Forbes Classical CD Of The Week: The Music Of Marx, With Hints Of Rheinberger

…I used to “not get” the Richard Strauss Violin Sonata and remember sharing that sentiment with several violinist friends who then, one by one, were converted. I have joined them now, after listening to a recording that I was actually drawn to more for the Joseph Marx Spring Sonata, than young Richard’s work. And craftsman Marx composed an astonishingly untroubled work in 1944 with an If-Rachmaninoff-had-been-Viennese air …

-> Classical CD Of The Week: The Music Of Marx, With Hints Of Rheinberger

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Michelle DeYoung, The Tone

Mahler, Das Klagende Lied, M. DeYoung (inter alii), San Francisco Symphony, M. Tilson Thomas (Sony, 1997)

Charles T. Downey, Michelle DeYoung’s big voice shakes the rafters in Terrace Theater (Washington Post, May 2)

Mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung has a big voice, which she deployed to blazing effect in a recital Sunday afternoon at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, presented by Vocal Arts D.C. One could complain, perhaps, about a lack of subtlety, but subtlety is not only about volume. While DeYoung shook the rafters at times, she revealed a love of reciting poetry in music, especially in German, which is the most important quality for a vocal recital.

A Brahms set was an ideal opening, with accompanist Kevin Murphy matching DeYoung ideally in tone and volume. This was big-boned Brahms, the bass-leaning piano parts setting the mood for DeYoung’s dark, intense sound... [Continue reading]

Michelle DeYoung, mezzo-soprano
Kevin Murphy, piano
Vocal Arts D.C.
Kennedy Center Terrace Theater

SEE ALSO:
Charles T. Downey, 'Aida' at Wolf Trap (Ionarts, July 27, 2015)

---, Michelle DeYoung's Seductive Dalila (Ionarts, May 15, 2012)

Jeanine de Bique @ NMWA

A. Previn, Honey and Rue, K. Battle, Orchestra of St. Luke's, A. Previn (DG, 1996)

Charles T. Downey, Soprano Jeanine De Bique shows range, refinement in song program (Washington Post, May 16, 2014)

Jeanine De Bique’s voice has grown in refinement and range since her local debut in 2009, judging by the mixed review she received then in these pages. The young soprano from Trinidad shone Wednesday night, in spite of reportedly being under the weather, in a program of American songs and lieder by Richard Strauss and Hugo Wolf in the intimate auditorium of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Strauss’s “Ophelia-Lieder” highlighted De Bique’s dramatic stage presence... [Continue reading]

Jeanine de Bique, soprano
Shenson Chamber Music Concerts
National Museum of Women in the Arts

Lawrence Brownlee @ Vocal Arts

Virtuoso Rossini Arias, L. Brownlee, Kaunas City Symphony Orchestra, C. Orbelian (Delos, 2014) Spiritual Sketches, L. Brownlee, D. Sneed (2013)

It is always good when Lawrence Brownlee is back in town. The American tenor has been featured in these pages many times before, at Wolf Trap, where he got his start, Washington National Opera, Vocal Arts Society, Washington Concert Opera (and in 2006), and as winner of the Marian Anderson Award. Since we first started writing about him, he has become an international star, most deservedly, just closing out the Metropolitan Opera season, for example, in I Puritani. In accordance with that prominence, perhaps, Vocal Arts D.C. presented Brownlee at Lisner Auditorium on Tuesday night, without seeming to sell many more tickets than would have filled their usual venue, the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater. In terms of acoustic and average vantage point, the latter is a superior place to hear this kind of recital, although Brownlee had no trouble filling the larger hall with his consistently lovely voice.

As noted before, in terms of being a song recitalist, Brownlee is not to the manner born. In his first half, problems with pronunciation in sets of songs by Verdi, Poulenc, and Joseph Marx impeded the impact of Brownlee's otherwise fine performance. He was most comfortable when the song gave him a character to play with, like the chimney sweep yelling in the street in Verdi's Lo spazzacamino. Where the music required more of a focus on recitation of poetry and melodic line, he was hampered, but the sweet legato of his sound came across in the slower songs, if without the pyrotechnics of bel canto opera, his specialty, his voice did not have as much occasion to shine. The high point of the first half was a set of delectable songs by Joseph Marx, a composer who deserves a full-fledged resurrection from obscurity. Here and in the Poulenc songs, pianist Kevin Murphy tamed the daring keyboard accompaniments, like the mischievous prancing of Marx's charming Die Elfe, with panache and sensitivity, support that allowed Brownlee to open up vocally, as in the gorgeous Hat dich die Liebe berührt.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, Lawrence Brownlee offers arc of self-revelation in Vocal Arts DC recital (Washington Post, May 15)

Alberto Ginastera's Cinco canciones popolares argentias provided a more experimental flavor, with crunchy dissonance in a spare, even barren setting of simple folk poems. Spanish seemed like a language that Brownlee has studied more carefully, so the easier sense of diction helped the performance. The same was true in the concluding American sets, beginning with Ben Moore's Broadway-style songs on poetry by Yeats and Joyce. The concert reached its high point with a set of five spirituals, in arrangements made for Brownlee by Damien Sneed, drawn from their recent recording together. Most classical singers who attempt to sing spirituals have not grown up in that tradition, with predictably stilted results.

Brownlee, like the luscious soprano Krysty Swann, heard a couple years ago, cut his musical teeth on this music. Sneed, who hails from Georgia and has a similar dual background in Gospel and classical music, has made attractive, moving adaptations of lesser-known tunes, which set in the sweet spot of Brownlee's voice were devastatingly effective. Certainly, not a dry eye was left in the house when Brownlee dedicated All night, all day, with its angelic falsetto vocalises, to his son, Caleb, who is on the autistic spectrum. (Hear it for yourself as recorded for an NPR Tiny Desk Concert.) The ovations earned three encores, Schubert’s Der Jüngling an der Quelle, the sentimental Be My Love, and -- finally -- an opera aria, Il mio tesoro from Mozart's Don Giovanni.

The 2014-15 season from Vocal Arts D.C. will feature recitals by Matthew Rose, Pretty Yende, John Brancy, Matthew Polenzani, Karine Deshayes, Karen Cargill, and the New York Festival of Song (featuring soprano Corinne Winters and tenor Theo Lebow).

Chamber Music You Didn't Know You Love (Marx)

J.Marx, Complete String Quartets, Thomas Christian Ensemble CPO

Loving Marx is a wonderfully unpolitical thing to do, at least if it is the composer and influential teacher Joseph Marx (1882 – 1964) that is the object of our admiration. And if you like romantic music that runs the gamut from chromatically twisted to old-fashioned to unabashedly melodic (including some close encounters with the saccharine end of ‘sweet’), then Marx is likely a composer you’d want to hear. If his three string quartets (“in modo antico” (1937/38), “in modo classico” (1940/41), and “chromatico” (1948)) don’t wallow in the same solidly tonal, melody embracing, almost orgiastic spheres as his luscious orchestral works or delicious songs, they are not the worse off for it. The Quartetto in modo antico, a hymnus to the old masters of vocal polyphony (Palestrina and Lassus) is written in the ancient modes: The Myxolydian for the opening and closing movements, Allegro poco moderato and Vivace, respectively. The Dorian mode serves as the basis for the Presto; and the third movement, Adagio molto is written in the Phrygian mode. The result is a quartet that, for all its ancient modes, lack of chromatic steps and irregular dissonances sounds strangely modern, with unexpected and unexpectedly pretty harmonic turns.

Marx, Alt-Wiener Serenaden et al., S.Sloan / Bochum SO ASV UK | DE | FR

More Marxian and perhaps more easily appreciated upon first hearing might be the “Quartetto in modo classico”, a busy work the most classical characteristic of which is its sonata form. It has that in common with the other two quartets – but speaks in a romantic idiom that isn’t trying particularly hard to be anything else. The title notwithstanding, one can’t expect a Haydn quartet heaved into the mid-twentieth century. As any of these three quartets, the name Max Reger is more likely to come to mind.

Early Schoenberg, or Debussy, Medtner, Szymanowski, Respighi (the latter three were friends of Marx) are composers that may not sound like Marx, per se, but are likely those whose works you will appreciate if you like the Marx quartets – and vice versa. And if exploring the last nook and cranny of tonality and where chromatic twists can lead it are your thing (add Zemlinsky to the list, now that I think of it), then you will find the Quartetto chromatico particularly pleasing. True to its name in a way the others are not, this is at turns a melancholic, a wild, a restless, and reflecting work – elegiac and dissonant at once. In a few moments of the energetic Scherzo Marx takes this works so far that an appreciation of Bartók might be more helpful than a love for Tod und Verklärung. But even if the string quartets are the works with the ‘least calories’ that Marx’s wrote, they are never so far away from his more overtly pleasing and melodic side that those who may already know his delicious “Alt-Wiener Serenaden” should hesitate getting to know these works.

Marx's Piano Music

Joseph Marx, Pieces for Piano, T. Lemoh (released on July 29, 2008) Chandos CHAN 10479 | 54'38"

Having recently raved about the songs of Joseph Marx (1882–1964), I was pleased to get my hands on this new disc of the Austrian composer's piano music. Through the work of the Joseph-Marx-Gesellschaft and supportive musicians, Marx's music, in a stubbornly ultra-chromatic tonal style, is slowly being rediscovered. The performer on this recording, Tonya Lemoh (who thus makes her debut on the Chandos label), was born in Australia, although her father is from Sierra Leone; she studied in Sydney, at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and ultimately at the Royal Academy of Music in Århus. She is now on the piano faculty of the University of Copenhagen, and one can read her Web site in either Danish or English (click on the Australian flag).

Lemoh's eclectic recital debut was noted for its technical achievement (if not interpretative perfection) and unusual repertoire choices. The same fortitude is apparent in the fuller passages of the meat of the selection here, Marx's 40-minute Six Pieces for Piano from 1916, especially in the steely voicing of the entrances of the thickly textured fugue (third in Lemoh's arrangement of the movements). A decadently Romantic wanness is beautifully applied to the more translucent pieces in the set, like the Albumblatt and a Debussy-esque Arabeske, and playful esprit comes to the fore with the Humoreske. Lemoh is the first pianist to make a recording of the four other Marx pieces included here, all of them unpublished and rediscovered from manuscripts in the Austrian National Library. Die Flur der Engel is a little tiresome with its constant harp-like arpeggiation, but the other three pieces -- Herbst-Legende (Adagio), Carneval (Nachtstück), and Canzone -- are worthy discoveries. The full-bodied Steinway D is captured in excellent sound, with a few stray noises. Lemoh's future projects include a disc of piano music by Danish composer Svend Erik Tarp (1908–1994) for Da Capo and a Russian CD for Chandos, which we hope to hear soon.

Christine Brewer In Excelsis

This week stands out for the number of appearances by star singers here in Washington, with Anthony Dean Griffey's recital earlier in the week and Washington Concert Opera's La Cenerentola with Vivica Genaux, among others, coming up tomorrow. At the peak of the trend was a recital by Ionarts favorite soprano Christine Brewer last night at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, as part of the Fortas Chamber Music Series. Your moderator has been an enthusiastic follower of La Brewer for several years as her career hit the big time, and we have praised her work in recordings from Wagner to William Bolcom, as a Lieder singer in a 2005 recital at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and on the stage many times, including as Ellen Orford and Gloriana. One expected her latest recital, also associated with the American Music Festival sponsored by Vocal Arts Society (but officially under the aegis of the Kennedy Center), to be up to those standards. It turned out to be far above them, indeed, one of the best song recitals to reach these ears in recent memory.

Brewer's voice is that rara avis, a luscious and buttery dramatic soprano that has the power to strip paint off the walls but with the control and suavity to apply that nuclear force only when needed. It is the instrument of choice for some repertories, like the songs of Wagner and Strauss, such as she sang on her last recital in the area, but Brewer has also excelled in works by other composers that can benefit from a large, broad voice. This was certainly true of her appearance in the title role of Gluck's Alceste last summer at Santa Fe Opera, which provided the striking opening number of this recital, the aria Divinités du Styx. The blistering high note, which returns a few times with the refrain, jolted one out of one's seat as did Brewer's noble and dignified stage presence.

J. Marx, Orchestral Songs and Choral Works, C. Brewer, BBC SO, Trinity Boys Choir, J. Bělohlávek (released on January 27, 2009) Chandos CHAN 10505 | 71'35"

This was only a warm-up for the main attraction of the first half, an extended set of songs by Austrian composer Joseph Marx (1882-1964), all of which Brewer recorded (of many more) with conductor Jiří Bělohlávek on a must-purchase CD released last year. (Most worthy for Brewer and the angelic Trinity Boys Choir and for the fact that several pieces received their first-ever recording on this disc, rather than the less than stellar performances of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus at some points.) We have reviewed some of the composer's 150-some songs only once before, when the Vienna Philharmonic appeared at Disney Hall a year ago. If you like the deliciously corrupt post-Romantic chromaticism of Richard Strauss and Erich Korngold, you should find a place on your shelf for Marx, a composer of exceptional talent (and a university academic with a background in art history and literature, as well as a doctoral degree in philosophy) who has inexplicably fallen into oblivion. Thanks to the Joseph-Marx-Gesellschaft, among others, his music is slowly being resurrected. (Memo to Marin Alsop and Christoph Eschenbach -- one local orchestra or the other needs to give a performance of Marx's Herbstsymphonie, which Riccardo Chailly has championed. Marx also composed three string quartets and some other chamber music.)

Like Strauss, the love of Marx's life was a talented soprano, Anna Hansa (1877-1967), who remained married to another man the composer knew in Graz even during the many years of her liaison with Marx. The songs test the limits of the soprano voice without pushing it over the edge, well, at least with someone like Brewer. Her gorgeous melodic line soared over the perfumed harmonies of Selige Nacht, with not only a puissant top, deployed ecstatically on the word "Ganz" in Waldseligkeit, but a chocolate-rich middle and low register, heard in Marienlied, with its vaguely smutty chromaticism almost shocking for a devotion to the Virgin Mary. Brewer also showed her comic side, regretting the bashful propriety of the narrator's lover in Der bescheidene Schäfer: to see her in what she described as her only comic role, go to Santa Fe Opera this summer, where she will sing Lady Billows in Britten's Albert Herring. Three Strauss songs, which concluded the first half, were just as pleasing (her new CD of Strauss opera scenes will be released this summer). Pianist Craig Rutenberg gave an inspired rendition of the orchestral reductions in all these songs, capturing many of the subtle colors of the score as well as approximating the full dynamic range of the orchestra, to support his singer at full moments and not force her voice at softer ones.

A second half of mostly American songs, far from being a disappointment after music that is so much Brewer's specialty, was just as revelatory. A set of songs by Richard Hundley (b. 1931, in Cincinnati) revealed a harmonic vocabulary not as dirty and chromatic as Marx but with plenty of pleasingly crunchy dissonances and an innovative and lyric melodic sense. The style is disarmingly simple, a tender setting of Richard Crashaw's lovely poem Awake the Sleeping Sun or a wide-eyed, naive rendering of Dickinson's Will There Really Be a Morning?. Only briefly, in Come Ready and See Me, did Hundley's harmony go a little too far over the edge into pop trashiness, with the progression on the word "I can't wait forever."

Other Reviews: Tom Huizenga, Brewer sings brilliantly on Fortas Chamber program (Washington Post, May 10) Matt Steel, Soprano Christine Brewer lights up 2010 Gilmore Keyboard Festival with her vocal prowess (Kalamazoo Gazette, May 5) Sarah Bryan Miller, Christine Brewer is transcendent Isolde with St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 3)

The 2002 song cycle Vignettes: Letters from George to Evelyn, by Texas-born composer Alan Louis Smith, is a work that merits repeated listening, too. It sets excerpts from war-time correspondence received by Evelyn Honts written by and about her young husband, First Lieutenant George W. Honts, who was posted to England in 1943, one short year after their marriage. He survived the crossing of the invasion of Normandy and then died in action along the Rhine River in 1945. As Brewer noted before she began the work, today is the 65th anniversary of V-E Day, a coincidence that made the work seem more poignant. While the entire work is well crafted, it is the setting of the telegram message that Evelyn received about George's death that was most devastating, much of it sung on a white-toned single note including all of the text ("1945 APR 2 PM 6 24 dot dot dot TA 84"). In the actual body of the message, Brewer roared to raging high notes on certain words (war, express, regret) that were allowed to make the piano sound board ring with overtones as Rutenberg held the sustaining pedal down.

As she did at her 2005 recital, Brewer concluded with a set of unusual songs drawn from the recital programs of favorite singers of the past, like Helen Traubel, Kirsten Flagstad, Eleanor Steber, and Eileen Farrell, most of which had been offered as encores. None of them was particularly familiar, but some of them were not only worth discovering but should be better known than they are, especially Edwin MacArthur's inspiring ballad Night, Paul Sargent's sultry Hickory Hill, Frank Bridge's sweepingly Romantic Love Went a'Riding, and Frank La Forge's impassioned, enigmatic Hills. For her own encores, Brewer gave a hilarious rendition of Celius Dougherty's Review, a setting of a text that reads like any review of a song recital, good and bad (with the final afterthought, "Matt Schmidt was the sympathetic accompanist," after which Brewer passed Rutenberg a dollar), as well as a moving version of the traditional spiritual City Called Heaven.

If you had the misfortune to miss this recital, mark the date on your calendar when Christine Brewer will return to Washington, to sing a recital for the Vocal Arts Society next season (March 23, 2011). You will not want to miss it.

Ionarts at Large: The Vienna Philharmonic in Los Angeles

Many thanks to Robert R. Reilly for contributing another review from the West Coast where he caught Bruckner's Ninth Symphony--not the least in preparation for the NSO's performance of that work under Herbert Blomstedt (19th through the 21st of March).

Marx, Orchestral Songs, A.M.Blasi (soprano) et al. / S.Sloane / Bochum SO ASV 1164 Available on Amazon.com Available on Amazon.co.uk Available on Amazon.de Available on Amazon.fr

Marx, Orchestral Songs & Choral Works, C.Brewer (soprano) / J.Bělohlávek / BBCSO Chandos 10505 Available on Amazon.com Available on Amazon.co.uk Available on Amazon.de Available on Amazon.fr

Bruckner, Sy.#8, G.Wand / Stuttgart RSO PH 04058 Available on Amazon.com Available on Amazon.co.uk Available on Amazon.de Available on Amazon.fr

In Los Angeles on the evening of March 3^rd, I was finally able to hear the fabled Vienna Philharmonic live. They performed in the Walt Disney Concert Hall under the former leader of the LA Philharmonic, Zubin Mehta. The program, appropriately enough, featured composers from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The first half included the brief but charming Italian Serenade by Hugo Wolf and, quite interestingly, Four Songs by Joseph Marx, whose music from the early 20^th century has only recently resurfaced. If Richard Strauss wrote the Four Last Songs, one might say that Marx composed the First Four. If Strauss’s songs are bathed in an autumnal glow of glorious farewell, Marx’s depict young love budding, the awakening of youthful “dreams of ecstasy,” as celebrated in Selig Nacht, the second song.

Surely, Marx’s sumptuous music represents some of most unabashed Romanticism of its time. It is drenched in orchestral richness and color and will sound familiar to those who know Strauss and early Schoenberg of the same period. I do not know whether to say this music is a step up from operetta, or that operetta is step down from it. Either way, the remark is not meant to denigrate this sweet love music, but to place it in a genre the may help to explain its long absence from the concert stage. This kind of music is read meat for the Vienna Philharmonic, which easily gave it a gorgeous performance. Soprano Angela Maria Blasi was fully engaged, heartfelt, and sweetly expressive in her renditions. (For those interested, Chandos has just released a beautiful CD of Marx’s orchestral songs and choral works, which include these songs sung by Christine Brewer. Mme. Blasi has them recorded on an ASV disc . Both are essential Marx-listening, if there is such a thing.)

The main feature of the evening was the Bruckner 9^th Symphony. It is what I had come for. I am afraid I spoiled it for myself by first listening to the live recording of Wilhelm Furtwangler’s 1944 performance of the 9^th with the Berlin Philharmonic. In any case, the experience was helpful in providing an instructive contrast. The difference was between making music on the edge of a volcano that was about to erupt and a visit to a confectionary shop. Mehta presented the Ninth as beautiful music, in a finely sculpted, mellow performance. And that was about it. Of course the Vienna Philharmonic played beautifully, and quite impressively in the big moments. But that is all they were–big moments. I never had the sense that anyone was playing as if their life depended on it. I certainly do not require histrionic calisthenics of conductors, but Mehta did not even seem to break a sweat.

If any music reaches for the transcendent, it is Bruckner’s, and of Bruckner’s symphonies, none reaches higher than the Ninth. A performance of it should grip you and shake you to the roots of your being. This is a visionary work in which one hears the terrifying tread of the Almighty as he approacheth. It is many ways a shattering experience. Furtwangler turned the score into a cauldron of molten lava in an explosive, tumultuous, even frightening performance. (He, of course, was sitting the edge of a volcano in 1944 Berlin.) Gunter Wand did the same in his concert in the Basilica of Ottobeuren in Austria, on June 24, 1979, with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra. You can hear his exalted performance on Profil (PH 04058).

If you can take your Bruckner 9^th without the cataclysmic, the minatory, the cosmic mystery, and the exaltation, then the Mehta interpretation might be for you. But you might wonder: where is the inner life of this work? This was an exterior view of Bruckner. As such, it revealed very little. God was left in the Green Room.

At the conclusion, the LA audience leapt to its feet in a standing ovation, with shouts of bravo. At the end of Wand’s performance, according to press reports, the awestruck audience sat silently and did not move for minutes on end. Which of the two do you suppose had heard and understood Bruckner? RRR