Barry, G.: Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (The) [Opera]

GALLUS: OPUS MUSICUM, ETC VAN

These performances are also included on Sony's 10-disc set "Bruno Walter
Edition Volume 3" - Sony Classical 66248.

Toccata Classics continues its survey of the music of the Hungarian composer Ferenc Farks with this sparkling album of works for wind ensemble. The chief characteristics of all eight scores recorded here are infectious good humor and a high charge of foot-tapping rhythmic energy. Like his teacher Respighi in Rome, Farkas went back to 16th and 17th century originals and brought them to life in arrangements for modern instruments. Laszlo Marosi enjoys a career leading orchestras and wind bands at concerts and festivals and in recording studios and academies around the world. Although he is very active in his native Hungary, his work is international - he is currently the artistic director of the International Band Festival of Villa Carlos Paz in Argentina. The Budapest Wind Symphony is the elite wind ensemble of Hungary, inviting musicians from the leading orchestras of the country. It draws its members from the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Hungarian State Symphony Orchestra, the orchestra of the Hungarian State Opera House, the dohnanyi Symphony Orchestra and the Hungarian Central Army Band.

The Hallé label shows both artistry and acumen in this release. This is something to celebrate among the legion of RVW mavens. It is the first complete recording of Vaughan Williams music for the 1909 Cambridge University production in Greek of the comic satire "the Wasps" by Aristophanes. The wide appetite of the classical music audience for Vaughan Williams is strong and not just in England. Rather like Britten and Tippett his music has travelled and enjoyed performances and nurtured enthusiasm far and wide. Mark Elder, who has done so much for the renaissance of the Hallé, is to be congratulated for his decision to associate himself with the project and for directing with such vitality. In a way the incongruity of the music in relation to the plot and satire hardly matters even where a taste of the drama is given through the David Pountney narration. I detect very little satire in this music. The music now seems inextricably and delightfully bound up in the English countryside, its cheeriness and its verdant beauty.

The narration explodes onto the scene with a strangulated scream of ‘Bastard!’ from the rough trade of Henry Goodman doing his best Ray Winstone act. Some flavour of the narration and the singing is in tr. 5 in CD1 where the tenors sing: ‘Could you not find any clean underwear?’ The whole effect is of one of those de luxe BBC Radio productions with full orchestral apparatus as in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Brecht’s Schweik in World War Two and in Flecker’s Hassan. The music plays over the snores, moans, speaking, salt and spleen of narrator Goodman. The overture starts to mean more when one hears the buzzing main theme sung by the chorus in ‘When we buzz’. The Hallé Chorus are in sterling voice singing like a phalanx of football thugs at one moment and classically lightly English at another (CD1 tr. 11 1:26).

CD2 includes Acts II and III. It launches with a delicate, tip-toe night march purged of all absurd overtones - sheerly delightful writing (Entr’Acte). This continues but with the absurdist gearbox fully engaged in The March Past of the Witnesses. This is RVW the far-seeing anticipating Prokofiev which he does again at 5:10 in tr. 15 where rather than Love for Three Oranges it is the Classical Symphony that is echoed/predicted. The Chorus Parabasis (CD2 tr. 7) recalls the mellifluous lilt of Serenade to Music and the writing of Vaughan Williams’ teacher Ravel. Back to spleen and bawdiness again in Pountney’s words for Melodrama (tr. 15): "Out of my way, you bunch of faggots, you pussy-footing plonkers ..." And there’s more, dear reader. This is not for the genteel auntie. Do bear in mind that here in the sung and spoken text you catch something of the football terraces and of punk. This is RVW red in tooth and claw. Then again other sections such as the flute and harp troubadourisms of Chorus and Dance (tr. 15 at 00:55) recall the writing in Sir John in Love. At the end where Procleon snores the effect predicts the somnolent Sir John Falstaff. It is equally Falstaffian - but in a different way - when he half wakes and mutters with drooling relish: "Show your daddy your dainty tussies and set them all in motion." It is a multi-faceted score - frankly fascinating.

Vaughan Williams re-scored parts of the music for the well known five movement orchestral suite. It is that suite and the overture by which most listeners will know some of this music. There is no competition for this set.

The set includes the full score of 80 minutes and incorporated dialogue of circa 25 minutes. The documentation is non-pareil with Michael Kennedy’s essay, David Pountney’s preface, full texts in English only, artist profiles and a listing of all personnel in the orchestra.

If you are interested, the full study score can be obtained from Faber Music. This is based on the editorial work of Igor Kennaway who back in the early 1990s conducted one of the best ever productions of RVW’s ‘morality’ Pilgrim’s Progress.

Some may find this an unnerving experience but it works superbly well provided you are ready for the salty dialogue. It’s a small price to pay for the fascination and delight of hearing so much familiar and unfamiliar Vaughan Williams.

- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

This selection contains both ADD and DDD recordings.

Stoltzman plays in a uniquely personal style - bent notes and microtonal slides in near vocal effects. Magical!

Richard Stoltzman could be claimed as the James Galway of the clarinet. He has developed the personality of the instrument in new ways, often drawing on jazz effects, in what he regards as an American tradition. And he has a considerable following. He has recorded major pieces like the Corigliano Concerto (RCA, 4/89), but in this collection he's simply relaxing.

He starts with an ingenious arrangement of Gershwin's piano pieces, the Three Preludes, where the few extra effects in both clarinet and piano are completely idiomatic. Then there's Bernstein's early Sonata, another American classic, which Stoltzman has now recorded in Sid Ramin's orchestration (RCA, 12193).

W. T. McKinley makes his debut in the British catalogue with a recent, rather overblown, fourmovement Sonata and so does Clare Fisher with Sonatine. There's nothing very individual in either work, but Stoltzman obviously enjoys playing them. The real gems come when he goes deeper into jazz, especially Jimmy Rowles's The Peacocks, which was used in the soundtrack of Round Midnight. This brings out everything in Stoltzman's unique style - bent notes and microtonal slides in near vocal effects. Magical!

Dick Hyman is another jazz pianist and composer. He has recorded a complete Joplin and has written rags himself. His Clarinata is a red-hot encore with a soupy middle section. Finally Stoltzman plays his own arrangement of Amazing Grace, starting unaccompanied, and very touching it is too. Altogether an attractive collection, well recorded, with some uniquely personal playing.

-- Gramophone [9/1996]

Track Listing
1. Samba Cantina - Paul Desmond
2. Our Waltz - Gary Burton
3. I'll Take Romance - Dominique Eade
4. Isfahan - Duke Ellington & His Orchestra
5. Sweet Lorraine - Coleman Hawkins/Henry "Red" Allen
6. Lazy River - Hoagy Carmichael
7. Petals Danse - Tom Harrell
8. My Ship - Sonny Rollins
9. Blues for Bessie - Bud Powell
10. After the Rain - Don Braden

Personnel: Dominique Eade, Hoagy Carmichael (vocals); Romero Lubambo (guitar, acoustic guitar); Everett Barksdale, Jim Hall, Peter Leitch (guitar); Joe Venuti, Regina Carter (violin); Ron Lawrence (viola); Akua Dixon (cello); Greg Tardy, Jimmy Dorsey, Buster Bailey (clarinet); Johnny Hodges (saxophone, alto saxophone); Don Braden (saxophone, tenor saxophone); Paul Desmond (alto saxophone); Coleman Hawkins, Sonny Rollins, Benny Golson (tenor saxophone); Tom Harrell (trumpet, flugelhorn); Henry "Red" Allen (trumpet); Tommy Dorsey (trombone); Duke Ellington, George Colligan, Herbie Hancock, Marty Napoleon, Bud Powell (piano); Gary Burton (vibraphone); Dwayne Burno, George Duvivier (acoustic bass); Connie Kay, Cozy Cole, Joe Morello, Matt Wilson , Roy McCurdy, Art Taylor (drums).

Recording information: New York, NY (11/30/1930-??/??/1997).

Arranger: Dominique Eade.

Jeffrey Stock's 'Lulie the Iceberg' is a kindred spirit to Prokofiev's 'Peter and the Wolf.' Stock's music enhances the children's story by Her Imperial Highness Princess Hisako of Takamado. Her Majesty's tale tells the story of an innocent and brave iceberg named Lulie as he embarks on an ocean journey. Stock's music calls on some renowned soloists--Yo-Yo Ma on cello, Pamela Frank on violin, Paul Winter on saxophone--and the Orchestra of St. Luke's to portray Lulie and his friends. Actor Sam Waterston narrates the tale with his customary warmth.
'Lulie the Iceberg' is miles ahead of the usual fare presented for children. The music is interesting for listeners both young and old, especially the beautiful work for chorus singing in Greenlandic. The soloists of course are superb, and Waterston tells the tale in an engaging manner that never patronizes. If you are interested in introducing your child to the world of classical music, there is no better recording available. 'Lulie' will stimulate the hearts and minds of people of all ages.

Rubinstein Collection, Vol. 58: Beethoven: Piano Concertos N

I would agree that the Homenaje to the murdered poet Lorca was one of [Revueltas'] most significant achievements—a long trumpet-led lament curiously interspersed with vivid dance-like episodes ''like El Salon Mexico on mescal'', as Page remarks about the last of the enjoyably pungent (but also lyrical) Alcancias (perhaps ''expansive bullets'' though, bewilderingly enough, it can also mean ''piggy-banks'' or ''brothel keepers''!). These latter pieces are brilliantly played by the London Sinfonietta, which then sobers up for the austere Planos, which the composer described as ''functional architecture''. Ocho x rondo is a scherzo (with a gentler central section) for octet, perhaps more immediately striking is a Toccata from the same year (1933), which demands (and gets) virtuoso playing from a chamber group. Revueltas's best-known work, the snake-killing ritual Sensemaya, is taken by Mata at the same deliberate pace he adopted with the Bolivar Orchestra of Venezuela (Dorian, 11/93) but sounds more decorous at the hands of the New Philharmonia.

There is, however, nothing sedate, except, very properly, in the evocative and beautiful third movement (''Night in Yucatan''), about the performance by the Jalapa (or Xalapa) Symphony under Fuente (whose Sensemaya for Pickwick was reviewed in 12/93) of the four-movement suite drawn from the music for the film La noche de los Mayas: its finale, with an orgy of manic percussion and brass would almost rouse the dead (which presumably was the scene it accompanied). A fascinating disc.

-- Lionel Salter, Gramophone [2/1995]

These two piano concertos find Dmitri Shostakovich in a playful mood, but playful in the way that Mahler is playful. It is the latter composer's kaleidoscopic canvases that come to mind when listening to Shostakovich's sonic tableaux. They paint both the vaudevillian, as in the end of the first movement of the Concerto No. 1, and the poignant, as in the second movement of the Concerto No. 2, which also sounds like an homage to the second movement of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No.2.
Possessing all of the requisite musical and temperamental qualities to bring this music to life, Russian-born pianist Yefim Bronfman offers up artistically and technically dazzling performances that sometimes alarm the listener with their heart-pounding immediacy. With unmannered, unassailably confident playing, Bronfman locates the music's humor, tenderness, and occasional mania, resulting in performances that convince without seeming to try.

Mozart: Ave verum corpus, K. 618 & Requiem in D Minor, K. 62

WAGNER: LOHENGRIN NELSSON, HO

Stokowski Formed the All-American Youth Orchestra in 1940, It's Players' Ages Ranging from 18 to 25. He Sought to Combat Nazi Propaganda Touting the Wonders of Hitler Youth with An Artistic Statement from Young Emissaries of the Free World. The Aayo Toured South America in 1940 and North America in 1941 and Was Met with Rave Reviews. These Performances Boast a Unique Combination of Past and Future: The Wisdom of Stokowski's Vast Experience Allied with the Pure, Undiminished Idealism of Youth.

Classical Music

On the occasion of Wilhelm Killmayer's 75th birthday, in August 2002, WERGO publishes a collection of the works for piano solo by the Munich composer. These works, written between 1975 and 1999, were enregistered by Siegfried Mauser in close co-operation with his former teacher, the multiple-prize-winning composer Wilhelm Killmayer.

Classical Music

It was Bernstein who introduced the Ives Second, amazingly, in 1951; the young conductor then premiered Ives's Symphony No. 1 in 1953 and No. 4 in 1965. All were worth the wait. And if the modest Ives revival has yielded other very fine recordings of the symphonies - from Michael Tilson Thomas and the Concertgebouw at their most surprising, from the sterling Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, from the inimitable Bernstein himself late in his own career - the New York Philharmonic captured with Bernstein in these recordings dating from 1958 to 1966 is in a class of its own. What a ball Lenny and his players have with the music! Everyone is at his or her spontaneous best, and while the rough edges show in ways they would not in the late Seventies or Eighties the whole affair still carries the exhilaration of discovery. There is method in all the rambunctiousness, too: Bernstein's sublime control in the Adagio cantabile central movement of the Symphony No. 2 is all the more extraordinary in the naturalness of the results. Only the Holidays symphony, recorded on different occasions before its disparate movements were called a unified work, betrays the absence of the conductor's breathtakingly organic approach. Yet the opening holiday, 'Washington's Birthday', emerges with so much joy that only a prig would complain of the lack of relation to the final 'Thanksgiving Day'. These are key recordings in understanding both Ives and Bernstein. They are also immensely enjoyable.

-- Octavio Roca, BBC Music Magazine

Classical Music

LEGENDARY STRAUSS RECORDINGS

This record of works written specially for Heifetz by Hollywood film composers will have one even more open-mouthed than usual at his pure wizardry.

This is a record to have one even more openmouthed than usual at the pure wizardry of Heifetz. All four works were written specially for him by Hollywood film composers, all of them émigrés from Europe. Where Korngold, the boywonder composer who never fulfilled the dazzling promise of his youth, used material for this Violin Concerto which he had already written for films—Another Dawn, Juarez, Anthony Adverse and The Prince and the Pauper—it was the other way about with Rózsa and Waxman. Rôzsa, in response to Heifetz's commission, wrote his concerto at high speed, then worked with l-leifetz on the details for 18 months, then finally used it in a subsequent film, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Waxman, after writing his Carmen Fantasy, also used it in the film, Humoresque. The Rózsa Tema con variazioni is the middle-movement of a Sinfonia concertante for violin, cello and orchestra, that he wrote for Piatigorsky—the other soloist here—as well as Heifetz.

None of this is great music, but in the hands of the magician who prompted it, it has many delights. If the Korngold brings the most striking ideas, the Rózsa pieces with their gentle Hungarian flavour (much closer to Kodály than to Bartok) are charming too, while the Waxman is a splendid firework display. That Waxman piece was recorded as early as 1946, long before the rest, with rather scrubby sound and an uneven surface even in the digital transfer. The Korngold followed in 1953, the Rózsa Concerto in 1956 and the Variations in 1963. Though the booklet keeps quiet about it, only the two Rózsa items appear to be in stereo. Few will worry about such points when the playing is so astonishing, and whatever the recording quality the solo instrument stands out vividly. The slight hum detectable in quiet passages is not so distracting as in some other Heifetz vintage transfers. There is a highly informative note by Richard Freed.

-- Edward Greenfield, Gramophone [4/1989]

Debussy: Nocturnes, L. 91, La damoiselle élue, L. 62 & Le ma

VIVALDI: VIOLIN CONCERTOS FROM

The Van Cliburn Collection: Chopin Concerto No. 1- Rachmanin