IRISH RHAPSODY

Simon Mayr was born in Bavaria but made his name in Italy. Although familiar with the Venetian two-part and Neapolitan three-part operatic overture traditions, he forged a style which at first mirrored the models of his Viennese contemporaries, then broadened out into large-scale and often virtuosic sinfonias filled with unexpected modulations and intervals and beautiful instrumental solots. Spanning a period of 25 years, the works on this recording include Raul de Crequi with its striking fugal opening, the dramatic Ercole in Lidia with its solo part for harp and Gli Americani which recalls Mozart and Beethoven.

Petrassi’s long creative life was marked by ceaseless absorption of ideas and by constant invention. His Flute Concerto is notable for its boldness of design and the surprise of its unorthodox sound world, where instruments rotate in block form. The Piano Concerto is more overtly virtuosic, even showing some influence from Prokofiev. The orchestral suite drawn from the ballet La follia di Orlando (The Madness of Orlando) is often clothed in Petrassi’s experimental orchestral sonorities. ‘The rehabilitation of Italian twentieth-century music by the Naxos label continues unabated: the latest release is this remarkable collection…that any genuine Petrassian will rush to purchase’. (International Record Review on 8.572411)

Masao Ohki' Symphony No. 5, introduced to world-wide audiences by Arvid Janson's and Leopold Stokowski, was one of the first of many Japanese works to be dedicated to the tragedy of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945.

RACHMANINOFF The Isle of the Dead. Symphony No. 1 • Leonard Slatkin, cond; Detroit SO • NAXOS 8.573234 (66:20)

Leonard Slatkin and his marvelous Detroit Symphony complete their superb Rachmaninoff symphony cycle with a spectacular First Symphony. Slatkin’s interpretations of the Second and Third symphonies were straightforward, powerful, and no-nonsense, focusing on the structure of both works and downplaying their emotional excesses. Here he takes a similar approach with the First Symphony and it pays off in huge dividends.

The first movement’s introduction is grimly menacing and Slatkin makes the allegro proper’s somewhat patchwork structure seem more cohesive than it really is, with deftly chosen tempos, forward moving rhythms, and seamless transitions. The Scherzo has an infectious swagger and Slatkin paces the Larghetto appropriately—well, larghetto (i.,e., not too slow)—so as to keep the music moving along and avoid languishing on the movement’s excessive melancholy. The Finale can often sound like a hodgepodge of discarded sketches of Rimsky-Korsakov, but Slatkin does as well as anyone at molding the seemingly unrelated episodic sections into a convincing unified statement. The performance here is extremely compelling and boasts an especially powerful and ominous coda. The trombones really have a field day. All in all, this is a great performance of a work difficult to pull off, one that can stand alongside the standard-setting versions by André Previn (London Symphony Orchestra, EMI 64530) and Vladimir Ashkenazy (Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Decca/London 448116 and 455798).

Rachmaninoff composed his symphonic poem The Isle of the Dead after viewing Arnold Böcklin’s painting of the same title in 1907. Considering the composer’s obsession with his own death, it is easy to understand how he would have been moved to compose a work inspired by this painting. Here Slatkin once again refuses to allow the music to wallow in its own mannerisms, choosing to make the most of its rhythmic momentum. In the opening, one can really feel the quintuple meter, so vividly depicting the gentle yet portentous sound of the oars as Charon, the ferryman, rows his boat with its newly deceased passengers across the River Styx. Throughout the work, Slatkin highlights the contrast between passages of ominous foreboding and those of serene tranquility perhaps more effectively than anyone before him. The climaxes are truly shattering, with snarling brass and pounding bass drum. Each successive statement of the Dies Irae becomes increasingly eerie. The cumulative effect is absolutely bone-chilling.

The city of Detroit may have seen better days, but the same cannot be said of its magnificent orchestra. After suffering its own financial woes a few years ago, the DSO has come back with a vengeance, sounding stronger than ever. Credit must be given to what is obviously a very productive partnership with its music director. I hope we can look forward to more Rachmaninoff from this team: say, the piano concertos and Paganini Rhapsody. Highly recommended, especially at Naxos’s budget-friendly price.

FANFARE: Merlin Patterson

The great twentieth-century Russian poet, Mikhail Alexeevich Kuzmin, was for much of his early life also passionately devoted to composition. Masterpieces of the vocal miniature, his Sacred Songs for voice and orchestra are settings of his own words based on studies of ancient Russian music. His incidental music for Masquerade is notable for a heartfelt Romance and a closing chorus which draws upon traditional Russian church music. The Society of Honoured Bell Ringers displays Mahlerian and Mozartian influences whilst greater harmonic complexity can be savored in Kuzmin�s edgier music for Deer deutsche Heinemann.

Classical Music

Luigi Mancinelli was a noted conductor, composer, and cellist. Over the course of his productive life (1848-1921) he became an important exponent of Verdi, Puccini, and Wagner, while living long enough to dip his toes into some of the earliest examples of film music. The two movements (out of six) from his incidental music to Cleopatra date from 1877 and show great promise. The Overture is dramatic, with memorable thematic material, while the Battaglia di Azio is simple in form and concept, but effective enough. It must have worked well in the theater.

Scene veneziane supposedly also dates from 1877, but wasn’t performed until 1889. I have my doubts about the alleged date of composition, for even if correct the work reveals an amazingly advanced orchestral technique as compared to Cleopatra. The very opening strikingly anticipates the start of Respighi’s Three Botticelli Pictures of some 50 years later (1927), and timbral nuances such as using the harp as a melody instrument, doubling the winds, reveal Mancinelli as a highly sophisticated composer. The work tells a love story, beginning with a brilliant carnival and continuing with such moments as a declaration of love, a gondola ride, and concluding ceremonial music (amazingly like a Bruckner adagio) leading to a joyful dance. It’s great fun, and a real find.

Francesco La Vecchia, as usual in this series, leads a vivacious performance, perhaps a bit roughly played in spots by the Rome Symphony’s brass, but exciting and enjoyable nonetheless. The sonics are brightly lit and have a bit too much of the “empty hall” effect, but are in all other respects perfectly adequate. A very enjoyable disc from a composer who achieved quite a bit, and deserves a hearing.

-- David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

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Even the most casual of Fanfare readers cannot fail to note the regularity with which even its most experienced contributors encounter composers they’ve never heard of before, many of them worthy of far more respect and recognition than they commonly get. Such a case faces this writer once again—an Italian by the name of Luigi Mancinelli. Discounting a couple of songs buried in large anthologies, the only previous Mancinelli music to be found in the Fanfare Archive was published 22 years ago, when David Johnson reviewed the complete incidental music to Cleopatra and the Romantic Overture (14:6).


Mancinelli is better known to posterity as a conductor than as a composer, including many years at Covent Garden and the Met, but he did leave a fairly substantial catalog of works that includes several operas. Johnson was not much taken with Mancinelli’s music, fairly damning it with faint praise, but I beg to differ. The opening bars of the Scene veneziane suggest nothing less than the Respighi of The Birds or The Pines of Rome —bright, sparkling sounds of a master orchestrator. Elsewhere we hear a grand, stately, and well-developed theme that could well have been a passage from an Elgar score marked with his trademark Nobilmente . Other moments have the touch of Glazunov. I have avoided mentioning Mancinelli’s dates (1845-1921) until now because the irony is that he preceded all the composers whose names I’ve just dropped. Also, as Johnson noted, Mancinelli, like Toscanini (also Italian), “began his musical life as a cellist and got his first big break by substituting at the podium for an indisposed conductor at a performance of Aida. ” Again, Mancinelli did not follow in Toscanini’s footsteps, but rather preceded the more famous maestro.


The present CD is billed as the world premiere recording of the complete Scene veneziane (Venetian Scenes, 1877). The five scenes, totaling 36 minutes, include the opening portrayal of a carnival; a love scene characterized by delicately intertwining woodwinds and a glowing, lyrical theme; the merry scurrying as indicated by the title “Flight of the Lovers to Chioggia” (again we find an anticipation of a later composer, here the Prokofiev of Romeo and Juliet ); an evocative gondola ride; and the final 13-minute scene depicting the processional wedding music, a return to the love scene and a rousing conclusion.


The Overture and “Battle of Actium” are two of the six symphonic interludes Mancinelli composed for a production of Pietro Cossa’s Cleopatra (also in 1877). The program notes describe the 10-minute Overture as “a fitting prelude to a tale of love, orgiastic excesses and the violence of war,” an assessment with which I fully concur. It has its share of bombast but also some stirring tunes; Wagner’s Rienzi might have served as its model. At 12 minutes, the “Battle of Actium” stands as a tone poem in its own right, a vivid depiction of that famous navel encounter complete with evocations of the sea, approaching rival fleets, the confusion of battle, and the love music that accompanies the flight of Anthony and Cleopatra. Through its use of recurring motifs, structural integrity and inspired orchestration, it is at least as good as most of Liszt’s tone poems.


Marta Marullo provides a fairly extensive biography of the composer as well as good, detailed program notes about the music in the inlay booklet, which is unfortunately rendered almost unreadable by the dense, tiny print. The Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma is a fine ensemble, conducted with verve and sensitivity by Francesco la Vecchia. If you need an obscure new composer in your life, I can heartily recommend Luigi Mancinelli.

FANFARE: Robert Markow

PIANO CONCERTOS

Wilhelm Furtwängler & the RAI Orchestra (Live)

Martin Chalifour is Principal Concertmaster of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and is a professor at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music. Chalifour is a frequent guest at several summer music festivals. Maintaining close ties with his native Quebec, he has returned there often to teach and perform as soloist with various Canadian orchestras.

COMPLETE STRING QUARTETS

Wilhelm Furtwängler & the Berliner Philharmoniker in Rome (L

The Places � Ludwig II of Bavaria followed family precedent in undertaking an extravagant building program during his relatively short reign from 1864 to 1886. The castles constructed on his orders included the romantic Neuschwanstein and the magnificent Schloss Linderhof, with it's elaborate formal gardens, grottoes and fountains. The tour ends with a brief glimpse of the mountainous Southern Tyrol in winter snow. The Music � Richard Wagner's innovative and immensely influential musicdramas were largely based on older German legend, notably on the Nibelungenlied, the basis of his tetralogy the Ring. Ludwig II was fascinated by Wagner and by his operas, on subjects that had long been dear to him. These include the opera Lohengrin, which Ludwig first saw in 1861, the beginning of his preoccupation with Wagner, and the earlier opera Tannh�user. The music chosen also includes an overture by Heinrich Marschner to an opera based on the old Bohemian legend of Hans Heiling, son of an Earth Spirit.

NORWAY: From Gaupne to Sogndal

The Places

The tour of Norway takes us from the countryside between Gaupne and Sogndal to Bergen, the birthplace of Edvard Grieg, and its surrounding countryside. Trolls make their presence known, and there are views of traditional farm buildings and stave churches from the open-air museum at Maihaugen.

The Music

The music chosen for this tour of Norway is by Norwegian composers, of whom the best known is Edvard Grieg. His Holberg Suite, Norwegian Dances and Erotikon from his Lyric Pieces are heard on this video. Other composers featured are Christian Sinding, composer of the famous Rustle of Spring, and Johan Svendsen.

Picture format: NTSC 4:3
Sound format: PCM Stereo 2.0 / Dolby Digital 5.1 / DTS 5.1
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Running time: 52 mins
No. of DVDs: 1

Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Chamber Choir present an intimate and stirring performance of Handel's Messiah. This 2-CD recording of the full score on period instruments features a stellar cast of soloists including Karina Gauvin, Robin Blaze, Rufus Muller and Brett Polegatol. Tafelmusik presents this baroque masterpiece with the spirit and vitality of Handel's own 18th-century productions. A perennial favorite with audiences and critics alike, Tafelmusik's Messiah has garnered glowing reviews year after year.

Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 4, Op. 58 & Symphony No. 3, Op

In 1778, Mozart spent half a year in Paris accompanied by his mother, Anna Maria. Tragedy struck in the middle of the summer, when she died of fever. Both works on this album were composed during the first weeks after their arrival in the city. In a letter to his father dated April 7, 1778, Mozart wrote that he had composed a sinfonia concertante for Mannheim musicians visiting Paris, scored for flute, oboe, horn, and bassoon. The work on this recording is considered to be a revised copy of the score, with the flute replaced by a clarinet.

Classical Music

RUSSIA The Places
Our visit starts in Moscow, with the Kremlin, the famous Conservatory of Music and the Tretyakov Art Gallery, with its unrivalled collection of Russian paintings. We see the splendour of some of the Metro stations in St Petersburg and much of the winter landscape in Moscow and in St Petersburg. We end with commemoration of Napoleon’s defeat in 1812 and his retreat from Moscow during a bitter winter.

The Music
Tchaikovsky’s disastrous marriage to an infatuated admirer in July 1877 ended after just a few weeks, when he left for his brother-in-law’s estate at Kamenka to escape from a wife to whom he had taken an invincible aversion. By the end of September, after attempted suicide, his marriage was at an end, and in October he left Russia to find relief in travel. In these extraordinary circumstances he nevertheless continued to work on the fourth of his six symphonies, completing it in early January 1878. Its first performance was given six weeks later in Moscow under the direction of Nikolay Rubinstein, attended by his new patroness Nadezhda von Meck, to whom it was dedicated, but in the composer’s absence.

Picture format: NTSC 4:3
Sound format: PCM Stereo 2.0
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Running time: 60 mins
No. of DVDs: 1

Karajan in Italy, Vol. 2

Salon Orchestra Favourites, Vol. 3

Recording information: Warsaw Philharmonic Concert Hall, Poland (09/24/2008-09/27/2008); Warsaw Philharmonic Concert Hall, Poland (09/30/2008); Warsaw Philharmonic Concert Hall, Poland (12/03/2008-12/04/2008).

A charming disc full of charming music, these light Elgar works seem to come and go in the catalog, undeservedly so. Like most great composers Elgar lavished as much care on his miniatures as he did on his large-scale productions, and some listeners may well prefer to enjoy his lyrical gifts and vivid orchestration in this easily digestible form. The performances are uniformly excellent, offering both lightness ("Fairy Pipers", "Little Bells", "The Merry Doll") and rambunctious high spirits ("The Wild Bears", "The Wagon (Passes)") where appropriate. James Judd's tempos tend to be a little slower than, say, Charles Mackerras' on his otherwise excellent Argo disc containing much of the same repertoire, but the music never drags and it's all easeful good fun. The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra plays with obvious care and affection, and the recorded sound lives up to the current high standards coming from this source. The Judd/New Zealand partnership has given Naxos some of its best discs, and this one is no exception. --David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

KLETZKI Piano Concerto 1; 3 Preludes; 3 Pieces; Fantasy in c • Joseph Banowetz (pn); 1 Thomas Sanderling, cond; 1 Russian PO • NAXOS 8.572190 (75:12)


Having been mightily impressed by a recording of Paul Kletzki’s Third Symphony and Flute Concertino on a BIS CD reviewed in Fanfare 28:3, I requested to review this new Naxos release of the composer’s works, figuring if I ended up not liking it, I’d have only myself to blame. As it turned out, I did like what I heard, quite a lot in fact. Kletzki (1900–73) was one of a handful of composers-turned-conductors who was at least as talented, if not more so, at creating his own music as he was at re-creating the music of others.


The 30-year-old Jewish Kletzki was still living in Germany when he wrote his D-Minor Piano Concerto in 1930. The piece was fully orchestrated by the composer, but it was published only in a two-piano version; and subsequently, it’s believed, the full score was destroyed during the Hitler regime, which explains the new orchestration by John Norine Jr.


Kletzki was either incredibly naive or incredibly unlucky. He fled from Nazi Germany to Italy, only to end up in the anti-Semitic hotbed of Mussolini’s Fascists. From that kettle he jumped into the frying pan of Soviet Russia during Stalin’s Great Terror. He finally found freedom from persecution in Switzerland, where he sought refuge in 1936, but not from the years of wandering that still lay ahead. Over the course of nearly the next four decades, Kletzki accepted appointments to lead orchestras in the U.K. (the Liverpool Philharmonic), the U.S. (the Dallas Symphony Orchestra), Israel (the Israel Philharmonic), Italy (La Scala), and Switzerland (the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and later the Suisse Romande Orchestra), but the engagements never turned into long-term, permanent marriages. Having lost several family members in the Holocaust, Kletzki lost his will to compose and wrote nothing further after 1942.


The loss is ours. Despite its overlay of “adventurous” harmonies, piquant dissonances, and complex rhythms, the Piano Concerto is, at its core, a deeply romantic and profoundly moving work. I’d go so far as to call it a masterpiece. To describe its general style and sound, I’d have to say that Prokofiev’s piano concertos are to the fore. Similarities abound in passages of percussive keyboard writing and lyrical melodies intentionally soured by passing bitonal harmonic progressions. But Kletzki is not quite as acerbic as Prokofiev can be at his most caustic, and Kletzki’s concerto contains many other extended passages that could pass for moments out of Miklós Rósza’s score to Ben-Hur . I wouldn’t quite put this piece in the grand virtuoso piano concerto tradition of Polish composers Moszkowski and Paderewski (Kletzki was also of Polish birth); it’s too late for that, as it is for Rachmaninoff. But it seems to inhabit a world somewhere between them and the concertos of Prokofiev and Martin??a beautiful addition to the recorded repertoire.


As for the remaining pieces on the disc, all for solo piano, one has to assume from hearing them that Kletzki was more than just a competent pianist. These are virtuosic works that sound extremely difficult to play, yet in the hands of Joseph Banowetz they emerge articulate, lucid, eloquent, and authoritative. The Three Preludes were written in 1923. Florid and fluid in their lyrical poetry, Chopin is their “godfather.” From the following year comes the Fantasy in C Minor, a substantial and substantive 19-minute work that is highly improvisatory-sounding and rhapsodic in nature. The model here, if there is one, is less clearly identifiable, though I can swear I hear the influence of Brahms’s piano rhapsodies and late keyboard pieces. Among the very last works Kletzki would write before giving up on composing are the three unpublished piano pieces, dating from 1940 or 1941. Less busy and more introspective, the music now takes on the patina of a kind of soft Impressionistic cocktail lounge jazz. I don’t mean anything disparaging by this; it’s just a way of describing and conveying to the reader how these pieces strike my ear.


Banowetz is a Grammy-nominated American pianist who has been acclaimed by others in these pages as “one of the preeminent ‘three B’s of Liszt playing’” and as “a giant among keyboard artists of our time,” though I confess I wasn’t able to find the latter citation in the archive. Nonetheless, Banowetz has racked up a very impressive discography with no fewer than 22 discs for Naxos alone, and his repertoire includes some of the most demanding works in the piano literature, for example, Busoni’s Fantasia contrappuntistica . Based on his playing on the present CD, I’d have to say that the acclaim he has received is well deserved.


This is an outstanding recording that should do much to advance Kletzki’s reputation as a serious composer, and it is sure to further enhance Banowetz’s reputation as well. The concerto was recorded in September 2006, in Studio 5 of the Russian State TV & Radio Company. The remaining tracks on the disc were recorded in January 2007, at Skywalker Sound in Marin County, California. However, there is little in the way of discrepant balances or sonic differences between the two venues. A superb job all around, and strongly recommended.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins