Hovhaness' admirers often tend to overlook the piano works in favour of his big orchestral statements. Nevertheless there's much to enjoy in these compact pieces which are here drawn from a wide time frame, spanning Op.36 to Op.390. The Twelve Armenian Folk Songs were composed around 1943 but not published until two decades later. The melodies are attractive in themselves but, more than that, they are most attractively played by Alessandra Pompili who shows a very strong affinity with all the music in this 52-minute disc. She plays the 'unfamiliar melodies' - in the composer's words - with simplicity and a real degree of affection in an acoustic that tends to the dry, though on balance I'd rather that than a billowing sound in these pieces.
Ghazal and Ghazal-Sufi date from 1938 and here the bass line underlies a weaving lyric right hand melody line. The former, which is the longer, has a tolling, melancholy-sounding motif whilst the latter is the more rarefied in expression. This is, it would seem the first ever recording of both pieces. Composed in 1959 whilst Hovhaness was in the Kashmir, Shalimar reflects his huge enthusiasm for Indian music. Formally, he introduced the idea of borders in this suite in an attempt to suggest the carpet-like designs of Moghul gardens. As much as rhythm drives this music, there is a huge amount of nature painting involved, the composer evoking the now-silent fountains through the memory of their music. Much is coolly flowing, beautifully expressive and often hypnotically rhythmic but there is also the Bachian element of the Third Interlude. Helpfully each incident - there are eight in all - is separately tracked.
The 'Cougar Mountain' Sonata, Op.390 dates from 1985 and returns to his love of nature - of vistas and expanse. As well as a slow opening movement there is a lament, a slumber song and, as finale, a dance. There are hints of Ravel in the early part of the sonata and the stomping dance with which the sonata ends certainly generates considerable dynamism. Its compact nature still allows a rich sense of characterization to emerge. The Fantasy, Op.15 - again this is a first recording - was written in 1938 but was later re-worked and absorbed into the Blue Job Mountain Sonata, Op.340. It's an unusually alternating work for Hovhaness, in which lyricism and percussiveness sit on opposite sides of the equation. Finally there is Dark River and Distant Bell which, with its oriental mood, was originally intended for harpsichord or clavichord. This is its first appearance on disc in piano guise.
Pompili, then, is a splendid young exponent of Hovhaness' music. That dry sound does help to clarify and centralize the piano writing without sounding off-puttingly objectified. Liner notes are in Italian and English and worth a detour, as indeed is this disarmingly well-played disc.
Mahler: Symphony No. 3 in D Minor - Prokofiev: Cantata for t
Urania Records
CD
$32.99May 27, 2016
Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 is not only Mahler’s longest work, but is the longest symphony in the standard repertoire. A typical performance lasts between 90 and 105 minutes. The six-movement piece is regarded as one of Mahler’s greatest, and has been recorded by all of the major orchestras. This recording of Mahler’s 3rd symphony was taken in Moscow, 1961, and features contralto Valentina Levko as well as the Ladies of the Moscow State Choir and Children’s Choir. Alongside Mahler’s work is Prokofiev’s October, Cantata Op 74, in a recording taken in Moscow in 1966. Both of these works feature the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Kirill Kondrashin.
Suk: Complete Works For String Quartet; Piano Quintet / Minguet Quartett
CPO
CD
$36.99Jan 13, 2015
“In 1912, when my second quartet was performed in Berlin, a tumult arose in the audience that was not far from a tussle. On the one side, shouts of amazement; on the other side, expressions of displeasure and boos. Even Schönberg, who attaches special value to flops, was envious of me because of this flop.” “…our generation too has fought for its ideals and had to wait long and often still is waiting to receive honest and full recognition of its efforts to produce a new musical language, which very often again became the basis for the new aspirations of the younger generation.” These words were not written by an anarchistic innovator but by the euphonious late romanticist Josef Suk. His second string quartet, however, is surely the most ambitious and ‘most modern’ work he penned. In the field of chamber music it also ranks as his most important. For cpo the Minguet Quartet has recorded Suk’s complete œuvre for string quartet – with Matthias Kirschnereit joining them for the early piano quintet.
Lehar: Das Furstenkind / Schirmer, Muenchner Rundfunkorchester
CPO
CD
$36.99Jun 25, 2013
Das Fuerstenkind (The Prince’s Child) has always been an “insider’s tip” in Lehár’s oeuvre, and the composer himself regarded this robbers’ tale from Greece premiered in 1909 as one of his best works. It was also his problem child because it never became a sensational success. The reason may have been due to the works blurring of boundaries between opera and operetta.
Fall: Die Kaiserin / Bad Ischl Lehar Festival Choir
CPO
CD
$36.99Sep 11, 2015
Conspiratorial plots, intrigues and affairs at the court of Austrian Empress Maria Theresa dominate the scenario of Die Kaiserin. However, the true focus of this wrongly forgotten operetta by Leo Fall (1873-1925) is formed by the steadfast love between the empress and her prince consort Francis Stephen of Lorraine. With a generally accurate historical libretto, the operetta was supposed to keep abreast of the times both in its music and content while avoiding all-too-obvious references to current political events, common practice in the operetta genre at the time of its 1915 Berlin premiere.
Lehár: Der Rastelbinder / ORF Vienna Radio Orchestra
CPO
CD
$36.99Oct 19, 2004
REVIEW:
CPO continues to show admirable enthusiasm for issuing the works of Lehár.Der Sterngucker(The Stargazer) was issued in Spring 2003 and now along comes this performance of his first operetta. It is a recording of a large-scale radio broadcast made 25 years ago.
The work was staged as a Christmas piece at Vienna's Carl-Theater in December 1902. Despite poor initial reviews its strong cast managed to achieve a long run for the piece. Incidentally, the conductor of the première was the young composer, Zemlinsky.Der Rastelbindertravelled through Europe and reached America in 1909, but now is largely forgotten.
The plot concerns a Slovak child engagement, with children who find it difficult to get on together when grown up. A Prelude is set 12 years earlier than the main action to provide a vehicle for the audience to be given background information of the childhood betrothal. The Prelude and Acts shift the action from Slovakia to Vienna and then to a Viennese army barracks. The settings allow Lehár plenty of scope to introduce different flavours of music appropriate to the action. In this early operetta, we hear, for the first time, a slow waltz that indicates the distinctive viennese style that was to follow and become a Lehár hallmark, 'Wenn zwei sich lieben'.
Helga Papouschek and Elfie Hobarth sing confidently as Mizzi and Suza and the young tinker boy (uncredited) provides a purity of tone, naïvety and innocence. Both Heinz Zednik (the grown up tinker boy) and Adolph Dallapozza (corporal) are strong tenors, the latter having a particularly high register.
The booklet is provided in German, English and French and contains interesting background notes by Stefan Frey as well as a synopsis for the vocal numbers.
Apart from the opera and the symphony, Max Reger made substantial contributions to almost every musical genre, and within chamber music his compositions for violin and piano formed the largest complex. These works are technically and musically demanding and, for one reason or another are rarely ever heard in the concert hall.
Busoni was a musician of rare versatility – a pianist, composer, writer and editor. His deep study of Bach and Mozart was essential to his own thoughts and creativity. It also bore much compositional fruit in the form of transcriptions and adaptations. The most famous transcription surely is his piano arrangement of the Chaconne from Bach's D-minor Partita for unaccompanied violin.
2010's Mörbisch Lake Festival has brought an operetta classic to the stage. It has an unusually tragic plot for this genre but became a hit, largely though Richard Tauber’s association with the work. Here the Romanian tenor Tiberius Simu sings the role of the Zarewitsch.
Marx: Eine Frühlingsmusik, Idylle, Feste Im Herbst / Wildner, Vienna Radio So
CPO
CD
$18.99Nov 18, 2008
MARX Nature Trilogy: Spring Music; Idylle. Feasts in Autumn • Johannes Wildner, cond; Vienna RSO • cpo 777 320 (63:07)
“Imagine an Austrian composer with Bax’s mystical sensitivity to nature, Schrecker’s gift for orchestration, and Magnard’s subtle sense of architecture. Throw in a strong enthusiasm for Debussy and a distinctive melodic profile, and you have Joseph Marx (1882–1964).” I started a review of Marx’s orchestral music several years ago in this fashion, and I think it still serves to indicate the kind of music he wrote. Far from being the dried-up pedant portrayed by contemporary serialists, Marx was a strikingly imaginative composer who combined great lyrical gifts with an ability to manipulate large orchestral structures creatively.
A recording of his Nature Trilogy was released in 2003, with Steven Sloane leading the Bochum SO (ASV 1137). I was frankly wowed in Fanfare 27:1 by both the music and its performance, and added the disc to my Want List that year. That recording is still available, despite the subsequent sale of ASV and discontinuation of new releases. Wildner is up against this steep competition, and for several reasons, I don’t think cpo’s new recording quite measures up—though it has its ace in the hole.
First, there’s the orchestra. The Vienna RSO performs competently, but lacks “face” in this difficult music that demands a vivid orchestral palette of many shades. On ASV, the Bochum SO strings sound a bit anemic, but the brass and especially the winds have all the wealth of color one could wish. A good comparative moment occurs roughly five minutes into the “Idylle” and continues for half a minute, where Marx plays different winds off one another to invoke a Debussy-like forest pastorale. The effect is delicately arresting with the Bochum musicians, but easily passed by without notice by the Vienna players.
The conductors adopt similar tempos and proceed convincingly, but Sloane is more willing to pause as required rather than push ahead. I also find him more sensitive to matters of phrasing and dynamic levels in the score. There’s a point at roughly 8:40 in his recording of “Idylle,” where the solo trumpet plays softly over shimmering strings, for instance. Sloane catches this, softening magically, while Wildner doesn’t bother. This isn’t to say that Wildner is callous about this music. He conducts it convincingly, with plenty of energy and an obvious sense of commitment. Sloane simply finds more in these works, and does the job better.
The sound also plays its part. ASV’s is better defined, the sustained winds, pulsating strings, and horns that lead off “Spring Music” each being clear while contributing to the overall effect. The engineering on the cpo disc is slightly recessed, each strand of orchestration just a bit harder to pick out.
Then there’s the matter of completion. Sloane offers the three sections of the Nature Trilogy: “Symphonic Night Music,” “Idylle,” and “Spring Music,” The new release includes only the last two. Marx stated that he conceived of them as a single, coherent three-movement piece. Wildner instead removes the first movement, puts the concluding movement, “Spring Music,” first, and places the final movement of another work in third (final) place on the disc. This effectively wreaks havoc with Marx’s architectural intentions, though it could pragmatically be argued that each of these pieces stands well enough on its own, and any new Marx is better than none.
On the positive side, this is also the premiere recording of Feste im Herbst (“Feasts in Autumn”), a reorchestration by the composer of the fourth and concluding movement of his Autumn Symphony. Marx wanted to get public exposure for his works at a time when modern tonal music was being increasingly marginalized on the musical landscape, and thought that the best way to do so was to take this movement and launch it on a career of its own. Sadly, it received scant attention, because it is a fetching piece on its own, a demonstration of the late German Romantic symphonic form at its most imaginative and aurally seductive.
The liner notes are excellent. I would recommend the ASV recording as a first choice to anybody seeking to hear what Marx can do, but the Feste im Herbst is a rare charmer that’s worth the price of admission alone.
Together with his fellow-Hungarian Franz Lehár, Emmerich Kálmán (1882-1953) was one of the leading operetta composers of the first quarter of the 20th c. Following the success of his first operetta in 1908, the years 1912-26 brought him a string of four further and farther-reaching operetta successes, including 1915s Die Csárdásfürstin (The Gipsy Princess). This 2002 production from the Seefestspiele Moerbisch Austria Festival, celebrated as a reference performance, stars Vera Schoenenberg and Ferdinand von Bothmer as Sylva Varescu and Edwin Ronald respectively.
PEJA?EVI? Symphony in f?. Phantasie Concertante for Piano and Orchestra • Ari Rasilainen, cond; Volker Banfield (pn); Rheinland-Pfalz St PO • CPO 777418 (62:42)
Cpo, a label noted for ferreting out obscure repertoire, has outdone itself this time by digging up not just another female composer—that alone wouldn’t be so rare—but a Croatian one to boot. Heretofore, I don’t think I could have named a single Croatian composer of any gender, but now I can. Short-lived Dora Peja?evi? (1885–1923) was actually born in Budapest, the daughter of a Croatian father and a Hungarian mother, the Countess Lilla Vay de Vaya, an accomplished pianist and Dora’s first teacher. On her father’s side, Dora was descended from a distinguished noble family in Slavonia, the eastern region of Croatia. In composition, she was largely self-taught, but she did receive some private instruction in Zagreb, Dresden, and Munich. She died at 38 following complications of childbirth.
During her short life, she produced 58 documented works. That number isn’t particularly noteworthy compared to other composers who died even younger and wrote much more, but what is worth mentioning is that like another female composer, the French Louise Farrenc (1804–75), Peja?evi? competed with the boys in the arena of large symphonic, concerted orchestral, and chamber works. In addition to the symphony and concert fantasy on this disc, known and/or published works include a piano concerto, sonatas for piano, violin, and cello, and a piano quintet. During her life, her music was not entirely unknown in the music capitals of Europe; it was heard in Vienna, Munich, Budapest, and Prague.
The works Peja?evi? left behind, to the extent they were acknowledged at all, must have seemed hopelessly outdated by a musical intelligentsia preoccupied with the latest compositional novelties. It’s not just that she embraced a musical vocabulary practically indistinguishable from any number of late 19th-century Romantic composers, but by the time she came to begin her F?-Minor Symphony in 1916, completing it a year later, the era of the big Romantic symphony was on life support, or at least on recuperative leave. Mahler had pretty much seen to that a decade earlier. Last-stand efforts by Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, Franz Schmidt, and a number of others didn’t change the fact that the symphony, as inherited from the 19th century, was about to take on new forms and modes of expression in the 20th.
Peja?evi?’s symphony, like Rachmaninoff’s Second, may have been written in the 20th century, but it belongs to the 19th. It’s your standard-issue four-movement effusively romantic affair—a rich tapestry spun from strands of long-breathed chromatically enhanced melody, luxuriant harmony, and opulent orchestration. It doesn’t seem to be much influenced by the Mahler-Zemlinsky-Schoenberg axis, though perhaps that shouldn’t be a surprise considering the very complex cultural cross-pollination of Croatia’s history by Hungarian, Italian, and even Russian influences. In fact, isolated passages throughout Peja?evi?’s symphony remind me a bit of Glazunov. But there are so many other crosscurrents going on in the score, not least of which is a passage at 7:54 in the first movement that sounds like it escaped from Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. But it quickly morphs into something that sounds like it was lifted from Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony.
If there’s any surprise at all in Peja?evi?’s piece it’s how upbeat and optimistic it sounds for a work ostensibly in a minor key. Her melodies have an almost Italianate character to them in their lithe and graceful manner, and if the title and notes didn’t identify the piece as being in minor, I’d bet the farm it was in major.
The piano Phantasie Concertante came two years after completion of the symphony. In a single movement lasting almost 15 minutes, the piece is a virtuoso vehicle that alternates between Gershwin-like bluesy harmonies and jazzy rhythms on the one hand and keyboard figuration right out of Rachmaninoff on the other. Just listen to the broad, lush melody beginning in the cellos at 6:12 and the florid passagework in the piano weaving around and entwining with it. It could have come from the first movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto. I hope someone from Hyperion is reading this, because Peja?evi?’s Phantasie and probably her piano concerto as well are ideal candidates for the next volume of the Romantic Piano Concerto series.
When you hear this piece you will wonder how Peja?evi? could have been forgotten. If the climax to the lengthy aforementioned passage doesn’t sweep you away, I can’t think of much else that will. The fact that Peja?evi? could develop, build, and sustain a musical paragraph of such length is evidence in itself that the woman could write circles around many of her peers, male or female.
Pianist Volker Banfield is stunning, as are conductor Ari Rasilainen and his Rheinland-Pfalz State Philharmonic forces. Cpo has done it again. I thought I’d already settled on my annual Want List selections, but this dark horse entry is just going to have to push another pick aside. Urgently recommended.
Premiering in Munich in 1903, Le donne curiose numbered among the greatest and earliest successes of the German-Italian composer Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari. No Wagnerian pathos or turn-of-the-century bombast here: Wolf-Ferrari’s merry work is based on a Carlo Goldoni comedy in the spirit of a newly discovered rococo. Le donne curiose formed the basis of his world renown as a composer whose dramatic talent was always overshadowed by the subtle humor of his buffo operas. Ulf Schirmer again presents a convincing case on his behalf (previous release: Wolf-Ferrari, Orchestral Works: cpo 777 567-2).
This CD features the acclaimed Finnish pianist Olli Mustonen with piano works by Alexander Scriabin, which have become his signature pieces in concert. Olli Mustonen has been hailed by The Sunday Times as, “a living dream of pianism, having broken through an expressive barrier that other players do not know exists.”
