CD Review: Pristine's latest urges second look at Schnéevoigt

One typically thinks of conductors from the 78 RPM era as having been conferred a halo of greatness which sometimes seem to glow brighter the worse the quality of their recordings get. But in the case of Georg Schnéevoigt, the reception of his posthumous legacy is, at best, “mixed.” If he is remembered at all, it is for his championing of the music of his compatriot Jean Sibelius, of whom he was a pioneering proponent on records. But unlike his colleague Robert Kajanus, whose recordings remain touchstones of Sibelian authenticity, posterity has been not as kind to Schnéevoigt’s shortcomings. His 1934 recording of Sibelius’ Symphony No. 4, for example, was privately criticized by the composer, leading HMV to withhold its commercial release. It was not hard to hear why it remained in the vaults for so long upon its eventual release over 40 years later: Simply put, it was a sloppy and ragged performance. (Small wonder then that HMV engaged Sir Thomas Beecham and his London Philharmonic for a remake which remains a classic.) Further tarnishing his reputation was the retrospective view of his helming of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “The bland Finn,” was local critic Gilbert Brown’s pithy appraisal of Schnéevoigt’s abilities. It does not help that the conductor made few recordings.

So what to make of Pristine Classic’s latest release, comprising of an all-Sibelius program led by Schnéevoigt with the NBC Symphony? The concert was part of Finland’s contribution to the 1939 World’s Fair, the crowning moment of an entire “Sibelius Week,” with Schnéevoigt appearing in New York City as a musical ambassador. Miles Kastendieck, reviewing the concert the following day in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, proclaimed it a “virtuoso performance of striking brilliance” in which Sibelius’ genius was “revealed in all its greatness.” Schnéevoigt’s Carnegie Hall audience seemed to agree, lavishing warm applause upon the performance. Whatever his faults may have been, on this evening at least Schnéevoigt was anything but “bland.”

His readings here are direct, unaffected, controlled, and powerfully inflected. Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2 opens up with an almost Stravinskian clarity and dryness, starkly prefiguring the comparatively more severe sound world of this score’s successor; although the big, muscular moments in this music (especially the recapitulation of the mighty theme in the finale) emerge all the more impressively for it. No less fine is Schnéevoigt’s interpretation of Sibelius’ Symphony No. 7, which surges forward as if in a single breath. Its restraint makes for telling contrast with Serge Koussevitzky’s BBC recording from around the same period (another Sibelian classic). Only the omission of the symphony’s opening minutes—the unfortunate result of NBC needing to accord space to its announcer—mars what would otherwise be an essential recording. Preceding the symphonies are two movements from what eventually became designated as part of the Lemminkäinen Suite. The movements—“Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of the Island” and “Lemminkäinen in Tuonela”—had only been recently published after having been withdrawn by the composer shortly after their completion. Schnéevoigt’s was their first American performance and while his reading has plenty of brawn, it is tempered by a sense of dignity. Opening the concert was a carefully proportioned and unsentimental interpretation of Finlandia.

Andrew Rose’s transfer sounds splendid over speakers. The balance of the mid-range and the definition of the treble are especially good.

Was Schnéevoigt unjustly maligned by posterity? This important release makes abundantly clear that at the very least his art deserves a second look from committed Sibelians.

CD Review: Yunus Kaya's gorgeous Brahms recital

Pianist Yunus Kaya is a name I had not encountered before this recent album of Brahms’ late piano music on Ars Produktion. A quick search for the name on Qobuz turned up a single track of Eurotrash EDM—perhaps another Yunus Kaya? 

At any rate, in his brief remarks included in his own recording of Brahms’ late piano works, this Yunus Kaya writes: “It is important to me that my interpretation seems spontaneous, almost improvised.” How exactly one goes about to achieve this or even to define what “spontaneous” and “improvised” sound like are not explained. Likewise, the artist’s biography in the same liner notes are filled with airy marketing mumbo-jumbo about his interpretations evolving “between inner silence and intimate communication with the audience.” Huh? 

Kaya’s recording, at least, is an excellent contribution to the distinguished discography of these winsomely autumnal works. He seems to have a natural feeling for their smoky, interior world; with an easy, but never facile command of their sometimes tricky polyphony and unostentatious melancholy. His playing sounds deeply considered, to use my own critical mumbo-jumbo, with carefully balanced voicing and unhurried pacing which allows the rich harmonies of this music to bloom. The impression is one of beauty borne out of nobility; even in the occasional tempestuous passages in these late works, nothing ever sounds ragged or coarse. 

Ars’ production matches the beauty of these interpretations with lush sound to match. The stage sounds deep, with enough air around the piano, but not excessively resonant. Kaya’s instrument—a Steinway D—sounds lovely.

In short, a very welcome recital by a name which, hopefully, will become better known to music lovers in the coming years.

Concert Review: Americana "Common" and "Uncommon" from Santa Barbara

In good traffic you can reach Santa Barbara in less than two hours. Its Mediterranean atmosphere, excellent wineries in its environs, and mild water beaches are reasons plenty to cruise up the 101, but classical music may not be what first comes to your mind. It should, though, because it is a city which has long cultivated a lively classical music scene, with many distinguished institutions and ensembles calling the area affectionately known as the “American Riviera” its home, not least of them being the Santa Barbara Symphony. I have not heard them in a long time, not since taking the former Amtrak San Diegan in January 2000 to hear a four-day festival devoted to the still neglected Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas, which was conducted by the orchestra’s former music director Gisèle Ben-Dor. At the time the Santa Barbara Symphony was a cracking, gutsy ensemble with a touch of warmth around the edges of its attacks. Their most recent concert, streamed live this past weekend, demonstrated that current music director Nir Kabaretti has not only preserved these qualities, but also enriched the mellow blend of its corporate sonority. 

Given the contemporary diminishing of this country’s collectively assembled mythos, resulting in our once marmoreal heroes being looked upon as worth little more than the avian excreta accumulated upon their now oft-tumbled monuments, last weekend’s Americana program was a little surprising, even quaint. As it happens, the grand figures of American classical music have not been spared the present’s restless inquisition of the past. 

Aaron Copland struggled his whole life long to remain on the right side of ever-fluctuating history. A dedicated supporter of communism and the workers’ movement in the 1930s – 1940s, he quickly dropped out of leftist organizations after being called upon to testify by HUAC in 1953; openly gay, he nevertheless remained discrete about his personal life in public statements, even well after the Stonewall riots. Facing each other across the epochal divide of 1945 were Fanfare for the Common Man and the Old American Songs which opened the Santa Barbara Symphony’s concert: The former a full-throated assertion of his earlier commitment to “socialist realism,” the latter a seemingly apolitical retreat into nationalist nostalgia meant to quell postwar paranoia. Fanfare is one of those fortunate musical works which are virtually invincible to bad performances. Santa Monica’s was very fine, with neatly balanced brass and percussion imparting nobility as well as power. 

Trickier are the Old American Songs which in the wrong hands can sound cute and saccharine. Baritone Cedric Berry, however, possesses amply the savvy and vocal charisma required to convince in this score. In the lead-up to the concert, a Chicago Tribune review praising his voice “of considerable power and agility” was much trumpeted by the Santa Barbara Symphony’s marketing team. But his art is considerably deeper than what that blurb implied. Berry’s rendering of Copland’s Old American Songs—artless and direct, beguiling the ear into believing this music is an authentic expression of the soil rather than the urbane facsimile it really is—was a masterclass in miniature. Listen closer and one hears more: The natural plasticity of his voice, its evenness, the evocativeness of his word-painting, and the sureness of his interpretive instincts. 

He followed the Copland with “Polarity” by George N. Gianopoulos, extracted from his song cycle America, Op. 43. “He took a Harlem Renaissance poet and set it to music,” Berry remarked about the song prior to its performance. “The music captured some of the swag from that era. He does it in just such a smooth, cool way.” The performance was as smooth and cool as the song itself. In his setting Gianopoulos drew out the music inherent in McKay’s verse, rather than impose music upon it. With its long melodic lines and shimmering orchestration the song was a haunting “Gotham Nocturne”; the glint of a silvery trumpet reflecting off the moonlight evoking the glamor, as well as the decadence and disillusionment that rapidly subsumed Roaring ‘20s America. 

The hope which also surged during that period, then lost amidst the Great Depression and subsequent mass annihilations hitherto unprecedented in human history, until resurging briefly before the onset of the Cold War was apparent in the Lyric for Strings by George Walker. “Hope” may seem an odd quality to ascribe to this music: It was written in memory of the composer’s grandmother. Yet the mood throughout is restrained, speaking of dignified grief rather than emotive lashing out. Perhaps it was a tribute to as much as reflection of a woman who had endured slavery in the flesh but managed to live long enough to see the emergence of a better world in which her grandson could eventually triumph. 

The relaxed lyricism of Samuel Barber’s Summer Music and Robin Frost’s Serenade eventually gave way to Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question, which (unintentionally or not) was answered in ironic fashion by the Fanfare for an Uncommon Woman, No. 1 by Joan Tower. Its tone and title also turned Copland’s utopian collective vision on its head; the “Me” vanquishing the “We.”

Maybe the better answer was Ives’ unanswered one. As the Santa Barbara strings coolly phrased the impassive yet obsessive chant of the “Druids who know, see, and hear nothing,” the call and response between the solo trumpet (played straight and without affect by Dustin McKinney) and wind quartet interrupted combatively until finally exhausting themselves in futile effort. Yesterday’s progress become the failures to be mended of the present, which in turn sow the seeds of unforeseen failures of a future yet to come. In Ives as in history, multipolar despite (and in spite of) us, eternity which knows, sees, and hears nothing always has the last say. 

Latin American music facing off against clickbait-creators and lazy critics

The recent debut recordings of the masterly symphonic cycle by Ecuadorean composer Luis Humberto Salgado reminded me—yet again—of the persistent neglect (and condescension) classical music and musicians outside of Europe and especially Anglo-America are regularly subjected to. Why this occurred historically is a complex matter, but that it should continue today is inexplicable, much less excusable. Especially when various talking heads have taken to fashionably lambasting classical music for reasons that curiously coincide with larger issues that media outlets would never dream of exploiting cynically for page-clicks and ad revenue. But however one may feel about such criticisms, what makes no sense is why virtually none of these critics have done anything meaningful to rectify what they believe are classical music’s obstructions to being more diverse and inclusive. For example, would it not make sense to simply start programming and regularly champion music from outside Anglo-America and Europe? Not in some special interest series treated as something apart from mainstream repertoire, but sitting side-by-side with Beethoven and Brahms where such music belongs? Will the New York Philharmonic make good on the “classism” it purported to decry in a recent podcast it co-produced and give a symphonist like Salgado a central place on its programs? 

With typical irony, too, the chattering clickbait-creators reveal their ignorance by overlooking how important the likes of Beethoven were to non-white composers. “From a very young age I loved Bach and Beethoven,” wrote Silvestre Revueltas. “I enjoyed wandering about with large strides through the romantic boulevards of Chapultepec, hair tousled, and arms folded behind my back. Those lithographs and etchings which showed poor Beethoven looking like a loner always had a great influence upon me. I could do no less.” Moroi Saburō, perhaps one of the greatest of Japan’s composers, not only bears the strong imprint of Beethoven in his own symphonies, but also wrote several books of biography and commentary on Beethoven which remain highly regarded in his homeland to this day. Luis Humberto Salgado was in some ways Beethoven-obsessed, yet found his own creative and highly original musical voice, his idol becoming an inspiration rather than a burden. If Beethoven is such a symbol of racial oppression or whatever, how does one explain his formidable influence on composers from such diverse racial and national backgrounds? 

Sometimes what well-meaning bien pensants in classical music tend to say about composers from Latin America is even more revealing. It has become a cliché, for example, to liken the music of the region, whatever the actual individual style of the composer in question, to the “magical realism” of Gabriel García Márquez. According to Wikipedia, “magical realism” is “a style of fiction and literary genre that paints a realistic view of the modern world while also adding magical elements, [and] often deals with the blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality.” The term has become a reliable catch-all for our redoubtable Mark Swed for whenever he is confronted with music south of Calexico:

• “Southwest Chamber Music has just issued an all-[Gabriela] Ortíz recording, "Aroma Foliado," in which you can hear the past sneak up on the present through a kind of musical magical realism.”

• “[Alberto] Ginastera's Piano Concerto No. 1, written in 1961, is a work of brutalist, magical realism.” [Swed continues by describing the music’s “unusual evocations of eerie rain-forest weirdness,” which is funny as Ginastera was born and raised in Buenos Aires, a city as much a rain forest as Manhattan, lived in the United States for long stretches of time, and spent his final years in the curiously un-tropical climate of Switzerland. Not exactly the sort of places where Swed may have expected our presumably spear-chucking composer to have lived.]

• “It is a little easier, although still somewhat problematic, to come to terms with [Daniel] Catán's old and new in the L.A. Opera revival. Part of what made it easier was the outstanding conducting of Grant Gershon, who unraveled new layers of wonder in Catán's orchestration. The pit, more than stage, is where most of the magical realism is realized.”

• “The text for “Cantata Criolla” is an important Venezuelan poem by Alberto Arvelo Torrealba, the director’s grandfather, that celebrates the dusty, perilous, mysterious llanos (plains) of Venezuela and presages magical realism with a singing contest between a brazen coplero (a troubadour of the llanos) and the devil.” [In that case, why are Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale or Gounod’s Faust also not forecasts of “magical realism?”]

The less a critic or musicologist knows or cares about Latin American music, the more you can expect them to describe it as “magical realism.” Not exactly an enlightened attitude.

CD Review: Luis Humberto Salgado—From Ecuador to the World

Eric Salzman, in his otherwise excellent Twentieth Century Music: An Introduction, devoted barely two pages to Latin American composers. What little space he afforded them seemed mostly begrudging. When the author was not criticizing them for being inadequate or fully realized, he subtly chided them for being derivative. Although over half a century has passed since Salzman’s book, Latin American classical music still suffers from an image problem north of the Rio Grande and across the Atlantic. The achievements of its composers—and they are considerable in both quantity and quality—are usually sneered at or, at best, doted upon patronizingly for a brief, fashionable moment. That is if they are ever played at all. 

Luis Humberto Salgado (1903 – 1977) was the dean of composers in Ecuador during the mid-20th century. Across his 75 years, Salgado composed a large body of work in diverse genres: chamber music, operas, ballets, concerti, piano works, vocal works, and the nine symphonies presented here for the first time on records on this 3-CD Brilliant Classics set. Despite never having personally traveled beyond the borders of his homeland, Salgado was a composer whose work was global in scope. As the Orquesta Sinfónica de Cuenca under Michael Meissner make emphatically clear on this release, Salgado’s work is a vital contribution to 20th century art.

Like Brahms and Vaughan Williams, Salgado was a late-bloomer as a symphonist. His First Symphony was not completed until his 46th year. He initially was an adherent of the "Streamline Moderne" style of post-neoclassical musical nationalism which was popularized in the New World by Copland during the 1930s – 1940s. His early symphonies are packed with native rhythmic motifs and recollections of folk music which are not only very attractive, but are also fused together into compelling musical statements. By the time of his middle symphonies, Salgado wanders off into more interesting, gnarlier paths. In these works he reminds me a little of Vagn Holmboe, Irving Fine, or Roger Sessions, but make no mistake—Salgado is very much his own man. 

Part of what has inhibited the composer’s international recognition, Meissner writes in his excellent liner notes, is that none of Salgado’s sizable compositional output totaling over 200 works have ever been commercially recorded until now. Aggravating this dilemma is the apparent inattentiveness with which the composer’s manuscripts have been preserved. Sometimes a movement is missing, other times a particular work or movement exists only in a sketch score. Occasionally there are scores which are lost altogether.

Salgado’s Symphony No. 1, nicknamed the “Andean,” is one such example: Its finale is extant only in a revised and simplified version which was recycled for a much later unnumbered Symphony of Vernacular Rhythms (not included in this set). For all that, it is a stirring and colorful work. As the nickname suggests, motifs and dances from regional indigenous folk music are threaded with their urban counterparts, along with snatches of twelve-tone rows which forecast similar methods Shostakovich employed in his late works. The result is earthy and sophisticated; colorful, vibrant, but never stooping to picture postcard musical nationalism. As Salgado himself remarked: “Obviously, it would be foolish to assume that simply orchestrating elements of folk music in the order expressed would be sufficient to obtain a symphony. The result of such would not even be a suite, but just a mere collection of vernacular airs.”

The Symphony No. 2 represents a considerable leap in Salgado’s prowess with symphonic form. Dubbed the “Sintética” for its synthesizing of the traditional four-part symphonic form into a single, concise, and unbroken movement, it is a tighter and somewhat more austere work than its predecessor. Its chiseled Beethovenian cast is punctuated by a pair of solo cadenzas, first for solo violin, then later for celesta, before concluding with a stylized alza, Ecuador’s national folk dance.

Somewhat of a curveball is his Symphony No. 3, which he dubbed “A-D-H-G-E: sobre una tema pentafónica en estilo Rococó” (A-D-B-G-E: On a Pentatonic Theme in Rococo Style). The four-movement work is Salgado’s whimsical spoof on the Classical style, although its good-natured cheer is closer to Prokofiev’s “Classical Symphony” by way of Raymond Scott’s “In an Eighteenth Century Drawing Room” than the acidulous irony of Stravinskian neoclassicism. Salgado uses the colors of his orchestra with child-like glee, tossing in harpsichord and harp against each other for good measure. Remarkably, this charming and original work was not premiered until 2017, over 60 years after it was composed. 

Nationalism returns to the forefront in his aptly nicknamed “Ecuadorian” Symphony No. 4. Initially it seems as if the relative terseness of the “Sintética” has given way to a generosity of instrumental color and texture which are closer to his “Andean.” These quickly subside, however. There are throughout telling moments of relatively spare orchestration in two voices. Rumblings of cellos and basses set starkly against plaintive woodwind lines; later violins twitching haunting ostinati, which draws the response of bare flute and celesta chords, before suddenly returning to the earthiness of the movement’s opening. There is nothing here like the tub-thumping confidence which one typically associates with “nationalist” music.

No less paradoxical is the Symphony No. 5, starting with its nickname. In its ambiguity of mood, sparseness of texture, and its mobile tonal gravity, it is hardly the reactionary score that the name “Neoromantic” would betoken. “[The symphony is a] cold shower for those who expected a Romantic gesture in the old sentimentalist style,” Meissner astutely observes. If not “sentimentalist,” the symphony is certainly highly expressive, although Salgado here rigorously fuses feeling into architectural logic. Its Sibelian economy of gesture represents another significant development, although how it was originally intended to sound like will probably never be known: The orchestral score has since been lost. Meissner has instead orchestrated the composer’s reduction of the symphony for piano two-hands. Very skillfully, it needs to be added, as one would be hard pressed to guess that the instrumental colors had been devised by anybody else but the composer himself, so idiomatic do they sound. 

Austere unto bleak is the Symphony No. 6 scored for strings and timpani. It opens with a foreboding hymn-like theme, which is followed by a dry, neatly-cut theme; part Classical, part folkloric which is soon lost in a thicket of string polyphony before being reprised. One senses that the play here is darkened by the composer’s own sense of mortality. Or perhaps not. There is something ultimately tight-lipped, outwardly impassive about Salgado’s music which defies the easy stereotype of Latin Americans as an emotionally exuberant and ostentatious people. 

Salgado’s Symphony No. 7 from 1970 (dedicated to the bicentennial of Beethoven’s birth) takes the atmosphere of its predecessor and pushes it to nearly saturnine extremes which would not be out of place in Pettersson. The residue of Ecuadorian folklore remains, but these elements are seamlessly blended into the musical material, never calling attention to themselves for their own sake. Salgado abstracts them, employing them as simply another sound element which has no especial value in and of itself. 

One wonders what Salgado’s peers and listeners must have thought when they first heard his Symphony No. 8. Composed to mark the sesquicentennial of the Battle of Pichincha, the event which secured Ecuador’s independence from Spain, there is little in the symphony which is immediately “celebratory.” Instead there is throughout a sense of anxiety and restlessness, further underlined by Salgado’s free use of dissonance which verges on atonality. Only in the march-like finale does he allow the music to brighten up, but even then there is an inescapable sense of irony which darkens the proceedings; its closing stretto recalling Hanns Eisler at his most caustic.

Salgado’s compact, single-movement Symphony No. 9 “Sintética 2” is his last. A masterly work wherein the composer permits himself a slight grimace, it synthesizes much of the elements of his late style into a statement of compelling power. Like many of Salgado’s works, it was not premiered until well after his death.

The playing by the Orquesta Sinfónica de Cuenca is alight with passion and profound commitment to the cause of evangelizing this inexcusably neglected composer, but one must admit their limitations. There are moments of wayward intonation and less than perfect ensemble which may unsettle listeners accustomed to the illusion of perfection which recordings so often conjure. Brilliant’s close-up miking and resultant powder dry acoustics only further magnifies these flaws. There are also Meissner’s occasional “retouchen” of Salgado’s scores to grapple with. In his notes for the Symphony No. 3, for example, the conductor states that certain string passages had to be rescored as the composer’s demands “exceed what is technically possible or reasonable [emphasis mine].” Whether this is true or not is impossible to say as there are no published scores of Salgado’s symphonies (at least to my knowledge) readily available to consult. But it is hard to believe that the skillful orchestrator heard in these works could have been so clumsy as to make unrealistic demands of his performers. All these notwithstanding, the enthusiasm of the Cuenca players is so great, the repertoire so rare as to make these drawbacks insignificant. 

There is no good reason that these works should not be part of the international orchestral repertoire. That they are presently excluded is no fault of the music; only the lack of curiosity of performers is to blame, not to mention a classical industry bent on milking the hits. Salgado’s symphonies arrive at a timely moment too. Classical music bashing has become all too trendy the past year. (Cynically, it needs to be said. I doubt that very many of these academics, musicians, and other talking heads would ever be committed to doing anything meaningful to change a genre which also happens to provide them a healthy source of income and prestige.) The problem—at least one of them—is the fact that white and non-white "folx" alike think classical music is all "dead white males" because that is all they ever bother to know. In fact, especially from the 20th century on, classical music is far more ethnically and racially diverse than its detractors are willing to give it credit for. Salgado for his part needed no infantilizing. He unapologetically idolized Beethoven, modeled his music upon his example, and sought to continue his ideals in a language for his own time. Can we expect any of the big American or European orchestras to take up Salgado’s symphonies for the sake of inclusion and shattering "white supremacy" in classical music? I wish they would, but I am not holding my breath. That is not where the money is, after all.

In the meantime, we have this treasurable release. The Orquesta Sinfónica de Cuenca, Micheal Meissner, and Brilliant Classics have here delivered what is one of the most memorable and important classical releases of 2021. Let us hope that more Salgado is coming our way, sooner rather than later.

CD Review: Lise Davidsen overcomes hype in her second Decca album

Lise Davidsen’s debut album—with Strauss’ Vier letzte lieder as centerpiece—was met with ecstatic critical praise last year. It all went over my head, however. She sounded mannered to me, hooty, with an unpleasant hollowness to her tone. For somebody already being compared to the likes of Kirsten Flagstad and Birgit Nilsson, her voice was less than expected. So I was less than thrilled to hear this disc when it arrived. Who wants to hear another earful of an artist who may not be quite ready for the world stage? But how wrong I was this time around!

The voice that poured out from my speakers was opulent, warm, secure, with a glint of sunniness to her middle and top registers. How nimbly and naturally she can wield her instrument was immediately apparent in her reading Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, the heart of this disc. With a flexibility that is nothing less than astonishing, she deftly turned from strength to vulnerability and back, sounding as if she were born to inhabit this quietly anxious chromatic music (to say nothing of the female lead in the opera this score was a test-run for). “Im Treibhaus” is rent with unfulfilled passion verging on heartbreak, which leads into a “Träume” that is as dreamily ecstatic as I have ever heard; a release of breath, desire which Davidsen conjures a miniature “Liebestod” out of, vanishing into the air of a spring night. The expanse of feeling she conveys between “Daß sie wachsen” to “Und dann sinken in die Gruft” defies efforts to pin down in mere words.

Davidsen sounds no less at home in the excerpts of Cherubini, Verdi, and Mascagni which fill out this recital. Her evenness of tone, the suavity which her voice modulates registers, and her impeccably controlled pianissimi in “Pace, pace” from La forza del destino, for example, is the kind of feat which few sopranos active today could match. None could surpass Davidsen. Her “Ave Maria” from Otello is another superb display of vocal virtuosity and minutely calibrated emotional power.

My impressions of Davidsen were so sharply divergent from what I heard in her previous Decca disc, that I fished it out to relisten and compare. Maybe I was wrong back then too. But, no, the same problems I had with that recording remained. Perhaps she was feeling more tense, less trusting of her formidable instincts and talents. What is certain is that Esa-Pekka Salonen, a superb musician, was simply the wrong choice to accompany Davidsen on her debut. His emotional aloofness and clipped phrasing are deadly in Wagner and Strauss. For the most part Mark Elder is a much better partner, although there are moments when one would have preferred that he had given Davidsen just a little more give with respect to tempi.

Make no mistake—these are very minor complaints which, in the face of Davidsen’s achievements, are insignificant. My hope is that she (and her handlers) carefully stewards her voice and builds upon the foundation which is her birthright. Is she really the next [enter your choice of Wagnerian prima donna of the past here]? I cannot say. What I do know is that she is a very remarkable Lise Davidsen right now; capable of earning the respect she merits without relying on cheap marketing hyperbole. Long may this artist continue to thrive.

The Most Beautiful Brahms Cycle?

Shortly before the global pandemic brought concert life to a halt, I experienced the unexpected pleasure of hearing Zubin Mehta conduct live. “Unexpected” because in my mind Mehta’s name had become synonymous with the well marketed schlock and awe that classical record labels in the 1990s desperately hawked. Tarnishing the well-deserved lustre his name had garnered in his earlier career were The Three Tenors circus, the awful Turandot in Beijing’s Forbidden City, and middling recordings with the Israel Philharmonic. But the octogenarian whom I watched step onto the rostrum of Disney Hall was no flim-flam man, but a genuine artist who drew from the Los Angeles Philharmonic a vitality which seems to regularly elude colleagues decades younger than he. 

Impressed, I spent some time sifting through his discography in order to find further confirmation of how wrong I had been about him. And wrong I was, but sometimes my former self was also right. In the event, what I discovered were two Mehtas: scrupulous sound artist on one hand, cunning hustler chasing the bag on the other, both inhabiting the same person. While these divergent sides of his musical personality were not quite apparent in his younger days, by the time he transplanted himself from the West to the East Coast, he was already a Two-Face on the make.

Excepting the wizardry of Leopold Stokowski, who as if by osmosis could transform any ensemble into the Philadelphia Orchestra, it wasn’t until Pierre Boulez took the reins of “Murder, Inc.” in 1971 that an ensemble of ornery individuals otherwise known as the New York Philharmonic could be made to play beautifully together. Mehta, his successor, took this achievement a step further and cultivated a richly blended, solidly centered, oaken tone which the orchestra has, gratefully, preserved ever since. 

Among the dwindling, but avid fanboys who care about this sort of thing, Mehta’s tenure is often regarded — especially after the energy of the Bernstein and Boulez years — as one of the duller periods in the New York Philharmonic’s history. (His programming, studded with new and contemporary works, many whose complexity are no longer welcome at David Geffen Hall, would seem to indicate otherwise.) Some blame Mehta for losing the orchestra’s decades-long contract with Columbia Records, but the fact is that irreversible economic and audience demographic changes had already led to similar situations with orchestras in Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland. (There also was no “loss” of anything as the orchestra would soon rebound to Teldec.) So what of Mehta’s New York discography? Much of it is actually quite good, about as consistent as his work in Los Angeles; with albums of Wagner, Strauss, and a voluptuous rendering of Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder among the highlights. But, perhaps, their finest collaboration on records is the Brahms cycle which they recorded across the late 1970s and early 1980s for Columbia (reissued in 2019 on compact disc by Sony Classical). 

Mehta’s heady interpretations luxuriate unabashedly in the collective sonority of the New York Philharmonic, which by then had banished any memories of the “cast iron string tone” that Virgil Thomson had once infamously decried. When listening to these hefty (but never heavy), bronzen recordings, beguilingly tilted towards the mid-range and bass, one would never guess that the polished, Old World-ish orchestra under the mikes had once been a pretty scrappy band. 

Try the gorgeously colored and weighted chords which open the Third Symphony, launching the first theme like a rocket across the sky. It then segues smoothly into the second subject, whose phrasing Mehta imparts just a touch of (Johann) Strauss to. Listen to the waves of autumnal gold and brown that Mehta and his New Yorkers ride aloft in their traversal of the opening movement of Brahms’ Second. Theirs is a marvel of subtly shaded colors, seamless transitions, and carefully sculpted phrasing. Everything sounds so unforced, yet evinces the care which was lavished by everyone involved. Then there are the deep hues they impart to the shifting, almost magical harmonic modulations preceding the redevelopment in the opening of the Fourth Symphony; like a twinkling nocturnal cityscape peering through a veil of fog. Perhaps most impressive of all is their traversal of the First, a work which in the wrong hands can sound blustery and tub-thumping. This interpretation, on the other hand, is anything but; sounding elegant and heroic, bold with a touch of introspection. The finale’s closing theme is here a full-throated song of joy, progressing inexorably to a brilliant coda which sweeps the listener along, without ever feeling as if one were being pressed along by the performers. 

Credit also goes to Columbia for a deep and wide production that hones in on the individual felicities in Brahms’ orchestration, without ever sacrificing ensemble sound. Compared to their, frankly, ugly productions with the same orchestra during the Mitropoulos and Bernstein eras, it seemed that Columbia Records, too, had come a long way.

Around the same time in the next time zone to the west, Lorin Maazel and the Cleveland Orchestra recorded a Brahms cycle which has its own admirers for their corporate beauteousness of tone. For me, at least, their sleekness treads too close to being slick; amounting to a heap of lovely components signifying nothing greater than themselves, with Maazel’s auto-pilot direction disappointingly forecasting the much later work of his successor in “The Forest City,” Franz Welser-Möst. With Mehta there is an unforced sense of purpose, architectural line, and dramatic cogency which are missing from their rivals. To my ears, this set has few rivals and no superiors; remarkable those this may sound, there probably hasn’t been a more beautifully rendered cycle of these works since.

Brahms once wrote to a friend that in his music he strived to be beautiful when possible, but that perfection was a must always. Mehta and the New York Philharmonic eloquently demonstrate that in his four symphonies the great bearded master accomplished both these goals handily. 

Apology and Explanation

Not content to grapple with a global pandemic of historic proportions, my body decided to increase the difficulty setting for yours truly. A dormant chronic condition of which I had been ignorant began to assert itself last year, then erupted into full force this year; its symptoms swelling to such a degree that it made it impossible to work, or even think, and left me despairing whether my days were dwindling down to a precious few. September, November…

To the great relief of my loved ones and myself, the condition, while bothersome and permanent, is also non-life threatening. Better still, a drastic dietary change can make my flare-ups more manageable, although my specialist says that it may take about a year for their intensity to begin receding. It has been only in recent weeks where I have been able to begin feeling and functioning like my old self.

Regrettably, I had no choice but to abruptly drop out of a few projects, including tending to my humble website. Being able to type anything at all and managing these few words of explanation is a small achievement for which I am deeply grateful.

I hope in the next few months to begin returning to work and, hopefully, sharing more about the art which has sustained my energies through this difficult time.

Allan Evans (1956 - 2020)

I never met Allan Evans and will always regret not having been able to. We were supposed to have met last October, but insurmountable obstacles on my end prevented this from happening. “I’d be glad to have you sit in on one of my classes [at Mannes] whenever you’re able to,” he said to me over the phone shortly before concluding an interview with him about a musical mentor from his youth. That was just over six weeks ago.

At the age of 12 I was bit by the classical music bug and life has never been the same since. Through a series of chance happenstances, I quickly ended up diving into the proverbial deep end: Specifically mid-20th century avant-garde music and historical recordings. Both of these youthful loves were combined in my discovery of Ignaz Friedman, by way of the Pearl Records set which Allan Evans produced and wrote his splendid liner notes for. Hitherto my only encounter with Chopin’s Mazurkas had been through Arthur Rubinstein’s late RCA recordings, which presented this music as desiccated relics caked beneath a thick layer of formaldehyde. (It was not until about 20 years later that I finally began to love Rubinstein’s Chopin—except for his Mazurkas.) Hearing Friedman’s fingers, however, was something else altogether. Chopin’s bristling rhythms and harmonies (in the late Mazurkas sometimes closer to Schoenberg’s Vienna than the Paris salons of his own time) came alive. Suddenly one wasn’t hearing a neatly curated museum curio kept tidily under glass. Friedman understood the performance of Chopin not as the reenactment of esoteric rituals encoded in a ceremonial dead language, but as documents of joys and sorrows uttered in a living lingua franca. Here was Chopin the lover, the poet, the dreamer, the frustrated patriot whose music drew a starlit patina over subversive nationalist yearnings of a future Poland resurgent. Heady stuff for an 8th grader!

Somehow I managed to collect my thoughts and scribble out a fan letter to Allan Evans, which was sent in care of Pearl Records, who then happily forwarded it to my hero. What I wrote has since vanished into the recesses of my memory, but Allan Evans kindly replied to me, patiently answering a number of questions, and encouraging me further on my adventures in listening. 

A co-worker at a record store gig long ago once chided me for my musical preferences. “If you listen to classical music now, what are you going to listen to when you’re old?,” he snickered. Presumably he had never heard Rachmaninoff’s sweetly rueful observation: “Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music.” (And that in a time well before today’s present atomization of music and the listening audience.) Yet it was precisely because of classical music that I needed to hear and absorb other styles in order to better contextualize it. Over the next quarter of a century I used my ears, to borrow a phrase from Charles Ives, like a man. Coursing through my cochleas like an unstoppable torrent were tangos, milongas, Weimar-era cabaret songs, psych-folk rock from the 1960s, easy-listening instrumentals for bluehairs long gone, experimental noise from East Asia, mournful prewar Japanese gunka, electronic novelty amusements, languorous romantic ballads from a Latin America now the dust of eternity—alongside Shostakovich, Bruckner, Stravinsky, Boulez, Feldman, Webern, Brahms, Beethoven, Revueltas, and Carter. Although he was unaware, Allan Evans presided over it all, my distant spiritus rector.

A few years ago at another record store job, a co-worker inducted me into the mysteries of blues music. As my head swirled with the frisson of hearing this music for the first time, my thoughts turned to musicians from another, seemingly unrelated time and place. It struck me that there was a thread of kinship, however unlikely it appeared, between Rev. Gary Davis, Washington Phillips, and Blind Willie Johnson; and the likes of Ockeghem, Wolkenheim, and Josquin. One could call the latter representatives of “Western European roots music,” if you will. (With Bartók, arguably, being its final practitioner and synthesizer.) This epiphany, vividly illustrating the “only two kinds of music” quote apocryphally attributed to an ever-expanding who’s who of musical notables, was the kind of deep listening personal experience fostered by Allan Evans. 

He was a gentleman scholar whose restless intellectual curiosity touched countless people, some even afar and unknown to him; an individual who is a rarity in any age, but especially so in our strident and vulgar times. We shall not see the likes of him again.

I never met Allan Evans and will always regret not having been able to.

Wilhelm Furtwängler: German Refugee in Switzerland

In those years when Central Europe began to rebuild itself upon the rubble of World War II, a number of German conductors—emigrés and wartime remainers alike—had already fled to their homeland’s alpine neighbor to the south. Switzerland, memorably gibed by another postwar cultural figure as a five-hundred year peaceful democracy whose greatest contribution to world culture was the cuckoo clock, would be the setting where Otto Klemperer, Carl Schuricht, and Hans Rosbaud all breathed their last. 

Although his dying weeks were spent in Wiesbaden, Germany (and was ultimately laid to rest about an hour’s drive south in Heidelberg), it was in Clarens—today a suburban municipality of Montreux, the second largest city in the majority Francophone canton of Vaud—where Wilhelm Furtwängler made his final home. He had known the country well since his journeyman days as third conductor at the Opernhaus Zürich, a brief and rocky engagement which drew to an abrupt close after a disastrous performance of The Merry Widow. As a lifelong mountaineer and skier, the Swiss Alps were naturally his frequent vacation destinations. But the chain of events which made Switzerland his adopted homeland was borne out of more worrisome considerations. 

On January 23, 1945, Furtwängler led his last concert in Nazi Berlin. Allied bombing had pulverized the old Philharmonie and Staatsoper, forcing the Berlin Philharmonic to decamp for the Blüthner-Saal. At the concert’s intermission none other than Albert Speer, Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production, came to pay the conductor a visit in the green room. He pointedly asked Furtwängler what his plans in the near future would be. Only days before, Speer had learned of the Soviet capture of the strategic industrial region of Silesia, an outcome which terminated any wild hopes the Nazi leadership may have entertained for a conclusion to the war that resulted in anything other than Germany’s unconditional surrender. When Furtwängler replied that he was engaged to conduct in Switzerland in a matter of weeks, Speer subtly suggested that he extend his stay there. “After all,” he coolly remarked to the conductor, “you look so very tired.” The hint was taken. 

Five days later in Vienna, Furtwängler conducted his final concert in the crumbling German Reich: A program of Franck, Brahms, and Beethoven with the Vienna Philharmonic (an event gratefully preserved for posterity). Earlier that day, he had slipped on ice and suffered a concussion. Not only did this threaten to derail the concert, but it also jeopardized his ulterior motive for which the performance had served as pretext. Recuperating at the city’s Hotel Imperial, which only a few weeks later would be among the many structures damaged and destroyed in the Allied bombing of Vienna, he received an urgent call from a mysterious bureaucrat at the Foreign Office in Berlin demanding to know who signed off on Furtwängler’s exit visa. In the early hours of the next morning, the conductor was surreptitiously led out of the hotel, placed on a milk train, and (after a number of stops and changes) eventually arrived at the town of Dornbirn along the Austro-Swiss border. Days later, after a last burst of cloak-and-dagger intrigue, Furtwängler crossed over into Switzerland. 

While he and his family were grateful for the safe passage provided to them by the Swiss authorities, the country’s press and many of its citizens were less than thrilled about receiving a man they considered a Nazi cultural grandee. Leftist publications and political groups called for a ban on his performances, claiming that the purity of Swiss neutrality was at stake. In late February, a Furtwängler concert in Winterthur was disrupted by protesters with stink bombs, dispersing only when local police turned water hoses on them. Heeding the advice of friends who suggested that he step away from public life at least for a time, the conductor checked himself into a sanatorium in Clarens where he waited out the inevitable end to the war. 

By the time of this Lugano concert on May 15, 1954, that animosity had long dissipated. Thanks to friends and colleagues such as Ernest Ansermet and Edwin Fischer, Furtwängler firmly established himself in Swiss musical life, becoming especially associated with the Lucerne Festival. Few in the audience at the Teatro Apollo that day would have guessed that this would be among the conductor’s very last public performances, although his intimates were well aware of the hearing loss which was making him increasingly despondent. Whether his sorrow over that played a part in the valedictory tone of these performances (or in his death six months later) is impossible to ascertain. But there is a sense, such as one hears in this performance of the Beethoven Pastoral, of its “cheerful and thankful feelings” for life made bittersweet by one’s awareness of its transience. It would be a mistake to believe, however, that these performances are exhausted, weak. While his earlier studio recordings of Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel are more polished, neither matches this performance’s fusion of tragic power and grim irony. Equally rewarding and revealing is his accompaniment to Yvonne Lefébure’s magisterial interpretation of the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 20, the best known part of this concert, as well as the only recorded collaboration between these two extraordinary artists. 

One wonders whether Furtwängler was familiar with Miguel de Unamuno’s Of the Tragic Feeling of Life: “Only the weak resign themselves to final death and substitute some other desire for the longing for personal immortality. In the strong the zeal for perpetuity overrides the doubt of realizing it, and their superabundance of life overflows upon the other side of death.” Regardless, something of that permeates this concert; a testament to the inextinguishable lifeforce of music, of the artists documented here, long since vanished into the eternity of history.

This essay will be included in the liner notes of a forthcoming reissue of Furtwängler’s May 1954 Lugano concert on the Japanese ATS label.

Furtwängler (left) with Ernest Ansermet shortly after fleeing to Switzerland, February 1945.

CD Review: Kabalevsky delights from Korstick and CPO

Like Stravinsky and Prokofiev before him, Dmitri Kabalevsky cast his gaze across the Baltic Sea towards France, although unlike them his inclinations were generally towards musical conservatism. Had his world been a kinder one, his lightness of touch and skill at crafting melodies could very well have made him a latter-day Russified Massenet or Chabrier. Reality was otherwise, of course. Instead he spent a significant portion of his career squandering his considerable talents on musical agitprop, although not without also composing a number of works which have managed to nudge their way onto permanent places in the concert hall and recording studio.

Pianist Michael Korstick, whom CPO has kept busy with various recording projects (including two previous Kabalevsky programs), presents here a compilation of all of the composer’s piano preludes, some of which are well known in piano pedagogy, but are otherwise on the periphery of the performing repertoire. The centerpiece here are the Twenty-four Preludes, Op. 38, which according to the informative liner notes by Charles K. Tomicik, was composed at the height of World War II in 1943. One would never guess: This joyful and guileless music betrays nothing of the harrowing times from which it emerged.

Each prelude uses a Russian folk melody as its basis (including an unexpected appearance from Stravinsky’s The Firebird in Prelude No. 13), which the composer develops into miniature tone sketches. Among the most delightful are the étude-like Prelude No. 12, the skittering Prelude No. 23, and tongue-in-cheek martial color of Prelude No. 24. Whether listened to individually or as a whole, Kabalevsky’s Twenty-four Preludes exude an easy-going charm rare in music of the 20th century.

Serving a more didactic purpose, but no less a pleasure to listen to are his later set of Six Preludes and Fugues, Op. 61 which cleverly makes sophisticated musical principles appealing for children to play. Take a listen to the wistful little chorale which makes up “Becoming a Young Pioneer,” or the closing fughetta of “A Feast of Labor.”

The end of the disc turns back the clock to the beginning of Kabalevsky’s career with his Opp. 1 and 5, consisting of three and four piano preludes each. The mood of these works are heavier, their idiom more searching than the preceding ones; both sets being strongly redolent of Myaskovsky and Scriabin, and leaving one wondering how the composer would have developed his talents had he not become an enthusiastic proponent of “socialist realism.”

What is remarkable about Korstick’s recordings for CPO are their consistently high quality, with none of the featureless workman-like qualities that are often the poison pill in these sweeping recorded surveys of neglected piano repertoire. His warm touch and sympathetic performances, with great care lavished upon phrasing and textural color (abetted winningly by CPO’s excellent engineering), are perhaps the finest these works have yet been treated to on records. 

Could CPO and Korstick be persuaded to look over the piano works of Mikhail Nosyrev, Vladimir Shcherbachev, Nikolai Rakov, or the still criminally neglected Gavriil Popov next? One can always dream.

Kabalevsky turns up the Soviet charm.

CD Review: Daugherty’s Tendentious “This Land Sings”

Michael Daugherty was perhaps among the most promising of the young American post-minimalists that came into prominence in the 1990s. His irreverent, yet subtly moving scores, bespeaking of the baby boomer generation’s see-sawing derision of and nostalgia for the postwar plastic-fantastic culture of their youth, were among the new music gems of the short-lived revival of the Argo label. His art is consumed by a boundless fascination with Americana, the mythos of America and what it all means, fact and tall-tale alike. 

Over the past decade Daugherty has become closely associated with Naxos’ American new music arm, the latest offering in that series being his This Land Sings: A WPA-meets-Pierrot Lunaire-style distillation of the life and music of folk singer Woody Guthrie. Although the score may echo another Naxos release from years ago called Mr. Tambourine Man, which fatuously reset the lyrics of Bob Dylan to newly composed music by John Corigliano, Daugherty’s score is something else entirely; being only his most recent in a long line of works that takes a figure from American popular culture, pins them down, and scrutinizes them, sometimes ruthlessly, as a lepidopterist would with a rare butterfly. In the finest of these works, such as Sing Sing: J. Edgar Hoover and Jackie O, Daugherty walks a careful line between satire and pathos, passing no judgment on his subject and leaving it to the listener to sort out the sometimes unsettling ambiguities. 

“The music I composed gives haunting expression, ironic wit and contemporary relevance to the political, social, and environmental themes from Woody Guthrie’s era,” the composer writes in his prefatory notes for This Land Sings; “haunting expression” and especially “ironic wit,” however, are qualities sorely lacking in this music. Instead the pokerfaced restraint of his younger self has succumbed to the ongoing pandemic of political hysteria; a scourge to which geriatrics under the toxic spell of 24-hour news channels and the never-ending torrent of cynical faux-outrage clickbait, whatever their political bent, seem especially prone to. 

A brief instrumental overture based on This Land is Your Land gives way to a series of vignettes—sometimes sung, sometimes rendered in sprechstimme—which purport to depict various aspects of Guthrie’s characters and biography. Whether the use of a skillful librettist would have helped the final result is anybody’s guess, but Daugherty’s decision to provide most of his own libretto was unfortunate. The dismaying puerility of “Hot Air” and “Silver Bullet” are like Facebook boomer screeds made manifest in sound, the kind of thing one silently shakes their head at and wishes a responsible loved one had counseled against sharing.

How Daugherty’s music is connected to Guthrie’s, if at all, is difficult for me to determine as the latter is a name I know only slightly by repute, and his music (save for one or two songs I learned in elementary school) virtually not at all. That said the composer of This Land Sings has wandered far off the path of his zestful earlier works; its ramshackle gaucheness would not be out of place in a production by Corky St. Clair. 

The performance here by Dogs of Desire, the Albany Symphony Orchestra’s new music ensemble, is as fine as one could imagine, though the contributions from the vocal soloists leave a bit to be desired. Baritone John Daugherty (no relation to the composer) is mostly adequate, despite an occasional tendency to bark. Annika Socolofsky’s hooty and thin soprano, on the other hand, quickly becomes wearying on the ear. 

As has occurred with a lot of good people over the past 20 years (and especially so since 2016), Daugherty’s apparent obsession with the trivialities of the perpetual (and partially manufactured) culture wars has caused the onset of what seems to be chronic brain rot. Let us hope for the sake of this talented composer that the diagnosis is not terminal. 

Big oof.

CD Review: Vänskä’s Mahler 7 as Modernist Urtext

The emergence of BIS’ ongoing cycle of the Mahler symphonies under Osmo Vänskä’s direction was, at least to me, unexpected. His rhythmically punchy, excessively accented interpretations would seem to be an ill fit for Romantic music of long-breathed melodic sweep, as it indeed has been in the previous installments of his flawed survey of the Austrian composer’s symphonies. (The less said about his role in Stephen Hough’s Tchaikovsky concertos, the better.) When the symphonies of so many other worthy composers—Roger Sessions, Vagn Holmboe, Gavriil Popov, George Rochberg, et al—are practically screaming for a top American orchestra to take them on a spin to the recording studio, why yet another mediocre Mahler cycle? So the arrival of this present recording of the Mahler Seventh with the Minnesota Orchestra was not exactly an auspicious one. Nor is the work itself considered much of a treat.

The Seventh, as Jeremy Barham reminds the listener in his fine liner notes, is the ugly duckling among the composer’s symphonies, being his least discussed and performed. Though the public has remained cool to the work, cognoscenti such as Schoenberg and Webern agreed with its composer’s high estimation; while decades later, Shostakovich would copy out parts of it for study as he prepared his own Fourth Symphony.

This time around, Vänskä’s approach is an asset rather than a detriment to Mahler, and very much at home in the forward-looking qualities of this tricky score. By digging hard into the startling dissonances of this vast nightscape and letting its incongruities fall where they may, Vänskä presents the symphony as if refracted through the lens of the present; or better still as if an awestruck revelation of a long lost modernist urtext. Although the cumulative effect deliberately focuses on contrasts rather than blend, he deftly navigates the Minnesota Orchestra through the crashing rapids of its shifting moods, managing to keep the whole unwieldy thing from coming apart. 

In the inner Nachtmusiken, orchestra and conductor are carefully attuned to Mahler’s proto-Klangfarbenmelodie orchestration, imparting edgy tension to the Nachtmusik I and Scherzo which are often glossed over. The symphony’s starlit serenade in the Nachtmusik II, for once and correctly so, is kept from dissolving into the treacle ordinarily heard; its sentiment instead recalling the “masculine tenderness” that elicited Beecham’s admiration in Mozart’s music.

Equally revelatory is the symphony’s knotty finale, wherein Vänskä steps aside and lets the listener decide for themselves what all its bustling noise means. Is its merry-making sincere, or is it a spiritual progenitor of the unsettling cavalcade to come at the end of Nielsen’s much later “Sinfonia semplice?” No matter. Its festive glitter becomes a concerto for orchestra, a triumph for Mahler, as well as an occasion to celebrate a partnership between orchestra and conductor which for the past 17 years has been one of the great success stories in American classical music. 

Whether you know this symphony well, or consider yourself one of its many detractors, you owe it to yourself to hear this fresh perspective on a problematic score.

Beautiful and strange: Osmo Vänskä and the Minnosota Orchestra’s traversal of Mahler 7.

CD Review: Urbański’s Strauss for the soyboy generation

Following their excellent Lutosławski and Shostakovich discs, the NDR Elbphilharmonie and their music director Krzysztof Urbański now turn to some of Richard Strauss’ best-known music in their latest installment of their ongoing series of recordings for Alpha. To which one can only ask: Why? It is a question worth asking when the competition consists of a virtual roll-call of the greatest conductors of the last century, starting with the composer himself. 

Just to be clear, none of these are bad recordings, and one can imagine themselves emerging from a concert hall fairly pleased after hearing Urbański’s readings live. On records, however, superior alternatives are at least as plentiful as Don Juan’s lovers. 

Speaking of which, the opening riff of the eponymous tone poem which he inspired falls flat with excessively tenutoed and legatoed articulation that robs this music of the sensuality, charm, and dazzle its composer intended to convey. Till Eulenspiegel hobbles about with none of the insouciance of the best performances, resigned from the start to his unhappy destiny. And the revelations of Also sprach Zarathustra seem to go no further than the performers’ navels. 

Alpha’s sound is warm, with fine midrange presence (if a touch shallow in the bass), but is hardly enough to save these perfunctory performances. 

Pass.

If only he had spent at least half as much attention on Strauss as he did on his hair…

CD Review: Stoki's expressionistic Beethoven with the NBC

The destiny and legacy of the NBC Symphony and Arturo Toscanini are so inextricably bound that it is sometimes easy to forget that each had a life of its own, occasionally even far apart. Throughout the orchestra’s existence they collaborated with a long rotating list of guest conductors. But for a brief period spanning the 1941 – 1942 season, the Maestro split altogether, fallout from a fracas with NBC’s management. Though he eventually would return, Leopold Stokowski was appointed his replacement during the interregnum, enlivening the repertoire with a number of world and local premieres of the sort of music Toscanini never touched.

Stokowski also was, as a recent compilation from Pristine Audio reminds the listener, himself a superb Beethoven interpreter, if of a totally different type from his elder colleague. Whereas Toscanini cultivated a lean and tight sound that highlighted the music’s freshness, Stokowski’s interpretations of Beethoven’s Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh are dark-hued, imposing, and Romantic; with flexible tempi, grand rhetorical gestures (listen to the opening “fate” motif of the Fifth), and a quasi-cinematic breadth of sonority. Stokowski had recorded Beethoven before and would do so again much later, but these NBC interpretations arguably capture him at his best. 

The gem of this compilation may be his Reubenesque rendering of the Seventh, which has a voluptuousness of tone rarely heard in Beethoven (or from the NBC Symphony, for that matter). It is songful, yet heaven-storming; with an “Allegretto” whose funereal cast is like something out of the expressionistic world of Murnau and Lang. Nothing drags, however, and it is followed by propulsive and vigorous readings of the final two movements that leave one clutching their seat. How the audience at Studio 8-H managed to keep themselves from screaming their heads off at the vertiginous excitement that Stoki goaded from the NBC strings at the finale’s coda is beyond me.

Of his various recordings of the Beethoven Fifth, this NBC performance may be Stoki’s finest, aided by a touch of rhythmic tightness that sharpens the contours of its drama. When the finale’s blaze of light erupts upon the scherzo, Stoki conveys a sense of implacable triumph: Nothing can (and does) stop Beethoven’s victory.

Stoki’s super sleek approach to the Beethoven Sixth, fine performance though it is, has little of the earthy bumptiousness this music demands. (It is the “Pastoral,” after all.) His is very much an urbanite’s glossy daydream of country life rather than the thing itself; the central scherzo sounding more like the frolicking of impeccably airbrushed models for The Gap, than that of peasants.

Also in this collection are some of Stoki’s Wagner performances with NBC; appropriate given the conductor’s Wagnerian approach to Beethoven, including a steamy, XXX-rated rendition of the “Prelude to Act I” and “Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde that practically scorches one’s speakers.

While this material has been made available before, the sound restoration by Andrew Rose polishes it further to a lustrous gleam. Nowhere can this be heard better than on Stoki’s NBC Beethoven Seventh, previously heard on a deleted Cala disc which suffered from an unusually over-filtered transfer. Bad memories of that CD are immediately cast aside by this present reissue, with the strings especially taking on a vivid presence nothing like the boxiness one normally expects from this venue.

Here’s to hoping Pristine keeps the treasures from NBC’s vault coming.

Lustrous and bold: Stokowski’s Beethoven with the NBC Symphony.

CD Review: Gardner's journey through Schoenberg's waking dream

Late in his life, Otto Klemperer sniffed dismissively at it. “[It] isn’t Schoenberg’s greatest work,” he said, “not at all.” The late Alan Rich was more to the point: “If you believe, as I once did, that Ein Heldenleben is the ugliest of all major orchestral works, you don’t know Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande.” 

Their derision notwithstanding, Schoenberg’s sprawling tone poem has (along with Verklärte Nacht and the Gurre-Lieder) remained one of the composer’s most enduringly popular works, even over a century after its creation. Well, perhaps not “popular,” but orchestras seem to program it fairly regularly and audiences do not seem to mind. 

In recent years Edward Gardner has become one of Chandos’ house conductors, with surveys of music by Janáček, Bartók, Britten, and Lutosławski already under his belt. Having delivered a fine Gurre-Lieder awhile back, Gardner now turns to Schoenberg’s other early exercise in post-Wagnerian hyper-romanticism.

Pelleas und Melisande is certainly a score which has led a charmed life on records, beginning with Winfried Zillig’s excellent Telefunken recording from 1949. This latest release, played by the Bergen Philharmonic, is another distinguished addition to its discography. Chandos’ spacious, larger-than-life sound befits this cryptic, dream-like, yet curiously phonogenic music; a Begleitmusik avant la lettre. 

Gardner is a precise and sensitive guide through this phantasmagorical soundscape, pellucidly articulating Schoenberg’s orchestration and counterpoint (listen to the haunting layering of instrumental color beginning at :37 on track 3, or the ebbing away of Melisande’s life depicted at the start of track 12). His Danish strings, though lacking the last bit of opulence that one hears in first-rank orchestras, play with great polish and expressive nuance. Their judicious use of portamenti are especially welcome, highlighting the proto-cinematic qualities of early Schoenberg. (Franz Waxman and Max Steiner must have studiously cribbed off of Pelleas for their later film scores.)

On a lesser plane is the performance of Erwartung that is Pelleas’ discmate. Excellently played and sung though it is, Gardner lacks the ability to fully unleash this score’s expressive vehemence; nor does his soloist, soprano Sara Jakubiak, have the vocal heft and dramatic urgency required. For that, listeners are directed to Jessye Norman with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra under James Levine (Philips), Anja Silja and the Vienna Philharmonic under Christoph von Dohnányi (Decca); and if vintage sound is not an impediment, Dorothy Dow and the New York Philharmonic with Dimitri Mitropoulos (Sony), and the volatile rendering of Helga Pilarczyk with the NDR Philharmonic under Hermann Scherchen (Wergo).

Recommended for Gardner’s superb Pelleas.

Let Gardner be your guide through Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande.

CD Review: "Blue" Gene Tyranny "Detours" Into a Twilit Soundworld

For years I had seen this album staring back at me from the avant-garde section at Amoeba Hollywood, where I had worked years ago. But despite my adoring his Out of the Blue and Country Boy Country Dog (How To Discover Music in the Sounds of Your Daily Life), to say nothing of Detours’ appealingly late 1990s-esque cover, I never took a chance on the album. Having finally acquired it during Unseen Worlds’ coronavirus relief sale, all I can ask is: What took so long?

Tyranny unspools thread after lyric thread of lyricism, while gently peeling off the veneer of pretense and affectation that have encrusted themselves upon minimalism post-John Adams. It is simultaneously a distillation  and an encapsulated retrospective of Tyranny’s art. Wafting by are traces of influences, of musical doings long ago; bits of parlor song calling out across the chasm of time, the sprightly chatter of synthesizers wryly answering back. their wistfulness augmenting this music’s crepuscular feel. It is music borne of a lifetime’s strivings, hopes, heartbreaks, joys; untouched by bitterness; filled only with gratitude.

If Bartók had his “night music,” then in Detours “Blue” Gene Tyranny gives the listener “twilight music”: Rarefied musical visions which dance along the shimmering frontier straddling waking and repose. 

A quiet milestone in the work of a modern American master.

Laid back melancholia: “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s Detours.

CD Review: Roth Versus Ravel—Whose "Authenticity?"

Not content with beating the life out of music of the 16th – 19th centuries, the period performance cult in the last two decades has turned its sights onto the music of the 20th century. Their puritanical, hairshirt conjectures have been able to stubbornly survive given that there is no contemporary recorded evidence for earlier music that disproves their negatives. With music of the 20th century, however, their inflexible dogmas are revealed as just that as such evidence of the composer’s intentions survive, often from the creators directly and sometimes abundantly so. The latest installment of Les Siècles’ ongoing Ravel project under François-Xavier Roth is a perfect case in point. 

The gushing liner notes state: “[T]he approach of François-Xavier Roth with his ensemble Les Siècles, which gives pride of place to period instruments, is the obvious way to do full justice to this masterpiece. . .” Fair enough. Only problem is that Ravel composed the work for Serge Koussevitzky, who left behind not one, but two recordings of the work. 

Comparison with his 1930 RCA Victor recording, the first ever made of Ravel’s arrangement and set down only eight years after it was premiered (while the composer was still very alive, it should be noted), reveals a performance that is the polar opposite of Roth’s bland, featureless recording. Under Pierre Monteux, Koussevitzky, and Charles Munch, the former “aristocrat of orchestras” cultivated a tangy, lithe Gallic sound that was in keeping with Ravel’s expectations. The color they were capable of defies the limitations of their era’s sound reproduction. Fruity winds beautifully complement and contrast Boston’s sleek strings; cumulatively their orchestral palette is Technicolor to Les Siècles’ monochrome. Listen, for example, to the Bostonian trumpet principal on “Samuel Goldenberg und Schmuÿle,” whose bittersweet solo verges on words, mingling sarcasm, anger, and pity. Roth’s soloist, on the other hand, merely plays a series of difficult repeated notes (albeit splendidly). “Baba Yaga” and “The Great Gate of Kiev” under Koussevitzky possess a cinematic breadth, a sense of structural cohesion and dramatic line that continues to impress nearly a century later. The blazing coda of the latter movement is the triumphant end of a long journey, its joy daubed with pathos. Roth, for all his “period” conceits, is unable or unwilling to actually conduct in the period style of podium auteurs like Koussevitzky. 

Its discmate, La valse, is no better. As so happened, Monteux conducted the first recording of the score in Paris in 1930. That performance—alive with vibrato, portamenti, and tempi fluctuations—sounds nothing like the perfunctory blandness masquerading as “authenticity” of the Les Siècles recording. Not only that, but evidence suggests that Ravel himself preferred hearing the work interpreted in a far more virtuosically dramatic manner than what Roth is capable of. 

“I have never heard [La valse] shine so bright,” the composer wrote to Willem Mengelberg, not exactly a conductor known for his interpretive reticence, following a performance in Amsterdam. “I would like to tell you once more how pleased I was at the beauty of what you performed. . . You are not only a great conductor, but a great artist.” 

Then there is the unforgettable nightmarish vision of this music from Victor de Sabata, another conductor whom Ravel praised, with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1951. 

Wherefore Roth and Les Siècles’ scrupulous adherence to period performance practices then? So much for scholarship and fidelity to the composer’s intentions!

Hard pass on Roth’s “period” conceits.

CD Review: Harty beguiles in compilation of British music

Among British conductors of the 20th century, the work of Sir Hamilton Harty is sometimes lost in the shuffle, at least on this side of the Atlantic. Hereabouts listeners may be more familiar with him as a composer and arranger, but in his lifetime the Irish-born maestro was considered one of the best conductors in England. His last years, unfortunately, were clouded by professional setbacks and deteriorating health, which forced him to abstain from performing for an extended period before his death at age 61 from brain cancer. At the peak of his career and health, however, he earned critical and public acclaim as music director of Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra; not only for shoring up the ensemble’s standards, but also for his wide and sometimes daring repertoire. (Although his personal tastes could be eclectic. He admitted to disliking Franck and Scriabin, looked upon Brahms skeptically, and rated Wagner below Berlioz.) 

“[N]obody has given so many inspired performances and nobody displayed the same inherent taste for diverse works or the same remarkable versatility,” eulogized John F. Russell.

Collectors have been treated to a handful of Harty compilations in the CD era from Dutton, Symposium, and Pearl, but they have all since vanished from the catalog. So it is very welcome to find Pristine devoting a number of releases to his recorded art, including this latest program of British music.

The debut recording of Bax’s Overture to a Picaresque Comedy, which opens this program, remains unsurpassed 85 years after it was recorded. Contrasting with the Sibelian mood of his better known symphonies, this work captures Bax in a playful, rakish mood. Hardy demonstrates a superb sense of comic timing in the chattering orchestral back-and-forth, as well as great suaveness in the overture’s more lyrical moments. The London Philharmonic, at their Beecham era peak, give Harty (the score’s dedicatee) finely etched playing brimming with character, especially the winds. 

Following are three selections that show off Harty’s work as composer and arranger, as well as the playing of the Hallé Orchestra, to which he was contracted to until he was unfairly ejected shortly after these recordings were made. Their collective sound is handsome, well burnished, and balanced, with some beautifully string shaded playing.

At the end we arrive at the music of Elgar, this collection’s center of gravity. The two wistful Dream Children miniatures are tenderly caressed, but the Enigma Variations are the real stars here. Save for a hard to find commemorative disc that was briefly available from the BBC 30 years ago, this performance is otherwise new to the digital era. Listen to how Hardy overlaps the wind and string textures in “W. N.,” like a play of light and shadow that follows a breeze in the canopy of a forest. “Nimrod” is sensitively moulded, with careful use of string portamenti at expressive nodal points that balance poignancy with noble bearing; a lesson for conductors today who post-Bernstein are wont to turn the variation into a funeral dirge. There are also reminders that the music was still somewhat fresh when Hardy recorded it in 1931, as well as telltale signs that the Hallé, for all its quality, was still technically below the ensembles in London, never mind those in continental Europe or America. There are moments in the faster variations (try “W. M. B.”) where Hardy’s orchestra is being stretched to its limits, occasionally scrambling to keep up with his pace. Despite all that, the performance overall is excellent; perhaps the best of all the early ones of this piece.

Mark Obert-Thorn’s transfers of this material is, as ever, superb. His use of reverb is tastefully and discretely applied; as is his noise reduction, which never threatens to dilute the fullness of sound often lost in less skilled hands.

For collectors new to Harty’s art, this attractive collection is a great place to start.

Pristine offers an assortment of British works on their latest volume devoted to Sir Hamilton Harty.