It is rare to find a disc as creatively programmed as this BIS release. Enhanced by lovely performances, played with great devotion to the memory of the recently-deceased Japanese master, the repertoire was chosen by conductor Tadaaki Otaka and producer Robert Suff, who organized it not only in the most effective succesion, but in a manner that illustrates the works' individual meaning and illuminates Takemitsu's career.


All but one of the compositions are from Takemitsu's late period. The other, the Requiem for Strings, is one of the earliest works to win him fame. Fantasma/Cantos II, for trombone and orchestra, is among the last Takemitsu compositions. Both it and the Requiem provide considerably more forward harmonic motion than the other four works, which are in Takemitsu's typical "Japanese garden" meditative style, a kind of revival of French impressionism using harmonies that are more like Messiaen's than Debussy's.


Christian Lindberg is well known to fans of the BIS label as one of the greatest masters of the trombone, seemingly undaunted by any challenge. He also is a musician of wide interests who has recorded all sorts of music for that instrument. Although his part in Fantasma/Cantos II no doubt is quite difficult, it is not written to make a virtuoso effect, and Lindberg shows that the loudest instrument in the orchestra is capable of unexpectedly subtle, gentle singing. And when Takemitsu permits loud sounds, Lindberg stays within the composer's undemonstrative aesthetic.


The nearest conducting competitor Otaka has in this music is Oliver Knussen, who has recorded four of these pieces for Virgin Classics and Deutsche Grammophon. Otaka gets the nod by banishing (except in Requiem, where it belongs) the hard-edged modernist feeling that slightly impairs Knussen's accounts.


The Kioi Sinfonietta of Tokyo is a select group of top-flight Japanese orchestral players plus some of their most talented younger counterparts. In this age where "training orchestras" frequently are first-rate ensembles, the Kioi sounds like an experienced group of long-term pros. Woodwind soloists beautifully play the short melody fragments that are so common in the descriptive pieces, and the whole ensemble seems to float effortlessly into Takemitsu's trademark meditative mood. The most lovely piece is How slow the wind, which has a gorgeous six-note melody. Tree Line, a more austere and static piece depicting a row of acacia trees near Takemitsu's studio, is impressively dark and mysterious.


The sound is absolutely clear. The disc is an SACD hybrid comprising two stereo music programs (one a standard CD, the other DSD) but no surround-sound, which would have been particularly desirable for the spatially conceived Archipelago S. Overall the SACD offers a substantially more natural sound than the standard CD layer.


In his own field Takemitsu was as important an artist as Kurosawa was in Japanese cinema. This disc is an excellent demonstration of the reason why, and is highly recommended to those who already understand this, but especially to those who have not yet realized it.
--Joseph Stevenson, ClassicsToday.com

This is an, err… enchanting disc of Grieg’s choral music – both original and arranged for choir. The opening, resonant, full bodied choral arrangement of the popular “At Rondane”, op.33, No.2 (originally for voice and piano) is plain gorgeous in its moody way. Two religious songs were prepared for mixed choir by Grieg himself of which “Withered, Fallen – At the Bier of a Young Wife” sounds a bit predictable, but touching in its cathedral-like piety. In this song, as in “Ave, Maris Stella” or indeed most of the other works on this glorious sounding (multi-channel/stereo) hybrid SACD, the non-Norwegian ear will always pick up a certain preciousness, that silver-voiced, Christmas-choir touch with scents and touches of mulled wine, snow boots, and blond locks under a woolen hat.

“Margaret’s Cradle Song” op.15, No.1, a short gem some 90 seconds long, was written in appreciation of the birth of his daughter Alexandra in 1868. It is set to the Ibsen poem of the same name and hauntingly beautiful. Alexandra, however, never got to appreciate her song; she died shortly after it was written. (Which is tragic and yet, given that it was set to something by Ibsen, also so terribly appropriate.)

Grete Pedersen, who conducts the Norwegian Soloists’ Choir also sets the first of the Lyric Pieces op.71 “Det var engang” for mixed choir. It might be the only miscalculation in that the result sounds nice and pleasant but also — in its dum-de-dum new-agey way — cheap.

Norway was already an independent nation when Grieg composed the 1907 Four Psalms op.74, his last work. It’s a somber end to his musical output – with “Jesus Christ is Risen” being an especially austere, if moving, setting of this Hans Adolf Brorson text. The four psalm settings are based on a collection of Norwegian “newer and older mountain tunes” that Grieg wanted to help preserve with his musical adoption. He has achieved that all over again by having them included in this very fine reminder that Grieg is so much more than the Grieg of a certain mountain king’s hall, or of lyric pieces, or a piano concerto.

-- Jens F. Laurson, WETA 90.9

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Rather than an attempt to depict a reality-based musical view of China, pianist Jenny Lin's program seems designed to show how fantasy tends to mix with reality in many Western composers' attempts to evoke the flavor of a far-off, exotic land that held strong fascination. Of course, this fascination with the Orient in general began centuries ago with Europeans' first awareness of music, styles, food, and art, an awareness that grew to spawn periodic fads and influence fashions. Rulers stocked their palaces with treasures brought from the far east; Puccini and Gilbert and Sullivan celebrated this attention and many other composers included or tried to include elements of what they thought was oriental "flavor" in some of their works. Most often, however, the result was as much like real Chinese as the Moo Goo Gai Pan from your local takeout.


Lin has chosen a varied and eminently colorful program that includes many unfamiliar works--but no one can complain that this isn't one of the more engaging, intriguing, original, and entertaining piano recordings to come along in the past year. And pianist Lin is a wonderful musician, in total technical command of this long (nearly 80 minutes) and formidable program. And (as long as we're on the subject) she imbues the music with an enticing mix of variously scented spices that truly bring out the unique, if rarely authentic flavors of each composer's creation. As you might expect the pentatonic scale and its permutations are a ubiquitous presence, a feature that may have seemed merely curious a century ago but now comes off as more than a little cartoonish and hackneyed. But it still can be made charming and even pretty, as in Martinu's The Fifth Day of the Fifth Moon, or sensuous, as in the surprising, Debussyian Lotus Land by Cyril Scott. Morton Gould's Pieces of China is a kind of Pictures at an Exhibition for the Kodak age. The idiom is a hybrid of borrowings from popular music styles (especially jazz) and the Western composer's "do-it-yourself Chinese music fake book"--but it's an absolutely charming condensation of cliché and postcard images, from "The Great Wall" to "Puppets" to "Slow Dance-Lotus".


Other highlights include Anton Arensky's Étude sur un theme chinois Op. 25 No. 3, a great encore piece that whirls and swirls its way through four exciting minutes; Percy Grainger's Beautiful Fresh Flower, loaded to overflowing with open fourths and pentatonic melodies; John Adams' predictably busy-but-going-nowhere evocation of China Gates; and Albert Ketèlby's In a Chinese Temple Garden, complete with gong. The prize for most authentic goes to Alexander Tcherepnin's Five ('Chinese') Concert Études Op. 52. The composer not only lived in the Far East for nearly three years in the 1930s, but he married a young Chinese concert pianist, Lee Hsien-Ming, for whom the etudes were written. Inventive and artful in their use of real Chinese melodies and impressions of Chinese instruments, these pieces have been virtually ignored by pianists but, especially as Lin presents them, they also deserve serious attention by others. Lin's fluid legatos, skillfully calibrated dynamics, and polished rapid fingering technique really shine here.


In the "works that have Chinese names but nothing to do with China" category are Abram Chasins' Rush Hour in Hong Kong, which from the sound of it just as well could be San Francisco or London or any other city; Ferruccio Busoni's Turandots Frauengemach, which is based on the folk tale Turandot, but whose theme is the very English tune "Greensleeves" which, according to the excellent liner notes, Busoni mistakenly thought was Chinese; and Rossini's Petite Polka chinoise, in which amusingly you can hear lots of Chopin but virtually no chinoiserie. Lin plays this with knowing humor and understated flair.


Lin's Steinway benefits from an acoustic that complements and naturally captures its full range and character, from robust lows to ringing highs. This is a release that every piano enthusiast should own. Those looking for a quirky but unfailingly delightful visit to China will enjoy it too. [7/1/2000]
--David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com

Import Hybrid-SACD pressing.

Import Hybrid-SACD pressing.

Classical Music

This is the second of a planned series of eight discs promising to trace the development of the trio sonata, the archetypal Baroque chamber form. The first, devoted to music from London Baroque’s home country, was reviewed in Fanfare 28:3 with considerable enthusiasm by Laura Rónai, and by myself elsewhere in a review that largely mirrored my colleague’s findings. Now London Baroque has turned its attention to what was happening during the same period across the English Channel, with equally commendable results.


The ambivalent French attitude to the sonata, an Italian invention, was famously and sardonically expressed in the words of playwright Fontenelle: “Sonate, que me veux-tu” (literally “Sonata, what do you want from me?”). A more balanced view came from the theorist François Raguenet who, although a stern critic of Italian opera, declared that he had “never met with a master in France but what agreed that the Italians knew much better how to turn and vary a trio than the French.” A number of French masters, indeed, sought to integrate the spirit of the Italian sonata, specifically the Corellian sonata, into their own style, among whom François Couperin attempted a fusion that reached a climax in the two sets of L’apothéoses , dedicated respectively to Corelli (1724) and Lully (1725). (Both have already been recorded by London Baroque on BIS CD1275, not reviewed in Fanfare. )


The selection made by London Baroque provides a representative cross section of writing in trio style, taking us chronologically from Lully to Clérambault (one assumes the series will include a second French disc devoted to the 18th century), and managing to include at least one unfamiliar name in the shape of Jean Nicolas Geoffroy (?–1694), a shadowy figure whose obscurity is not helped by the fact that there was more than one composer of that name working in Paris at the time. According to gambist Charles Medlam’s note, his Dialogues were probably originally intended for organ, but they work well enough in this form, if too diffuse to lay any claim to the structural balance of the true trio sonata. Much the same can be said of the little pieces by Louis Couperin, which provide no indication as to instrumentation. Lully’s trios for the ceremony of Le coucher du Roi , performed daily at Versailles by the petits violons , do achieve true equality between the two violins, but, true to form, the Italian-born Lully firmly implanted French style on the music. Although Marais’s Pièces en trio (1692) were the first works to be published in France in trio form, they are in fact a collection of mostly dance movements that following tradition could be arranged in suites. As such, they too bear little relationship to the true trio sonata, preferring to explore the French love of varying sonorities rather than the symmetrical balance of the Italian sonata, an observation that applies equally to the Suite by Gaspard le Roux (1660–1707).


It is only with the next generation that an awareness of the Italian model emerges. François Couperin’s La Superbe is well named, being a majestic work that pays overt homage to Corelli in the suspensions of its opening movement, and the fugal writing of the second, while Jean-Féry Rebel’s tombeau in honor of Lully largely remains loyal to native style, but also betrays Italian leanings in some dazzling solo violin-writing and furious tremolandos in its fourth movement. Most Italianate of all is the work by Louis-Nicolas Clérambault, significantly the only one included here to bear the name “sonata.”


With the proviso that, as with the disc of English works, London Baroque’s style of playing manifestly owes more to the 18th than the 17th century, these performances can be thoroughly recommended. The technical expertise, splendid sense of balance between the players, finesse, and spirited approach are by now all familiar assets, while the music is of generally high quality and well worth hearing. The engineering occasionally imparts a glassiness to the violins’s upper register, but is otherwise fine. I look forward to further issues in this interesting series.


FANFARE: Brian Robins

Classical Music

Classical Music