Briefly Noted: Anderszewski's Central European Survey (CD of the Month)

Janáček, On an Overgrown Path (Book 2) / Szymanowski, Mazurkas (selected) / Bartók, Bagatelles (complete), Piotr Anderszewski (released on January 26, 2024) Warner Classics 5419789127 | 65'32"

Schedule conflicts prevented me from hearing Piotr Anderszewski's most recent area recitals at Shriver Hall, in 2023 and 2019, much to my regret. The Polish pianist's program last year included some of Karol Szymanowski's Mazurkas, which are at the heart of this new recital disc, combining sets of early 20th-century miniatures by three esteemed composers from central Europe. Anderszewski once summed up his approach to playing the piano by saying, "to be a musician is to make sense through sound." In performance, he continued, he allows himself "a certain incoherence," to be "in a world of feelings where strict logic is not the most important thing."

The sense of vivid storytelling in an uncomprehended language suits this compilation of pieces enlivened by dissonance and folk-inspired rhythm and harmony. The disc opens with the second book of Janáček's On an Overgrown Path, recorded in 2016 at Warsaw Radio. Anderszewski included the three pieces the composer never officially included in the in the second book, from 1911. Janáček eschewed the character titles he gave each movement in Book 1, providing only tempo markings. This choice gives some emotional distance from the subject matter Janáček ascribed to these pieces, a combination of memories of his childhood and the painful experiences surrounding the death of his 20-year-old daughter Olga in 1903.

The other two selections on this disc were captured last year in Berlin. Anderszewski has long championed the music of fellow Pole Karol Szymanowski, and he gives glowing accounts of six of the twenty Mazurkas published in the composer's Op. 50. Szymanowski went even farther than Chopin in his incorporation of folk elements in his Mazurkas, and Anderszewski brings out the blue-note touches, quintal drones, and imitation of folk instruments.

The complete set of Bartók’s Bagatelles, Op. 6, packs intense flavors into each of these fourteen pieces, most no longer than a minute or two. The experimental nature of this early score, completed in 1908, is announced in the very first piece, where Bartók notated the left hand in four sharps and the right in four flats. The mixture of modal colors, drawn from central European folk music, and atonal techniques revealing the influence of Debussy and Schoenberg, is bracing in Anderszewski's rendition. The final pair of Bagatelles reveal the influence of Stefi Geyer, the young violinist Bartók developed an unrequited love for around this time: a funeral elegy ("Elle est morte") and a madcap waltz ("Ma mie qui danse"), both containing a melodic motif associated with her.


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Briefly Noted: Rousset's Artful Fugue

Bach, Die Kunst der Fuge, Christophe Rousset (released on January 12, 2024) Aparté AP313D | 83'02"

Christophe Rousset waited until he was nearly 60 years old to record J.S. Bach's Die Kunst der Fuge for the first time. Captured at the Hôtel de l’Industrie in Paris toward the end of the pandemic year (November 29 to December 2, 2020), this new disc quickly rises to the top of the list of recordings on harpsichord, which actually are not that numerous. It is certainly in the running with Gustav Leonhardt's two recordings, as well as the exhaustively complete version by Davitt Moroney. Both of those were made decades ago. Rousset plays on a German harpsichord made by an anonymous craftsman, now in an unnamed private collection. The sound is close and warm, showing off the musician's smooth, connected touch and his patient unwinding of the piece's contrapuntal complexities, at often introspective, leisurely tempi.

Rousset has chosen not to record the incomplete "Fuga a tre soggetti" added as Contrapunctus XIV to the 1751 edition of the work, the version edited by and possibly added to by Bach's sons. (Leonhardt also left this final piece of the posthumous edition unrecorded, while Moroney composed his own completion of it.) A brilliant booklet essay by Gaëtan Naulleau, a musicologist at the University of Tours and formerly a recording reviewer and editor at Diapason, explains the thinking behind rejecting this late addition to the score. After playing Contrapunctus I to XIII in order, Rousset concludes with the four canons, leaving Canon I to the very end.

After treating Contrapunctus XIV as spurious, it seemed a little odd to include the two-harpischord arrangement of Contrapunctus XIII, a version also included only in the 1751 edition published after the elder Bach's death. The younger Belgian harpsichordist Korneel Bernolet takes the second part in this piece, a gesture recalling the younger Rousset's doing the same with his older colleague, Christopher Hogwood, many years ago: a sense of in turn handing on a tradition is poignant as Rousset himself moves closer to retirement. (Bernolet has assisted Rousset, as both conductor and harpsichordist with his ensemble Les Talens Lyriques, since 2014.) Both Contrapunctus XII and XIII are mirror fugues, meaning that the original notation of the fugue and its mirror notation, with all the parts inverted, both adhere to all the rules of counterpoint. Rousset and Bernolet play both rectus and inversus versions of both pieces, presumably adding their own arrangement of Contrapunctus XII for two harpsichords.

Naulleau, in his essay, notes an interesting possibility, that Bach's title for this dense work, The Art of Fugue, could be seen as a clapback aimed at an anonymously penned article lamenting that Bach had obscured his musical genious by an "Allzu-grosse Kunst" (all-too-great art). Indeed, for most listeners, the unrelenting contrapuntal density of the work can be stultifying if listened to in a single go. "One person, however, can follow the work from beginning to end without exhausting himself," he writes, "thanks to his profession, his training and the support of the score: the performer. For the pianist and musicologist Charles Rosen, The Art of Fugue is 'above all, a work to be played for oneself, to be felt under one's fingers as much as listened to'." One is only too happy to accompany Rousset as he goes on that journey.


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Briefly Noted: The Story of St. Emmeram of Regensburg

Historia Sancti Emmerani, Schola Hungarica, Janka Szendrei, László Dobszay (re-released on December 1, 2023) Profil PH21477 | 66'25"

St. Emmeram, born into a noble family in Poitiers, set out from his homeland in France to spread the Gospel in Bavaria in the mid-7th century. The Duke of Bavaria welcomed Emmeram to his court, where he began his missionary activities, including founding a Benedictine monastery at Regensburg that later bore his name and preserves his relics. According to a highly suspect Vita by Arbeo of Freising, written long after Emmeram's death, he was attacked, beaten, and tortured (while tied to a ladder) by the duke's son, over a misunderstanding involving the pregnancy of the duke's daughter. His feast day is celebrated on September 22, and he is often shown with the iconographic symbol of a ladder as the means of his martyrdom.

In addition to Vitae, those often highly fanciful biographies of saints, churchmen and women came to know the lives of local saints through special chant offices sung in monasteries and cathedrals on their feast days. This was the inspiration for a series of publications called Historiae, co-founded by my mentor in graduate school, the late Ruth Steiner, and David Hiley, who taught for many years at the University of Regensburg. Hiley contributed the edition of Arnold von Vohburg's Office in honor of St. Emmeram to the series (edited from manuscript sources in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 14870 and 14872), and the Hungarian scholars Janka Szendrei and László Dobszay made a recording of it with their excellent choir, Schola Hungarica, originally released in 1996. No longer available in its original form, on the Calig label, this valuable disc was re-released last month by Profil Edition Günter Hänssler.

Recorded in St. Anne's Church, a former Franciscan monastery in Esztergom, Hungary, the ensemble sang with their accustomed rhythmic clarity and pure intonation, even the group of well-trained children. The recording includes almost all of the music and text notated in clm 14872 (photographed charmingly with an archivist's thumb in frame). Psalms and canticles introduced by antiphons are not chanted (with the exception of the Invitatory psalm), not being specific to St. Emmeram, nor are doxologies in responsories for the same reason. The words of the written-out prayers are intoned, however, and all verses of hymns, with text relating to the saint, are sung in their entirety. In the fast-moving style favored by the Hungarians, where long neumes are often performed faster than single notes, like rhythmic divisions (quite striking in the long melismas that adorn the complex Matins responsories), the whole Office takes about an hour to sing, covering the services from the Vespers before the feast to the Vespers on the day.


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Briefly Notedest: Some of the Year's Best Recordings

I wish I could listen to and review more new recordings, but there are just too many crossing my desk. Below are the six new releases that really stuck with me this year.

[Review]

Claudio Monteverdi, Vespro della beata vergine. Pygmalion, Raphaël Pichon (Harmonia Mundi HMM902710.11)
Claudio Monteverdi is a favorite composer, and there is no piece of his greater in my estimation than the Vespro della beata vergine. The Vespers of 1610, as the piece is sometimes known, has been reviewed in these pages many times, both in recordings and live. In other words, it would take a lot for me to be surprised by a new recording of this piece, but that is precisely what conductor Raphaël Pichon and his ensemble, Pygmalion, have done in their newly released recording.

[Review]

Franz Schubert, Piano Trios Nos. 1 and 2. Christian Tetzlaff, Tanja Tetzlaff, Lars Vogt (Ondine ODE1394-2D)
Lars Vogt delayed checking into a hospital in 2021 for further analysis of the cancer that would eventually take his life last September. Instead, he traveled to Bremen to make the first part of this double-album of Schubert's chamber music with Christian Tetzlaff and his sister Tanja Tetzlaff. In addition to the two numbered trios is the Notturno, a single slow movement possibly composed for and then removed from the first piano trio. Vogt wrote that it "feels a little bit like everything, at least in my life, has developed toward this Trio in E flat major.”

[Review]

Marin Marais, Pièces de Viole. Jean-Guihen Queyras, Alexandre Tharaud (Harmonia Mundi HMM902315)
Alexandre Tharaud has not visited Washington since 2015, and cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras was last here in 2017. The two esteemed French musicians have continued their long and fruitful collaboration in a striking new Baroque album, with delightful transcriptions of Marin Marais’s pièces de viole, originally for viola da gamba and continuo, for cello and piano. The performances, in the spirit of Baroque elaboration but taking full advantage of modern dynamic range and harmonic content, are delightful.

[Review]

Josquin Desprez, Missa Malheur me bat. Gli Angeli Genève, Stephan MacLeod (Aparté AP338)
One cannot have too many recordings of Josquin's cyclic Masses, at least not yet. The complete set by the Tallis Scholars remains hard to beat, but then along comes Gli Angeli Genève with this new release of a program centered on the elusive Renaissance composer's Missa Malheur me bat. The sound, recorded at the Eglise Saint-Germain in Geneva, is less aggressive than the Tallis Scholars, who recorded this Mass only about a decade ago: slightly smaller in number of voices, but also more intimate, more rarefied and refined.

[Review]

Pietro Locatelli, Violin Concertos / Concerti Grossi. Isabelle Faust, Il Giardino Armonico, Giovanni Antonini (Harmonia Mundi HMM902398)
If you've heard of Locatelli, it is likely as part of a list of other 18th-century violinist-composers in the mold of Corelli and Vivaldi: one of those Italian -i names. At most, early music groups will include a Locatelli piece along with more famous composers in a program from time to time. So be prepared to be wowed when you take in the latest disc from Il Giardino Armonico and the mesmerizing violinist Isabelle Faust, which is devoted entirely to the works of this under-played composer.

[Review]

Gabriel Fauré, Nocturnes and Barcarolles / Dolly Suite. Marc-André Hamelin, Cathy Fuller (Hyperion CDA68331/2)
Marc-André Hamelin has made a name for himself by playing extremely difficult music with ease and musicality. The latest in the Canadian-born pianist's excellent series of deeply probing recitals of unusual music, all on the Hyperion label, is devoted to Gabriel Fauré, specifically to all thirteen of the French composer's Nocturnes and all thirteen of his Barcarolles. Solidifying the qualifications of this double-CD set as the best to own is the addition of a lovely rendition of Fauré's Dolly Suite, with Hamelin's wife, Cathy Fuller, on the primo part.


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Briefly Noted: Schumann for Four and Five (CD of the Month)

Schumann, Piano Quartet/Piano Quintet, I. Faust, A.K. Schreiber, A. Tamestit, J.-G. Queyras, A. Melnikov (released on November 24, 2023) Harmonia Mundi HMM902695 | 52'42"

Many musicologists have described Robert Schumann's youthful piano quartet and piano quintet as twin works, not least because they were composed in the same key, E-flat major, and within a few weeks of one another. Neither of these pieces, early experiments by Schumann with pairing his favorite instrument, the piano, with different combination of string instruments, lasts over a half-hour, but the young composer, still only 19 years old, laid the foundations for many later examples of both of these still relatively rare genres.

This delectable new release assembles a dream team for these exemplary works: violinist Isabelle Faust, violist Antoine Tamestit, cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras, and pianist Alexander Melnikov. All play on historical instruments, with the strings all made roughly around the year 1700, as early as 1672, in the case of Tamestit's Stradivarius viola. Melnikov plays on a historical fortepiano made by Ignace Pleyel (Paris, 1851), technically constructed after Schumann composed these pieces, but that is a minor point.

Even though it was composed slightly later, the quartet is the lesser work to my ears, but its slow movement, with ardent cello solos here played subtly by Queyras, is nothing short of gorgeous. Schumann's piano quintet, however, has always struck me as one of the most perfect pieces of chamber music ever written. This performance, with Anne Katharina Schreiber joining on second violin, is going to be rather difficult to improve on, and it is certainly in competition with Melnikov's own recording of the same pairing from a decade ago (with the Jerusalem String Quartet) and the version made around the same time by the Takács Quartet and Marc-André Hamelin. The second movement surprises, both by the detached, somewhat brisk pacing of the funeral march and the understated rubato of the B section. The use of historical instruments and the individual strengths of each player put this disc a notch above.

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Briefly Noted: Distler's Modern Christmas Oratorio

Hugo Distler, Die Weihnachtsgeschichte, Adam Riis, Concert Clemens, Carsten Seyer-Hansen (released on November 1, 2023) OUR Recordings 6.220684 | 40'17"

Athesinus Consort Berlin, Klaus-Martin Bresgott [2015]

This recording of Hugo Distler's Die Weihnachtsgeschichte, while not the first, is the one that finally made me study this sadly lesser-known work. Many choral musicians, myself included, know Distler's austere arrangement of the late medieval tune "Es ist ein Ros entsprungen." This larger piece for unaccompanied SATB choir uses that tune to unify its 40 minutes of music: many verses of it are sung, interwoven with the Gospel account of the Nativity, sung in chant-like unaccompanied recitative by several soloists.

In this sense, the piece is akin to one of Bach's chorale cantatas, just without solo arias, but it also has much in common with the sacred music of Heinrich Schütz. The ingenuity of the chorale device reaches its climax when the chorale is touchingly interwoven with the part of the dialogue where Mary sings the words now known as the Magnificat, as if all souls ever born are present in that moment to praise Mary's submission to God. Shortly after, in another brilliant moment, there is a verse with the basses on a lullabye ostinato ("Eia, eia, eia"), soothing the newborn Jesus laid in the manger.

The Evangelist, on this disc the refined tenor Adam Riis, gets the bulk of the recitative between choruses, with other singers from the choir appearing as the angel Gabriel (high soprano), Mary and Elizabeth (mezzo-sopranos), and Herod and Simeon (basses). The main competition for this disc is the 2015 recording by the Athesinus Consort Berlin, conducted by Klaus-Martin Bresgott, who is also the editor of the critical edition of the score that appeared the same year (Carus-Verlag, 2015). Individual soloists may be slightly better on one disc or the other, but the overall performance of the Danish choir Concert Clemens on this new disc, directed with great sensitivity by Carsten Seyer-Hansen, is more moving. In particular, the disc's resonant sound preserves the sense of hearing it in an open space with acoustic ring, the Skt. Markus Kirken in Århus, where it was captured last year.

Distler composed this gorgeous piece of modern sacred music in 1933, as his life became entwined with the fate of the Nazi party. Born in Nuremberg, the young German composer had done collegiate studies at Leipzig Conservatory but was forced to withdraw from them for financial reasons in 1931. He took a job as organist at the church of St. Jacobi in Lübeck and got married in 1933. That same year he joined the Nazi party and left written records, documented by historians, showing his support for the regime. Distler rose to better positions in Stuttgart and eventually Berlin, but the Nazi party eventually turned on him, labeling his music "degenerate" and threatening to conscript him into military service. In 1942, at the age of 34, he committed suicide in Berlin.


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Briefly Noted: Merry Charpentier Christmas

Charpentier, Messe de Minuit, Ensemble Correspondances, Sébastien Daucé (released on October 13, 2023) Harmonia Mundi HMM902707DI2 | 80'52"

The French early music group Ensemble Correspondances has quickly become a favorite. For that unusual Christmas gift, conductor Sébastien Daucé has put together a most entertaining Noël program on this new release. In splendid performances, it pairs Marc-Antoine Charpentier's more familiar Messe de Minuit, a setting of popular Noël melodies to the Ordinary of the Mass, with two of the same composer's oratorio-like dramatic motets for Christmas.

In his excellent booklet essay, Graham Sadler notes a musical self-borrowing not often commented on, in which Charpentier based the "Gloria" movement of the Midnight Mass on the music that went with a parallel text in his motet In nativitatem Domini canticum, H. 416. Having always been struck by the beauty of this moment in the Mass, so much more reflective and introspective than the general take on the "Gloria" text, I was delighted to learn of this connection with the earlier work, which I did not know at all.

Daucé rounds out a Christmas Eve celebration with a number of charming selections, including two of Charpentier's instrumental settings of Noëls used in the Mass. The setting of "Laissez paître vos bêtes" for recorder consort is an absolute delight, as is a motet for the elevation of the host, excerpted from a longer work by Charpentier's contemporary, Sébastien de Brossard, a real find for music directors looking for something unusual to program next month. The disc ends with one of Charpentier's versions of the Te Deum, H. 147, likely used during the Christmas season at the Jesuit church of St. Louis in Paris, where Charpentier was maître de musique. Sung at the end of Matins, it would have directly preceded Midnight Mass.


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Briefly Noted: Noseda's cycle of Walker sinfonias

George Walker, Five Sinfonias, National Symphony Orchestra, Gianandrea Noseda (released on September 29, 2023) NSO0007D | 65'17"

Gianandrea Noseda had planned to lead a complete cycle of Beethoven symphonies to mark the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth. The twist was that the NSO would perform all nine symphonies in just three weeks, beginning in late May of 2020, a plan wiped out by the coronavirus pandemic. Fate intervened further with the murder of George Floyd that month, igniting a national reaction that led the NSO and other classical music institutions into self-reflection about representative programming. The eventual cycle, led by Noseda from 2022 to 2023, was a pairing of Beethoven with symphonies by African-American composers George Walker and William Grant Still.

One of the benefits was this complete cycle of the five sinfonias of George Walker, all recorded live in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall under Noseda's fastidious baton. Remarkably, for all the effort and time involved in bringing this composite cycle to completion, this single disc clocks in at just over an hour. None of the Walker Sinfonias is longer than about fifteen minutes, and the most slender is the one the NSO itself commissioned in 2012, when the esteemed American composer was 90 years old, Sinfonia No. 4. Walker's subtitle, “Strands,” refers to the way he interwove two spiritual melodies (“There is a Balm in Gilead” and “Roll, Jordan, Roll”) almost imperceptibly into this one-movement piece, which the NSO took on its 2023 visit to Carnegie Hall. Sinfonia No. 2 stands out among the Walker symphonies for its originality, especially the short second movement (“Lamentoso e quasi senza misura”) where a mournful flute solo is accompanied by enigmatic clusters and melodic snippets from the cellos and even guitar.

Sinfonia No. 3 has a percussion-laden third movement bustling with rhythmic activity, reminscent at times of Stravinsky or Shostakovich. However, like Sinfonia No. 1 and portions of most of these pieces, a disappointing sameness and arid quality prevail. Sinfonia No. 5 ("Visions"), premiered after Walker's death in 2018, has the most overt programmatic elements of the five. While Walker was working on the piece, in 2015, a white supremacist shot and killed nine black parishioners at Mother Emanuel Church in South Carolina, after which the composer added words to the symphony, spoken by a soprano, a tenor, two baritones and a bass. The composer's last symphonic statement thus took up the ongoing struggle for racial equality in the United States, made more explicit by a video by Frank Schramm shown at the premiere, including ocean scenes and photographs documenting the slave trade in Charleston.


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Briefly Noted: Tetzlaff siblings play Brahms Double (CD of the Month)

Brahms, Double Concerto / Viotti / Dvořák, Christian Tetzlaff, Tanja Tetzlaff, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Paavo Järvi (released on October 1, 2023) Ondine ODE1423-2 | 60'43"

Earlier this year, I singled out Christian and Tanja Tetzlaff's last recording with Lars Vogt. After the late pianist died last September, the Tetzlaff siblings recorded this program as a memorial to their dear friend in December. They turned to a piece they have played many times before, the Double Concerto of Brahms, as a tribute. The opening cadenza for cello, later joined by violin, is quiet and intimate, with a sense of plaint suitable to the tone of remembrance. The siblings do well in this unusual concerto, where the two instruments, after that opening cadenza, almost always play together, one finishing the thoughts of the other.

Brahms wrote this piece very late in life, for cellist Robert Hausmann and his old friend Joseph Joachim. At that point Brahms and Joachim were no longer on speaking terms, as Brahms had "gone with" (as Larry David put it) Joachim's ex-wife following their divorce. In a gesture of friendship, Brahms meant the piece as a reconciliation, even including a varied form of the F-A-E motif he had used in the movement of the collaborative sonata dedicated to Joachim 30 years earlier. The Tetzlaffs' rendition of the slow movement is especially free and elegiac. Järvi excels at keeping the musicians of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin together with the soloists, giving them room rhythmically and with careful dynamics. The third movement could perhaps be more daring from the soloists, but it has a fine seriousness about it.

Christian Tetzlaff ingeniously pairs the piece with something unexpected, Giovanni Battista Viotta's Violin Concerto No. 22, from the end of the 18th century. It is a piece that Brahms and Joachim both loved. Tetzlaff notes in his booklet comments that Brahms used it as a model for the Double Concerto, including the choice of key (A minor) and some motifs that are borrowed. Brahms wrote to Clara Schumann of the Viotti concerto as one of his "very special raptures," and by including it in the Double Concerto, it is a way to recall to Joachim one aspect of their early friendship through this music. The first movement may not much to speak of, other than some showy bits in the solo part, but the second movement is quite gorgeous, in addition to its significance in relation to the Brahms. The younger Tetzlaff gets her solo piece as well, an encore-like lagniappe of Dvořák's "Silent Woods," an Adagio arranged for cello and orchestra from From the Bohemian Forest.


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Briefly Noted: Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff Romances

Rachmaninoff / Tchaikovsky, Romances, Piotr Beczała, Helmut Deutsch (released on August 25, 2023) PentaTone PTC 5186 866 | 81'01"

Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff are not composers likely to come up glowing in my estimation. The exceptions to this rule include their songs. The temporal limits of the text to be set helped both composers avoid their usual sin of going on far too long, especially in symphonies and concertos. The late, beloved baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky owned this repertoire, but in his wake, the Polish tenor Piotr Beczała has made a strong case in this new release for a different voice type to swoon and complain of the hardships of Russian life.

Rachmaninoff's overwrought style so suited the poems he chose, such as the tender "Lilacs" and the world-weary "They answered." Beczała draws out the marrow of this sweet suffering, as in the aching rubato of "How Fair This Spot," in which he applies a dulcet, sighing head voice to the high note at the end. That is a standout in this selection of 31 romances by these two giant figures of Russian Romanticism, a series of charming miniatures, only one lasting longer than four minutes.

The nostalgic tone of many of these pieces seems apt for autumn listening. Beczała wields heroic power as well, deployed at climactic moments in Rachmaninoff's "In the silence of the secret night" and in "Do not sing, my beauty," a poem set by countless composers, of which Rachmaninoff's is the most moving. Pianist Helmut Deutsch supports his singer in every way, moving out of his way when necessary and infusing the introductions and postludes with their own poignancy, including in the most demanding accompaniment, that of "Spring Waters."

The Tchaikovsky songs account for more than half of the disc, in spite of standing out less. Most are piecemeal selections from several different sets, with the exception of the six romances of Op. 73, which Beczała and Deutsch recorded in its entirety. In these melancholy songs, Tchaikovsky turned to the poetry of Daniil Rathaus, a 20-something student who sent the composer these poems as an unsolicited submission. These songs certainly touch on the "Ambiguous Speech and Eloquent Silence" that scholar Philip Ross Bullock has noted in his assessment of the "queerness" of Tchaikovsky's songs. This mini-song cycle, the last work Tchaikovsky completed before his death in 1893, also features musical reminiscences of his "Pathétique" symphony.


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Briefly Noted: Josquin and Phrygian Pain

Josquin Desprez, Missa Malheur me bat, Gli Angeli Genève, Stephan MacLeod (released on September 22, 2023) Aparté AP338 | 67'

One cannot have too many recordings of Josquin's cyclic Masses, at least not yet. The complete set by the Tallis Scholars remains hard to beat, but then along comes Gli Angeli Genève with this new release of a program centered on the elusive Renaissance composer's Missa Malheur me bat. The group, founded in 2005, is mostly known for Baroque repertoire, especially Bach. This turn to the High Renaissance was a bit of a surprise, at least to me. The group's director, bass Stephan MacLeod, anchors a group of nine singers. They sing mostly two on each of the four parts in most pieces, with baritone Frederik Sjollema swinging back and forth between tenor and bass.

The sound, recorded at the Eglise Saint-Germain in Geneva, is less aggressive than the Tallis Scholars, who recorded this Mass only about a decade ago: slightly smaller in number of voices, but also more intimate, more rarefied and refined. MacLeod uses one-on-a-part textures in interesting ways, as in building up to the climax with all nine singers in the long Miserere mei deus. This Mass is one of several based on the three-part chanson "Malheur me bat" (formerly attributed to Ockeghem, but now thought to be the work of a composer named Malcort), transcribed along with the Mass in the old Smijers edition of Josquin's music. (The chanson has not survived in any manuscript source with its complete text.)

In a booklet interview, MacLeod said that the appeal of this particular Mass setting was its mode, the Phyrgian (mode 3). Since the chronology of Josquin's music is almost impossible to establish with any certainty, the modality serves instead as programmatic theme, as all the motets placed between the movements of the Mass are in the same mode. With its distinctive half-step above the final, the Phrygian often served as a musical marker for lamentation, which it does in these motets and in the chanson on which the Mass is based, describing both sacred and secular grief: Douleur me bat, Nymphes des bois (for death of Ockeghem), Miserere mei deus, and Mille regretz (of which the attribution to Josquin is now challenged by scholars).

The only non-Phrygian piece is the final motet, Praeter rerum seriem, which follows the last movement of the Mass. (MacLeod's assertion that the text of this motet expresses doubt about the perpetual virginity of Mary is a misreading: no matter what it may mean for MacLeod's beliefs, the text is about wonder and mystery, not doubt.) Praeter rerum seriem is a hymn set in six parts: Josquin has the superius and the tenor answer one another on the original Gregorian melody. To point this out, the choir introduces the motet by singing a verse of the hymn melody by itself in this way, antiphonally back and forth, phrase by phrase, with the triple meter of the polyphony sped up.

The Mass is a compositional wonder, in four voices, but with some two-voice sections in the Sanctus, where the "Hosanna" is over 50 measures long, with interesting shifts of triple and duple and extremely dense textures. The amazing second statement of the Agnus dei, for alto and tenor, is an extended canon at the 2nd, of remarkable complexity. Josquin then outdoes himself in the third Agnus, expanding to six parts: both altus and bassus are split into two, doubled in close canon at the unison. MacLeod and his ensemble sing the piece at the pitch where it was notated (E), just as the Tallis Scholars did, and with women's voices on the superius part.


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Briefly Noted: More Schubert on Fortepiano

Schubert, Impromptus, Op. 90 and Op. 142, Ronald Brautigam (released on September 1, 2023) BIS-2614 | 61'47"

Ronald Brautigam is one of this century's leading proponents of the fortepiano, noted in these pages for his traversals of the music of Beethoven and Mozart, among others. His new release is a set of Schubert's eight impromptus -- not including the three piano pieces of D. 946 once known, incorrectly, as impromptus -- recorded on a fortepiano built by Paul McNulty in 2007, modeled on a Conrad Graf instrument from around 1819.

Schubert never actually owned a piano, and his only opportunity to play the keyboard came in the homes of friends. The composer almost surely never heard the particular instrument imitated by McNulty: Graf's opus 318, located in a Czech castle. Ardent admirers of Graf's pianos in the early 19th century included Beethoven, Chopin, Robert and Clara Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Brahms, among others. What you hear on this recording is a likely approximation of the sound in Schubert's ears as he composed and played these arch-Romantic pieces.

Even though a Graf had a smaller sound than the later modern piano, because of its thin soundboard and smaller hammers, its fortes are still resonant, as in the middle section of Op. 90, no. 2, or Brautigam's devilish trills in Op. 142, no. 4. The pianoforte's advantage over earlier keyboard instruments was its range of soft sound: this Graf had four pedals, a sustaining pedal and una corda pedal like the modern piano, but with a moderator and even a double moderator as well. This device pushes a thin layer (or double-layer) of cloth between the strings and the hammers, and it was the pianoforte's "secret weapon," in the words of András Schiff, who once sneered at early keyboard revivalists before making his own Schubert recording on a reconstructed fortepiano. Hearing those soft effects helps one understand what Schubert had in mind when he wrote pianississimo.


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Briefly Noted: Pichon's 1610 Vespers (CD of the Month)

Monteverdi, Vespro della beata vergine, Pygmalion, Raphaël Pichon (released on September 1, 2023) Harmonia Mundi HMM902710.11 | xx'xx

Claudio Monteverdi is a favorite composer, and there is no piece of his greater in my estimation than the Vespro della beata vergine. The Vespers of 1610, as the piece is sometimes known, has been reviewed in these pages many times, both in recordings and live. In other words, it would take a lot for me to be surprised by a new recording of this piece, but that is precisely what conductor Raphaël Pichon and his ensemble, Pygmalion, have done in their newly released recording. The opening movement, in which Monteverdi interweaves his brilliant brass fanfare from Orfeo with the opening versicle of the Vespers service, is adorned with added brass riffs. Then, just when I thought that Pichon was going to omit the final statement of "Alleluia" from this compact section, his forces delivered it, after a long pause, with expansive delicacy.

Pichon's St. Matthew Passion was a CD of the Month last year, and this release is no less fulfilling a listen. An older version of the Vespro, led by Frieder Bernius, remains my favorite because it is presented liturgically, rounded out with exquisitely performed chant. Pichon's approach could not be more different: where Bernius favors reserve and propriety, Pygmalion goes for spectacle, with a big chorus on many numbers, clarion brass, and splashy surprises of sound.

Not surprisingly, Pichon says in his booklet interview that he feels that "the Vespro is the first cinematic work in the history of music. Monteverdi’s dramatic genius means that each psalm (and especially the first three) is presented as a genuine scene of dramatic action. He sets the scene, and makes us feel, visualise, even touch it!" This situates the work in that most dramatic of stylistic periods, the Baroque, the same era that created the genre of opera. The experience Pichon wants is "immersive," and it is: as he puts it, "to attend a performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers is to experience ecstasy," in a way similar to a viewing of a room-filling work by Bernini.

Many elements will strike a listener familiar with the work as quite different. Pichon opts to eschew the "chiavette" system, by which the often high tessitura of some music of this period was transposed down by a fourth, as heard on many recordings. By not only adhering to the original keys, but also resorting to the high pitch standard of Italian tunings of the time (A set somewhere between 440 and 465 Hz), the singers add further virtuosic, one might say "operatic," intensity to many key climaxes.

Like most conductors, Pichon shuffles the order of numbers slightly in the work's final section. The most significant change is the interpolation of another piece by Monteverdi, Sancta Maria, succurre miseris (SV 328) from Promptuarium musicum, published in 1627, to serve as the "antiphon" to the Magnificat. (In his "liturgical" recording, Bernius added a chant antiphon with an almost identical text in this position.) The motet is followed by the litany-like Sonata sopra Sancta Maria, with which it shares intriguing melodic elements, as if the composer were alluding to one in the other. The concluding number is also a nod to cinematic style, as the Orfeo fanfare that opened the work returns, retrofitted to the closing formulas of Vespers.


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Briefly Noted: Hamelin Surveys Fauré

Fauré, Nocturnes and Barcarolles / Dolly Suite, Marc-André Hamelin, Cathy Fuller (released on September 1, 2023) Hyperion CDA68331/2 | 163'40"

Marc-André Hamelin has made a name for himself by playing extremely difficult music with ease and musicality. The latest in the Canadian-born pianist's excellent series of deeply probing recitals of unusual music, all on the Hyperion label, is devoted to Gabriel Fauré, specifically to all thirteen of the French composer's Nocturnes and all thirteen of his Barcarolles. Hamelin played a few of these pieces during his most recent appearance in the area, last year on the Candlelight Concert Society's series. (He had just put this recording in the can the previous July and September, in London.)

Fauré apparently disdained programmatic titles, and the genre of nocturne and barcarolle were instead suggested by publishers: the composer's son Philippe famously joked that if left to his own devices, Fauré would have called every piano piece "Piano Piece No. so-and-so." Yet while the nocturnes are not all placid and nocturnal, the Barcarolles are set in the expected compound meter, like the Venetian gondolier songs for which the genre is named. Hamelin approaches these often melancholic, curious works with tasteful reserve, never overstating but leaving no question of technical mastery over them. The stylistic development of harmonic vocabulary and melodic fancy is fascinating to hear, from the first pieces composed in the late 1870s up to the last from 1921, shortly before Fauré's death.

Solidifying the qualifications of this double-CD set as the best to own is the addition of a lovely rendition of Fauré's Dolly Suite, with Hamelin's wife, Cathy Fuller, on the primo part. Fuller is a trained pianist who now works as a broadcaster, and she makes a lovely impression on the upper part, which Fauré intentionally made simpler, for the dedicatee, Regina-Hélène (nicknamed Dolly), the young daughter of his lover, Emma Bardac. (Emma eventually became Debussy's wife.) A perceptive booklet essay by Jessica Duchen, erstwhile blogger and author of an authoritative biography of Fauré (Phaidon Press, 2000), rounds out this most alluring new release.


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Briefly Noted: Faust Channels Locatelli

P. Locatelli, Violin Concertos / Concerti Grossi, I. Faust, Il Giardino Armonico, G. Antonini (released on August 25, 2023) Harmonia Mundi HMM902398 | 68'22"

If you've heard of Pietro Locatelli, it is likely as part of a list of other 18th-century violinist-composers in the mold of Corelli and Vivaldi: one of those Italian -i names. At most, early music groups will include a Locatelli piece along with more famous composers in a program from time to time. So be prepared to be wowed when you take in the latest disc from Il Giardino Armonico and the mesmerizing violinist Isabelle Faust, which is devoted entirely to the works of this under-played composer. He was born in Bergamo in 1695, but his peregrinations took him from Rome, where he trained, throughout Italy and Germany and eventually to Amsterdam, where he died in 1764.

This recording features two of Locatelli's concerti grossi, including the intriguing and intensely introspective Op. 7, no. 6, given the subtitle "Il pianto d'Arianna." Likely a sort of programmatic setting of an unknown text about the abandonment of Ariadne by Theseus, it is a sort of quasi-operatic instrumental drama: conductor Giovanni Antonini compares its structure to that of Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna for clues to each movement's meaning. Broken into ten movements, the first five, all quite short and featuring turbulent contrasts, are joined together here in a single track. The ensemble's lead violinist, Stefano Barneschi, takes the second solo violin parts under Faust in this and the less noteworthy Op. 1, no. 11, with opulent results.

While the concerti grossi emphasize Locatelli's melodic invention and musicality, two solo violin concerti showcase his other compositional side, the virtuosic exploits of a true showman. Locatelli ornamented his solo concertos with astounding cadenzas, each of which he gave the title of Capriccio. These Capricci, twenty-four in number, are an important forerunner of and likely influence on Paganini's 24 Caprices. Faust is magical in the insane runs of whistle-tone harmonics in the Capriccio from the first movement of Op. 3, no. 11. Likewise, she somehow navigates the perilous extended positions in the Capriccio for the third movement, so high in range that it reminds one of the anecdote that Locatelli once stunned a canary off its perch with his sound. Melodically these pieces are often as dull as a Hanon exercise, but the facility of the playing is nothing less than amazing. Locatelli also often marked a fermata in places where the soloist was meant to improvise, and here Faust plays written-out cadenzas by Godefridus Domenicus Reber from an edition of 1743.

As Faust puts it in her booklet essay on the solo concertos, these excessive cadenzas "are of such great technical difficulty that Locatelli expressly left it up to the performer whether to play them or not. He was obviously aware that not every violinist’s hand could master these cadenzas." Fortunately with Faust, her hands are up to the challenge. The tender Pastorale movement from another concerto grosso, Op. 1, no. 8, serves as an encore to cool down the strings.


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Briefly Noted: London, Circa 1740 (CD of the Month)

London, circa 1740: Handel's Musicians, La Rêveuse, F. Bolton, B. Perrot (released on August 18, 2023) Harmonia Mundi HMM902613 | 68'57"

Gambist Florence Bolton and theorbist Benjamin Perrot, who co-direct the early music ensemble La Rêveuse, continue to survey the lesser-known corners of 18th-century music in England. The concept for the first half of their latest release is to bring together music of Handel with other pieces by the virtuosos who performed under him during his English period.

Flutist Carl Friedrich Wiedemann and oboist (and flutist) Giuseppe Sammartini both became principal players in Handel's orchestra. Both were likely featured in humorous engravings by William Hogarth: Sammartini's notorious bad temper was lampooned in The Enraged Musician. Traverso player Oliver Riehl and soprano recorder player Sébastien Marq contribute remarkable solo playing in concertos by Wiedemann and Sammartini, respectively.

Violinist Pietro Castrucci, whom Handel met when they both worked for the Ruspoli family in Rome, later came to London and became the concertmaster of Handel's opera orchestra. Florence Bolton takes the solo part in a gamba sonata by Castrucci, as well as contributing a wide-ranging booklet essay giving a vivid portrayal of musical taste in the period. Handel is represented by a fine trio sonata, featuring the gorgeous, intertwined violins of Stéphan Dudermel and Ajay Ranganathan. As lagniappe, there is the Hornpipe that Handel wrote for the budding concert series at Vauxhall Gardens, organized by the entrepreneur Jonathan Tyers at one of the summer retreats from London for the nobility. (The Prince of Wales, who used his artistic patronage in his ongoing campaign for popularity against his father, King George II, was a patron and even maintained a Prince's Pavilion there.).

The second half of this pleasing disc goes in a completely different, folk music-influenced direction. Cellist and composer James Oswald, although not directly connected to Handel, was a Scotsman active in London from the 1740s on, later even becoming chamber composer for King George III. Born in Crail, a town in Fife (the region where my own Scottish ancestors lived for a time), he made many arrangements of Scottish folk tunes, beginning with a popular Sonata of Scots Tunes in five movements. The recording also features a selection of melodies from his Caledonian Pocket Companion, an anthology of twelve volumes, rounding out this diverting late-summer delight.

Briefly Noted: A Trio of 20th-century Piano Trios

Montsalvatge / Tailleferre / Korngold, Piano Trios, Andrist-Stern-Honigberg Trio (released on August 4, 2023) Centaur CRC4037 | 57'11"

Audrey Andrist has been a long-time fixture at Washington-area concerts, particularly in contemporary repertoire. The Canadian-born pianist plays often with her husband, violinist James Stern, as a duo and, with National Symphony Orchestra cellist Steven Honigberg, as the anchor of a rather fine piano trio.

While beautifully played, the new disc from the Andrist-Stern-Honigberg Trio, released by Centaur Records, is of interest primarily because of its intriguing combination of music. First is the Piano Trio by Xavier Montsalvatge, dating from the 1980s, when the Catalan composer was in his 70s. This suave, refined work, infused with jazz and folk elements, feels like a love letter to Spain. Its first movement is a "Balada a Dulcinea," infused with tender sweetness for Don Quixote's imagined sweetheart, followed by a "Diálogo con Mompou," referring to another composer, Montsalvatge's contemporary from Barcelona.

Adding to the recent rediscovery of Germaine Tailleferre's piano music is her Piano Trio, composed during World War I, when it went unnoticed and unpublished. The French composer took the piece up again in 1978, when she was in her 80s, and the revised version is a mixture of early and late styles, as she wrote a new second movement and added a fourth-movement finale. With each of the four movements clocking in at a balanced three minutes each, the piece has a pleasing unity.

Erich Korngold composed the final Piano Trio on this disc, the longest of the three works, when he was only twelve years old. The piece was among the fruit of his tutelage with Zemlinsky, study recommended by Gustav Mahler, who had heard a cantata the boy had written. A child prodigy, Korngold had already had a ballet score performed professionally in Vienna, and Artur Schnabel was performing his piano sonata around Europe. This trio is a tour de force for the pianist, and Andrist rises to the occasion, especially in the rollicking Scherzo, an hommage to the Viennese waltz redolent of both Strauss and Mahler.

Briefly Noted: Lars Vogt swan song (CD of the Month)

Schubert, Piano Trios Nos. 1 and 2, Christian Tetzlaff, Tanja Tetzlaff, Lars Vogt (released on February 3, 2023) Ondine ODE1394-2D | 136'45"

I was lucky to have heard the late German pianist Lars Vogt at his one local appearance in recent years, an extraordinary Beethoven first piano concerto with Markus Stenz and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 2016. We have noted a number of his fine recordings over the life of this site, most recently an odd but satisfying one of rarely heard Romantic melodramas, made with his daughter Isabelle. As recounted in a beautiful article by David Allen for the New York Times, Vogt delayed checking into a hospital in 2021 for further analysis of the cancer that would eventually take his life last September, in order to travel to Bremen to make the first part of this double-album of Schubert's chamber music with Christian Tetzlaff and his sister Tanja Tetzlaff.

The resulting set is a remarkable testament to Vogt's sensitivity as a chamber musician. At their sessions (the second was after Vogt had started chemotherapy) the group recorded all of Schubert's piano trios, except for the Sonatensatz, D. 28, a work of juvenilia, as he composed it when he was just 15 years old. This performance of Piano Trio No. 2 is distinguished by its restoration of a section later cut from the Finale by Schubert, among many musical qualities, especially in the dark-hued slow movement. (There is an odd sound I can't identify at the 10:52 mark in the finale of Piano Trio No. 2.)

In addition to the two numbered trios is the Notturno, a single slow movement possibly composed for and then removed from the first piano trio, with which it has a related home key. It is this piece that stands out on the first disc, especially the graceful, unhurried performance of the hushed main theme. The more heroic contrasting sections sound defiant and determined, but it is that hovering, bliss-filled lead subject that haunts the ears. Schubert composed all three of these works for piano trio in 1827 and 1828, not long before his death, adding an element of wistfulness. What I heard first in the performance was confirmed in the emotional recollections of the Tetzlaffs, included in the booklet:

(Tanja) When Lars listened to this recording, he wrote in our trio chat: “Now I immerse myself in the miracle, too. Feels a little bit like everything, at least in my life, has developed toward this Trio in E flat major.” What again and again was heard from him was this ‘Now we’ve done it, recorded these trios; now I could go too.’ And I find that in the recording one notices that deep inside he already knew that in all likelihood he wasn’t going to be able to live very much longer.

(Christian) The recording was made shortly before the diagnosis. But after every session he lay on the sofa and had horrible stomach pains. And he knew that something catastrophic had happened. When he mentioned this piece, then what went along with it was that it very clearly deals with departure and death, very differently than the B flat major trio.

Vogt also recorded Schubert pieces with each Tetzlaff individually: the Rondo brillant in B minor with violinist Christian and the "Arpeggione" sonata in A minor with cellist Tanja, from 1826 and 1824, respectively. The Tetzlaffs had intended to make a concert tour with Vogt this year, which included one of the Schubert trios. The tour will go ahead, with Kiveli Dörken, a beloved students of Vogt's, taking his place. The tour's local stop will be at Shriver Hall in Baltimore on March 26. shriverconcerts.org

Briefly Noted: Andsnes champions Dvořák

Dvořák, Poetic Tone Pictures, Leif Ove Andsnes (released on October 28, 2022) Sony 886449916887 | 56'10"

The last local appearance by Leif Ove Andsnes had been in 2017, a striking duet recital with Marc-André Hamelin. Happily for those like me starved for his stylish playing, Washington Performing Arts brought him back to the Kennedy Center for a stupendous solo concert last month. (Although unreviewed in Washington, the program was the same as his Chicago recital, reviewed by my colleague Lawrence Johnson.) Here in Washington, Andsnes ran the first half all together with no applause: he did not need to ask the audience not to applaud, but the unfamiliarity of the music and his command of attention kept the house quiet. For me the highlight of the evening was an astounding reading of Beethoven's Op. 110, full of technical wizardry and a witty approach to the quotation of silly folk songs and the self-mocking of the concluding fugue, a gesture recalled by Verdi in the finale to his opera Falstaff.

Andsnes's touring program closed with this forgotten set of character pieces by Dvořák, which the Norwegian pianist recorded in 2021. Op. 85, which runs to almost an hour, was a bit much to hear in a single sitting, but as usual Andsnes made a strong case for its revival. Dvořák wrote this collection over the course of several weeks on summer vacation in 1889, three years before he came to the United States. Andsnes came to know the pieces when he studied with a Czech teacher, as well as through a recording by Radoslav Kvapil. The pause in his concertizing during the Covid-19 lockdowns gave Andsnes the chance to study the set in detail, leading to this recording and the live performances on tour. Andsnes hits an ideal balance between the maudlin sentimentality of the simpler, slower pieces ("Twilight Way" and "In the Old Castle," among others) and the fierce virtuosity also required. Highlights include the fun starts and stops of "Toying" and especially the tipsy, spinning runs of "Bacchanalia," which Andsnes has likened to "a Scarlatti sonata gone mad." Folk touches come into play delightfully in "Peasant Ballad" and "Furiant."

Briefly Noted: Queyras and Tharaud go for Baroque (CD of the Month)

Marin Marais, Pièces de Viole, Jean-Guihen Queyras, Alexandre Tharaud (released on January 27, 2023) Harmonia Mundi HMM902315 | 62'24"

Alexandre Tharaud has not visited Washington since 2018, and cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras was last here in 2017. The two esteemed French musicians have continued their long and fruitful collaboration in a striking new Baroque album, with delightful transcriptions of Marin Marais’s pièces de viole, originally for viola da gamba and continuo, for the cello and piano. The performances, in the spirit of Baroque elaboration but taking full advantage of modern dynamic range and harmonic content, are delightful.

The two longest tracks are celebrated works in Marais's oeuvre. About a third of the disc is given to Couplets des Folies d'Espagne, from the composer's second book of Pièces de Viole, Marais's epic variation set on the widely known tune "La follia." This version of the piece shivers with rhythmic vitality, including some folksy Spanish twists, not least Tharaud's guitar-like repeated notes in one variation.

The second-longest piece on the disc, though only a quarter the size of the Folies d'Espagne, is La Rêveuse, included in Marais's Suite d’un goût étranger in his fourth book and used crucially in the splendid movie about Marais, Tous les Matins du Monde. From the same odd suite is the single track performed by Tharaud alone, an arrangement of the viol piece "Le badinage" somehow rendered on the Yamaha grand piano. Queyras also has one solo track, an arrangement of "Les Regrets," a charming piece sometimes attributed to Marais, given a soulful rendering on Queyras's 1696 Gioffredo Cappa cello.

Also not to be missed is the truly bizarre "Le Tableau de l'opération de la Taille," a piece that describes the horribly painful operation to remove a stone from the bladder. Actor Guillaume Gallienne reads the descriptions of this surgery, which Marais himself underwent without anesthesia in 1720. Unfortunately for those who do not speak French, there is no translation of this brutal text in the booklet, but the vivid demonstrations by the musicians give more than enough sense of their meaning.