MAHLER: SYMPHONY NO 2 DE WAAR

MAHLER: SYMPHONY NO 6 DE WAAR

MAHLER: SYMPHONY NO 8 DE WAAR

MAHLER: SYMPHONY NO 4 DE WAAR

HAYDN: KAISER QUARTET, LARK QU

On RCA the voices, solo and choral, are set in a more spacious acoustic, which helps in giving bloom to the soprano's soaring phrase, "Dulcissime" in the final section, "The Court of Love" (Barbara Hendricks on RCA sweeter and more sensuous-sounding than Judith Blegen on Telarc)... As to performance, Mata underlines the fun element in the work... John Aler's high, refined tones on RCA strike me as near the ideal...

-- Gramophone [9/1981, reviewing the original LP release of Carmina burana]

--------------------------

This was one of the very first orchestral Compact Discs to reach my ears and I shall not forget the thrilling first impression of the opening brass fanfares in the Tchaikovsky Capriccio italien, richly and resonantly caught, overwhelming in impact but naturally balanced. The sound is sumptuous throughout, a little bass-heavy perhaps, but lovely to wallow in. The performances are vivid and nicely paced. The Tchaikovsky is the best, the Enescu Rhapsodic has comparable elegance of style and rich colours, but lacks something in unbuttoned exhilaration at the end. The lushness of the sound removes any starkness from the Rimsky scoring of the Mussorgsky piece, which fails to sound in any way sinister. The elusive L'apprenti sorcier is affectionately characterized, but again there is a lack of adrenalin—no sense of real calamity at the climax. But the recording is very persuasive, the strings have appealing ambient lustre, and as a whole this concert is easy to enjoy.

-- Gramophone [6/1983, reviewing the Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky and Enescu works, RCA 4439]

BEETHOVEN: SONATAS, VARIATIONS

MAHLER: SYMPHONY NO 1 DE WAAR

FALLA: SIETE CANCIONES POPULAR

This disc includes both DDD and ADD recordings.

This selection is available for a limited time as a special import.

SCHUMANN: HUMORESKE, FANTASIES

When the first of the four Ballades was sketched, in the autumn of 1831 at Stuttgart, the twentyish and quite unknown Chopin was en route from Warsaw to Paris, where he was quickly to become the pale darling of the salons. When the last of the Ballades was published, in 1843, he had already forsaken the drawing room for the sickbed. Those dozen years thus virtually define his career as a composer, and it is defensible to say that the Ballades, which appeared at intervals over that period, succinctly define the length and breadth of his enduring artistic achievement – each in its way is a fair sample of a style so original, so unmistakable, that it must be accounted among the very few truly unique dialects in the universal language.

-- James Lyons, From the original liner notes for LSC-2304

---------------

The quality of the piano playing is very substantial indeed. The dramatic turns in the Ballades are electrifying and the characteristic rhythms of the Polonaise are propelled irresistibly.

Whether the Chopin Ballades really illustrate the series of Lithuanian epics related on this record's sleeve-note is doubtful; it would be romantically agreeable if they did. More certainly they turn rapidly and romantically from one emotion, Lithuanian or no, to another. These turns of emotion are projected vividly by Graffman: piu mosso, says Chopin, and he is off like a whirlwind; presto con fuoco, and he is out of sight over the horizon. The effect is often electrifying, although the contrasting poetical moments—on the whole, in these pieces, the more numerous—are not quite so convincingly handled: repose seems less successfully conveyed than activity, poetry less successfully than drama. Yet of course the quality of the piano playing as such is very substantial indeed. It comes into its own in the Grande Polonaise.

Here the characteristic rhythms are propelled irresistibly, with a surge which must nearly convince the listener that the piece is not three times too long after all; the relatively peaceful Andante Spianato helps here, too.

-- Gramophone [6/1966, reviewing these performances on LP]

Shirley Verrett sings strongly, and with great beauty of tone, and one would be hard put to find another band to match the superb playing of the Virtuosi di Roma.

If only for the first item, this is most welcome record. There are three and a half columns of Vivaldi's concertos in the Master Edition of THE GRAMOPHONE Classical Record Catalogue, but only six specimens of his church music: a 50 per cent increase is no mean addition.

The Credo is a little masterpiece. The text of the Creed, with its multiplicity of short clauses, is almost as hard to set in one movement as that of the Te Deum. Vivaldi brings it off superbly. Priest or no, he gets through the rather dry and un-pictorial matter that opens and closes the Creed in double-quick time, using essentially the same music for the beginning and the end— a brisk, concerto-fashion allegro in triple time, driven along at a cracking pace by an insistent ostinato, but cunningly varied by occasional hemiola rhythms that run two bars of 3/4 metre into one bar of 3/2. This leaves him free to expend his most imaginative music on the "Et homo factus est" and on the heart of the mystery, the "Crucifixus". The busy orchestra is silent for the former, and the unaccompanied voices wind their slow way through some very expressive modulations from E major to D major. The "Crucifixus" is marked largo, which tempts Renato Fasano into a tempo rather too slow—at this date largo means broad, not necessarily slow. Vivaldi writes an A minor movement over a stabbing ostinato of quavers separated by rests—very likely a pictorial symbol of the nails being relentlessly driven home: the same effect was unmistakable in a Credo by Domenico Scarlatti that I once heard this same choir perform, for it was underlined by the entire string orchestra playing pizzicato chords. It was in Bach's mind too, in the "Crucifixus" of the B minor Mass: what else are those minim chords doing in the wind and strings? (I've yet to hear the movement started forte as Bach intended: it's an expression of intolerable pain and grief.) The Vivaldi may not quite be in that class, but he certainly shows here that he can write moving, deeply-felt music when the need arises. The chromatic wailings rise to a fine climax, and then we're back in the home tonic, E minor, for a brilliantly developed reprise of the opening material. A fine work, and worth the price of the record on its own.

The second item is a setting of the medieval Stabat Mater. The Council of Trent had banished this sequence from the liturgy, along with hundreds of others; but composers continued to set it to music, and it was re-admitted to the Church ritual in 1727, to take its place beside the other four Marian antiphon. Vivaldi's setting, for contralto solo, may possibly have been composed to celebrate this event.

It's certainly worth hearing, though it won't, I think, steal the palm from Pergolesi's duet version. Shirley Verrett sings it strongly, and with great beauty of tone in her upper register; but she does not yet seem quite at home in music as early as this. Rhythms are a little stiff here and there, and the lower passages evoke one or two rather awkward gear-changes. Still, Vivaldi makes some interesting harmonic experiments in the course of the work: listen for the modulations of the "Cuius animam", and the surprising interrupted cadences of the C minor largo. The dotted rhythms of the latter, by the way, surely suggest the self-scourging of the penitent sinner; the passage needs to be taken faster, or at least the dotted notes should be exaggerated. For the "Fac ut ardeat", Vivaldi had the unusual but delightful idea of writing a sort of sacred dance over a pizzicato bass, a 6/8 siciliana which moves to A flat for a moment (a welcome relief from the rather wearing insistence on F minor). The final "Amen" seems somewhat superfluous (F minor again), after Maestro Fasano's excessive ritardando on the cadence of the previous section, which is in the same key.

[A] setting of Psalm 112, Beatus vir, [is] very much in the manner of the choral works that Handel composed during his youthful visit to Italy. It's presumably an occasional piece, very festive and secular in tone, though we don't know for whom he wrote it. Probably some Venetian Maecenas: "Well is it with the man that dealeth graciously and lendeth", runs the fifth verse.

Maestro Fasano asks the whole of his choir, the Polyphonic Ensemble of Rome, to sing the whole of the time. I doubt if Vivaldi really intended this, for many verses clearly demand the services of agile solo voices. The choir is the right size, however: only in verse two was I a little reminded of those awful performances of Handel's "The Lord is a man of war" sung by massed basses. Incidentally, the choral tone on this side sounds much better, to my ears at least, in the mono version: stereo here seems to expose the voices too much.

Beatus vir as a whole falls well below Handel's level. The idea of repeating the opening words to the same music as a refrain after nearly every verse sounds good in theory, but becomes predictable and a trifle boring in practice, even though the dynamics are varied. Individual sections, nevertheless, are often extremely fetching. I remember the Purcellian dotted runs at the end of verse 2 (and the rather alarming click that follows in the stereo version); the tripping duet for two sopranos in verse 3; above all the very beautiful trio for alto, tenor and bass, with its unusual but effortless triple invertible counterpoint, at the words "the righteous shall be had in everlasting memory". Later, at "Cor firmatur", Vivaldi writes an entertaining scherzando, pairing the voices in octaves, with a fine Handelian climax where the sopranos hold long notes against the faster rhythms of the lower voices. The pictorialism of the last verse is quite as amusing as that of The Four Seasons: we hear the wicked gnashing their teeth and melting away (the tenor runs are none too clear at this point). Finally, he repeats the orchestral introduction for the doxology, adding voice-parts and finishing off with an exciting coda.

The recording is on the whole excellent... Stereo is used to provide directional echo effects in Beatus vir where Vivaldi must surely have intended no more than a drop in dynamic from the same players: it's not a work for two orchestras, and indeed one would be hard put to find another band to match the superb playing of the Virtuosi di Roma.

-- Gramophone [8/1967]

Critical consensus never ranked this 1959 Gary Graffman/Charles Munch Brahms D minor concerto on par with its reference 1950s and '60s competitors (Fleisher/Szell, Serkin/Szell, Arrau/Giulini, Rubinstein/Reiner, and Katchen/Monteux), yet it's an exciting, inherently musical interpretation. You won't find Szell's gaunt, amazingly regimented orchestral image, Reiner's chamber-like dovetailing between winds and strings (the Rondo's fugato, for instance), Rubinstein's rounded, singing tone, Arrau's bottom-to-top technical finish, or the nuanced nervous energy with which Serkin and Fleisher hold your attention. Still, I can't think of any professional performer who wouldn't be glad to claim Graffman's tremendously solid, albeit simpler pianism. Indeed, Graffman's sense of forward sweep and sustaining power within long, introspective passages score over what Van Cliburn halfheartedly delivered in his own recording with the Boston Symphony a few years later.

Call Munch's subito fortes and frequent encouragement of the brass raw or just plain unsubtle if you have to, but at least credit him for bringing out details that other recordings rarely reveal. At measure 192, for example, how often do you hear the marcato motive that passes between the two horns, the violas, the second violins, and first violins so clearly projected--or similarly, the detail at measure 345, when the horns take up the main theme underneath the piano soloist's descending triplet sequence in the recapitulation? Furthermore, Munch achieves this despite the dynamically constricted and inconsistently balanced engineering. Reissued through Arkivmusic.com's "on demand" program, this disc is well worth hearing.

--Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com