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Reger: Clarinet Quintet & String Sextet / Johanns, Glassl, Yang, Diogenes Quartet
CPO · Jul 2020CD$18.99 -
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SaleBach: Secular Cantatas, Vol. 9 - Contest of Phoebus & Pan / Suzuki, Bach Collegium Japan
BIS · Jan 2018SACD$21.99$15.99 -
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SalePostcards from Grimethorpe - Music for Brass Band / Stamp, Grimethorpe Colliery Band
Toccata · Sep 2023CD$20.99$15.99 -
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Part: Tabula Rasa, Fratres, Passacaglia, Darf Ich & Spiegel im Spiegel / Mullova, Jarvi
ONYX CLASSICS · Sep 2018CD$20.49 -
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Orff: Ein Sommernachtstraum / Von Gehren, Andechser Orff-Akademie Des Munchner RO
CPO · Jul 2011CD$36.99
Dowland: Complete Lachrimae / Musicall Humors Viol Consort
‘London, April 1604. With the freshly printed partbooks of his Lachrimae under his arm, John Dowland walks from the printing house to his home in Fetter Lane. He should have been back in Denmark long ago, but for the moment all his thoughts are on the new publication he is carrying, his latest and most ambitious work to date: a complete cycle of instrumental music, twenty-one dances, honourably dedicated to Anne of Denmark, Queen of England.’ For Dowland has just completed one of the greatest masterpieces of Renaissance music. He had left England to enter the service of the Danish court, disappointed at not being appointed court composer to Elizabeth I, but he seems to have made the best of all his setbacks to compose this magnificent collection of purely instrumental works, much of it bathed in the melancholy typical of late sixteenth-century England.
Musicall Humors – a collective of the finest gambists of their generation – performs the complete set of pavans, galliards and ‘almands’, grouped into suites, each with its own character. A character inspired by the music, but reinforced here by the changing composition of the consort and the players taking turns to perform the ‘top line’, so that each musician’s personal playing style gives each piece a specific colour.
REVIEWS:
Dunford immerses the five-person gamba ensemble led by Julien Léonard and Lucile Boulanger in a rich and often extremely fragile-seeming web of voices and moods with a composure and sovereignty that moves and inspires. Everything breathes in the most wonderfully sonorous interplay, nothing groaning excessively. And when they dance, they maintain their posture and dignity like a dream.
-- ConcertoNet
We are faced with an absolutely referential recording, of intense and unprecedented beauty. Musicall Humors offers us the complete collection, but in a sequence of pavans followed by galliards, which refreshes our ears with the contrast, compared to the usual arrangement.
-- Scherzo
Glenn Gould in the Sixties
The rich Glenn Gould discography is enlarging of a series of recordings performed by the artist between 1960 and 1963 for the television and now are presented for the frist time on disc, after a digital remastering. Glenn Gould had a personal propension for some Beethoven, specifically Variations, Op. 34 and Op. 35, of which he often performed live when he was younger. His interpretation of the two movements Adagio ma non torppo and the fuga of Sonata No. 110 are really something unique in his career as a performer and artist. These masterpieces are now available for the public and Gould fans.
BEYOND (17TH CENTURY ARIAS)
Faure - Grzeszczak - Whitbourn: Masses
French Opera Arias / Von Stade, Pritchard, London Po
A case in point is Offenbach's "Ah! quel diner je viens de faire" from 'La Perichole.' Often referred to as the "drunk" aria, it is one of von Stade's signatures, and she slyly portrays the plastered dinner guest trying to hide the extent of her intoxication. In dramatic contrast, von Stade passionately sings of desperate love in "Dieu! Que viens-je d'entendre?" from 'Beatrice et Benedict.' She seems to thrive on the intricate orchestration of Berlioz, and her flawless French diction is a delight to the ear. This is an important disc for those interested specifically in this repertoire, and von Stade sings it better than anyone else.
Dreamers
Pintscher: Nemeton / Ensemble InterContemporain
| ‘Going all the way back to the Celts and the Druids, the term nemeton designates a place where forces and energies are crystallized, generally clearings where solemn or ritual actions were performed. The best-known nemeton is certainly Stonehenge. The architectural marvel of Chartres Cathedral is built on a nemeton. In composing this piece for solo percussion, I wanted to depict a “place” of this kind by means of sound. I’m utterly fascinated by the instrumentarium of this work, consisting chiefly of metal, wood and skin instruments that don’t have their own “specific” resonance. The trajectories between the different tones condition and define the energy charge, rather as if two beings, in the mad hope of an encounter, were rushing towards each other’, writes Matthias Pintscher as an introduction to one of the pieces in this monograph of works composed between 2000 and 2018: it also includes his violin concerto Mar’eh, the concerto for piano and ensemble Nur, Beyond for flute, Verzeichnete Spur, Lieder und Schneebilder, Celestial Object I & II and Occultation. |
Dreamspace
Reger: Clarinet Quintet & String Sextet / Johanns, Glassl, Yang, Diogenes Quartet
Max Reger’s oeuvre occupies a unique position between the centuries. His advanced compositional techniques made him one of the most frequently performed composers at the Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen in Vienna and meant that he was held in great esteem by Arnold Schönberg. His affinity for Bach in his settings as well as in his choice of forms, architectonic techniques, and specific instrumentations was just as obvious as his grounding in Romanticism and his veneration for Beethoven and Brahms. Reger’s ties to the tradition – in this case to Mozart and Brahms – were the point of departure for his Clarinet Quintet in A major op. 146, a work radiating an ease that hardly seems to have been disturbed by the circumstances of a world war. The major tonality of the work is unusual in the chamber music from Reger’s late period and something it shares with the String Sextet op. 118. Apart from the sextet, after 1909 it is found only in the Flute Serenade in G major op. 141a and in the clarinet quintet. In contrast to these two other works, however, the sextet is of much greater complexity in formal design and material elaboration, which happens to be assigned to a very obvious thematic presentation. Even though Reger did not live to experience the publication and premiere of the clarinet quintet, the string sextet received a posthumous tribute inasmuch as the study score was immured in the base of Reger’s funerary monument in the Waldfriedhof in Munich on 11 May 1930.
Bach: Secular Cantatas, Vol. 9 - Contest of Phoebus & Pan / Suzuki, Bach Collegium Japan
Most of Johannes Sebastian Bach’s secular cantatas were written for specific political, academic or private festive occasions. In the case of Geschwinde, ihr wirbelnden Winde, BWV 201, however, it may well be that Bach composed it for his own sake: the message conveyed in the work can be interpreted as a defence of Bach’s own artistry and musical attitudes against the trend of the time towards easier fare.
Subtitling the cantata ‘dramma per musica’, Bach sets an episode from Greek mythology in which Phoebus (Apollo) and Pan enter into a musical contest. Phoebus, the god of the arts, presents a beautifully balanced and technically accomplished aria, while Pan sings a rustic dance tune. The judges offer Phoebus the prize, but the verdict isn’t unanimous – King Midas prefers Pan’s catchy ditty, for which Phoebus punishes him by giving him donkey ears. On this amply-filled disc Bach’s praise of high art is followed by another tribute, now to Augustus III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland. It is likely that Augustus never knew that the same music had been used 10 years earlier to congratulate a Leipzig academic on his promotion: Auf, schmetternde Töne… BWV 207a is based almost entirely on Vereinigte Zwietracht der wechselnden Saiten, BWV 207. But Bach was something of the recycler’s recycler, and already BWV 207 included music from the First Brandenburg Concerto, with a choir added to the forces, and trumpets and timpani replacing the horns.
REVIEWS:
BWV201 is an enormous piece lasting over three-quarters of an hour...The score is packed with imaginative passages describing the landscape, the characters and the events of the preposterous mythological scenario. It is, needless to say, utterly superb music.
BWV207a...like the companion piece on this disc, is indulgently scored with trumpets and timpani in addition to the usual woodwind and strings. A grand and exciting sound it all makes too. Thirty minutes of the most glorious music.
It is almost superfluous to mention that the performers are excellent, the notes are detailed and scholarly and the recording is spectacular in its clarity and spaciousness but still a realistic sound picture of the recording space.
-- MusicWeb International
Altnickol & Bach: Bach's Family Choral Motets
Postcards from Grimethorpe - Music for Brass Band / Stamp, Grimethorpe Colliery Band
"A beautiful, rich, exciting brass sound...a fine tribute to one of the UK’s best brass bands." -- BBC Radio 3
When the American composer Jack Stamp was appointed International Composer-in-Association to the Grimethorpe Colliery Band in 2019; he conceived a recording project focused on works specifically written for the GCB; including compositions by himself and Liz Lane; the other GCB Composer-in-Association; alongside other pieces which have played a prominent role in the Band’s recent activities. The kaleidoscopic range of styles to be heard here displays the extraordinary virtuosity of one of the world’s best-known brass bands.
Mahler: Symphony No. 10 / Storgards, Lapland Chamber Orchestra
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REVIEW:
Having taken Deryck Cooke’s completion as the basis for her edition, Michelle Castelletti slims down the orchestra, not the argument. Meanwhile John Storgårds always cultivates legato, connects notes and episodes, privileges coherence over discontinuity and reminds us that the composer’s sketches preserved at least a single thread of melody running through almost the entire symphony. However you hear the Tenth, you’ll hear it differently after experiencing this one.
– Gramophone
From Venice to Leipzig - Organ Music / Manuel Tomadin
Whether or not they actually traveled south of the Alps, as Handel did early in his career, all 18th-century German composers of note were influenced by the Italian style of vocal and instrumental writing at the time. Manuel Tomadin’s latest album for Brilliant Classics explores the connections between these apparently disparate traditions, beginning with the Toccata, Adagio and Fugue BWWV564 which stands among the most striking examples of JS Bach’s work during his years as Capellmeister to the ducal court in Weimar (1710-1717). The Italian qualities of the concerto-like nature of the opening Toccata in BWV564 and then the pathos of the Adagio, with its walking bass and Neapolitan harmonies, are underlined by the following transcription made by Bach of a Vivaldi Concerto, the A minor RV522, and then Walther’s transcription of a concerto by Torelli. Just as Bach was later influenced by the violin playing and writing of the virtuoso Pisendel, German-born but widely traveled in Italy, Johann Gottlieb Graun was a pupil of Pisendel’s who had also studied with the prince of Italian violinist-composers, Giuseppe Tartini, and so Tomadin includes a solo-organ concerto of Graun’s which abounds in violinistic figuration. An arrangement of Handel’s opening Sinfonia to his oratorio Esther, another Vivaldi concerto and Bach’s magnificent A minor Prelude and Fugue BWWV543 complete this stimulating program.
This album is also a valuable record of the historically significant organ in St Peter’s Church in the Dutch town of Leens. Dating from 1733-34, and thus contemporary with the music recorded here, the instrument is the work of the Dutch organ-builder Albertus Anthoni Hinsz. He modelled his designs on the instruments by the Schnitger family who dominated North-German organ-building at the time, and the example in Leens is a superbly preserved and scrupulously restored example of this heritage. The booklet is generously annotated with an essay by Manuel Tomadin exploring the Italian connections between the music on the album, a history of the organ, a full stop-list and a record of the specific registration used for each piece.
Hugh Aston: Three Marian Antiphons / Blue Heron
Blue Heron has made the Peterhouse repertoire a specialty ever since its first concerts in 1999, in which the ensemble performed Aston's Ave Maria dive matris Anne, the opening track of the new disc. It is safe to say that Blue Heron has sung more of Nick Sandon's tenor lines than any other ensemble in North America, and never in ten years has any one in the group felt that a note he composed felt wrong. His quite amazing accomplishment is to have recreated a musical line that is utterly idiomatic, not merely to the general language of English music in the early sixteenth century, but to the local dialect and accent of one composer and, even more specifically, to that one composer's voice as heard in one piece in all its particularity. We-and Aston and Jones and Mason and all the other Peterhouse composers-owe him grateful thanks for restoring this marvelous music to us in singable form.
The CD booklet includes extensive notes by Nick Sandon on the Peterhouse partbooks, their place in history, and the process of restoring the missing music, as well detailed information concerning historical performance practice by Scott Metcalfe.
French Violin Sonatas
Weber: Der Freischutz / Chung, Teatro alla Scala
Also available on standard DVD
Weber was at the forefront of the rise of German Romantic opera and sought to dethrone Rossini from his position as the leading operatic composer in Europe. In his breakthrough and most popular opera Der Freischütz (‘The Marksman’) composed in 1821, he succeeded in his aim of establishing a truly German form. Turning to the folklore and folk songs of his native land he took a story of a marksman who makes a pact with the Devil, vesting it with powerful intensity – not least in the famous Wolf’s Glen scene – and an astonishing control of orchestral color and atmosphere.
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REVIEW:
Goodness, but Der Freischütz is a problematic opera for today! You can’t ignore it because it’s instrumental in the development of German musical Romanticism; several scholars would even call it its progenitor. Schumann, Mendelssohn, Wagner and Strauss would have been unthinkable without it, and even Beethoven, who was no friend of Weber’s, was impressed. However, it poses an all but insoluble problem in staging it for modern audiences. Its setting is so grounded in the Romantic German Forest that any attempts to remove it from there or to update its setting invariably fall flat or seem reductive (or simply indulgent). However, staging it in its original setting risks seeming like a parody of blood-and-soil National Socialism. This dilemma means that, more often than not, it’s one of those works where you’re far better to retreat into the pictures of your own mind’s eye, and happily we have lots of good CD recordings to help us do that, most notably those from Keilberth, Kleiber, Harnoncourt and Davis.
This 2017 La Scala production is a game-changer, however, and it does the best job I’ve yet seen of putting the opera on stage in a way that is neither daft nor wilfully obstructive. Matthias Hartmann goes for a mixture of the specific and the abstract. There are plenty of trees to put us in the forest, but well-placed strips of lighting suggest the church, the hut and the mountainscape behind. The costumes are a quirky mix of national dresses – ranging from Scotland to the Balkans – but, more importantly, Hartmann also gets into the work’s dark psychological possibilities, wondering whether Max’s obsession with the magic bullets is a mirror for his wider insecurities. He doesn’t shun the supernatural, however: various devils appear to direct Kaspar’s actions, and occasionally we see demonic creatures that might have been lifted out of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. Importantly, this eclecticism works. It poses many questions and gives every facet of the opera its due without getting trapped in any of them, and that alone makes this the opera’s most successful outing on film to date.
The musical performances are excellent too. Who would have thought that the La Scala orchestra would be so good at this cornerstone of the German repertoire? Their playing of the overture is one of the best you’ll hear, with dark, suggestive strings at the opening, a heart-stopping quartet of horns, and a crackling sense of drama in the main Allegro. Myung-Whun Chung is a natural with the whole score, too, shaping the unfolding drama with an unfailingly right sense of where it is going and how it is going to get there.
The singers are top-notch. Julia Kleiter is radiant, luxuriously beautiful in her two big arias without a hint of simpering, and Eva Liebau’s Ännchen is a delightfully light-hearted contrast. Both are fully comfortable in the tessitura and are a joy to listen to as well as to watch. Michael König has a tiny touch of abrasion in his Heldentenor voice, but I could forgive him for his heroic tone, and Stephen Milling does a wonderful deus ex machina as the Hermit. Best of all, though, is Günther Groissböck, whose Kaspar sets the stage alight, almost literally so in the Wolf’s Glen scene. He’s a powerhouse to watch, and he uses his big bass voice with agility and athleticism to bring the part to life.
I approached this with a good degree of scepticism, but I found it completely compelling and was totally won over. To my great surprise, it solves the problems of staging Der Freischütz for our time. With its compelling production and its brilliant musicianship, it is now a clear first choice for Der Freischütz on film, and it’s by some margin the best opera film I’ve seen in 2019 so far.
– MusicWeb International (Simon Thompson)
Maw: Violin Concerto / Joshua Bell, Roger Norrington, Et Al
This isn’t a new release. Maw’s Violin Concerto was written with Joshua Bell specifically in mind in 1993; the recording followed in September 1996. In the very enthusiastic sleeve-notes – I’m not sure how Maw feels about being described as a “genius” – great play is made of the work in relation to the Brahms Violin Concerto. Certainly it has a complex romantic affiliation but the composers’ names that occurred to me were those of Prokofiev and Walton. Not that Maw could be remotely taken to be either of them – but in its cultivation of an almost Italianate lyricism it does summon up the memory of Walton’s Mediterranean work and in its fusion of melodic beauty and scherzo drama it must pay at least oblique, tangential historical homage to Prokofiev.
The Concerto is cast in four movements. It opens with ruminative slowness but then opens out into a flourishing, rich and luminous sound world, bedecked by manifold orchestral and solo felicities; those little orchestral lurches toward the end for instance. The second movement is indeed Walton-like in its vivacity but Maw’s control of lingering lyricism, finely woven into the work’s fabric, ensures seamless warmth from the current-swell of dynamism that he generates. The lodestones here are Prokofiev and Barber but they’re securely absorbed into Maw’s lyric modernist world. The powerful cadential passage over a sustained orchestral chord is followed by a muted upwards drift into orchestral nothingness, a Cherubini-like stroke of translucent and mysterious beauty.
Maw’s predilection for major chords – the C major especially – permeates the third movement. Harmonies are richly complex and there are elements of post-impressionism in the writing, as well glimmers of Berg; but over and above such composer-spotting moments, which are essentially incidental, is the sense of luminous quiet, the rapture, the specific and yet endless personal landscape that Maw evokes. And when he unleashes the finale it comes brimful with tunes, vibrant and exciting, richly orchestrated.
Throughout Bell plays with the romantic ardour that Maw identified – and so admires – in him. His playing manages to balance scrupulous cleanliness of attack with tonal warmth and pliant phrasing. Norrington marshals the LPO in assured, colouristically aware fashion and the recording does full justice to the enterprise.
The Maw is a concerto that embraces its historical lineage without being shackled by it. If you admire the Berg, Barber, Walton and Prokofiev concertos, and like orchestration that is both luminous and pulsing then this is the work for you.
-- Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International
Part: Tabula Rasa, Fratres, Passacaglia, Darf Ich & Spiegel im Spiegel / Mullova, Jarvi
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REVIEW:
This is not music that hinges on sudden shifts and sharp contrasts. However, at its core lies the age-old dichotomy between freedom and control, head and heart…Mullova brilliantly manages to tease out these dichotomies on this new recording. In Fratres, she approaches each variation from a different angle. Sap and rosin fly off the bow in the coruscating arpeggio figurations of the opening chord sequence.
– Gramophone
Samaniego: La Vida Es Sueno / Los Musicos De Su Alteza
We know very little about Ruiz Samaniego, Kapellmeister in Saragossa during the second half of the 18th century. However, he left an abundant music production, including some villancicos. These polyphonic vocal works of theatrical origin have been adopted by the Church to celebrate their main feasts. Sung in Spanish, not in Latin, they are built on a religious thematic, mostly in the form of dialogues and they frequently use musical elements of popular origin. Very little explored, the Spanish Baroque vocal music is a world of many rich artistic treasures that cry to be rediscovered. The villancicos of Ruiz Samaniego are undoubtedly part of these treasures, as witnesses of an artistic universe specific to Spain, in which spirituality and sensuality are irremediably fused.
Mahler: Lieder / Christian Gerhaher
MAHLER Rheinlegendchen. Ich ging mit lust. Frühlingsmorgen. Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht? Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. Zu Strassburg auf der Schanz. Das irdische Leben. Nicht wiedersehen. Phantasie. Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen. 5 Rückert Lieder. Urlicht • Christian Gerhaher (bar); Gerold Huber (pn) • RCA RED SEAL 756773 (75:52 Text and Translation)
Christian Gerhaher’s generous Mahler recital offers samples of the early, unorchestrated Lieder und Gesänge aus der Jugendzeit (Early Songs and Ballads), several of the Des Knaben Wunderhorn songs, the early cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer), and the later set of five Rückert songs.
The program begins with three lighter songs, intimately sung. Doubts about Gerhaher’s vocal substance are dispelled in the Songs of a Wayfarer, which he sings with a fuller tone and greater dynamic range. It’s a great performance of Mahler’s early masterpiece. Gerhaher sometimes sounds like the young Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, particularly in his upper register, and his Wayfarer approaches the level of Fischer- Dieskau’s magical performance from 1952 with Fürtwangler conducting. (I call it “magical” because it captures Fischer-Dieskau at his most unaffected and therefore most affecting). Gerhaher doesn’t have as rich a lower register as Fischer-Dieskau, nor is his singing, at this stage, marred by the self-consciousness that sometimes affected the older singer.
There’s an appealing modesty to Gerhaher’s approach that suits Mahler’s folk-like early songs particularly well. The voice suggests a sensitive youth singing with great sincerity, which seems at odds with the singer’s unshaven, morose-looking cover photo. (Is this an attempt at marketing Mahlerian angst? Why?) Gerhaher’s lack of mannerisms and lovely though not particularly distinctive sound do not mean that he doesn’t interpret the darker songs with real intensity of emotion—he does. The two big Rückert songs, “Um Mitternacht” and “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,” are given satisfying readings, and “Das irdische Leben,” a feverish drama with narrator and several characters like Schubert’s “Erlking,” is strongly characterized.
There’s a treasurable version of the Rückert songs that Fischer-Dieskau recorded with Leonard Bernstein as pianist, a deeper, more italicized approach than Gerhaher’s—it seems to be currently unavailable—and there is also a wonderful concert performance by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson with Roger Vignoles, but I’m sure that I will return to Gerhaher’s performance for his natural manner of singing and for the outstanding contribution of the pianist, Gerold Huber.
I usually prefer to hear the songs that Mahler orchestrated played by an orchestra, but Huber’s piano playing has the rhythmic control of the greatest conductors. Every sound and balance is judged meticulously and his huge range of articulation and color sets a new standard in the playing of Mahler’s orchestral parts on the piano. Other than in the Rückert songs with their very delicate, specific instrumental timbres, I don’t miss the orchestra. The disc is well recorded and highly recommended.
FANFARE: Paul Orgel
I Will Bring You Home: Songs of Prayer, Stories of Faith / Haas
Tim Shriver, Chairman of Special Olympics International, Washington, DC writes: ‘I Will Bring You Home’ is a selection of 17 songs from David Haas’s book of the same name. David has been putting music on the lips of the people of God for over four decades, and this companion recording highlights some of his most beloved songs and hymns from throughout his prestigious career as a liturgical composer. It also includes two newly composed songs that David wrote specifically for this collection, “I Will Walk with You,” and “What Can I Leave Behind.” “We are called,” as David wrote, “to love tenderly.” But sometimes, we need to sing it to feel it and feel it to live it. No one helps us along that path of love better than David Haas. His work invites us to sing, feel, and live a life of love. No follower of the gospel could hope for more, and these stories help begin to tell us why.
Divine Hair - Mass In F
Twice before the producers and the cast of Hair had been involved in a loud and happy birthday party, both times in New York’s spacious Central Park. The events had been “happenings” for the young – particularly those committed to the Age of Aquarius. Just as easily and just as naturally the third anniversary could have been held in the Park, but Michael Butler, the world producer of Hair, felt otherwise. He wanted a service rather than a concert, and he wanted it in a specifically committed building, and yet he somehow wanted it to be large-hearted and generous with the non-committed. The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine seemed to be not only large enough, but also to have the necessary combination of splendor and “give” to insure a service of the character desired. The Bishop of New York and the Cathedral’s clergy, fully conscious that some of their constituents might quit the Christian religion, decided that this sort of thing was one of the reasons for having a Cathedral and went along happily with the whole idea.
Galt MacDermot’s Mass in F, sung by the choirs of St. Martin’s, Manhattan and St. Mary’s, Staten Island, furnished the music necessary for the Solemn Eucharist, and appropriate selections from Hair, sung by the New York cast and the Cathedral Choir, provided the Introit, Sequence, Offertory and the Response to the Blessing and Dismissal.
This recording conveys everything there is to be said about the vitality of the music and the spontaneous joy of all who were there. The calm splendor of the liturgy, constantly aware of the pulse of the music, provided that vibrant tension which is the essence of the drama of which religion is the mother. Its overtones united young and old, rich and poor and men and women, of every race and creed.
Lindberg & Golijov / Emil Jonason
Selected by ECHO (the European Concert Hall Organisation) as one of its ‘Rising Stars’ of the 2009/10 season, the Swedish clarinettist Emil Jonason has become increasingly visible on the international music scene. For his first release on the BIS label he has chosen to record a concerto written for him by his compatriot Christian Lindberg, composer, conductor and legendary trombonist. As Lindberg remarks in his own note on the work, the soloist was involved at all stages of the compositional process. But the Erratic Dreams are the composer’s own – as is the figure of Mr Grönstedt, the main character of those dreams, and of the six movements that make up the colourful score. In his teens, Emil Jonason was attracted by klezmer music, and played in various klezmer bands. It was therefore a natural choice to combine Lindberg’s concerto with the Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov’s work The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind. In contrast to Lindberg, Golijov found inspiration in a historic figure, the medieval rabbi Isaac the Blind, and his lifelong dedication to the ideas of the Kabbalah. Golijov describes the movements of his work being written in three of the different languages spoken by the Jewish people throughout its history: Aramaic, Yiddish (‘the rich and fragile language of a long exile’) and Hebrew. The work includes references to Jewish prayers as well as to klezmer tunes and the clarinettist is specifically requested by the composer to acquaint himself with the idiom of klezmer music.
Orff: Ein Sommernachtstraum / Von Gehren, Andechser Orff-Akademie Des Munchner RO
ORFF Ein Sommernachtstraum • Christian von Gehren, cond; actors; Andechs Fest Ch; Munich Youth O; Munich Radio O Andechs ORFF Academy • CPO 777 657 (146:09) Live: Andechs 7/28–30/2010
Carl Orff’s incidental music for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream grew out of the desire of the National Socialists—generally, but here specifically Frankfurt’s anti-Semitic Lord Mayor Friedrich Krebs—to produce an appropriately Aryan accompaniment to the play as replacement for the now inconveniently “Jewish” musical additions of Felix Mendelssohn. Orff, even as his scenic cantata Carmina burana was gaining popular acclaim in the new Germany, was concerned with his politically dubious reputation as a modernist and consorter with leftists during the Weimar years. So he took the commission despite warnings from his pragmatic publisher that he would never be able to “dispatch Mendelssohn.” In fairness, his interest in the Elizabethan comedy was real; he had been working on such incidental music since 1917. No doubt he also found the sizable advance attractive. But what had been politically expedient in 1938—he prospered during the Third Reich—was to haunt him after the war, however facile his explanations, and at the least diminishes any pleasure one might have in hearing what he has to offer.
Or maybe not. The audience certainly seems to enjoy this production from the 2010 Orff in Andechs Festival. It will be rougher going for anyone lacking fluent German. Though the story is well known, and the alert listener will be able to figure out what is happening some of the time, there is no text, translation, or synopsis, a serious failing shared with cpo’s other recording from this festival, the Orff/Monteverdi Orpheus . My admiration goes out to anyone who, textless, can happily attend for more than two hours and 20 minutes to heavily edited Shakespeare in German, with attractively dreamlike but inconsequential and repetitive music cues that cannot even be appreciated in context of the words they are to amplify.
Cynicism aside, one is left wondering what Orff did to earn his substantial commission. Many of the handful of independent pieces are adaptations of other compositions: The prelude is from Carmina burana (“Si puer cum puellula”) transformed into a fanfare, used again in full as a replacement for the wedding march. The Rustics are introduced (in this version of 1964) with music from the 1943 fairy tale opera Die Kluge, which, in this context, jars with its banality. Annotator Thomas Rösch suggests other sources: Carmina burana again (“Chramer, gip die varwe mir”) for Titania’s lullaby, and an allusion to the act II duet for Octavian and Sophie from Der Rosenkavalier for the moonrise scene. I suppose one could make a game out of identifying the remaining borrowed themes, but I’ll leave that to others.
There are magical moments; the playing of the trumpet to the moon has the same charm as the ending of Der Mond , the prelude to the ninth scene in Theseus’ palace recalls moments of repose in the famous cantata, and the wonderful midnight melodrama (though I would have wanted Puck’s speeches done less malevolently) and finale (name that source!) provide a fitting end. Would that it all had been so engaging. The youth orchestras, and the chorus in its brief outings, are able; the recording clear for those for whom German is not an obstacle. The birds chirping in the forest are a nice touch. In any case, though my curiosity has been only partly satisfied, at least now, thanks to cpo, the historical footnote is made tangible. You might want to check the samples online before buying. And find a translation.
FANFARE: Ronald E. Grames
