Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

HERZOGENBERG Die Geburt Christi • Matthias Beckert, cond; Alexandra Steiner (sop); Barbara Werner (alt); Tilman Lichdi (ten); Benedikt Nawrath (ten); Philipp Gaiser (bs); Michael Bauer (bs); Ökumenischer Hochschulchor Würzburg; Herzogenberg Würzburg O • cpo 777 211 (79:15) Live: Würzburger, Neubaukirche 12/3–4/2005


A commanding, ominous peal of organ fanfare cues the choir, and Heinrich von Herzogenberg’s grand annunciation begins, majestic, high-toned religiosity having been given voice in the composer’s pre-premiere declaration: “For Sunday I’m inviting our dear God,” he wrote to Friedrich Spitta, younger brother of the Bach biographer Philipp, and the man who sang this Christmas oratorio’s tenor part in its first performance in late 1894.


Herzogenberg was tapped by fate several times for a good deal of setbacks and despair in his life, and yet retained a bon vivant spirit, even a mischievous one, when it came to his art or any discussion thereof. Spitta commissioned the oratorio that forms the whole of this excellent set under the duress of what he called “preconditions,” namely the personnel and budgetary limitations of his church at Christmas time, with most of the seasonal expenditure earmarked for a Bach cantata. Herzogenberg, as the story goes, had at his disposal a harmonium player and a four-part choir, and was directed to write simple solo passages, the text being provided by the Bible and the church hymn book and some selections from Boehme’s folk songs. Plying Spitta with wine and slabs of cheese at the local inn, Herzogenberg made his case for the provision of some string-players, arguing that a handful of beer-addled fiddlers could be rounded up easily enough on the cheap, and that an oboe really would go over much better than a wheezing harmonium. And what do you know—it is indeed Herzogenberg’s pined for—and well-won—oboe that provides the piping, brimming joy on the piece’s final, triumphant chorus. Take that, Herr Spitta.


Unaware of the work’s back story—or that its title translates to “The Birth of Christ”—you’re not likely to denote anything overwhelmingly seasonal in the music, probably for the reason that the God-fearing Herzogenberg wished to suggest not a time of the year, but rather a prevailing consistency of faith: contemplation voicing celebration, musically speaking. Thus, proclamatory passages feed into triumphal, impeccably blended choruses, the voices of Steiner and Werner rounded out by the tenors beneath, additional heft then provided by the bass singers, for a caramelized, shining, shimmering whole. Rarely am I disappointed in the sound of any cpo recording, and this is not the set to buck the trend; it’s live, but there’s little in the way of ambient sound, and when some extraneous noise is picked up—like when an audience member stifles a faint cough near the end—it only adds to the atmosphere of solemnity; here is music that bespeaks a devotion upon which we must not intrude. You can’t exactly stuff your collection with Die Geburt Christi recordings—I know of only one other set, on Hänssler Classic—but one could profit by the notes, themes, and oboe melody encoded in this disc for an age, so no worries there. And when the oboe does drop out for a full stop before the choir surges to life three quarters of the way through the recording, the bequests of a hundred sugar plum fairies probably wouldn’t be enough to set you to thinking how another version might be procured.


FANFARE: Colin Fleming

Includes work(s) by various composers. Ensemble: Schuppanzigh Quartet.

This second disc of orchestral music by Dutch composer Johan Wagenaar (1862-1941) is very enjoyable. I say “orchestral music” and not “symphonic poems,” as the back of the tray card promises, because the largest and best work on the disc isn’t a symphonic poem at all. It’s his Sinfonietta, a work which is exactly what it purports to be: a little symphony, expertly crafted, cleverly scored, and simply delicious from first note to last. What a splendid addition this piece would make to any program, not that you’re every likely to hear it live. Thank God we have recordings, and this one sounds excellent, both as regards the conducting, playing, and engineering. Console yourself accordingly.

Next on the list of gems is the tone poem Elverhöi, one of those “virtuous knight meets a batch of nasty fairies” stories so beloved of romantic composers. This time the tale has a happy ending. Indeed, much of Wagenaar’s music is cheerful, and in Frühlingsgewalt and the Amphitrion overture it can easily lapse into a sort of four-square blandness that his detractors associate with Dutch music generally, for some reason. I have no idea if this is true, but both pieces, merely “nice”, fail to show the composer at his best. What matters more, to me at least, is that Wagenaar did have a “best” to show. Le Cid is the prelude to a comic opera, and funny it surely is. Not all of this music is equally great, but the good stuff is really good, and certainly worth hearing.

-- David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Classical Music

REGER Violin Concerto in A, Op. 101. Aria for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 103a/3 • Ulf Wallin (vn); Ulf Schirmer, cond; Munich Radio O • CPO 777736 (SACD: 61:24)


More than half-a-dozen recordings of Max Reger’s self-described “monster” Violin Concerto in A can be found on disc, and three of those—not counting a fourth in a chamber orchestra arrangement made by Rudolf Kolisch for Schoenberg’s Vienna Society for Private Musical Performances—have been reviewed in Fanfare . Two of them fall into the category of historical or archival performances: One, a 1944 performance by Georg Kulenkampff with Willem van Otterloo conducting the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra is part of a 13-CD set featuring the Amsterdam orchestra; the other, a performance by Manfred Scherzer with Herbert Blomstedt and the Dresden Staatskapelle is included in a seven-disc set of Reger’s orchestral works featuring various conductors and orchestras and recorded between 1963 and 1984.


Since then, Reger’s just under an hour-long massive concerto hadn’t received much attention on disc, until recently, when all of a sudden, two new recordings appeared, and now, with this one, a third. Violinist Tanja Becker-Bender tackled the work with Lothar Zagrosek and the Berlin Konzerthaus Orchestra for Volume 11 of Hyperion’s “Romantic Violin Concerto” series, and it was reviewed, in 35:5, with reservations, by James H. North, who expressed a preference for a no-longer-available recording by Edith Peinemann. Actually, North might be interested to know that the Peinemann can still be had, though in the form of a download file from various sites. The other quite recent recording is Benjamin Schmid’s with Hannu Lintu and the Tampere Philharmonic on Ondine, a CD that unfortunately I haven’t heard. I do, however, possess the Hyperion disc, and what I can say is that if you have even a passing familiarity with Reger’s orchestral scores, there’s at least one reason why this latest entry from CPO, in co-production with BR Klassik, is the version of the concerto to have.


Reger was anything but sparing when it came to orchestrating his scores; some would call his results dense and opaque. CPO’s new recording of the concerto is the only one to date to take advantage of multichannel SACD technology, and it really makes a difference when it comes to clarifying the concerto’s layered textures. Subtle details emerge here that go unheard in Hyperion’s recording. For example, in this new version, you can actually perceive in measures 22–23 that the first and second violins are playing divisi. Of course, none of this would matter if the soloist wasn’t any good, but Ulf Wallin is a long-time veteran on the recording scene, with nearly three-dozen albums to his name, mostly in late 19th- and early 20th-century repertoire, which puts Reger right up his alley, and, in my opinion, he simply beats Becker-Bender at the game.


In comparing Becker-Bender to Peinemann, North noted in his review that Becker-Bender’s timing of 56:56 felt a bit rushed in places to Peinemann’s 62:23, but Peinemann may be more the exception than the rule, for Wallin and Schirmer’s reading comes in at 56:26, and it doesn’t feel rushed to me at all. Our first recording of a work or the one we’re most familiar with often tends to establish itself in our minds as a model for the way it should go. In any case, I realize that for not a few listeners, acquiring a taste for Reger’s music can take some time and effort, but the violin concerto is a beautiful score, rich in ripe romantic melody and harmony, and Wallin’s playing reveals a genuine love for it. His tone caresses Reger’s lyrical flights in a way that, for me, Becker-Bender’s doesn’t, and technically, Wallin is stunning. His flying staccatos in the big first movement cadenza have a Heifetz-like spring and zing to them, and his double-stopping is surgically clean and accurate.


If you don’t know Reger’s Violin Concerto at all, I can almost guarantee that you’ll find Wallin’s recording a special treat. But even if you already have another version of the work, you owe it to yourself to acquire this one for an outstanding performance and a quite remarkable recording. The Aria for Violin and Orchestra is a five-minute bonus. It’s Reger’s own orchestration of the Aria from his Suite in A Minor for Violin and Piano, which was played at the composer’s funeral by his good friend and colleague, Adolf Busch. This receives my highest recommendation.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

Includes work(s) by Julius Röntgen. Ensemble: Rheinland-Pfalz State Philharmonic Orchestra. Conductor: David Porcelijn.

Includes concerto(s) by Johann Gottlieb Graun. Ensemble: Vienna Academy. Conductor: Martin Haselböck. Soloists: Ilja Korol, Daniel Sepec, Vittorio Ghielmi.

Since recordings of Albéric Magnard’s hefty 1904 Op. 18 piano trio are few and far between, any new contender is bound to get attention. On balance, violinist Geneviève Laurenceau, cellist Maximilian Hornung, and pianist Oliver Triendl give us the most consistently satisfying version from both sonic and interpretive perspectives.

The sprawling first movement’s potentially murky low-lying passages emerge with uncommon textural clarity, while the pages and pages encompassing obsessive dotted rhythms of the Schubert and Schumann finale ilk unfold in long paragraphs that never bog down. The musicians sensitively address the Chantant movement’s delicacy and subtle harmonic sleights-of-hand and balance the huge climaxes so that the soaring string melodies and sweeping piano arpeggios interact rather than compete.

If the Valse isn’t ideally lightfooted, I still appreciate the pointed contrapuntal repartée and timbrally differentiated pizzicatos. By contrast, the finale is both forceful and transparent, characterized by the performers’ intelligently contoured counterpoint. They also avoid the easy temptation to inflate the chorale-like final pages with false grandiosity.

Laurenceau and Triendl more than hold their own among the Violin Sonata’s (relatively) more extensive catalog choices. They effortlessly and insightfully navigate the music’s formidable technical demands and acres of textural thickness. Listen, for example, to the inner voices and bass lines coaxed out of the long slow movement’s cascades of descending piano arpeggios, and notice the scrutiny with which Laurenceau and Triendl handle the compact and complex Scherzo’s imitative passages. Colorful shaping also helps to intensify the finale’s fugal writing. After such a workout, you’d expect a big ending payoff. But no, Magnard again goes for the quiet close. In other words, no immediate standing ovation! However, I heartily applaud these excellent performances of underrated works that both deserve and reward any serious music lover’s attention.

-- ClassicsToday.com

Classical Music

Classical Music

cpo are doing great things for lesser known music, many times undeservedly neglected works. The cycle of Kurt Atterberg’s nine symphonies is one recent project, gloriously realised, Carl Loewe’s songs and ballads is another long-time undertaking; I reviewed volume 20 not long ago, and Franz Lehár’s “other” operettas – apart from that handful that is frequently played – have been given brand new recordings. This is the third within a year. They may not always have picked the best singers in the business and presentation has sometimes been a bit slipshod, but operetta lovers must still feel grateful that the music becomes available.

Eva has never been much of a success and set beside some of his other stage-works the musical – or rather – melodic inspiration seems a bit meagre. The only hit-song is Eva’s Lied early in act I, Wär es auch nichts als ein Augenblick, which also appears a couple of times later on in the operetta as a kind of Leitmotif. There are good enough melodies of typical Lehár Schmalz and a great deal of light-hearted rhythmic dances, but they tend to slip out of one’s memory as soon as they are over. What is obvious though is his masterly handling of the orchestra and more than in any other operetta I know gives grateful and attractive solos to many of the instrumentalists in a transparent orchestral web. I think he is closer to Puccini’s sensuality than Richard Strauss’s overblown bombast, even though in the second act finale there are reminiscences of Der Rosenkavalier, which was premiered almost a year before Eva was first performed, on 24 November 1911 at Theater an der Wien. That was the same theatre that also saw the premiere of Die lustige Witwe, and the first Hanna Glawari and Danilo, Mizzi Günther and Louis Treumann, also sang the leading roles in the new operetta.

The libretto is a variant of the old Cinderella story, where the poor factory girl wins the prince, in this case the owner of the glass factory, situated near Brussels. A kind of social realism, one could think, but in the second act we are back in the normal upper class operetta world, in Octave Flaubert’s villa. The third and last act takes us, not for the first time in a Lehár operetta, to Paris. There are rather few arias, and those few are labelled Lied (song) to make them less pretentious, since they are often very short. Most of the musical numbers are duets, but there are no less than three melodramas that grow into songs or duets. The three finales are quite extended numbers, the one in act II is almost 14 minutes long, and here, just as in the melodrama numbers, Lehár works in freer, partly recitative style, more related to opera. It is also in these more ambitious numbers that his inventive scoring is at its most colourful. This recording is complete with all the spoken dialogue, in some places fairly stilted and unatmospheric but there are several heated scenes where the acting is lively and involved. It is a pity, though, as is unfortunately often the case, that the spoken dialogue is recorded at a seemingly lower level. This means that you have to turn up the volume quite a bit to hear it properly and then turn it down again when the music starts. The melodramas are likewise afflicted and even though Lehár has scored the music lightly, the orchestra still tends to mask some of the spoken words. I also regret that the sung and spoken texts are not printed in the booklet, which would have been a great asset even for fluent German speakers. Apart from the balance problem the recording is good without being very atmospheric. It was recorded in the Festival Hall in Bad Ischl, where every summer there is a Lehár festival. Lehár lived in a beautiful villa in Bad Ischl in Salzkammergut in Austria, from 1910 until his death, but he also had a house in Vienna. This recording was not made during performances but with a cast that had played a number of performances and were settled into their roles. Conducted by Wolfgang Bozic, who is well versed in this genre – I have heard him conduct operetta in Vienna – and he finds that typical Lehárian lilt in the music with tempos that feel absolutely right. The chorus is good. There is even some a cappella singing at the beginning of Act I.

Of the soloists Morenike Fadayomi impresses in the title role with a large vibrant dramatic soprano voice. It comes as no surprise to find that she has been singing both Aida and Salome. Reinhard Alessandri, an experienced operetta singer. I saw his Edwin in Die Csardasfürstin at Volksoper some years ago. He is a good actor while his voice is rather small and he has some trouble with the top notes. But he can sing meltingly beautifully when the tessitura is not too high and in the main he makes a positive impression. Zora Antonic as Pipsi is fully into her role and Thomas Malik is just perfect for the comic part as Dagobert with his expressive and fluent buffo tenor. Stefan Frey contributes one of his well-researched liner notes and also a synopsis that unfortunately isn’t related to the track-list, but rather gives a general overview. On the credit side it is nice to have several photos, both from the original production back in 1911 and from the Bad Ischl event.

A matter of swings and roundabouts but operetta lovers will find much to enjoy here.

Göran Forsling, MusicWeb International

Classical Music