Classical Music

Classical Music

With his four concertos for marimba the Danish composer Anders Koppel (b. 1947) has played a crucial role in the development of a concert repertoire for this distinctive sounding instrument. + His concertos have been performed by virtuoso percussionists all over the world, but for this premiere recording the composer has personally selected a special soloist - here making her CD debut - the young Polish marimba player Marianna Bednarska, who finds herself accompanied by the Aalborg Symphony Orchestra an conductor Henrik Vagn Christensen. + The young Ms. Bednarska is already a well-recognized percussionist. + She has won 19 first prizes in national and international percussion competitions, the most important the marimba competitions in Paris (2009), Fermo (Italy 2008) and the Percussion Competition in Plovdiv (Bulgaria 2007), where she also received a Special Prize, and in several percussion competitions in Poland. + In 2013 Ms. Bednarska was awarded the ‘Polish-Danish Friendship Prize’ for her close connection with Danish musical life, culminating in the CD recording presently under consideration.

For Dacapo and the Nightingale String Quartet (NSQ) alike, this is a quickish follow-up to volume 1 of Rued Langgaard's string quartets, released in spring 2012. It has a very similar feel. The only noteworthy difference, arguably, is the fact that the three works heard here come from an earlier period. That was before his music became more idiosyncratically flirtatious - or "filled with so much frustration and weirdness", as the NSQ's first violinist referred to the first-disc quartets. Indeed, this trio in particular is said to encapsulate feelings of love towards a certain 'Dora' that would stay with Langgaard all his life - even after his later marriage to Constance. There is, consequently, a lot of lyrical warmth and nostalgia embedded in these scores, which are basically late-Romantic-cum-neo-Classical in spirit. They are indeed conservative enough for Carl Nielsen's somewhat earlier quartets to be considered a useful reference point.

Dacapo have promised nine string quartets, the six numbered ones plus the A flat and Rosengaardsspil, both heard here, and the set of variations already appearing on volume 1. There exists also a late and very short quartet movement, the 'Italian Scherzo', which may or may not be included on the single volume to come. With the cycle Dacapo are, curiously, in direct competition with themselves: a double disc featuring quartets nos. 2-6 was recorded by the estimable Kontra Quartet in the 1980s, originally appearing on RCA LPs (DCCD 9302). It appears the Kontras never did complete their Langgaard cycle, although that may be due in part to gaps in the scholarship at the time.

Lest the collector be drawn to the present set primarily by the 'SACD' badge, it may be worth recalling that the first disc, recorded by the same team at the same location, did not really deliver 'Super-Audio' engineering, despite a short-listing for the 2013 BBC Music Magazine Awards. Volume 2 is no different: spacious, but so bright that the NSQ might have been given protective sunglasses for the recording sessions. Furthermore, although microphones have thankfully been kept away from players' noses, background traffic does intrude repeatedly in the more tranquil passages - of which there are quite a few.

Still, these quibbles are not so major as to constitute a true caveat emptor. Besides Langgaard's delightful, fundamentally hospitable music, the NSQ's interpretations are also most commendable. Volume 1 was in fact their commercial recording debut, but they showed little sign of greenness or nerves. A year or so on, they seem even more relaxed and in tune with the works of their maverick compatriot. A blend of expressive astuteness and technical self-confidence leaves the whole project smelling aptly of roses. The CD's credit side is further augmented by extensive and informative booklet notes, in English and Danish.

-- Byzantion, MusicWeb International

Classical Music

“The five singers of Ars Nova Copenhagen blend beautifully in the deeply expressive Introitus and the fantastic quality of consort singing is no more notable than the touching communication of the text. Each singer performs their solo lines insightfully...this spellbinding performance is well worth acquiring.” - Gramophone Magazine, August 2010

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

In one of my earlier reviews of recordings of Nørgård’s music, I remarked that his musical and stylistic progress is far from a straight line. This composer is used to surprising even his staunchest admirers with unexpected twists and turns. This is certainly valid when considering his string quartets - ten at the time of writing. It may be worth reminding ourselves that his first essays in the genre are available on Kontrapunkt 32015 played by the Kontra Quartet. It’s a disc still worth looking out for.

The String Quartet No.7 opens mysteriously “with faraway signal notes”. The music quickly gets more animated and unfolds through contrasting episodes characterised by capricious rhythms. The slow movement makes use of various techniques and is almost a study in microtonal writing. It creates harmonic and tonal ambiguity that is fairly quickly dispelled by the energy at play in the final movement in which we hear reminiscences from Nørgård’s Second String Quartet Quartetto Brioso composed in 1954 and revised in 1958. The Seventh String Quartet was written to celebrate the bicentenary of the Danish Royal Library, a rather improbable commission indeed considering that there is absolutely nothing academic in the music.

The String Quartet No.8 subtitled Natten sænker sig som røg (“Night Descending like Smoke”) was completed in 1997. Its five movements derive most of their thematic material from Nørgård’s Apollinaire-inspired opera Nuit des Hommes - available on DaCapo 8.226011 and reviewed here some time ago. The first movement opens with siren-like sounds before proceeding further with what is mostly a distorted rendering of a Danish hymn-tune and building to violent, final, climactic and heavily repeated chords. The second movement Man – Animal is a short brutal war-like Scherzo. The third movement Voyage suggests exactly that in various ways, mostly through rhythm. The fourth movement Night Descending, opening with a variant of the opening gesture in the preceding movement, is a sort of tense Nocturne which at times seems to come to a standstill. The final movement Epilogue – Elegy reverts to the material of the first movement albeit presented in a totally different way, “including the chorale, but now transformed or distorted into a lament” as well as brief reminders of material from the other movements. Nørgård’s Eighth String Quartet is one of the grimmest of works, but this should not surprise anyone who knows the opera on which the piece is based.

Completed a few years later, in 2001, the String Quartet No.9 subtitled Ind i kilden (“Into the Source” or “Into the Spring”) is again completely different from its immediate predecessors. Whatever the intended meaning of that subtitle - maybe “the further forward, the further backward” as suggested in the excellent insert notes accompanying this release - the music is far more approachable. It is full of typical Nørgård hallmarks and remains rather demanding, while ultimately rewarding.

Much the same can be said of the most recent work here, the String Quartet No.10 subtitled Høsttidløs (“meadow saffron”). It is in one movement and, again, is almost plain sailing – by Nørgård’s standards – when compared to the much more acerbic Eighth Quartet. The music here is mostly characterised by clarity and transparency. The very opening is a good example of such almost disarming new simplicity although much of the ensuing music is clearly from the same pen as that heard in the other quartets. This is a beautiful and engaging work and one likely to earn Nørgård new admirers.

The Kroger Quartet, for whom the Tenth Quartet was composed, play beautifully throughout and clearly have the full measure of the music Their committed and carefully prepared readings deserve only praise and admiration. The recorded sound is magnificent and the production of this release, particularly Jensen’s well-informed insert notes from which I have quoted, is first rate and well up to DaCapo’s best. This most welcome release is a must for all fans of this composer’s music. It usefully and splendidly completes Kontrapunkt’s recordings of the earlier string quartets. This is quite strong stuff but it is all well worth the effort.

-- Hubert Culot, MusicWeb International

Captures the rhythmic vitality of this brilliant but tricky music.

This is the second of Ars Nova Copenhagen’s Taverner discs. The first centred on Taverner’s Western Wynde Mass (see review) and at least one commentator said that it was the version which succeeded best in dispelling his doubts about whether the mass ever quite transcends the four-square element in its construction.
 
This new disc uses Taverner’s Gloria Tibi Trinitas mass as its main work. Like the first disc, Paul Hillier intersperses the movements of the mass with other motets and plainchant to create a more liturgical feel. They open the disc with Fayrfax’s glorious Magnificat ‘Regale’ from the Eton Choir Book and continue with motets by White, Byrd and Tallis.
 
The presence of the Fayrfax makes this disc something of a hymn to the great Tudor choir books. The Taverner mass is found in the Forrest-Heather part-books which were compiled for use at Cardinal College, where Taverner was choirmaster. His time there proved to be brief as the choral provision at the college was vastly reduced on Cardinal Wolsey’s fall.
 
The title of the Taverner mass comes from the plainchant ‘Gloria tibi Trinitas’ which is a Vespers antiphon for Trinity Sunday. Hilliard and Ars Nova Copenhagen include the plainchant propers for Trinity Sunday, thus allowing us to hear the plainchant which forms the cantus firmus of the mass.
 
The choir of Cardinal College comprised 16 choristers and 12 clerkes; Ars Nova Copenhagen deploys some 15 to 17 singers, with women sopranos and altos. They make a goodly noise and the performances on this disc are notable for the excitement and vigour which the singers bring to this music.
 
Fayrfax came from the previous generation to Taverner, and his elaborate 5-part Magnificat ‘Regale’ is filled with rhythmic energy and brilliantly elaborate contrapuntal parts. It makes an apt complement to Taverner’s 6-part Missa Gloria Tibi Trinitas. The choir are similarly glorious in this music. In both works, the solo sections work very well, with the unnamed single voices providing fine contrast to the larger-scale full passages. The tessitura of the soprano part occasionally seems to give the singers pause. The top line of both works is high, in the typical early Tudor manner but generally the sopranos are ideally flexible and light.
 
Rather annoyingly the CD liner notes do not indicate what pitch the Taverner is sung at and, lacking a printed score, I am entirely unable to determine whether Hillier performs the mass at the high pitch which modern scholarship suggests, but I suspect that they don’t.
 
Hillier has obviously urged his singers on vigorously and there are one or two passages, particularly in the Magnificat, where you can feel the choir being goaded on by Hillier and just failing to follow him. This is a small point and does not greatly detract from the performance; frankly I am not sure I would have noticed but at the moment I am rehearsing the Magnificat with my own group so was paying particular heed to it.
 
Robert White came from a later generation than Taverner. He seems to have had a fondness for the Vespers hymn Christe ui lux es et dies because he made four settings of it. Each alternates chant with a setting which is woven around the chant. Here Hillier and his group perform the final two, each a gentle and tiny masterpiece. Byrd made his own setting of the same words and this setting is also included on the disc. In it Byrd sets himself a technical challenge - and succeeds, of course. Each verse has the chant threaded through it, but in a steadily higher voice starting with bass in verse 1 and ending with soprano in verse 5. Part of the charm of Byrd’s technical solution is that it is possible to appreciate the piece without ever knowing this. The group finishes with Tallis’s Te lucis ante terminum - another masterly little work.
 
The group is recorded in quite a generous acoustic, but the recording preserves the vigour and clarity of their singing and individual lines have both clarity and vitality.
 
The CD booklet includes an informative article by Sally Dunkley together with full texts and translations.
 
Having said how much I enjoyed this disc, then I have to confess that there is one place where you ought to look if you are interested in a performance of Taverner’s Missa Gloria Tibi Trinitas. In 2007 Christ Church Cathedral Choir - the present day successors to Taverner’s Cardinal College Choir - issued a recording of the mass under their conductor Stephen Darlington. This was the first recording of the work by the sort of choir - men and boys - which Taverner had in mind. And it is a release which demands to be taken seriously. So the choice is yours, depending on your views on the boy trebles v. female sopranos controversy.
 
This is definitely a disc for those for whom many recordings of music from this period come into the perfect but cool category. Hillier and his singers, whilst retaining sufficient perfection, bring the elaborate music brilliantly to life.
 
You might hear more polished and perfect performances than this one. But I don’t think you will hear one which excites more, or one which better captures the rhythmic vitality of this brilliant but tricky music.
 
-- Robert Hugill, MusicWeb International

Classical Music

Classical Music

MOZART Symphonies Nos. 1, 4–31, 33–36, 39–41. Symphonies, K 19a, 42a, 45a–b, 73l–n, 73q, 111b • Ádám Fischer, cond; Danish Natl CO • DACAPO 8.201201 (12 CDs: 716:42)

I mentioned in my review of a single disc from this series, which included symphonies Nos. 28–30 (Fanfare 34:4), that I didn’t think that Ádám Fischer’s performances captured “Mozart’s drama as well as they capture his elegance,” but added the caveat that it’s difficult to gauge an entire series of symphonies by one CD. Alas, in later reviewing the disc including symphonies Nos. 31, 33, and 34, I had the opposite feeling, that Fischer was making a “race to the finish line” and playing the symphonies too quickly. Now, as it so happened, I reviewed those two discs about two years apart, and so did not have the first still on hand to compare to the second, or to think about the differences in approach. But now I have the full set of 45 symphonies to review, and my feelings have changed. Now I am inclined to agree with Patrick Rucker, who gave a rave review to the single disc of symphonies Nos. 15–18 in Fanfare 31:1 (a disc reviewed, I believe, before I joined the magazine staff), stating that he was “grasping for superlatives.”

The difference? Listening to the entire series in chronological sequence. By doing so, I noted that, despite an overall theatrical approach to these symphonies (in the liner notes, Fischer admits that he tends to think of orchestral music “operatically,” i.e., finding a dramatic theme or thread in the music that he then tries to bring out), he does make distinctions between the earlier and the later symphonies. Reducing his approach to a few basics, he plays the earlier symphonies with equal drama and electricity but with far fewer changes in dynamics and fewer rubato touches. In addition, I was able to download the scores of four of the symphonies—two of the most famous late works (40 and 41) and two early symphonies (Nos. 5 and 15, chosen pretty much at random)—and although these are not up-to-date, verified, Urtext scores like the ones Fischer worked from, they do include dynamics markings. And, as any number of conductors of the past have mentioned, they do not tell you what to do between the forte here and the piano four or six bars later (or vice versa). You are expected to follow your own good taste in approaching them.

Perhaps another deciding factor for me was in hearing Philippe Herreweghe’s more dynamic performances of symphonies Nos. 39 and 41 and, believe it or not, Bruno Walter’s historic performances of symphonies Nos. 39–41. Despite Walter’s slower tempos (and richer string sound), he actually elicited much more nuance and detail from those symphonies than did Jaap ter Linden, whose set I gave a good review to and suggested at the time that it was a fine historically-informed set of the Mozart symphonies. But, to be honest, what really sold me on Fischer’s approach were his performances of the early, lesser-known, oft-neglected, and unnumbered symphonies. Each and every one of them sounded as if it was just bursting with excitement, yet not too much that it overpowered the music on the printed page.

Moreover, what struck me in the single disc of symphonies 31, 33 and 34 as too fast now, suddenly, made sense in context. And, for the several Toscanini-bashers out there, I found it almost comical to note that Fischer takes the Finale of the “Jupiter” Symphony at virtually the same tempo that they consider “too fast.” The difference, of course, is that musicians of the 1940s and 50s weren’t used to playing Mozart this swiftly, and so they tended to sound pressed, whereas Fischer’s Danish National Chamber Orchestra skips through the music deftly and nimbly, like snow rabbits dashing across the landscape. It’s the comfort level of the executants that makes the difference, then, not the “wrong” tempo.

A good example of Fischer’s approach is CD 3, where he presents no less that four symphonies in a row that are all in the key of D Major (K 73l, m, n, and q). It would have been very easy for him, and the orchestra, to simply slip into an all-purpose style for these works, which of course would make them sound pretty much the same, yet he continually varies his approach from work to work. I do, however, caution the listener to approach this set one CD at a time. That is what I did, listening on consecutive nights to only one CD per evening, and it worked out pretty well. You get a better feel for the magnitude of Fischer’s achievement that way, and you are being fairer to both him and the Danish orchestra, whose players helped prod him on to take chances with the music and do things differently from the norm. After all, this was a seven-year project for them. These symphonies did not just get all rehearsed and recorded within a year or two.

I should also point out the work that went into Symphony No. 15, one of the four I obtained scores of. In the notes, Fischer asserts that if this work had not been by Mozart, who wrote so many symphonies and so many of good quality, it would probably be a much better known work, possibly a repertoire staple. Just reading the score, the music does look promising but certainly not brilliant. The first movement, for instance, is in a quick 3/4 time, featuring a jagged melody with the usual wide-ranging melodic leaps. From the first bar, the dynamics marking is forte, which changes to piano at bar 13, then back to forte at bar 22, piano again at bar 25, forte on the first beat of bar 30 with a sudden fp on the second beat (a half note played by the oboes, trumpets, and first violins, while the second violins play 16ths and the violas, cellos, and basses play eighth notes). It’s all pretty cut-and-dry, you might say, and this is how most conductors play it. Fischer adds a little burst of extra volume at the top of bar 5, when the agitated strings play against long-held notes by oboes and trumpets, and there are all sorts of little gradations of sound in various places, including slight crescendos to emphasize the musical drama. More interestingly, none of this sounds particularly fussy; if you didn’t have the score in front of you, or if you hadn’t heard any number of flat-response historically-informed performances, you’d think that this is simply the way the music goes. Toscanini once said it isn’t the f here or the p there that’s difficult to gauge, but what to do in between. Sadly, Toscanini paid little attention to most of Mozart’s symphonies because, except for the last three, he found most of them boring: “Is always beautiful, but always the same!” In Fischer’s performances, nothing is “always the same.” In the Andante of this Symphony, for instance, there are no dynamics markings at all, yet Fischer plays it at a moderate mp with further gradations down to p or pp and back again. By such means does he create and sustain interest.

The notes also explain the reason why the music sounds so vibrant and alive: His string players all use steel strings, which gives the music a consistently “edgy” quality that reveals, as Fischer put it, Mozart’s “earthily honest side.” The more you think about it, the more this makes sense, since Mozart was strongly influenced by both Haydn and C. P. E. Bach, both of whom exploited an earthy, dramatic quality in their symphonies.

Probably the most difficult aspect of the earlier symphonies to overcome was the monotony of orchestration. Clarinets, horns, and other instruments only begin to appear in Mozart’s symphonies later on; earlier, the composer had to rely on his ingenuity of counter-rhythms and occasional harmonic changes to sustain interest, and unlike Haydn, Mozart almost invariably sought the widest possible popularity for his music (perhaps one of the reasons why Toscanini found it “always the same”). Yet, as the notes also point out, in Mozart’s day no one bothered to listen to music more than three years old as a rule. It was all about what was new, not what had come before. No one gave a hoot back then about “historical performance practice” because they didn’t want it and wouldn’t have listened if you gave it to them.

I still feel that occasional movements, such as the Andantes of the “Paris” Symphony and No. 39, are a shade too fast for my taste, but in the context of Fischer’s overall musical conception what he plays works very well. I can now accept what I hear in those later symphonies because my tolerance was built up through what he did with the numerous early works. In short, I have taken this symphonic journey with Fischer, the only difference being that I did it in 12 nights rather than in seven years.

I have now replaced the Jaap ter Linden set of Mozart symphonies on my shelf with this one. I strongly urge you to give them a listen and see if you don’t agree.

FANFARE: Lynn René Bayley

Classical Music

Classical Music

Apocalyptic and paradisiac visions of good and evil meet aphoristic miniatures of nine small, mainly malignant insects. The rousing graphic imagery of Rued Langgaard (1893-1952) is on full display in this third volume of piano works by the deeply original Danish composer. Including three world premiere recordings, Berit Johansen Tange captures the mysterious forces, poetic gracefulness and absurd hysteria that are all part of Langgaard's both dark and wondrous expression.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music