Classical Music

Vol. 2 features Gebel’s Cantatas from the 1747-48 cycle that he wrote for church services on New Year's Day and the 1st Sunday after Epiphany. These large-scale Christmas cantatas appear for the 1st time on CD. Once again, as in the St John Passion (also released by CPO), we admire the unparalleled harmonies, modern melodies and artfully intricate counterpoint of Gebel's distinctive and novel idiom.

The Bayadere celebrated its premiere in Vienna in December, 1921. A few months later, in February, 1922, the Metropoltheater in Berlin staged this operetta by Emmerich Kalman. His music brings together Hungarian folk melodies and the Viennese waltz, displays operatic and melodramatic elements, and illustrates the American dance rhythms of its times. In addition, it offers exotic tone colors like those of the tarogato and specific rhythms designed to satisfy the longing for the faraway, foreign India. These ingredients came with the guarantee of musical success. This work numbers among the genuine highlights in the Hungarian composer Kalman's oepretta oeuvre. In 2014, the WDR presented a concert performance of The Bayadere and then went on to produce this work in the studio. The great Richard Bonynge opened the operetta's vibrant introduction with plenty of energy and stormy drive, astonishing for this world-renowned Australian conductor who is now in his seventies. The elegant, slender gentleman with a full head of white hair who has always loved the operetta and whose discography includes many recordings in this field led the WDR Orchestra and the WDR Chorus with precisely trimmed conductor's gestures, so that here Emmerich Kalman's famous Bayadere experienced the right interpretation.

Antonio Cartellieri (1772-1807), despite his Italian name, actually was trained in Berlin and Vienna, and his music has all of the best characteristics of Viennese classicism. Indeed, his models are easy to detect: Gluck’s “Dance of the Furies” in the finale of his Symphony No. 1 (in C minor), and Haydn’s Symphony No. 86 in the first movement of Symphony No. 4. Of course, there’s no way to tell if he knew these other pieces, or even when Cartellieri’s were composed. He isn’t exactly a household name, and Gernot Schmalfuss spent something like 10 years looking for two of these works. These four symphonies are all that Cartellieri wrote, evidently.

The Second Symphony is a zippy Italian sinfonia in three movements, but the others have four movements and they are all truly beautiful, full of good tunes and characterful orchestration (especially for the winds). Cartellieri, for all the reminiscences, has a distinctly catchy melodic style that’s very memorable. The music has personality. In the C minor Symphony (No. 1), for example, the outer movements have a welcome degree of contrast and no small measure of genuine passion (sample the opening below). The three minuets also are all quite different from each other, and well suited to their context. They never sound generic.

The performances are terrific. Conductor Schmalfuss is an oboist with the Consortium Classicum, and he certainly knows how to play music of this period. His style is broadly period-influenced, with swift tempos, timpani played with wooden sticks, and energetic rhythms in the quick movements. Textures are utterly transparent but never anaemic. He allows the strings a good measure of warmth in the slow movements, thereby getting the best of both worlds. The Evergreen Symphony Orchestra of Taiwan plays the music extremely well, and the whole production is superbly engineered. This disc is a real find for anyone interested in the Viennese classical style.

-- David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

BLOW Venus and Adonis & • Paul O’Dette, Stephen Stubbs, cond; Amanda Forsythe ( Venus ); Tyler Duncan ( Adonis ); Mireille Lebel ( Cupid ); Boston Early Music Fest Vocal/Ch Ens • CPO 777 614-2 (65:21 Text and Translation)


& Welcome, Ev’ry Guest. Chloe Found Amyntas Lying All in Tears. Ground in g


Venus and Adonis is an opera or masque (at the time, an opera intended for royal presentation) composed by John Blow in or around 1683. It isn’t the earliest English work of its kind to be set to music without spoken dialogue, though it is the first whose score is known to have survived. A tally of its predecessors yields much of interest. The great playwright Ben Jonson wrote that Nicolas Lanier’s setting of one of his masques in 1617 was completely composed, and in “stylo recitativo,” while William Davenant penned the libretto in 1656 for an all-sung opera titled The Siege of Rhodes , with music by Henry Cooke, Henry Lawes, and Matthew Locke. Two other operas composed around that time, Richard Flecknoe’s Ariadne Deserted by Theseus and The Marriage of Oceanus and Brittania , were also sung without spoken dialogue. Whether these or other operas furnished Blow with any English precedent to draw upon is impossible to determine, though the lack of any similar dramatic works in his career may indicate a commission or request of some kind.


The opera’s subject is well known, but here, too, a mystery arises. In other versions of the myth, Venus tries to persuade her lover Adonis not to go hunting; he refuses, leaves, then dies. Blow’s librettist, Anne Kingsmill, a maid of honor to the Duchess of York, reverses the roles, making it Venus who repeatedly demands that Adonis go forth to do battle via hunting, while Adonis wishes to stay with her. The reason for this inversion has never been explained, but that one existed is universally acknowledged. Royal masques (and French opera-ballet, such as Charles II enjoyed and occasionally took part in at Versailles while in exile) always operated at multiple propagandistic levels, and the little we know about the opera’s first performance is that it was performed at court with Mary “Moll” Davis, one of Charles II’s former mistresses and an actress of some ability, as Venus, while her daughter by the King, Lady Mary Tudor, was Cupid. (She would have been about 10 years old at the time of Venus and Adonis . Later she would marry three times, always into the nobility, and have four children, two of whom were hanged for treason as Jacobites.) About one of the opera’s subtextual political meanings we are reasonably certain, then: The presence of Mary Tudor amounted to recognition in her father’s eyes before his court. Beyond that, we can only guess about Venus’s harsh behavior. Charles II was known among other personal qualities for his great discretion, and his court records imitate their master in this.


This studio recording followed by almost a year the Boston Early Music Festival’s double-bill performance of Venus and Adonis paired with Charpentier’s Acteon . I saw that production in late 2008, with all the trimmings, scholarly and entertaining, that the BEMF bestows on its operatic productions. None of the visuals are available here, of course, but the production’s stylishness and vitality under the dual leadership of Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs are palpable. Amanda Forsythe combines a radiantly focused soprano with excellent enunciation and a dramatic coloration of the text. Surely other fanciers of archival operatic performance besides myself would proclaim “My Shepherd, Will You Know the Art” a superb example of shading and phrasing if it were only hip-deep in tics, rumble, restricted frequency response, and scratchy background noise on an acoustical 78 rpm shellac disc. She is well matched in all respects by Tyler Duncan’s darkly suave baritone. His especially fine lower extension is heard to advantage in “You Who the Slothful Joys of City Hate.” Finally, there’s Mireille Lebel as Cupid, a relatively simple part as written, and suited to a talented 10-year-old probably trained in singing for several years. Lebel gives us characterization, a great deal of color, and I suspect more in the way of delicately executed figurations than Mary Tudor managed.


I can’t claim to have listened to all the available competition. Of those I’ve heard, Philip Pickett’s vigorous, sharply accented account (Decca 473713) is fortunate enough to have the rich-voiced Catherine Bott as Venus, though neither oratorio-like Michael George nor the harpsichord-laden continuo do much for me. Elizabeth Kenny/Theatre of the Ayre (Wigmore Hall Live 43) has a superior Adonis in Roderick Williams, but I find Sophie Daneman not as vocally or dramatically as interesting as either Forsythe or Bott, while Elin Manahan Thomas seems too hard-edged for Cupid.


Given its 50-minute length, the BEMF folks supply three additional pieces that were not sung live in the Chamber Opera series. Welcome, Ev’ry Guest is the opening number to Blow’s song collection Amphion Anglicus , published in 1700. Forsythe’s control of agility and dynamics come to the fore in this virtuoso piece.


Chloe Found Amyntas Lying All in Tears is a setting of a Dryden poem published in 1693. It is a mock pastoral: The shepherd Amyntas begs for a kiss from, and is ridiculed by, his Chloe, who requires three verses before she repents (with some risqué play on words). Blow has great fun portraying Amyntas’s quasi-pathos, complete with elaborate chromaticism and madrigalisms, and Chloe’s cruel, blithely uncaring response. The trio of two tenors and a bass-baritone produce a fine sound, with excellent intonation, and the slow, pointed skipping of Chloe’s rhythms by the continuo are highlights.


Finally, the Ground in G Minor spotlights the stylish and technically expert work of Robert Mealy and Peter Spissky. I can’t claim much familiarity with the latter, but Mealy is a fixture at many early-music festivals, as well as a professor of early music at Yale. He’s on several records, but seldom in any solo capacity—would that were to change, based on several instrumental concerts I’ve seen.


The sound is generally good and close for the vocalists, as it should be, though I note one oddity in Venus and Adonis : Forsythe’s microphone audibly diminishes in volume in the middle of her repeat of “hounds” on F in “Hark, Hark, the Hunters; Hark, Hark, the Hounds!” This should have been fixed before release.


That very minor blemish aside, this is a first-rate release in all respects. BEMF has yet another highly successful operatic recording to its credit.


FANFARE: Barry Brenesal

How often have I made the rather obvious point that the CD has devastatingly increased the recorded repertoire. Whether it is cause and effect is debatable.

In the case of Allan Pettersson we need to bear in mind that there were quite a few Pettersson LPs in the period 1960-1980, particularly during the mid-late 1970s. The enlightened attitude of the Swedish recording industry and arts establishment was crucial. This chimed well with Pettersson's archetypically pessimistic-tragedian language touching sympathetically resonating nerves. We should also remember the pioneering work of the conductors Dorati and Westerberg and overwhelmingly the Romanian-American conductor Sergiu Comissiona (1928-2005) who made gave many of the premieres and whose recordings form part of the vinyl legacy.

The main Pettersson symphony LPs were:

Mesto for strings - Swedish RSO/Stig Westerberg. Swedish Society Discfil SLT 33203. September 1960
Symphony No. 2 - Swedish RSO/Stig Westerberg. Swedish Society Discofil SLT 33219. 6-11 March 1966
Symphony No. 7- Stockholm PO/Antal Dorati. Swedish Society Discofil SLT 33194. 18-19 September 1969
Symphony No. 6. Norrkopping SO/Okko Kamu. CBS 76553. 11 April 1976.
Symphony No. 9. Goteborg SO/Sergiu Comissiona. Philips 6767 951. 8-10 June 1977.
Symphony No. 8. Baltimore SO/Sergiu Comissiona. DG 2531 176. 1980.
Symphony No. 4. Goteborg SO/Sergiu Comissiona. BIS 5 LP set. LP-301/303. recorded 5 February 1970. issued 1985.

It's quite a list and I am not by any means sure that it is complete. Only numbers 2 and 7 from this list have been reissued on CD.

CPO have the hard-won distinction of issuing the first CD intégrale of the symphonies of Allan Pettersson. It has been a long slog. Their first Pettersson symphony disc came out in 1984. Their last (No. 12) appeared very recently. We should not forget that they have also recorded many other Pettersson works – most recently a second recording of the Violin Concerto No. 2.

Pettersson was a modern romantic. Romantic in that the music conveys an interior and very personal world. One senses a psychological pilgrimage or passage of arms. As a romantic his music is not to be compared for example with that of Atterburg. There is no pastoral relaxation, no folk influence and no flicker of humour unless it is the skull’s vacant leer. He has some superficial kinship with Fartein Valen and Harald Saeverud. He is ‘modern’ in that the music exploits dissonance when it serves the composer’s purpose. There is no systematic adherence to serial technique or 12-tone dogma. It is instead fraught with anxiety - tense, distraught, turbulent, drained of relief, buffeted, grievously wounded, tortured by outrageous fortune, excoriating but singing with hard-won hope. This pessimism is in line with the Nordic stereotype – or caricature - but its redemptive power and the reason why people are drawn back to these scores is the composer’s ability to draw a tearful serene epiphany out of exhaustion and a battered spirit. This speaks to the experience of many in the last century though Pettersson’s suffering arose from his paralysing illness, his meagre family circumstances and the neglect of his music.

His way with small rhythmic motifs, repeated in a non-minimalist way is part of his sound autograph. These often are set off like little automata in a sort of ‘oompah’ habanera and then fade and fall. Similar DNA strands include the screaming and protesting strings and groaning and agonised brass. The lachrymose and fragile yet enduring blessing of a long-limbed Pettersson melody will be what has you going back to these scores. They are much stronger than the fashionable following they attracted in the 1970s and 1980s and this is your chance to find that out.

Will you take to him? First of all you have to hear him. I recommend that you persist with the Seventh Symphony which at 44:35 is by no means his longest. It ends in a high-whistling benediction of a melody that is haunting in its crushing emotional power. It is quite simply one of the largely unsung wonders of Western classical music. There is perhaps a little of Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs about that miraculously sustained finale. Then again you get some idea of the idiom by trying the ten minute Symphonic Movement on the first disc. However while you can hear the Pettersson manner, the substance and its emotional range mean that there is no substitute for experiencing a complete symphony. That has to be the Seventh – that’s the one that Antal Dorati recorded in the 1960s. That Dorati recording, still available on Swedish Society Discofil – carried Pettersson’s name far and wide and won new friends for him across the world. It remains the best version although Albrecht is very good.

The First Symphony was destroyed so the first viable one and the first to be recorded was the Second. It dates from his years studying with René Leibowitz in Paris. It is of about the same span as the Seventh and is also in his hallmark single movement format. Searing Tchaikovskian strings pass like wraiths from the Pathetique. They are dowsed in the acid rain of Bergian lyricism and the devastation and upheaval of the Fourth symphonies of Sibelius and Shostakovich. There is some balm in Gilead but here it does not flow like honey and when it comes it is brutally shrivelled. A sharp thrust from the trumpets ushers the work towards its close. CPO competes with the Swedish Society Discofil’s SCD 1012 – the 1966 analogue recording. Francis takes five minutes longer than Westerberg over the symphony yet neither seems unduly fast or unduly slow.

The Third Symphony is divided into movements; the only one of the symphonies to follow this pattern apart from the Eighth. After the first movement the remaining three are linked attacca. The first is alive with fast-trudging ruthless ostinati and upheaval and is followed by the desolation of a Largo with a trademark flute solo singing emotional emptiness over the murmuring deep strings. The allegro commodo third movement at times sounds like a 20th century Tasso’s ride. The finale - in language proclaiming connective tissue with Prokofiev 6 – sinks into a shimmering discontent punctuated with defiant little troika cells. Of about the same duration is the Fourth Symphony – which has been available before on LP as part of a Bis LP set. CPO have tracked this in five segments with the longest being 26:02 (Andante espressivo) which serves as a second movement of sorts. It features a rural hymn-like melody occasionally chaffed by nightmare creatures taking the form of rhythmic protesting fanfares – a distorted echo of Beethoven’s fate motif.

These are the only CD recordings of the Third and Fourth symphonies and they can still be tracked down separately on CPO999 223-2.

Pettersson's Fifth was the last symphony he was able to write out in his own hand before crippling polyarthritis struck home. It is in his accustomed, massive, single movement pattern and is his first truly mature work. It opens in the quietest of whispering mysteries, punctuated with stabbing figures, tolling and tumultuous brass and strange bird and insect calls. The symphony marks his middle period spanned by symphonies 5-9 of which all but No. 8 (in two movements) are monoliths.

The Sixth Symphony has been recorded before but only on LP. It plays for just over an hour and only the Ninth and the Thirteenth were to be longer. The Ninth is the longest. The material for the Sixth Symphony is drawn from the last of his 24 Barefoot Songs. That song He can put out my little light is not heard until the last twenty minutes of the symphony which are the most lyrical. The work attains a crippled majesty at 24:20 after continuously tortured material. The music seems to open the wound and allow the listener to look into and witness the hurt. It becomes meditative aided by those reticent bass ostinati which lend the work forward momentum. Interesting at 50:00 onwards to hear those punched out hammer-blows recalling similar impacts in the symphonies of Hilding Rosenberg – especially the Sixth.

The note-writer for the CPO version of the Seventh Symphony describes it as ‘by no means a cheerful work’. At 3:12 we hear for the first time the mournful little troika ostinato played by the deep brass that is to buoy and goad the work to its conclusion. Torturous and protesting writing for the brass rises chorale like, ill-formed yet deliberately so – eloquent in tragedy. We might hear shades of Shostakovich in the long caustically singing lines. In the repetition we may hear the seeds of trance-like concentration and in the long-limbed searing theme the voice of Pettersson singing a lonely consolation and healing from 42:23 to the close.

The Eighth Symphony was first recorded by pioneer Sergiu Comissiona on a Polar/DG LP but never reissued. It was premiered in Baltimore in October 1977. Pettersson's chorales are one of his trademarks: a fingerprint. They are prominent in the Eighth Symphony. A long calmly confident line expands freely and stretches its wings across the massive framework of this diptychal symphony (21:46 + 28:32). Little surges, shudders and currents disturb the calm and nightmare scenes intrude. Thomas Sanderling does not keep things moving as effectively as Segerstam on his Bis recording. There is always a temptation towards meandering with Pettersson. The second ‘panel’ is riven with conflict. The symphony ends amid a raw lyricism comparable with that of the Seventh. The work gently moves down the gradient to silence.

The Ninth Symphony is his longest at circa 70 minutes. It is also in a single movement. CPO have helpfully allocated this 17 tracks so students can the more easily examine its structure. This is aided by music examples and commentary by Andreas K W Meyer alongside a timeline and quotations from the composer. The music is restless and tense. Pettersson fingerprints are there to be heard including those downward punching ostinati (trs. 6, 17). A sauntering version of the troika from the Seventh Symphony can be heard in tr. 10. This a statuesque symphony here enjoying its only CD recording.

The Tenth is a vortex of despair and violence. Pettersson said that this symphony and its successor were written ‘in the tunnel of death’ during a nine month period in hospital in 1970. It could not have been produced without Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini, nor without Shostakovich's bleaker symphonies but the sound remains essentially very much Pettersson's own. Great themes rear up constantly through the screaming agonised brass. The crippled splendour of the music is accessible. The rhythmic contour frequently reaches back to Beethoven’s fate motif. An almost Bach-like theme winds in and out of the last half of the symphony; typical Pettersson. Segerstam on Bis is a minute and a half quicker and you feel this invigorating acceleration in the first 10 minutes of the symphony where Segerstam keeps pressing forward almost impatiently. Francis seems to have a better handle on the work. Frankly though, either will satisfy and neither strikes me subjectively as a distortion or unrepresentative. The booklet cautiously recounts a possibly apocryphal story that sections of this symphony were written out on bandages and dressings which became part of Pettersson's daily life from the Fifth Symphony onwards as arthritis took its toll.

The Eleventh opens in gentle spirit but soon feels the siren call of Gehenna. It is turbulent but without the sustained rip-tide of its predecessor. Great striding themes claw heavenwards through oceans of strident clamorous sound. One of these themes closes the symphony which ends as if brutally cut off in mid-step: not for Pettersson any conventional finishing flourish; again typical of the composer.

The Tenth and Eleventh are single movement pieces but CPO – ever sympathetic to the student – have allocated five tracks to each to aid navigation and assimilation.

The Twelfth De Döda på Torget is his only choral symphony. It sets poems by Pablo Neruda in nine movements. The words are given in full but only in Swedish and German – no other translations. It seems that there were legal obstacles to reproducing the Spanish originals and English translations. The choral writing recalls Tippett’s in A Child of Our Time – often touched with desperation as the deaths and injustices perpetrated in Chile are tracked as emblematic of social injustices on an international stage. The searing tortured string writing combines seamlessly with the singing in the sixth movement. Fascinating to have the solo violin adding its voice to the progress of the finale. The Twelfth Symphony although taken up with a specific atrocity by the Chilean authorities in 1946 was written in the wake of the deposing of the Socialist president of Chile Salvador Allende in 1973.

The Thirteenth is two minutes short of the Ninth Symphony’s duration. Its composition came at a time of increasing wealth for the composer. He had received a stipend of 10,000 Swedish crowns from the Swedish copyright organisation. There were to be 25,000 crowns for the Thirteenth Symphony from the Bergen Festival. It is a dense and complex work – not the place to start out with Pettersson! It is as if he is making up for the directness of speech in the Twelfth Symphony. The language is the usual restless combination of angst, fear and ominous reflection which is only redeemed in the work’s last ten minutes with a powerful rather than whispered blessing of a melody carried by the piercing strings and of course bearing a tragic and restless payload.

The Fourteenth Symphony is another single movement work; this time of 47 minutes duration. Both Arnell on CPO and Comissiona on Phono-Suecia take about the same time. The CD format has been kind to Pettersson permitting his monolith symphonies a single uninterrupted listening experience. This has been the upside. It was written the year after the Second Violin Concerto – recorded by Ida Haendel and also on Phono-Suecia (and now on CPO as well) - and the year before the Sixteenth Symphony. It dates from the same year Pettersson also wrote the Fifteenth Symphony. The CPO is of Arnell conducting the German premiere of the work and the recording has some analogue hiss to remind us of its age: 1988.

From the first instant you are left in no doubt that this is a serious piece. It protests and laments, screeches and bellows. Tension rises and is sustained almost unbearably and then slackened off into great arioso valleys. I am not sure how well it all coheres and the ending strikes me as suspect. However there is some extraordinarily excoriating writing along the way. The effect, as with so much Pettersson, is of an agonising and scouring abrasion. There is nothing belligerently atonal about it but the racking conflict leaves its dissonant mark. It is a fine work that speaks with superior conviction and deserves to stand in the magisterial company of the Seventh Symphony.

The Fifteenth Symphony is from the same year as its predecessor and the Second Violin Concerto. Again it is in a single movement which CPO have tracked into five elegiac, angry and scouringly poignant sections which end on a surprisingly Sibelian dazzle from the violins.

The coupling for No. 15 is Düsseldorf-born Peter Ruzicka’s … das Gesegnete, das Verflüchte, which the composer terms his Pettersson Requiem. The style is close to Pettersson’s with references to symphonies 14 and 15. I reviewed Ruzicka’s Celan Symphony in 2005 and at that time noted the Petterssonian sound of his more tortured climactic writing.

The Sixteenth Symphony was written in the same year as another concertante work: the Viola Concerto. There is little peace in it. A furious angst is alleviated by a second movement producing another of those blessed Pettersson melody-laments. It is amongst his finest examples. This repose which is almost Bachian is surely what he envisioned for himself ... This is a very tuneful score and one of Pettersson's most accessible. Those who have enjoyed other modern saxophone concertos would do well to try it.

I am not sure how much of the incomplete Seventeenth Symphony exists but surely it is time someone was engaged to complete or ‘realise’ it.

This set follows the now classic pattern for a CPO box: strong price discount (circa £5.80 per disc), light card box – a casualty in waiting - and heat-sealed shrink-wrap. Otherwise it’s the original single issue CDs reached down off the warehouse shelf and shuffled into the box. This is not a typical EMI or Brilliant Classics wallet issue. Nothing amiss with that. The liner-notes are inside each of the twelve cases.

One symphony is played by Pettersson’s compatriots, two by the BBC’s Scottish radio orchestra and the rest by German orchestras. All but one of these were recorded pre-1995; the only exception being the most recently issued: No. 12 – which would have been the trigger for the collection. Alun Francis, whose modest media presence belies his magnificent contribution especially in the field of recorded music, is the mainstay here. He conducts symphonies 2-5, 9-11, 13, 16. The others are shared between Peter Ruzicka, Johan Arnell, Manfred Honeck, Thomas Sanderling, Gerd Albrecht and Manfred Trojahn; the first and last being composers. Symphonies 8 and 14 are in ADD sound.

Of course you can still get the individual discs and some have been reviewed on this site. I have drawn on those reviews for some of the material in this piece.

This set is to be welcomed at so many levels. Pettersson’s voice can be sensed as a significant one. There is little in the way of a performance tradition and recordings, broadcasts and concerts are still unusual. This CPO box offers a unique insight into the music and will aid its cautiously growing reputation.

-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

Georg Philipp Telemann’s chamber oeuvre has always had a significant place in the repertoire of the Camerata Köln. The ensemble’s contributions to this field have included complete recordings of magnificent cyclical work groups such as his Essercizii musici, Trios of 1718, Six Concerts et Suites, Die kleine Kammermusik, and Der getreue Music-Meister. The present release rounds off the complete recording of Telemann’s concertos with wind instruments on a total of 16 albums on cpo. The Baroque orchestra La Stagione Frankfurt led by Michael Schneider performed the orchestral compositions, and the Camerata Köln was responsible for the chamber works – and the wind soloists of the two ensembles are identical. The second release of the Concerti da Camera once again contains chamber masterpieces by Telemann featuring a complex texture of parts in a concerto style in which each of the concertizing instruments is allowed to come forward with thematic material as well as with figurations.

GILSE Symphony No. 4 in A. Funeral Music on the Death of Uilenspiegel. Concert Overture in c • David Porcelijn, cond; Netherlands SO • CPO 777689 (62:33)


CPO here continues apace with its survey of Jan van Gilse’s symphonies. Details of the composer’s life and descriptions of his music can be found in reviews of his first three symphonies in 32:2 and 36:2. The Fourth Symphony in A Major occupied Gilse from 1910 to 1915, and appears to be his last fully completed symphony; only a fragment of a Fifth exists, dating from 1922, and since the composer lived for another 22 years after that, it has to be assumed that it wasn’t death that prevented him from completing it. The Concert Overture in C Minor has received a previous recording by Jac van Steen conducting the Netherlands Radio Symphony Orchestra on an NM CD. It was reviewed in 31:5.


If you acquired one or both of David Porcelijn’s CPO recordings of Gilse’s first three symphonies, you’ll know what to expect of the Fourth, and there’s really not a lot to add. This is well-made music in high romantic style. Commenting on the First Symphony in 32:2, David H. North pegged it as Dvo?ák’s No. 4-1/3. Gilse has advanced considerably beyond Dvo?ák in his Fourth Symphony, but considering its date of composition, it’s still a decade or so behind its time. The most pervasive influence on the score, even more so than on Gilse’s Third Symphony, is Richard Strauss. The music is shot through with much of the same orchestral busyness—the flashes, splashes, and dashes of luminous colors—and the long-arching passages of melodic and harmonic nostalgia familiar from Strauss’s tone poems. If Gilse’s First Symphony was Dvo?ák’s No. 4-1/3, his Fourth Symphony is Strauss’s Don Juanenspiegel.


The Strauss connection is literary as well as musical. In 1941, during the German occupation of Holland, Gilse composed his Funeral Music on the Death of Uilenspiegel , the flip side, if you will, of Strauss’s Till . This, for Gilse, was how things ended for the legendary merry prankster. The music now anticipates the Strauss of Metamorphosen of four years later. If this and previous reviews have not taken Gilse very seriously, his Funeral Music is a score that commands serious attention and perhaps a re-evaluation of his work as a whole. The piece actually was extracted from a section of Gilse’s opera Thijl and then expanded to stand as an independent orchestral work. The Concert Overture of 1900 is Gilse’s first attempt at a piece for orchestra and it, like the First Symphony, contains echoes of Dvo?ák.


Of the three CPO discs released so far in this series, I find myself most impressed by this one. Performance and recording standards remain very high, and this is music anyone who enjoys beautifully crafted and magnificently scored orchestral music of the type and style described will derive much pleasure from. Strongly recommended.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

In our series "Music from Wolfenbüttel Castle," the sixth concert in the series featured and recorded parallel settings of sacred works by Michael Praetorius and Heinrich Schütz. One does not immediately think of counting the great Dresden composer Heinrich Schütz among the kapellmeisters at the Wolfenbüttel court, and yet he was officially engaged there as "Capellmeister von Haus aus" from 1655 until at least 1666. Michael Praetorius, however, had long since died around this time. By juxtaposing compositions with identical texts (so-called parallel settings) by Praetorius and Schütz, this album makes it possible to compare the styles of these two "heroes of music history". This is particularly appealing inasmuch as the stylistic upheaval at the beginning of the 17th century, which originated in Italy, falls into the creative period of both composers, and it is revealing to observe in what way the new developments influenced the oeuvre of both masters. At the same time, the works of both composers with identical texts are not exactly numerous, which is related to the fact that Praetorius turned to the arrangement of Protestant church hymns to a particularly strong degree, a genre that either interested Schütz little, or that his position at the Dresden court did not offer any occasion to serve.

Ludwig van Beethoven and the stage: this is the story of a predominantly unhappy love affair with an unexpected happy ending - the late breakthrough of Fidelio. If this paean to husbandly love had not triumphed at the third attempt, there would be little more left in the dramatic field, apart from some very fragmentary operatic attempts, than the festival music for The Ruins of Athens and King Stephen, Hungary's First Benefactor, which Marcus Bosch and the Capella Aquileia have already recently recorded for cpo. Of course, the "more" also includes two pieces for dance theatre: the cute music for a knight's ballet written in Bonn's time and - far more weighty - the extensive score for the work by the famous choreographer and dancer Salvatore Viganò, which premiered under the title The Creatures of Prometheus at Vienna's Burgtheater on 28 March 1801. What the audience saw was a rather idyllic excerpt from the wildly eventful life of the disobedient titan. He has just formed his creatures out of clay, but they cannot get beyond mindless emotions. In his anger, Prometheus at first wants to stomp them out, but then he takes them to Parnassus, where the Muses teach them basic knowledge and artistic behavior under the eyes of Apollo. A general dance performance brings the predominantly cheerful, charming event to a close.

First the discovery of his works in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, then the new edition of the chamber music works in the Kammermusikverlag from 2020 and finally the contact to the three performers / inside who had great interest to record these works. So, finally, with these first recordings, about 160 years after the composition of these works, one can have a listening impression of the chamber music of Berthold Damcke: a German composer, pianist, conductor, music educator and critic, and newspaper correspondent. Born in Hanover, he first studied theology and later music in Frankfurt am Main. in 1845 Damcke went to St. Petersburg. From 1859 he lived and worked in Paris, where he was active as a correspondent, among other things. The 2 piano trios at the center of this production are works that were very much heard in Paris at the time, or in its salons. The Revue et Gazette described the music as "the best chamber music". Liszt spoke of Damcke as one of the most sought-after composition teachers in Paris. Berlioz called him a "great musician, an artist." The recorded works are worth rediscovering and performing.

BEETHOVEN: Piano Sonatas Nos. 3 and 29, "Hammerklavier"

Along with the world’s most renowned vocal ensemble – the Singphoniker – the Taipei Male Choir (TMC) led by Nieh Yen-Hsiang presents contemporary pieces for soloists and male choir and organ or percussion. Of the three similar repertoire CD releases to TMC’s credit, the first and third discs won the Taiwan Golden Melody Award Interpretation Prize in 2011. Metaphorically, the three works deal with the coexistence of darkness and light in the world and the perennial quest for purposefulness in human existence – until reaching its heavenly goal, which is filled with love and brightness.

Haydn, F.J.: Feuersbrunst (Die) [Opera]

VOLKMANN: Serenades Nos. 1-3 / Reinecke: Serenade in G minor