KHACHATURIAN Spartacus • Michail Jurowski, cond; German SO Berlin; RIAS CCh • CAPRICCIO 5112 (2 CDs: 136:50)


Recorded between September 1996 and February 1997, this was reviewed more than two years later in three short, unfortunately uninformative paragraphs by John Bauman in Fanfare 23:2. I say “unfortunate” because this was, at the time, the first new recording of Khachaturian’s complete ballet to come down the pike in 25 years, and since this Jurowski set appeared, the only other Spartacus completes I’m aware of have been released on DVD and Blu-ray only, including the live 1970 black-and-white, mono Bolshoi performance cited by Bauman.


Khachaturian is one of those Soviet-era composers Western academics and critics tend to dismiss as a tool of the Communist regime. Deeply shaken by the infamous Zhandov decree in which he, Shostakovich, and Prokofiev were denounced in the same breath for their formalist tendencies and anti-proletarian music, Khachaturian, more than the others, took the censure to heart and truly repented the error of his ways. He then applied himself to writing music that would please the Soviet authorities, winning in the process a number of State prizes and awards, including, in 1958, appointment to the fifth Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. In Russian eyes, Khachaturian had been successfully rehabilitated and his official reputation restored. In Western eyes, he had been debilitated, seen as a sellout to a corrupt and repressive government apparatus.


Spartacus was completed in 1954, and with choreography by Leonid Yakobson it was first staged in 1956. This was well after the nasty Zhandov business and during the period in which Khachaturian’s standing was back on the rise. In fact, the ballet won him a coveted Lenin Prize.


The ballet’s storyline purports to reenact actual historical events, though as with all such adaptations, liberties are taken. Spartacus, King of Thrace, and his wife, Phrygia, are taken captive by the Romans during one of their conquests around 75 B.C. There’s enough blood, gore, and sex to satisfy everyone. Phrygia is domiciled with the Roman consul’s concubines, Spartacus is sent into the gladiators’ ring, and Aegina, a nymphomaniac if ever there was one, incites the crowd to a bacchanalian orgy. Spartacus marshals the other male captives and slaves in a rebellion against the Romans in what was documented by Plutarch as the third and final Servile War or the War of Spartacus (73–71 B.C.). The uprising was ultimately put down and in the end, at least in the ballet, Spartacus is impaled on a spear and Phrygia weeps to the strains of a mournful chorus. Highlights of the score, of course, are the bacchanal scene and the famous Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia upon their initial escape.


The quality of Khachaturian’s score is uneven. The music undoubtedly fits the stage action at any given moment, but it sometimes seems to play as background music in a film soundtrack, a medium with which the composer was not unfamiliar. This may be a main reason why Spartacus has been filmed more times than audio-only versions of the complete ballet have been recorded. Seen in its most recent and popular 1968 Bolshoi choreography by Yuri Grigorovich, the music makes sense. Heard straight through as a strictly orchestral score, rather than in one of its suites made up of choice excerpts, there are stretches that lose their reason for being when disassociated from their visual staging.


For those, however, who do wish to experience the full score in an audio-only recording, Jurowski’s Capriccio version is colorful, well characterized, highly dynamic, and unreservedly recommended.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

Straus, renewed the most Viennese of all genres, Operetta, with a work aimed at parodying contemporary society. To his great success, every punch Iine was laughed at, and musical allusion understood. There was equal laughter at musical quotations from Wagner's solemnity, dragon's-blood sausage, dachshund dressed as a dragon, and parody of the Nibelung verse metre. Yet what lay, barely concealed, behind it all was also accepted: an attack on military display and Germanic arrogance.

Schaumann presents Vol.2 of most interesting compositions from the environment of the famous composer Schumann and some of his contemporaries. Included herein are world premier recordings of works by Kirchner and Reinicke.

Von Webern composed at the maximal condensation of expression through small dimensioned designs. Wolf composed the single movement serenade for string quartet within 3 days and Puccini wrote a melancholic quartet movement in C sharp minor in a single night. The Sigum Quartet presents this interesting edition of musical fragments and quartet movements.

REVIEW:

German harpsichordist and pianist Christine Schornsheim has been making CDs for many years now; I’m mostly familiar with her collaborations with non-period performers such as tenor Peter Schreier and the German oboist and conductor Burkhardt Glaetzner. In fact, the only decidedly “period” CD of hers in my library is a Harmonia Mundi recording of Mozart four-hand music made a few years ago with pianist Andreas Staier on a Stein Vis-à-vis piano/harpsichord. Based on this admittedly limited experience, I was not prepared for the excellence of this release, nor for the depth of her understanding of Bach.

Complete recordings of the Well-Tempered Clavier have been coming fast and furious of late; one need only scan the 70-plus listings of Book I on ArkivMusic to see that the music has attracted harpsichordists and pianists of every stripe and persuasion. Since joining the staff of Fanfare , I’ve personally surveyed four versions, the most exceptional of which is undoubtedly Rebecca Pechefsky’s recording of Book 1 on Quill Classics, reviewed in Fanfare 34:3. The first hint that Schornsheim’s version might be a cut above the ordinary comes in her personal observations about the project, contained in the liner notes: “ The Well-Tempered Clavier has always had a healing effect on me. Whenever I felt bad, I sat down at the nearest keyboard and played fugues.” She goes on to say that despite being an immense challenge, recording the 48 plus 48 has cleansed her soul and given her inner peace. One could interpret this as mere advertising jargon, but I don’t think so. The sincerity of these statements is borne out entirely by the integrity and honesty of the playing on these CDs.


It may surprise you to learn that I don’t automatically subscribe to the early-music dictum that the WTC can be played only on the harpsichord. Like any instrument, the harpsichord has its pluses and minuses, and in the hands of a lesser artist, the harpsichord is ruthless in revealing weaknesses in phrasing and technique. (It’s also very easy to sound dull and mechanical on the harpsichord.) The modern piano, on the other hand, with its damper pedal and increased resonance, is less restricting for many artists, allowing for a freer interpretive approach—or so they think. The best artists, of course, can turn a handicap into advantage. Schornsheim capitalizes on the strengths of the harpsichord in ways that are often hard to verbalize, such as the almost imperceptible changes in articulation—which would be lost on the more resonant modern piano—that set one voice against another in a fugue, or the minute applications of rubato that make sense of the rhetoric of a prelude. It is a style of playing grounded in intense study of and appreciation for Bach’s music, but one that never sounds labored, forced, or unnatural. There is nary a misjudged tempo or instance of flagging inspiration here; throughout Books 1 and 2 the level of accomplishment is remarkably high. In the international arena of Bach performance, I predict that this release will enjoy immediate and widespread favor.


Another reason for the serious record collector to consider the acquisition of this set is the choice of instrument. It is the 1624 two-manual Ruckers (enlarged in France in the 18th century) housed in the Musée Unterlinden, Colmar. The instrument has been the subject of numerous recordings, most recently a Centaur CD of Couperin played by Lisa Goode Crawford ( Fanfare 35:4). It is simply one of the most magnificent-sounding French harpsichords in captivity, and it has never been recorded more intelligently and realistically than it is here. Highest recommendation.

FANFARE: Christopher Brodersen

Classical Music

This 2CD-album of recordings taken from the legendary Capriccio-Archive joins some of the world’s leading singers together and simultaneously presents a broad repertoire of known and unknown songs for orchestra as well as some songs yet to be discovered. Singers include: Christine Schafer, Thomas Quasthoff, Matthias Goerne, Christiane Oelze.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

In the latter half of the 18th century, Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach was active at the Count of Schaumberg-Lippe’s Court in Buckeburg. Near the end of 1772 German poet and theologian Johann Gottfried Herder wrote the poem Die Kindheit Jesu, and entrusted the text to Bach to set to music. The magnificent fruit of that collaboration was performed for the first time on February 11, 1773 at the Buckeburg court. This oratorio for solo voices, four-part chorus and orchestra is performed under the baton of Hermann Max. The accompanying booklet contains notes, complete libretto and translations.

This is splendid Baroque period music composed for the occasion of Christmas Eve. Performed by the New Berlin Chamber Orchestra along with soloists on organ and violin, these nuggets include Corelli’s “Concerto grosso Op. 6 No. 8 in G minor ‘fatto per la notte di Natale”’, Handel’s “Pastoral Symphony” from Messiah, “Locatelli’s Concerto grosso in F minor,” Manfredini’s “Concerto grosso in C major,”and more works by Molter, Torelli, and Werner.

REVIEW:

So far as I know, only two pianists have recorded comprehensive Scriabin solo-piano cycles. One is Michael Ponti; the other is Maria Lettberg, a Riga-born Swedish national residing in Berlin, who lived with this repertoire for years, and even wrote a doctoral thesis on Scriabin. She recorded all of Scriabin’s solo piano works with opus numbers between 2004 and 2007 for a co-production between the Capriccio label and Deutschlandradio Kultur.

Unlike Ponti, with his horribly-engineered and ill-tuned instrument, Lettberg enjoys the advantage of a beautifully regulated concert grand and resplendent, lifelike engineering. She revels in the composer’s dynamic extremes and inner-voice labyrinths both real and implied. Her big, juicy sonority and refined articulation consistently address the sensual element that perpetually lurks underneath the surface of nearly every composition, from the early, Chopin-influenced Preludes, Etudes, Mazurkas, Waltzes, and sundry short pieces to the harmonically ambiguous, intensely mystical late sonatas and poems. Granted, you won’t encounter the ice in the fire revealed throughout the younger Richter’s incisive live Second, Fifth, or Ninth sonatas, nor the jackhammer impact of Horowitz’s repeated chords in Vers la flame or his trills in the Tenth sonata. At the same time, Lettberg can unleash enough fervent momentum to help tighten looser-knit works like the Fantasie Op. 28 and the rarely played Allegro Appassionato Op. 4.

A bonus DVD features Lettberg in excerpts from different sonatas interspersed with discussions about the music and a multi-media project called “Mysterium”, where video artist Andreas Schmidt reinterprets the music in terms of abstract manipulations of color. While Lettberg may not displace favorite versions of specific works, her overall consistency, meticulous technique, and total identification with Scriabin’s idiom deserve nothing less than our highest rating. Capriccio’s bargain price is enough to forgive the pianist’s poorly organized booklet notes, although they contain many interesting quotations from the composer.

-- ClassicsToday.com (10/10, Jed Distler)

Classical Music

The composer’s image – in his time, he was an avowed anti-Semite – repeatedly sparked fierce discussions in the feature pages of national and international newspapers. Art, music, and especially the musicians in National Socialist Germany became the direct focus of new analyses and current evaluations.

Although we may not forget and certainly should not suppress the political context, if we approach the actual work, a prosaic analysis reveals that the word “German” does not appear once in the entire opus, and that Pfitzner took the emotionally charged title of a folk song collection “Aus deutscher Seele” from the German-Jewish author Ludwig Jacobowski.

The Eichendorff cantata “Von deutscher Seele” was composed in 1921 and – this is also one of the contradictions – is not ideology set to music, but abstains from any kind of resentment. The work is subtitled “ a romantic cantata”. Pfitzner’s tonal language was certainly rooted in the 19th century, but it by all means branches out onto “new pathways”, to paraphrase Robert Schumann, whom Pfitzner greatly admired.

INGO METZMACHER had the support of a first-class ensemble of soloists for his Berlin performances. Despite all polemic and widely varying discourses: the aim of this CD release is to document the opus itself in its entirety, regardless of how discussions of it may continue.