Reviewed, Not Necessarily Recommended: St. John Passion from King's College

J.S. Bach , St. John Passion (1724), The Choir of King's College, Cambridge, Academy of Ancient Music Soloists Stephen Cleobury (conductor), KGS

Adequacy Amid Excellence

There's some wonderful singing here from James Gilchrist, Neal Davies, Iestyn Davies and above all Roderick Williams (whom I'd rather have heard in a bigger role i.e. - Jesus - than Bass & Pilate, but who's to complain). The Academy of Ancient Music plays very well, too; not too far in the foreground, but more than professional. There's subtle drama to be found in what they do. But the rest of the ingredients is either pedestrian or simply not good. Sophie Bevan is having a bad day with only some good but too many ungainly moments; Benedict Kearns is a liability (even for a part as small as Peter that's a drag); the Choir of King's College is serviceable here, but nothing more. It's not even the best St. John Passion with trebles involved; that title is easily held by the Thomaner Recording of the St. John Passion with G.C.Biller from Leizpig. The invariable conclusion is that this live take off a humdrum 2016 performance is not a competitive recording of the St. John Passion. Indeed at no point of the recording is it clear why this was released for any other reason than it had been planned and scheduled to be released before the fact and no one dare spoke up.

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Dip Your Ears*, No. 205 (The Blue Notebooks or: Recycling Gone Wrong)

The Blue Notebooks, Max Richter, Tilda Swinton et al. DG

Not even Background Muzak

As good as Max Richter’s “Recomposed” version of the Four Seasons was—one of my favorites that year—as ghastly is his “Blue Notebook”, originally from 2004 but now re-released on Deutsche Grammophon. The aggressive simplicity of the music, the—perhaps intentional—barely-competent way single, repetitive violin or piano lines are performed, the dearth of ideas and the derivative style makes it an experience akin to chewing broken Philip Glass. Do you know the third-rate film music that makes you feel cheated for every emotion it manages to muster, against your will? Typewriter-background noise and crows crowing and raindrops dripping undermine any goodwill as Tilda Swinton makes read-out Kafka excerpts sound fearfully hackneyed. The liner notes have nothing to say about the release at hand, instead they just promote Richter and projects past and upcoming and the added bonus track is (or sounds like) a discarded out-take from the Vivaldi recording. Yikes!

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(* Dip... or not. This should probably be part of the "Reviewed, Not Necessarily Recommended" series.)

Reviewed, Not Necessarily Recommended: Peter and the Wolf at Lake Wobegon

PETERING The Tomten and the Fox: New Classical Music for Children • Mississippi Gulf Coast Suite, Journey for Two Violins, String Quartet for Pet Rabbit, The Tomten and the Fox • Norene Smith, Mark Petering, Charles Sena (narrators); Stephen Colburn, cond; Milwaukee Chamber Orchestra New Music Ensemble • Zebrina Records ZR1075 (50:30)

M.Petering , The Tomten and the Fox et al., N.Smith, M.Petering et al., S.Colburn, Milwaukee CO, New Music Ensemble Zebrina Records ZR1075

This is a CD for children with music composed for children and extensive narration presumably tailored to a child’s preferences. Lacking children of my own, or accessible nieces and nephews for testing purposes, I tried to listen to this CD with child’s ears of my own. (Incidentally, a childlike state of mind doesn’t present particular difficulties to me.) Not all children are the same, however, and consequently not every child will react to this disc in similar ways as did my six year old alter ego. I happen to have been a child that could not stand condescension and the particular tone of fawning excitement that adults would put on to excite us—and I still can’t abide it.

But I am getting ahead of myself. The title work—The Tomten and the Fox—is a perfectly amiable setting of the Astrid Lindgren story for chamber orchestra and narrator. Oozing wholesomeness, it’s a lightweight version of Peter and the Wolf fresh from Lake Wobegon. Not as good as the original so obviously modeled on, but good enough to recommend as a sequel when the youngster has heard and seen enough of Prokofiev’s duck being swallowed.

Unfortunately that remains the gently elevated highpoint on this disc. As narrator Norene Smith and composer Mark Petering (b. 1972) proceed with the painfully obviously scripted dialog, the cringe factor increases steadily. They introduce and recap “Five Animals” represented by Woodwind quintet, among other items, and after every musically misrepresented beast (cub, fawn, rabbit, skunk, wolf) Smith exclaims in breathless sycophantism how that was totally like a rabbit, or a fawn, or—unintentionally best of all—“this was skunk!”. If you want to teach your child the meaning of servile flattery, you’ve got a winner at hand. The music, utterly competent throughout, lacks variety and sometimes misses the intended characterization entirely. What kind of squirrel is represented by a bassoon, anyway?

The CD ends on a note addressing the children listeners of how Norene and Mark hope that they will make music a part of their every day life. Neat thought, but if instructions to that extend become necessary, perhaps the music simply wasn’t spellbinding enough? Any smart kid and sympathetic teacher or parent will have more from an hour with Messiaen (when it comes to ‘readying’ the youngsters for “new classical music”) or, more conventionally, an audio biography of Haydn or Beethoven. In the end, what you have here is a CD full of good intentions and modest music, the result being the very lowest common denominator of a Garrison Keillor show (the Midwestern niceness) and Peter and the Wolf.

(Marketed directly, here.)

Reviewed, Not Necessarily Recommended: Vapid Mann

Johan Gottfried Hendrik MANN: Feest Preludium for Orchestra op.95, Clarinet Concerto op.90, Violin Concerto op.101, Troisième Suite op.98. Sebastian Manz (clarinet), Akiko Yamada (violin), Hermann Bäumer (conductor), Osnabrücker SO ● CPO 777 620 (73:40)

J.G.H.Mann, Violin & Clarinet Concertos et al., S.Manz, A.Yamada / H.Bäumer / Osnabruck SO CPO

I don't remember being less impressed by any type of unknown romantic composition. Pleasant, harmonic, utterly pointless, utterly forgettable music. The Troisième (3rd) Suite is just mindbogglingly vapid. The Violin Concerto means nothing to the ears. The Clarinet concerto is superbly played and just good enough to make one notice the quality of the playing. Terribly disappointing all the tedious way... to the point where further exploration of that composer is discouraged... especially with so much marvelous, equally unknown and under-recorded stuff coming from the same label and in part even the same performers^*. Sebastian Manz can't be blamed, meanwhile; he is a phenomenal clarinetist who audibly gives his all and should be commended for playing a less well known—and only coincidentally, unfortunately in this particular case: lesser—work. I want to hear more of him in that kind of repertoire: he'll be sure to unearth a gem or two. In a very important way the release is still welcome: only in taking risks can any artistic success be achieved, and that includes music-publishing.

* The Osnabrück Symphony Orchestra, for example, has recently made the first (!) Turkish language recording of Ahmed Saygun’s Magnum opus, the oratorio Yunus Emre... which is a delightful, major contribution to the recorded repertoire. Review forthcoming.

Reviewed, Not Necessarily Recommended: Political Music from Paul Dessau

Dessau, Orchestral Works, Epple / DSO Berlin Capriccio .com .co.uk .de .fr

DESSAU Symphony No. 2. Symphony in one movement. In memoriam Bertolt Brecht. Danse et Chanson¹. Examen et poème de Verlaine^{1, 2}. Les Voix.^{1, 3} ● Eoger Epple, cond; German SO Berlin; Ksenija Lukic (sop)¹; Manuela Bress (mez)²; Holger Groschopp (pn)³ ● Capriccio 5019 (69:36)

There are composers that I love to love for musico-biographical reasons. Most of the ‘lost generation’ of Viennese post-romantics—Korngold, Mittler, Zeisl, Marx—belong in that category, as do those composers that teetered between the post-romantic and the modern world without being part of the Second Viennese School or the avant-gardist movement. Braunfels, Toch, Křenek, and Hartmann come to mind. I would have thought that Paul Dessau (1894-1979) would be among that lot, but the generous selection of his orchestral works that Capriccio brings us—all new recordings made between 2004 and 2008 by the German Symphony Orchestra Berlin under Roger Epple—doesn’t do the trick. “In Memoriam Bertolt Brecht” wears its ever noble sentiment on its sleeves… or at least on the movement titles: “Lamento”, “War be damned”, “Epitaph”. A tedious, lurching, and extraordinarily dusty composition, it does more, alas, to damn the composer than mourn his friend. Joylessness would be excused given the occasion. But the idea that sorrow also, necessarily, translates into beauty—however well hidden or ‘difficult’—is solidly rejected by Dessau’s dirge. Berg’s Violin Concerto this ain’t!

Annoying is a highly subjective quality, but contrived and affected compositions like “Examen et poème de Verlaine” for soprano, mezzo, and orchestra make it difficult not to respond with a good rolling of the eyes. Dessau, always a steadfast supporter of the GDR’s dictatorship that afforded him a privileged life, was perhaps too much of a political composer—a species that sees its works age more rapidly and worse than others. In 26:4 James North writes of Dessau’s opera “Einstein”: “once [absorbed and appreciated], there is little of permanent musical value to draw you back again”. Agitprop as inspiration comes with a definite “best-before” date… which is one reason why I find Hanns Eisler’s biography much more appealing than most of his music.

It took me a long time to come to terms with genuinely disliking the Dessau pieces’ portentous plodding and self-importance, but apart from the clean, unfussy, and steadily moving Andante tranquillo of his Symphony in One Movement, there isn’t much that pleases the ears (or the intellect). The three works for voices—overt Spanish flavors in the two-minute “Dance & Chanson”—least so. The forced gaiety of the Andante contemplativo and the broodingly meandering Andante quasi Allegretto of the Second Symphony don’t enamor me, either. I could get used to the strident, pounding fourth movement, though, as well as the third movement “Dance”, an homage to Bartók in Bulgarian rhythm that Dessau added thirty years after composing the three other movements and publishing them as “Petit Suite symphonique” in exile in 1934.

That the DSO Berlin and Roger Epple perform these works with evident engagement is laudable. In fact, it’s what I love best about classical music today: Exploration of neglected, lost, dismissed, and forgotten works from all centuries are constantly unearthed by efforts such as these—affording us the opportunity to discover, re-discover, re-evaluate. This means an unprecedented amount of choice for music aficionados who can make up their own mind about what they like or don’t. The presence of lesser examples is not so a much lamentable side-effect of this trend, but a necessary element; hardly less enriching for being less pleasing. Sampling of bits of any CD is easy these days (Amazon, for example, offers snippets of the Dessau) and you might still like to hear for yourself if you are even mildly intrigued by Dessau’s musical kin Weill and Eisler.

Reviewed, Not Necessarily Recommended: Nowowiejski Organ Concertos

Nowowiejski, Organ Concertos, Innig MDG .com .co.uk .de .fr

NOWOWIEJSKI Concertos for Organ: op.56 / 1, 2. Marche festive op.8 / 1. Pièces for organ, op.9 / 2, 3, 4, 7, 8 • Rudolf Innig (org) • MDG 317 1591 (79:42)

Whatever the differences are between a concerto for solo organ and symphonies for solo organ, they are too subtle for me to discern. I’m not sure if Felix Nowowiejski, the Cracowian composers (1877-1946) knew (or cared), either. Jerzy Erdman, editor of the Nowowiejski organ works, plausibly suggests that after writing nine organ symphonies and dedicating the last to Beethoven, he didn’t want to exceed the symphonic magic number “9” and continued writing solo organ ‘concertos’ instead. David Denton, who has written about the symphonies, the composer, and the Sauer organ of the Bremen cathedral at length in Fanfare Magazine (22:1) calls him “the Chopin of the organ”.

Nowowiejski was a student of Bruch and Dvořák, but you’d not be able to tell from the two concertos included on this MDG disc. The liner notes—by the performing organist Rudolf Innig, are a pleasure to read and well translated into English—point out: “The musical language of the concertos [from the 30s and 40s] is different from the earlier symphonies; the music sometimes goes to the limits of tonality, harmonic tensions frequently remain unresolved and many movements end on a dissonant or bitonal note.” Nowowiejski’s concertos have a similar effect on my ears as Reger’s organ music, with a dash of Petr Eben: intrigued lack of comprehension as I listen to music that seems conventional but doesn’t ring the expected bells. ‘Conventional’ in this case being a clumsy description by which I mean to convey that the aural anticipation differs to, say Messiaen’s organ works. With Messiaen you know that the listening experience is going to be a different… color, not structure. Here we have essentially conservative musical roots prodded into ambiguous tonal territory for a reason I can’t aurally discern.

It’s difficult to write about music when hampered by ignorance—but the fact that I get into it at all suggests that the performances of the concertos, in MDG’s resplendent sound, are first class. And in any case there are the six shorter, didactic pieces on this disc, which are easier to embrace: the calm repose of the chorale-based “Preludium sur un theme Kyrie de la Messe XI” op.9/3 or the festive, occasionally clumsy “Marche festive” op.8/3 are early Nowowiejski—and now his teachers show a bit more… we are in territory much more reminiscent of Rheinberger. What we are not in, however, is the colorful world of French romantic organ music that inspired Nowowiejski to his organ symphonies in the first place. I might have be intrigued enough to want to look into his organ symphonies now (also on MDG with Innig) at this point, but Haig Mardirosian’s reviews of Nowowiejski organ works for Fanfare Magazein (22:3, 24:2) more dowse than fuel the timid enthusiasm David Denton was able to work up. My reluctant conclusion is: less “Chopin of the organ” and more “everything I dislike about Widor”.

Reviewed, Not Necessarily Recommended: Schnittke, Sport & Soft Porn

Schnittke, Film Music v.4, Strobel / Berlin RSO Capriccio .com .co.uk .de .fr

SCHNITTKE Adventures of a Dentist. Sport, Sport, Sport. Ÿ Frank Strobel, cond; Berlin RSO ● CAPRICCIO 5002 (Hybrid multichannel SACD: 57:39)

Take equal parts James Bond, 70s soft porn soundtrack, and Henry Mancini and you should get something akin to the concert suite derived from Alfred Schnittke’s music to the 1970s film “Sport, Sport, Sport”. “Sport”—mocking the exertions of sportive Russians in pursuit of athletic activity and excellence—won a sort of Soviet silver merit badge of film: it was immediately banned by the censors. (Gold would have gone to those eminently deserving censorship, but subtle enough to slip through.) I am sure that with that in mind—and the film screened, the whole package would turn this silly, sometimes saccharine, and flamboyantly ethnic music into poignant accompaniment. Unfortunately we don’t have the film to go with it.

“Adventures of a Dentist” is more indicative of Schnittke’s polystylism with its many baroque and classical quotes; and where he cuts and pastes Tchaikovsky (on the accordion) in “Sport”, Handel and Bach are his subjects in “Dentist”. There is no way to avoid a broad smile when Schnittke serves up the catchiest two minutes of Charleston between all this (I probably hit the repeat button half a dozen times), but altogether it’s difficult to think that Schnittke’s own arrangement of one Suite from both films might not be more satisfactory than Frank Strobel’s exhaustive arrangement of each. Great film music—Rozsa, Korngold, Rota in the West, Prokofiev beyond the Iron Curtain —is great because it remains superb music independently of the film it was written for.

The Berlin RSO doesn’t seem to mind, though—they play through the bopping and bubbling score sounding fully convinced and engaged under Russian film music-veteran Stroble’s baton. If I were a Russian expatriate, I’d grab this (volume four) and another in this Capriccio-SACD series of Schnittke’s film music, always to be at hand for a vodka infused evening of melancholia and laughter-through-tears. I, meanwhile, might check out some more Charleston, instead.

Reviewed, Not Necessarily Recommended: “Risonanza”__Hanuš, Haas & Eben

Hanuš, Haas & Eben, Risonanza, Veverka, Kahánek, Englichová Supraphon

HANUŠ Trio concertante, op. 59b; Sonata quasi una fantasia, op. 61. EBEN Ordo Modalis; Risonanza. HAAS Suite for oboe and piano Ÿ Vilém Veverka (ob); Ivo Kahánek (pn); Kateřina Englichová (hp) Ÿ Supraphon 3993 (70:42)

The Supraphon album “Risonanza” takes its name from Petr Eben’s “6 Risonanza for Harp Solo”, although that is actually the least (in terms of duration) of the included Czech 20^th century compositions for various combinations of oboe, harp, and piano. The intrigue begins with the cover. What is oboist Vilém Veverka doing to the chest of the alluringly reclining, gorgeous harpist Kateřina Englichová? Fixing the very bottom of her necklace? Why does pianist Ivo Kahánek look on with thin-lipped disapproval? Curiosity-fuelled closer inspection reveals the risqué scene to be an optical illusion. Note to photographers: small aperture—resulting lack of depth perspective—may make hands and bustier appear closer together than they are.

An early anti-climax, that revelation, but nothing that can stop my curiosity knowing a bit of Eben’s music as I do and having much liked the little I’ve heard of Janáček-student Pavel Haas’ music. Jan Hanuš (1915-2004) is a new musical acquaintance of mine.

The mentioned “6 Risonanza” (1986) are highly attractive solo harp pieces—more engaging than much of the solo harp repertoire I have had the (occasionally dubious) pleasure to hear at the last ARD harp competition. They are not purely virtuosic pieces but instead idiomatic, coy, and colorful tableaux that are connected by a few bars of Mozart quotations that slowly, over the course of the work’s seven minutes, being to rub off on the stretches of music between. Eben’s “Ordo modalis” for oboe and harp (1964), according to the composer, is inspired by the Shakespeare poem “Venus and Adonis”. “If the poem’s theme is a combination of the ancient Ovid motif and its renaissance Shakespeare version, then in [this] music we find inspiration in ancient harp and shawm [as well as] renaissance baroque orientation in the… freely stylized old dances, lined up into a suite.” The modal composition tailored to showcase the harp is full of bubbly, intriguing moments but in need of more attentive listening than it readily encourages.

The Haas Suite for Oboe and Piano is a de-facto vocalise for the oboe on top of a muscular piano sonata. The lyrical, urgently expressive suite was written at the time of—and influenced by—the German invasion of Poland, the fourth neighbor of German to fall, now through outright war, after the Saar, Austria, and Haas’ Czechoslovakia had already been annexed. The writing of future horrors was already on the wall in late 1939, even if Haas could not have foreseen his tragic end in the Holocaust five years later. The liner notes describe the suite, especially the closing moderato, without any hyperbole as “among the best that Czech music has brought forth in the first half of the 20^th century.”

That, and Hanuš’ Trio concertante for oboe, harp, and piano (1978) are the best arguments to purchase the recording. What a bold and brisk trio the Hanuš piece is! It’s op.59b because the trio is the composer’s own piano-reduction of the orchestral part of his double concerto op.59a. That would explain the trading of extended solo passages among the harp and oboe. The sonata for oboe and piano, finally, is a particularly happy, buoyant “sonata quasi una fantasia”—written in the spring of 1968, before the events of August 21^st that turned a hope-filled year’s start into the blood-stained associations we now have with the “Prague Spring”.

The three performers delight throughout, which means this recital’s appeal will extend beyond just those listeners with a healthy interest in 20^th century Czech music or repertoire for the oboe and harp. By how much? Veverka mentions Britten, Dutilleux, and Poulenc as roughly Western analogues to this music. And it is fair to suggest fancying those should be a good indicator of finding the Hanuš-Eben-Haas connection attractive, too.