title: Best response to those who claim that nothing beautiful was written since Britten and Shostakovich

text:
I’m not usually a great fan of repetitive minimalism and its neo-simplicity. It’s not the repetition I mind – as everybody, I’m a great fan of Ravel’s Bolero. I may object more to the (at least apparent) simplicity, which I would tend to find less nourishing than “complexity”, but it’s really – more than simply the fact that the music is always safely, even snugly tonal – the simplistic, saccharine and sentimental harmonies which often come with the repetitions of Glass, Adams, Nyman, Bryars and others that make me cringe: I find them grossly, cheaply and vulgarly manipulative, harping all too unabashedly on the sentimental string, and I don’t like to feel like a puppet hanging at the end of big wire cables.

But there must be something – either with me, or with the composers – with the genre of the string quartet, because I’ve greatly enjoyed those of Glass and Nyman, and likewise with those of Gavin Bryars.

It is not entirely clear why Bryars assigned to the first string quartet (written in 1985 for the Arditti Quartet) the subtitle “Between the National and the Bristol”. In fact, that phrase refers to the other piece paired with the Arditti’s recording of the quartet for ECM in 1986, “Three Viennese Dancers” for French Horn and percussion, which originated as an abandoned “aria for Mata Hari” project for Robert Wilson’s The CIVIL WarS. While working on his aria, Bryars came across the fact that three famous female dancers had spent the same evening in Vienna, unbeknownst of each other, with Mata Hari staying at the Bristol Hotel, Maud Allan at the National Hotel, and Isadora Duncan in an undetermined one “between the National and the Bristol”. Bryars doesn’t say that the composition of the String Quartet had anything to do with his work with Wilson, so one is left with the conjecture that he gave the piece that subtitle only to link it with the Three Viennese Dancers on the ECM disc. In fact, he had wanted to make his quartet a tribute to four great string players-composers, Ysaye, Vieuxtemps, Hindemith and Schoenberg, but due to lack of time could write in only a cursory reference to Ysaye. Bryars refers to a practical joke pulled by Ysaye on his accompanist Busoni “in the Queen’s Hotel Birmingham”, but he doesn’t say which (in fact, research shows that it involved Ysaye disguised as the grotesque ghost of Paganini and playing in the dark on a tiny violin), and it is not known if Ysaye descended in a Viennese hotel between the National and the Bristol, and when.

Anyway, the music is beautiful: cast, as its too successors, in one continuous movement but with clearly delineated episodes, mostly slow-moving, slowly pulsating, meditative, very lyrical without being saccharine, mysterious, haunting, other-worldly, with the strings often playing in the highest registers and harmonics. Sometimes the quartets of Janacek and their exacerbated lyricism come to mind.

Alexander Balanescu was the second fiddler of the Arditti Quartet when Bryars composed his Quartet for them and was influential in getting the ensemble to commission the work. He then joined Bryars’ own performing ensemble (as well as Nyman’s) and soon founded his own string quartet, for which Bryars wrote his second String Quartet (no subtitle this time), in 1990.

Other than its first fiddler, the Balanescu Quartet changed lineups over time and its once second fiddler, Jonathan Carney, went on to create the Lyric Quartet… for which Bryars wrote his third String Quartet, in 1998. So far that’s it, no fourth string quartet yet… maybe because the Lyric Quartet’s second fiddler, Edmund Coxon, hasn’t established his own ensemble (Bryars wrote in fact another string quartet, or rather a series of ten 5-minute string quartets, in 1992, in the original version of his piece with pre-recorded speaker “A Man in a Room, Gambling”).

Both Quartets Nos. 2 and 3 follow very much the style, processes and moods of the first:  more slow meditative motion, exacerbated lyricism and other-worldly sounds, more arpeggios, moments of breathtaking beauty.

String Quartet No. 1 got the honor of three recordings, by their premiere performers the Arditti Quartet in 1986 for ECM ([[ASIN:B00002614E Three Viennese Dances]]), this one by the Balanescu Quartet for Argo in 1995 and by the Lyric Quartet in 2001 for Black Box ([[ASIN:B0000631BP String Quartets 1 2 & 3]] ). Arditti didn’t tackle more Bryars, at least not on CD, so that leaves two recordings for the second String Quartet, and so far only one, by the Lyric Quartet, for the third.

All these versions are valid, all three have their (minor) plusses and (minor) minuses (and those are very subjective) but all three are fine and do full justice to the music. The Arditti Quartet, though benefiting from the legitimacy of being the premiere performers of SQ No. 1 and playing on the acoustic/electric RAAD instruments which seem to produce beautiful, other-worldly harmonics, have the disadvantage of playing only the first quartet, which gives a definite nod in favor of the two others. The Balanescu’s recording pickup affords less instrumental immediacy and impact to each instrument, they are more embedded into the whole sonic picture, but as a result they are more comfortable, less aggressively in your ears. The recording of the Lyric Quartet has left a strong ambience noise around the instruments, very perceptible at the beginning of each track and in the moments of silence. Their other-worldly harmonics at the end of SQ No. 1 are a bit shrill. In SQ 2 the Lyric has slightly more presence and immediacy but, consequently, less refinement than Balanescu. They are more dynamic in the “scherzo” passage from 6:32 to 9:58, but Balanescu’s sul ponticello harmonics thereafter (10:48 in their recording) are more snarling. Balanescu lend a haunting, other-worldly quality to the melody that develops after 15:43 (14:38 for Lyric in the same passage). The last and intensely lyrical cello melody soars more with Balanescu’s Sian Bell than it does with Lyric’s David Daniels.

But really, these are details perceptible only on close comparison, and both ensembles serve the beauty of the music. So choice between both depends really whether you want the three quartets (Lyric) or the first two quartets and the duet for two violins “The Last Days” (Balanescu): again much in the same mood as the quartets, very lyrical and songful, but more in the direction of simplicity and sentimentalism. Still, there are aspects in Balanescu’s interpretations, especially in the second quartet, that I wouldn’t want to be without. In fact, you could do like me: buy both CDs. You might, or you should. Bryars writes music that is intensely lyrical without, I find, and unlike so many contemporary composers attempting to write “intensely lyrical” music, lapsing into the sentimental. One may be, as is my case, a staunch advocate and fan of the “complexity school” that dominated Western contemporary music in the 20th century, and still consider that Bryars is the best response to all those who claim that “modern” music stopped producing anything valid after Britten and Shostakovich. Not only do they prove that they are they incapable of grasping the beauty that lies in “complex” music (and, sure, it does take a wee bit of effort, concentration, and training, and some people prefer to judge without knowing than to know without judging) but also that they’ve never heard the string quartets of Bryars.

Check out the other entry for the Balanescu's recording, it sells cheaper at the time of writing: [[ASIN:B000004CWJ Bryars: The Last Days]].


title: “An odd man out in opera literature”

text:
The liner notes make a brave attempt to justify the description of Karel Goeyvaerts’ “Aquarius” as an opera. “Let’s take as a guideline the definition of opera from the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians: ‘Opera. The generic term for musical dramatic works in which the actors sing some or all of their parts. Opera is a union of music, drama and spectacle: these have been combined in different ways and degrees in different countries and historical periods, though normally with music playing a dominant role’. Looking at it in this light, Aquarius has everything to satisfy these criteria, especially when we put the emphasis on the various ways and degrees in which the separate elements are able to be combined with each other.”

But the conclusion, as applied and applicable to Aquarius, is debatable. The New Grove Dictionary’s definition is obviously conceived to distinguish opera from “pure” theatre (“actors singing some or all of their part”), and the “some of their part” proviso provides for the genres of “opera comique”, Singspiel, vaudeville or musical comedy in which the transitions between musical numbers are spoken. And sure, you can say that in Aquarius, the “actors” sing “some of their part”. But it’s not that they speak the rest: the rest of their “part” is silent: in a staging of Aquarius, they’d mime it, or perhaps dance it. And that indeed is what Aquarius is about: a stage work (yes), with a plot (yes), but in which two thirds is purely orchestral, where the characters aren’t individualized (“Aquarius is a drama of society, not of the individual” in the composer’s own words, and the choir of 8 female and 8 male sings mostly as a chorus) and where the singers, when they do sing, sing mostly onomatopoeia, from which a comprehensible word emerges now and then, as a signpost to some kind of meaning. To which Goeyvaerts had an excellent justification: in traditional opera, the words sung are incomprehensible anyway (true, and not just because many are sung in a language not familiar to the listener. The spectator satisfies himself with some general notion of the plot, or, if he is familiar with the piece, he knows the words and their meaning already: “mill’ e tre!”). Anyway, opera or not, one may agree with the conclusion of the liner notes that  “the work becomes an odd man out in opera literature”.

Born in Antwerp, Goeyvaerts (1923-1993) is an obscure but significant figure of 20th Century Flemish and Dutch music. He studied in Paris in the late 1940s with Milhaud and Messiaen. He then, in the early 1950s, became a serialist and a pioneer of electronic music when serialism and electronic music were the hot stuff in Paris and Darmstadt: Goeyvaerts was very close to Stockhausen, who premiered with him his seminal Sonata for 2 pianos. There are some controversies as to who composed the first “total” serial composition, but Goeyvaerts, with his Sonata, is one of the contenders. At the end of the 1950s however, he went through a deep personal and artistic crisis, rejecting serialism, and as a consequence must be the only composer in history to have worked (from 1957 to 1970) for the now defunct Belgian airline company Sabena. He then worked for the Belgian public radio. All that time he kept privately composing, experimenting with different techniques and aesthetics. From 1975 onwards he experimented a personal version of repetitive minimalism, and then spent the last decade of his life working on Aquarius.

The CD set comes with an extensive booklet, too verbose even when it describes the sources of Goeyvaert’s inspiration for Aquarius, which he viewed (rightly so) as his “magnum opus”: Among these, Marilyn Ferguson’s “The Aquarian Conspiracy. Personal and Social Transformations in the 1980s” plays a major part. Sorry if offend fans of Mrs Ferguson’s theories (I read on Wikipedia that she had some following), but it sounds to me like a hodgepodge of rambling New Age pipe dreams, proving only that irrationality and hocus pocus have a brilliant past and a bright future (we knew that already). Not that it’s a bother in Aquarius: unlike a book which purports to be “scientific”, an opera plot doesn’t need to be “rational”, and even less so with a “non-opera” plot as Goeyvaert’s idiosyncratic stage work. Goeyvaerts’ plot is about the way “society” will emerge and free itself from “the stiffness of a constrained existence” and “the strict limitation of personal enthusiasm” and reach “The Holy City” of personal development and total equality into the sky. If you ask me, this is no more (but no less) mystagogically hare-brained than the plot of Wagner’s Parsifal – no coincidence that Goeyvaerts used the word Bühnenweihfestspiel in relation to his own work. Goeyvaerts’ at least has the advantage of containing no words or words of no importance, so there is no attraction to concentrate on anything else but the music.

Indeed, while the absence of lyrics in the traditional sense would certainly make Aquarius a piece posing a great challenge to a stage director (but no more than Peter Handke’s “The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other”, a theatre play without any words, which incidentally shows that the definition of “theatre” would also more complex than “a stage work in which actors speak some or all of their parts”, but more something like “a live stage work in which actors enact some kind of a plot, conveyed usually through spoken words”), it’s not a problem, and it’s even an advantage, in the context of a sound recording.

What about the music, then? It sounds to my ears very much like a continuation and development of the neo-classical style of Stravinsky as featured in the Symphony in Three Movements, Symphony in C or The Rake’s Progress. Not a bad model, if not entirely cutting-edge. A little bit of Carl Orff also (beginning of CD 1 track 2). Not that I want to reduce Goeyvaerts’ style to a derivation of Stravinsky or Orff: he explores other expressions, like his processes of construction/deconstruction typical of his personal brand of minimalism. The music is upbeat, dynamic, rhythmic and syncopated, at times ritualistic and grandiose, lyrical and melismatic in its moments of lyricism, with moments of gossamer orchestration, accessible without being “easy-listening”. Claude Vivier also comes to mind, for the onomatopoeia and melismata, also for the attraction to Utopia and the willingness to explore new theatrical paths. TT 50 + 57 minutes. This entry here is for barcode 797562899974, which seems to be a distributor's (Albany) rather than the label's barcode. There are two other entries linked to Megadisc's "legitimate" barcodes, [[ASIN:B00000JLEZ Aquarius]] barcode 413356861520 and [[ASIN:B00007JR5P Aquarius]] barcode 5413356861525.


title: the music is better than the composer's philistine stance would let you expect

text:
Born in 1951, Dutch composer Jacob Ter Veldhuis started as a rock musician, although he is also a conservatory-trained composer. His stylistic stance as expressed in the liner notes smacks of philistinism – “in contrast to the other contemporary art forms, new music is engulfed in clouds of intellectualism put about by composers., scholars and other experts. Such an academic approach to music does not interest me. In music I express myself emotionally, spiritually, rather than rationally. Much new music is bookish and lacking ‘duende’ (magic, spell), the vitality of other musical genres. I try to make my approach to music as elementary as possible. I compose with my ears, which is – strangely enough – rather exceptional these days”. That kind of populist proclamation makes me see red whenever I meet it – and it is often met these days: when the subject comes to contemporary music, philistinism is hip. In addition to which, I’ve usually found the music that derives from that kind of "philosophy"' absolutely trite and derivative, saccharine and shallow.

Fortunately I listened to the CD before reading the liner notes, and the music is better than that. Quartet No. 1, from 1990, sounds like the kind of "Classical meets World Music” style that the Balanescu or Kronos Quartets have illustrated: catchy tunes (very Prokofiev-sounding), dance-like repetition, rhythmic syncopation, wistful-sentimental in the slow movements (the quartet alternates fast-slow-fast-slow). The quartet reminded me of Terry Riley's [[ASIN:B000005IZP Riley: Salome Dances for Peace]]. It is titled “Versailles” after the palace and Ter Verldhuis provides a programmatic explanation to each movement, but I find it bogus. If you want music for or about Versailles listen to Lulli and Charpentier, Ter Veldhuis’ quartet stands on its own. SQ No. 2, from 1992, written in the aftermath of the first Gulf War and subtitled “Postnuclear Winterscenario”, is a continuous slow movement, running 11 minutes, mourning and bleak, and here the bleakest moments in Shostakovich’s last quartets can come to mind, with whiffs of Britten maybe.

Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Britten: none of this is cutting edge, it’s all quite predictable, but it’s pretty, and easy listening.

Although following the same principles, and composed of a slow movement followed by a fast one, SQ 3 (1994) is more elaborate and sophisticated in its harmonies, rhythms, architecture and expression, and for that reason the most impactful of the three. The quartets of Kevin Volans come to mind ([[ASIN:B000004CW3 Volans: String Quartets 2 & 3]]), but this one has genuine originality.

TT 51 minutes, booklet presentation is irksomely hip, with some words capitalized apparently at random. Well, better not read the liner notes anyway, just listen to the music. PS from September 2017: the recording was reissued in 2013 by Challenge Classics. You won't find this CD on Amazon using the obvious search criteria of composer and performers, in fact you you won't find unless you know its barcode or follow this link, [[ASIN:B006T1YP6O There Must Be Some Way Out of Here]], because, by one of those usual and infuriating botches that seem to proliferate on Amazon, it is now attributed to "Artist" Georg Frideric Handel!!! At the time of writing it sells much cheaper in the Challenge edition.


title: a Flemish independent, worth investigating

text:
Megadisc Classics is a label made famous with fans of contemporary music for bringing to the limelight, in the early 1990s, the music of Shostakovich’s maverick student Galina Ustvolskaya ([[ASIN:B000024YA2 Galina Ustvolskaya: Piano Sonatas]] / [[ASIN:B000026CLX Preludes & Compositions]] / [[ASIN:B00002828C Ustvolskaya: Trio, Sonata & Octet]] / [[ASIN:B00002543R Galina Ustvolskaya: Grand Duet & Duet]] / [[ASIN:B00008LLHU Galina Ustvolskaya: Piano Concerto / Symphony No.1]] and [[ASIN:B00007GXWT Symphonies 2, 3, 4 & 5]]). As Megadisc’s website explains, “Megadisc Classics started in 1993 when Antwerp was Cultural Capital of Europe and the owner of Megadisc Ric Urmel found to his amazement that there were no CD recordings of the composer Karel Goeyvaerts” (in fact the first releases are copyrighted 1992). This one, Megadisc Classics MDC 7877, was their first “contemporary-classical” release.

There’s a very thorough article on Goeyvaerts on French Wikipedia, the English version is more succinct. Born in Antwerp, Goeyvaerts (1923-1993) studied in Paris in the late 1940s with Milhaud and Messiaen. He then, in the early 1950s, became a serialist and a pioneer of electronic music when serialism and electronic music were the hot stuff in Paris and Darmstadt: Goeyvaerts was very close to Stockhausen, who premiered with him his seminal Sonata for 2 pianos. There are some controversies as to who composed the first “total” serial composition, but Goeyvaerts, with his Sonata, is one of the contenders. At the end of the 1950s however, he went through a deep personal and artistic crisis, rejecting serialism, and as a consequence must be the only composer in history to have worked (from 1957 to 1970) for the now defunct Belgian airline company Sabena. He then worked for the Belgian public radio. All that time he kept privately composing, experimenting with different techniques and aesthetics. From 1975 onwards he experimented a personal version of repetitive minimalism, and the pieces recorded here all illustrate that late compositional phase. He spent the last decade of his life working on his “opera” (for eight baritones and eight sopranos) Aquarius.

While Goeyvaerts derives some of his compositional techniques from repetitive minimalism, using processes of repetition, overlapping, development through rise and fall of component parts, his music doesn’t sound at all like American repetitive minimalism, it is more abstract and less sensuous, because his harmonies always eschew the saccharine tonal harmonies favored by the American minimalists, and because his themes are less continuous and smooth, the cells he develops are more shards of sound. The cycle of Litanies was composed between 1979 and 1982 and ultimately numbered five pieces, of which three are performed here. Litanie 1 for piano (1979) is percussive, syncopated and pointillistic, sounding something like Nancarrow meets Webern. Litanie 2 for three percussionists (1990) alternates from subtle and gossamer colors to more violent outbursts, more Varèse than minimalism, but without the strong pulse of Ionisation. Litanie 4 (1982) is scored for soprano, flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano. The voice is treated instrumentally, singing pure onomatopoeia, and the liner notes appropriately speak of “ejaculations”, with the voice and instruments proceeding in combined, pointillistic explosive outbursts. Here the music of French-Greek composer Georges Aperghis vaguely comes to mind. The three pieces share a ritualistic quality, hence the general title.

The Voices of Aquarius (1986) for soprano and chamber ensemble are an offshoot of Goeyvaerts’ opera project and, with the voice again treated instrumentally (shards of texts in hardly recognizable languages – German, French, maybe English - can be heard, if not understood), the piece is more melismatic than Litanie 4. Here the music of Claude Vivier may come to mind.

Das Haar (The Hair), for five winds and five strings, from 1990, after a line from Brecht’s The Ballad of the Drowned Maiden, is Goeyvaerts most deeply personal and autobiographical piece, having been inspired by his perceptions and impressions on his ICU bed after suffering a heart attack in 1989. Again shards of melodies, sometimes calm, sometimes nervous and anguished.

All this draws the image of an independently-minded composer bound to no rules or strictures, and makes Goeyvaerts a composer worth exploring further. Here are the other CDs of his music on Megadisc (note that Megadisc’s label numbering went backwards, highest numbers = earliest releases. I guess they wanted to do everything unlike everybody else, or maybe it was something about being Belgian):

MDC 7872/3, gathering [[ASIN:B000028283 Goeyvaerts: Litanies 1 - 5]] including the same three performances as here.
MDC 7853 works for string quartet [[ASIN:B00007JR5Q Seven Seals: For String Quartet]] or [[ASIN:B00000IMGX Seven Seals / For String Quartet]]
MDC 7850/51 Aquarius the opera [[ASIN:B00000JLEZ Aquarius]] or [[ASIN:B00007JR5P Aquarius]]
MDC 7848 [[ASIN:B000028285 Goeyvaerts: Works for piano, 1964 - 1990]]
MDC 7845 [[ASIN:B00007JR64 Sonate N 1 Pour 2 Pianos, The Serial Works]]
DC 7829/30 various compositions 1959-1976 [[ASIN:B00007JR6T amor[t]]] or [[ASIN:B000056T6Q Orchestral Choral & Chamber Music]]


title: If you are looking for Chédeville’s Saisons Amusantes, you won’t find them here

text:
The enterprises of Nicolas Chédeville offer a good testimony of Vivaldi’s fame in France under the reign of King Louis XV. Chédeville was “oboist of the King’s Chamber and bagpipe player of the Royal Academy of Music” (e.g. the opera), and upon his retirement in 1748, “musette” master of the King’s daughters (the musette was the gentrified bagpipe in vogue at the court). As the liner notes of the competing CD by the Palladian Ensemble put it, he was the “high priest (though not the founder) of an improbable bagpipe and hurdy-gurdy cult to which much of the French high society surrendered in the early 18th century”. He was also an unabashed plagiarist, although the notion applied to the 18th century is anachronistic. Not only did he see fit to publish, under the Venetian composer’s name, a collection of six sonatas for bagpipe (musette), hurdy-gurdy (vièle), flute, oboe, violin (all "either", not "and") and continuo, “Il Pastor Fido”, long known as (and, although the forgery was exposed as early as 1749, still often presented under the title) “Vivaldi’s opus 13”, in which he “recycled themes and passages culled from the composer’s published concertos (and from the concertos of other composers that he may have believed were Vivaldi’s), adding much material of his own composition, which, ironically, turns out to be the most attractive music in the volume” (Michael Talbot, [[ASIN:1843838192 The Vivaldi Compendium]]). Furthermore, in 1739, he obtained a Royal Privilege (or license) to publish “Vivaldi’s Spring, a concerto, and other concertos and sonatas chosen from among all the Italian composers, arranged, transposed and modified to that they can be easily played on the musette, hurdy-gurdy or flute…” Vivaldi’s opus 8 cycle, comprising The Four Seasons, had been originally published in 1725.

“Arranged, transposed and modified”, indeed. No “historically-informed performance” and preoccupation of “Urtext” fidelity back in the 18th Century. In fact Chédeville “re-shuffles” as much as he arranges. The only concerto which is indeed an arrangement, and nothing else but an arrangement of the original is Spring (not note for note, there is some minor recomposing). Even in Autmn, Chédeville uses as Largo the one from Winter. And that’s all he actually arranges from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. The one he titles Summer (more precisely: “The Pleasures of Summer”: and indeed, with its crushing heat and violent storms, Vivaldi’s summer wasn’t so pleasurable. Not good for the French high society that was Chédeville’s public!) is not at all an arrangement of Vivaldi’s respective concerto, but of Opus 8 No. 12 for the first two movements and of the first movement of Opus 8 No. 10 “La Caccia” for the Finale (funny, in view of the fact that Vivaldi’s hunting scene takes place in the Finale of Autumn). Likewise with Winter, which is an arrangement of Opus 8 No. 7 in its first movement and of No. 9 for the two others. And to boot, Chédeville adds two seasons to the four usual suspects: one he calls “The Harvest”, placed after Summer and before Autumn, an arrangement of the outer movements of Opus 8 No. 8 and the Largo of Opus 8 No. 7, and “The Pleasures of the Saint-Martin” (after 4th Century Martin, Bishop of Tours, and a very popular Saint’s Day in France before the Revolution, on November 11, an occasion for all-night feasting, singing and dancing), a “straight” arrangement of Opus 8 No. 6, after Autumn and before Winter.

But if you came here enticed by the title of this Claves CD, “Nicolas Chédeville Les Saisons Amusantes” and hoping to hear Chédeville’s take on Vivaldi’s opus 8, you will be disappointed. Recorder player Conrad Steinmann and partners, recorded in 1982, hardly play Chédeville at all. They offer a series of transcriptions of some – but not even all – of Vivaldi’s Seasons and a few additional movements from other concertos from Opus 8 alright, but most of them by Steinmann himself (it’s all in the German subtitle: “in einer Neufassung von Conrad Steinmann”), and even when they play Chédeville’s, it’s not exactly Chédeville’s….

Spring for instance has absolutely nothing from, or even inspired by Chédeville. The first movement is interesting nonetheless, as it is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous transcription for solo flute or recorder: so if it is not Chédeville, it is nonetheless a real “period transcription”, and a significant one historically. That we’re given only the first movement may not be too much of a loss: the solo recorder playing Vivaldi’s famous tunes doesn’t necessarily sustain interest over a long span. The second and third movements are Steinmann’s arrangements, directly from Vivaldi rather than from Chédeville. The second movement, in particular, re-introduces the “barking dog” viola left out by Chédeville (actually a “pardessus de viole”, e.g. a viola da gamba playing an octave above the tenor viola da gamba), together with solo recorder and violin, and to those Steinmann adds harpsichord in the Finale. The latter is played too ploddingly to evoke the joyous dance of shepherds and nymphs described by Vivaldi’s explanatory sonnet.

For whichever reason Steinmann places The Harvest second and before Summer: in Chédeville’s score it comes in between Summer and Autumn. The first movement is again Steinmann’s arrangement, and this time slightly more inspired by Chédeville’s in that the hurdy-gurdy is present, but where Chédeville had ascribed all the solos to bagpipe or hurdy-gurdy, Steinmann confines its role to the tutti and attributes the solos (which he takes from Vivaldi’s original and not from Chédeville’s recomposing) to violin. Steinmann claims that second and third movement are Chédeville’s, but this is not the case with the Finale: again the hurdy-gurdy is confined to the tutti and the (extended) solos are attributed to recorder. Only the second movement is played exactly as Chédeville wrote it.

Then comes Steinmann’s Summer, and it is NOT Chédeville’s but Vivaldi’s, e.g. not the combination of Opus 8 No. 12 and No. 10, but transcriptions from Vivaldi Summer, for recorder, violin and continuo, with the hurdy-gurdy added only in the various strorm tutti. The color it adds is effective, but it isn’t Chédeville at all. In the first movement the violin plays the cuckoo, but it’s the recorder that takes the main share of the solos, the turtledove and bullfinch, and later on the plaintive villager, then the Largo. Roles are more evenly shared in the Finale.

Again Pleasures of the Saint-Martin (e.g. Opus 8 No. 6) comes not in its place, after Autumn, but before, and it is limited to the Largo, but at least this is Chédeville’s arrangement exactly as he wrote it. Autumn is Steinmann’s arrangement and without hurdy-gurdy. The first movement is supposed to depict the villagers’ joyous dance to celebrate the new harvest, but at Steinmann’s tempo it’s a rather elegant and dignified dance, and played by recorder and very straight, the drunkard sounds lively and gay, and not inebriated at all – I guess they harvested something else than grape. You even wonder why a sudden lull seems to fall on him at 3:32. Steinmann’s Autumn – and Seasons – end with the “slumbering” Largo: no hunting Finale (another departure from Chédeville), no Winter.

So, really, the title under which Claves marketed this CD is deceptive: what you get from Chédeville are only two Largos, and a re-arranged Finale from Harvest. The rest is Steinmann’s arrangement of some, not all, of Vivaldi’s Seasons, for recorder, violin and continuo (viola da gamba and harpsichord), and very occasionally hurdy-gurdy. If any inspiration from Chédeville, it is more in the rescoring of Vivaldi’s Seasons for a small ensemble of two solo instruments and continuo, than for Chédeville’s emblematic use of solo hurdy-gurdy or musette. I’m giving this CD three stars, which according to Amazon means “it’s okay”, because, sure, and arrangement for even the reduced lineup of recorder, violin, gamba, harpsichord and occasional hurdy-gurdy works, the beauty of Vivaldi’s music comes through. So even as it is, “it’s okay”.  But, even independent of one’s reaction to the arrangements, Steinmann and partners' interpretation is nothing to rave about, some movements are fine, but as mentioned some of the Allegros tend to plod. And… Seasons without a hunting expedition in autumn and without a winter, really? In a very similar arrangement for recorder, violin, cello and harpsichord (but no hurdy-gurdy or bagpipe), Red Priest’s 2003 recording ([[ASIN:B0000CERI1 Four Seasons]]) provides infinitely more imagination, daringness, fun and excitement – and the full Vivaldi Seasons. And it’s not the innocuous little pieces for hurdy-gurdy of Nicolas and his older brother Esprit Philippe Chédeville given here as interludes that will tip the scales.

Now, for Chédeville’s “authentic” Seasons, there’s not much choice. The Palladian Ensemble, recorded in 1997, at least play Chédeville, but only the four “canonic” Seasons, not The Harvest and The Pleasures of the Saint-Martin, and they too re-arrange Chédeville and attribute to recorder and violin most of the hurdy-gurdy solos. I don’t have much information about Jacques Vandeville’s recording on REM, [[ASIN:B000009JAG Seasons / 6 Concerti]], except that he plays the six concertos, but with oboe solo, not Chédeville’s bagpipe (although it is probably a better approximation than recorder or violin). So that leaves the version by Les Eclairs de Musique, [[ASIN:B0000918QE Printems Ou Les Saisons Amusantes]], which seems to be the complete and “original” Chédeville with hurdy-gurdy, but from the 30” excerpts on Amazon I suspect that they also reattribute many of the solos to flute or violin; apparently, there’s just so much solo hurdy-gurdy that a person in its right mind can take. But I'm aware of no version of Saisons Amusantes as Chédeville intended them, with "musette" solo. It seems to be an art and skill that disappeared with the Chédevilles and the French "Ancien Régime".


title: I find the Amsterdam Guitar Trio preferable

text:
About the legitimacy and appeal of transcriptions in general and transcriptions of the Four Seasons in particular, allow me to refer the reader to my review of the competing version by the Amsterdam Guitar Trio, [[ASIN:B000003FGP The Four Seasons]], with many product links to other transcriptions of Vivaldi’s masterpiece, from two pianos to synthesizer or Japanese zither ensemble.

One may have harbored doubts at the ability of a guitar ensemble, with its very homogeneous timbres and limited registrational range, to emulate the gamut of colors elicited by Vivaldi’s original bowed-string ensemble and to picture as graphically all the little scenes and episodes described by the composer’s explanatory sonnets: birds chirping, winds soft and violent blowing, dogs barking, beasts howling, hunting horns resounding, ice breaking…

And to an extent, it is true. In fact, I don’t know what the music would evoke to someone who’d never heard the original and didn’t know what it was supposed to depict. The raindrops in the Largo of Winter, sure. But while the cuckoo and bullfinch in summer are quite recognizable even at the guitars (track 4 at 0:53 and 2:11), would even the trio of chirping birds in the first movement of Spring (track 1 at 0:28) really conjure the image of birds joyously singing, or just guitars serenading? And likewise with the turtledove in summer (track 4 at 1:46), or would it be construed as a dirge for a dead bullfighter, similar to the one Manuel de Falla wrote in his Homenaje? But in truth, for most listeners, the ghost memory of the original will always hover around.

Nonetheless, the beauty of Vivaldi's music comes through, the original is beautifully suggested, and in fact, the loss of the variety of the original colors of the string ensemble enables one to concentrate on the Seasons as “pure” music rather than as descriptive music – and it is certainly beautiful music. As my reference to Manuel de Falla indicates, it doesn’t even sound to me specifically 18th century, more like the kind of gentle 20th century music that Joachin Rodrigo could have composed and Alexandre Lagoya could have played.

That said, I find the version by the Amsterdam Guitar Trio preferable to this one by the Tetra Guitar Quartet: it is more gentle in tone – Tetra sounds constantly more metallic and aggressive, which works well in the storm scenes of Spring and Summer or the hunting Finale of Autumn, but not so well in the more pastoral moments - and in interpretive approach as well: Tetra’s Largos are always more urgent than Amsterdam Trio’s, to the point, in the Largo of Spring, of sounding agitated, almost high-strung, with an undercurrent of anxiety, where Amsterdam’s is appeased and nostalgic.

But the urgency doesn’t extend to all the Allegros, and their trudging Finale of Spring isn’t made up by the fine exchanges between three of the four guitars, and the lovely playing with harmonics (1:58). Their first movement of Winter is also more laid-back, less dramatic than the Amsterdamers’. Their technique also sounds awkward in some of the fast runs in some Allegros, or maybe it’ s that the Amsterdam Trio’s transcription is more idiomatic for the guitar. But there are nice things in the transcription for four guitars, like added echo-melodies attributed to second guitar in the first Allegro of Summer or added “left-hand” runs. Playing The Seasons with a quartet allows for fine exchanges between them, where The Amsterdam Trio is more limited to a one-to-a-part approach. As with the Amsterdamers, their Winter is transposed a semi-tone down (probably to avoid the four flats of Vivaldi’s F-minor key). As with the Amsterdamers, the movement that changes most is the Largo of Autumn, where the guitars can’t sustain a long note as violins do and make up with arpeggio filling. In the other Largos, the Amsterdam trio add imaginative and profuse ornamentation, Tetra is more score-bound. Their cuckoo in summer is fine, a Flamenco cuckoo (track 4 at 0:52).

There’s a relatively loud background noise that could be hall ambience rather than tape hiss, but you hear it only in the moments of silence. Unlike the Amsterdam Trio, Tetra adds two complements, the chamber concerto with lute RV 93 and Concerto for thee violins opus 3 No. 10, for a TT of 58:23.

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title: Antonio, what are you trying to tell me ?

text:
There are coincidences that are too incredible to seem true. So, I’m currently doing some extensive comparative listening of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, including transcriptions, and I’ve just reviewed a number of versions for flute or recorder.

And then, I buy a lot of CDs, on Amazon and on eBay: it doesn’t matter if I don’t know the composer and his music, if the CDs are cheap and seem interesting, I’ll buy them. I’m just hoarding for later – when will later come, I don’t know, probably never, I’ll have to live 10 lives, but I’m hoarding anyway – and not telling my shrink anything about this, because I don’t really want it to stop.

Just received a huge parcel, one of my latest purchases on eBay, and since I need to list all those new arrivals (or I’ll forget that I ever bought them, and might inadvertently buy again – it occasionally happens, even with my lists), I’m not going to actively listen to another Four Seasons, so I pull out of the box this disc of Mogens Christensen, “Music for Recorder” – my purchase includes a number of CDs by this composer, along with many other CDs of contemporary music. There are too many good composers around the world, including plenty from the Scandinavian countries, and I never got around to Mogens Christensen, so here’s my chance. Bird music, apparently, a series of pieces titled “Nocturnal Birds”, and that’s certainly a link, however oblique, to Vivaldi’s Seasons, and it’s probably why I zeroed in on this one. Plus the fact that I’m curious to hear what a contemporary composer can do with the recorder, how original he will be with the instrument.

Well, the disc is great. There are too many good composers around the world and occasionally I chance on one of them that I had never heard or heard of before, and until I’ve heard all of them, how can I stop buying all those CDs?

So, Christensen has a fascination with the recorder, and not just because he is (or was) married to a recorder player. As the excellent liner notes put it: “like most composers of the present day, Mogens Christensen holds a keen interest in the timbral properties of sound. The recorder has a very nuanced range of sound possibilities. It is not just one, but several instrument (the bass, tenor, alto, descant and sopranino varieties are the ones most frequently used) each of them with its own peculiarities. The recorder is, of all instruments the one most capable of imitating bird-song, another one of Mogens Christensen’s fascinations”. The CD features three works of his. Winter Light, a 10-minute piece for recorder and violin, was written first, in 1991, and earned a number of prizes. It draws its inspiration from “the thousands of different lightings experienced on a winter day: from the gentle prism of a snowflake to the overwhelming mass of light from a low sun through twilight’s introverted mood”. The “Concerto for Recorders and Sinfonietta” “A Fancyer’s Delight”, track 10, is from 1993. It is based on a collection of melodies published in 1717, The Bird Fancyer’s Delight, “containing a variety of tunes for the recorder which were diligently taught to domestic birds” (I see that it, or excerpts from it, was recorded at least once in the LP era, [[ASIN:B001Q1P930 The Bird Fancyer's Delight or Choice Observations and Directions Concerning Ye Teaching of All Sorts of Singing Birds (Singingbirds)]]. Despite its title, the Vanguard LP by René Clemencic contains in fact only one tune from the collection, and a variety of works for recorder by other composers, [[ASIN:B008F0BZAG The Bird Fancyer's Delight [LP record]]]). That in turn triggered Christensen to write (between 1993 and 1998) his own Four Seasons, the cycle of four pieces “Nocturnal Birds”, one per season, and all at night. Spring and Autumn are scored for solo recorder, Winter (scored for bass recorder) adds tape and electronics, and Midsummer (obviously for the reference to Shakespeare) is scored for recorders, guitar and electronics. They are interspersed with three short tunes from the original collection of Bird Fancyer’s Delight.

They are all fascinating pieces, using – buyers without an ear for contemporary music, beware: this is not always “pretty” music – the full array of contemporary performance techniques, like “dirty” sounds with parasite harmonics and overtones (blending with those of solo violin in Winter Light), or vocalizing while blowing, but they are always integrated into a coherent, colorful and evocative musical discourse. Birds of a Spring Night for solo recorder sounds like wild and excited birds alright, and a welcome change from those of Vivaldi or Messiaen, Autmun Night sounds more like “pure” music, with the recorder producing tones and overtones that make it at times almost evocative of the organ, there’s a particular wistfulness to the combination of guitar, recorder and electronics in Midsummer Night. Running almost 18 minutes, Birds of a Winter Night is the longest of the four, and sounds like a nocturnal meditative soliloquy rather than like birds, with the tape and electronics adding their ghostly washes of resonance. The Concerto is superb too, full of birds again, playful or wild, but it’s not just “pretty”, it’s witty, fun, original, with a sure hand at combining recorder and the instrumental ensemble and conjuring a wide array of colors from the latter. This and the other pieces on the CD deserve to be a staple of the repertoire of every recorder player even moderately interested in contemporary music for their instrument.

And that’s where the coincidences come in. Already, that I’m just occasionally escaping my on-going obsessive exploration of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons by haphazardly picking out a CD from my new arrivals boxes that would seem to have nothing, but nothing in common with Vivaldi, and precisely chance on a contemporary Four Seasons, what are the odds of that? And on top of that, here comes the Concerto for Recorders and Sinfonietta: and guess what happens at 2:42? A short quotation from the bird-chirping dialogue in the first movement of Spring, the first concerto from the Seasons. In fact the concerto includes many such quotations, “from a plethora of composers whose music ever had anything to do with birds, such as Van Eyck, Byrd, Vivaldi, Pasquini, Saraste, Respighi, Stravinsky, and Messiaen”, but although I’ve spotted a few of them (without being able to identify any of the sources), they don’t protrude as alien elements, which is always the pitfall of “post-modern” quotations (the works of Schnittke are a good example), they are fully integrated in the flow of the music, and it’s the case too with the Vivaldi quotation.

Anyway, what’s that message from destiny, all these little nods from The Four Seasons? Okay, I guess, if you take it rationally, the chances weren’t exactly zero, since the choice of a CD of contemporary recorder was both the logical impulse from my Vivaldi listening, and likely, because of the very nature of the instrument, to feature something inspired by birds and nature. Okay. Still, what are the odds that I bought and received that CD just right now – no cause and effect relation here, just an eBay seller who happened to offer a number of Christensen CDs for cheap, could have happened two or ten years ago or in two or ten years or never, but it happened right now. Antonio, what are you trying to tell me from the netherworld????

And this is only volume 1? As of 1999, when the recording was made, Christensen had composed six other works involving the recorder? I need to find volume 2. Only, it seems never to have been released – and in a private correspondence Christensen has confirmed that to me, but he’s pointed out that Da Capo has recently released a kind of volume 2, [[ASIN:B00Q6RC5J0 Busy Bees & Birds]]. So now I’m going to have to buy more. As if I didn’t have enough already.


title: a cross-breed of free jazz, whiffs of world music, and crossover contemporary/dance music

text:
Transes Européennes was a small French label established in the mid-1990s by percussionist Pablo Cueco, aimed at releasing “the works of artists who include in their creative approach the existence of other cultures”. They were short-lived and issued no more, I think, than 30 recordings, most of them, apparently, devoted to contemporary jazz/world music crossover. A few of those have been of interest to me, the ones with music by the Greek-French composer and pioneer of “theatre musical” Georges Aperghis ([[ASIN:B000024YKN Triptyque]], [[ASIN:B00004UZJ3 Parcours (Musiques De G.Aperghis)]]), and those of percussionist Jean-Pierre Drouet (himself early on associated with Aperghis and music-theatre), [[ASIN:B00004S3I7 Jean-Pierre Drouet Solo]] and [[ASIN:B00004S3I5 Drouet: Les Variations D'Ulysse]]. So I thought I’d explore more when prices were cheap enough to make the exploration risk-less, and this CD of Pablo Cueco’s own music seemed the perfect choice.

Here – the title means Sun, Ground, Shadow & Sky – Cueco is credited as percussionist (playing the Brasilian berimbao and the North-African zarb, which, incidentally, is also a French slang word for “bizarre” = “zar-bi” = “zarb”) and artistic director of the Transes européennes Orchestra conducted by Patricio Villarroel. The orchestra is sizeable and its layout makes it closer to an ensemble of classical contemporary music rather than to a jazz combo: violin, cello, flute(s), oboe, bass clarinet, cornet, harp, piano and a vast array of percussions played by three players.

The music sounds like a combination of free jazz, with some whiffs of world music (especially in the very “African”-sounding percussion of track 7, Sombra III, and track 10, Cielo II, and in the Mid-eastern-sounding cello passage of track 8, Sombra IV), and the kind of crossover of dance music and contemporary exemplified by composers like Steve Martland or Graham Fitkin. It is sometimes invigoratingly rowdy, with some invention in timbres (at the beginning of track 5, Sombra 1, with what sounds like a low-ranged foghorn – I’m not sure which instrument(s) produce(s) that sound, a bass flute? Amateurs of free jazz and the kind of contemporary dance music illustrated by composers like Steve Martland may have an interest for this. TT 43 minutes.


title: Harnoncourt’s Four Seasons: not just the music of Vivaldi – the theatre of Vivaldi

text:
I never had this version in the LP era (or in the CD era until just now). The few excerpts I heard of it back then shocked me so much, went so much against my notions and expectations of how Spring should sound, that I kept it at bay, “vade retro Satanas”, for the next, well, decades. What I heard sounded to me like brutalized lines, arbitrary shifts of tempo, wayward phrasings. And obviously I wasn’t the only one to react that way. Among the critics of the time, there were those who were won over and raved upon it, and those who rejected it as repulsively as I did. Certainly the recording was controversial, even antagonizing – a trademark that Harnoncourt would probably have been proud of.

But then, little did I know back then – both figuratively and concretely. My expectations were shaped by the versions I knew, and these must have been Karajan’s first version with Michel Schwalbé and the Berlin Philharmonic (from 1972, [[ASIN:B000001G67 Four Seasons]]), and in the late 1970s or early 1980s, Jean-Claude Malgoire’s ([[ASIN:B000026I0Q Four Seasons, Violin Concertos]]) – like Harnoncourt’s one of the first on period instruments and released roughly at the same time.

In fact, Harnoncourt’s and Malgoire’s recordings were part of the earliest batch of Seasons recordings on period instruments. If I haven't missed anything, the very first recording on period instruments was Trevor Pinnock’s with his English Concerto for CRD, made May 1976, with the rest of the Opus 8 cycle recorded in April 77 ([[ASIN:B002NXSSPQ Vivaldi: Concertos, Op. 8 - The Four Seasons]]). The Four Seasons were first released individually, and reviewed in The Gramophone of November 1977; the rest came out a little less than a year later. Teldec/Warner also provides two recording dates for Harnoncourt, October 76 and March 77: I am supposing that the Seasons were recorded first, than the rest of the Opus 8 cycle. But Teldec originally published the complete cycle, and it was reviewed in The Gramophone of March 1978. Collegium Aureum followed, with a recording made in February 1977 ([[ASIN:B00002586S Vivaldi: Le Quattro Stagione (Four Seasons); La Tempesta di Mare; Il Piacere]], Gramophone review from October 1979). Malgoire was recorded in January 1978 and reviewed in The Gramophone of August. Kuijken and Petite Bande recorded their version in June 1979, [[ASIN:B00002470I Four Seasons: Oboe Concertos]].

And hearing these versions now, when so much has happened since on the front of Vivaldi interpretation, and now that I’ve listened to much, much more, score in hand, I discover how much and how radically my expectations have changed.

Vivaldi’s Four Seasons are famously introduced by four sonnets, one per season, of poor poetry but presumed to be from Vivaldi himself, and which give the underlying program of his four violin concertos, with direct and precise correspondences in the various episodes of the score. And when you read the successive verses under their respective place in the score, it becomes obvious how much Vivaldi’s Seasons are not just “music”, not even “evocative” music. They are descriptive music, even graphically descriptive music, and even more than that: they are theatre in music.

But, listening to all those versions, from the very first recording made in 1942 by Bernardo Molinari and the Rome Saint Cecilia Orchestra ([[ASIN:B0002N6T8M Four Seasons]]), to those of the 1970s and later, it is striking how so many of them seem to have given short shrift to the theatre in Vivaldi’s Seasons, and played them as if they were “just” music with no programmatic content. A listener without the score, sonnets and precise correspondence between verse and score would be hard put to recognize what the music was talking about. Sure, bird songs in the first movements of Spring and Summer, that’s pretty easy – although the cuckoo is not always recognizable in the first movement of Summer, not when tempo plods. Spring and summer storms maybe (not always recognizable, even them, at the plodding tempos adopted by many), soft winds of spring, flowing water-sources, winter chill.

But dog barking in the Largo of Spring, those gentle, elegant, almost inaudible punctuations of the viola? Swarms of horseflies and thunder in the Largo of Summer? Despaired shepherd meditating on his fate in the first movement of Summer? Inebriated villager in the first movement of Autumn and slumbering drunk villager at the end of the same? Joyful dances to greet spring or the autumn harvest in the two Allegros of Spring and the first movement of Autumn, at those laid-back to plodding tempos and with those thick string textures? Horse-riding huntsmen in the Finale of Autumn? (Riding heavy-hooved draft-horses, you mean… ) Gunshots, beast frantically running from hounds, and ultimately dying under their assault? Gushing winds, violently erupting storms? No, I don’t hear that in those versions. Just pretty music, that certainly expresses something (interpretation is open to the listener), but certainly not what Vivaldi’s sonnets describe.

So the historical AND musical significance of Harnoncourt’s recording was that he was the first ever to play not just the music, but the theatre, of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. And his interpretation remains still entirely valid and up-to-date today.

His Allegros are lively, creating even, in the dancing Finale of Spring, an undercurrent of inquietude. The dance to rejoice at the autumn harvest is boisterous and romping. Summer storms erupt with shattering violence, and the foot-stamping in Winter (track 10) sounds like a winter storm. Harnoncourt sometimes favors extremes of tempo: I’ve never heard I think such a racing and vigorous hunt  (Finale of Autumn) – now those are horses truly galloping, not just prancing, let alone the sturdy draft-horses many versions have turned them into, and gunshots really explode. On the other hand his opening of Summer is not the Allegro non molto Vivaldi’s score calls for, but a Lento, not doubt to evoke the feeling of languor under the crushing sun described by Vivaldi’s sonnet. But I appreciate that, in the Finale of Winter, in the short sirocco episode where that opening melody of Summer returns (1:56), he should relax only slightly his Allegro tempo and NOT follow the old and ungrounded tradition of playing it (without any indication of the score to that effect) much slower: sirocco in Italy is not a gentle breeze, but a wind that can be quite violent.

But it’s not just the visceral excitement of tempo and speed: it’s character. As soon as the first measures and tutti ritornello of Spring, Harnoncourt’s interpretation is filled with details and ideas of phrasing that are too numerous to describe, and always keep attention awake. The various bird calls in the first movements of Spring and Summer are played with great freedom of pulse, cadenza-like (it shocked me decades ago, it now sounds to me like the only valid way to phrase them, and the approach has been adopted by most performers today), although stereo separation could have been better in the bird trio of the first movement of Spring (0:28), as well as in the stormy Finale of Summer – here Vivaldi’s antiphonal exchanges between first and second violins aren’t clearly elucidated. The dog really barks in the Autumn Largo (funny to read the Vivaldi critic in Fanfare of November 1979, Niels Anderson, complaining of "the overly loud and distracting bass in the second movement of Spring”. Makes you wonder if he ever looked at the score, or if he understood Italian; Vivaldi instructs to play these dog barks "molto forte, a strappato", with a violent tearing movement of the bow...). In the Finale of Spring, I have heard no other version where the viola sounded, not just “as much as here”, but simply “as here”, like a bagpipe drone. In the first of Summer, the plaint of the villager (4:06) sounds like a real plaint, not just like a pretty melody without dramatic content. The episode of the beast’s death in the Finale of Autumn (1:58) is rendered splendidly, because Harnoncourt applies a dose of theatrical freedom to his racing tempo. Winter is suitably chilly (and in the opening of Winter Harnoncourt phrases, as written, by the quarter-note, not to the eighth-note as most performers).

Certainly, even I am ready to pick nit with some aspects and details of Harnoncourt’s rendition. The Finale of Spring could have been more sharply articulated, here the dance of nymphs and shepherds sounds a little too mushy-legato. The cuckoo in summer (first movement, track 4, 1:37) is high-strung, almost on cocaine, to the point that the actual cuckoo melody (it’s embedded in a figuration of rapid eighth-notes) might get lost to uninformed ears. I think there was plenty of scope to depict an even more inebriated peasant than what Alice Harnoncourt evokes in the opening Allegro of Autumn (0:58 track 7) – in fact, the only ones I know to have gotten this part right are Red Priest, in their transcription for flute, violin, cello and harpsichord, [[ASIN:B0000CERI1 Four Seasons]] – and I don’t exactly hear slumberous breathing in her phrasing of the penultimate episode in the same movement (3:04). In the Finale of Autumn, Harnoncourt’s very animated opening hunting tempo remains then too strict in the ensuing double-stops to really evoke the hunting horns they are evidently supposed to imitate (0:28) – that I think is a passage where Harnoncourt could have applied more cadenza-like freedom of pulse.

It’s easy also to take exception with some of Harnoncourt’s choices of tempo in the Largos: the Largo of Autumn flows, the shepherd’s sleep sounds agitated, not calm and appeased, and the undulating grass sounds more like a river rapidly flowing towards a cascade, or like time flying by with no return. As for the Largo of Winter, it is more than flowing, it is almost racing, and sure the violin pizzicatti are more in the direction of the pouring rain depicted by the sonnet than of the after-shower rain drops of most versions, but the solo violin melody doesn’t really evoke the cozy feelings of sitting by the fire – sounds more like very pressing wooing. But one is ready to accept a lot from a version with so much personality.

There was a point in the artistic history of the Harnoncourts when Nikolaus’ wife Alice seemed to have decided or accepted to step back in the shadow of her husband and act as his assistant in musicology and score preparation. But, on the evidence of these recordings, she was a violin virtuoso of the first order. The only thing that may mark out this version as being of its time is that she doesn’t add any ornamentation in the Largo of Spring – but she does in the Largo of Summer (there’s not much she can add in the racing Largo of Winter, and the slumbering Largo of Autumn is not one where the solo fiddler ornaments anyway). Harnoncourt alternates between organ and harpsichord as a continuo instrument. The organ provides more timbral homogeneity with the strings, but in the Largo of Autumn the harpsichord remains commendably discreet – in many versions it tends to become invasive, turning it into a harpsichord concerto of sorts, which is not the point.

I’ll return later to the other Opus 8 concertos. Even limited to The Four Seasons, this is, for both its historical importance and its musical validity still today, one of the main building blocks of any Vivaldi library. If it's only the Four Seasons you're interested in, check out the other editions of the same recording for best price, [[ASIN:B000000SL0 Vivaldi: The Four Seasons / Le Quattro Stagioni]], [[ASIN:B000000SQI Vivaldi - The Four Seasons (Le quattro stagioni) / Harnoncourt]], [[ASIN:B00004VKU1 Vivaldi: Four Seasons]]. For Harnoncourt's complete Opus 8, Warner's 2009 reissue is the edition I have: [[ASIN:B00277YJN8 Vivaldi: Il Cimento Dellarmonia E Dellinventione]].


title: Lots of birds in these Seasons

text:
So far as I could establish, the Vienna Flautists, recorded in 1993, were the first to offer a transcription of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons for flute ensemble – here, an octet. They were followed a year later by Marion Verbrüggen and the Flanders Recorder Quartet, a transcription for a quintet of period recorders ([[ASIN:B0000007EY Vivaldi: Le Quattro Stagioni (The Four Seasons) - Arranged for Recorders]]). But the idea of importing the flute or recorder into The Four Seasons was initiated, at least on records, by James Galway, in 1976 ([[ASIN:B00000E67M James Galway & Zagreb Soloists: Vivaldi Four Seasons (RCA Red Seal)]]), who only substituted the flute to the solo violin – a substitution which has precedents and finds its historical legitimacy with Vivaldi himself, and which was common in the 18th century. Not that versions with flute or recorder have been extremely abundant since – at least, not compared to the number of recordings of the “straight” version – but those that have appeared have mainly followed the path of Galway, replacing solo violin by flute or recorder: Jean-Claude Veilhan in 1983 (recorder and small period-instrument ensemble), Michala Petri in 1987 (recorder and modern strings) and a remake in 2005 ([[ASIN:B0009VI4GM Antonio Vivaldi: The Four Seasons transcribed for solo flute and flute orchestra]]), Jean-Pierre Rampal in 1992 (transverse flute and modern strings, [[ASIN:B0000028U2 Vivaldi:  The Four Seasons, Darmstadt Concerto, Concerto for Flute and Organ]]), Dan Laurin in 2006 (recorder and small ensemble of period instruments, [[ASIN:B000HOJTDI Vivaldi: The Four Seasons Performed on the Recorder]]), Erik Bosgraaf in 2012 (ditto, [[ASIN:B00FP45QR8 Vivaldi: The Four Seasons]]). I’m aware of only one more version for flute ensemble, from 2004, by the All Flutes Chamber Orchestra led by Vieri Bottazzini 2004 on Callisto, [[ASIN:B0009VI4GM Antonio Vivaldi: The Four Seasons transcribed for solo flute and flute orchestra]]. The version of Red Priest, first published in 2003, [[ASIN:B0000CERI1 Four Seasons]], is in a category of its own, as it is a transcription for recorder, violin, cello and harpsichord – and an outlandish interpretation to boot.

On the face of it, it would seem pretty obvious to use flute(s) or recorder(s) in The Four Seasons. What instrument could better evoke all the bird calls, the winds soft and violent, the murmurs of the flowing sources that resonate throughout the four concertos? And didn’t Vivaldi himself write a Season of sorts for flute and strings, in his famous Opus 10 Concerto No. 3, “The Bullfinch”? But as tempting as it may seem, the purists might object just as well that such transcriptions are a betrayal of the very essence of The Four Seasons, which are not so much a celebration of nature as a celebration of the ability of five string to evoke and imitate the sounds of nature – doubly a challenge, first because they are an ensemble of homogeneous timbres (L’Arte dell’Arco fixed that, by reorchestrating The Seasons and introducing woodwinds and brass in the orchestral accompaniment, [[ASIN:B0001WGEIO Quattro Stagioni: A Dresden Version With Winds]]) and second because they are precisely NOT the instruments that would seem most ideally suited to imitate those sounds of nature. The 18th century was fascinated with the games of artifice vs nature, and The Four Seasons are certainly a feat of artifice imitating nature – two centuries before the famous His Master’s Voice Nipper.

But this is music, not musicology: the listener’s delight, not any consideration on the “essence” of Vivaldi’s Seasons, is the ultimate judge, and there’s much delight to be derived from these transcriptions. As far as homogeneity of timbres is concerned, the transcriptions for flute or recorder consort are more in line with Vivaldi’s original project, and so are transcriptions for brass ([[ASIN:B0000026EB Vivaldi: The Four Seasons]]). In fact, there’s even more homogeneity of timbres in the versions of the Vienna Flautists and of Marion Verbrüggen, since both do away with harpsichord continuo: just flutes/recorders. What those transcriptions gain is a a sweeter, more pastoral and soothing sound than the original version. What they lose is a muscularity of attack, a certain range of coloring (no sul ponticello playing to evoke the shivering of winter frosts). But they don’t aim at replacing the original version, simply at offering another view, another atmosphere and mood.

Compared to the recorder quintet of Verbrüggen, the flute octet is sharper, slightly more high-strung, not as gentle and sweet  – but it’s not just a question of instruments, it’s also a matter of interpretation: the Vienna Flautists’ Allegros are generally more dynamic, less laid-back than Verbrüggen’s. Indeed, they decidedly follow the interpretive model that developed with the period-instrument ensembles in the 1980s - Allegros are, in general, suitably lively and joyous, not stately and dignified (an exception being the Finale of Spring, more laid-back than that, evoking more the tender and loving embracing of nymphs and shepherds than their unleashed dancing described by Vivaldi’s explanatory sonnet), Largos are flowing rather than dragging and (as with Verbrüggen) richly ornamented. The trio of fluting birds (first movement of Spring at 0:29) is truly the joyful and excited greeting of spring described by Vivaldi, the flutes lend an incomparable sweetness to the flowing source that follows (1:12), the dog in the Largo of spring sounds more like it's yelping than barking, but it's convincing enough (with Verbrüggen, played by the bass recorder, it doesn’t sound at all like a dog barking, in fact it barely registers, something like the whiff of a gentle breeze), and the gently undulating grasses are beautiful.

Still, even in those dynamic Allegros, the flutes lend the music a pastoral and gentle quality rather than the boisterousness conveyed by the strings, as in the opening dance and hunting Finale of Autumn, tracks 7 and 9 – the hunt sounds more like Chihuahua barking at dove than huntsmen-mounted horses chasing boar, but it’s lovely nonetheless. In the same movement Verbrüggen invented a great sonic effect which made you hear bullets whistling past your ears – in that detail the transcription of the Vienne Flautists is plainer and less evocative. Likewise, the raining pizzicato effect in the Largo of Winter is not rendered as effectively as with Verbrüggen’s Flanders Recorder Quartet. But their all-flute autumn slumber is very atmospheric (Largo of Autumn, track 8).

In fact, sometimes the all-flute transcription seems to tell an entirely different story than the one set forth by Vivaldi’s sonnets. The spring and summer storms (track 1 at 1:41, track 4 at 2:51, Finale of Summer) are not particularly stormy, although there is a certain aggressiveness to them, at least compared to the more gentle Verbrüggen – in fact, they sound more like birds fighting for territory or food, or frightened and flustering away, and after all that’s evocative enough. In the Finales of Spring and Summer I can fancy a ballet of Titania’s birds in Midsummer Night’s Dream rather than the dance of nymphs and shepherds or storm described in the respective sonnets. The cuckoo episode in the first movement of Summer (track 4, 1:01) sounds here like some kind of puffing musical clock, because of the use of what I think is bass flute for the bass part, and because the solo flautist stresses his upper notes, which should be only an accompaniment to the cuckooing melody. The plaint of the hapless villager (track 4 at 3:28) doesn’t sound particularly plaintive, but this is not proper to the Vienna Flautists, it is one of the episodes that I find most constantly failed, because everybody plays it straight, rather than plaintive. And it is the same with the drunkard in autumn (track 7 at 1:07), played much too straight to sound like a drunkard, but I’ve yet to hear a version of the Four Seasons that has it right (but I haven’t yet heard Harnoncourt and Red Priest, so there is hope). Here it sounds like another of those birds. Flies in the Largo of summer sound again like dog sadly barking, and thunder like leaves rustling.

No criticism implied. Precisely the interest of those all-flute transcriptions is that they are not just an imitation of the strings version, they tell another story. Choice between Verbrüggen and the Vienna Flautists? Both are fine. Verbrüggen would be for those who prefer their Seasons more gentle, pastoral and soothing, and the Vienna Flautists who’d want them slightly more dynamic and bouncing. I’m happy to have and keep both. None offer complements and are limited to a scanty TT of circa 40 minutes. For those who’d like to explore more of the same, there’s another recording of Vivaldi transcriptions by the Vienna Flautists, [[ASIN:B000002238 Concertos]].


title: The Age of Melancholy

text:
Before all the "splendour and corruption was gone", when reigned "the dark night, the monstrous downpour, the violent surges of the flood, the huddle of little black, beetle-browed houses, the cobbled pavements that reeked of garbage and ordure", when "the irregular and huddled purlieus which had been the city of London in the reign of Elizabeth" "lay crowded, a mere huddle and conglomeration of houses", with "the stars reflecting themselves in deep pits of stagant water which lay in the middle of the streets", when "troops of ruffians, men and women unspeakably interlaced, lurched down the streets, trolling out wild songs with jewels flashing in their ears, and knives gleaming in their fists", when "danger and insecurity, lust and violence, poetry and filth swarmed over the tortuous Elizabethan highways and buzzed and stank in the little rooms and narrow pathways of the city", and before pharmaceutical companies had invented color-coded pills for every and any ailment, English music was known in Europe for its special strains of melancholy, and its greatest champion was John Dowland.

At the time of posting this review, this Amazon listing is badly wanting – no indication other than "Dowland Lachrymae", no listing of performers or label, no cover photo, and good luck sellers! – but barcode information, 3351470991754, shows that this is a CD from Dutch Vanguard  (and I'll spare you the complicated story of the relation between US Vanguard and Dutch Vanguard), 99175, Dowland "Lachrimae or Seven Teares and other Pavanes" by Musica Antiqua Köln under Reinhard Goebel, published in 1999. The same recording was reissued on Challenge Classics in 2003, [[ASIN:B00006F1HR Lachrimae Or Seven Teares]], so check it out for best price. The liner notes, written by Goebel himself, don't entirely eludicate the logic of the recital, but it is made more clear when one consults Dowland's entry on Wikipedia, where the complete title of his instrumental cycle is given: "Lachrimae or Seaven Tears [that's where the CD's title ends], Figured in Seaven Passionate Pavans" for string quintet, each based on the theme derived fom Dowland's lute song "Flow my tears", and "one of the best known collections of consort music in his time" (to which Goebel adds: "the first secular instrumental cycle in the history of music"). To those, Goebel adds a choice of other Pavanes, some of them based on the same theme (Heinrich Scheidemann's Pavane Lachrimae for harpsichord solo track 8, Johann Schop's Pavane Lachrimae for Violin solo and continuo track 9), to show the wide-ranging influence of Dowland's cycle on "a whole generation of northern composers around 1600". Two are also by Dowland, including his famous "Semper Dowland semper Dolens", which nicely summarizes the composer's psychological outlook.

All this sounds promising, but I'm afraid the recital doesn't entirely live up to its promises. The mood of Dowland's seven pavanes is very uniform, going from melancholy to despondency, and as they are based on the same thematic material, their 27+ minutes don't offer much musical variety either - seven times the same thing, something like Haydn's Seven Last Words of Christ, in shorter, but less varied and less dramatic. Dowland's Semper Dowland semper dolens is much in the same style, mood and atmosphere, although the music is slightly more animated at the end. The rest offers a little more diversity, with the violin flourishes of Schop's Pavana Lachrimae, the (comparative) playfulness of Farina's (track 12), the greater muscularity and drive of Scheidt's (track 13), and the greater passion of Dowland's Pavane in C major (track14) coming as a welcome contrast and fillip. Still, they are like ripples in a calm sea of repetition.

As already mentioned, Goebel's program notes are frustrating. He devotes a number of parapraphs explaining that Pavanes are not to be confused with Chaconnes - okay, but since no Chaconne is played in the recital, what's the point? But he doesn't say anything specific about the individual pieces. Were are told in the track listing that Scheidemann's Pavana is a recording premiere, fine, but why, where, who unearthed it, from where, and who was he? More irritating still, Goebel claims that "it can hardly be disputed [ouch! that's the sentence everybody begins with when they have something very disputable to say] that the gamba quintet with lute was Dowland's intended ideal scoring", but he then goes on to say that "the violins" are already mentioned in the printed edition of 1605 (oh? so the gamba quintet and lute wasn't Dowland's ideal scoring for Seaven Teares?), and adds that "it is clear [ouch! the phrase everybody begins with when it is not so clear] that Dowland was hardly thinking of the high lamento scoring such as Biber or Schmelzer would have used, but rather of a mixed scoring a beneplacito" (e.g. "according to wish") - okay, I'll take your word for it - and then ends up playing them neither with gamba quintet and lute, nor with a mixed score a beneplacito, but with the Biber/Schmelzer lineup. I don't get the logic.

But I still think music is a better cure for melancholy than those color-coded pills. Is that why I spend so much time listening?


title: A Theatre of Percussion

text:
Born in 1935, Jean-Pierre Drouet is first and foremost a French percussionist, closely associated to composers Karlheinz Stockhausen, Maurizio Kagel, Iannis Xenakis and Georges Aperghis, and performers Sylvio Gualda (percussion), Michel Portal (clarinet) and Vinko Globokar (trombone), but he’s also a composer, especially of incidental music to various stage works or music for chorographies.  I’ve just reviewed his Variations d’Ulysse on the same label, the music for a ballet of Jean-Claude Gallotta from 1995, commissioned by the Paris Opera ([[ASIN:B00004S3I5 Drouet: Les Variations D'Ulysse]]). The label is Transes Européennes, founded by percussionist Pablo Cueco in the mid-1990s and whose aim was to “feature the work of musicians that include in their creative approach the existence of cultures other than theirs”. It had very few releases, most of them in Jazz.

Here we find Drouet in a live impro, recorded on March 22, 1994. It’s sounds like an exploration of sounds, not all “percussive” in the literal sense, especially the bells, cymbals and other metal percussion sounding very “Oriental” (track 1, track 3), although even those are eventually treated percussively and with a strong sense of pulse (end of track 1 & track 2). Membranophones (aka “drums”) are first introduced in track 2 at 3:29, first in a non traditional use involving, if ear serves, brushing the skin surface rather than drumming on it. But all kinds of percussion instruments are used, including mouth harp (track 7) and some that I can’t identify (track 3, I hypothesize one of those toy boxes that imitate the sound of a sheep bleating when you jerk them). It’s a theatre of percussion.

Drouet’s theatrical bent – honed in his collaborations with Georges Aperghis, one of the champions of “theatre musical” in France – becomes much in evidence in track 4, when he introduces various and nondescript vocal noises – between a madman’s guttural laughter and the sound of a dog frantically chewing on a plastic ball – and the best part of it is when you hear a kid in the audience himself burst in laughter. Scatting returns in track 8, together with finger snapping, tongue clicking, even sniffing is made into percussion. The piece ends with Drouet mumbling what sounds like “tu veux danser ?” - “you wanna dance?” repeated as “t’en a assez?” “you’ve got enough of it? Me too!” and it’s over. The audience seems to be enjoying itself. It must have been quite a show, and something of it is perceptible on the recording. It’s entertaining. It was a long impro but still adds up to a short total timing of 37:45.


title: ...If you like that kind of eclectic, entertaining, easy-listening crossover dance music

text:
Born in 1935, Jean-Pierre Drouet is first and foremost a French percussionist, closely associated with composers Stockhausen, Kagel, Xenakis and Aperghis, and performers Sylvio Gualda (percussion), Michel Portal (clarinet) and Vinko Globokar (trombone),  but he's also a composer, especially of incidental music to various stage works or music for choreographies. Variations d’Ulysse is indeed the music he composed in 1995 for the ballet of French choreographer Jean-Claude Gallotta. The terse notes of Gallotta reproduced in the booklet are not clear at all about the chronology of the ballet when he states that the choreography was completed in 1981, and I had to go to French Wikipedia to understand it. Ulysse was indeed premiered in 1981 and was considered a landmark piece in the “new French choreographic movement”, and Gallotta regularly returned to it: in 1993 (Ulysse, re-création), 1995 (Les Variations d'Ulysse) and 2007 (Cher Ulysse). Les Variations d’Ulysse was a commission from the Paris Opera and became part of the ballet’s repertory. Drouet was commissioned to compose a new music that had to closely follow the rhythms of the pre-existing choreography.

Gallotta describes Drouet’s music as “a post-Gipsy band that would have crossed the path of Igor Stravinsky, Miles Davis and all the drums in the world”. I’m not sure what a “post” Gipsy band exactly is, but yes, the description is pretty fitting, and to those influences and inspirations I would add:  the kind of world music typical of the Kronos Quartet, minimalism, Bartok’s folk style and the sardonic side of Shostakovich. In his own more extensive notes (only partially translated to English), Drouet says that he sought to pay homage to the dance music of the Mediterranean countries, Greece, the Middle East, North Africa, Spain, to the percussions of subsaharan Africa, Jazz. That’s exactly what you hear. The instrumental ensemble derives from the very project: string trio for classical music, clarinet and trumpet for classical and jazz (played by jazz musicians), flamenco guitar (played by jazz guitarist), accordion for popular dance music, percussion.

TT 66 minutes.Variations d'Ulysee may be for you If you like that kind of entertaining, easy-listening crossover eclecticism – or “cosmopolitism”, as Drouet himself describes it. Transes Européennes was a small French label founded by percussionist Pablo Cueco, with very rew releases. I've just reviewed two more from the same label, one of music for percussion and harp of Georges Aperghis, [[ASIN:B000024YKN Triptyque]], and the other, a 37-minute live impro for percussion of Drouet, [[ASIN:B00004S3I7 Jean-Pierre Drouet Solo]], very entertaining and possibly a better introduction to this composer/performer.


title: A French pioneer of composition with tape and an orignal and entertaining voice

text:
Luc Ferrari: 1929-2005, and a French pioneer of composition with tape, recorded sounds and “musique concrete”, a pupil of Honegger and Messiaen and an early attendant of the Darmstadt serial composition courses, but more influenced, he claimed, by his encounter with the music of John Cage. A stalwart of the French GRM centre for electro-acoustic music founded by Pierre Schaeffer, although later, in 1964, he broke off with Schaeffer, over his piece for tape Heterozygote, too anecdotic for Schaeffer (and indeed Ferrari subtitled it his first “anecdotic piece”) whose effort and goal was to make abstract compositions out of the sonic objects.

Adda: an independent French label from the late LP and early CD era, with many attractive releases in all styles, from early to contemporary. Grew too fast, folded in 1993. The CD was released in late 1987.

Cellule 75: very exciting composition for piano, percussion and tape (combining concrete sounds and distorted acoustic instrumental sounds, if ear serves), with shards of Jazz and popular music. Noisy, boisterous and exciting. Cellule 75 seems to be a very "popular" piece of Ferrari: at least two other recordings are listed here, [[ASIN:B0000067WK Cellule 75]] and [[ASIN:B004DDBRD4 Piano & Percussion Works]].

Collection 85 are a series of 23 quasi-Preludes, tape adds shards of voices, percussive and distorted acoustic instrumental sounds. Many of the pieces are very humorous (including a take off from Strauss’ Zarathustra). The language veers between Pop, Prokofiev (even in the two homages to Schumann) and percussive syncopation. Only in the Finale does Ferrari move in the direction of Xenakis and violently pounding “contemporary music”, although the piece ends with whiffs of "cool" and dreamy Jazz over ominous ostinato chords from tape.

TT 49.


title: typical but somewhat predictable Aperghis

text:
A Triptych written by Greek-French composer and pioneer of music theatre, Georges Aperghis, for husband percussionist and wife harpist Gaston and Brigitte Sylvestre. Liner notes don’t say, but Aperghis’ website does: it was composed in 1982. Supposed to depict “the story of a couple”.  Part one, “Coup de foudre” (Love at first sight) is scored for percussion and electronics, “Compagnie” for harp and percussion, “Fidélité” for harp, the latter supposed to depict the memory of the previous mo(ve)ment. TT 45 minutes.

What you hear is Aperghis’ usual theatre in music. In "Coup de Foudre", lots of noises of percussion, voice itself used as a percussion instrument with text reduced to single words and even syllables – there’s a long explanation in the liner notes about what it might mean, but what’s music that requires long explanations to “get it”? The way Aperghis uses – and destructures – his text, the “meaning” doesn’t really matter, I think it’s best taken as an added percussion. The “electronics” here seem reduced to tape running simultaneously with more percussive text and percussion from Gaston, and a few interjections from Brigitte and harp.

I find “Companie” more interesting, because, while Aperghis’ scoring for percussion doesn’t really let you discover anything new, the sounds he elicits from the harp, and the dialogue with percussion (here used more for color and timbre than percussive noise) sound to me more original. The last part of the trypitch is also more typically Aperghis, in its combination of performer playing the instrument and uttering shards of phrases - and at times even complete and intelligible phrases (texts and translations not provided in the booklet, only the short presentation of the piece by Aperghis gets an English translation).

Triptych's limitation, even for the fan of Aperghis, is that, when you know his music well, it's all very predictable: your usual Aperghis. This CD is fine as a complement to your Aperghis collection if you are a fan of the composer (I am), but it’s not the CD to start a discovery of this very orignal musician. Go to [[ASIN:B00000DT8L Recitations for Solo Voice]] or [[ASIN:B000009L76 Sextuor / L'Origine Des Especes]] for that.


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

text:
Buyers in search of I Solisti Veneti's recording of Vivaldi's Mandolin Concertos, beware. This is a budget reissue, on Erato's early budget series Bonsaï, NOT of Scimone and I Solisti Veneti's 1983 recording with mandolinists Ugo Orlandi and Dorina Frati, first published on CD, here: [[ASIN:B0018KRYZA Vivaldi: Concertos for Mandolin]]. It is their earlier recording, from 1969, with Bonifacio Bianchi and Alessandro Pitrelli, originally issued 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). There are various botches in Erato's cheap edition: they mislabel RV 552 into 522 (which would have made it "L'Estro Armonico" Op. 3 No. 8), they give, for the mandolin concertos, the old Pincherle catalog numbers (P) instead of the now customary Ryom references (RV), they fail to give any such catalog number, right or wrong, to RV 583, and finally don't tell you which mandolinist plays RV 425: it's Bianchi. The original LP had lengthy line notes contributed by Claudio Scimone himself: the CD reissue has none.

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 ''''''':'''''''''''']]), 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: Nobody would go wrong with this version if there weren't better ones, and selling cheaper too

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Published in 1991, this CD offers a fine version of Vivaldi’s popular Opus 10 cycle played on transverse flute and modern strings, whose only limitation is that even better ones have been published, before (Camerata Köln, [[ASIN:B00000E6VA Vivaldi: Flute Concerti Op. 10 - Camerata Köln [Deutsche Harmonia Mundi]]], but that version isn't exactly comparable, as it is of the original versions in the form of chamber concerti, and played on recorder) and after (the incomparable Il Giardino Armonico, also the original versions played on recorder, [[ASIN:B000000SEM Antonio Vivaldi: Concerti da Camera, Vol. 1 (Concerti, Op. 10) - Giovanni Antonini / Il Giardino Armonico]]. The main reference on transverse flute and modern strings is the recording of Emmanuel Pahud with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, from 2005 [[ASIN:B000DZ6VWS Flute Concertos]]. There’s an excellent version also with modern strings with the Cologne Chamber Orchestra conducted with dynamism and zest by stalwart Helmut Müller-Brühl on Naxos, [[ASIN:B00005RVO8 6 FLÖTENKONZERTE]], but flautist Daniel Rothert plays them also on recorders, and only Op. 10 No. 4 on the transverse. And the versions on period instruments are too numerous to mention).

Here the Allegros are usually played with commendable dynamism and energy, although usually not as much as in those other versions – the two framing movements of Tempesta di Mare are a good case in point: they are not shameful, even better than many, but Il Giardino Armonico, Pahud’s Australian Chamber Orchestra have brought more tempestuousness to the music, and Müller-Brühl more drive and excitement. The basses of the Orchestra of St. John’s are a bit boomy, making the tutti sound a bit thick and depriving them of some bite, but a nice touch is that the first violin part is often attributed to the solo instrument, in unison or in dialogue with the solo flute. Bassoon in the continuo is a discreet but welcome presence, adding character and crispness. Exceptions to the rule of nicely or reasonably dynamic Allegros are are the opening movement of No. 5 - but hereVivaldi’s indication of “Allegro ma non tanto” makes it a customary option to play it very moderato, and it is beautifully tender that way also (and the Finale of the same concerto is played with exciting vivacity), and the first movement of Op. 10 No. 6, in which the tutti trudge musingly and without vigor.

Largos don’t drag sentimentally, but there is more imagination, bite, and hence tension and drama in the string accompaniment in the Largos of Tempesta and Notte with Il Giardino Armonico or Sébastien Marq and Jean-Christophe Spinosi ([[ASIN:B000076H2W Recorder Concerti: La Notte]]), and even Pahud’s Australian Chamber Orchestra – Lubbock’s St John’s Orchestra plays the notes, but only the notes, where they interpret the notes and play beyond the notes. But the cantabile of Gardellino and the Largo Cantabile of No. 5 flow nicely, with a beautiful bareness to the latter, with the continuo reduced to punctuations of cello.

Stallman’s flauting is spirited in the Allegros, and he adds imaginative, profuse and beautiful ornamentation the Largos of Il Gardellino, No. 4 and No. 6, more discreet in the Largo cantabile of No. 5. The ornamentation in the Largo of Il Gardellino is particularly exquisite – I’ve never heard ornamentation there that evoked as much as Stallman’s a bird’s cooing, and he even adds a cadenza with wild chirping at the end of the Finale. He also ornaments occasionally in the Allegros, and I regret that he doesn’t do it more, because whenever he does he offers some beautiful flights of fancy.

As a complement, Stallman offers the concerto RV 441, listed as a concerto for recorder in Peter Ryom’s now authoritative Vivaldi catalog, but played here at the transverse flute as was customary in a time when the 1948 catalog of Marc Pincherle ruled, which designated it as a concerto for “flauto”, with some uncertainty as to which instrument exactly Vivaldi had in mind. Stallman’s and Lubbock’s reading lacks again a touch of dynamism in opening Allegro and plods in the Finale, and the effect is elegant and laid-back, not particularly exciting. There’s no great drama either in the perfunctorily tossed off orchestral introduction of the Largo. Things are better in the solo unfolding, with a bare dialogue of flute and cello, and nice ornamentation from Stallman.

Nobody would go wrong, and in fact everybody would go right with this version of the Opus 10 concertos if it was the only one available on the market. But it’s a vast and competitive market and there are better ones. My first choice for the Opus 10 on transverse and modern strings is Pahud, and at the time of writing it cannot sell cheaper than it does on the marketplace. I'll keep Stallman mainly for his ornamentation. The recording was licensed in the US by the Musical Heritage Society, and if interested you may want to check it out, as I write it also starts at 1 cent on the marketplace, [[ASIN:B000EHKD2E Vivaldi: 6 Flute Concerti, Concerto in C Minor]].