FOOTE: Piano Quartet / String Quartet No. 1

VIOLIN CONCERTO 'HUNG HU'

In the realm of miniatures and transcriptions, Leopold Godowsky's genius for concocting elaborate and fustian piano textures truly flowered, much as a brilliant interior decorator can transform a humble bedroom into a veritable boudoir. Not all decorators make good architects, however, and Godowsky's sprawling five-movement Piano Sonata is a case in point. The huge outer movements contain gorgeous passages laced with purple harmonies and clever polyphony but offer little in the way of memorable motives that lend themselves to being developed and transformed enough to sustain our interest.

Nevertheless, Konstantin Scherbakov manages to throw his considerable dexterity and feeling for Godowsky's keyboard idiom into this music at full force. Note his caressing rubatos in the Andante Cantabile, the excitement and sense of ongoing momentum he brings to the first movement's boring development section, and his ultra-discreet pedaling. If you're curious to hear this work, Scherbakov's effort easily surpasses Geoffrey Madge's world premiere recording on Dante (now out of print). While the four shorter works don't rise to the level of invention of other Godowsky short pieces (like those in the Java Suite), their period charm benefits from Scherbakov's thoughtful and scrupulously prepared interpretations. Those who've been following the Scherbakov/Marco Polo Godowsky cycle will want to add this fifth volume to their collections.

--Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com

EMMANUEL: Songs of Burgundy

Dublin-born Brian Boydell (b. 1917) was one of the first composers in his land to cast off the narrow features of national Irish aesthetics and adopt certain influences of international modern music. But he did not in any way become an avant-garde composer, a serialist, or anything like it. In fact, though he was "the naughty boy of modern Irish music" in the 1940s and 1950s, as he said in a recently published interview, he admits now to being rather "old-fashioned" and to feeling "lost with very contemporary music."

For the 80th birthday last year of this self-proclaimed "old fogey," Marco Polo has issued this retrospective CD of four of Boydell's orchestral works. If you know his orchestral music at all, it is probably the Megalithic Ritual Dances, once available on a Decca LP. But some lucky readers may have the New Irish LP of Boydell's grand, picturesque Symphonic Inscapes of 1968. But if you know neither work, then this CD is your way to get to know Boydell.

ln Memoriam Mahatma Gandhi was written and premiered within six months of the great man's death in January of 1948. The music builds slowly to a climax in the Funeral March middle section before subsiding to everlasting calm. The work's deeply felt, tragic character becomes something else to remember about the piece. (This is one of the surprisingly few pieces written in Gandhi's memory. In fact, the only other such work I know of is Lukas Foss's 1948 orchestral Recordare.)

The Violin Concerto of 1953-54 is quite beautiful. Rhapsodic but strongly argued, the concerto is reminiscent of Bloch; the Lento middle movement has a particularly passionate lyricism that aches over some unidentified loss or regret. The Rondo finale has rhythmic and harmonic elements of late Bartók that challenge the soloist's precision and intonation, a challenge that Ms. McCrann conquers dead on.

Masai Mara (1988) was named for a game park in Kenya where the composer felt that he could nearly coexist in harmony with the dawn of humanity. Frankly programmatic, Masai Mara opens by depicting a limitless, wide-open plain populated by mysterious bird sounds re-created on a tenor recorder. Eventually a threatening mood ensues, and the bird sounds become cries, though, as Boydell says, "they should not be interpreted too literally." This powerfully angular, driving middle section achieves the contrast that sets up the final, prayerlike conclusion.

The Megalithic Ritual Dances (1956) were inspired by the circle of huge stones found in various places in Ireland—a vestige of some long-ago religious practices occurring before the arrival of St. Patrick in the fifth century A.D. It was the stones' "dark hints of human sacrifice" that attracted Boydell. He will admit to pictorial elements in the music to the point of acknowledging that the slow dances could "obviously" be connected to the possible offering up of virgins. So these are not Malcolm Arnold-like, high-energy folk dances; based on mock-folk melodies, the music is heavier and more ceremonial, without rambunctiousness but with all the variety of orchestration and rhythm that makes such cycles rich listening. The work's Final Dance is driven on by cascading timpani, to end this fine CD quite emphatically.

One certainly has the lion's share of Boydell's major symphonic music right here. This is a wonderful installment in Marco Polo's ongoing Irish Composer Series—which I hope eventually gets to Ian Wilson, who has one of the most acute ears for instrumental color that I've ever heard. The all-Irish performances are first-rate; the sound is ever so slightly dampened.

-- Stephen Ellis, FANFARE [1/1998]

Born in 1931, Anthony Hedges becomes the youngest composer to be represented in Marco Polo's admirable British Light Music series. His name will probably be little familiar to light music followers generally, and those expecting any of the radio and television themes that have popped up repeatedly throughout this series will here be disappointed. Hedges's concentration on light music seems to have developed from his 30-odd years as Reader in Composition at Hull University, which provided the impetus to compose music that, in the words of Grove, "presents no great difficulty to performer or listener". The Humberside area is specifically celebrated in the Scenes from the Humber and Kingston Sketches, while Hedges's family holidays apparently inspired the Four Breton Sketches and the lively overture Heigham Sound. This last, commemorating an East Anglia beauty spot, is perhaps the most impressive item here, engagingly contrasting its bustling and tranquil aspects. By contrast the delightfully uninhibited waltz "St Lunaire" (from the Breton Sketches) that opens the collection is the piece one might most readily go away humming.

The various sets of geographical impressions do ultimately tend to be rather similar in style and lacking in sharply defined characteristics. However, the disc as a whole should prove a welcome addition to the collections of more adventurous light music enthusiasts looking for something slightly different. With the composer at the helm, all is elegantly written, played and recorded.

-- Gramophone [4/1998]

MAY: String Quartet / FLEISCHMANN: Piano Quintet

Guarnieri is the most impressive Brazilian composer who thrived in the wake of Villa-Lobos. Canção sertaneja is a genuine gem from a composer whose lush and lively corpus of works needs much more exposure on disc.

Probably the most impressive composer who thrived in the wake of Villa-Lobos's single-handed inception of Brazilian musical nationalism would have to be Camargo Guarnieri (1907-93). In fact, compared to the well-deserved attention that the recording industry (Marco Polo in particular) has recently lavished on his predecessor and mentor, it seems that the force and vitality of Guarnieri's accomplishments have been somewhat slighted.

Although Guarnieri's mature idiom is unmistakably indebted to the indigenous melos pioneered by Villa-Lobos (who was about 20 years his senior), Guarnieri, rather than turning toward the Gallic traditions—both post-Franckian and Impressionist—that fortified Villa-Lobos, imbibed from the very beginning the stirrings of Neoclassicism during the 1920s and emerged almost fully formed as an exponent of a vigorously well-mortared, cosmopolitan language with strong Latin American inflections.

While the core of Guarnieri's output remains his extensive orchestral catalog (there are at least four symphonies and as many piano concertos as well as numerous other concerted works plus assorted overtures, suites, and programmatic pieces), his series of violin sonatas—written over more than four decades—are highly regarded. This companion volume to Marco Polo's earlier release of the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Sonatas offers the remaining three (the first having been lost) in the cycle. Both the Second and the Third Sonatas were recorded on LP and have probably been the most frequently performed.

The earliest dates from 1933 and clearly indicates that Guarnieri's dramatic style, whose traditional formal inclinations were already well established even before his belated studies in Paris with Koechlin and his important contacts there with Milhaud and Boulanger during the years just before the outbreak of World War II. All the sonatas are conceived in three fast-slow-fast movements (the triptych was Guarnieri's favorite format) of some 15 to 20 minutes in duration. The ideas are clearly and forcefully articulated and their development, though sometimes partaking of the rhapsodic mode, is always tightly constructed, while the overall form is quite compellingly logical and symmetrical. But this music is hardly dry and formulaic—it is full of rhythmic élan and an expressive lyricism, as some representative tempo designations (Sem pressa ben ritmado; Profundamente terno; and Impetuoso) would indicate. This is most listenable music, and it is given a firm send-off and advocacy by the well-attuned team of Larsen and Müllenbach.

During the 1970s Guarnieri, like some other elder Brazilians such as Mignoné, lost faith in the validity of his nationalist manner and dabbled in more "experimental" efforts. The Seventh Sonata of 1977, although still imbued with the same temperament as the earlier works, is completely lacking in their charm and appeal because the harshly impersonal, almost atonal language has absolutely no Brazilian resonance and seems highly inimical to Guarnieri's peculiar strengths.

The program closes with a ravishingly melancholy Canção sertaneja (Song of the Backwoodsman), marked Dolentemente in Guarnieri's best and most engaging "upcountry" manner—a genuine gem from a composer whose lush and lively corpus of works needs much more exposure on disc. Let's hope Marco Polo has plans afoot!

-- Paul A. Snook, FANFARE [1/1998]

MARKEVITCH: Orchestral Music, Vol. 4 - Lorenzo il Magnifico

PACINI: Saffo

TOURNEMIRE: Symphony No. 7, 'Les Danses de la Vie'

SPOHR: Songs

KORNGOLD: Another Dawn / Escape Me Never

STEINER: Lost Patrol (The) / Virginia City

BUCKLEY: Organ Concerto / Symphony No. 1