In Brief: Epiphany Was on Friday Edition

The Liszt Project Pierre-Laurent Aimard

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond.

• You can hear Pierre-Laurent Aimard play selections from his Liszt Project program (reviewed live in Washington last May), at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, recorded last month. [France Musique]


• Riccardo Chailly directs the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in Mahler's second symphony, with soprano Christiane Oelze and mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly as soloists, and the MDR Radio Chorus, Berlin Radio Chorus, and Gewandhaus Chorus. [France Musique]


• In Paris the Opéra-Comique has revived Johann Christian Bach's Amadis de Gaule, created for that city's Académie royale de Musique in 1778 (the new production, the first in Paris since the 18th century, was first given at the Opéra Royal de Versailles last month). Its libretto is a reworking of one written by Philippe Quinault for Lully, in 1684. Mozart heard the rehearsals on his visit to Paris, and scholars have noted its influence on operas like Mozart's Idomeneo. By all reports, it has been a success, not least due to the conducting of Jérémie Rhorer and his Baroque ensemble, Le Cercle de l'Harmonie. One hopes for a DVD to be released. [Le Monde]


• Listen to the finals of the string quartet competition at the Concours de Genève last month. The Quatuor Hermés and Armida Quartet shared first prize, with the Girard Quartet taking third. [France Musique]


• The Arditti Quartet and friends perform recent compositions by Mexican composers, at the Festival d'Automne in Paris. [France Musique]


• The news for opera companies continues to be bad. After the closing of Opera Boston and apparent closing of the San Antonio Opera, the New York City Opera is at an impasse in contract negotiations with its musicians. [WQXR]


• A blast from the past: pianist Claudio Arrau as soloist with the Orchestre National de la RTF, under Igor Markevitch, a concert recorded on September 29, 1958, at the Festival de Montreux. [France Musique]


• A recital of Schubert and Liszt by pianist Philippe Cassard, from the Château Cheval Blanc in Saint-Emilion. [France Musique]


• One may question the methodology of the now-infamous Stradivarius Test, in which musicians, in a blind comparison, almost all said that they preferred modern instruments to priceless Stradivari and Guarneri instruments. Still, modern instruments, and not just violins, tend to give a fuller, more vibrant sound than their historical forebears, and that sound is easier to produce. More than once, we have heard musicians, playing on historical instruments loaned at the Library of Congress, sound not quite as comfortable as on the instrument they regularly play. The relationship of instrument and player is a personal thing. [The Guardian]


• Listen again to the Proms performance of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis with Colin Davis directing the London Symphony Orchestra. [France Musique]


• Watch pianist Mikhail Rudy with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, under conductor Alexander Vedernikov, playing Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev. [Cité de la Musique Live]


• Probably not for everyone: a whole concert of overtures and choruses by Verdi, by Daniele Gatti, the Chœur de Radio France, and the Orchestre National de France. [France Musique]


• Didier Sandre reads excerpts from the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, alternating with music performed by cellist Alexander Kniazev, pianist Plamena Mangova, clarinetist Romain Guyot, and violist Andrei Gridchuk, from the Cité de la Musique. [France Musique]

Folger Consort's Latest

A New Song: Celebrating the King James Bible, Cathedra, Folger Consort (released on December 13, 2011)

The Folger Shakespeare Library marked the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible with an exhibit last fall, a suiting tribute to perhaps the most influential book in the English language. The Folger Consort also commemorated this landmark event with a concert of music setting King James texts. My review, based on a hearing of the first performance of this program, noted a few shortcomings, the sorts of infelicities that are generally ironed out in subsequent performances as the musicians relax and reach a greater comfort level. Happily for listeners, the group went on to make a recording of this music in the few days following the weekend of concerts, yielding a disc released last month on the Library's private label, Bard Records. The sound, captured in the gorgeous acoustic of the Library of Congress's Coolidge Auditorium, is excellent, and the program has benefited from further thought and performance. Highlights includes two impressively virtuosic pieces played by Adam Pearl on the chest organ, a Fantasia by Orlando Gibbons and a Ground by John Blow, and the particularly fine F major sonata by Purcell. The vocal selections are all good, especially those by Purcell and the concise, perfectly focused Hosanna to the Son of David by Gibbons, with outstanding performances by tenor Aaron Sheehan in solo pieces and sections.

Readers are warmly encouraged to attend the second performance of the Folger Consort's excellent New Year Concert, this evening at Washington National Cathedral (January 7, 8 pm). The four women of Anonymous 4 sing chants of Hildegard von Bingen and a selection of 13th-century motets from the Montpellier Codex. I heard the first performance last night, but my review will not appear until Monday, so consider this your advance notice.

For Your Consideration: 'The Help'

The Oscar nomination ballots are due back from members of the Academy a week from today, and speculation about what films will get the nod and for what is everyone's favorite pastime. One film that ranks high in the speculation is The Help, a breakthrough feature directed and written by Tate Taylor (known as an actor, in Winter's Bone, for example). The screenplay is based on the debut novel by Kathryn Stockett, who happens to be Taylor's childhood friend from Jackson, Mississippi, where the story is set -- in the Civil Rights era, before either of them was born. The film has had widespread popular success with audiences, if not with critics, making back its entire $25 million budget in just its opening weekend and going on to gross over $160 million.

The Help, directed by Tate Taylor (released on December 6, 2011)

The movie has much in it to admire, beginning with the world-weary but grand and dignified performance of Viola Davis, as Aibileen Clark, a black maid in a white family's household. Against her better judgment, she agrees to help aspiring journalist and author Eugenia ("Skeeter") Phelan, played by a far less remarkable Emma Stone, for a book she wants to write about the lives of the invisible maids in the 1960s American south. The rest of the cast is a gallery of stock characters, bitchy white women of privilege (Bryce Dallas Howard, Ahna O'Reilly, Anna Camp), a white trash outsider (Jessica Chastain, bleach-blonde and inane), Sissy Spacek in a delightfully batty turn as an increasingly senile mother, and a straight-shooting maid who eventually helps Aibileen and Skeeter (the sassy Octavia Spencer). Making the best of the best role, however, is Davis, who made quite an impression in a small role in Doubt a couple years ago and who deserves a nomination for best actress.

Other Reviews: Washington Post | TIME | NPR | Roger Ebert | Wall Street Journal New York Magazine | New York Times | Los Angeles Times Village Voice | The New Yorker | Movie Review Intelligence

The vast divide between blacks and whites in Mississippi, in spite of the inter-reliance of the two groups, is vividly drawn, in a way that connects the novel and its film adaptation, as Ralph Eubanks pointed out, to the world described in the short stories of Eudora Welty and other writers. In particular, the intertwining of families, especially the bonds between white children and the black maids who raise them, is appreciated in all its complexity. Unfortunately, in the last 30 or 40 minutes the film loses its way, turning from a serious examination of race issues into a parody of the south à la Steel Magnolias, Fried Green Tomatoes, or Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. A gross tale of revenge takes on far too much importance, played up grotesquely for its humorous excess, and ultimately it seems far too easy (and, at worst, disrespectful and trivializing) to assume that generations of racial injustice -- and the real and terrifying threat against any action to change it -- have vanished because of the publication of one slender book.

Twelve Days of Christmas: Slavic Heroes

Slavic Heroes, M. Kwiecień, Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Ł. Borowicz (released on January 10, 2012) HMW 906101 | 55'18"

We have witnessed Mariusz Kwiecień's appeal on stage before. The Polish baritone's new recital of opera arias, recorded back in 2009 with some touch-ups or additions made early last year, gives ample occasion to admire the smoothness and resonance of his voice, while the packaging, with photos of the open-collared singer, may be geared to a portion of the audience with other concerns. Most aria recitals of this sort are hardly worth recommending on musical terms, being aimed mostly at the rabid fans of individual singers. This disc, under the less than imaginative title Slavic Heroes, does offer many excerpts of operas one does not hear often in this part of the world and that are worth knowing. Besides the more obvious choices of Borodin's Prince Igor and Tchaikovsky (Mazeppa and Eugene Onegin, the latter title role being one of Kwiecień's recent successes), there are unexpected selections of Polish, Czech, and Russian operas. Tchaikovsky's Iolanta, Rachmaninoff's Aleko, and Rimsky-Korsakov's Sadko are not exactly unknown quantities, but Smetana's Čertova stěna (The Devil's Wall) and Dvořák's The Cunning Peasant are off the beaten path, not to mention excerpts from three different operas by 19th-century Polish composer Stanisław Moniuszko. While none of the Moniuszko selections sounds like much more than watered-down Donizetti or Verdi, the disc ends with another Polish composer, an excerpt of Karol Szymanowski's Król Roger, the title role of which Kwiecień will sing this summer at Santa Fe Opera. The Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Łukasz Borowicz, accompanies ably, although the balances sound a little artificial.

Twelve Days of Christmas: Always More Janáček

Janáček, Choral Works, T. Walker, P. Mayers, Cappella Amsterdam, Radio Blazers Ensemble, D. Reuss (released on January 10, 2012) HMC 902097 | 71'42"

No one has to twist my arm to listen to more music by Leoš Janáček. Given the Czech composer's background in liturgical music, including a formation as a chorister and student with the Augustinians at the Abbey of St. Thomas in Brno (where Gregor Mendel was a monk and then abbot -- Janáček later played the organ at Mendel's funeral), he wrote quite a lot of music for chorus and knew how to write well for voices. The selection of choral pieces heard on this fine new release from Harmonia Mundi, featuring the excellent chorus of Cappella Amsterdam, includes two lovely sets, as well as a few stand-alone pieces. The young Janáček adapted the Six Moravian Choruses from the Moravian Duets of Antonín Dvořák, and they are just as charming as the original. Even simpler -- and yet more complicated -- is Nursery Rhymes, a charming group of 28 miniatures on almost nonsensical fairy-tale texts, composed originally in a version accompanied only by clarinet and piano late in the composer's life and performed here in the expanded version he made for an unusual assortment of ten instruments (including, at various points, a quite charming ocarina and toy drum), played evocatively by the Radio Blazer Ensemble. Janáček also astounds in his use of harmonium and harp in the expansive, meditative, harmonically lush version of the Our Father, with many repetitions of the Czech text. Liturgical musicians should not be fooled by the plush male-chorus Ave Maria, which sets not the Latin devotional text but a Czech translation of words by Lord Byron from Don Juan. Favorite discoveries include the decadently gorgeous song The Wild Duck and vigorous The Wolf's Trail, both secular pieces, and the intensely personal Elegy on the Death of My Daughter Olga (the second child the composer lost, Olga died at age 20, after becoming sick while studying in Russia), one of several opportunities to appreciate the heroic voice of British tenor Thomas Walker.

Twelve Days of Christmas: Music for Henry V

Music for Henry V and the House of Lancaster, Binchois Consort, A. Kirkman (released on September 13, 2011) Hyperion CDA67868 | 72'47"

Henry V and Henry VI were Kings of England at a critical point in music history, when the so-called contenance angloise, or English manner, was taking hold. The English preference for the intervals of thirds and sixths, which influenced Burgundian composers, was one of the shifts in music that made the eventual development of tonal harmony possible. In the range of music on this new CD, mostly from the early 15th century, devoted to music sung for and in some cases specifically in honor of Henry V, one can hear that shift from medieval to Renaissance style. More importantly, the performances by the Binchois Consort, a small ensemble of six male voices, are both historically faithful, down to the English-inflected pronunciation of the Latin texts, and simply beautiful to hear. This remarkable body of music is, among other things, a tribute to the championship of learned music by both of these monarchs. The disc is centered on an early English cyclic Mass, the Missa Quem malignus spiritus, which was first recorded only a couple years ago, by Calvin Bower and the Schola Antiqua of Chicago. By an anonymous composer, it weaves contrapuntal lines around a cantus firmus, the responsory Quem malignus spiritus, a chant quoted from one of the most famous rhymed Latin office created in the late Middle Ages, in honor of St. John of Bridlington, an Augustinian canon at Bridlington Priory in Yorkshire. Sections of the chant, along with others from the Wollaton Antiphonal (one of the few late medieval manuscripts to survive the violence of the English Reformation), fill out the disc, along with some motets from the same period.

Twelve Days of Christmas: More from Istanbul and the Mediterranean

La Sublime Porte: Voix d'Istanbul, M. Figueras, G. Dinçer, L. Elmaleh, Hespèrion XXI, J. Savall (released on November 25, 2011) Alia Vox AVSA 9887 | 79'49" [MP3] Mare Nostrum, M. Figueras, L. Elmaleh, Hespèrion XXI, J. Savall (released on January 10, 2012) Alia Vox AVSA 9888A+B | 158'03" [MP3]

After the success of the album Istanbul last year, Jordi Savall continues a fruitful collaboration with musicians from Turkey and other parts of the Middle East. The title of this new disc, La Sublime Porte, refers both to the gate of the Vizier's palace in Istanbul and the role of that city as portal of transition between East and West. In a similar vein, Mare Nostrum -- Hespèrion XXI's latest CD-Book, as these lavishly produced sets are called -- is a 2-CD exploration of music of various traditions from the lands around "our sea," the Mediterranean. The latter release, scheduled for early next month, is a long-term project, with recording sessions stretching back to 2009. The group produces so many fine recordings, at a dizzying pace, that it would be reckless to recommend all of them. Both of these recordings can be enjoyed without the full trappings of thick booklets (in, let's face it, far too many languages) and SACD sound, since the performances are probably just as pleasing in much less expensive mp3 format.

In particular, the philosophical self-seriousness of the Mare Nostrum booklet essays, weaving together details of history and geography of the Mediterranean region with ponderous political diatribes on the Arab spring uprisings and immigration issues in Europe, far outweighs the rather simple music recorded here, a string of dance pieces, lullabies, and love songs, some of it medieval and much of it from the last two centuries. The mixture of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim music is a hot trend at the moment: we just reviewed two programs featuring Sephardic music in that combination, by the Rose Ensemble and the Boston Camerata. Here, as there, the problem of trying to pass off folk music of recent vintage as a comparison to notated medieval music is evident. Again, listening to the performances, which are all lovely and made with obvious conviction, is more satisfying by itself than trying to coordinate it with the somewhat superfluous, quasi-historical stuff. In short, this is pretty music but not compulsory listening.

In fact, the most compelling attraction of both of these discs is the chance to hold onto the sound of soprano Montserrat Figueras, the wife and muse of Jordi Savall, who passed away last month. Overall, La Sublime Porte is the more pleasing of these two discs, but Figueras is heard on only two tracks, rendered poignant mostly because they were recorded, in a chapel in Catalunya, only a few months before she died. In both recordings, her light, increasingly frail voice is paired with that of Israeli folk singer Lior Elmaleh. His is also a lovely voice, rather than a great one, attuned to the folk styles featured here, blurred together in a sort of potpourri. There is nothing stopping his rendition of the final tune, the title track of Mare Nostrum, from becoming the next Euro pop hit.

In Brief: Cinderella and Kissin Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond. Happy New Year!

• If you missed Laurent Pelly's marvelous production of Massenet's Cendrillon when it was at Santa Fe Opera, you can watch it online from Brussels. [Théâtre de la Monnaie]


• From the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, you will not want to miss the 10th anniversary concert of Le Concert d’Astrée: Emmanuelle Haïm conducts an all-star assortment of vocalists, including Natalie Dessay, Patricia Petibon, Sandrine Piau, Sara Mingardo, Phillipe Jaroussky, Rolando Villazon, and many more. [France Musique]


• Watch the New Year's concert with the Berlin Philharmonic and pianist Evgeny Kissin, under the baton of Simon Rattle. [Medici.tv]


• There is also Evgeny Kissin with Charles Dutoit and the Verbier Festival Orchestra, also Chopin. [Medici.tv]


• More Evgeny Kissin, this time at a gala concert with the Israel Philharmonic, plus Vadim Repin and Julian Rachlin. [ARTE Live Web]


• Evgeny Kissin again, for the win: his solo recital, also part of the celebrations for the 75th anniversary of the Israel Philharmonic. [ARTE Live Web]


• Alexei Volodin gives a recital of music by Chopin, Liszt, Reubke, and Schumann. [France Musique]


• Watch Murray Perahia playing Beethoven with the Israel Philharmonic. [ARTE Live Web]


• Pianist Nikolaï Lugansky joins the Russian National Orchestra, under the baton of Mikhail Pletnev, for music by Sibelius, Rachmaninoff, and Tchaikovsky in the Salle Pleyel in Paris. [France Musique]


• See another pianist, Haochen Zhang, also with the Israel Philharmonic. [ARTE Live Web]


• Listen to a performance of Rameau's extraordinary opera Castor et Pollux, from the Festival Baroque de Sablé, by the group Ausonia led by Frédérick Haas. [France Musique]


• Watch the operatic portion of the New Year Concert from Teatro La Fenice in Venice. Verdi's chorus Va, pensiero, sull'ali dorate and the brindisi from La Traviata are de rigueur. [ARTE Live Web]


• Hear a recital by pianist Denis Zhdanov, recorded this summer in Barcelona: Prokofiev's 8th sonata and suite from Romeo and Juliet, plus pieces by Falla and Turina. Click on the headphones icon to start the streaming audio. [France Musique]


• The choir Accentus, the Orchestre de l'Opéra de Rouen-Haute-Normandie, and a quintet of soloists perform music by Bruch and Schumann, from the Cité de la Musique. [France Musique]