In the expansive acoustic of Hereford Cathedral, Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, John Wallace and Colm Carey draw the listener into a late-Romantic world of outstanding and strikingly idiomatic ensemble music. Originally released in 2004, ‘The Trumpets That Time Forgot’ is now part of Linn’s ECHO series that offers a second chance to enjoy the best of the label’s award-winning catalogue. “The playing of all three gentlemen is absolutely assured” – Int’l Record Review

Like his English contemporary, Sir Arthur Sullivan, Barbieri - sometimes styled 'The Spanish Glinka', for his importance to Madrid's operatic development - drew on a potent mix of ingredients ranging from Mozart, French opera comique and Italian opera through to the popular music of his time and place. El barberillo boasts a brilliant, tuneful score, and a libretto by Luis Mariano de Larra that is witty, well-structured and passionate. Although not Barbieri's 'breakthrough work' (which was Jugar con fuego, 'Playing with Fire' in 1851), El barberillo is Barbieri at his perfect best. The title plays on his own name, while inevitably evoking another famous Spanish barber, Rossini's from Seville. It is as if Barbieri was issuing a challenge, proclaiming that Madrid was now an operatic match for any city in Europe. The gambit succeeded: the huge success of El barberillo supplied the cornerstone for a long-lived musical stage tradition (and economic goldmine) which lasted beyond the 1936 Spanish Civil War.

Classical Music

A wide cross-section of Maxwell Davies's work is represented on this programme, part of the ongoing Naxos reissues of recordings fist released by Collins Classics. The two concertos are performed by their dedicatees.

Emotional and intense, composer Frank Horvat gives his audience the time and space to reflect in our fast-paced world. His compositions tell deeply personal stories while permitting audiences to ponder their own. Whether he writes for his band, the concert stage or film/TV, his music is both aggressive and introspective. It digs into your heart and soul with a driving minimalism and a haunting reflection. Frank's compositions are based on social injustices as well as the wondrousness of life, love. And longing. This minimalist and loop-oriented chamber music album creates a captivating effect by re-creating an electronic looping effect associated with electronic music with only the use of a single acoustic instrument or family of instruments in each piece. Each track's timbre is unique as the album moves from harp to clarinet, percussion, piano and human voice.

The Stars and Stripes Forever opens this collection of Sousa's music with characteristic swagger. All the favorite marches, such as The Liberty Bell, The Washington Post, King Cotton, and Semper Fidelis are mixed in an attractive and varier program with a lesser-known side of 'The March King's' musical personality. Some of these tracks appear on disc for the first time in invigorating performances. (Nimbus)

Selections recorded December 27-29, 1984 and December 18-19, 1986.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Chicago-based composer Ross Crean’s opera The Great God Pan soars in this new release, the first collaboration between the composer and PARMA recordings. The Great God Pan takes its story from an eponymous 1890 novella by Welsh author Arthur Machen, which explores themes of scientific hubris, transcendental medicine, and unexplainable supernatural behavior. Impressively, Crean adapted Machen’s narrative into the work’s libretto himself, an ambitious and rare undertaking for a composer. Crean’s familiarity with the story shows through in the emotional resonance of his music, which matches and communicates the character’s concerns and feelings with unflinching precision. The key to Crean’s musical portrayal of the story is twofold. First, beginning with the overture, much of the opera’s accompanimental music is defined by pulsing ostinato ideas. This characteristic is inviting to the listener and draws us into the musical world of Crean’s opera. More importantly, the relentless quality of these rhythms wordlessly establishes the ominous mixture of tension and mystery at the heart of The Great God Pan’s narrative. Second, Crean’s text setting is extremely clear, so the story is conveyed with crystal clarity in this recording. Without giving too much away, the tale at the heart of The Great God Pan begins with a surgery gone wrong. The first character we meet, Dr. Raymond, has invited the opera’s protagonist, Clarke, to witness an important experiment based in elements of non-traditional, ancient rituals. Dr. Raymond sacrifices his wife Mary as the subject of his attempt to access a higher spiritual plane – referred to as, “seeing the Great God Pan” – and unwittingly initiates a serious of mysterious supernatural occurrences that Clarke encounters over the next few decades. This recording represents a chamber version of Crean’s opera that includes a full cast of ten superb vocalists and a pair accompanying pianos. The piano parts yearn to be orchestrated, and, in many moments, the listener can easily imagine the lush mixture of brass, strings, woodwinds, and percussion Crean will employ once he has the opportunity to fully orchestrate the piece. With this said, the performance on this album never neither feels incomplete, nor does it ever lack any intensity it might enjoy in a full production. This owes to the excellent quality of the album’s vocal performances, and to Crean’s ingenuity in composing the accompanying piano parts with the sounds of strumming and plucking, which combine to make the music that much more vibrant. Ross Crean is a multifaceted artist, composing and active in many genres of music. As a vocalist, he has studied rock, opera, and many disparate vocal styles. He received his degree from Illinois State University in Music Theory/Composition and has worked with or received commissions from Oberlin College, Opera on Tap Chicago, and Loyola University Museum of Art. Crean’s song cycle, A Passive-Aggressive’s Guide to Mother Goose, was a 2016 winner of One Ounce Opera’s inaugural Fresh Squeezed Ounce of Art Song competition.

Classical Music

Also available on Blu-ray

Glyndebourne has a proud association with the operas of Benjamin Britten, however until 2010 had never staged Billy Budd. The all-male opera with a libretto co-written by EM Forster, is based on the battle between pure good and blind evil, and is set on a British man-‘o-war ship. Michael Grandage, Artistic Director of the Donmar Warehouse, chose this work to make his long-awaited operatic debut. Sir Mark Elder returned to conduct the production, marking the 100th opera production in his illustrious career.



Benjamin Britten
BILLY BUDD

Captain Vere – John Mark Ainsley
Billy Budd – Jacques Imbrailo
Claggart – Phillip Ens
Mr. Redburn – Iain Paterson
Mr. Flint – Matthew Rose
Lieutenant Ratcliffe – Darren Jeffery
Red Whiskers – Alasdair Elliott
Donald – John Moore
Dansker – Jeremy White
Novice – Ben Johnson
Squeak – Colin Judson
Bosun – Richard Mosley-Evans

The Glyndebourne Chorus
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Mark Elder, conductor
Michael Grandage, stage director
Bonus:
- Introducing Billy Budd
- Designs on Billy Budd

Picture format: NTSC 16:9 Anamorphic
Sound format: LPCM Stereo 2.0 / DTS 5.1
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Menu language: English
Subtitles: English, French, German, Spanish
Running time: 200 mins
No. of DVDs: 1

This Blu-ray Disc is only playable on Blu-ray Disc players and not compatible with standard DVD players.

Also available on standard DVD



Elsewhere in this issue I review—and excoriate—a Regietheater butchery of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites . Here we have its polar opposite, an absolutely stupendous performance in which— mirabile dictu! —the production team dedicates itself to a scrupulously accurate and imaginatively vivid realization of the creators’ intentions. This is the first opera production by well-known British stage director Michael Grandage, who works here with an established team of collaborators: stage designer Christopher Oram (who has the deepest bass speaking voice I’ve ever heard; I have a basso profundo , and he makes me sound like a baritone!), lighting designer Paule Constable, and movement director Tom Roden. The results are nothing short of spectacular, and they deserve as much commendation as the singers for a brilliantly executed production.


Normally the interviews that accompany many opera DVDs are insubstantial fluff, but not here. In two excellent supplementary features, Introducing Billy Budd and Designs on Billy Budd , Grandage, Oram, and Constable articulate their conceptions with exceptional grace, and it is worth quoting them at some length.


Grandage: “From a director’s point of view, the starting point of any piece of work is trying to get back inside the creator’s head and what they imagined. I think that’s one of the most exciting jobs of an interpretive artist. … And so it’s always been of interest to me to use their starting point as my starting point. … I’m not the kind of director who enjoys immediately looking at a time and place set by the writer and then going ‘Let’s not do that.’ It gives me more pleasure to try and interpret something that was clear for them, when they first set about writing it, and trying to bring that clarity to a new production.”


Oram: “At the end of the day, the idea is to communicate ideas and to serve one person, which is the writer. I want to do him justice by presenting his works in the best way possible.”


Constable: “I’m just telling the same story the opera is telling. … I don’t want them [the audience] to notice the lighting. I just want them to be part of something that tells the story as well as it can.”


What is truly striking about all this is not just the clarity, concision, and intelligence with which this common viewpoint is stated, but rather the humility it expresses. In contrast to the pernicious egotism of Regietheater , wherein the director poses as a Nietzschean Übermensch who proclaims to the benighted hoi polloi his annihilation of all moral laws and social conventions, it offers the concept of service to the original artistic creator, rather than subjugation of him. At the end of the day, Regietheater is utterly futile because it is absolutely barren, its hopelessly self-referential gestures comprising a pseudo-intellectual onanism. By contrast, the traditional period productions the Regietheater practitioner scorns are those which, by virtue of fidelity to original time and place, paradoxically achieve temporal transcendence and become universal in their connotations. Consequently, they are infinitely more creative—and thus truly artistic—than the sterile and puerile gimmickry of directors whose pretensions to “originality” consist of spewing forth hackneyed clichés of contemporary pop cultural phenomena and political artifacts du jour.


In this particular case, the production team constructed a stage setting consisting of the interior of an 18th-century frigate, with the deck lines following the architecture of the floor and balconies of the opera house so that the audience feels itself to actually be inside the ship and immediately participating in the action. For the scenes that take place in cabins or below deck, a cross-hatched framework is lowered over the stage that, in conjunction with deft alteration of the lighting (including a remarkably eerie blue twilight), creates a claustrophobic atmosphere that perfectly underlines and heightens the dramatic tension culminating in Billy’s doom. The costumes are in harmony with the set, and the acting by all concerned is natural and unaffected, with crowd scenes of the entire ship’s crew exceptionally well conceived and managed. The booklet notes remark that “Unlike Melville, Grandage doesn’t grandstand the homoeroticism”; that would seem to be a remark more pertinent to co-librettist E. M. Forster than Melville, but as far as the staging is concerned it is all to the good.


With one partial exception, the singing is on as high a plane as the staging. John Mark Ainsley has long been one of England’s most accomplished tenors, and here as Captain Vere he gives what may be the crowning performance of his career, inhabiting the role with vocal and physical nuance as well as complete security. Ideally, one might wish for the greater sweetness of tone he possessed in his youth, but the now slightly more strained timbre of his upper register serves here to accentuate the inner tensions of a fundamentally good man whose great flaw is an overly punctilious adherence to regulations that he allows to thwart his nobler impulses at a crucial moment. As Billy Budd, Jacques Imbrailo is the finest exponent of the role since Theodore Uppman in the world premiere; he not only has the requisite bright, rock-steady baritone with an open top, but also the looks, athleticism, and air of good-hearted, youthful innocence that no one between him and Uppman has fully accomplished on recordings. Interestingly, in his on-camera interview Imbrailo evinces a slight stammer—noticeably on words beginning with a hard “th” sound such as “the”—and one suspects that this provided him with a unique degree of insight into and empathy with the character of Billy that makes his personification so radiant.


The only serious, albeit limited, reservation I have concerns Phillip Ens as Claggart. Interpretively he is superb, the perfect embodiment of pure malevolence concealed behind the mask of duty; but too often, particularly in his middle range, his voice becomes unfocused and diffuse, with something of a wobble. However, the same thing is true of virtually every other bass who previously has recorded this part (Friedrich Dahlberg, Michael Langdon, Eric Halfvarson, and John Tomlinson immediately come to mind) and Ens is actually less flawed in this regard than most of them. It’s a crying shame that Robert Lloyd was never called upon to commit the part to disc; fortunately Matthew Rose, an excellent Mr. Flint here, has just recorded Claggart for a superlative new set on Virgin Classics with the all-star lineup of Ian Bostridge, Nathan Gunn, and conductor Daniel Harding, that now claims pride of place as the best-sung Billy Budd in any medium. As Dansker, Jeremy White also has a sometimes diffuse vocal emission, but the timbre itself is so warm and genial that one forgives the fault and enjoys the otherwise ideal characterization. All of the other secondary characters—Iain Paterson as Mr. Redburn, Matthew Rose as Mr. Flint, Darren Jeffery as Lieutenant Ratcliffe, Ben Johnson as the Novice, Colin Judson as Squeak, Alasdair Elliot as Red Whiskers—are uniformly excellent, with Rose and Johnson being particularly impressive. While Sir Mark Elder is not the most incisive conductor of the score on disc, he has sturdy musical sea legs and sure-footedly navigates all the maritime depths of the score—here, the revised two-act version. The recorded sound quality is stupendous, particularly the deep, thunderous, rolling bass that rumbles through the theater without the slightest hint of dryness or muddiness.


Of the three DVD versions of Billy Budd available, this is easily the one of choice. It is superior in both film quality and the singing of the lead roles to the historic 1966 telecast with Peter Pears, Peter Glossop, Michael Langdon, and Charles Mackerras, recently released on Decca and reviewed by Paul Ingram in Fanfare 32:2, while both are vastly preferable to the abstractly staged and dramatically inert English National Opera production under David Atherton on Kultur despite the latter’s starry vocal cast of Philip Langridge, Thomas Allen, and Richard van Allen. The only regret I have is that this came in sixth place in the competition for a slot on my 2011 Want List; it is fully equal in worth to the five finalists I chose instead, and I cannot urge you strongly enough to make this a part of your music library. It is an instant classic of opera on film, and while in the future it may be equaled, I do not see how it will ever be surpassed.


FANFARE: James A. Altena


Benjamin Britten
BILLY BUDD
(Blu-ray Disc Version)
Captain Vere – John Mark Ainsley
Billy Budd – Jacques Imbrailo
Claggart – Phillip Ens
Mr. Redburn – Iain Paterson
Mr. Flint – Matthew Rose
Lieutenant Ratcliffe – Darren Jeffery
Red Whiskers – Alasdair Elliott
Donald – John Moore
Dansker – Jeremy White
Novice – Ben Johnson
Squeak – Colin Judson
Bosun – Richard Mosley-Evans

The Glyndebourne Chorus
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Mark Elder, conductor
Michael Grandage, stage director
Bonus:
- Introducing Billy Budd
- Designs on Billy Budd

Picture format: 1080i High Definition
Sound format: LPCM Stereo 2.0 / DTS 5.1
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Menu language: English
Subtitles: English, French, German, Spanish
Running time: 200 mins
No. of Discs: 1 (Blu-ray)

The title of this release, Triangle of Resistance, is taken from the three-part suite by Miya Masaoka which opens this album. During World War II, under Executive Order 9066, Masaoka’s family was imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp, which was the inspiration for the piece. The final work, Four Moons of Pluto, explores musical intervals like orbits of planets. The detuned bass used for this piece delves into sonic depths that mirror the music of the spheres. Miya Masaoka is based in New York City. She has written works for traditional instrumentations as well as pieces for solo koto, laser interfaces, laptop and video, and sculpture installations. She frequently works with the sonification of data, and has mapped the behavior of plants, insect movement, and brain activity to sound.