Not only violinists are eternally grateful to Antonio Vivaldi for the sheer abundance of concert works he bequeathed. The instrument he wrote for with the second greatest frequency is the bassoon, for which he created about forty concertos. Two of the most celebrated bookend Václav Vonášek’s debut recording and are supplemented by pieces by other 18th-century masters.
JARMILA NOVOTNÁ OPERA RECITAL • Jarmila Novotná (s); Ezio Pinza (bs);3 Raoul Jobin (t);5 Jan Peerce (t);7 James Melton (t);9 Martial Singher (bar);11 Arturo Toscanini1, Paul Breisach2, Bruno Walter3, Frieder Weissmann4, Thomas Beecham5, Morton Gould6, Ettore Panizza7, Maurice Abravanel8, Frank Black9, Alfred Wallenstein10, Donald Voorhees11, Wilfred Pelletier12, cond; Gibner King (pn);13 Vienna PO;1 Metropolitan Op O;14 Victor O;4 Bell Telephone O11 • SUPRAPHON 4158, mono (79:02) Live, film, and studio performances 1930–1956
ROSSINI Il barbiere di Siviglia: Una voce poco fà (in Czech). MOZART 1Die Zauberflöte: Ach, ich fühls. 2,14Le nozze di Figaro: Non so più; Voi che sapete. 3,14Don Giovanni: Ah, che mi dice mai; Fuggi il traditor. OFFENBACH Les contes d’Hoffmann: Les oiseaux dans la charmille (in German); 4Belle nuit,ô nuit d’amour; 4Elle a fui; 5,14Voyez l’étrange fantasie … C’est un chanson d’amour. VERDI La traviata: 6Tra voi; 7,14Ah, fors’ è lui … Sempre libera; 8Addio del passato; 9Parigi, o cara. PUCCINI La bohème: 10Si mi chiamano Mimi; 11Mimi! Speravo di trovarvi qui. 12,14Tosca: Vissi d’arte. SMETANA 10The Bartered Bride: Ten lásky sen. 4The Kiss: Hajej, m?j andílku. 13Rusalka: O lovely moon
Despite a long, distinguished career of 30 years, 16 of them at the Metropolitan Opera, Jarmila Novotná is known largely to record collectors and students of archive performances. Her one and only intersection with popular culture was an appearance in the M-G-M film The Great Caruso (1951), whose big star was tenor Mario Lanza. In Germany, where she appeared for several years and made some fairly popular films (Fire in the Opera, The Beggar Student, The Bartered Bride, Song of the Lark), she is perhaps better known, and in her native (now former) Czechoslovakia she is considered to be on a par with Emmy Destinn and Maria Jeritza. In her early years, when she was a high soubrette, the voice was ear-ravishing lovely, even sparkling in sound, but by 1937 her tone was becoming a bit heavier and her upper range less easy; thus, by the time she made her Met debut (January 5, 1940, in La bohème opposite Jussi Björling), the voice had become darker. But she was an excellent stage actress, an outstanding musician (she had already sung such offbeat works as Ravel’s L’heure espagnole, at Otto Klemperer’s Kroll Opera, as well as Krenek’s The Life of Orestes, and Schoenberg’s Die glückliche Hand) and a fine stage actress. She was a favorite soprano of such conductors as Zemlinsky, Erich Kleiber, Walter, Szell, and Toscanini.
One thing you can’t miss from the opening track—Rossini’s “Una voce poco fà” sung in Czech—was that she sang with her high range too “open,” much the same way Bidú Sayão did in her “coloratura” years, and with similar results; both had to come down to the lyric range because they blew it out. You can hear the difference immediately after the Rossini aria, in her the “Ach, ich fühls” from Die Zauberflöte in Toscanini’s ill-fated Salzburg performance (ill-fated due to the overloud singing of his Tamino, Helge Rosawenge, and the botched, out-of-key performance of the Queen of the Night, Julie Osvath). Yet you can also hear her phrasing becoming tighter and more musical, less scatter-gun in her approach to producing notes. To modern ears, more used to mezzo Cherubinos, Novotná sounds rather light and very girlish (even Christine Schäfer, one of our few soprano Cherubinos nowadays, sings the music with a darker tone than this), but once again she is very fine, particularly in “Voi, che sapete.” Despite a slightly slower tempo than we are used to today, this performance could pass muster in our modern opera houses. But one does sense a loss from her earlier voice with its bright, open tone: The sound, now slightly covered, is no longer as distinctive. In Donna Elvira’s “Ah, che mi dice mai,” the voice no longer has any “bite” up top, despite splendid singing (and Bruno Walter’s tempo is much too fast for this music), but both soprano and conductor sound better in “Fuggi il traditor.”
The three excerpts from Les contes d’Hoffmann point out the differences well: the very early (1930) “Doll song” in German sung with light, pointed tone (and good trills), the “Barcarolle” and “Elle a fui” (now in French, from 1945) sounding more covered and bit muddy in tone, as is the 1944 duet with Jobin (a rather plain, ugly-sounding vocalist who was the Met’s preferred French tenor of the 1940s). By this point in her career, Novotná was also breaking her phrases a bit more frequently for breath than she had just a few years earlier.
The four Traviata excerpts, ranging in date from 1940 (“Addio del passato”) to 1950 (“Parigi, o cara”) are interesting in showing how Novotná built a character up throughout an opera. She was not the equal of an Olivero or Mattila, but in some moments she was interesting in a general way. In “Ah, fors’ e lui” she sings the descending opening line with the rests between the notes, the way Verdi wrote them, but after the tenor’s lines in “Sempre libera” she makes a mistake, correcting herself quickly. There is, however, no feeling in her “Addio del passato,” which is also conducted much too quickly by Abravanel. The voice is so dark by the time of her 1950 “Parigi, o cara” that it is almost unrecognizable as the same singer, and there is no feeling of loss or desperation in her voice. She might as well have been singing about her missing dog. (To be fair, however, her partner in this duet, James Melton, sings with no expression whatever.) There is a bit of expression in her “Si, mi chiamano Mimì” from 1943, but again, it’s just a sort of “generic Puccini sound,” nothing particularly personal in her tone or expression. The Mimì-Marcello duet with Singher (a rather gray-sounding and uninteresting baritone who was the Met’s French baritone counterpart to Jobin) shows, once again, Novotná’s generic, all-purpose acting style.
Although Novotná does not give out any more emotionally in the Czech operatic excerpts, the voice does sound more comfortable than in Italian or French. Hers is one of the better performances I’ve heard of the Bartered Bride aria, and the best I’ve heard of the aria from The Kiss. But I still have to rate Elfride Trötschel, Zinka Milanov, and Renée Fleming better in “O lovely moon” from Rusalka. (Novotná’s performance is also cut, missing one section.)
All in all this is an interesting cross-section of performances by a now-neglected soprano, though I’d much rather have had one of her excerpts from the German Bartered Bride film in place of the Tosca aria.
Launching his Mozart debut recorded with the Czech Philharmonic and Jirí Belohlávek, Jan Bartoš drew to himself a lot of critical attention on an international scale. Those who reviewed the album especially appreciated his rare ability to combine thorough understanding both of the musical architecture and the deep emotionality of the works (a quality possessed also by the pianist's tutors Ivan Moravec and Alfred Brendel). From the early "Haydn-like" Sonata No. 3 in C major to the highly dramatic "Appassionata" to the transcendent last Sonata No. 32 in C minor, which gives an impression of the composer parting with this world, the pianist facilitates to us the amazing integrity and colorfulness of Beethoven's piano work. During the thirty years separating his first and last piano opus, the composer tried out numberless experiments, and yet some crucial themes come up again and again; the imprint of his unique musical DNA is discernible from his very first opuses. In the hands of Jan Bartoš, Beethoven whispers, sings and thunders. We encounter a world full of contrasts, an image whose colors remain impressed in our memory for a long time.
Hunting Music of Old Czech Masters / Collegium Musicum Pragensae, Prague Symphony
Supraphon
CD
$28.99Feb 16, 2018
Hunting cannot be thought about in isolation from the sounds accompanying it – the barking of dogs, the shrieks of frightened quarry, the shots, and the sound of horns and trumpets. Signal instruments and the atmosphere of chase gave rise to the special genre of “hunting music”. The quintessential hunting-related instrument is the French horn, which became widely used in Bohemia after 1760, owing to Count Franz Anton von Sporck. Yet hunting music, for a variety of ensembles (including the wind Harmonie), was also played at feasts and other social events. Hunting-themed pieces - cassations, serenades, partitas (many of them termed caccia or la chasse) - indicated their connection with hunting by the selection of instruments, the typical harmonies and melodies, as well as by featuring onomatopoeic effects, such as the sounds of animals and birds, and sonic renditions of buoyant merry-making in the wake of the hunting expedition. The music featured on the present album was written by three Czech representatives of high Classicism. Jirí Družecký and Jan Nepomuk Vent composed numerous popular pieces for wind instruments. Pavel Vranický, a friend of Haydn and Beethoven, who both chose him to conduct their works, was a distinguished theatre figure in Vienna.
An artist with a penchant for seeking out the new, Radek Baborak has joined forces with other outstanding musicians so as to interpret the pieces as arranged for horn and string quartet. "I liked the idea of presenting the concertos in the form they may have been heard when Mr. Leutgeb would visit the Mozart's home, get together with Mr. Michael Haydn and Mr. Sussmayr, and make music."
There are few countries that can match Russia in terms of having produced as many outstanding musicians, especially pianists; Tatiana Nikolayeva was one member of what has become known as the Russian Piano School which along with her includes Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels and many others and that tradition continues right down to today’s representatives with no apparent sign of any let up, thank goodness! Raw talent coupled with a dedicated singl- minded sense of purpose drove these artists to dominate the very pinnacle of peerless pianism. In 1951, aged 27, Tatiana Nikolayeva visited Prague and made the earliest of these recordings, several of which appear on CD for the first time. She had already caused a considerable stir in Czechoslovakia’s capital on previous visits, which included her first in 1947 when she came second at a competition organised as part of the First World Festival of Youth and Students. That was the same year she completed her conservatory studies when she astounded her examiners by including all 48 of Bach’s preludes and fugues from his Well Tempered-Clavier for her final performance test. In Leipzig in July 1950 during that town’s Bachfest, organised to mark the 200th anniversary of Bach’s death that work became a turning point in her career as she offered the judges the opportunity to call for her to play whichever they asked for on the spot; on the jury that awarded her first prize was none other than Dmitry Shostakovich! At the festival’s closing concert when Bach’s concerto for three pianos was to be performed Maria Yudina (1899-1970), who was to have been at the second piano, had injured a finger and couldn’t play so her place was taken by Shostakovich, himself an outstanding pianist, and from that moment on Nikolayeva’s acquaintance with the composer developed into a friendship that would last right up until Shostakovich’s death in 1975. It is a measure of Shostakovich’s respect and admiration for Tatiana Nikolayeva that he not only dedicated his cycle of 24 preludes and fugues to her but consulted with her over them, including many of her suggestions and observations in the work and, of course, it was she that gave its première in Leningrad in December 1952.
It was fascinating to read in the booklet that she had such a phenomenal memory that she never took any sheet music with her on tours, relying instead on that memory for her performances. The digital mastering from the original tapes by Jan Lži?a? has done wonders with the inevitable clicks and pops one might expect from these recordings, some of which were made over 65 years ago, though obviously the solo works come off best as the orchestral sound betrays its age more readily. That said her playing in the Rachmaninov piano concerto is as convincing as any I have ever heard despite the (to my ears) rather sluggish orchestral accompaniment. Her playing comes over as completely natural, without the least suggestion of artifice. The first of the solo works is Prokofiev’s 3rd piano sonata ‘From old notebooks’ and despite the rather brittle sound caused, I think, by a little too much treble, it is a solid performance that demonstrates her capacity for bringing out the contrast between the stormy and the subtle. Next come three pieces by Nikolayeva herself revealing a less well-known or appreciated side of her, that of composer. Her Three concert etudes, op13 show a real talent; how much music she wrote I must confess I don’t know but on the evidence here what she did compose is clearly worth exploring. It shows the influence of Prokofiev with complex rhythms and dense textures as opposed to the lighter and more romantic touch of Rachmaninov.
Opening disc 2, we are treated to three of the Shostakovich 24 Preludes and fugues which, as mentioned above, were dedicated to her and for which she was closely consulted. You would expect Shostakovich to know what he was doing with his dedication and consultations and her performance shows how well-founded his opinion was as she plays the pieces as naturally as if they were her own. In an interview she characterised the 15th prelude and fugue in D flat major as “...so fierce and lively, like a whirlpool. And in that quiet forest, (in Ruza outside Moscow at an artists’ retreat) when I heard that stormy whirlpool I went into wild rapture”. That certainly comes over in her playing. Conductor Kurt Sanderling told Tatiana that in his opinion the preludes and fugues were Shostakovich’s intimate diary and when she objected “Why not his string quartets and symphonies”, he replied no, this work for it is “an intimate diary of Shostakovich, kept for himself, that brings happiness to all of us”. How true Sanderling’s observation was and how wonderful to listen to these works with that thought in mind.
She then turns to Bach, her great love and for which playing she is rightly renowned. First up is the Fantasia in C minor, BWV 816 and her luminous playing is revealed to its highest degree, and shines through despite the sound appearing to be a little distant. Even better is her earlier recording of Bach’s French Suite no.5 in G major, BWV 816. This is a remarkable recording in terms of playing and sound which belies its age of 66 years. She plays these again as if she owned them; just listen to the Courante and its following Sarabande and marvel at the contrast she creates, injecting excitement and refinement in equal degrees and after the gentleness of the Sarabande the Gavotte and Bourrée revert to the thrill of a headlong race as notes tumble out in a great rush; utterly thrilling. Altogether a fabulous 15 ½ minutes of pianistic brilliance finishing with a breathtakingly fast Gigue.
Closing the two-disc set is another marvellous example of Nikolayeva’s technical skills, which were coupled with an innate sensitivity: her 1952 recording of Bach’s Chromatic fantasia & fugue in D minor, BWV 903 which, along with the Prokofiev, her own concert etudes, the Shostakovich and the Bach fantasia, is the first time the recording has appeared on CD. It is further proof that she was one of the greatest ever interpreters of Bach’s keyboard works. It is not enough simply to love them since all pianists who include them in their repertoire surely do, rather it is a total understanding of how they work and an ability to reveal their intrinsic humanity which she had and which is rare in my listening experience. This set is a must-have for all lovers of solo piano music and admirers of the consummate art of Tatiana Nikolayeva, a true original.
The piece reflects the tumultuous post-war musical development and can be designated as one of Foerster’s most progressive compositions. The young and gifted Janáček Trio interprets Foerster’s works with an understanding of the composer’s inner world and complete engagement.
