Critic’s Notebook: Drop-dead gorgeous: Pygmalion plays Shakespeare — en français

Also reviewed for Die Presse: Zum Sterben schön: Ein Requiem für Ophelia mit Pygmalion im Konzerthaus

G.Fauré, Requiem (v.1900) K.Battle, A.Schmidt C.M.Giulini / Philharmonia DG

G.Fauré, Requiem (v.1893) A.Mellon, P.Kooy P.Herreweghe / La Chapelle Royale Harmonia Mundi

A.Thomas, Hamlet T.Hampson, J.Anderson, S.Ramey, D.Graves A.De Almeida / LPO EMI/Warner

The French ensemble’s musical Hamlet-synthesis culminated in a heavenly Fauré Requiem

Music-as-theatre — that’s a concept Raphaël Pichon and his Ensemble Pygmalion have been embracing for a while now. By threading a dramatic arc through a series of thematically and musically connected works, they often bring lesser-known pieces out into the light. They’ve done it with Bach (Köthener Trauermusik), resurrected early Mozart (“Liberta!”, both Harmonia Mundi), and in Salzburg this summer they will give Mozart’s unfinished stage works an outing, propped up and united by some dramatic scaffolding (Zaide, or the Way towards the Light).

Saturday night at the Konzerthaus, it was Ambroise Thomas’s grand opéra Hamlet and Fauré’s Requiem, joined by rarely performed Berlioz (Tristia, Parts 1 and 3, but not “La mort d’Ophélie”) that formed a full-length program under the title/theme: Requiem pour Ophélie.

Since Thomas’s Hamlet is a rare guest at the opera house (last seen in Vienna in 2012, also with Stéphane Degout) and comes with its longueurs, hearing its best scenes in this concentrated form was a treat. Sabine Devieilhe—with her agile voice, secure high notes, and dramatic punch—lent the music a quality bordering on outrageous and made an Ophelia to die for. Degout: powerful, open, warm, sonorous, and without a trace of nasality. What more could one want?!

Still more, as it turned out! Fauré’s Requiem — unquestionably one of the most beautiful of its kind — offered everything the heart could desire. The orchestra, with its colourful, rich yet pliant sound, a sublimely musical harp, and a harmonium that chimed in (in the best sense) like a cross between synth and accordion, was sheer joy. The superbly blended, earthy-sounding chorus was its equal in tonal and executive quality. And by the time Devieilhe reached her “Pie Jesu” and “In Paradisum,” all that was left was childlike wonder and quiet bliss. It’s hard to hold back the tears, when faced with such beauty.


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City Ballet marks diamond jubilee with resplendent "Jewels"

Sara Mearns in "Diamonds," from Balanchine's Jewels, New York City Ballet. Photo: Erin Baiano

New York City Ballet celebrated its 75th anniversary by opening the season last fall with its blockbuster staging of George Balanchine's Jewels. A full-length abstract ballet, composed of three rather different acts, it is often described as having no plot. Watching this choreography in the Kennedy Center Opera House Tuesday night, for the first time in a decade, brought home the purely visual stories the work presents, matched ideally with the pulse of the music.

"Emeralds," Balanchine's opening tribute to French Romanticism, remains a graceful but melancholy affair. Set to Gabriel Fauré's incidental music for Pelléas et Mélisande and Shylock, the sense of profound tragedy pervaded the act, made more rueful by the lack of understanding of this unnamed pain from all those who see it. Indiana Woodward and Tyler Angle seemed graceful and settled in to the lead pairing in this part of Jewels, which they performed for the first time last fall. The delicate flute solo movement of the Pelléas music felt especially poignant, and the sadness of the group of men at the tableau's end, gazing up through the murky light to something unseen, felt funereal.

Balanchine's tribute to American dynamism in "Rubies" came across with delightful humor. Megan Fairchild and Anthony Huxley led the light-footed corps through the unorthodox steps and movements, timed with verve to Stravinsky's Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, energized by the lively piano playing of Stephen Gosling. The red-costumed dancers flirted with all sorts of Americana: they were cowboys, they were flappers, they were the chorus line of the Rockettes. In the most openly sexual moment of the whole ballet, the tall, elegant Mira Nadon was moved about by four male dancers, positioning her like a doll.

After tragedy and mirth came a sense of Russian classicism that stopped time, in the concluding "Diamonds." Sara Mearns, one of the company's most celebrated dancers, brought a reserved nobility to the role that Balanchine created for his muse, Suzanne Farrell. Her partner, Chun Wai Chan, became City Ballet's first Chinese principal dancer two years ago, and he provided all of the athletic power of their scenes, lifting Mearns with effortless strength and leaping with remarkable balance and agility. Andrew Litton paced the movements (all but one) from Tchaikovsky's dance-infused Third Symphony ideally with the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra, bringing to an end a grand tribute to Balanchine and the company he helped create.

Jewels runs through June 9. kennedy-center.org

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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On ClassicsToday: Nicolas Stavy's Muscular Romanticism in Fauré (10/10)

A Fabulous Fauré Piano Music Primer

by Jens F. Laurson

If, as pianist Daniel Grimwood has suggested, it is true that “it is hard to name another composer who enjoys such renown in his homeland yet such neglect elsewhere” and that this is allegedly because “his sound-world…is so Gallic that any listener without French sensibilities... Continue Reading [Insider content]

CD Reviews: Carolyn Sampson

Charles T. Downey, Recording reviews: A limpid soprano’s chance to soar
Washington Post, February 3

A Verlaine Songbook, C. Sampson, J. Middleton (released on November 18, 2016) BIS-2233 | 80'

Carolyn Sampson is known for her radiant performances of baroque music, having recorded widely with the world’s leading early-music ensembles. The British soprano’s voice combines limpid clarity with laser-focused precision, but with any possible harsh edges softened in a smooth finish. It is also beautifully suited to the corrupt delicacies of late Romantic French mélodie, as demonstrated in Sampson’s recent song recital recording on the BIS label, with the accomplished pianist Joseph Middleton.

All of the songs here are settings of poetry by Paul Verlaine. Some of the early works were inspired by Verlaine’s love for Mathilde Mauté, the young girl with the “Carolingian name,” as he put it in his collection “La Bonne Chanson,” set as a cycle by Gabriel Fauré. Verlaine married Mathilde, but not long after she had borne him a son, he ran off with a young poet named Arthur Rimbaud. Their scandalous love affair provided much of the material for his collection “Romances sans paroles,” including the poems set by Debussy in a set called “Ariettes oubliées.” After time in prison, Verlaine ran off again with Lucien Létinois, a 17-year-old student at the Jesuit school where Verlaine taught.

Multiple composers have composed songs on the same Verlaine poems, which makes for interesting comparison of musical settings. Sampson pairs Debussy's “Fêtes galantes” with songs on poems from the same collection by Poldowski, the nom de plume of Belgian-born pianist Régine Wieniawski. Individual songs by other composers, including Ravel, Saint-Saëns, Charles Bordes and Reynaldo Hahn, round out a most attractive program. Songs such as Déodat de Séverac's “Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit” and Josef Szulc's “Clair de Lune” are major discoveries.

Throughout, Sampson produces an elegant ribbon of sound, couched in refined French pronunciation, that can hang in the air — for instance, a long, exquisitely soft high G at the end of Chausson's “Apaisement.” The only minor setback is that when pushed to louder dynamics, Sampson’s voice loses some of its satiny quality, turning strident, but this is rare in the songs here.

***

Mozart, Great Mass in C Minor / Exsultate jubilate, Carolyn Sampson, Olivia Vermeulen, Makoto Sakurada, Christian Imler, Bach Collegium Japan, Masaaki Suzuki (released on December 9, 2016) BIS-2171 | 65'52"

When Masaaki Suzuki reached the end of his epic traversal of Bach’s sacred cantatas with Bach Collegium Japan, he turned to Mozart. The Japanese conductor's authoritative recording of Mozart's Requiem was one of my favorite discs of 2015, and opened up a new line of specialization for his ensemble beyond the music of its namesake. Shortly after its release, Suzuki conducted another Mozart Mass, the “Great” C minor, with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in an astounding performance. Now, his recording of this work, with Bach Collegium Japan, is out on the BIS label.

It was hoped that Suzuki’s Requiem was the start of a recorded reexamination of Mozart’s music for the Catholic church. Mozart left the “Great” C minor Mass, like his Requiem, unfinished; he began it in Vienna as a complete setting of the Latin Ordinary but performed only parts of it on a honeymoon visit to Salzburg, Austria, with his wife, Constanze, in 1783. Suzuki has used the musicologist Franz Beyer’s careful reconstruction of the score, and the relevant historical details are laid out in a superlative booklet essay by Christoph Wolff.

Suzuki takes the opening “Kyrie” at a most satisfying, slow, grand tempo, like a dignified, crisply organized funeral march. The “Qui tollis” section of the “Gloria” has an equally cathedral-filling sound from both chorus and orchestra.

Mezzo-soprano Olivia Vermeulen, tenor Makoto Sakurada and bass Christian Imler ably take their parts in the quartet of vocal soloists. The star of this score, though, is the first soprano, a part written for and premiered by Mozart’s wife. It seems tailor-made for Carolyn Sampson. In the extended showpiece “Et incarnatus est” in the “Credo,” she interweaves her immaculate soprano with the intricate woodwind lines, sweet and tender.

Rounding out the recording is Mozart’s famous cantata “Exsultate, jubilate,” from a decade earlier, although here Sampson’s fast runs are not quite pristine. As a lagniappe, Suzuki has added Mozart’s slightly revised version of the first movement — more a curiosity than an absolute necessity.

Briefly Noted: Grimaud's 'Water'

Water, H. Grimaud (released on January 29, 2016) DG 0289 4793426-4 | 57'03"

Hélène Grimaud was last in Washington in 2008, to play Beethoven's fourth piano concerto with the National Symphony Orchestra. This recent release is partially a live recital program on the theme of water in music, which she played in several places, captured here at the Park Avenue Armory in New York in 2014. In between these tracks -- by Berio, Takemitsu, Fauré, Albéniz, Ravel, Liszt, Janáček, and Debussy -- are ethereal "transition" pieces, recorded last summer by Nitin Sawhney. In these brief, mostly electronic pieces, Sawhney creates soundscapes on keyboard, guitar, and computer, including some pre-recorded sounds of water.

The live version of this recital, reviewed in the New York Times, sounds much more interesting than the result on disc. A collaboration with artist Douglas Gordon and lighting designer Brian Scott, the concert was staged in a pool that slowly filled with water over the course of 20 minutes: "Then, the lights darkened until the hall was almost completely dark. You heard the subdued sloshing of someone walking on the flooded space: Ms. Grimaud, of course." Some of the repertoire choices are perhaps too obvious (Ravel's Jeux d'eau, Liszt's Les jeux d'eau a la Villa d'Este, Debussy's La Cathédrale Engloutie), making Grimaud's renditions of Takemitsu's Rain Tree Sketch II and Berio's Wasserklavier stand out from the crowd. A Fauré barcarolle and Janáček's In the Mists seem like stretches thematically, especially when there are choices like Ravel's Ondine, Scriabin's second sonata, and Debussy's Poissons d'Or. That last one was reportedly Grimaud's encore at some performances.

La Piau Goes to Washington

Après un rêve, S. Piau, S. Manoff (Naïve, 2011)

Charles T. Downey, French soprano Sandrine Piau makes stunning D.C. debut
Washington Post, February 9

Sandrine Piau made her long overdue Washington debut on Sunday afternoon, and the Phillips Collection, celebrating its 75th anniversary season, got the glory. The French soprano’s excellent program of 19th-century songs, superbly accompanied by pianist Susan Manoff, was the latest sign of the ascendancy of the Phillips concert series, which has become one of the strongest in the city.

Manoff and Piau recorded many of these songs on their 2011 CD, “Après un rêve.” The qualities that set Piau’s voice apart on disc were, if anything, more pronounced live... [Continue reading]

Sandrine Piau (soprano) and Susan Manoff (piano)
Phillips Collection

PREVIOUSLY:
Charles T. Downey, Briefly Noted: Sandrine Piau (Ionarts, November 1, 2011)

Musicians from Marlboro I

Mozart, String Quintets, Talich Quartet, K. Rehak (La Dolce Volta, re-released in 2012)

Charles T. Downey, Musicians at Marlboro provide lovely reading of Mozart
Washington Post, October 9

The touring concerts from Vermont’s Marlboro Music Festival returned to the Freer Gallery of Art on Thursday night. The three works heard at this concert all feature unusual chamber music combinations, made more feasible by the festival’s variable programming format, with so many musicians on hand each summer.

“By general consent,” wrote pianist Charles Rosen, “Mozart’s greatest achievement in chamber music is the group of string quintets with two violas.” The doubling of Mozart’s beloved viola opened a vista of greater contrapuntal possibilities. The last of the set, K. 614, is also the final piece of chamber music that Mozart composed, not long before his death in 1791. Lead violist Rebecca Albers gave a lovely plangency to her part’s solo moments, while first violinist Hye-Jin Kim played with an occasionally unpleasant stridency that led to minor intonation problems. The group brought out the details of Mozart’s final tribute to Haydn in this piece, especially the folksy, drone-ridden trio of the third movement and the droll starts and stops of the finale.

Discovering the “Three Poems in French” for soprano and string quartet by Earl Kim (1920-1998) made me want to hear more from this Korean American composer. Soprano Hyunah Yu’s beautiful but slender voice allowed her to fit into and at times hide within the tightly coiled clusters and repeated motifs of the strings.

Pianist Kuok-Wai Lio brought technical polish to Fauré’s first piano quartet (C minor, Op. 15), keeping his cool even in the head-spinning finale. The second violinist and violist from the Mozart took the lead parts here, with violinist Danbi Um especially producing graceful, understated sound.

The second and third installments of the Musicians From Marlboro series will be held at the Library of Congress (Jan. 20 and May 6), because the Freer will be closed to the public starting in January.

Musicians from Marlboro I
Music by Mozart, Kim, Fauré
Freer Gallery of Art

SEE ALSO:
Vivien Schweitzer, Musicians From Marlboro, With Works by Mozart and Fauré (New York Times, October 6)

Pintscher Debuts at NSO

To no one's surprise, the National Symphony Orchestra will not renew Christoph Eschenbach's contract as Music Director after the 2016-2017 season. The announcement came on the heels of more shocking podium news, principally that the New York Philharmonic and Alan Gilbert are parting ways at the same time as Eschenbach and the NSO. Speculation ran rampant on Twitter as to what conductors around the world might be on New York's short list, and many of the same names might be on the wish list of Deborah Rutter, the new president of the Kennedy Center since last September. Such speculation, as entertaining as it can be, is nothing more than that, but one can peruse the list of guest conductors who have appeared with the NSO in recent years, and those will appear in the near future, to form a possible list.

With that in mind, the NSO debut of young conductor Matthias Pintscher was thrown into sharp relief last night. The relatively young German is also a composer, whose works have been heard in Washington a fair amount in recent years and who was introduced to the NSO by none other than Christoph Eschenbach. Pintscher's music, to my ears, is hit and miss, with fine and interesting efforts like the Hérodiade-Fragmente, heard from the NSO in 2010, alongside the rather dull violin concerto, Mar'eh, given its North American premiere last night. Pintscher is a first-rate orchestrator, and the new piece teems with unexpected sounds, but a half-hour of scratches and wisps of sound, no matter how intriguing, is a burden to most ears. It is the sort of writing that can be a slog for orchestral musicians: as a musician friend once said, it is "the kind of piece where you rest for 57 bars and then click your key pads on an offbeat." Violinist Karen Gomyo, heard with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra a few years ago, is not on the same level as Julia Fischer, for whom the work was created, but was up to the challenges of the solo part.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, At NSO, German composer leads French music — and his own (Washington Post, February 20) Kate Molleson, BBCSSO/Pintscher review – ardour at arm’s length (The Guardian, December 5, 2014) Anthony Tommasini, Philharmonic’s Contemporary Foray Ends, With a Promise of More (New York Times, June 8, 2014)

The rest of the program was devoted to late Romantic French music, a style that is a major influence on Pintscher's compositional voice. Pintscher serves as music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the band that Pierre Boulez built, and has made his name as a contemporary specialist. At the podium in Fauré's suite of incidental music for Pelléas et Mélisande and Ravel's complete ballet score for Daphnis et Chloé, Pintscher helped to make some pretty, especially soft sounds but fell short of what one would hope for a music director in the canonical repertory.

In both pieces, different sections of the orchestra seemed at odds with each other here and there, especially in the irregular-meter sections of the Ravel, an ensemble deficiency that has to be attributed to Pintscher's beat, not always clear. (To hear music of this period at its best, go hear Charles Dutoit conduct examples by Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande tomorrow.) Individual contributions showed off the NSO's new-found strengths: silvery, low-set flute solos (including alto flute); strong oboe playing from both principal and associate principal players; the tremor-free sound of the horn in the Ravel. About sixty singers from the Washington Master Chorale did well with the thankless job of singing the wordless chorus parts, heard from offstage in the ballet as first choreographed by Michel Fokine (later also choreographed by Frederick Ashton).

This concert repeats tonight and tomorrow night, in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall.

Karine Deshayes, At Last

French Romantic Cantatas, K. Deshayes, Opera Fuoco, D. Stern (Zig Zag, 2014)

Charles T. Downey, Mezzo-soprano Karine Deshayes at the Kennedy Center
Washington Post, February 5

Pierre Bernac, the singer and authority on the French “mélodie,” summed up this late Romantic song genre as “the art of suggestion,” characterized by its “subtle poetic climate, intellectual refinement, and controlled profundity.” Rarely does one hear this delicate, pastel-hued music performed as authoritatively as on the Washington debut recital by French mezzo-soprano Karine Deshayes, presented by Vocal Arts D.C. at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater on Tuesday evening.

An entire program of languorous French songs, ranging from Hector Berlioz to Henri Duparc, might seem like too much of a good thing. With the fine qualities of Deshayes’s singing... [Continue reading]

Karine Deshayes, mezzo-soprano
Carrie-Ann Matheson, piano
Vocal Arts D.C.
Kennedy Center Terrace Theater

Mark Padmore and Jonathan Biss

Charles T. Downey, Mark Padmore, Jonathan Biss give intoxicating performance
Washington Post, October 13, 2014

Schumann, Dichterliebe / Liederkreis, op. 24, M. Padmore, K. Bezuidenhout (Harmonia Mundi, 2010)

Mark Padmore has an unconventional voice, but the British tenor knows how to use it to the best effect. This he demonstrated once again in a recital heard Friday night at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at Maryland, performed with American pianist Jonathan Biss as collaborating artist. The audience may have filled only about half of the hall, one of the venue’s smaller ones, but the spell woven was often intoxicating.

In my favorite Padmore recording, he partnered with Kristian Bezuidenhout on a 19th-century piano, a mellow instrument that suited his lighter voice better than the modern piano. That disc included Schumann’s “Liederkreis,” Op. 24, which also opened this concert. Padmore’s enigmatic tone, sometimes thin or, oddly, almost strangled, helped evoke the often strange sentiments of Heinrich Heine’s poetry. There, as well as in Schumann’s “Six Poems and Requiem,” Padmore floated soft high notes in an otherworldly way, making the dreamy songs the high point. Although Biss was generally an able, if sometimes overpowering accompanist, he was at his best making solo contributions in the many important postludes to the songs.

Padmore’s diction was impeccable, relishing the sounds of consonants without affection. Michael Tippett’s cantata “Boyhood’s End” had some high notes that were just out of Padmore’s reach, but the almost manic passages of this unusual work were thrilling, thanks in no small part to Biss’s virtuosity at the keyboard. Biss was also essential in Gabriel Fauré’s “La bonne chanson,” in which his endlessly undulating figuration allowed Padmore to just glide over the top of the texture. A single encore, Schubert’s “Ständchen” from “Schwanengesang,” was as sweet as a nightingale’s call.

Mark Padmore (tenor) and Jonathan Biss (piano)
Music by Schumann, Tippett, Fauré
Clarice Smith Center

SEE ALSO:
Matthew Guerrieri, Padmore, Biss bring character, technique to Gardner (Boston Globe, October 14, 2014)

Charles T. Downey, Briefly Noted: Padmore's HIP 'Dichterliebe' (Ionarts, August 9, 2012)

NGA Vocal Ensemble

Debussy, Music for the Prix de Rome (Le Gladiateur, La damoiselle élue, L'enfant prodigue), Flemish Radio Choir, Brussels Phil., H. Niquet (Glossa, 2009)

Charles T. Downey, National Gallery of Art Vocal Ensemble provides some pleasant surprises in concert
Washington Post, June 10, 2014

Composers and painters have influenced one another in many eras, and in France at the end of the 19th century, the ties were strong. In a concert Sunday evening, the National Gallery of Art Vocal Ensemble explored the atmosphere of that period, offering music that complemented the museum’s exhibit of works by Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt.

The selection featured many unexpected choices, and the performance was generally good, despite a few... [Continue reading]

NGA Vocal Ensemble
Music in honor of Degas/Cassatt
National Gallery of Art

Glittery 'Jewels' from New York City Ballet

Teresa Reichlen in George Balanchine's Rubies from Jewels, New York City Ballet (photo by Paul Kolnik)

George Balanchine's opulent Jewels is a favorite of Miss Ionarts, and she has watched it many times in the DVD from the Mariinsky Ballet. From her point of view, it is pretty, colorful, varied, and there are no scary villains. Created in 1967 for the New York City Ballet, it is also Balanchine's survey of the state of dance, with each of its three acts focused on the heritage of three ballet traditions -- French Romanticism in Emeralds, New York modernism in Rubies, and Russian imperialism in Diamonds. The New York City Ballet has brought its refurbished production to the Kennedy Center this week, along with a mixed program of shorter choreographies, and it is well worth seeing.

The music of each act reflects those orientations, beginning with two refined scores of incidental music by Gabriel Fauré, for Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande (also heard on Sunday night from the Israel Philharmonic) and Shylock, Edmond Haraucourt's reworking of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. Neither story appears in any appreciable way in the choreography, but with Balanchine, as with all gifted choreographers, the music was his guide. The horn call of the first movement summons the corps de ballet into a diagonal line; the spinning movement features a ballerina making many turns; arms tick-tocked, clock-like, with gently pulsed repeated notes; each phrase or surge or motif is matched with an evocative movement. Both of these scores are diaphanous wonders -- movements from Shylock are inserted between the third and fourth movements of Pelléas, the last of which ends the act -- and the company's interim music director Andrews Sill led a capable, if not yet perfectly polished performance by the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra. Unlike their visit last spring, the company's resident orchestra did not accompany them. One could sense at times a tug of war between conductor and musicians, as in that gorgeous flute solo of the third movement of Pelléas, which needed to go a little faster than the orchestra seemed to want.

Read more »

Israel Philharmonic

Gianandrea Noseda certainly gets around. In just the last few years, we have reviewed him conducting the National Symphony Orchestra here in Washington, the Teatro Regio Torino Orchestra in Vienna, and he makes regular appearances with the BBC Philharmonic, the Mariinsky Theater, and many other ensembles. He was back in Washington on Sunday night, on tour with the Israel Philharmonic, with whom he is now principal guest conductor, in a concert of French music presented by Washington Performing Arts Society (the 20th concert by this orchestra presented by WPAS). The orchestra was near the end of a long American tour, which also included a Bruckner program with Zubin Mehta at the helm. While Israeli ensembles are met with protests in some cities, such disturbances are generally rare in Washington, and there were no outbursts inside or outside for this concert; there were none at the Russian Embassy earlier in the weekend either. Only the performance of both the American and Israeli national anthems at the opening of the concert, along with the display of both nations' flags, carried a whiff of political overtones.

Noseda's forte, so to speak, thus far has been bold and dramatic pieces, generally with the loud and fast emphasized. That was still definitely true of the final piece on this rather long program, Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, which Noseda led in a take-no-prisoners kind of performance, not without a few slightly slipshod areas. The work, a barn-burner par excellence, is a guaranteed big finish, but the best part of the concert came on the first half, three suites of brilliant miniatures of savant orchestration, which required svelte ensemble, beauty of instrumental color, and delicacy of sound. Noseda, against all odds, helped the orchestra deliver all of these qualities, showcasing especially the suave, unified tone of the its violin section, as well as the silvery low range of its principal flutist. Fauré's suite drawn from his incidental music for Maeterlinck's play Pélleas et Mélisande was otherworldly in its murky veils of sound, dark-hued strings and horn call in the first movement, the spinning motif in the second, and especially that famous flute solo in the third.

Read more »

Ana María Martínez's Fête galante

Charles T. Downey, At Kennedy Center, soprano Ana María Martínez excels with pleasing, lighter songs (Washington Post, January 10, 2014)

A. M. Martínez, Soprano Songs and Arias, Prague Philharmonic, S. Mercurio (2005)

Why singers connect to some types of music more than others often comes down to personal taste, and how music and language sit in the voice. During the recital by soprano Ana María Martínez, presented Wednesday night by Vocal Arts D.C. at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, it was French songs and Mozart arias that were most suited to her pleasing, compact, flexible lyric soprano voice.

It is a voice beautifully suited for the lighter roles in the Mozart operas: airy in “Un moto di gioia,” one of the arias Mozart wrote for a new Susanna in a revival of “The Marriage of Figaro,” and plangent in the slow section of “Vado, ma dove?”
[Continue reading]

Ana María Martínez, soprano
Vocal Arts D.C.
Kennedy Center Terrace Theater

Dip Your Ears, No. 167 (Fauré, Heavenly Interspersed)

G.Fauré / J.S.Bach Requiem et al. N.Short / Tenebrae, LSO Chamber Ensemble G.Nikolitch, G.Davidson, W.Gaunt LSO Live SACD

Heavenly Interspersed

If the performance and recording of the Fauré Requiem (in the slimmer second, 1893 version) on this disc weren’t one of the most powerful and satisfying, transparent and focused, all the clever programming around it would be for naught. As it is, it’s a co-principal delight to hear a first half of Bach, chorales and the D minor Partita interspersed. Based on sheer speculation, the Partita’s Chaconne is then set to Lutheran chorale tunes; an alleged tribute to his first wife. It’s been done before (on ECM’s “Morimur”), it was silly and gorgeous then and it is silly and gorgeous now: Musicologically daft and musically satisfying… and tremendously gorgeous!

(Best of 2012 – Almost List)

Made possible by Listen Music Magazine.

'Et in Arcadia ego': Adès on Mortality

T. Adès, Arcadiana (inter alia), Endellion Quartet

It was time last night for the first Musicians from Marlboro concert on the free concert series at the Freer Gallery of Art. Some of the most engaging performances (and their performers) are selected to be sent on tour around the country between summers, when the festival is held in Vermont. In the case of this program, featuring a piano trio and a string quartet that shared some members, it was almost certainly Arcadiana, a fascinating work for string quartet by British composer Thomas Adès, that was the reason for this program being sent on tour.

The most recent string quartet by Adès, Four Quarters from 2011, struck me as a major work when it was performed by the Arditti Quartet here last year. His first attempt in the genre, from 1994, was new to my ears in this performance, and it was perhaps more obtuse but just as fascinating to unravel. Adès has a way of eliciting unexpected sounds from instruments, often combining them in surprising ways, a talent that goes back at least as far as this work, completed when he was still in his early 20s. Glissandi and percussive barking attacks gave a growling, sometimes human vocal quality to many of the movements, with sounds like sighs in sliding pizzicato notes. He makes some outrageous demands on the players, like the flautando, ultra-high harmonics in the first violin in the second movement. This group -- violinists Scott St. John and Michelle Ross, violist Emily Deans, and cellist Matthew Zalkind -- does not perform regularly as a quartet, but the luxury of several summer weeks in Vermont made possible an astounding grasp of the work.

Adès took his title not just from Arcadia, the name of a region of Greece held up by classicizing scholars in the 17th and 18th centuries as the ideal location of a golden age of poetry. Adès references the painting by Poussin known as Et in Arcadia ego (at left), which explains much of what he is trying to do with the piece. The phrase "Et in Arcadia ego" goes back to a painting made by Guercino in 1621, and Poussin's famous variation on it in the same way shows shepherds discovering a tomb with the words as an epitaph. The meaning, as if spoken by the dead person -- or by Death itself -- is that death, too, is in Arcadia. As M. Owen Lee put it, in Death and Rebirth in Virgil's Arcadia: "Even in the enclosure where all is supposedly timeless happiness, death is present." Adès seemed to evoke this idea by quoting music -- a section of Mozart's Magic Flute, a Schubert song, Elgar's Nimrod variation -- well, really, processing more than quoting, as it often seemed to have gone through a food processor and was now a sort of sonic purée. For all of its quizzical effect, one was left with a feeling of nostalgia, as if to say that death has claimed all those composers, too, and perhaps even their music, one day, will ultimately die.

Other Reviews: Robert Battey, Music From Marlboro program returns to Freer Gallery (Washington Post, November 22)

The other three pieces on the program were far less extraordinary, both in terms of the music and the performance -- still pleasant, but there were no other real delights until the encore, which brought together all five musicians for the Scherzo movement of Dvořák's piano quintet. Beethoven's Variations for Piano Trio on Wenzel Müller's dippy song Ich bin der Schneider Kakadu, op. 121a, was a reminder of Beethoven's fondness for weaving great things from the humblest of fabric. Fauré's D minor piano trio (op. 120), completed in the year before the composer died, has pretty moments but is episodic and more than a little saccharine, especially given that it was composed almost a decade after Rite of Spring. Its third movement uses a short motif that is an (unintended?) quotation of the words "Ridi, Pagliaccio!" from Vesti la giubba, the famous aria in Leoncavallo's Pagliacci. In Mendelssohn's E minor string quartet (op. 44/2), all four musicians produced a beautiful tone and played with energy, if not always a taut sense of ensemble, but the result still felt a little sterile.

The other two Musicians from Marlboro concerts at the Freer are planned for the spring, on April 10 and May 10, 2014.

WNO Celebrity Series: Diana Damrau

Charles T. Downey, Coloratura Diana Damrau charms in Washington National Opera debut despite illness
Washington Post, April 10, 2013

Nuit d'étoiles (music by Debussy), X. de Maistre (harp) with D. Damrau (2009)

Diana Damrau, one of the finest coloraturas of her generation, finally came to Washington National Opera on Monday night. It was not exactly the debut one might have hoped for, not on the main stage and not in her typical repertory. Still, in a recital of largely ethereal German and French songs, the German soprano showed herself a gifted storyteller, set against the evanescent backdrop of arrangements for harp played by Xavier de Maistre. Many hearts leaped into many throats when she announced that she was sick, but she put on a brave face and persevered.

Damrau was to have made her company debut as Ophélie in the 2010 production of Ambroise Thomas’s “Hamlet,” part of the reconfiguration of that season after the financial crisis forced the company to postpone its “Ring” cycle. She was unable to travel to Washington when she became pregnant with her first child that year, but a performance was announced featuring Damrau in the Celebrity Concert Series for this season. [Continue reading]

Diana Damrau (soprano) and Xavier de Maistre (harp)
"Liederabend Harfe"
Washington National Opera, Celebrity Series
Music by Schubert, Tárrega, Strauss, Hahn, Chausson, Fauré, Duparc, Dell'Acqua
Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater

PREVIOUSLY:
Nathan Gunn (2012)
Angela Gheorghiu (2012)
Bryn Terfel (2011)
Juan Diego Flórez (2011, inaugural Celebrity Series concert)

Emmanuelle de Negri with Opera Lafayette

Soprano Emmanuelle de Negri (photo by Bdallah Lasri)

Hurricane Sandy, among many other far more dastardly things, disordered the Washington concert schedule. On Tuesday night, the planned WPAS recital by András Schiff was canceled: it has now been rescheduled for next April, but Schiff will no longer play the second book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, replacing it with his next tour programming, Bach's French Suites. Although it was a shame not to hear Schiff's preludes and fugues (review of the fine recording forthcoming), the cancellation did provide the chance to hear another concert I had regretted missing, the Opera Lafayette recital featuring the company debut of French soprano Emmanuelle de Negri. The program was a little unusual for Opera Lafayette, with a Baroque first half, accompanied by a small ensemble of historical instruments, followed by a selection of late Romantic songs with piano. Strikingly, de Negri sang the entire recital from memory, creating little dramatic vignettes for each piece in the first half.

The 17th- and 18th-century selections showed de Negri's voice in the best light, a clear-toned, bright, agile instrument with verve and energy. Much of the appeal of French Baroque music has to do with the poetic recitation of text, and there were no complaints with de Negri's diction: her attention to the texts and charming, often funny vocal characterizations brought this music to life. For the opening set, drawn from André Campra's opera-ballet Les Festes Vénitiennes, she wore a masque as the character of Amour, dancing and moving about gracefully. Standout discoveries included a melancholy passacaille by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Sans frayeur dans ce bois, and the knock-out sleep aria from Le Sommeil d'Ulysse by Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre (1665-1729). Introduced by the sweet tones of Colin St. Martin's transverse flute with cello and theorbo, de Negri sang this piece seated, while reading from a book, as if narrating, floating long high notes that hung in the air limpidly. Other beautiful discoveries included the ardent Laissez durer la nuit by Sébastien Le Camus (1610-1677) and two delightful airs by Michel Lambert (1619-1696), especially the pathetic Vos mépris, which sounded a lot like the famous aria Pur ti miro, pur ti godo, probably not by Monteverdi, from the end of L'Incoronazione di Poppea. Sopranos in search of an unusual encore piece may want to take a look at the cute aria Rien du tout, by Nicholas Racot de Grandval, sung by a diva who refuses to sing.

Other Reviews: Cecelia Porter, Opera Lafayette’s passionate ‘Invitation’ (Washington Post, November 1)

The idea behind including the set of songs by Debussy, Ravel, Fauré, and Henri Duparc -- all on exquisite poetry that evoked the fantasy Arcadia of the 18th century, prefaced by de Negri reading a poem from Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal -- was stronger than the execution. Something happened to de Negri's voice at the top of the range presented by these songs, revealing a tone that was a little constricted, a little brittle. Not that there was not much to admire in these songs, especially those by Duparc, a composer who destroyed all but a very small number of his songs, all of which are perfectly formed jewels. Pianist Jeff Cohen, filling in for Susan Manoff (who was still listed in the program), often overshadowed de Negri in terms of vigor and flair, giving an acrobatic wackiness to Debussy's Fantoches, for example. The two were best together in the final two songs, the drunken post-party revel of Ravel's Sur l'herbe and the radiant ecstasy of Debussy's C'est l'extase langoureuse. Two encores continued in the same vein, the neo-Baroque A Chloris by Reynaldo Hahn and Debussy's Mandoline.

The next performance by Opera Lafayette will be Félicien David's Lalla Roukh (January 26, 8 pm), at the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater. This exotic opéra-comique, set in India and Uzbekistan, will feature choreography by Kalanidhi Dance.

Ionarts-at-Large: MPhil Season Opening Concerts

After two introductory concerts (Mahler and Wagner/Bruckner), Lorin Maazel’s first season with the Munich Philharmonic was well under way in a variety—deliberately varied—of concerts. The inclusion of works by Bach, Schubert, Strauss, Stravinsky, Puccini, Fauré, and Ravel was no accident, it’s all part of the consistently stressed, heavy handed at times, repertoire-diversity that Maazel is meant to bring to the Munich Philharmonic. The less-than-subtle suggestion that that’s what was missing under his predecessor never far away. At least it’s a better narrative than the 82-year old, by now tottering Maazel being the future of the orchestra.

On the four-concert program on the 13^th, 14^th, 15^th, and 16^th of September (as if two or three weren’t enough) was Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No.5, Schubert’s Fourth Symphony, and Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra. Bach, with the slightly silly inclusion of a harpsichord in the 2500 arena that is the Philharmonic hall of the Gasteig, is good to play for the orchestra, and they should do more of it by all means. It’s music that philharmonic audiences all over the classical world are increasingly deprived on, but shouldn’t. Eventually, as familiarity with the idiom is being re-introduced to the orchestra, it will be good to hear, too.

Schubert’s Fourth, “Tragic”, Symphony was next in this ‘travel-through-the-style-periods exercise’. It’s said that there is quite a bit of Schubert in Bruckner; on this occasion there was quite a bit of Bruckner in Schubert. The most tragic thing about the work is that

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