Includes work(s) by Aaron Copland, Maurice Ravel, Joaquín Rodrigo, Sergei Prokofiev, Virgil Thomson, Gabriel Fauré, Jacques Ibert, Percy Aldridge Grainger. Ensemble: Philharmonia Virtuosi. Conductor: Richard Kapp.

Akhnaten, Philip Glass's third opera, is a work of relatively compact dimensions but with all the qualities of epic about it. More a history than a story, it tells in Glass's characteristically elliptical fashion of the rise and fall of Akhnaten, sun-worshipper and monotheist, the 'man of religion' who complements in Glass's opera-trilogy the 'man of science' in Einstein on the Beach, and Gandhi, 'man of politics' in Satyagraha. Instead of a libretto there are texts and documents recovered by the Egyptologists, sung or spoken against an endlessly flowing line of orchestral background that symbolizes the passage of time.

Characters as such barely exist, indeed the very notion of 'characterization' is quite inapplicable to the elusive figures who pass through the music like ghosts or shadows. Religious fervour always excepted, everything is drained of human detail and emotion. Even the Act 2 duet between Akhnaten and Nefertiti has all the passion of a pair of scarab beetles mating, indeed, it comes as no surprise to find that the words of this domestic exchange are the same ones used just minutes earlier to address the sun-god Aten. Such is the manner of this solemn, ritualistic work. Decades pass; religions are set up and topple; always the orchestra, the ultimate protagonist, throbs underneath with its almost seamless weft of minor-mode arpeggios. Like Satie's Socrate, another piece of 'white music' and a score to which Akhnaten owes a great deal, this is a statuesque work of such earnestness that the term 'opera', with its implication of drama, fails to communicate the nature of the conception.

Akhnaten contains some of Glass's very best music. The Act I funeral scene, almost anthropo-logically observed with its terrifying drumming and the wild trumpet that accompanies the male chorus at the climax of the procession, strikes a chilling note from which the atmosphere never recovers. The final scene, sung wordlessly by the ghosts of Akhnaten, his wife and his mother in the ruins of their city, haunts the mind long after the music has ceased to play. Strangest and most wonderful of all is the ''Hymn to the Sun'', sung by Akhnaten himself at the centre of the opera, and addressed to the audience in its own language—English was chosen for the recording. It is one of the very few moments when we are invited to participate in Akhnaten's private world of belief, and with Glass's mesmeric music it's difficult not to be drawn in completely and utterly.

Success in the performance of Akhnaten relies more upon the orchestra than on voices, and here the Stuttgart State Opera (which commissioned the work) does a superb job. With relatively limited scope for interpretation, the soloists are to be judged more for the nature of their voices than for what they put into the playing of their parts, and in this regard I was slightly disappointed only by Paul Esswood, whose tense, tight-toned singing of the title-role turns Akhnaten into a colder, more remote figure than he need have been. The chorus is marvellous. Documentation, vital for an understanding of the story, is more than adequate, with full texts and translations from the Egyptian and Hebrew.

-- Gramophone, 02/1998

[I] must say that I much liked the warmth and generosity of feeling that Bruno Walter brings to it. Fournier is quite magnificent and the orchestra respond with playing of genuine eloquence and feeling. Francescatti, of course, is not a violinist to all tastes: JN spoke of his "wiry, extrovert performance", for which he did not really care, though he admired the performance in every other respect. To my mind his playing lacks real inner repose and his tone here tends to be chilly. However, generally speaking, this is a most satisfying reading and the orchestra produce glorious tone.

-- Gramophone [3/1974, reviewing the Brahms]

Selections from "Mikrokosmos" were recorded April 29 and May 16, 1940.

Includes work(s) by various composers. Ensemble: Waverly Consort. Conductor: Michael Jaffee.

Rudolf Serkin's gaunt tone and impassioned phrasing, along with Eugene Ormandy's robust, alert support, have long distinguished this 1964 recording of Schumann's A minor concerto as one of the catalog's finest.

-- Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com [reviewing Sony 93908]

MAHLER: SYMPHONY NO 4 MOZART

Domingo is in full, burnished voice, rising splendidly to the wild ardour of this underrated opera.

In the words of a survey of nineteenth-century Italian opera, published by the Corriere della sera to mark the turning of the century, Mascagni was "condemned to a masterpiece": after the triumph of Cavalleria rusticana nothing less would do. He lived for another 55 years, and although some of his 14 subsequent operas were immensely successful for a while (he claimed that Iris was better received than Cavalleria, and there was a near-riot of enthusiasm at the premiere of Il piccolo Marat) none was judged by the critics to be the awaited 'masterpiece', and nearly all had fallen from the repertory by the end of his life. It would be a sad enough story if all that he had done was to attempt, vainly, to repeat his first success. The evidence (of Il piccolo Marat, of L'amico Fritz, of Iris—I cannot claim to have heard all fourteen) suggests that he did no such thing, that he had the capacity to develop, and the scruple and the skill to strike out on new paths, and that his very reluctance to repeat himself contributed to the long decline of his career.

Iris is an extremely interesting opera, even (in the context of late nineteenth-century Italy) an 'experimental' one. It contains an elaborate 'play within a play', both triggering the main event of the drama (the abduction of the innocent child Iris by a libertine and his procurer) and foreshadowing its outcome (her father curses her, believing that she has voluntarily become a prostitute) with pathetic irony. There is a duet in which one character speaks while the other sings, and a crucial wordless scene where 'light' music darkens to accompany sinister action. The rich orchestration is filled with cunningly contrived local colour (the opera is set in Japan) from which Puccini clearly learned a thing or two when writing Madama Butterfly six years later (there is an offstage humming chorus in Iris, too . . . ). Each act has a quasisymphonic, atmospheric orchestral prelude, and each scene has at least one strong coup-de-théâtre: the puppet-play itself in Act 1 (Iris is so caught up with the sad story that she is at one point heard in touchingly sympathetic duet with her puppet alter ego); in Act 2, the paper walls of Iris's oppressively luxurious prison slide away to reveal the brothel quarter of Tokyo, with a noisy crowd of eager customers clamouring for her; and the Act 3 curtain rises, not, as we half expect, on Iris's longed for but now desolate home, but on an open sewer, with scavengers rooting among the filth, eventually discovering a body wrapped in mud-spattered silken rags.

And is the music up to it? It is, and it is quite unlike Cavalleria, save in its melodiousness. The once famous "Hymn to the Sun", which opens and closes the opera, has a brazen, only slightly over-the-top splendour. Iris has four solo scenes, each with its own curiously still, passive pathos, rising to heart-warming Italianate eloquence at the end, as she dies, welcoming the rising sun as her deliverer. The odious Osaka has at least the elegant (and also once famous) serenade "Apri la tua finestra" and several other pages of warm and ample ardour (true, he ought to have been the tenor equivalent of Peter Lorre, but would you have written such a part for Fernando de Lucia?) and most of Mascagni's 'experiments' actually work: the 'play within a play' is oddly, grippingly effective; the wordless dance scene is salon music, really, but with a queer dramatic power to it; the three 'visions' that appear to Iris in her degradation, ghosts of those whose egoism has destroyed her, are simple (plain vocal lines over dark solo strings) but telling.

Oh, yes, if you insist, I shall have to admit that Mascagni is Mascagni (which is to say 'like Puccini but not quite so good'); that Illica's vaporous and mystical libretto is something of a liability; and yes, all the characters save Iris are two-dimensional. But the quality of the opera's best pages suggests that Mascagni was the victim of the unkindest injustice of all: condemned for not living up to Cavalleria when he had, if intermittently, surpassed it.

A fine performance and an excellent recording (not the first, as CBS claim; I have heard two others, one of which at least seems not to have been pirated—taken from a Dutch radio tape— both featuring that riveting artist Magda Olivero in the title-role). Tokody's exciting, rather Callas-like voice has a slight wobble under pressure on high notes, but she makes a touching and lull-voiced Iris. Domingo is in full, burnished voice as well (a bit too full in the serenade, perhaps, but rising splendidly to the wild ardour of the scene in which Osaka realizes what he has lost by his contemptuous dismissal of Iris as a mere unresponsive doll). Pons and Giaiotti bring vocal distinction and something like a third dimension of real character to the cynical whore-monger and the stern, blind father; Patané lavishes affectionate care on Mascagni's polychrome orchestra; only a woefully inadequate First Ragpicker lowers the standard of the supporting cast. The whole enterprise is let down rather by the provision of a florid and often ludicrously inaccurate English translation of the libretto, but don't let that put you off. Iris, as Mascagni said, is an opera with almost too much music in it.

-- Gramophone [9/1989]

LILY PONS RECITAL

MAHLER: SYMPHONY NO 5 WALTER,

In a very literal sense there is never a dull moment...the utter chaos let loose in the orchestra is, by any reckoning, tremendous fun...Stokowski, who directed the symphony's first performance, also directs the new one with an obvious sense of dedication...The recording is splendid and it is very good to see one further act of justice done towards a composer who has been so shockingly neglected in the past.

Charles Ives was not alone among members of the human race in being exercised about the purpose of life, nor alone among composers in thinking such an enquiry a fit subject for music. But he must surely have been alone in writing music quite like this to pursue the point. In a very literal sense there is never a dull moment. Indeed the proliferation of things happening is such that there is hardly ever time for any one possible answer to the basic inquiry to be expounded with conviction.

The inquiry itself is identified in (Part) I, a short Prelude in which Ives Sets for a chorus the hymn "Watchman, tell us of the night". The chorus is small, in size and contribution; the major part, here and elsewhere, is played by an enormous orchestra and a chamber group of solo violins, viola, and harp whose special repertoire seems to be based on "Nearer, My God, to Thee".

With (Part) II comes the first of Ives's answers, though just what the answer is might be thought to be in some doubt; there are episodes stated to be Pilgrims' Hymns, but these are short compared with the flood of orchestral sound unleashed on various avant-garde technicalities and on the performance, often simultaneous, of half-a-dozen tunes ranging from "Turkey in the Straw" to "Columbia the Gem of the Ocean". If II's answer is a double fugue, with more hymns for the subjects: "From Greenland's icy mount" and "All hail the power". The music itself will be familiar to listeners who own the Vox record of some eighteen months ago coupling the two Ives string quartets, for it is a large orchestral transcription of the first movement of "A Revival Meeting", the first of those quartets.

The fourth and last movement of the symphony is, Ives himself explains, "an apotheosis of the preceding content, in terms that have something to do with the reality of existence and its religious experience". Nevertheless the utter chaos let loose in the orchestra is, by any reckoning, tremendous fun.

Many American critics have also hailed it as great music (though written in 1916 the symphony had to wait for performance until 1965); and no doubt there will be English critics who share this view. I am not, alas, among them; but I am very glad to have had the opportunity of hearing and enjoying such a glorious technicolored feast of hokum. The technical experiments, whether chaotic in result or no, must often have involved extreme difficulties in performance, and three conductors and a very large and skilled body of performers have bent enormous efforts towards producing this sumptuous result. Stokowski, who directed the symphony's first performance, also directs the new one with an obvious sense of dedication. The recording is splendid, especially in stereo; and it is very good to see one further act of justice done towards a composer who has been so shockingly neglected in the past.

- Gramophone, [July, 1966] - Review of the premiere recording reissued on this CD.

KODALY: HARY JANOS SUITE PROK

These performances are distinguished by their clean textures, rhythmic precision, and some spectacular high horn-playing. It would be hard to imagine performances of more freshness and conviction.

The most remarkable of [these works] are the two minor-key symphonies that reflect the influence of the Sturm und Drang ("Storm and Stress") movement in German literature of the time: the impassioned No. 39 in G minor with its four horns, which inspired similar works in the same key by J. C. Bach, Vanhal and Mozart, and the sombre No, 49 in F minor, known as La passione and the last and greatest of Haydn's symphonies in the form of the sonata do chiesa (with the slow movement placed first). Of the other four works, No. 38 in C - in Haydn's festive manner - with trumpets and drums and C alto horns, is particularly striking not least because of its stunning, concertonle oboe solo in the finale, probably written, as H. C. Robbins Landon suggests in the accompanying booklet, to show oft the Esterházy orchestra's new oboist Vittorino Colombazzo. No. 59 in A, known as the Fire for reasons that remain obscure, is full of excitement and dramatic surprises, such as the totally unexpected entry of the oboes and horns two-thirds of the way through the slow movement, and the extraordinary fortissimo horn call that interrupts the return of the main theme a few bars later. No. 35 in B flat is on the whole a sunny, exuberant work, though with an unexpected outburst of passionate counterpoint in the first movement's development section; and No. 58 in F has an almost chamber-musical intimacy and boasts an amusing menuet alla zoppa ("Limping Minuet") that frames a dark-hued Trio that sounds, in Landon's words,, "rather as if a group of slightly sinister Gypsies had suddently entered the feast".

The performances are distinguished by their clean textures, rhythmic precision and nice feeling for tempo; there is a tasteful, and never obtrusive, harpsichord continuo and some spectacular high horn-playing. Perhaps the two minor-key symphonies could do with rather more weight and intensity, but on the whole it would be hard to imagine performances of more freshness and conviction. Even the tendency towards short-breathed phrases in the slow movements and to vibrato-less bulges in the string playing seem less noticeable than before. The recording is every bit as vivid as were the earlier ones [released on Saga Records, now unavailable]—and that is high praise.

-- Gramophone [7/1982]

JOHN WILLIAMS AND FRIENDS

Reissue of the original full-priced CD edition. Translated libretto included.

Von Stade is magnificent, with faultless intonation and sparkling scales; she makes it easy to sympathize with Cinderella’s distress, as well as to smile with her.

First issued on CD on CBS Masterworks CD79323 (itself from the 1979 LP issue, 79323), this set positively sparkles with joy. Its fairy-tale story, known surely to all (Cinderella) is perfectly suited to the masterly craft of Jules Massenet, whose operas must surely soon receive the full attention they deserve. A concert performance of Thaïs at the Barbican by ENO recently acted as a timely reminder of that work’s stature (review). But that is only one of a total of 25 from this composer’s pen – and the level of inspiration in Cendrillon is hardly less. The magic/fairytale element clearly suited Massenet’s wide and sensitive orchestrational palette, while the vivacious story of Princes, magic and balls makes for pure delight.

The cast here is really rather starry, boasting the likes of von Stade, Gedda and Bastin. Ruth Welting was a name new to me, yet her account of the Fairy’s mesmerising coloratura roulades is consistently ravishing (her roles at the Metropolitan, New York included Zerbinetta Ariadne auf Naxos, Königin der Nacht Zauberflöte and Gilda Rigoletto).

After an introduction that fizzes along, the chorus shows their prowess (‘Chez Madame de la Haltière’). Yet it is the focussed voice of Jules Bastin’s Pandolfe that really impresses. In tandem with Rudel’s exemplary pacing, every word is clear. Bastin’s aria (Scene 2, ‘Du côte de la barbe’) is excellent, with the singer placing his high notes perfectly. Again fast and clear, Bastin’s projection of the comedic ‘Félicitez-moi donc’ and his ensuing contributions (track 7) are perfectly done. Wherever he sings, Bastin is focussed and his pitching is uniformly true.

Cinderella has to wait until Scene 5 (track 8) before she enters our consciousness in the rather sighing line ‘Ah! Que mes soeurs sont heureuse!’. Von Stade is magnificent in providing just the right bleak tone appropriate for her character’s malaise. How plaintive is the simple cry of ‘Ah!’, how meaningful the phrase ‘Résigne-toi, Cendrille’. Her joy at the end of the act is similarly brought to life (the repetitions of ‘Je suis Reine’, for example). Or try von Stade in Act 3 Scene 1, her tuning faultless, her scales sparking away, her pitching clean. During the course of this performance it is easy to sympathise with Cinderella’s distress, as well as to smile with her.

Nicolai Gedda’s Prince Charming matches von Stade’s Cinders. His Act 2 Scene 2 shows off his truly lovely round tone to perfection and it is worth noting that he is thoroughly convincing here, despite the cheesiness of some of the lines he has to sing (‘Coeur sans amour, printemps sans roses’ …). It is at moments like this that I wondered the omission of a libretto might not be so bad after all …. When Cinderella and her Prince are in duet (Act 2 Scene 4), it is all one could have hoped for. Gedda provides an outpouring of passion against von Stade’s lovely, simple and tender innocence. Their voices are suited to a tee. Again, Gedda’s ardent singing warms the heart towards the end of Act 3.

As mentioned above, Ruth Welting is superb. She emits an aura of the approachably supernatural with her vocal twists and turns, and her thoroughly delightful trills. The other star of this set is the Ambrosian Opera Chorus. Massenet puts his chorus to good use, and the Ambrosian responds with disciplined yet touching singing, the Fairies floating along nicely (CD2 Track 10).

The sparkling repartee of Noémie (Teresa Cahill) and Dorothée (Elizabeth Bainbridge) in Act 3 Scene 2 exemplifies these singers’ grasp of Massenet’s world while Jane Berbié’s strong mezzo cuts an imposing Madame de la Haltière.

Julius Rudel’s command is never once in doubt and it is good that his orchestra gets the chance to shine in the Dances of Act 2 (CD 1, Tracks 15-19), but the many felicities of scoring throughout the opera mean that the Philharmonia is a source of constant delight... [T]his is a Recording of the Month if ever there was one.

-- Colin Clarke, MusicWeb International [reviewing Sony 91178]