjamin Bagby, also playing harp and hurdy-gurdy), founder and soprano Barbara Thornton, and Margriet Tindemanns on fiddle. Songs are sung either solo, duo and even one in trio, they are bare and meditative even lamenting, but enrapturing. Lyrics are mostly religious, Mary, the sufferings of Christ, World's Bliss never lasts. But the main fascination comes, possibly, from the very language, Middle English, both entirely alien and (translation helping) strangely familiar. Sequentia's musicological credentials are unchallengeable and include tuition from two university scholar on pronunciation of Middle English. Go to the entry of the original edition or Edition Classica America reissue for my longer review.


title: converting Wall Street to Socialism

text:
Of course, nobody woke up one ill-starred morning of 410 and, learning of the news of the sack of Rome by the Visigoth Alaric, or later in 476, when the Germanic Odoacer deposed Emperor Romulus, exclaimed, “OMG, the Middle-Ages have begun!”. The “Middle-Ages” is a concept coined by much later historians. Writers of the era considered themselves, after Augustine, to have beeen in the “6th Age” since the birth of Jesus Christ (see the Wikipedia entry on "Six_Ages_of_the_World") and in the 1330s, Italian poet and humanist Petrarch referred to the Christian era as “The New” Age. It is the later Humanist historians, starting in the 14th century, who saw their own times as a revival, a restoration (of Roman classical culture) or a “renaissance” after the Barbaric ages (and it is 16th century art historian Giorgio Vasari of first used the word Rinascimento), but the term of “Middle Ages” appeared only, according to Wikipedia, in 1604.

My point is that when one talks of “Medieval Music”, or finds a more specific program of “[[ASIN:B000027NZC Medieval English Music]]” (as the one I recently reviewed), they are usually songs from the late Middle Ages, 14th or 15th centuries, which was already the early or first Renaissance.

So the interest of Sequentia’s recording of “English songs of the Middle Ages”, recorded in 1987, is to give us what are really the earliest extant English songs. “The repertoire of songs in English from the 12th to the early 14th century is surprisingly small. We know that much music composed to English texts is lost to us (due to the oral mode of vernacular song transmission), and must therefore content ourselves with the less than two dozen pieces, some in fragmentary form, which have survived in a variety of manuscript sources including a saint’s life, a book of miscellaneous religious writings and even the reverse side of a papal bull. Unfortunately, there exist no large manuscript collections of English song comparable to the chansonniers of the Troubadours and Trouvères, since the courtly literate, - and therefore written – tradition in England before Chaucer’s time was largely French.” In fact, the earliest recorded non-anonymous English song seems to be the four Marian songs of St. Godric (see Wikipedia's "Godric_of_Finchale"), performed here on track 1. Wikipedia gives his dates as “c. 1065-1170”, which make him a near-contemporary of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), but also die dubiously old.

The music as performed by Sequentia is sparse and bare – laments, ballads -, instrumental accompaniments reduced to a bare minimum, sometimes just fiddle (track 2, 4) or harp (track 7), sometimes none at all (track 1, 6, 11, 12), texts are religious (Mary and the sufferings of Christ, World’s bliss does not last) and the era, as documented in those songs, was NOT particularly jocular. Songs are sung either solo, duo or even trio (two men, including Sequentia’s founder and leader Benjamin Bagby, and founder soprano Barbara Thornton). Four tracks (out of 13) are purely instrumental dances. The songs sung by Barbara Thornton are of ineffable beauty (tracks 2, 7, 11), lamenting ballads that could have been sung by Joan Baez, and Benjamin Bagby sings “Man mai longë lives weenë” (Man may expect long life...  but is often deceived), track 10, with great sardonic wits.

But the main fascination of the recital is perhaps the language, Middle English. It’s both entirely alien – sometimes it sounds like a strange German dialect, even like Yiddish - and, when you follow on the translation in modern English, strangely familiar, and it mysteriously adds to the fascination of the music, as a treasury buried deep, lost, inaccessible, and yet visible, a hazy and fragile recollection of a world disappeared in the aeons of time.

The musicological credentials of Sequentia are undisputable – including consultation of the original manuscripts and help from and credits given to two scholars from the University of Leeds and the University of Texas on the pronunciation of Middle English. Erudite liner notes, texts of songs given with translations in English, German and French, TT 60 minutes. This here is the original CD issue on Deutsche Harmonia Mundi when it was still distributed by EMI. After their takeover by BMG it was reissued on the Editio Classica budget label, American edition 77019-2-RG [[ASIN:B000001TW9 English Songs of the Middle Ages]], European edition GD77019 [[ASIN:B000026NE9 English Songs of the Middle Ages]], and also licensed by Musical Heritage Society, [[ASIN:B0009K7EIW English Songs of the Middle Ages]]. There's also a Japanese edition listed here, [[ASIN:B0014W8T1K English Songs of the Middle Ages]].

And here’s one I’d like to offer to the fans of Bernie Sanders, the last stanza of Worldes Bliss, to go and chant in Wall Street every day.

Werld and welë thee biskwiket;
mid iwis hi byeth thi vo.
If thinë werld mid welë sliket,
thet is vor to to thee wo.
Thervorë let lust overgo,
man, and eft hit wel thee liket.
Weilawei! Hu sore him wiket
thet in o stundë, other two,
wercth him pine evermo!
Ne do, man, swo!

Translation:

The world and its wealth deceive you;
for certain they are your foes.
If your world flatters with prosperity,
that is in order to do you harm.
Therefore let desire pass by,
man, and afterwards things will please you well.
Alas! What a grievous service he does to himself
who in one hour or two,
earns himself torment for ever more!
Man, do not so!

Maybe it’ll convert all those bankers and traders to socialism, it’s worth a try.


title: Perfect for Christmas - if you don't mind Christmas in Czech

text:
I recently gave a try to the work through which Jakub Jan Ryba gained his way to posthumous fame: the so-called Czech Christmas Mass – in fact not a mass at all but a Cantata, sung in Czech, on the Nativity. I found it cute, sweet, music for children by children, something like Mozart’s Bastien and Bastienne at Christmas ([[ASIN:B000071WH4 Ryba: Czech Christmas Mass]]). The disc was completed by a lovely Pastorella sung by soprano, and I wondered how the rest of Ryba’s output sounded. Ryba (1765-1815) is very typical of those schoolmasters who brought music to the uneducated backwaters of Bohemia and Moravia. To quote the liner notes, “the tradition of schoolteachers’ involvement in spreading musical education throughout the rural areas of Bohemia and Moravia dates long centuries back, and had an undeniable share in the development of the characteristic Czech musicality”. I don”t know however how representative Ryba’s fate is of the common lot of these schoolmasters: having met with constant hostility from local authorities and superiors and reduced to dire poverty, he committed suicide.

So how does Ryba sound when he’s not composing his Czech Christmas Mass? Exactly like his Czech Christmas Mass, in fact. All those Pastorales are, in conformity with the word’s etimology, shepherd’s songs, and they are also all nativity songs, exactly like the Christmas mass. Like the Christmas mass, they are, musically, very much “Bastien and Bastienne meet folk music”, a feeling reinforced by the fact that all are here sung by the Kühn’s children's choir. And they sound wonderfully like children, unlike many of those Austrian or English choirs that, for all their tonal sophistication, sound somewhat too mature, when not simply bored.The music is sweet and naïve, sometimes to the point of cloying (track 6). Some of the Pastorales display fine touches of orchestration (like organ, clarinet and trumpet track 10, or the wonderful accompaniment of “raindrop” string pizzicati at the end of track 8, the accompanying flute and violin in 11, clarinet and horns in 13, trumpet and horns in 16), showing that Ryba is more than just a schoolmaster dabbling in music: a real composer (and that he had those instruments and instrumentalists at his disposal in his remote Czech villages). Some also feature adult’s solo voice dialoguing with the chorus, even a trio of tenor and two basses in 16 impersonating the Magi (but the authorship of the latter is not firmly established) – and baritone Jindrich Jindrak tends to bellow in tracks 2 and 5, but after all, a measure of over-the-top caricature isn’t entirely out of place in these works. Track 7 falls out of pattern for being sung only by soprano, no chorus, but it’s appropriate to the words, being a lullaby to put baby Jesus to sleep, so one assumes it is Mary singing, and it is explicitly so in her response to the three Magi in track 16, also sung by solo soprano. On the other hand, the Nightingale pastoral, track 11, that was sung by soprano solo on the Christmas Mass disc, is here sung by the children’s chorus. Except for the part of the three Magi, all these songs are monophonic and the choice is open of singing them solo or with choir.

Great music for Christmas, if Christmas in Czech is okay for you. Recording made digitally in 1987, good sound, adequate liner notes, texts and translations of songs provided (good point), the only drawback being that they are not side by side but one after the other. TT 61 minutes.


title: a clever and interesting program, though no substantial revelation - but find it cheaper elsewhere

text:
Apparently this CD, Discover International DICD 920101, copyrighted 1993, has been published under various barcodes - I've seen backcover photos for 741952410126, 7602419201189 and 071083201011 (the latter on this entry, which however does not respond to that barcode, but to 741952412601 - type barcode 071083201011 of the cover photo and that will take you to a listing for ANOTHER CD from Discover International,  [[ASIN:B0007MWENM Salve Antverpia: Romantic Symphonic Music From Antwerp]] . Go figure) , and I personally own 4010479001015. There's an entry for this CD corresponding to its barcode 741952410126, where at the time of writing is sells much cheaper too, [[ASIN:B00000220F Flemish Rhapsodies]], and it also sells cheaper here, [[ASIN:B00008FCBM Flemish Rhapsodies]] , which is an entry responding to barcode 730099351126 although the uploaded back cover photo shows the barcode 7602419201189. Don't try and understand, look for the cheapest.

The six Rhapsodies gathered here, all but one composed in the short time-span of 1928 (Absil) to 1936 (Roussel), offer no substantial revelation, but nonetheless an entertaining hour of music. See my review under the cheaper entries for more details.


title: MHS reissue of Hyperion's top-chart recording of music of "The Sybill of the Rhine"

text: Judging from the cover photo and confirming by the entry's barcode (717794675023), this is the reissue on the record-club Musical Heritage Society of a top-chart recording published by Hyperion (in 1982 for the LP and 1985 for the CD), whose original CD release is here, [[ASIN:B000002ZGD Hilegard von Bingend: A Feather on the Breath of God]], and doesn't sell more expensive on the marketplace at the time of writing. The music is monophonic, appeased, ethereal, mystical, soothing, Medieval New Age music. For more details, see my extensive review and 58 others under the original Hyperion entry.


title: if you enjoy plainchant...

text:
Had I known what this recording actually was – I wouldn’t have bought it. I was exploring the Gimell catalog and the recordings of the Tallis Scholars, a great British a cappella vocal ensemble, and chanced on this one, from 1988 and the early days of the CD. I guess I was expecting something like Hildegard von Bingen, or the Chants of the Sybil ([[ASIN:B0000264IM El Cant de la Sibil-la I]]), mystical chants, or maybe early polyphony in the style of Leonin and Perotin.

Not so. This is plainchant. The “Sarum rite” is the Roman Catholic liturgy as it was exercised in the 13th century at the Church of Salisbury, one of the major churches and rites of Medieval England. “The music recorded here is from the First Mass of Christmas according to the Salisbury Rite. It would have been celebrated after midnight on Christmas Eve, and was known as the Missa in gallicantu – the Mass at Cockcrow”. The Chant was taken from 16th century Missals and Graduals.

So, okay, this is plainchant: monophonic, square and simple rhythms modeled on spoken language, limited melodic intervals – maybe great for the rite, but, truly, the degree zero of music. 55 minutes of it.

If you like plainchant and Gregorian chant, you may enjoy this recording more than I did. At least my copy was cheap – that’s why I bought it, in fact. Well, you can’t win every time. Now I'll return to Hildegard and Perotin.


title: Posthumous gratitude to Dieter Klöcker for the rediscovery of Cartellieri

text:
This set conveniently compiles the 5 CDs of the music of Antonio Casimir Cartellieri recorded from 1996 to 2003 by the late clarinetist Dieter Klöcker and forces assembled around him. Not only a fine clarinetist but an indefatigable researcher of forgotten scores, we owe to him the rediscovery of Cartellieri and his music, starting with his recording of three wind divertimenti for another label, Cpo, in 1991  ([[ASIN:B000001RUT Cartellieri: Wind Divertimenti 1-3]]).

Born in 1772, Antonio Casimir Cartellieri belongs to the generation of Beethoven (1770), the one that made the transition from the “classical style” of Haydn and Mozart to the early romanticism of Spohr (1784) and Weber (1786). There are more parallels and ties with the composer from Bonn than their proximity of dates. Born in Danzig (which, according to Wikipedia, was under Russian rule then, and was annexed by Prussia only in 1793, although, since the 16th century, “the city inhabitants largely became bi-cultural sharing both Polish and German culture and were strongly attached to the traditions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth”), Cartellieri established early on in Vienna (exact moment seems uncertain, but it must have been a couple years after Beethoven) and, like Beethoven, he was (although this is apparently not firmly established) a pupil of Salieri. He was engaged as Kapellmeister, composer and violinist of Prince Lobkowicz in 1796.

He was friends with Beethoven and often collaborated with him. “On 29–30 March 1795, the première of his oratorio Gioas re di Giuda took place in Wiener Burgtheater. (In the interval, Beethoven played his piano concerto which became Beethoven’s debut as a composer). He notably performed in the world premières of several works by Beethoven under the composer's baton, including the Eroica Symphony and the Triple Concerto on 23 January 1805” (Wikipedia).

The liner notes of each CD were written by Klöcker himself, and those of the compilation reproduce the bulk of them. Klöcker goes to great lengths to make a case for Cartellieri, and possibly overstate it. Evidently Cartellieri wasn’t Beethoven, and whatever he might have developed into, he didn’t, since he died an early death, in 1807, aged 34. Except for a few early works (especially the Flute Concerto on CD 2), all these compositions are decidedly anchored in the stylistic universe of early romanticism - it's not music Mozart or Haydn could have written - although it is more the light-hearted romanticism of Weber or Spohr than the "unfettered genius" of Beethoven. Schubert may occasionally come to mind also, but it's the lighter Schubert of the Trout Quintet, and without the emotional depths and melodic distinctiveness of even the lighter works of Schubert. It is music for entertainment, music for pure enjoyment, merriment, insouciant and voluble music, music for the gazebo. Only occasionally does Cartellieri rise "above the merrily/merely fluffy if I may dare the pun" and "lifts himself up to the regions inhabited by Beethoven", as I wrote in my reviews of the individual discs.

However, if I may quote myself again, "if you don’t demand of the music more than it has to offer, it is highly enjoyable. However limited his expressive compass, Cartellieri is a master composer, these works are beautifully instrumented, there’s a glee at the instrumental exchanges, this is music for friends – friends who’d be virtuosi of the highest order on their respective instruments"..

That Cartellieri is no Beethoven is recognized by Klöcker, when he writes of the Clarinet Concertos that “there is no real need to link them to major masters (‘endorsement by celebrity’). Such efforts merely indicate that an enthusiastic clarinetist, in this case the interpreter of the concertos, hopes to obtain an audience for his composer. Unless Gioas or other works bring Cartellieri some of the recognition he deserves, he will continue to be doomed to virtual oblivion. I am of the opnion that our artistic conscience cannot allow such an extraordinary personality and others like him to suffer this fate”.

One may share the enthusiasm, not so much for what Cartellieri does NOT offer – the clarinet concertos or quartets or wind divertimenti Beethoven never wrote – as for what he does offer, entertaining early romantic works that deserve their place in the repertoire alongside those of Reicha, Crusell, Spohr, Weber and the likes.

For more details on each disc and program, see my reviews under their respective entries:

[[ASIN:B0000021EJ Cartellieri: Concertos for Clarinet and Orchestra]]

[[ASIN:B00004LMPO Cartellieri: Wind Concertos Vol. 2]]

[[ASIN:B00009OODT Cartellieri: Wind Sextets]]

[[ASIN:B0000669V1 Cartellieri: Clarinet Quartets]]

[[ASIN:B00007FP6J Cartellieri: Clarinet Quartets, Vol. 2]]


title: Authoritative interpretations by Litaize's pupils

text:
Being born blind didn’t prevent Gaston Litaize from studying at the Paris Conservatoire with Marcel Dupré and Henri Büsser and, privately, with Louis Vierne (who for decades was the titular organist of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, and his second successor was Pierre Cochereau, after the now forgotten Leonce de Saint-Martin), from coming second at the 1938 Prix de Rome just after Henri Dutilleux, from being the organ teacher at the Conservatory of Saint-Maur near Paris, and from being the tenured organist of the Saint-François-Xavier church in Paris for 45 years. Olivier Latry, who became one of the successors of Cochereau at the organs of Notre-Dame at age 23, started as Litaize’s pupil at Saint-Maur, and was also his successor as organ teacher there, and Denis Comtet (who joins Latry in the Triptych for two organs that concludes the CD) was also a pupil of Litaize at Saint-Maur, before moving on to Michel Chapuis at the Paris Conservatoire. With all those credentials, and the organs of Notre Dame to boot, their interpretation of Litaize’s works can be considered authoritative. The disc – an early publication from the small French label BNL, from 1989 – sold cheap, so I decided to give a try to the music of Litaize.

It took me a few hearings to warm up to it. It can be awsomely loud – try the opening Cortège for Organ and brass, or the beginning of Sequence, the third movement of the concluding Triptych for 2 organs (stupidly the individual pendants of the Triptych aren’t cued – it starts at 17:11, and Nocturne the second movement, at 6:52) – and the Triptych, clocking 31:36 in all, is long, which on first hearings made it sound to my hears somewhat grandiloquent and, in its moments of repose, rambling, lots of noise but little sense of aim and necessity.

But repeated hearings revealed that there is organisistic imagination there, that Litaize’s modernism may be run-of-the-mill and none-too-challenging, but at least he is commendable for not indulging into some kind of retarded and derivative neo-romanticism.

TT 67:32. Bizarrely, the sound briefly switches to distant mono from 25:30 to 25:40 in the Triptych. Liner notes in French only and of limited interest in any language. here's another entry for the same CD on this website, [[ASIN:B000025WQO Oeuvres Pour Orgue Des XVIe et XVIIe Siècles]]. The CD is BNL 112768, barcode 3298491127680 for those who'd want to hunt for it elsewhere.


title: from fluffy insouciance to unexpected death

text:
Henri Sauguet’s opera, Les Caprices de Marianne, after the play by Alfred de Musset, was written for and premiered at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, on July 20, 1954, and one can hear in the composition the echoes of the fluffy insouciance and elegance of the uppity social class that frequented the Festival. Sometimes the music is reminiscent of Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortileges and, in its more comical vein, L’Heure espagnole. Marianne’s first act aria, “O Amour mysterieux” (O mysterious love) has an underlying agitation and inquietude that vaguely brought Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress to mind. In an introductory note to the CD’s booklet, Gabriel Dussurget, the founder and artistic director back then of the Aix Festival, writes of the present time (that was in 1993) “when France is becoming a body without a soul, the life without hope, when wealth comes without joy” and sends a tribute to Sauguet, calling him “the man who represents the French spirit: the frivolous seriousness or, if you prefer, the serious frivolity”. It summarises well the spirit of the music, both in its attractiveness and limitation. As entertaining as are these two hours, there’s nothing truly substantial or essential here. For all the Ravel or Stravinsky reminiscences that it evokes, Sauguet’s orchestra doesn’t have the unique distinctiveness and shimmering lushness of Ravel’s (except in the beautiful ringing of the morning bells in Act I scene 3) or the rhythmic buoyancy of Stravinsky’s, it sounds through-composed, aimed at efficiently accompanying and underpinning the words and stage action, and overall the orchestral music is always subservient to the words. But at least it does that with great skill, and there is an interesting line that runs through the opera, from the apparently frivolous games of love and chance to the unexpected drama of jealousy and death. It’s not just cardboard, there is genuine subtlety in the network of feelings and passions that link the four main characters.

This set from the French label Solstice, published in 1993, documents a studio performance given for the French public radio on May 27 and 28, 1959, under Manuel Rosenthal. It is remarkably free of any audience noise. It sounds mono and the orchestra is somewhat unidimentional (I have the feeling that more environing and lush stereo sonics might have helped enjoy Sauguet’s orchestral writing some more), but the voices register with perfect clarity and presence. It gathers the stalwarts of French singing of the era – Andrée Esposito as Marianne is fine, with easy highs, if lacking the last degree of tonal beauty, her enamored but gauche and shy suitor Coelio/Michel Sénéchal is too nasal in tonal production to make the character appealing – but there is a case for that, and you understand why Marianne would fall not for him but for his friend and mouthpiece, the smooth talker Octave, elegantly sung by Camille Maurane. Louis-Jacques Rondeleux as the suspicious and jealous husband is well-suited to this character role, if a little bland perhaps. It’s a bit frustrating that the role of the Duegna, written for a transvestite basso, should have been allocated here to a mezzo – reminds me of the infamous practice from the pre-Historically-Informed-Performance era of recasting Haendel’s male castrato roles for tenors or baritones. They all sing with perfect French diction, but marked also by slightly out-moded accents, very typical of the 1950s French opera, that are not out-of-place in the work but confine it a little too much maybe to a 1950s style.

The Solstice production deserves praise: it comes with lyrics and English translation of them (only quibble, they are not side by side but one after the other) and a fine photo gallery. Note that the recording of the 1954 Aix-en-Provence world premiere can be purchased in download form for very cheap from the website of Ina, the repository of the French public radio and TV archives, with Graziella Sciutti, Jean Capocci, Jean-Christophe Benoit and an anonymous souffleur, and Orchestre de la Société des Conservatoires under Louis de Froment (I'm not sure, though, that it can be done if you are located outside of France or Europe). Also on the same website and in the same conditions, there is a performance from the same production given two years later at Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, still with Graziella Sciutti but now with the same Michel Sénéchal who sings it here, Jacques Jansen and the RTF Orchestra under Louis Martin. Incidentally, the photos in the Solstice libretto are of that 1956 revival. I've downloaded the 1954 recording. I don't find it preferable to Rosenthal's 1959 version. There are a lot of stage noises and applause, the orchestra is dryer than for the 1959 studio recording, making the latter sound very full and vivid in comparison, ensemble sounds occasionally scrambled, Graziella Sciutti's French is perfect but vocally she's inferior to Esposito and sounds  too much like the soubrette that she usually sung in Aix (and with a pronounced vibrato on some of her highs), there's more body and maturity in the voice of Esposito which lends her more profundity (and Sciutti makes a cut in her "O Amour mystérieux" aria), tenor Jean Capocci / Coelio is timbrally the same kind of comprimario as Sénéchal in 1959 but he is affected by a strong vibrato, Jean-Christophe Benoit / Octave is far less elegant and convincing than his 1959 counterpart Camille Mauranne, much more a comical character (which is a permissible option, but not the most interesting one), the basso singing the role of the Duegna makes no effort at singing in falsetto which limits very much the comical interest of making this a comical tranvestite character, the mezzo singin Coelio’s mother is timbrally much less ingratiating than her 1959 successor. It's only Louis-Jacques Rondeleux, singing the servant Tibia (rather than the jealous husband as in 1959) who is a touch more characterful and funny than his 1959 counterpart Gérard Friedmann (who in 1954 sung the innkeeper).


title: authoritative interprertations of Litaize by his pupils

text:
The title of the entry, "Organ Works of the 16th and 17th Century", is false and I've sent Amazon product information update requests, with link to the same entry on French Amazon which has it right, but they don't seem to be moving. That this is indeed the organ works of Litaize himself played by Olivier Latry assisted by Denis Comtet on BNL, as per the cover photo I've uploaded, is proven by the fact that I bought my own copy from the French entry, and researched this entry using the CD's barcode, which leads right here.

Being born blind didn’t prevent Gaston Litaize from studying at the Paris Conservatoire with Marcel Dupré and Henri Büsser and, privately, with Louis Vierne (who for decades was the titular organist of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, and his second successor was Pierre Cochereau, after the now forgotten Leonce de Saint-Martin), from coming second at the 1938 Prix de Rome just after Henri Dutilleux, from being the organ teacher at the Conservatory of Saint-Maur near Paris, and from being the tenured organist of the Saint-François-Xavier church in Paris for 45 years. Olivier Latry, who became one of the successors of Cochereau at the organs of Notre-Dame at age 23, started as Litaize’s pupil at Saint-Maur, and was also his successor as organ teacher there, and Denis Comtet (who joins Latry in the Triptych for two organs that concludes the CD) was also a pupil of Litaize at Saint-Maur, before moving on to Michel Chapuis at the Paris Conservatoire. With all those credentials, and the organs of Notre Dame to boot, their interpretation of Litaize’s works can be considered authoritative. The disc – an early publication from the small French label BNL, from 1989 – sold cheap, so I decided to give a try to the music of Litaize.

It took me a few hearings to warm up to it. It can be awsomely loud – try the opening Cortège for Organ and brass, or the beginning of Sequence, the third movement of the concluding Triptych for 2 organs (stupidly the individual pendants of the Triptych aren’t cued – it starts at 17:11, and Nocturne the second movement, at 6:52) – and the Triptych, clocking 31:36 in all, is long, which on first hearings made it sound to my hears somewhat grandiloquent and, in its moments of repose, rambling, lots of noise but little sense of aim and necessity.

But repeated hearings revealed that there is organisistic imagination there, that Litaize’s modernism may be run-of-the-mill and none-too-challenging, but at least he is commendable for not indulging into some kind of retarded and derivative neo-romanticism.

TT 67:32. Bizarrely, the sound briefly switches to distant mono from 25:30 to 25:40 in the Triptych. Liner notes in French only and of limited interest in any language. There's another entry apparently for the same CD, with an (expensive) offer at the time of writing, [[ASIN:B000BGQS86 LITAIZE: Works for Organ - Oliver Latry]]. The CD is BNL 112768, barcode 3298491127680 for those who'd want to hunt for better offers elsewhere.

attachment_type: IMAGE


title: A good place to start your collection

text:
From Adès (b. 1971) to Abel (1723-1787). As I was slotting into place the latest CD of music by Thomas Adès (b. 1971) that I've heard and reviewed (see [[ASIN:B0000C17Q8 Thomas Adès: America: A Prophecy]]), I realized that a few CDs to the left (I'm not very enthusiastic about John Adams, but I do have a version of [[ASIN:B00005A9OE Adolphe Adam's "Le Postillon de Lonjumeau]]"), this recital of Overtures and Sinfonias of Carl (sometimes spelt Karl) Friedrich Abel was the first in alphabetical order of my sizeable collection. Since I have this vague and unrealistic notion of leaving reviews of all of them before I die or doomsday (whichever happens first), I thought it would be as good a place to start as any other. Not that I intend to be consistent and move on alphabetically, because I don't want to wait that long to review the hauntingly beautiful music of Isang Yun.

The recording was made in February 1994 and this is its first release, on Dutch Vanguard. It was reissued in 2002  by the same label, with a different cover, [[ASIN:B000067DO8 Carl Friedrich Abel: Ouvertures & Sinfonias]] ( "Passacaille" is in fact the name of the collection, and already was on the original disc). It is an enjoyable disc, that will offer much pleasure to amateurs of 18th Century music from Bach and Haendel to Mozart and Haydn. In fact Abel's style is closer to Haydn and the Bach sons than to Haendel (but with a boisterousness in the fast movements that links them to the latter). No surprise: Abel's dates, 1723-1787, make him roughly a contemporary of the Bach sons (Wilhelm Friedemann 1710 – 1784, Carl-Philip 1714 – 1788), of Gluck (1714 – 1787), Leopold Mozart (1719 – 1787) and Haydn (1732 – 1809). His father Christian Ferdinand played the violin and viola da gamba in the famous orchestra of Cöthen (where his son was born) when Johann Sebastian was its Kapellmeister, and Carl himself played in the Dresden court orchestra under the famous Hasse, where he made the acquaintance of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (Bach's second child and eldest son), who was organist in Dresden at the time. In 1758 he established in London, where he founded (in 1762) the famous Bach-Abel concerts with Johann Christian Bach's, Bach's 11th and youngest son (1735-1782). He remained in London to the end of his life.

II Fondamento under Paul Dombrecht, a period-instrument ensemble (21 members), turn out what sound like spirited performances, maybe a little laid-back in some of the fast movements (I'd need to hear the same works performed, say, by Concerto Köln to make sure), with the slightly acid tone so typical of such period-ensembles. This will not replace your favorite Haydn and Mozart, but will offer a fine complement for those interested in placing the great masters in historical context. TT 60:33, excellent notes in the original Vanguard release.

A good place to start your collection then - alphabetically, I mean.


title: an hour of not very distinctinve "Riley-inspired" jazz-rock

text:
So, is this what became of Terry Riley, the inventor of the corruscating and hugely dynamic and exciting repetitive minimalism of In C, of the enrapturing marriage of the classical traditions of the string quartet with world music in his series of quartets composed for the Kronos Quartet, the “mystic” improviser on pianos tuned in “just intonation” in the wake of his mentor LaMonte Young, and therefore sounding slightly out-of-tune? “Intuitive Leaps” was recorded in 1994 and first published by a British label, Work Music, WRK002-3, [[ASIN:B000009LAT Zeitgeist]]. This here is the 1998 Sony reissue. It offers two pieces, “The Room of Remembrance”, written in 1987 for the Zeitgeist ensemble that performs it here, and “Salome’s Excellent Extention”, completed in 1989 and supposed to be, indeed, an extention from Riley’s great cycle of string quartets “[[ASIN:B000005IZP Salome Dances for Peace]]”,  “an expansion or elaboration of themes and patterns from some of these earlier works”.

But these two pieces sound, in the main, like jazz-rock compositions, and sometimes even just jazz impros, as they’d be played modern jazz-rock ensemble, often cool and bluesy, sometimes bordering on rock, repetitive, yes, but in the style of any jazz-rock ensemble inspired by the minimalism of Riley. In the third movement (out of four) of Salome’s Excellent Extention and in the last part of the last, and in the first and last movements (out of three) of The Room of Remembrance, Riley reverts to his former self, but watered down in a pretty, agreeable and fundamentally un-challenging minismalism, enhanced by the colors of hammer percussion (vibraphone and marimba), electric keyboard, piano and sax. The fourth movement of Salome opens with a furious Boogie-Woogie evocative of Conlon Nancarrow.

Sure, a composer can’t endlessly repeat what made his earlier success (althoug many do…), and I hold it in Riley’s favor that, unlike Glass, he didn’t spend his life milking to no ends and bastardizing the compositional recipes that had made him instantly famous back in 1964, but you can expect of him that he’ll take you in new voyage of discovery in unchartered territories, or at least you expect him to let you hear his unique voice. I don’t hear much that his really distinctive in the “Riley-inspired” jazz/rock played here – the use of vibraphone and marimba, maybe, although this is hardly a novelty.


title: Not much emotional depth, but much charm ala Paganini

text:
This recording is interesting if only because it offers the opportunity to hear the unfamiliar Paganini: not the Caprices, not the Violin Concertos, not the violin virtuoso, but three quartets for strings and guitar. As the liner notes point out, “most people won’t know that Paganini was also a virtuoso of the guitar and composed a lot for the instrument”. Well, true, I was among these people, although I should have remembered, since I listened to and reviewed a similar disc a few months ago, with Paganini's Sonatas for Violin and Guitar op. 2 & 3: [[ASIN:B00RAAFJUO Paganini Works for Violin and Guitar]]. In fact “in his childhood Paganini learned the mandolin before he turned to the violin”. He wrote in all 15 such Quartets with guitar. Not much is known about the circumstances of composition of the Quartets op. 4 and its companion cycle op. 5 (the latter not represented on this CD), but it is thought that they were written between 1806 and 1816, and they were published in 1820. So that’s the time of mature Beethoven and early Schubert.

If from Paganini you expect solo guitar with accompaniment of strings, not so. First, these are not pieces meant for virtuoso display. Liner notes again: “While Paganini sought to sweep away the public through his extraordinary masterpieces for the violin, pushed at the limits of technical possibilities, in his chamber music he pursued other goals. Traces of his virtuosity are scantier, the musical dialog and the pleasure of playing together predominate”. And second, far from being “guitar quartets”, these three compositions are more in the nature of string trios with rhythmic and harmonic underpinning by the guitar. But they are real “string trios”, not just violin and accompaniment, and there is a lot of interplay between the strings.

The works offer some truly enticing moments, such as middle trio for cello and viola with accompaniment of violin pizzicatti in the Minuetto of quartet no. 1 (track 2 at 2:16) and a similar passage on a songful cello melody in the 3rd Quartet’s “Andantino alla Spagnola” (0:57 track 9), a solo passage for guitar at 6:23 into the first movement of Quartet No. 2 (track 4) sounding very much like it could have been written by Fernando Sor in Spanish style, an obsessive passage in the trio of the Second quartet’s Minuetto with trilling violin and gambolling cello (track 5 at 1:45), the Schubertian songfulness of the Larghetto of the same Quartet (track 6), the Schubertian – again – and Trout-like insouciance of the first movement of Quartet No. 3 (track 8), the wistful “rain-dropping” or tip-toeing of the pizzicatti in the Romance of the third Quartet (track 10).

But, in the main, the music is charm charm charm, very much in the style we know from Paganini’s works for violin, and plumbing little emotional depths. The world of opera is never very far – the opera of Rossini, that is. And the cycle ends with a little touch of humor: the finale of the last quartet ends… and after a fermata of two or three seconds, the guitar unexpectedly adds its little comment in form of an coda. Paganini never performed those quartets publicly, they were obviously destined to amateurs and friends. Excellent recording from 1986, immaculate performances, excellent liner notes, TT c. 60 minutes.


title: promises that the occasions didn’t really allow to unfold

text:
Although French pianist and composer Denis Levaillant has been in discographic activitiy since the early 1990s, it is only now that I’ve discovered and started exploring his music. Born in 1952, Levaillant rose to public visibility in France a quarter-century ago through his collaborations in dance, theatre and circus. He had been very active for a time in modern Jazz and improvisation, partnering performers like Jenny Wheeler, Jean-François Jenny-Clark, Michel Portal, Barry Altschul and Barre Philips. Levaillant was never part, apparently, of any “school” or coterie, his pieces weren’t played at IRCAM, and Ensemble Intercontemporarin did commission a piece from him – the soundtrack for Fritz Lang’s The Woman on the Moon.

And those are the very reasons why I neglected him until just now. I had this preconception that his music must be easy-listening and pop-oriented – something like, at best, Hugues Le Bars (the composer of choreographer Maurice Béjart, a composer of playful and easy tunes) and at the worst, Yann Tiersen. Well, the music of Le Bars (he died in 2014) is entertaining and witty (search on YouTube), although not very substantial and not what I’d want foremost to buy for my daily consumption. But Yann Tiersen? No thanks!

But as I was exploring the catalog of Thesis, a small French label that had been in activity in those years, I chanced on Levaillant’s CD of piano music, [[ASIN:B004W0H5S4 Musiques pour le piano]] or [[ASIN:B000M2BABO Musiques Pour Le Piano]]. One of the three pieces there, Souvenirs de Félicité, seemed to bear out my prejudices – a rambling and self-indulgent radio piece with little musical substance and apparently big autobiographical content, and little interest other than for its composer– but fortunately it is the piece that came last on the CD, as the two others, Douze Mouvements and Piano Transit, turned out to be major contemporary piano cycles, as avant-garde as anything composed in those years (early 1980s) and more imaginative and effective than most.

So that encouraged me to explore more, and “Musiques pour le theatre” sold cheap enough on the marketplace. It includes three suites from incidental music Levaillant wrote in the late 1980s for three plays, all staged by French director Alain Françon. As Levaillant writes, they were, in the context of the original productions, more than just incidental music, e.g. utility music to fill the minutes during set changes. He worked in close collaboration with the director and his music had a dramatic function in the unfolding of the respective plays.

That said, it is in the nature of these occasional pieces not to give the best compositional picture of the composer. The first Suite, “Les Menteries du style” (“The Lies of Style”) was written for Corneille’s The Liar. Much of it is just a pastiche – not a caric ature, just an imitation, an “in the style of” – of late 17th-early 18th French baroque music. If you didn’t know that the Aria “Cette flamme”, track 2, was by Levaillant, you could easily think it was by Charpentier or Rameau (in fact Levaillant took his inspiration from Michel Lambert). In track 6, for solo violin, it’s is Bach who comes to mind, and in track 12, for violin and cello, Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe. The Suite is also performed by the crème of the cream of French early-music performers of those years: soprano Sophie Boulin (beautiful voice), Noelle Spieth harpsichord, David Simpson baroque cello, Daniel Cuillier baroque violin, Alan Hacker baroque clarinet.

But Levaillant’s few flights into his “own” music are appetizing enough, especially the distorted and grotesque quasi-baroque of the Overture (track 1), bringing similar music of Peter Maxwell Davies to mind, the nightmarish vision of “La Nuit” (The Night), track 4, sounding very much like the “Musique Spectrale” of Radulescu traversed by whiffs of baroque music, and evoking indeed the spectres of Goya or Füsli, or again the atmospheric “L’Aube” (Dawn), track 11.

But, with the longest track running 2:15, Levaillant doesn’t have time to really develop his ideas. It makes you regret that this should be only occasional music, and not a fully-fledged composition of Levaillant, one that would be entirely made of his original music. The "Suite for Hedda" (for Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler) is written for string quartet (reproducing the play’s quartet of characters), sounding at times like a dirge from Shostakovich or the most plangent moments of Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night, and in some movements even more fully contemporary than that (tracks 20, 22). In its 8 mouvements (running from 35 seconds to 6 minutes), Levaillant unfolds with not much variation and much repetition the same or very similar anxiety-torn themes, and it was apparently the composer’s intention, since he speaks, about the play itself, of “variations sans issue”, e.g. “without escape” or “without resolution”. But the uniform mood tends to wear thin in the course of its 17+ minutes heard continuously – which of course, in the context of the theatrical performance, they were not meant to be. Again it would be great to hear a fully-fledged String Quartet of Levaillant.

In “Welcome to Mascotte Palace”, for a play by a contemporary French playwright Enzo Cormann, the music is a hodge-podge of styles, ballroom Walzes, French “chanson”, big bang jazz. What’s missing is music in the style of Levaillant. First and last movements are a pastiche of cabaret music “as a pupil of Schoenberg would have written it in the 1930s Vienna” – and, yes, it sounds that way: somewhat dry, gloomy, melodically unappealing. Schoenberg did better in his Serenade op. 29. Actress Dominique Valadié sings in track 27. The voice is not very trained, but has a childish quality that is interesting.

This CD, recorded a quarter-century ago, contained promises that the occasions didn’t really allow to fulfill. I’ve heard more recent pieces of Levaillant and they seemed to confirm my worst prejudices about the mixture of Tiersen and Le Bars, when not run-of-the-mill of electronica, including (but not limited to) [[ASIN:B003CN98BO Music Is the Film]] . So far the best pieces of Levaillant are the two early ones for piano, dating from the early 1980s. For the rest, for me the jury is still out on this composer. TT 55 minutes, liner noters in French and English.


title: Prejudice reconsidered: two major contemporary piano cycles here

text:
Denis Levaillant is a French pianist, performer and composer born in 1952, who gained some visibility in France in the 1980s and 1990s through is numerous collaborations in dance, theatre and circus, and very active for a time in modern Jazz, partnering performers like Jenny Wheeler, Jean-François Jenny-Clark, Michel Portal, Barry Altschul and Barre Philips. Levaillant was never part, apparently, of any “school” or coterie, his pieces weren’t played at IRCAM, and Ensemble Intercontemporarin did commission a piece from him – the soundtrack for Fritz Lang’s The Woman on the Moon.

And those are the very reasons why I neglected him until just now. I had this preconception that his music must be easy-listening and pop-oriented – something like, at best, Hugues Le Bars (the composer of choreographer Maurice Béjart, a composer of playful and easy tunes) and at the worst, Yann Tiersen. Well, the music of Le Bars (he died in 2014) is entertaining and witty (search on YouTube), although not very substantial and not what I’d want foremost to buy for my daily consumption. But Yann Tiersen? No thanks!

But in the case of Levaillant, boy was I wide off the mark.

I was researching the early French CD label Thesis, which published a few CDs of Levaillant’s music in the early 1990s, and listening to the few excerpts offered on Levaillant’s own website made me immediately reconsider. Impression confirmed listening to the full CD.At its best (the Twelve Movements op. 11 and Piano Transit op. 21), his piano music is fully contemporary, as contemporary as anything written any avant-garde composer of the 1980s, and it’s also superbly imaginative and impactful. Douze Mouvements op. 11, composed in 1980, is a series of studies, each based on a pianistic gesture: monody, extreme registers of symmetrical hands, percussive clusters, pointillism, masses, jumps, crossing arpeggios, trills and tremolos etc. It opens with a piece, Monodie, which sounds as if had been written by a Webern follower (and that in itself is a statement) but without the terseness and austerity of Webern, flight of (monodic) notes running up and down the full range of the keyboard. I don’t know if it is actually atonal/serial, although it sounds that way, and if so, it would be one of the best serial compositions I’ve ever heard, one that combined intellect and playfulness. What follows is a study in pianistic resources and techniques, hugely atmospheric, dramatic, powerful and imaginative, exploring texture, color, resonance, sound. Piano Transit for piano and tape (airing the reprocessed sounds of the piano), from 1983, is also hugely impressive, with the taped sounds not sounding artificially superimposed but an integral part of the sonic continuum and inspiration, because the piano isn’t played for melody but again for mass, texture and color and blends superbly and challengingly with the reprocessed sounds (as Levaillant mentions in the liner notes, in 1983 the technology to do that existed only in studio 123 of INA-GRM). Again his piano writing is superbly imaginative, atmospheric and effective. Levaillant creates what sounds like a gigantic and wild aviary, music for Romero’s remake of Hitchkock’s The Birds.

Did I say my prejudices with Levaillant were wide off the mark? I have to take part of that back. It’s fortunate that I hadn’t heard Souvenirs de Félicité before purchasing this disc, or it would have confirmed me in my negative biases against the composer. It is a radio piece, and it rambles along for more than 20 minutes with much self-indulgence (voices of Levaillant’s kids reading some kind of poetry and speaking, Levaillant himself pronouncing lines about what seems to be a separation from a woman, sounds from the studio before recording the take, etc. – and all in French, which further limits the appeal for non-French-speaking audiences) and little musical substance (Jazz impros, tremolos and scales, Yann Tiersen type of little melodies, mock big romantic piano concert), a reverie that may have had some personal interest for the composer, but leaves this listener unconcerned. Finally it ends on a fade out, and you don’t even know why it ends there rather than at any fade out point before.

But those 20 minutes don’t matter much, in the face of Douze Movements and Piano Transit, two of the most rewarding compositions of contemporary piano to have come my way in some time. TT 61:47, liner notes also in English, check under the CD's other entry for availability and best price, [[ASIN:B004W0H5S4 Musiques pour le piano]].


text:
Denis Levaillant is a French pianist, performer and composer born in 1952, who gained some visibility in France in the 1980s and 1990s through is numerous collaborations in dance, theatre and circus, and very active for a time in modern Jazz, partnering performers like Jenny Wheeler, Jean-François Jenny-Clark, Michel Portal, Barry Altschul and Barre Philips. Levaillant was never part, apparently, of any “school” or coterie, his pieces weren’t played at IRCAM, and Ensemble Intercontemporarin did commission a piece from him – the soundtrack for Fritz Lang’s The Woman on the Moon.

And those are the very reasons why I neglected him until just now. I had this preconception that his music must be easy-listening and pop-oriented – something like, at best, Hugues Le Bars (the composer of choreographer Maurice Béjart, a composer of playful and easy tunes) and at the worst, Yann Tiersen. Well, the music of Le Bars (he died in 2014) is entertaining and witty (search on YouTube), although not very substantial and not what I’d want foremost to buy for my daily consumption. But Yann Tiersen? No thanks!

But in the case of Levaillant, boy was I wide off the mark.

I was researching the early French CD label Thesis, which published a few CDs of Levaillant’s music in the early 1990s, and listening to the few excerpts offered on Levaillant’s own website made me immediately reconsider. Impression confirmed listening to the full CD.At its best (the Twelve Movements op. 11 and Piano Transit op. 21), his piano music is fully contemporary, as contemporary as anything written any avant-garde composer of the 1980s, and it’s also superbly imaginative and impactful. Douze Mouvements op. 11, composed in 1980, is a series of studies, each based on a pianistic gesture: monody, extreme registers of symmetrical hands, percussive clusters, pointillism, masses, jumps, crossing arpeggios, trills and tremolos etc. It opens with a piece, Monodie, which sounds as if had been written by a Webern follower (and that in itself is a statement) but without the terseness and austerity of Webern, flight of (monodic) notes running up and down the full range of the keyboard. I don’t know if it is actually atonal/serial, although it sounds that way, and if so, it would be one of the best serial compositions I’ve ever heard, one that combined intellect and playfulness. What follows is a study in pianistic resources and techniques, hugely atmospheric, dramatic, powerful and imaginative, exploring texture, color, resonance, sound. Piano Transit for piano and tape (airing the reprocessed sounds of the piano), from 1983, is also hugely impressive, with the taped sounds not sounding artificially superimposed but an integral part of the sonic continuum and inspiration, because the piano isn’t played for melody but again for mass, texture and color and blends superbly and challengingly with the reprocessed sounds (as Levaillant mentions in the liner notes, in 1983 the technology to do that existed only in studio 123 of INA-GRM). Again his piano writing is superbly imaginative, atmospheric and effective. Levaillant creates what sounds like a gigantic and wild aviary, music for Romero’s remake of Hitchkock’s The Birds.

Did I say my prejudices with Levaillant were wide off the mark? I have to take part of that back. It’s fortunate that I hadn’t heard Souvenirs de Félicité before purchasing this disc, or it would have confirmed me in my negative biases against the composer. It is a radio piece, and it rambles along for more than 20 minutes with much self-indulgence (voices of Levaillant’s kids reading some kind of poetry and speaking, Levaillant himself pronouncing lines about what seems to be a separation from a woman, sounds from the studio before recording the take, etc. – and all in French, which further limits the appeal for non-French-speaking audiences) and little musical substance (Jazz impros, tremolos and scales, Yann Tiersen type of little melodies, mock big romantic piano concert), a reverie that may have had some personal interest for the composer, but leaves this listener unconcerned. Finally it ends on a fade out, and you don’t even know why it ends there rather than at any fade out point before.

But those 20 minutes don’t matter much, in the face of Douze Movements and Piano Transit, two of the most rewarding compositions of contemporary piano to have come my way in some time. TT 61:47, liner notes also in English, check on the CD's other entry for availability and best price, [[ASIN:B000M2BABO Musiques Pour Le Piano]].


title: The Mahlerite purists might foam in rage - yet, these "pop" arrrangements are strangely effective

text:
Lauren Newton is an American avant-garde Jazz vocalist (soprano), born in 1952, more active in the German-speaking countries of Europe than in the US (she holds a teaching position in Lucerne, Switzerland) and a founding member of the Vienna Art Orchestra, the leading Jazz ensemble from Vienna in activity from 1977 to 2010.

To quote her English Wikipedia entry, “Lauren Newton's music is typically highly abstract, blending conventional technique with non-conventional vocal sounds.” The German Wikipedia entry is more assertive than that, calling her “one of the most important contemprorary Jazz vocalists, and according to Peter Rüedi, ‘one of the most signifcant contemporary vocal improvisers’”.

Not being into Jazz myself, I discovered her only recently, through the Vienna Arts Orchestra’s recording of arrangements of Satie, [[ASIN:B000025YVO The Minimalism of Erik Satie]]. I was arrested and intrigued enough by her few contributions – indeed quite outlandish – to want to explore more, and seeing that she had recorded Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (in two sessions, in November 1993 and March 1994) seemed tantalizing enough. Good pick.

These “pop” arrangements might send the Mahlerite purist foaming in rage, yet I find them strangely effective. Both the arrangements of Henning Schmiedt (this sounds like synthesizer rather than acoustic instruments; although guitarist, trombonist and drummer are credited) and Newton’s singing bring Mahler’s songs a despondent, ghostly quality that serves them well. All the songs are slow-moving, significantly more than they’ve ever been played in the concert hall, but with an undercurrent of pulsating rhythmic activity and even nervousness given by the drums; always present in the background. Newton’s high soprano voice is not what we are used to hearing in these works, but, surrounded as it is by a slight halo of resonance, it is haunting. “Nun see ich wohl….”, track 2, starts with a series of stark and ominous brass chords (they sound synthetic), 1:28 of them, before the music of Mahler starts running, and it is very effective. In “Wenn dein Mütterlein”, there is, within the slow-moving tempo, a playfulness in Newton’s tone that contradicts both the tempo and the meaning of what is sung (these are all about the mourning over dead children) that, again, elicits echoes of horror, gory movies, and I find it again very effective. The last song, “In Diesem Wetter…”, the most agitated in Mahler’s original composition (“Oh why did I let them go out in this storm, in this tumult?”), is the one that sounds most “rock-and-roll” (riffs of electric guitar and thumping drums), although again the voice unfolds slowly and with an other-worldly character, as if the dead were the singer, not those she was singing about.

For those, coming here from Jazz or pop and not Classical, and not familiar with Mahler’s song cycle, it is one of the most harrowing song-cyles in the history of classical music, not just because of Mahler’s setting of it, but because of the original poems, by Friedrich Rückert: because the death of the children is never vulgarly insisted upon, there is no hair-tearing and hand-wringing and exhibitionistic display of grief, it is always alluded to with utmost restraint, as if the pain were so immense that it could not be allowed to be expressed, lest it would submerge and entirely crush the sufferer. It’s not “Oh my honeys why are you dead I am suffering so much and how will I ever survive you?”, it is “Now the sun will rise again as if no misfortune had occurred during the night. A little lamp went out in my dwelling, hail to the light that cheers the world!”, it is “when your mother returns, my first gaze doesn’t fall upon her face, but upon the place where you dear little face would appear”. And because the words don’t extrovertly weep, the listener does in their stead.

The CD is very short, limited to the Kindertotenlieder song-cycle, 36 minutes including a last track with the first song played on piano alone. Still, it is entirely worth it. I just wish Newton had recorded Schubert’s Winterreise cycle in a similar vein.


title: Beautiful, despite a certain elegiac sameness

text:
It is the CD of [[ASIN:B00000DTLK Masses & Motets]] of Leonel Power by the Hillard Ensemble which sent me back to this one. They form a logical pair, and not only because the Power program was recorded in September 1980 and the Dunstable closely followed it, in September 1982. But Dunstable and Power were close contemporaries – for the little that is know of their respective biography, Dunstable slightly younger than Power, and for sure, Power died eight years before Dunstable, 1445 vs 1453 - and although Dunstable is today a more recognized figure than his elder, they were both major influences in the shaping of a distinctive English choral music. Let me quote the thorough and erudite liner notes of conductor Paul Hillier:

With Power and Dunstable, “the English composers now began to dominate the ‘avant-garde’of European musical thought. Their music was sought after and survives today mostly in foreign sources – so effective was the destruction of ‘popish’ manuscripts under Hery VIII and later, the Commonwealth; Dunstable was recognized by Tinctoris as the ‘fount and origin’ of the English style – the ‘Contenance Angloise’ as Martin le Franc described it. This English countenance or style was, above all else, a sound: ‘a new practice of making frisk concordance… rendering their song joyous and notable” (le Franc). The sound resulted from the use of thirds and sixths in harmony and from a suppleness of rhythm and melody that was newly expressive, and which was taken over by Dufay and Binchois in forming the Burgundian style”.

Of the music of Dunstable as featured here, I can say the same as in my review of the Hilliard Ensemble’s Power disc: this “may not send me as much into nirvana as the music of the later and last generation of English Catholic composers, those whose works are documented in the Eton College collection, like Cornysh, Fayrfax, Browne (see my review of [[ASIN:B000I8OOR4 Eton Choirbook Collection]]), but it certainly goes in that direction”. I’m not familiar enough with the music of both composers to say if there is a striking difference of style between both. As sung by the Hilliard Ensemble, there seems to be more rhythmic animation in Power, more uniform elegiac beauty in Dunstable. There is, indeed a certain elegiac sameness in the way the Hilliard Ensemble sings Dunstable; I already had that impression with their Power, but it is even more pronounced here. In any case the music is certainly enrapturing, and fans of late Medieval-early Renaissance English choral music should not miss it.

Since the entry here doesn't provide much information, here's the complete track listing:

1. Veni sancte spiritus - Veni creator
 Four-part isorythmic motet for Pentecost
countertenor, two tenors, baritone (plus bass) [6:25]

 2. Alma redemptoris mater
 Three-part motet to Mary (Marian antiphon)
countertenor, two tenors (plus tenor and baritone) [4:45]

 3. Credo super 'Da gaudiorum premia'
 Three-part isorhythmic mass movement
countertenor, two tenors (plus tenor and baritone) [4:44]

 4. Agnus Dei
 Three-part mass movement on a Gregorian chant
two tenors, baritone (plus bass) [4:21]

 5. Salve scema sanctitatis
 Four-part isorhythmic motet to St Catherine
countertenor, tenor, baritone, bass [7:54]

 6. Gaude Virgo salutata
 Four-part isorhythmic motet to Mary
two countertenors, two tenors (plus tenor and baritone) [6:12]

 7. Quam pulchra es
 Three-part motet from 'Canticum Canticorum'
countertenor, tenor, baritone [2:44]

 8. Salve Regina misericordiae (con Tropus Virgo Mater)
 Three-part motet to Mary
countertenor, tenor, baritone (plus tenor and bass) [9:47]

 9. Preco preheminenciae
 Four-part isorhythmic motet to John the Baptist
countertenor, two tenors, baritone (plus bass) [6:31]

Performers

David James, countertenor (1, 5, 6, 8, 9)
Ashley Stafford, countertenor (2, 3, 6, 7)
Paul Elliott, tenor (1-6, 8, 9)
Leigh Nixon, tenor (1-4, 6-9)
Rogers Covey-Crump, tenor (2, 3, 6)
Paul Hillier, baritone (1-9)
Michael George, bass (1, 4, 5, 8, 9)

Note that, when EMI purchased Virgin records in the mid 1990s, they transferred the EMI Reflexe catalog to the new label. Both the Power and the Dunstable were reisued on Virgin, respectively [[ASIN:B000006DDV Power: Masses & Motets]] and [[ASIN:B000006DDU Dunstable: Motets]] (but at the time of writing, the original Dunstable CD here stills sells significantly cheaper), and Virgin also recently issued a twofer pairing both recordings - a logical and welcome choice, but now using for Dunstable the spelling considered by modern musicology to be historically correct, but which Paul Hillier had deliberately chosen NOT to use back then ("I have preferred to retain the current spelling which seems unlikely to change and by which where the composer is knon at all, he may clearly be recognised"): [[ASIN:B0074DXR4M Power and Dunstaple: Masses & Motets]].


title: outlandish – but you wouldn’t expect less of Joëlle Léandre

text: A recital of avant-garde double bass music, recorded in December 1987. Be prepared for something wild, no melodies here but an exploration of the vast array of outlandish sounds that a double bass can do, and Léandre’s vocalizations on top of that in some, various horror screams even in Scelsi’s Maknongan and (less extreme, and with various other vocal sounds, some of them orgasmic) in Jacob Druckman’s Valentine (track 5) and Sharon Kanach’s “J’ai tant rêvé” (track 10). Beautiful soprano voice, too, in the two pieces of Cage. You’ll hate it if you hate avant-garde music and believe that music is just about beautiful romantic melodies, but if you are into that kind of exploration, it’s very entertaining. My favorites are Betsy Jolas’ Episode huitième (“Eighth Episode”) track 1, Scelsi’s Le Réveil profond (“The Deep Awakening”) track 3 (a typical Scelsi obsession with single tones and harmonics), and Léandre’s own Réflexions, track 6. TT 57 minutes.