Tchaikovsky Bavarian State Opera; Shuraitis The Queen of Spades

In this 1983 performance, Maazel conducts Beethoven's liberation opera full of energy and precision, partnered by a highly dramatic Leonore, a Florestan in heroic voice and the Vienna Philharmonic in brilliant form.

The longer the modern era lasts, the older “New Music” grows, and the more versatile it becomes. Upon closer listening, one quickly becomes aware of the many byways and backroads of the genre, in addition to the principal trends, and one composer who trod his own path decisively, with great success, is Gottfried von Einem. Since his breakthrough with the premiere of his opera Dantons Tod (the death of Danton) at the Salzburg Festival in 1947, through to the composer’s death in 1996, many of his works have been performed on the international music stage, as witness recordings featuring the likes of Böhm, Karajan and George Szell on this label. However, everyone knows that for a composer to continue to develop his artistic skills he needs more than glittering premieres, and so the Orfeo label is delighted to mark the 100th birthday of the composer born in 1918 by releasing, alongside other new recordings of his works from its catalogue, a retrospective of von Einem’s work featuring the very best performers of today.

The earliest work on this new release is the choral work with orchestra Stundenlied, which originates from a highly interesting cultural and historical source: a collaboration with the playwright Bertolt Brecht who from 1949 lived in the German Democratic Republic. The story of Christ’s passion is witnessed and presented in a popular, naive way as a dreadful event and brilliantly depicted by von Einem using simple and stringent compositional means to produce a work that is haunting and authoritative, performed here by the Singverein and Philharmonic Orchestra of Vienna under Franz Welser-Möst.

Although Luciano Pavarotti only took on a few roles during his career, his performances rewrote history and set a benchmark for vocalists that would follow him. This 2-disc set is a live recording of Pavarotti in his role as Riccardo in Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera. The Vienna State Opera Orchestra accompanies the vocalists in a raw, emotional performance under Claudio Abbado.

Johan Botha’s unfailingly radiant and yet powerfully carrying voice established him over many years as a Strauss and Wagner singer par excellence, but most of all as a youthful hero, and not as a weighty heroic tenor. In fact, Tannhauser was something of a marginal role for him, but what a role! The recording of the Rome episode in the Vienna State Opera premiere of June 16, 2010, with which the release’s four-part Wagner portrait begins with excerpts from Vienna Staatsoper productions, movingly reveals how as a suffering yet passionate pilgrim he returns from Rome dejected and unredeemed. The bridal-chamber scene from the third act of Lohengrin looks back to Botha’s early years at the Staatsoper. Fifteen years later, he is an ideal Walther von Stolzing, who after a night of dreams reveals his Prize Song to cobbler-poet Hans Sachs, who in turn refines it and writes it down. The most moving scene comes perhaps at the close of Ariadne auf Naxos, when a figure hailed as Hermes, the divine messenger of death, proves to be Bacchus, the god of love. The recording captures one of Botha’s last appearances at the Vienna Staatsoper.

Daniel-Francois-Esprit Auber (1782-1871) was long considered as one of the most typically French and most successful opera composers of the 19th century. His overtures were once favourites of the light Classical repertoire. This opera francais, first performed on 3 May 1825, relates to the venerable tradition of the rescue opera, topical since the French Revolution. Both book and score were equally successful. The opera represents a decisive development in Aubers style, a turning away from imitation of Rossini to Boieldieu’s simplicity and thereby to a specifically French tradition. It was the first of Auber’s mature opera-comiques, an international success, characterized by an Italianate sparkle with French grace and lyricism. The work remained in the repertoire from 1825 to 1896 and was performed 525 times. By the 1850s it had been translated into German, Danish, Swedish, Polish, Czech and Hungarian. On German stages this opera remained one of Auber’s most popular works, given as late as 1950 in Vienna.

Andris Nelsons has been familiar with the Russian and, more especially, the Soviet musical tradition practically since he began his training as a conductor. After all, he studied in St. Petersburg with Alexander Titov and also with Mariss Jansons. His journey to Shostakovich and the Russian composer’s Seventh Symphony, which he recently conducted to great acclaim at the BBC Proms with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, is one that makes perfect sense in this context. Shostakovich’s symphonies continue to be at the mercy of commentators eager to find historical and political encoding in them, and yet a work like the Seventh Symphony in C major (“Leningrad”) has a universality for which the term “war symphony” is wholly inadequate.

The almost idyllic opening of the first movement and the disruption of that mood by the sudden irruption of a series of timpani rolls, together with the themes associated with a military attack, remain etched in the memory in spite of the final frenzy bound up with the idea of victory, and the same is true of the emotional highs and lows of the middle movements, in which listeners are torn between subdued trust and chorale-like solemnity in the tradition of some of Shostakovich’s great Russian predecessors, especially Modest Mussorgsky, enabling him to lend his voice to the tormented soul of a nation above and beyond all ideological divisions. It was no doubt passages like these that led to the rapid worldwide dissemination of the work once the microfilmed score had reached the United States after an adventurous journey via the Middle East.

A new chapter in this exciting performance history of the symphony has now been written by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under its music director Andris Nelsons with a thrilling reading notable for its musical focus and depth and, not least, for its contrasts between rhythmic power and lyrical tenderness. The monumentality of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony emerges to particularly moving effect in a performance in which garish primary colours are banished in favour of balance. - Orfeo

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Peter von Winter's chamber music for wind was written under the influence of Beethoven's septets. But this is also thoroughly European music, with echoes of Italy and Bohemia providing both variety and a degree of technical invention that is here superbly realized by the Consortium Classicum.

Classical Music

This release explores the field of vocal music, and lieder in particular. The lieder recital no longer seems to be such a self-evident feature of musical life as it once was, but at the Salzburg Festival it always had a special place of its own, and that place has certainly been due in part to the presence of “leading lights” of the music scene. Looking back to the most recent decades, we see that like Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau before her, there was nobody in the Eighties and Nineties who could so captivate the audience at a lieder recital, with a dramatic art and a wealth of vocal resources that defied comparison, as the inimitable Jessye Norman. All who can consider themselves lucky to have caught her in those years, doing what she did best of all, will count themselves equally fortunate – no less than new enthusiasts coming fresh to her work – to discover (or renew acquaintance with) an additional programme by the diva, sensitively accompanied by James Levine, effortlessly superb and impeccably quadrilingual in Richard Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder and – with their high “repertoire value” – the rarity of Schoenberg’s Brettl-Lieder, Viennese rather than modern.

Classical Music

Classical Music

It is not often that a young vocal artist releases a debut album that is so "complete" or so convincingly conceived and finished to such a high polish as is the ase with Anett Fritsch. What makes it all the more astounding is that she achieves this by singing arias from the Mozart/Da Ponte trilogy of Figaro / Don Giovanni / Cosi, masterworks by a composer regarded and feared in equal measure for the complexity of his writing. Yet the repertoire focus she has chosen is entirely in keeping with the soprano's career to date. She began in her teens and has progressed in recent years through a series of acclaimed performances on international opera stages.

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REVIEW:

Anne Fritsch's Mozart is a sheer delight. This is no bland essay of the usual suspects painted in anonymous colors but a vivid portrait gallery of characters that Fritsch has portrayed on stage. From the very first bars of the Overture to Marriage of Figaro the playing of the Munich Radio Orchestra instantly makes yous it up and listen. A jewel of a disc.

– Gramophone

KOZELUCH Clarinet Concertos: No. 1 in Eb; No. 2 in Eb. Sonata concertante in Eb • Dieter Klöcker (cl); Milan Lajík, cond; Prague CO • ORFEO 193 061 (69:21)


With Jan Antonin Koželuh (1747–1818), we find that—like many Bohemian subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, including Jan Waczlaw Stamic (Johann Stamitz) and Anton Rössler (Antonio Rosetti)—the spelling of his name was altered and usually was written as Leopold Kozeluch, although there are instances where it is seen partially in Latin, i.e., Iohannes Antonius Kotzeluch. Kozeluch—to adopt the form generally used in the musical world today—was one of many Bohemians whose desire for fame and fortune took them to Europe’s great musical centers, including Mannheim, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Paris, and London. There is an 18th-century map showing lines radiating from Bohemia to these and other cities and the lines are so numerous that they resemble a spider’s web. It was Bohemia’s national musical fecundity that prompted Dr. Charles Burney, the well-known 18th-century traveler and writer on music, to refer to Bohemia as the conservatory of Europe.


Among the little country’s musical progeny was Kozeluch, termed in The New Grove’ s Dictionary of Music and Musicians “one of the foremost representatives of Czech [Bohemian, to be politically correct] music in 18th-century Vienna.” It appears that Kozeluch was a declared adversary and critic of Mozart, as contemporary accounts indicate that Kozeluch—with the help of Antonio Salieri—tried to establish himself as Mozart’s rival. Nine years after Mozart’s death, Friedrich Rochlitz noted in the Allemeine Musikalisches Zeitung , “Kozeluch expressed his mind too volubly,” and further on we read, “envy and obsessive criticism are not the way to surpass a great man.”


First and foremost, Kozeluch was a secular composer. His musical legacy extends to some 420 separate works, including arrangements of his and other composers’ works. The bottom line though, is a catalog of some 250 original compositions, including 11 symphonies, 22 keyboard concertos, and two for the clarinet, the last not listed in TNG.


There are four concerted works for clarinet that bear Kozeluch’s signature, but the Czech clarinetist Jirí Kratochvil maintains that one was written by Leopold’s cousin, Antonin, so it has been eliminated from this recording. Of the three works on this Orfeo release, the Sonata concertante in Eb is almost one-of-a-kind, joining a similar work by one Franz Bühler (1760–1823). The first concerto is indebted to the Mannheim School, while the second, written for the German virtuoso Josef Beer, is (according to Dieter Klöcker’s copious and erudite annotations) based upon the popular Clarinet Concerto No. 3 in Bb by Kozeluch’s countryman, Carl Stamitz, but the Kozeluch concertos are far superior to anything Stamitz wrote for the instrument and along with the concertos of Franz Krommer, run a close second to Mozart’s lone clarinet concerto.


Dieter Klöcker’s musical instincts are unfailing; he has continuously and consistently brought forth a great deal of lovely and neglected—not negligible—music for his chosen instrument and each new release is a musical epiphany. Much of the repertoire he has chosen, including music of Soleré, Bärmann, and Schacht, still exists in only his recordings and where other works have seen additional recordings since Klöcker’s premieres, his remain benchmark.


The first concerto of Kozeluch is included with works by Krommer and Crusell on a well-played ASV CD of 18th- and early 19th-century concertos played by Emma Johnson (ASV 763). A search of the Sanctuary Classics Web site reveals that the 1997 disc is still available, so if one is in search of a broader picture of the late-Classical and early-Romantic clarinet concerto repertoire, then this would be the way to go. But the decision of Orfeo and Klöcker to issue an entire disc of Kozeluch is wholly in keeping with the way they go about things and should not be overlooked by those with the slightest curiosity. I should also point out that Klöcker plays a clarinet fitted with the Oehler fingering system (standard, I believe, in the German-speaking countries) and a wooden mouthpiece with the reed held in place in the old-fashioned manner by string, the combination of these most surely accounting for his unusual tone quality.


Both recordings are lively, well played, and equally well recorded, with Klöcker’s Orfeo offering a more distant perspective and therefore a hint of concert hall realism. Violinist Milan Lajcík and his colleagues in the Prague Chamber Orchestra are more than up to the tasks offered by these works. The orchestral support is beyond reproach, with unforced directness, poise, and verve that is totally void of metrical stiffness. Another star in the crowns of both Orfeo and Dieter Klöcker.


FANFARE: Michael Carter

On the dark side of fame awaits the slide into obscurity. That’s certainly true for a number of operas that, while popular and highly lucrative during their composers‘ lifetime, soon followed their creators into the shadowy realm of oblivion. Operas, for example, that only ever get mentioned in connection with some much more famous sibling. Giuseppe Gazzaniga’s Don Giovanni – premiered half a year before Mozart’s masterpiece – is such an example, as is Ruggero Leoncavallo’s La Boheme and George Bizet’s Djamileh, widely considered the predecessor of Carmen. Other operas just do not stand out among other works by a composer – Jules Massenet’s operas for example are hardly a footnote of music history, his opera Therese, a thoroughly forgotten work, however, is. Two examples for works that are scarcely performed or even known outside of what is now the Czech Republic are also included in this collection of Opera Rarities on ORFEO: Antonin Dvorak’s last opera Armida and Zdenek Fibich’s Sarka.

REVIEW:

Containing radio performance recordings of six works by Dvorak, Massenet, Leoncavallo, Bizet, Gazzaniga, and Fibich mentioned often in histories of music but almost never on the bill, this is a box certainly precious for those who love opera.

– Classical Music Daily (Giuseppe Pennisi)

Classical Music

Classical Music

The global careers of not one but two Slovakian singers were launched on March 23, 1978 in Vienna’s State Opera: that of then-27-year-old tenor Peter Dvorský, and that of 31-year-old Edita Gruberova, hers a career which has endured to this day. Despite her success there in the role of Zerbinetta just eighteen months earlier, she was then still an insider tip for such a large bel canto role. Although studio recordings from subsequent years exist of this role which would later become Gruberova’s hallmark, this early live recording has a quality that is missing from later recordings: the maidenly determination and yet stupendous vocal perfection that Gruberova delivers in her portrayal, her inimitable sonorous timbre – which she retains to this day – alongside the wonderfully intimate and yet tense partnership with Dvorský, whose passionate, burning tenor provides a unique highlight in his first duet with Gruberova’s Lucia and supplies a further high point in the tricky final scene on a recording not short of such brilliant climaxes. Matteo Manuguerra’s reading of Lucia’s brother Enrico is a perilously relentless, masculine tour de force. Last but not least, the quickening touch of Giuseppe Patane’s baton makes this a gem among the treasures of Edita Gruberova’s discography, one never short of outstanding testimony to her consummate vocal skill and is a wonderful addition to that of Peter Dvorský, whose discography is sadly not so bountiful. The Neapolitan conductor, who was highly regarded in Munich for his performances of Italian repertoire, transforms a singing festival into an exciting music drama in the way that he leads the Vienna Philharmonic in a highly flexible and dynamic manner through the musical narrative.

The festival’s co-founder Strauss was a contemporary composer in his time, still capable of writing new and original works more than two decades later, and so the performance of contemporary works remains at the heart of the Festival’s identity, not least as a commitment and a counterbalance to assiduous cultivation of the classics. At a time in which the umpteenth new recording of classical works often seems less than essential, credit is all the more due to the Festival for programming “new music” that is already over a century old. One of this year’s new releases is Krenek’s Orpheus und Eurydike, a work that is several things rolled into one: “classical” subject-matter in the sense of a further reworking – in this case, of the creation myth of opera itself, not just since Monteverdi (1607), but since the primal “big bang” of the operatic cosmos with Caccini/Peri (1600); one of the timeless tales of human existence linking love, longing for the past and their transcendence in art; a bang-up-to-date work of art that nevertheless remains a work of its time, the era in which the Festival was founded; and above all a festal tribute to honour the 90th birthday of a major 20th-century composer. Krenek himself attended the1990 Festival performance documented here. Kokoschka’s stormily Expressionist narrative was put to paper between 1915 and 1917 in the aftermath of a passionate love affair with Alma Mahler, and set to music in headstrong mixed style by Schoenberg’s highly independent pupil between then and 1923. Given the literary standing of the librettist (and of the composer), ORFEO is additionally printing the libretto (from which the title of our text is taken), also bearing in mind that this recording is the first and only one ever to be released.

The well-known “classical” exception to the canon of ten Wagner works that can be performed on the Green Hill goes back to the master himself: it is of course Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. The most famous recording of one of the rare Bayreuth performances of the symphony is of the legendary concert that reopened the Bayreuth Festival after the war, in 1951, with Wilhelm Furtwangler on the rostrum. That recording was released for the first time, officially and uncut, by Orfeo in association with the Bayreuth Festival in 2008 (C754081). In 1954, Furtwangler conducted the Ninth a second time (ORFEO C851121). Much less well-known and issued here for the first time in a live recording is a performance conducted by Karl Böhm in 1963 to mark the 150th anniversary of Richard Wagner’s birth and the 80th anniversary of his death. Here we witness the emergence of a new musical generation.

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REVIEW:

While a distinct improvement on previous exhumations which have done the rounds, Orfeo's excellent new transfer from a Bavarian Radio source only serves to clarify how much Gundula Janowitz dominated her colleagues on this occasion, though they were all more seasoned Bayreuth performers. A significant release from an historical point of view.

– Gramophone

Classical Music

Classical Music