It really is a problem, choosing between these two recordings. (Giordano: Andrea Chénier / Pavarotti, Caballé, Chailly) It might seem sensible to start with the tenor in the title-role, and here my strong inclination would be to plump for RCA and Domingo: he is in splendid voice, with a touch of nobility to his manner that makes for a convincing portrayal of a poet. Pavarotti (for Chailly on Decca) begins with a rather leather-lunged Improvviso, but he later finds poetry in the role as well, especially when responding to his soprano, Caballe who is rather stretched by the more exhausting reaches of her role and sounds audibly grateful for the occasional opportunities he gives her to float rather than belt a high-lying phrase. And besides, Pavarotti is an Italian tenor, and his Italianate sense of line adds 1 per cent or so of elegance to some phrases that even Domingo cannot match. Caballe does many things beautifully, and her fine-spun pianissimos and subtle shadings only occasionally sound mannered, but the role is undeniably half-a-size too big for her. So it is for Scotto, you might say, and a hint of strain is audible once or twice, in her timbre rather than her phrasing. It is her phrasing, indeed, that tips the balance back to RCA: Scotto is as subtle a vocalist as Caballe, but she gives meaning and eloquence to every phrase without ever breaking the long line, which one cannot always say of the Spanish soprano. Matters are about even as far as the baritones are concerned: Milnes acts admirably, but refrains from over-acting, and the voice is rich and characterful. Nucci for Chailly is a bit less compelling dramatically, but the voice strikes me as more integrated, more even, than Milnes's, and thus, again, is more Italianate in its line. Decca field a sumptuous supporting cast (Astrid Varnay, worn of voice but full of character as the Countess, Christa Ludwig, no less, in the ten lines of Madelon's part, Tom Krause as a fine Roucher, Giorgio Tadeo an implacable Mathieu), but RCA's striking Bersi, vividly characterized Irtcredibile, and their Roucher, too, are not outmatched (only their Madelon, both fruity and acid—a grapefruit of a voice—is disappointing). A lot of people will enjoy the huge energy and bustle of Levine's direction. It is vividly characterful, but to my taste a shade exhausting and over-assertive. The flow of the music seems more natural in Chailly's hands, and orchestral detail is clearer. The Decca recording, too, is warmer than the RCA, which has a slight edge to it. Even so, for Scotto's sake and to a slightly lesser extent for Domingo's, I think I would choose RCA, but that would mean rejecting Chailly, Pavarotti and the Decca recording … As I say, it is really a problem.

-- Michael Oliver, Gramophone [9/1989]

Mark Elder leads the Halle Orchestra in two beautiful works by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The 8th Symphony was written for, and premiered by, Sir John Barbirolli and the Halle orchestra in 1956 and is noted for an enlarged and colorful percussion section. The music is among the more light hearted and sunny of Vaughan Williams' scores. The lyrical, richly melodious 5th Symphony embraces the world of nature and human emotions one finds in the Tallis Fantasia and Serenade to Music. This concert was recorded live in the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester on 9th November 2011.

Review quote:

"Elder made a splendid job of it, capturing its quizzical nature to a nicety and balancing the orchestral sound with a skill that drew out the subtlest of Vaughan Williams’s instrumental colourings." - Richard Fairman, Financial Times, (Review of Symphony No.8 Royal Albert Hall Proms, July 2008)

BRAHMS Violin Concerto. Serenade No. 2 in A • Ernest Bour, cond; Zino Francescatti (vn); SWR SO Baden-Baden and Freiburg • HÄNSSLER 94.219 (72:07)


Readers should be aware that when multiple reviews of the same release appear back-to-back in the magazine, copies of those recordings are sent to the contributing reviewers blind. This means we don’t know when or if a colleague might be submitting an opposing opinion and, if so, who that colleague might be. In this case, however, I think I can make a pretty good guess that this release also went out to Robert Maxham and, based on our usually differing views about violinists and violin playing, plus what he’s said about Zino Francescatti in past reviews, I can almost guarantee the reader two quite different takes on this performance of the Brahms Violin Concerto.


First, let me say that of Francescatti’s recordings I’ve heard—admittedly not that many—there’s only one I really liked and would have recommended, had I been reviewing for Fanfare back then. That was his 1959 recording of the Brahms “Double” Concerto with cellist Pierre Fournier and Bruno Walter leading the Columbia Symphony Orchestra. Among my disliked Francescatti recordings was his Paganini First Concerto with Mitropoulos and the New York Philharmonic, coupled with a Saint-Saëns Third Concerto with Ormandy leading the Philadelphia Orchestra.


It’s hard to say exactly what turned me off Francescatti’s playing early on. It was at a time in the late 1950s, shortly after I first started learning the violin and listening to recordings that my ideas of what constituted ideal violin playing were being formed. Francescatti was touted as a virtuoso extraordinaire, a technician of such redoubtable accomplishment that he was compared favorably to Heifetz. Yet what I heard when I listened to Francescatti was a rich, silken tone that often turned hard and abrasive in technically challenging passages. More disturbing, though I couldn’t have verbalized it at the time, was what I now regard as a laissez-faire approach to rapid passagework—a sort of “close enough for government work” attitude, in which harmonics were missed, runs were uneven, and notes were often sloughed off. To my ear, Francescatti lacked the self-discipline of Heifetz and Milstein and the discretion of Oistrakh in knowing when to resist risk-taking that exceeded one’s limits.


Second, all of this may be of little relevance because—though Francescatti’s discography is probably more extensive than current listings would suggest—Columbia Records, the label for which Francescatti mainly recorded, decided that Isaac Stern was the more saleable violinist, thus curtailing Francescatti’s exposure on record, at least to American audiences.


Counting this current Hänssler release, to the best of my knowledge, there are five Francescatti versions of the Brahms concerto on record, all of them commercially available on CD. Compared to Oistrakh’s 15 recordings, documented in a 28:4 review, five seems like a modest number, but as suggested above, Francescatti may have been captured live in more performances of the work than are in general circulation; I don’t know. Of the five, however, this studio recording made in 1974 is the latest. The other four versions are Ormandy/Philadelphia, 1956 (mono); Mitropolous/Vienna Philharmonic, 1958 (mono); Bernstein/New York Philharmonic, 1961; and Leinsdorf/ORTF National Orchestra, 1969.


Francescatti was 72 when he joined Ernest Bour and SWR Symphony Orchestra of Baden-Baden and Freiburg for this venture. It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that his previously full-bodied tone has thinned a bit, and there seems to be a very slight but detectable right-hand tremor on sustained notes; listen carefully, for example, to the high A at bar 140. Also, some of the minor technical issues noted in his earlier recordings have now become real liabilities. The passage in chords beginning in bar 164, for instance, is choppily articulated and sounds a bit desperate in its grasping for the notes. Nonetheless, the violinist has lost none of his fearlessness in the face of danger. For a 28:4 review of Arabella Steinbacher’s Brahms, I plugged 24 versions of the concerto into a spreadsheet and then sorted them by timings. If I were to add this Francescatti performance to the mix, it wouldn’t be the fastest—at 36:03, that distinction still goes to Milstein with Fistoulari and the Philharmonia in a 1961 recording for EMI—but at 38:15, it ties Grumiaux’s 1958 recording with van Beinum and the Concertgebouw for seventh place on the list, still 15 seconds faster than Heifetz’s classic 1955 Reiner/Chicago account.


I hope I haven’t made this Francescatti Brahms sound worse than it is. If you’re willing to overlook a slip here, a mishap there, and a rough patch every now and then—all technical flaws which I believe were always present in Francescatti’s playing on earlier recordings—there are some nice things to be said of the performance as well. Conductor Bour and Francescatti share a rapturous vision of the score, bringing to it many moments of an almost ecstatic magnanimity. The lofty, angelic purity of Francescatti’s tone in the first movement’s post-cadenza measures (he plays the familiar Joachim cadenza, by the way) is absolutely transfixing.


So, even though I’ve expressed personal reservations about Francescatti’s playing in general, I acknowledge that he’s justly recognized as one of the 20th century’s great violinists, and I recommend this CD not just to Francescatti fans. Those who cherish Brahms’s Violin Concerto will also want this memento of what is probably the violinist’s last recorded performance of the work.


Brahms’s rustic, amiable A-Major Serenade is a generous addition to this already desirable disc, and considering it’s almost as long as the concerto, it would be ungenerous to call it filler. Ernest Bour is not a conductor I’ve had occasion to review before, but based on his contribution in the concerto and his reading of the serenade, I’d have to say that he has a real flair for Brahms. Unfortunately, Bour died in 2001, so we’re not likely to hear any more from him. But this is a glowing performance by a conductor and an orchestra on top form.


Sonically, both the concerto and the serenade are quite good, but the serenade, recorded four years later in 1978, is marginally better. It’s more open and has more air around it, which lends the serenade an appropriate outdoorsy atmosphere. Strongly recommended.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

YURI BASHMET - BRITTEN, REGER,

Introducing François-Xavier Roth - the charismatic new Principal Conductor of the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden and Freiburg in his debut recording as part of the SWRmusic/haenssler CLASSIC collaboration that has produced so many critically acclaimed recordings. This beautiful program features two Late Romantic paeans to nature: Mahler's popular First Symphony and Anton Webern's early, lushly scored tone poem, "Im Sommerwind".

Personnel includes: Doc Severinsen, Snooky Young, Tom Brown, Richard Perry, Bobby Bryant, John Audino (trumpet); Mac Kenley, Robert Alexander, Lloyd Ulyate, Gene Cipriano (trombone); Vincent DeRosa (French horn); Lew Tabackin, Bud Shank, Ernest Watts (woodwinds); Ross Tompkins, Pat Rebillot, Michael Woodford (piano); Dennis Budimir, Peter Woodford, Tommy Tedesco (guitar); John Williams, Meyer Rubin (bass); Fred Stites, Ed Shaughnessy (drums); John Pacheco, Michael Collazo, Larry Bunker (percussion).

Producers: Don Sebesky, Pete Spargo, Dick Hyman, Joe Reisman.

Compilation producer: John Snyder.

Recorded at RCA Studios, New York City and RCA Studios, Hollywood, California on April 29 & 30, 1971; June 2, 1971; June 12, 1972 and August 22, 1973. Includes liner notes by Mort Goode.

Digitally remastered by Joe Lopes (May 7, 1992, BMG Recording Studios, New York, New York).

This compilation contains tracks recorded for RCA from 1971-1973.

PIERRE MONTEUX EDITION VOL 11

Peter Pears gives the words their full due and sings with sensitive mastery, while Julian Bream plays with unfailing affection. The enthralling music and superb performances makes this out-of-the-way record a joy.

To a very considerable extent this record is a tribute to Julian Bream's playing; had he not been around, the two song cycles and the Britten folk-song arrangements (and for all I know, other items too) would never have been written. And very enjoyable it all is. The two song-cycles are, I think, near each other in quality, but some way apart in effect, for the Britten is obviously written to suit Peter Pears and Julian Bream, whereas the Walton seems at times to be written, as it were, against them. Thus the second song needs to be sung (I apologize for the word) saucily, the fifth with a degree of inebriations, and they are not really within Pears's emotional range. You might think the last one beyond the powers of most singers, so difficult is it, but in fact Pears makes a very good shot at it, and it is surprisingly effective. But Lady, when I behold the roses seems better suited to the performers' style and, a lovely song, it comes off without any sense of strain. The words of these songs ("chosen by Christopher Hassall"—why didn't Walton choose them?) all date from the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, and their charm is among the cycle's chief attractions.

The Britten Songs from the Chinese date from 1958, two years before the Walton, and they are settings of some of Arthur Waley's exquisite translations. Peter Pears gives the words their full due, and sings with sensitive mastery, while Julian Bream plays the marvellous guitar part with unfailing affection. I'm told that Britten himself did a good deal of guitar practice when writing these songs, and it would be interesting to hear him attempt them. His recent folk-song arrangements are delightful, and at least one of them has a guitar part of formidable difficulty. The Seiber arrangements of French folk-songs are simpler in style, but lovely to hear, and the Fricker setting of 0 Mistress mine, is delightful... [T]he enthralling music and superb performances and splendid quality makes this out-of-the-way record a joy.

-- R.F., Gramophone [7/1965, reviewing the original LP release]

Villa-Lobos seemed to have a bottomless well of simple, predominantly diatonic, yet affecting tunes, to which his harmonic eclecticism lent an exotic air; there is not one on this recording which is not capable of staying in the memory. Robert Bonfiglio is a most accomplished soloist in every respect... a most enjoyable programme...
-- John Duarte, Gramophone [4/1990]

Tashi don their tuxedos and, in the case of violinist Ida Kavafian, a flapper dress. The roaring twenties provide the only common link in this oddball collection; as the sleeve-note suggests during that rollicking decade ''the world was bent on having a good time''. I'll take that on trust. Tashi have a good time here, and so, for the most part, do we. I am never entirely sure about Hindemith, but you don't argue with the craftsmanship. He was 28 and irritatingly eager when he put together this inventive little Quintet. No musical fashion seems to have escaped him—from the obligatory string elegy with its generous coating of late romanticism, to the curdled third movement Landler with its grotesque mix of Berlin cabaret and Mahlerian Wunderhorn (Richard Stoltzman in his element brandishing the E flat clarinet), a touch of premature minimalism in the curiously spare fourth movement, and a finale which begins by sounding as though it is rewinding the score back to the beginning. The Lukas Foss piece is weird, too—not in terms of the musical language, which is disarmingly mainstream, but on account of its gentle off-beat humour. Just when you think you should be taking it seriously … The treadmill finale, for instance, is notable for two thin-lipped piano solos and a spooky disappearing-trick at the end. Stoltzman again gets the lion's share of the virtuosity.

As for the remaining bon-bons Stoltzman and friends are suitably laid-back. Alan Shulman's Rendezvous was written for Benny Goodman and sounds much as its title suggests. A deceptive start, like off-duty Richard Strauss, gives way to swingtime. And swingtime is what we are looking for, and get, in at least three of the five Gershwin morsels. Stoltzman tosses off a deliciously frisky Promenade (or Walking the dog) while the standards are duly adored—the flavour of the arrangements, Palm Court with a twist.

-- Edward Seckerson, Gramophone [3/1990]

HANDEL: CONCERTI GROSSI, VOL 1

REIMANN Melusine • Peter Hirsch, cond; Marlene Mild ( Melusine ); Teresa Erbe ( Pythia ); Gabriele May ( Madame Lapérouse ); Richard Kindley ( Max Oleander ); Song-Hu Liu ( Count Von Lusignan ); Nuremberg P • WERGO WER 6719 2 (2 CDs: 96:47 Text and Translation) Live: Nuremberg 5/12/2007


Aribert Reimann (b. 1936) has pursued a dual career as composer and pianist; he was Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s accompanist for 20th-century repertoire. Reimann has written perhaps 50 major works in many forms, most of them including the voice. He is best known for his ambitious operas based on major literary works: The Trojan Women (Euripedes), A Dream Play and The Ghost Sonata (Strindberg), The Castle (Kafka), The House of Bernarda Alba (Lorca), Medea (after Franz Grillparzer), and—talk about ambitious—Shakespeare’s Lear , the latter written for Fischer-Dieskau, who suggested the subject and sang the 1978 premiere, recorded live by Deutsche Grammophon.


The 1971 Melusine , based on a play by Yvon Goll, is the “Pastoral” Symphony of Reimann’s dramas, a breath of fresh air amid all that heavy breathing. It is the classic story of a mermaid who loves a mortal, for which they both must pay with their lives— Rusalka moved to the big city, or at least to a park at the edge of town. Max’s former lover, Madame Lapérouse, has arranged his marriage to Melusine, who remains virginal despite his complaints. She in turn consorts with her magical friends in the woods; the fairy Pythia (her Ježibaba) gives her the fishtail, which “closes her loins but makes her irresistible to men,” some of whom die for her. Finally, she falls for the Count, and you know the rest.


As befits a fairy tale, the elegant music is lighter and easier than the dense, mostly serial expressionism of Lear and The Castle , and the spare, harsh melodrama of Bernarda Alba . But the most fascinating—astonishing—thing about Melusine is the title character’s vocal line, which makes the Queen of the Night sound like a basso profundo. It has easily the highest tessitura I have ever encountered, probably around a’’, with excursions up through the next octave. Even more amazing is the apparent ease with which Marlene Mild handles the range and the coloratura; there is no screeching or squeaking here, and—after the astonishment wears off—her singing comes to seem natural for this mythical, magical creature. Baritone Song-Hu Liu is also marvelous as the Count; they share a long, gorgeous duet in the final act, which is surrounded by two impressive orchestral interludes. The whole cast is eminently satisfactory, as is the orchestra. The opera is a bit slow to get started—scene 1 is a tedious debate between Max and Madame which brings us up to snuff on who’s who and what’s what—but it takes wing with Melusine’s entrance. The live recording is clear and clean, with no audience intrusions. German and English texts appear on facing pages. Unless you can’t abide any music beyond Strauss, this is definitely an opera worth getting to know.


FANFARE: James H. North

Furtwangler: The Best Studio Recordings (1929-1943)

Classical Music

American pianist Anne-Marie McDermott, who has accumulated a catalog of outstanding recordings, performs five captivating and stimulating sonatas by Franz Joseph Haydn. In addition to these solo works, McDermott also joins the Odense Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Scott Yoo in two Haydn piano concertos.

“I've long admired Anne-Marie McDermott's unsurpassed performances of Haydn. Her understanding of his music is superb and her playing of it so apt and expressive that I could not resist her invitation to provide cadenzas for one of Haydn's concerti. It was a joy to write them, and reproducing my own thoughts in the language of this ancient composer was exhilarating. It goes without saying that their realization in sound is exactly what I had intended.” - Charles Wuorinen (The noted American composer who wrote the cadenza for Haydn's Concerto No. 4 in G major, Hob.XVIII:4)

Classical Music

Max Kowalski, who lived and practiced law in Frankfurt am Main, was from 1913 till 1933 a well-known, much esteemed, and frequently performed composer. Kowalski was born in Poland (then Russia) on August 10th, 1882 and grew up in Germany, to which his parents emigrated when he was a year old. Kowalski's reputation rests on his production of more than two hundred art songs, which have been in the repertoire of many leading artists, including Heinrich Schlusnus, Maria Ivog�n, Paul Bender, Joseph Schwarz, Alexander Kipnis, Karen Branzell, and Hans Hotter. The present CD is drawn from a recital sung in 2011 in Munich by the great Austrian baritone, Wolfgang Holzmair. It offers two song cycles and songs composed to texts by some of Germany's leading poets. The CD includes Kowalski's best-known cycle, his Pierrot Lunaire, which appeared the same year (1913) as Arnold Schoenberg's settings.

Adolf Busch had been one of the highly celebrated violinists and greatly admired exponents of the Beethoven concerto in Europe before WWII, but had never recorded it prior to his emigration to the U.S. in 1939. After a period of relative neglect, he was invited by American Columbia to record the work in 1942, but the outcome was not a success. Critic Tully Potter tells the story in his linernotes: "On 7 and 8 February [1942] the Busch brothers ... collaborated with the Philharmonic-Symphony, in the Beethoven Concerto, Adolf airing a new set of cadenzas written the previous year. ...the Saturday-evening interpretation gained mixed notices, the best being very good, the worst very bad; and perhaps the violinist was not at his best. Two critics indicated that he seemed nervous--hardly surprising, when it was his first performance for years of a work he had been accustomed to play almost every week. He was certainly in excellent form on the Sunday afternoon: the CBS network broadcast was taken down by at least two home recordists and one of those documents is here released for the first time. It makes an admirable corrective to the official Columbia recording, made next day at Liederkranz Hall. Unfortunately the production was delegated to the talented but inexperienced Goddard Lieberson. Busch was palpably under strain in the opening movement, his nervousness exacerbated by Lieberson's insisting he stand on a raised platform, which made him feel remote from his brother and the orchestra and brought him too close to the microphone. The resulting poor balance caused him to reject the recording and it was not issued until after his death. The live performance is everything one might expect." The fillers include a Bach concerto (in a minor) never commercially recorded by Busch.

Tchaikovsky: 1812 Ouverture

The concertos of Karl Amadeus Hartmann exhibit a rich spectrum of formal and expressive possibilities, not only richly varied in relation to each other, but also a welcome addition to his more unified group of eight symphonies. Particularly with his departures from the classical-romantic concerto form, Hartmann discovered new and individual solutions that confirm the importance of his concertos as significant and original contributions to the development of this form in the twentieth century. The works compiled on this CD were written between 1931 and 1955, thus providing a superb insight into all of Hartmann's important creative phases.

In the Romantic period, the connections between love and death were an obsession of artists. Composers were naturally drawn to explore the great themes that entered literature in the works of Dante, Petrarch and Goethe: good and evil, love and death. Liszt was no exception. The powerful, evocative works presented here range from moments of repose and contemplation to nearly unbearable contrasts of dynamics, pitch registers and tempi, dramatized by bold juxtapositions. “A fearless, flawless knight of the piano” is how Vienna’s Die Presse characterized pianist Carlo Grante.

Classical Music

Esthetic games as ends in themselves are far from the mind of the Latvian composer Peteris Vasks. He believes in "L'art pour l'homme" (Art for mankind) rather than "L'art pour l'art" (Art for art's sake). He sees his music as a language of the soul. This program features elegant performances of Sala, Musica appassionata and Credo from the Liepaja Symphony Orchestra led by conductor Atvars Lakstigala.

Classical Music

Morton Subotnick is a living legend. A leading innovator of electronic music, he has used many important technological breakthroughs in his work as a composer. This release, originally recorded and released in the 80s on LP by Nonesuch Records, has been specially remastered for this reissue. It features The Wild Beasts, a work inspired by an exhibition of Les Fauves paintings, and After the Butterfly, a concerto-like work for trumpet, instrumental ensemble and electronics.