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Debussy: Image, La mer, Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune / Bernstein
C Major Entertainment · Mar 2010DVD$32.99 -
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SaleBonporti: Sonatas, Op. 6 for 2 Violins & B.C. / Labirinti Armonici
Brilliant Classics · Oct 2023CD$13.99$6.99 -
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SaleR. Strauss & Copland / Stamp, Academy of London, Royal Northern Sinfonia
Signum Classics · Jan 2021CD$19.99$9.99 -
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Saled'Albert: Cinderella Suite, Little Mermaid, Overtures / Markl, Leipzig Radio
Naxos · Apr 2014CD$19.99$9.99 -
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Leshnoff: Violin Concerto no. 1, String Quartet no. 1 / Wetherbee, Carpe Diem Quartet
Naxos · Feb 2009CD$19.99 -
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SaleBach: Orchestral Suites 2 & 3; Chaconne - Transcribed for Organ / Wolfgang Rübsam
Brilliant Classics · Nov 2023CD$13.99$6.99 -
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SaleDornel: Livre De Simphonies Contenant 6 Suittes En Trio / Musica Barocca
Naxos · Jul 2008CD$19.99$9.99 -
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De Visee: La Musique De La Chambre Du Roy Vol 2 / Marchese, Ippolito, Tomadin, Staropoli
Brilliant Classics · Sep 2013CD$13.99 -
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Debussy: Image, La mer, Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune / Bernstein
Claude Debussy: Images, Prélude à l'apres-midi d'un faune, La Mer
Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia
Leonard Bernstein, conductor
Recorded live from the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Rome, 1989.
Picture format: NTSC 4:3
Sound format: PCM 2.0 / DTS 5.1
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Booklet notes: English, German, French
Running time: 86 mins
No. of DVDs: 1 (DVD 9)
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DEBUSSY Images pour orchestre. Prélude à l’près-midi d’un faune. La Mer • Leonard Bernstein, cond; Santa Cecila Natl Academy O • UNITEL 701608 (DVD: 86: 00)
Although Debussy did not figure largely in Bernstein’s repertoire, the conductor had an innate affinity for the composer’s music. We are therefore fortunate to have this concert, from scarcely a year before Bernstein’s death, preserving his interpretations of this repertoire in digital sound. Bernstein’s older Columbia recordings with the New York Philharmonic from 1960–63 are also still in print, although to duplicate this particular program one must acquire two different CDs (one from Sony, the other an ArkivMusic reissue). Those performances, however, are completely superseded by the present ones, both sonically and interpretively. In his later years Bernstein became decidedly self-indulgent, and his performances sometimes assumed bloated dimensions, as in the famous (or notorious) 1989 Christmas Day Berlin performance of the Beethoven Ninth. (I was blessed to attend that concert in person, being resident in East Berlin for my doctoral dissertation research at the time. As an interpretation it verged on the preposterous, but I still wouldn’t have missed it for all the world.) Here, however, he is in top form, eliciting performances with superb clarity of line, pellucid orchestral color and instrumental balance, and moderate tempi that are convincingly right at every point. Debussy is not the first thing I, as someone partial to Romantic German and Slavic orchestral repertoire, think to take off the shelf for personal listening pleasure, but Bernstein leaves me marveling at the sheer genius of these masterworks, providing a joy of rediscovery.
There are of course many performances of these works available on CD; most readers will already have their favorites, so I will not assay a broader discussion that in any case would exceed the bounds of this review. Regarding performances on DVD, this is the only complete performance of Images available. (For whatever reason, Bernstein altered the order of its three movements and placed Iberia in third position.) The Naxos issue with Alexander Rahbari and the Belgian Radio Symphony, which also has the Prélude and La Mer , omits Iberia in favor of the Nocturnes ; those are solid performances but not in the same class as these. The only other DVD to feature both the Prélude and La Mer is with Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic, reviewed negatively by Christopher Abbot in Fanfare 26:2 and positively by Colin Clarke in 32:3. I do not intend to enter the lists of the debates between champions and detractors of the German and American maestros; suffice it to say that in these works I prefer Bernstein’s clarity and sense of motion to Karajan’s lushness and perfumed languor. His DVD has more interesting camerawork to boot, with better lighting and more varied and better close-ups of the instrumentalists. The sound quality is excellent, the recordings having been made for commercial issue at the time. For those with more slender wallets, or who are uninterested in the visual aspects of an orchestral concert, these same performances were issued on CD by DG and are still in print as an ArkivMusic reissue. Strongly recommended.
FANFARE: James A. Altena
Zemlinsky & Schreker / Gielen, ORF Vienna Radio Symphony
Alexander Zemlinsky composed his Lyric Symphony op. 18 for soprano, baritone and orchestra during his time as musical director of the New German Theatre in Prague, where he had moved in 1911 from Vienna. It was generally regarded as his corresponding equivalent to Mahler’s Lied von der Erde (C210021) and is based on Nobel Prize laureate and most important representative of modern Indian literature Rabindranath Tagore. The work is combined with the befriended and three years older ‘phantasmogorist’ Franz Schreker’s Prelude to a Drama, which is a version of the overture of his Die Gezeichneten. It might be considered symptomatic for the most notable characteristic of Schreker’s music: the dominance of chordal sounds over the melodic element.
REVIEW:
Zemlinsky’s seven-movement Lyric Symphony lays claim to being his best-known work and is certainly the only one to attract a significant number of prominent conductors. This live account from Vienna in 1989 was Gielen’s second recording of the work, and it finds him in prime form. He leads a powerful orchestral reading that is all the more impressive because Vienna’s proficient Radio Symphony was the last orchestra I expected to be virtuosic. Every section is totally committed to the score’s voluptuous passions, however, and the recorded sound from Austrian Radio is wonderfully clear and vivid, no small achievement where Zemlinsky’s dense orchestration is concerned.
In the soprano part the choice has typically been big, dramatic voices on the order of Deborah Voigt and Alessandra Marc. Karen Armstrong can’t compete in that league, and wisely she doesn’t try to. By not pushing her voice, singing the chromatic lines accurately, and paying attention to the verse, she delivers a more than respectable performance. But realistically neither singer has the most beautiful or distinctive voice. Orfeo supplies no texts or translations, which means that this recording can only be supplementary to one that does. There are enough drawbacks, despite Gielen’s outstanding conducting, to place this release somewhere in the middle of the pack.
The pairing of Franz Schreker’s 20-minute Prelude to a Drama from 1914 isn’t a new addition to Gielen’s discography, since it also served as the filler to his Mahler Fourth Symphony. The Prelude is rich in themes and incidents, and so skillfully structured that it can be analyzed as a sonata movement. Schreker was a colorist, as he described himself: “I am a sound artist, a phantasmagorist of sound, a sound-aesthete, and there’s not a trace of melody in me.”
The music is lovely, and Gielen’s performance glows with ardent feeling, not a mode I associate with him.
For me the evocation of history hangs heavily over this release, but it holds considerable musical rewards, too, especially for aficionados of an aesthetic doomed to be wiped out through political denunciation.
-- Fanfare (Huntley Dent)
Bonporti: Sonatas, Op. 6 for 2 Violins & B.C. / Labirinti Armonici
Volume 4 in a critically acclaimed survey of Bonporti’s music reaches Op.6, perhaps the most overlooked treasure in the output of the ‘gentleman from Trento’. This was the nickname bestowed on himself by Francesco Antonio Bonporti (1672 - 1749), who was born in the northern Italian city, and made his career as a musician in the surrounding region before dying in Padova.
The Opus 6 collection of trio sonatas was published in 1705, and dedicated to the Roman prince Carlo Colonna, who had played a pivotal role in the career of the young Handel as his patron. Perhaps it has been comparatively neglected because of its relatively archaic form: by 1705, a collection of trio sonatas amounted to a tribute to the past, a kind of rite of passage through which every young composer of distinction should pass, before moving on to the more overtly impressive and demanding genres of concerto and solo sonata. Inevitably, the model for any composer of Bonporti’s era was the Op.1 collection of trio sonatas by Arcangelo Corelli. Bonporti’s Op.6 proves itself a worthy successor.
All ten sonatas are arranged in a three-movement form, mostly opening with a Prelude and then a pair of Baroque dances: courantes, gigues, gavottes and sarabandes, though now so stylised as to be distant from their original purpose. This somewhat minimalist form of trio sonata does not employ the theatrical devices heard in some Italian chamber music of the time; there is even a sense of melancholy restraint about Bonporti’s language in Op.6, as though he was straining towards an expressive freedom which emerges in later opus numbers. This tension is held in balance, however, and poured into a harmonic language of delicately placed suspensions which reach a highpoint in the chromatic opening prelude to the Seventh Sonata.
Reviewing Bonporti’s Op.2 Sonatas on Brilliant Classics with Labirinti Armonici (95718), Raymond Tuttle in Fanfare concluded, ‘These performances are excellent, ideally balancing energy and gracefulness… I can think of nothing bad to say about these sonatas and these performances. This disc has raised my curiosity about Bonporti, and I think that is recommendation enough.’
Debussy & Ravel / Roth, London Symphony
Franz Liszt Transcriptions
LISZT Ad nos, ad salutarem undam Fantasy and Fugue for organ and orchestra (arr. Dupré). Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen (orch. Weiner). Orpheus, for organ (trans. Liszt). Prelude and Fugue on B-A-C-H (orch. Bischof) • Martin Haselböck, cond; Christian Schmitt (org); Deutsche RP (Saarbrücken/Kaiserslautern) • CPO 777 472–2 (69:58)
During his Weimar years, Liszt’s friend, the organist Alexander Winterberger, spurred his interest in the organ, prompting the composition of two of his most ambitious works, the Ad nos… Fantasy and Fugue (1850) and the Prelude and Fugue on B-A-C-H (1855, revised 1870). Thereafter, Liszt experimented, transcribing a number of his own works, including the tone poem Orpheus . The Weinen, Klagen,… variations, composed for piano in 1862, were transcribed for organ the following year. Considering the metamorphoses visited upon them by their composer, the step to orchestral arrangements by other hands was small, if ambitious. Depending on venue and acoustics, the instrument, registrations, and the acumen of engineers, these organ works can come across as towering masterpieces or murky monster-pieces. One of the joys of the orchestral transcriptions is hearing details often covered in cavernous rumble or obscured by distance on the organ standing forth boldly from the orchestra, their intricacies revealed, while their climactic moments acquire major clout and transparency. Weiner’s tilt at Weinen, Klagen,… is indebted to mid-19th-century models, highlighting a Gothic, cobwebby aura clinging to Liszt’s kaleidoscopic variations. Rainer Bischof’s take on the BACH Prelude and Fugue , on the other hand, is brash, brassy, and unabashedly modern in its use of an overloaded wind and percussion contingent (in addition to the cited vibraphone, do I hear a wood block, tubular bells, and a glockenspiel, among other novelties?) to make for metallic brilliance, glittering passage work, and climactic cataclysmics. The Gothic stunner, however, is Marcel Dupré’s arrangement of the Ad nos … Fantasy and Fugue for organ and orchestra, a feat placing what many believe to be Liszt’s greatest single work in company with the Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony and Poulenc’s Concerto for Organ and Orchestra.
One expected more of Christian Schmitt, whose recent go at Koechlin’s organ works (CPO 777 512–2, Fanfare 36:4) demonstrated an arresting keenness to that composer’s psychic, haunted atmospherics. His Orpheus is well-paced in the way that one thing leads to another, though having heard performances in which episodes escalate with fraught portent—e.g., Olivier Vernet’s solo rendering, or, as we’re considering transcriptions, his duo with Laurent Cabasso on piano (a six-CD intégrale , Ligia 0104226–11)—Schmitt’s dynamic range and resources of feeling are audibly constricted. The Ad nos … arrangement compels more adventurous playing, but Schmitt is disadvantaged by the recessed capture of the organ in Luxembourg’s Philharmonic Hall which allows orchestral overshadowing. That said, the upshot is still thrilling, magnificent, and magisterial. To the last point, one may feel that, in their orchestral and orchestra/organ garb, one is hearing these works for the first time. Martin Haselböck, himself an organist of exceptional prowess, who has performed the originals many times and recorded them at least twice, leads with a sweep alert to detail and, in the Ad nos … Fantasy and Fugue , manages the organ/orchestra dialogue with potent eloquence, though the recording imbalance becomes distracting in the fugue. The orchestral works come across in immediate, transparent, often walloping sound. Enthusiastically recommended.
FANFARE: Adrian Corleonis
R. Strauss & Copland / Stamp, Academy of London, Royal Northern Sinfonia
The four works on this release, all composed in the 1940s, embrace the lingering end of one musical tradition and the vigorous upsurge of another. Mellifluous, retrospective and playful, the Duet Concertino and Prelude to Capriccio were works from Richard Strauss’s final phase – an old man’s refuge from the barbarism of war and its aftermath. What the public thought of them was incidental, even irrelevant. In the same decade, Aaron Copland and other younger American composers were reaching out, via radio, recordings and film, to a new mass audience. The European influence of Appalachian Spring and the Clarinet Concerto, though inescapable, was minimized in a populist, vernacular idiom that absorbed folk music and jazz.
Richard Stamp unites some of the finest instrumentalists from the UK and Europe in these performances – featuring celebrated orchestras the Academy of London and the Royal Northern Sinfonia with renowned Austrian soloists Ernst Ottensamer and Stepan Turnovsky. Stepan Turnovsky joined the Vienna State Opera and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1978 and has kept the position of Solo Bassoonist there since 1985, performing with conductors such as Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein, Karl Böhm, Carlos Kleiber amongst many others. The late Ernst Ottensamer was a former principal clarinettist at the Vienna Philharmonic and an avid performer of chamber music – founding numerous ensembles and collaborating with musicians such as Sir Simon Rattle, André Previn, Daniel Barenboim and Rudolf Buchbinder amongst others. In 2005 he found a clarinet trio with his sons Daniel and Andreas Ottensamer – themselves the Principal Clarinettists of the Vienna Philharmonic and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestras. This present performance represents his last concerto recording.
REVIEW:
It is for the two Strauss performances that I can offer an enthusiastic thumbs up. Ernest Ottensamer died suddenly in 2017 at the age of 61, and the Copland was his last concerto recording. That, too, adds to the value of this release. Signum deserves gratitude for saving all four performances from being lost and forgotten.
– Fanfare
The Age of the Russian Avant-Garde - Futurists & Traditionalists
Modernity in Russian music emerged despite its struggles with the Soviet regime in the early 20th century, with the mystical vision of Scriabin’s musical legacy providing a foundation on which to build. In these acclaimed albums we discover Medtner’s life affirming Sonatas, and hear Lourié’s journey from Impressionism to pioneering Cubist conceptions. Mosolov’s works are bold and complex, while Roslavets new tonal system brings ‘fi re and ice’, and Stanchinsky’s sophisticated virtuosity anticipates many aspects of 20th-century style. These remarkable works represent a time of profound change in Russian culture that is still being discovered and assessed today.
Past praise for previously released volumes included in this set:
Mosolov: Complete Works for Solo Piano / Andryushchenko
These are outstanding performances of works that deserve to be heard. The sonatas, in particular, are impressive and, though Scriabin’s spirit runs through much of these compositions they are fine works in their own right.
-- The Classical Reviewer
Louriè: Complete Piano Works, Vol. 1 / Koukl
Arthur Lourie turns out to be a pretty darn good composer—too good to have been left in the attic trunk all these years. The Five Fragile Preludes, Op. 1, have a natural flow to them, and an inevitability that is both rhythmically and harmonically arresting in an impressionism somewhat redolent of Debussy mixed with early Scriabin. While exceedingly brief, they are lovely, perfect jewels. All of this is well described in Anthony Short’s notes, a recording of demonstration quality, and a pianist totally in tune with the music.
-- American Record Guide
Medtner: Complete Piano Sonatas, Vol. 2 / Stewart
Paul Stewart’s love and admiration for Medtner’s music come through strongly in these performances, which require a great range of treatment from the gentlest of touches, sometimes merely brushing the keys, whilst at others displaying a towering emotional intensity. His ability to bring out the poetry in Medtner is impressive and the recording is crisp, which combination makes for a hugely satisfying experience.
-- MusicWeb International
Roslavets: Complete Piano Works / Andryushchenko
For those listeners yet to encounter this fascinating figure, please fear not—Roslavets’ work is appealing on a number of levels and you will find much to enjoy on this terrific pair of discs.
-- MusicWeb International
Louriè: Complete Piano Works, Vol. 2 / Koukl
I am glad to have had the opportunity to hear so much of Lourié’s music which is so interesting and so tuneful and so varied it seems he was a chameleon in more than just his assumed persona but in his music as well and it’s all the better for it; variety is the spice of music as well as of life itself. Giorgio Koukl is nothing if not a consistently impressive advocate of whichever composer’s music he takes it upon himself to focus on and I thoroughly recommend this disc to all lovers of solo piano music.
-- MusicWeb International
Stanchinsky: Complete Piano Works, Vol. 1 / Solovieva
The short-lived Alexey Stanchinsky (1888-1914) has shown up on my Want Lists before, but despite devoted advocacy by a few pianists, his Scriabin-inspired music hasn’t caught on. It’s not clear why: His works are wildly inventive in their treatment of rhythm, harmony, and counterpoint—and while he died before he got to solidify his style, the dizzying sense of adventure in even his earliest works is palpable. May this new release by Olga Solovieva (the first volume of a complete cycle) be the one that turns the tide.
-- Fanfare
Muffat: 12 Suites
Bach - Gambensonaten / Stadtfeld, Vogler
BACH Sonatas for Viola da Gamba and Basso: in G, BWV 1027 ; in D, BWV 1028 ; in g, BWV 1029 . Chorale Preludes from the Orgelbüchlein: “Jesu meine Freude,” BWV 610; “Vom Himmel hoch,” BWV 606; “Gottes Sohn is kommen,” BWV 600; “In dir ist Freude,” BWV 615; “Der Tag, der ist so freudenreich,” BWV 605; “Herr Christ, der ein’ge Gottes Sohn,” BWV 601; “Vom Himmel kam der Engel Schar,” BWV 607; “Herr Gott, nun schleufz den Himmel auf,” BWV 617 • Jan Vogler (vc); Martin Stadtfeld (pn) • SONY 88697575192 (54:27)
The three sonatas for viola da gamba and basso composed by Johann Sebastian Bach probably during the last year or so he spent in Weimar are repertoire staples, both for early-music practitioners and for performers on modern instruments, such as the viola or the cello. As such they are almost required repertoire and there is a plethora of recordings, both on period instruments and modern, available in the catalog. This particular rendition introduces cellist Jan Vogler and pianist Martin Stadtfeld in another of those attempts to reenvision these venerable works in an unusual and perhaps even unique way. As the rather perfunctory booklet notes state: “Performing these three works on the cello and piano has long since become established as an alternative that combines knowledge of performing practice in Bach’s time with the striving for tonal expression that has analytical clarity [that] benefits the dialogue character of these sonatas.” All right, one supposes, as a generic goal, but it is clear that this particular recording seems more the result of a discussion between the two performers than one more attempt to find a unique reconfiguration of conventional and well-known pieces. Since the three works are short, the two chose a selection of chorale preludes from Bach’s Orgelbüchlein to fill out the disc. And of course, having these performed by the cello/piano duo presents another take on the short practical pieces that Bach attempted to write for the entire liturgical year (he only finalized 46 out of an intended 164 chorales). As they say, they were “taking up the challenge of reproducing on their instruments Bach’s compositional technique that varies between festive splendor and intimate melancholy.” I suppose that is enough to link these various pieces to the gamba sonatas, but to my ear they come off more like encores than the sort of experiment proposed.
I’ve always considered the gamba sonatas to be good if typical representatives of the early 17th-century German style. Two of the works are in the typical four-movement format, while the last, BWV 1029 in G Minor, reflects a more modern three-movement pattern typical of the Italian secular style just coming into vogue. Bach is quite adept at the intricate spinning out of his main themes in the fast movements, altering the motives just enough to provide interest and weaving the continuo and solo lines in subtle ways that avoid mechanical repetition. One hears echoes of the short didactic works from the Anna Magdalena Notebook in the second movement of the G Major, while the Andante of the D Major could have come straight out of a Vivaldi concerto. (It is interesting to note that around this time Bach was angling for another position at Cöthen and studying Vivaldi intensely.) The first movement of the G Minor could almost be a replacement for Brandenburg 6, with close thematic similarities abounding. In short, these are solidly composed and well worth having in one’s collection of Baroque chamber music.
The issue that surrounds this disc is really that it is yet another recording on modern instruments, when so many fine examples of the works on period instruments can be found. I don’t propose to reopen what has to be a real can of worms here, but let me state right out that while idiomatic performances do bring out much of the sound world Bach originally created in these sonatas, he at least would not have particularly objected to their being performed on whatever was available at the time. Moreover, from the benefit of almost three centuries of instrumental development, these still resonate, whether on period instruments or modern. Both Vogler and Stadtfelt are fine performers. Their execution of the sonatas is clean and finely nuanced. Yes, there is more than a little bit of modern vibrato and resonant tone, but because they are rather equally matched, this gives their performance a rounded sound that brings out some of the technical subtleties of the composition. Sometimes they do miss an occasional beat; for example, in the Adagio of the G-Minor Sonata the cello mezza di voce is bland, not at all the resonant increasing vibrato that the sustained tone calls for, but by and large these are decent performances. The only rather weak areas are the chorale preludes. These, unfortunately, do not “vary between festive splendor and intimate melancholy,” but rather sound sort of like background music one might find in a romance film. They are universally romantic in their performance, and neither of the players really has a sense of what these things were supposed to do in real life. They would be good encores after particularly rousing applause, but they don’t really belong with the gamba sonatas. The final word on this disc is that these are all right, especially if you are a budding cellist who has contemplated your own performance of the sonatas. Period-instrument devotees will find this yet another anathema, but if you take it in the spirit of presenting a collaboration between two relatively new names in the field, then you might want to add this to your collection.
FANFARE: Bertil van Boer
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If Bach's viola da gamba and harpsichord sonatas played on the cello and piano hold appeal, then you'll very likely enjoy these direct, clear-lined, slightly dry, yet intelligently interactive and texturally contrasted performances. Jan Vogler applies vibrato discreetly, yet never sacrifices tonal values in the process. Vogler's haunting, alto-like timbre above the staff weaves aural magic in slower movements and in the chorale-prelude transcriptions that bookend the sonatas. With the ghost of Glenn Gould gently hovering above, Martin Stadtfeld's dry-point articulation, rhythmic incisiveness, and sparkling trills significantly contribute to the mix (incidentally, Sony ought to release Stadtfeld's excellent Goldberg Variations in the U.S.). The cover photo seems less worthy of Bach than of Saturday Night Fever.
--Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com
British Opera Overtures / Bonynge, Victorian Opera Orchestra
BRITISH OPERA OVERTURES: English Opera in the Nineteenth Century • Richard Bonynge, cond; Victorian Opera O • SOMM 0123 (74:36)
BENEDICT The Lily of Killarny. BARNETT The Mountain Sylph. BALFE The Siege of Rochelle. Le Puits d’amour. LODER The Night Dancers. WALLACE Lurline. The Amber Witch. Love’s Triumph Prelude. MACFARREN She Stoops to Conquer. THOMAS The Golden Web
For the most part, these are pleasant, skillfully wrought pieces, though some may deride them as a mere parade of pleasant tunes. I imagine the annotator makes a valid point in blaming the librettos of the operas they precede for the music’s demise in popularity. If you’re really curious, a few of them have made their way to recordings. John Barnett’s opera The Mountain Sylph is based on the same story that resulted in the venerable ballet La Sylphide (1836), composed by Herman Løvenskiold with choreography by August Bournonville. Like Rossini, Duparc, and Sibelius, Barnett severely curtailed or stopped his composing, in his case, from 1841 until his death in 1890. During his long life, he met Beethoven and studied with Weber. On the other hand, Edward Loder’s The Night Dancers uses some of the same plot as another venerable ballet, Giselle (1841), and Puccini’s opera Le villi, but no unfaithful bridegrooms have to dance to their deaths—it all turns out to have been a bad dream. Unlike Barnett, Loder attempts a few spooky effects in his Overture. Probably the most successful of these Victorian composers was Michael William Balfe, who is represented by two overtures, those to The Siege of Rochelle and Le Puits d’amour (“The Well of Love”—it’s also a French pastry with a hollow center). The latter work, with a libretto by Scribe, was first presented in Paris. His first London success was The Siege of Rochelle , his fourth opera. He went on to compose 24 more, of which the most successful was The Bohemian Girl . Unlike most of these operas, William Wallace’s Lurline , based on the Lorelei legend, has actually been recorded. Both the Overture and that to his The Amber Witch seem more engaged by the story than some of the overtures I have mentioned. George Macfarren’s She Stoops to Conquer is, as expected, based on Oliver Goldsmith’s 1773 play. Some composers have continued to create even after they became deaf, or nearly so; Macfarren wrote She Stoops to Conquer after he had gone blind. It has not been recorded but there is a recording of another of his operas, Robin Hood . I am grateful to Richard Bonynge for his interest in obscure vocal and dance music which has resulted in some delightful recordings—in fact, I’m interested in almost anything he chooses to record. One can enrich the catalog without adding another Beethoven symphony cycle to it.
FANFARE: James Miller
Respighi: Works for Orchestra / Mustonen, Oramo, FRSO
RESPIGHI Concerto in modo misolidio 1. Fountains of Rome • Sakari Oramo, cond; 1 Olli Mustonen (pn); Finnish RSO • ONDINE 1165 (53:53)
Sakari Oramo and his Finnish forces give us a sensitive if not outstandingly atmospheric performance of the earliest of Respighi’s Roman trilogy, the Fountains of Rome of 1916. The big moments are somewhat hampered by a lack of string power. The violins do not contribute as much as they should to the climax of the third movement (“Fontana di Trevi al meriggio”) and, unfortunately, the success of these Roman tone poems lies in balancing the weight of the fortissimos against the quiet passages of impressionistic introspection. The latter are meltingly played, with details like the distant church bells in the “Fontana di Villa Medici” perfectly balanced.
The main work on this disc is a rarity. Completed in 1925 and premiered in New York under Mengelberg, the Concerto in Mixolydian Mode is a large-scale Romantic piano concerto imbued with medieval church harmonies. Much of the first movement sounds like an extended fantasia on Debussy’s Engulfed Cathedral , beginning as it does with a chorale in full chords stated by the soloist. (The theme is based on the traditional introit for the Mass of Ascension Day.) The mixolydian mode is close to the major scale—only a flattened seventh differentiates them—and the piano’s first entry avoids that note, sounding for all intents and purposes to be in a major key. Gradually, modal harmony creeps in as the composer’s evocation of an earlier era is established.
Respighi’s concept of medieval times was, let us say, the polar opposite of Pasolini’s bawdy, earthbound vision; the composer envisaged the period as one of grandeur and ecclesiastical solemnity. These are the overriding characteristics of the lengthy first and second movements, which work their way through a number of musical episodes at an unhurried pace. In the second movement, the piano part becomes increasingly decorative, adding a glittering veneer to the basically sedate proceedings. Momentum is finally achieved in the passacaglia finale, but for all their lushness and lyricism it is probably the lack of impetus in the first two movements (totaling 27 minutes) that keeps Respighi’s concerto out of the repertoire. His Concerto Gregoriano for violin and orchestra of 1922, similarly based on ancient church modes, is more successful, though it too has its longeurs, while his 25-minute Toccata for piano and orchestra (1928)—another piano concerto in all but name—is saved by its spectacular final movement.
I have no wish to write this work off, however. There is a case to be made for it, and these musicians make that case convincingly. Olli Mustonen plays with uncharacteristic legato . Listen to his limpid interpretation of the first movement’s closing solo (around 15:30); this is certainly not the pianist who pecks his way through Beethoven. His lightness of touch in the passagework of the finale is a delight. This is very much a concerto where soloist and orchestra work as a partnership, and under Oramo the Finnish RSO contributes strong and often subtle support. The sound is clear and vivid. Previous recordings by Tozer and Scherbakov have been praised, but I cannot imagine them being superior in any way to this one. Recommended as a disc that could easily grow on you.
FANFARE: Phillip Scott
Respighi was proud of his Concerto in modo misolidio, and rightly so. It's a beautiful work, full of attractive melodies and effective writing for the soloist, and it deserves more exposure on the concert stage than it gets. This is hands down the best performance it has received thus far on disc. It's so typical that Mustonen (rather like Leopold Stokowski), who can be so perverse in his performances of the standard repertoire, offers such a faithful rendering of the piano part when confronted with a novelty item. This isn't to suggest that his performance lacks imagination or spirit: just the opposite. However, Respighi gives the soloist so much to do (much of the part is written on three staves) that there's certainly less room to fool around gratuitously, and so Mustonen doesn't.
The main competition in this work comes from Tozer/Downes on Chandos, a good performance that nonetheless sounds more than a touch stodgy next to this one. It takes some five minutes longer, almost all of it the central slow movement and concluding passacaglia. Mustonen and Sakari Oramo's extra energy in these movements pays huge dividends, effectively belying any view of the work as pretty but formally ungainly and lacking excitement. This is certainly the version to choose to get to know the concerto, particularly if you're coming to it for the very first time.
Only the coupling prevents this disc from getting the very highest rating. Actually, this is an excellent performance of Fountains of Rome, very well played, and glitteringly captured by the engineers. But there are many such, and it's a skimpy disc-mate, bringing total playing time only to 53 minutes. It would have been so much nicer to have some more neglected Respighi--my vote would have gone to a new version of Metamorphoseon, which shares a similar aesthetic to that of the piano concerto, or perhaps even the similarly modal Concerto gregoriano for violin. Still, as the finest version available of the main item, this disc will be self-recommending to Respighi fans (and piano buffs too).
--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com
Dance of the Night Sky
Kornauth: Piano Music Vol. 1 / Powell
The music of the Czech-born Viennese composer Kornauth (1891-1959) was once a staple of Austrian concert-halls. It has been largely forgotten in the half-century since his death. In this pioneering recording, British pianist Jonathan owell uncovers the many strands that fed into Kornauth’s rich and full-bodied compositions.
REVIEW:
This is the first full disc of piano music by Egon Kornauth, a composer born in what is now Olomouc in the Czech Republic (and was then Olmütz) who studied with Robert Fuchs in Vienna and then later with Schreker and Franz Schmidt.
Jonathan Powell is one of the most eloquent commentators on the music he plays I have come across, whether that be Sorabji or Kornauth, and his booklet note is a source of great interest. The angular, active Fantasy (1915) contains distinctly Richard Straussian turns of harmony and phrase in the sweet contrasting themes (that influence is less obvious in the more Schwung sections); the overt lush Straussian gestures sound more like a reduction of an orchestral tone poem. The op. 25 Klavierstücke (1920) are more modernist, probably because of his experiences of Schreker. The first is decidedly Bergian (think the op. 1 Piano Sonata), while the central Improvisation sounds exactly like that. Most fascinating is the final “Walzer,” a very sprightly evocation of Viennese dance, a bit like an Austro-Germanic Ravel La Valse in places.
The Kleine Suite (1923) has fewer ambitions than the other works on the disc and receives another fantastic performance from Powell. The Barcarolle (third movement) sums the suite up in essence, reflecting the less demanding demeanor of the piece, while the penultimate “Walzer” elicits a phenomenally light touch from Powell before the cheekily scampering Finale rounds things off with a smile.
The Präludium und Passacaglia offers maximal contrast, the B♭-Minor twilight of Bachian rigor and severity of the Prelude meeting the storm clouds of Chopin’s finest turbulence; the Passacaglia continues the gloominess. Powell paces it superbly: The close is truly crushing before the final surprise major-key end. The op. 44 Klavierstücke of 1940 is also sometimes known as the Second Suite. It is shot through with sweet nostalgia. The five pieces (“Präludium”; “Intermezzo”; “Capriccio”; “Mährische Ballade”; “Walzer”) speak of sweet nostalgia. Powell lavishes them with an attention to detail that almost makes them sparkle (in a retrospective sort of way). The “Mährische Ballade” (Moravian Ballad) is the highlight. Its almost folkish mode of discourse hides a strong compositional rudder steering the work perfectly; the final “Walzer” is the suite’s longest movement, and drips with charm.
This is a fascinating disc (as we are beginning to expect from Toccata Classics). The recording (made at Durham University, U.K.) is excellent.
-- Fanfare
d'Albert: Cinderella Suite, Little Mermaid, Overtures / Markl, Leipzig Radio
The extravagantly gifted pianist and composer Eugen d’Albert had one of those improbably full, cosmopolitan lives spanning the 19th and 20th centuries. Born to a family of French and Italian origin in 1864, the same year as Richard Strauss, he grew up in Scotland. Taking on German nationality as a young adult, d’Albert studied with Liszt, who called him “Albertus Magnus,” and had a significant association with Brahms. A leading pianist of his time, he later turned to composition and was a prominent figure in Berlin’s extraordinary musical flowering in the 1920s.
D’Albert’s style isn’t easily pinned down, since he adopted differing stylistic approaches in different works. All of his music that I have heard is very well crafted, and some of it is inspired. It tends to be lively, affirmative, and light, at times, more like Humperdinck (traditional) than Busoni (progressive), to mention two of his contemporaries. Harmonically, it’s usually less adventurous than that of Liszt or Strauss. One of d’Albert’s teaches was Arthur Sullivan, for whom he composed the Overture to Patience . The writing for female chorus in Tiefland reveals this unusual influence.
D’Albert composed 19 operas in all manner of genres, changing his style from work to work, as Mascagni also did, in the quest for popular success. He found it with Tiefland , which is sometimes called a German verismo work, and is still occasionally performed. (Recordings of the Jewish-themed Der Golem , and the brief domestic comedy Die Abreise , have been issued in recent years.) Musically, Tiefland is compelling, and in it, one hears that d’Albert’s text setting and writing for the voice are as confident as his orchestration. It’s a very satisfying work to listen to, and I can recommend the Janowski recording with Marton, Kollo, Weikl, and Moll.
There’s a lot of music in this collection, all of it unfamiliar, and some of it very impressive. D’Albert’s colorful, sumptuously orchestrated preludes and overtures aren’t brief, and not all of them make a strong individual impression, but two stand out. The overture to Grillparzer’s play Esther from 1888 resembles a fully developed symphonic movement, majestic, with contrastingly playful sections, and perhaps modeled on Brahms. The prelude and introduction to Die toten Augen (1916), a biblical tale, sounds completely different, an atmospheric combination of a Korngold movie score mixed together with La mer.
Das Seejungfräulein (The Mermaid), an extended scene for soprano and orchestra, after Hans Christian Andersen, was composed in 1897 for one of d’Albert’s six wives, the soprano Hermine Finck. (Another was the pianist Teresa Carreño.) This intensely chromatic, surging music certainly shows the influence of Wagner, but manages not to sound derivative. Though it maintains more traditional harmony, it reminds me a little of the soprano “songs” in Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, and it’s the most impressive composition on the CD. In the strenuous vocal part that requires the power and range of an Isolde or Brünnhilde, the Lithuanian soprano Viktorija Kaminskaite has a warm, attractive voice, and a committed delivery, but she strains and loses tonal support on some sustained high notes.
Finally, the disc’s featured work, the 1924 Aschenputtel (Cinderella) Suite , after the Brothers Grimm, is a deftly scored set of five brief, programmatic dances. Keith Anderson’s notes don’t identify the suite as a ballet, but it would certainly lend itself to choreography. This tuneful, entrancing score is a masterpiece of its kind, and like Ravel in Ma mère l’oye —there’s a French feel to Aschenputtel —d’Albert had the gift of creating captivating, childlike music.
Jun Märkl leads lively, flexible performances, and the Leipzig Radio Symphony plays well, particularly in the Aschenputtel Suite , with its many solos. I highly recommend this disc for the chance to make the acquaintance of Die Seejungfräulein , although I hope that there will be future recordings of it with more technically assured singing, and especially Aschenputtel , a delightful find.
FANFARE: Paul Orgel
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Eugen D’Albert was a tremendously gifted musician, and even had he not been we would owe him respect for being married six times and inspiring his second wife, the also multiply married Venezuelan pianist Teresa Careño, to utter that immortal line, “Darling, your children and my children are quarreling with our children again!” Aside from multiple marriages, D’Albert composed multiple operas, nineteen at least, and the overtures and preludes contained on this disc are very enjoyable. They range from the moody prelude to Die toten Augen, to the the luscious The Ruby (his first opera), to the jolly comedy The Departure.
The Overture to Grillparzer’s Esther is actually a robust, early concert work, while the delightful Cinderella Suite has plenty of the requisite fairytale atmosphere. The Little Mermaid is a brilliant, post-Wagnerian scena for soprano and orchestra, and it’s quite beautifully sung by soprano Viktorija Kaminskaite. Her voice rides the orchestra effortlessly, while her tone remains consistently smooth and lovely throughout its range. Jun Märkl leads the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony with plenty of verve and a conviction often missing from his prior recordings of Debussy.
D’Albert’s style lacks the ultimate in individuality, but it’s unflaggingly attractive, and he clearly evolved from his Wagner/Liszt origins to something more contemporary, if not more personal. Anyway, the only way to find out is to listen, so let’s get to it.
– David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com
Maurice & Marie-Madeleine Chevalier Durufle at the Organ
Originally recorded in 1967 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC, this release projects, among other virtues, a tangible sense of occasion. The shrine's two organs had been installed and dedicated in 1965, but the Duruflés' recital of two years later was the first to utilize both instruments simultaneously, in Marcel Duruflé's transcription for two organs of the eighth of Handel's 16 concertos for organ and orchestra. That was, by the evidence on this release, a performance tour de force. The two instruments (the great and the chancel organ) are separated by a distance of some 300 feet, a virtual city block. The Duruflés overcame that vast and vastly disorienting sonic space by resorting to the sounds transmitted via telephone headsets rather than those of the acoustic surround. The result is a breathtaking synchronici-ty of attack and release, not merely of purely technical precision, but of musical affect as well.
Clarity and precision, not merely that of getting the right fingers to the right keys and pedals in a timely fashion, but of going, straightaway, to the heart of the musical discourse at hand, inform each track on this release. The little Schumann Canon in B Minor projects a playfulness that underscores its inherent irony. The Tournemire piece (a vast improvisation by that composer subsequently reconstituted by her husband) becomes, appropriately, César Franck on speed. Mme. Duruflé's clear-eyed realization of its every Easter-chant-derived iota converts it into a grippingly human drama, at once horrifying and consoling.
Of the incense-tinged Prelude and Fugue of Marcel Duruflé, I will say nothing. Mere words become woefully irrelevant.
If you've been lulled to sleep by my verbosity, wake up and get this one before it becomes, as is so much of the best that music has to offer, unavailable.
-- William Zagorski, FANFARE [1/2000]
The Bach Gamut Vol 1 / Virgil Fox
BACH Fantasia and Fugue in g, BWV 542. Sheep May Safely Graze. Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C, BWV 564. St. Matthew Passion: Finale. Prelude and Fugue in a, BWV 543. Air on a G String. Prelude and Fugue in D, BWV 532. I Call to Thee, Lord Jesus Christ • Virgil Fox (org) • REFERENCE 107 (66:19) Live: San Francisco 9/1976
From Professor Keith Johnson, the man committed to producing state-of-the-art vinyl recordings, who once claimed his company would never succumb to the siren call of CDs, comes this 24-bit HDCD transfer of a live recital given by Virgil Fox on the Ruffatti pipe organ and the Rodgers “Royal V” touring organ in San Francisco’s St. Mary’s Cathedral.
Virgil Fox remains a controversial figure in serious organ circles. Often looked upon as the Liberace of organists, Fox was noted for his flamboyant style and an approach to his craft that often put theatrics above respect for the composers whose music he played. The story, quite possibly apocryphal, is told of a visit Fox paid to the Wurlitzer electric organ factory. VIP that he was, he was conducted on a tour of the facility by the president of the company himself. At tour’s end, Fox was escorted into a sealed, temperature-controlled room that contained a pipe from an actual pipe organ. The president proudly announced that the pipe was used as a standard against which Wurlitzer’s organs were measured. To which Fox replied, “Fancy that, a real organ pipe in an electric organ factory! That’s like finding bird poop in a cuckoo clock!”
Not that Fox ever showed much discernment for the instruments he played on. His was a phenomenal technique often wedded in equal proportion to excess and lack of taste. His last years in particular, devoted to his “Heavy Organ” concerts and psychedelic light shows, were especially sad; though in his defense it could be said that he exposed many young people of that generation (the late 1960s and early 1970s)—even if it was through a haze of pot smoke—to the world of classical music.
This will not be a CD for those who take a serious view of the organ in general or of Bach’s masterpieces for the instrument in particular. But no one can take away from Fox his virtuosity or his showmanship. Nor can anyone take away from this recording its astonishing presence and stunning sound. For an organ spectacular to impress friends and alienate neighbors, recommended.
FANFARE: Jerry Dubins
Perfect Moods: Contemplative, Contemporary Piano Miniatures
This six album boxed set comprises Tanya Ekanayaka’s Twelve Piano Prisms performed by the composer (GP785); works by Valentin Silvestrov performed by Elisaveta Blumina (GP639); Philip Glass’ piano music played by Nicholas Horvath (GP692); and Haro Stepanian’s Preludes (GP760) and Baal HaSulam’s Melodies of the Upper Worlds (GP808) performed by Mikael Ayrapetyan, alongside the pianist’s own A Whole in 12 (GP809). These contemplative contemporary piano miniatures have been expertly curated from the Grand Piano discography, and are sure to leave listeners and critics alike extremely satisfied.
Past praise for previously released volumes included in this set:
Stepanian: 26 Preludes for Piano / Ayrapetyan
Haro Stepanian was a fellow student of Aram Khachaturian. Stepanian himself was certainly a fine composer, based on this collection of preludes written between 1947 and 1965. There are three sets of eight here, completed in 1947, 1948, and 1956, plus two individual preludes written near the end of his life. His style is consistently folk derived, nothing one could call revelatory, but simply well-crafted work across a broad spectrum of emotional expression. The young Armenian pianist Mikael Ayrapetyan is a very fine advocate for this decidedly obscure music.
-- Fanfare
Ekanayaka: 12 Piano Prisms
Tanya Ekanayaka certainly hits her musical mark with these piano pieces. At times contemplative, sometimes raucous, these works have been injected generously with beauty and Rachmaninoff-like technique and drama. These works are certainly recommended to pianists to program for recitals: not only do they take the audience on a lovely, dark journey through the music of different cultures via the lens of a classically-trained pianist, but they sound enjoyable to play.
-- American Record Guide
Silvestrov: Piano Works / Blumina
Silvestrov seems well served by pianist Elisaveta Blumina. All is played and recorded with close and calmingly fervent engagement. Silvestrov’s surprising but pleasing commitment is to a vocabulary chronologically distant from the predominance of the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first. If he occasionally sounds briefly like Einaudi it is only to remind us that once we listen for more than a couple of minutes Silvestrov is not a minimalist. In this context he is just a composer, one strand of whose creativity is inextricably in thrall to a style that, while familiar, serves his expressive needs better than any other. It is one dimension of the man.
-- MusicWeb International
Coates: String Quartets Nos. 1-9 / Kreutzer Quartet
At long last, the aural equivalent to Salvador Dali's melted watches! Gloria Coates (b. 1939) has created a string quartet language out of glissandos: long, short, abrupt, gradual, creaky, rounded, often dissonant, sometimes consonant. The music conjures up vivid aural images. The Fifth Quartet, for instance, begins with delicate high-register, insect-like squeals. These assiduously descend into detuned, slow moving canons that resemble a chorus of drunken cartoon cats and coyotes intoning half-remembered hymns and barroom ballads. Its second movement is built from glissandos that ascend and descend in super-slow motion. By contrast, the third movement nearly recaps the second at a hundred times the speed, the double stops suggesting a veritable orchestra of quartets whizzing before you in a race against time.
The brief First Quartet dates from the composer's late 20s and reveals that the basic elements of her present style already were in place, if not so extreme in their deployment. I especially like the Sixth Quartet's concluding "Evanescence" movement, where palpable melodic shapes emerge from intertwining long, sustained, slowly modulated glissandos, demarcated by occasional gentle pizzicato dabs. If Coates is the painter, the Kreutzer Quartet is the widely varied palette of colors and the big, austere canvas. The sheer variety of nuance and timbre the players bring to these scores will be hard to equal, let alone surpass. Kyle Gann's exemplary notes are analytical without being academic.
--Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com
Reviewing original release of Quartets 1, 5 & 6
I get the feeling that Gloria Coates does not spend a lot of time worrying about whether or not other people enjoy her music. That is a compliment, not a complaint. Whether or not you like what she does, she does it with a very personal style and with great conviction. The present CD, the fifth of Coates’s music to be released under Naxos’s American Classics imprint, ranks very low on the list of CDs one would play as light background music during a convivial dinner with friends. Coates’s music, this CD included, forces one to consider why we listen to music at all, and to examine what we mean by “entertainment.” To my thinking, entertainment, in the usual sense of the word, is overrated. We need to devote equal time and effort to moving ourselves into new emotional and intellectual territories, even at the risk of causing ourselves a little pain.
Coates is an American who now lives in Germany. In an interview, she describes the German culture as “very serious and formal,” and comments, “One is left alone much of the time unless he plans ahead.” Is there anyone in the United States who is writing music quite like Coates’s? Not that I am aware of. Her music says difficult things—things Americans seem unwilling to say at this point.
This is the world premiere recording of her recent (2007) String Quartet No. 9. The work is in two movements, both of them slow, and both of them making an almost obsessively detailed exploration of texture and sound. The first is a canon and nearly a palindrome, although the materials thus treated are not only melodic but also textural. The long, siren-like glissando, a trademark of Coates’s music from the start of her career, appears six minutes in and produces an unsettling effect. The listener also is thrown off kilter by pitch, because the first violin and the viola are tuned down one quarter-tone. Glissandos occur in the second movement, albeit within a narrower range; imagine listening to the slow movement of a late Beethoven quartet on a turntable whose motor is giving out and from an LP that has been pressed off-center. As Kyle Gann writes in his booklet notes, “The atmosphere is unworldly, creepily dissonant and yet serene, a kind of music of the spheres.”
The Sonata for Violin Solo (2000) allows aspects of Coates’s compositional style to stand out in stark relief. The movement titles—Prelude, Fantasia, Berceuse, and Hornpipe—suggest Handel or Bach, or at any rate more “traditional” composers, but once again, Coates goes her own fascinating way.
One might think that Emily Dickinson would elicit a brighter response from any composer. All of the Lyric Suite’s (1996) seven movements are headed by a fragment from Dickinson’s poetry. The Belle of Amherst was a mystic and a visionary, though, and Coates’s music underscores the notion that much of Dickinson’s work was actually quite strange, considering the time and place in which she lived. Once again, unusual playing techniques, including strings tuned a quarter-tone flat, create a sound world that is eerily beautiful and queasy.
For Coates newbies, any of the discs featuring her orchestral works might be a slightly easier introduction. Nevertheless, I feel that the present CD is an honest representation of who she is and what she does.
The Kreutzer Quartet has participated in earlier Coates recordings, and the quartet’s first violinist, Peter Sheppard Skærved, has championed Coates for her music for two decades. (Neil Heyde is the quartet’s cellist.) It is hard to know what to say about the performances, except that there would be little point in performing and recording this music if one didn’t believe in it. Separately and together, the quartet’s members, plus pianist Chadwick, are committed to the task, and carry it out with deep concentration.
As usual, the cover art is a painting by Gloria Coates, whose visual art looks much like her music sounds. As the saying goes, when God gave out talent, she stood in line twice.
FANFARE: Raymond Tuttle
Reviewing Quartet no 9, Violin Sonata, Lyric Suite
Leshnoff: Violin Concerto no. 1, String Quartet no. 1 / Wetherbee, Carpe Diem Quartet
REVIEWS:
Leshnoff might compose his music for anyone who wants to listen, but it seems to me that the inattentive listener will be cheated out of most of its pleasures. Indeed, it wasn’t until I sat down and really listened to this CD on my home stereo that I realized how fine this music is. It asks the listener to devote time and attention to it; there’s no pandering here, but I think it still is accessible to anyone who is sufficiently open-minded enough to enjoy Hindemith, Bartók, or late Stravinsky, for example. (Surely that’s not too much to ask!)
The Violin Concerto could well be a significant addition to the instrument’s repertoire. Five movements are indicated, but because there is no pause between the first and second movements, and none between the fourth and fifth, and also because there is a tempo change in the fourth, the work’s structure is more complicated than the CD’s track listing indicates. The concerto opens with a figure not unlike Westminster chimes, and because it reappears several times throughout the concerto, it serves as a kind of guidepost. The opening Allegro drives forward with purpose, and is serious but not grim. There is much to interest the ears, not least in the orchestration, which is consistently imaginative. The solo writing is idiomatic, as if Leshnoff composed it for himself. At 7:57, the second movement (Slow) is the concerto’s longest, and it is here that we are introduced to Leshnoff’s more lyrical side. Again, orchestral colors are deployed with an artist’s sensitivity, and the musical argument is well considered and involving, with an emotional intensity suggesting that the composer, in spite of his age, is something of an old soul. If Samuel Barber had lived longer, he might have written music not unlike this. The central Scherzo lightens the mood—for a time—without disturbing the concerto’s emotional trajectory. Prokofiev comes to mind. Leshnoff uses the orchestra masterfully, avoiding both cliché and novelty for novelty’s sake. The fourth movement (Slow–Fast) returns to the mood of the second, but it is more unsettled, and soon becomes agitated. A crisis is reached, and then resolved—but only partly—in the closing Elegy, which again is reminiscent of Barber. The music stops before one expects it to, giving the concerto an open-ended feeling. Although he didn’t write a programmatic work, one of Leshnoff’s inspirations was a story told by a Holocaust survivor. During forced labor, SS guards would make prisoners sing Nazi propaganda songs, but the prisoners would insert their prayers into these songs. In light of this story, one can better understand why the concerto ends as it does.
Distant Reflections is scored for solo violin, piano, and strings, with an offstage string quartet. This might be thought of as Leshnoff’s response to Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia , except here Leshnoff uses fragments from a Mass by Ockeghem. As in the concerto (but without sounding like it), a very refined ear is at work (in terms of both color and form), and Distant Reflections is at once sensual and serious. Without talking down to listeners or gimmickry, Leshnoff indeed has succeeded in writing new music that could appeal to many.
Pearl German is the wife of Jeremiah German, “a college professor with an abiding love of music,” according to Naxos’s booklet notes. The String Quartet No. 1 was a commission in honor of German’s wife, on the occasion of her 80th birthday. The four movements, beginning with “Winter,” are named after the four seasons. Again, this is not a programmatic work—there are no Vivaldian stamping feet or barking dogs. Instead, Leshnoff seems to be aiming at a more metaphysical reflection on the cycles of life. Ending the work with “Autumn” allows Leshnoff yet another downbeat ending, which he seems to like and does well. In terms of both timbre and emotions, this quartet is refined, eschewing that which is obvious or easy. As in the other two works, his writing is concise; Leshnoff is not a composer who goes on talking after he has nothing more to say.
These performances, all supervised by the composer, make an excellent case for the music. Wetherbee is a first-class violinist, whether he is a soloist or within the very able Carpe Diem String Quartet, whose other members are Wendy Morton, Korine Fujiwara, and Robert Firdman. The Baltimore Chamber Orchestra, founded in the 1980s, plays with polish under the direction of Markand Thakar, and with evident appreciation for Leshnoff’s ideas. There are some weird and annoying sonic artifacts, only noticeable during pauses and very quiet sections in the recording of the String Quartet; it sounds as if another ensemble were playing in a studio two doors down. Otherwise, Naxos’s recording is excellent.
Labels like to push their hot new composers, and after a while, one gets skeptical over this or that so-called discovery. Leshnoff, however, is excitingly “the real thing,” and I expect we’ll be hearing a lot more from and about him in years to come.
-- Fanfare
Bach: Orchestral Suites 2 & 3; Chaconne - Transcribed for Organ / Wolfgang Rübsam
Over the course of more than half a century, Wolfgang Rübsam has consistently brought new insights to bear on the keyboard music of Bach, firstly in sets of the canonic organ music for Philips, then the same for Naxos. In the last few years, his musicianship and understanding of Bach enriched by those decades of experience, he has turned to the harpsichord/piano repertoire for Brilliant Classics. A series of critically acclaimed albums has shed new light on The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Goldberg Variations, the Partitas and Toccatas with Rübsam’s performance of them on a lautenwerk – a ‘lute-harpsichord’ with a distinctive chime and colour which Bach himself would have been familiar with. Rübsam now returns to the organ, with new transcriptions and recordings of two Orchestral Suites and Chaconne from the D minor Partita for solo violin. While the Chaconne has attracted transcribers and arrangers ever since the 19th century, drawn magnetically to its evolving variations on a ground bass which accumulate an emotional power unusual even for Bach, the Orchestral Suites are much less often encountered outside their original garb. Yet we can be sure that Bach himself would have embraced Rübsam’s idea with enthusiasm. The Suites themselves are compilations of dances, probably not all originally designed for their eventual destination as high-class entertainment music for the concert series at Café Zimmermann in Leipzig, and Bach repurposed some of their movements as sinfonias and even choruses for his church cantatas. As in his fairly free transcription of the Chaconne, Rübsam has made full use of the instrument at his disposal, a magnificent Casavant instrument (1998) at the Church of St. Louis, in St. Paul, Minnesota. The booklet includes a full disposition for the organ as well as an essay introducing both the works and Rübsam’s uniquely imaginative approach to them. ‘If the sound of the lute-harpsichord highlights Bach’s debt to French lute music, especially in the First Prelude, the instrument clarifies that homage while Rübsam’s interpretation transcends it.’ (Fanfare, November 2018, The Well-Tempered Clavier, 96750)
Debussy: 12 Etudes / Mariangela Vacatello
DEBUSSY 12 Etudes. Estampes. Deux Arabesques. L’Isle Joyeuse • Mariangela Vacatello (pn) • BRILLIANT 94371 (76:40)
Every so often—perhaps inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s eponymous poem—I contemplate things that might have been, and quite frequently my contemplations involve music: What would Beethoven’s 10th have sounded like? How much richer would we be today had Brahms not destroyed his early string quartets out of mortal fear of being called an epigone? Would the world be a different place had Dinu Lipatti been able to carry out his wish to record The Well-Tempered Clavier ? One of the reasons I find these questions so fascinating is because we can neither know their answer nor can we rely on what we do know to hypothesize it—after all, Beethoven’s Ninth is strikingly different from his Eighth; Brahms’s lost string quartets are forever gone; and Lipatti never got around to record a single prelude and fugue by Bach. Before hearing this new recording featuring the young pianist Mariangela Vacatello, it had never dawned on me that Debussy’s late piano works—his set of 12 Etudes for piano—present the perfect Borgesian riddle: Would Debussy have abandoned the Impressionist idiom had he lived another few years, or would we be speaking of Debussy’s Impressionism merely as a phase that eventually yielded to a new musical language?
You may be wondering how my musings about where Debussy’s music may have ended up had the composer not succumbed to cancer at age 56 relate to the task at hand. Well, I respectfully submit that they are relevant here because what I enjoyed the most about Vacatello’s recording is how exquisitely and unapologetically she conveys the striking novelty of these masterpieces. Like Mitsuko Uchida in her classic Philips recording, Vacatello does not unduly look for Impressionism in the etudes, nor does she try to tame these visionary and occasionally wild scores. She does not over-pedal, she does not soft-pedal, she does not play legato when Debussy calls for non-legato, and she does not seek to create tonal haze when the score does not call for such effects. Instead, Vacatello presents these works for what they are—experiments with a fascinating musical language Debussy had not yet fully figured out.
In the early works, Vacatello is equally compelling. Like her compatriots Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Aldo Ciccolini, and Maurizio Pollini, Vacatello subscribes to the Italian tradition of playing Debussy, which is characterized by rhythmic precision, a stronger emphasis on primary colors, and a certain degree of level-headedness. While it is true that Vacatello’s Debussy does not soar or intoxicate like that of Samson François, I find that it is just as fascinating. I am particularly impressed with L’Isle Joyeuse , in which Vacatello (unlike many pianists who play this piece) refuses the temptation to sectionalize—and, I believe, trivialize—in favor of a cohesive narrative that slowly builds towards apotheosis. The engineering is outstanding. This recording comes with my highest recommendation. Vacatello is definitely a pianist to watch.
FANFARE: Radu A. Lelutiu
Dornel: Livre De Simphonies Contenant 6 Suittes En Trio / Musica Barocca
DORNEL Suites, op. 1: No. 1 in a; No. 2 in A; No. 3 in 3; No. 4 in D; No. 5 in G; No. 6 in e • Musica Barocca (period instruments) • NAXOS 8.570826 (69:06)
We know very little about the life of Louis-Antoine Dornel, who lived from 1680 until approximately 1756 or 1757 (Naxos’s tray liner gives an incorrect date of 1765 but gets it right in the insert notes). He had appointments as organist at Ste Madeleine-en-la-Cité in Paris and the abbey of Ste Geneviève, as well as music master of the Académie Française, where he was required to write an annual motet for the feast of St Louis. His motets received praise in the Mercure de France , but none of them have survived.
The six works recorded here were published as Dornel’s op. 1, entitled Livre de symphonies contenant six suittes en trio pour les flutes, violins, hautbois, & c. avec Sonate en Quatuor . Each starts with either a prelude or a two-movement overture followed by four, five, or six dance movements. Dornel’s relative obscurity compared with his more-recorded late Baroque contemporaries apparently has nothing to do with his ability as a composer. The music here is inventive and enjoyable. However, I did find it better to listen to these works in a couple of sessions rather than straight through.
Part of the reason for this “ear fatigue” can, I think, be attributed to the interpretation. Musica Barocca’s playing is not at fault; the performances are excellent. But I question the decision to entrust the two solo lines to voice flute, a type of alto recorder. Although the score mentions flutes, violins, or oboes, there is, of course, no reason why interpreters cannot choose other solo instruments. But I found the voice flute to be a bit overwhelming after listening to a couple of these works, and would have welcomed some variety. Also, judging from scores I downloaded from the Internet, it appears that some of these works had to be transposed to be played by the voice flutes; the insert notes make no mention of this fact.
The recording does not include the Sonate en quatuor that was published as part of op. 1; there was not enough room on the disc for it. However, the Sonate can be found on a disc entitled “The Sultan and the Phoenix” on Signum, which includes works by seven other French Baroque composers. This is the first complete recording of the six suittes en trio ; I find only one of the suites available elsewhere on a Glossa recording. The music is worth getting to know, and the recording will provide enjoyment. But there is room for another recording using different solo instruments and with all works recorded in their original keys.
FANFARE: Ron Salemi
De Visee: La Musique De La Chambre Du Roy Vol 2 / Marchese, Ippolito, Tomadin, Staropoli
VISÉE La Musique de la Chambre du Roy, Vol. 1 • Manuel Staropoli (rcr, Baroque fl); Massimo Marchese (thb); Christiano Contadin (vdg) • BRILLIANT 94154 (55:22)
VISÉE La Musique de la Chambre du Roy, Vol. 2 • Manuel Staropoli (rcr, Baroque fl); Massimo Marchese (thb); Rosita Ippolito (vdg); Manuel Tomadin (hpd) • BRILLIANT 94437 (54:29)
After the pointed polemical exchange I recently had with two letter writers over a previous review of a disc of music by Robert de Visée (see issue 37:3 for the exchange and 37:1 for the review that prompted it), one might think I would shy away from reviewing another Visée CD anytime soon. However, these two discs arrived, and I am happy to review them. Here I will not revisit points of that controversy, except to state that on the hotly contested issues of de Visée’s conjectured birth and death dates, these two releases opt for c. 1655–1733.
Between them, these two discs present the 10 suites that comprise the composer’s third and final published compilation of his works, the Pièces de théorbe et de luth mises en partition, dessus et basse from 1716. Each suite consists of five or six movements, most commonly consisting of an allemande, courante, sarabande, gigue, and gavotte, with an initial prelude added in some instances. There are occasional substitutions: e.g., a menuet or rondeau replaces a gigue or gavotte. As the movement titles indicate, these are mostly dances of a slower, more stately character, set to music of elegant gravity and reflectiveness. The emphasis throughout is on atmosphere, not virtuoso display.
To my knowledge, these two releases constitute the first integral recording of these suites, and so they are welcome on that ground alone. That said, the music appears here in an idiosyncratic guise. As the anthology title states, these pieces were conceived by the composer for performance on the theorbo or lute; but here they are arranged for recorder and basso continuo, with (irony of ironies) the theorbo present as part of the supporting accompaniment. Of course, it was common practice for such pieces to be adapted to and played on various solo instruments; but the booklet notes rather stretch the point in ignoring the publication title and asserting instead that “in the frontispiece de Visée does not specify any particular instrument, which leaves plenty of leeway in the choice of the solo instrument.” (With more justification, they also cite an Avertissement attributed to Visée that preceded the original publication, which suggested harpsichord, viola da gamba, and violin as suitable instruments for the dessus part.)
The notes further explain that for the second CD, a harpsichord was added to the basso continuo ensemble in order to “widen the range of timbre, and thereby gratify the listener with greater variety.” For further variety, three different recorders (treble, descant, and bass) are employed, and the harpsichord gets a couple of solo turns as well. The discs also include three additional brief pieces, “Les Sylvains de Couperin,” “Entrée d’Apollon” and a Chaconne, that are performed on solo theorbo.
Whatever one makes of the issue of instrumentation, these are nonetheless stylish and winning performances in their chosen guise. While partisans of theorbo, lute, or guitar may be disappointed or chagrined, fans of the recorder and lovers of Baroque dance music in general can rejoice. The recorded sound balances all the instruments well; the booklet notes are somewhat skimpy on the composers and the works themselves, but provide extensive biographical notes on the performers along with photos. Finally, the price certainly is right; duly recommended.
FANFARE: James A. Altena
Zoya & The Young Guard - Suites From Film Scores
SHOSTAKOVICH (arr. Atovmian) The Young Guard: Suite. Zoya: Suite 1 • Walter Mnatsakonov, cond; 1 Minsk Ch C; Belarusian RTV SO • DELOS 2001 (61: 37)
The Russian Disc label has been gone for a while now, and with it some interesting Russian repertoire otherwise not available. Apparently Delos feels our loss, since it has embarked on a rerelease of four CDs of Shostakovich film-score suites from the departed label. This is the first of the releases, recorded by the Belarusian Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra in 1995, four years after the independence of Belarus and the collapse of the Soviet Union. (I have corrected Delos’s anachronistic use of the old Soviet name.) That a so recently liberated Belarusian orchestra was willing to record these suites says something for their emotional integrity. The memories here evoked, even 50 years later, are part of a devastatingly painful collective memory of bitter losses during World War II, and at the hands of Stalin before.
It is, after all, easy to dismiss Shostakovich’s film scores as mere accompaniment to Soviet propaganda. In fact, he wrote his 34 film scores for a number of reasons; some to pay the bills and for political expediency, but many out of conviction. These two wartime films fit in the latter category. The films extol real heroism and personal sacrifice, and the composer responds with music that is poignant, inventive, and emotionally honest. Coming on the heels of the 1946 censure of the Ninth Symphony for “ideological weakness,” no doubt The Young Guard also seeks to ingratiate. And yet, with its Coates-like main theme and relatively subdued expression, this is not everyday Soviet populism. Even The Death of Heroes , a stirring funeral march in Shostakovich’s public style, suggests by its gravity that the homage to the martyred young Ukrainian resistance fighters is sincere. The 1944 Zoya is more characteristic of Soviet expectations, with its triumphalist chorus of eternal memory and bellicose marches, yet here as well, in the heartbreaking passages for muted duo violins, and the Mahlerian interlude in the “Apotheosis,” we feel the composer’s honest admiration for Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, the 18-year-old guerilla fighter captured, tortured, and executed when resisting the 1941 invasion of Russia.
These two suites are 1950s reworkings of the film scores, with some additions, by Armenian composer Levon Atovmian. (Delos misspells it as Avtomyan.) He made a number of composer-approved arrangements of Shostakovich’s more popular music, including the familiar Ballet Suites. Atovmian’s additions here include a jaunty scherzo in The Young Guards suite composed from a fragmentary cue, and an orchestration of Shostakovich’s op. 34/14 Prelude in E?, which provides a touching Requiem, as annotator David Nice puts it, for the heroine of Zoya . With the exception of Atovmian’s banal “Song of the Young Guardsman,” inexplicably included instead of Shostakovich’s own patriotic song arrangements, the interpolations fit nicely, and the inclusion of the Prelude is a particularly apt amplification of the mood of the score.
The recorded sound is, unfortunately, reminiscent of earlier Soviet-period recordings; a bit brash and edgy in the climaxes. Violin tone is a little scratchy as well, whether from miking or substandard instruments, but in general orchestral execution is much better than competent, though more heartfelt than polished. Walter Mnatsakonov’s conducting is sensitive or rousing, as required, and the Minsk Chamber Choir is first-rate in its brief appearance. This disc joins recent Naxos and Chandos film-score releases as an important addition to the Shostakovich discography. No one who admires this composer will want to miss this, or any of the Delos series. Next up: seven suites from the early (1930–31) Alone.
FANFARE: Ronald E. Grames
Solti - Journey Of A Lifetime
SOLTI – Journey of a Lifetime Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the birth of Sir Georg Solti A film by Georg Wübbolt
Featuring:
Valerie Solti
Valery Gergiev
Christoph von Dohnányi
Sir Peter Jonas
Clemens Hellsberg
Ewald Markl
and many more as interview partners as well as several musical excerpts conducted by Sir Georg Solti
Bonus:
Dmitry Shostakovich: Symphony No. 1 in F minor, Op. 10
Sergey Prokofiev: Symphony No. 1 in D major, Op. 25, “Classical”
Modest Mussorgsky: Khovanshchina: Prelude
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Georg Solti, conductor
R E V I E W:
SOLTI: JOURNEY OF A LIFETIME • Georg Solti, cond; Chicago SO • C-MAJOR 711708 (DVD: 106: 00) A film by Georg Wübbolt
MUSSORGSKY Khovanshchina: Prelude. PROKOFIEV Symphony No. 1, “Classical.” SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony No. 1. Live: Chicago 1977
What is Georg Solti’s place in the pantheon of podium titans? He gained celebrity when he led the first complete recording of Wagner’s Ring to be issued. He created a comparable sensation when he took over the Chicago Symphony and led that orchestra in concerts and recordings that dazzled with their brilliance, virtuosity, and tonal splendor. In the 1970s Harold C. Schonberg, the influential chief music critic of the New York Times , pronounced Solti and Karajan the two most significant conductors of the age, characterizing Solti’s sonority as “molten gold,” in contrast to the “silvery” Karajan sound. As is usual, extravagant acclaim soon led detractors to weigh in, and Solti’s recordings began to be criticized as crude, unyielding, over-driven, excessively muscular, and lacking in nuance and refinement. Although he holds the record for the number of Grammy awards, his many recordings of standard symphonic repertoire rarely turn up today on lists of preferred versions, and he did not make BBC Music magazine ’s list of the 20 greatest conductors, as selected by a poll of 100 currently active conductors. (Nor, astonishingly, did Otto Klemperer or Bruno Walter.)
The centennial of Solti’s birth in 2012 saw the release on DVD of two documentaries about his life and career. The other one, which I have not seen, was reviewed by Lynn René Bayley in Fanfare 36:3. It is nearly three times as long as the one under review here and apparently more thorough and detailed, with a lengthier supplement of complete performances. The C Major release combines a 52-minute documentary with 54 minutes of performances by the Chicago Symphony. Filmmaker Georg Wübbolt was also responsible for a documentary on Carlos Kleiber that I reviewed in 35:1. As in that earlier effort, he follows the standard technique of interspersing commentary by those who knew the conductor, worked with him, or followed his career, with clips from rehearsals and performances. Solti himself is much more of a participant in the commentary than was Kleiber, who stopped giving interviews early in his career. Wübbolt also follows his earlier practice of shifting rapidly from one commentator to the next, which generates a fast-paced narrative but also leaves loose ends and unanswered questions. As in his earlier documentary, there are issues one would like to have discussed in greater detail. It is also sometimes hard to keep track of the identities of the commentators and their connection to Solti, since they are often not again identified when they reappear. They include Solti’s widow, Valerie, Christoph von Dohnányi, who served as his assistant in Frankfurt, Valery Gergiev, and the critic Norman Lebrecht, along with musicians and officials of the Chicago Symphony, the Vienna Philharmonic, the Frankfurt and Munich opera houses, the Bayreuth Festival, and others. Considering the importance of opera in Solti’s career, the absence of singers with whom he worked from the ranks of commentators is surprising and regrettable. The film is mostly in German, with English subtitles, although there is some narration and comment in English. Solti himself speaks in German.
The documentary provides a succinct overview of Solti’s career: his musical training in his native Budapest under Bartók, Ernö Dohnányi, and Leo Weiner; his 1937 visit to Salzburg, where he met Toscanini and was recruited to serve as a repetiteur; his second meeting with Toscanini in Lucerne in 1939, on the eve of World War II, which resulted in his being stranded in Switzerland for the duration of the conflict. In postwar Germany, he finally had the opportunity to begin a conducting career, since most German conductors were temporarily barred by the victorious Allies from performing. He first headed the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, where life for him was very difficult. The opera orchestra (“all Nazis” according to Solti) did not take kindly to being led by a young Hungarian Jew and showed it. In 1951 he moved to the somewhat friendlier territory of Frankfurt. His career took a giant step forward when producer John Culshaw selected him for the Ring project over more senior and established figures, perceiving him as someone who was more amenable to the demands of the recording studio and capable of achieving the results Culshaw envisioned for this ground-breaking effort. The Decca Ring is said to have led to Solti’s appointment to head London’s Royal Opera, although most of Ring operas had not yet been released when this selection took place. After his successful although controversial tenure at Covent Garden (1961-71), where he brought the company to “the highest international standards,” he had had enough of presiding over opera houses and wished to devote himself to symphony orchestras. As music director of the Chicago Symphony (1969-91), he perhaps reached the peak of his career, bringing the orchestra to a level of world-wide acclaim it had never before approached. Not so successful was his brief tenure with the Orchestre de Paris (1972-75), described in the film as “a terrible orchestra” where “no one goes…except for the money.” Curiously, the documentary does not mention his involvement with the London Philharmonic, which he led in the years 1979-83 and with which he recorded Elgar’s symphonies and several Mozart operas, among other works. When Karajan died in 1989 prior to the Salzburg Festival, Solti was urgently requested to take over the production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, which he did with some reluctance. Up to then he had never been invited to conduct at Salzburg or at the Berlin Philharmonic. There was no love lost between the two conductors, but they did listen to each other’s recordings to find out how the other was approaching a work. In Solti’s final years, he renewed his ties with Munich in guest appearances with the Bavarian Radio Symphony and returned to his homeland to lead the recently founded Budapest Festival Orchestra in a recording of works by his three teachers.
When the commentators attempt to characterize Solti’s style as a conductor, words like energy, vitality, and fire crop up repeatedly and are underscored by images of his abrupt, even violent movements on the podium. These movements, according to one observer, provoked orchestras to play loudly, and he had difficulty getting them to play more softly. In addition to fire, according to Gergiev, he possessed “icy control.” Other commentators mention his perfectionism, focus on detail, and special concern for rhythm, which are reflected in his practice of singing, or rather chanting, a passage to demonstrate how it should go. The Vienna Philharmonic cellist Werner Resel emphasizes and, I think, exaggerates the role of recordings in establishing Solti’s reputation, arguing that Solti “didn’t make a career by conducting concerts and delighting audiences but by making records that turned out to be great.” This gentleman apparently missed the decades in which Solti was thrilling audiences with his Chicago Symphony concerts, in Europe as well as the U.S. Peter Schmidl, another VPO musician, makes the surprising and demonstrably false claim that “Solti’s great career as a conductor became possible only when Böhm had stopped conducting and Karajan had died…and when Bernstein was no longer around,” in other words, in the last seven years of Solti’s life. The same observer, however, expresses regret that Solti was not called earlier to Salzburg, where he could have achieved great results.
The concert performances included as a supplement are drawn from a 1977 telecast featuring Russian music. The Khovanshchina Prelude is performed in Rimsky-Korsakov’s smoothed-out and comparatively bland revision. In the Prokofiev “Classical” Symphony, Solti’s weighty approach and the massive sound of the Chicago Symphony are perhaps not the best fit for this light and frothy music, but the piece is brilliantly played and enjoyable to hear. The fast-paced, forceful, and once again brilliantly played Shostakovich is the most satisfying item on the program. As was his practice, Solti tends to set a tempo and stick to it, without much inflection for expressive purposes, and with the solid, steady rhythmic underpinning that was one of his hallmarks. Others may bring more mystery and sense of underlying menace to this work, but with Solti the menace is quite overt. The sound is free from distortion, brilliant in tutti, and wide in dynamic range, if a bit opaque and lacking in spaciousness.
Returning to the question I posed at the beginning of this review, I have no definitive answer. Solti’s Ring , which has just been reissued in an expensive, hefty “super deluxe” edition and is said to be by far the best-selling classical recording of all time, retains its status, as does his Mahler Eighth, although even they are not without their detractors, as witness Lynn René Bayley’s unfavorable comments in 36:3. Solti’s legacy as an opera conductor, in Wagner, Strauss, Verdi, and, somewhat surprisingly, Mozart, seems to me secure. Although he was never one of my favorite conductors, he was one who engaged my interest, and I have a good many of his recordings of Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler, and others on my overburdened shelves. I will retain these performances as having enduring value, even if they would not necessarily be among my first choices for the works in question. Solti remains a worthy contributor to the almost infinite variety of performance that enriches our experience of music. For those interested in his life and career, the Wübbolt documentary, despite the shortcomings noted, offers a concise overview with many insights.
FANFARE: Daniel Morrison
1977 Video Production
Picture format: NTSC 16:9 (documentary) / 4:3 (bonus)
Sound format: PCM Stereo
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Languages: English, German
Subtitles: French, Spanish, Korean
Running time: 52 mins (documentary) + 55 mins (bonus)
No. of DVDs: 1 (DVD 9)
