This 4th volume of the Jam Session series presents six musicians at the start of their career. Since the time of the recording took in 1997 all six have made major advancements in their career and build a name for themselves in the jazz world with recordings and performances with major jazz artists and in their own names.

Whatever your views on the music or the performance, that this recording exists at all is an extraordinary story, and due congratulations must be offered to the hard work and dedication of all involved, in particular of Jennifer Condon. Her “normal” job is as a prompter at the Hamburg Opera, but she has been responsible for editing this previously unpublished work, preparing it for performance, persuading a large and distinguished cast to take part, in some cases without any remuneration, as well as conducting the performance. This shows a commitment to the work that may seem eccentric to the cynical but heroic to others who have laboured in vain on behalf of other similarly neglected works.
 
Peggy Glanville-Hicks was an Australian composer whose teachers included Vaughan Williams, Egon Wellesz and Nadia Boulanger, who was married for a time to Stanley Bate, another neglected composer, and who spent twenty years in New York before moving to Greece and finally back to Australia. Her other works include the opera The Transposed Heads, commissioned by the Louisville Orchestra and recorded by them in the 1950s and in 1984 by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra. I have listened many times to both recordings with increasing pleasure so that I have been very eager to hear the present discs.
 
Sappho is a setting of an adaptation by the composer of a verse play by Lawrence Durrell. It tells of the Lesbian (but not lesbian) poet Sappho in her latter years when she was married to a wealthy local merchant, Kreon. The various scenes show her with the twin brothers, Pittakos and Phaon, with her tutor, Minos, and with Diomedes, a drunken poet. Towards the end she is exiled to Corinth on a false charge of incest. Her final monologue, the only part of the opera to have been publicly performed, is the clear climax of the opera, with Sappho accepting the impermanence of personal relationships as well as of her own life. It mirrors similar scenes at the end of operas by Strauss and Janácek, albeit that it is very different in its musical style. That style derives to a great degree from the composer’s attempt to reduce the importance of harmony in music, and to throw the emphasis instead on texture and tone, melody and heterophony. The result may seem a little bland at first but the listener soon adjusts to the composer’s very individual style.
 
A quick glance at the cast list shows several distinguished Wagnerian singers. Very surprisingly that appears to have been a necessity due to the weight of some of the orchestration. The conductor’s note indicates that she believes that with adjustment to dynamics and some of the orchestration it could be performed on a smaller scale, and I have to say that this would be welcome. In fact the ideal might be to retain the Wagner-sized voices but allow them to sing at somewhat less than full power. That would permit a more nuanced approach to performance and a more natural delivery of the, admittedly somewhat flowery, text. I am full of admiration for the cast here, who have taken on a major new work with obvious enthusiasm, but it has to be admitted that for much of the time there is a lack of any attempt at light or shade in their singing. The many singers for whom English is not their first language cope well but it cannot be said that the result sounds idiomatic. Admittedly the results in the case of the English-speaking artists are not all that much better, and although I attempted to follow what was being sung without it after a while I found myself wholly dependent on the printed libretto to understand what was being said or even who was saying it.
 
Sappho is by no means as immediately attractive as is The Transposed Heads, partly due to an apparent preponderance of slow or slowish music, but enough is revealed through this very welcome issue to suggest that subject to the preparation of a performance edition that would make it kinder to singers and to a greater familiarity with the work it would certainly merit stage performance. In the meantime we should once again thank Jennifer Condon for her untiring efforts to make it possible to hear the work and all the singers and players who helped her in this. Congratulations also to Toccata Classics whose presentation of the issue, with essays on the work, the edition, Durrell and Sappho, together with the full libretto, does all that could be done to help the listener and encourage understanding of this important discovery.
 
-- John Sheppard, MusicWeb International

Classical Music

Classical Music

Stale Kleiberg’s Mass for Modern Man is about the loss of existential meaning as an antithesis to faith and belief. The work commutes between these two extremes, and raises the following underlying question: Is belief possible for modern man? In this work, the answer is ‘yes’: not a resounding ‘yes,’ but a ‘yes’ in spite of all. The work is a large-scale concert mass for two soloists, choir and orchestra where Kleiberg’s neo-romantic music commutes between the intimate and the grand. Stale Kleiberg (b. 1958) is a major Norwegian composer with a considerable international reputation. His music is widely performed in Norway and abroad, and is mostly commissioned by well-established orchestras, ensembles, and performers. There are also many published recordings of his music, including seven albums (the present one is number eight), that have received outstanding international reviews. Kleiberg’s music is characterized by a highly distinctive form of extended tonality and by meticulous attention to coloristic details.

Both in his native Denmark and around the world, Thomas Jensen became known for his uniquely authoritative interpretations of Carl Nielsen’s music. His postwar Decca and HMV studio recordings of the first two symphonies are inflected with unrivalled sweep and passion. They are coupled here with previously unpublished broadcasts of music by four Danish composers from the generation after Nielsen, including the brooding Largo which set the scene for Carl Th. Dreyer’s cinematic masterpiece, Ordet (The Word). Thomas Jensen studied at the Danish Conservatory of Music. Jensen led several Danish ensembles, including the Danish National Symphony Orchestra (from 1957) and the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra (then known as the Aarhus Civic Orchestra). In Aarhus he built the small orchestra up through broadcasts and tours within Denmark and later to Germany and the Netherlands. He also conducted the Tivoli Concert Hall Orchestra.

... SOMEONE needs to remind all of us what an alto sax is supposed to sound like! Auditory riches like a balm in Gilead. - Jazz Weekly. In 2001, alto saxophonist Brent Jensen released "The Sound of a Dry Martini: Remembering Paul Desmond." Resonating immediately with radio stations and their audiences, the album has been a consistent presence on the airwaves and has been streamed thousands of times a week since that technology was first conceived. Some twenty years later, Jensen now offers the house another round. Joined by guitarist Jamie Findlay, his long time partner in interpreting Desmond's works, Jensen improvises new melodies as rich and satisfying as the tunes from which they are based, subtly coloring his lines with romance, melancholy and joy. He shares a stylistic affinity with both Desmond and Lee Konitz in a lyrical sense, weaving singing, free-flowing lines in his own singular voice through Desmond favorites such as "Take Ten," and "Desmond Blue," or standards like "These Foolish Things" and "Alone Together." Supported by an outstanding Seattle cast - drummers Stefan Schatz and John Bishop, bassist Chris Symer and pianist Bill Anschell - Jensen creates another irresistible tribute to an iconic musical voice. "If this is the sound of a dry martini, then make mine a double. Highly recommended." - JAZZ REVIEW

A magical evening at the Tivoli Gardens! This new compilation features live and studio recordings of light orchestral waltzes and polkas, including the greatest hits of the Danish 'Waltz King', HC Lumbye. Several studio recordings from the 1940s receive their first release on album. Album 2 features a previously unpublished live concert broadcast direct from the Tivoli Gardens, where the people of Copenhagen have enjoyed relaxation and entertainment ever since 1843. Thomas Jensen directs the Tivoli orchestra with the same authority he brought to his classic recordings of Nielsen and Sibelius.