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.

Christian Thielemann's Inauguration Concert

The opening of the season of the Dresden Staatskapelle on Sunday, September 1^st, was a celebrated occasion in Saxony’s capital. Aided and abetted by a brilliant marketing campaign that simply said “ANGEKOMMEN” (in its complexity of sentiments insufficiently conveyed by the translation ARRIVED), Christian Thielemann’s inauguration as the new Music Director, anticipated for over a almost three years, finally took place. If the mood was slightly sober first, it was because the day before the Staatskapelle had played a concert in honor of Ulrike Hessler, the Semperoper’s still new Intendant largely responsible for getting Thieleman to Dresden in the first place, whose funeral had taken place that morning, after she had lost her battle with cancer, aged 57.

Thielemann Saga on ionarts Christian Thielemann Leaves the Munich Philharmonic (22.7.09) Thielemann to Leave Munich in 2011 (25.7.09, Deutsche Welle) Thielemann Signs Up With Dresden, Leaves Munich (10.10.09, WETA) Dresden’s Gain is Munich’s Loss: Thielemann Signs With Staatskapelle (11.10.09) A Mahler Cycle And Uncomfortable Silence: The Munich Philharmonic in 2010/11 (14.3.10) Thielemann Links Outside of Ionarts (23.3.10) Lorin Maazel succeeds Christian Thielemann in Munich (24.3.10) A Trophy Wife for the Munich Philharmonic: Maazel Signs His Contract (27.3.10)

The gorgeous, acoustically lucky Semperoper was filled with guests of honor, socialites, and press, and eager Dresdeners who had come to hear a program of two composers connected by their love for Wagner: Hugo Wolf and Anton Bruckner. For the relative rarity of orchestrated Wolf Songs, Thielemann’s accomplice was his much beloved Renée Fleming. And what hidden gems they are! Right away the first song, “Verborgenheit”, makes you wonder why Wolf would be less popular than Richard Strauss. The aural parallels are astonishing, but then the orchestration—in this most satisfying of the five offered songs by the wonderful arch-romantic Joseph Marx—plays a part in that.

Renée Fleming exerted utmost control over her voice, situated far back at the throat, which sounded partly mannered, but mostly tender. It was hard to understand a word of what she sang, that way, and the high notes were no longer as soothing as I remember them, but that didn’t keep one from melting at the beauty of the song, especially it’s last line, “Seine Wonne, seine Pein!”. Thielemann, visibly enjoying himself, fiddled with the Staatskapelle’s dynamics like a boy on the knobs of his parents’ stereo system. A musical boy that is… one who has the interest of his prominent singer at heart. In the voice-free lacunae he swelled and just in time dimmed the band with just a hint of a swoosh of his baton. The Wolf ended, via “Er ist’s”, “Elfenlied”, and “Anakreons Grab”, with a very touching “Mignon”, a virtual drama for orchestra and soprano in the composer’s own orchestration. The encore was the Strauss song, “Befreit”, a personal favorite of Thielemann and Fleming… on this evening a horribly tender, simple and grateful, moody thing of strings and prominent clarinets, with Fleming floating above it all.

A.Bruckner, Symphony No.8, C.T. / Stakap Dresden PROFIL Hänssler

After intermission Thielemann made Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony (Ed.R.Haas+) rise from a pool of great calm and quiet… slowly, gently for the first movement, like a dawn or awakening, but with iron determination. The Dresdner’s added their grand, dark sound to Thielemann’s little dynamic shifts and accentuations, to the continuous tightening and re-gripping of the Adagio (with cymbal crash), to the almost nonchalant, cheeky Scherzo, and a fourth movement that, after a mini-climax near the end, gained a momentum never to be lost, and ended in majestic, organ-like sounding fashion.

The performance was received, by a crowd that very much wanted this to have been a musical moment for the ages, with abundant enthusiasm. The fact that it had been an assembly of four very impressive, but curiously self-contained movements—each and as a whole with room for improvement—went generously or willfully unnoticed. The likelihood of the Bruckner coming together in the necessary way to satisfy the most demanding expectations is high for the stops of Thielemann’s little inauguration tour: Today in Frankfurt, tomorrow in Cologne, on the 8^th in Grafenegg, and then especially on the 9^th, just two, three days after Lorin Maazel’s season opening concerts with the Munich Philharmonic (with the same composers, Wagner and Bruckner!), at Munich’s Philharmonic Hall.

Here’s to hoping that “C.T.” in Dresden is the beginning of an era, not just an episode to end after five or seven years in acrimony and wistful dreams of what might yet still have been.

Read more »

Dip Your Ears, No. 123 (Frau ohne Schatten)

J.S.Bach, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Christian Thielemann WPh, Vienna State Opera Chorus S.Gould, A.Schwanewilms, M.Schuster, W.Koch, E.Herlitzius et al. (Opus Arte DVD 7104)

Phantasmorgastic, but with shadows: On the downside, Richard Strauss’ Die Frau ohne Schatten is boring. On the upside it’s a great opera with music unlike anywhere else in Strauss. Especially thanks to Christian Thielemann’s conducting; succulent and lean in turns, modern yet intransigently sumptuous. And uncut, which turns the Nurse (Michaela Schuster) into a principal character! Evelyn Herlitzius, the Dyer’s wife, also stands out, the other singers performs between convincingly and admirably. The staging by Christof Loy—the story of the first studio recording of Die Frau as re-told through the opera itself—is too clever by half, but at least it’s clever.

Review from the Salzburg production here.

Read more »

Notes from the 2012 Salzburg Festival ( 12 )

Bernd Alois Zimmermann • Die Soldaten

For discriminating and adventurous ears, open to unusual and disturbing experiences in an opera house, Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten in Alvis Hermanis’ production was the undisputed highlight of the 2012 Festival. With its five performances heavily advertised in every program book of the “Salzburg contemporary” series and by a school class or two that had come through town invited to join, the Felsenreitschule was well filled for the third performance (Friday, August 24^th), but still with room for me to spread out to the left and right of my seat.

In the enlarged pit sat a very sizable fraction of the Vienna Philharmonic, with instruments sprawling all over the Felsenreitschule and whole batteries of percussion and harp and organs to the left and right. Some of them looked excited about Zimmermann, others less so, but despite the VPO’s reputation for being unenthusiastic about contemporary music, they helped create a thrilling, chilling evening, guided by the truly stimulated, multi-tasking Ingo Metzmacher, who conducted from the score roughly the size of four Manhattan Yellow Pages laid out in a square.

On stage a reproduction of the arches of the Felsenreitschule are placed in front of the real thing. Behind those arches seven horses—the most expensive stars of the production—are led back and forth. The backlit windows—blind first, later revealing—show the sufferings of a military hospital, full of madness and shell shock. Zimmermann wrote his libretto for Die Soldaten based exactingly on the play by the same name of 18^th century author Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz; both had witnessed war first hand and dealt with their experience in their respective works.

Zimmermann sets his opera ‘on any given day, today, yesterday, tomorrow’. In this production Hermanis’ sets and Eva Dessecker’s costumes place the story solidly during World War I, which adds to the dialogue a wonderfully archaic and distanced quality. It also draws (unnecessarily obvious) connections to Wozzeck, which are echoed in the name of the title character Marie, the number of (15) scenes, and superficially in the music. Wozzeck is a post-romantic opera that limps into modernity, Die Soldaten in Zimmermann’s solid 20^th century idiom of advanced serialism. At its conservative end, Die Soldaten has parallels to Berg at his most serial. Other parallels are a propensity for both Berg (though not in Wozzeck) and Zimermann to augment their work with quotes from Bach (same as in the Ecclesiastical Action) and both make extensive use of traditional forms.

Zimmermann aficionados have claimed that Die Soldaten is the most, perhaps only important opera since Wozzeck; a rather ideological viewpoint, even if you qualify the statement and confine it only to German operas. At the very least, there is some competition: Król Roger, Věc Makropulos, Mahagonny, Lady Macbeth, Lulu, Capriccio, Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, The Rake’s Progress, Turn of the Screw, Carmelites, Elegy for Young Lovers, Der junge Lord, and since 1965: Le Grand Macabre, Lear, Saint François d'Assise, Gawain… decide for yourself.

That said, it is an astounding, startling, in its way marvelous work, aggressive, powerful, willfully overwhelming, and perversely complex. Yet every seemingly random detail is most exactingly and scrupulously composed and specified… down to the crisscrossing chattering, yelling coffee-house voices and the clatter of the teaspoons. To coordinate that organized chaos, extra conductor (“Maestro suggeritore”) Andreas Abegg, sticking half way out of the pit, supported Metzmacher handing out cues for the singers. For these Salzburg performances, the last scene was modified to exclude parallel video feeds and other electroacoustic elements to heighten the drama and the focus on the music itself. (Zimmermann himself experimented with various alternative versions to end his opera, not the least to make it playable in concert.)

Die Soldaten, which contains all the musical seeds of Zimmermann’s later work, is difficult music—“difficult” with and without quotations marks, and it is supposed to be. In the discomfort that listening to Die Soldaten can induce lies part of the message of the opera… war, rape, and the fall from grace, the story of the decline and fall of Marie. The percussion instruments fire away like artillery; the brass pulsates relentlessly (except for the fuck-along Jazz number in the café later), and the strings shriek. More force, bite, organized cacophony, could hardly be had: Aggressive music for an aggressive, dystopian topic of hopelessness tainted with a soupçon of nihilism.

Still, the evocations and quotations of the work create an atmosphere, a sensuality, and shreds of lyricism that distinguish this opera from New Complexity works like Shadowtime or the stentorian braying of something like Sophie’s Choice. Not only the listeners are challenged, the singers are faced with enormous challenges, too. Every voice driven to its extremes, both in range and power, and the music drives on, in unforgiving ways. At the emotional, possibly musical climax, Marie (Laura Aikin), her sister Charlotte (Mezzo Tanja Ariane Baumgartner), and the Countess de la Roche (Gabriela Beňačová) meet in stratospheric heights for an amazing trio in which each eating their heart out.

If there is a complaint to be had, it’s that the realism, the superficial historicism, and the intense ambiance of Hermanis’ set smooth the corners of the music and take the edge of Die Soldaten. Perhaps it’s even a benefit, since it opens the opera up to enjoyment by those who would otherwise be too disturbed by the music… but is such an opera about enjoyment? In any case, the eye clings to the movie-like scenery, with wicker chairs, whores on horses, and meticulously injured soldiers. (The equestrian cast members being rather more important than a mere chorus member, the one soldier who turned out to be allergic to horses had to be recast as a TB-sufferer, sniffing from a cloth tinctured with antihistamines.) A double of Marie’s attempted a real high wire act (with metaphorical implications) across the Felsenreitschule’s stage that seemed like the real thing, until the actual Marie appeared from a different location. The sex scenes, between grueling and reluctantly appealing, are staged in a proto-phone booth, camouflaged as ‘a roll in ze hay’. The same hay which is later, slowly, unbearably used to depict—and not-depict—Marie’s abortion... and in the background was illustrated with vintage daguerreotype nudie pictures.

The vast lot of the singers—two dozen major and minor roles, lots of supplementary soldiers—performed, with scarcely an exception, superbly. Some highlights among them: Baumgartner (Charlotte), the first to make a great impression and for a while stealing the limelight from Laura Aikin’s very good, clear and bright-voiced Marie. Alfred Muff as their father, Wesener, switched seamlessly between spoken and sung text with his clean and voluminous bass. And the Countess (much like Marie, but ripened) is a great, Kostelnička-like role for a dramatic, coloratura, piercingly and it was very powerfully sung by Beňačová. Not mentioning Renée Morloc (Mother of Stolzius), Tomasz Konieczny (Stolzius), Daniel Brenna (Desportes), Morgan Moody (Captain Mary), Cornelia Kallisch (Mother of Wesener), Matthias Klink (young count), does them injustice, but it would make for awful reading. The main necessary ingredients for this opera—navigation of uncomfortable heights, agility, and power—were present to more than sufficient degrees in all.

Pictures (above and below) courtesy Salzburg Festival, © Ruth Walz

Read more »

Listen Up: Remembering Fischer Dieskau

New in Listen Magazine

A Voice from Ruins

An appraisal of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

When Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau passed away this year, there were few superlatives raining down on him in obituaries that hadn’t already been used during his lifetime. He was one of three or four giants in classical music who were able to shape the cultural landscape — and he was the last one. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau need not have been your favorite singer in order to acknowledge his greatness and importance.

Like Herbert von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein, Fischer-Dieskau arrived right at the time when recording technology allowed for the easier-than-ever dissemination of music, when competition was limited, and when classical music still defined mainstream culture, even for those who didn’t much care for it. With some four hundred records to his name, Fischer-Dieskau became one of the most recorded singers of all time. In Germany he is called Der Jahrhundertsänger — literally that’s “singer of the century,” or “hundred-year singer,” although neither translation does justice to the air of veneration the term connotes. His complete recordings of Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, Wolf, Beethoven and Brahms and copious doses of other, less well-known Lieder composers were the record collector’s natural (and often sole) choice. There are few classical-music listeners above the age of thirty-five for whom Fischer-Dieskau’s interpretations of this repertoire didn’t leave the emotional footprint of first exposure.

The quantity and, at its best, quality, intelligence and matter-of-course-ness of his Lieder singing made German art songs known, even popular, in non-German-speaking countries. American critics, marveling at the quality of his Lied interpretations, were more reserved in their Fischer- Dieskaumania than their German and English colleagues, but not by much. Harold C. Schonberg called him “the most protean singer alive today,” saying he was “acknowledged to be the greatest of contemporary lieder singers [who] has triumphed in opera . . . from Handel to Henze [and] a stalwart in oratorio work.” Donal Henahan referred to Fischer-Dieskau as “that paragon of 20th-century singers.”

Continued here.

Briefly Noted: More Bach Motets

J. S. Bach, Motets, Monteverdi Choir, J. E. Gardiner (released on June 26, 2012) Soli Deo Gloria SDG716 | 72'24" J. S. Bach, Motets, Bach Collegium Japan, M. Suzuki (released on February 23, 2010) BIS-SACD-1841 | 73'31" J. S. Bach, Motets, Bach Sinfonia, D. Abraham (released on October 26, 2010) DSL-92119 | 76'20" D. R. Melamed, J. S. Bach and the German Motet (1995)

Some of Bach's greatest achievements in choral music are found in his set of motets, a somewhat archaic genre used for (mostly unspecified) special occasions. As Daniel Melamed has shown in his comprehensive study of Bach's motets, these pieces are part of a long tradition of German motets, rather than sticking out historically like a sore thumb. There are six of them, BWV 225 to 230, plus one now considered spurious (BWV 231) and another formerly misattributed to Johann Christoph Bach (BWV Anh.159), which is now generally included in the set. John Eliot Gardiner's first recording of these pieces (Erato, 1982) was one of my favorites, among several others, so widely has this music been set to disc: two by the Hilliard Ensemble (1985, with the Hanover Boys Choir -- important listening, to remember the vocal forces Bach had at hand -- and 2007, augmented by other adults), Harry Christophers and the Sixteen (1993), and Nikolaus Harnoncourt in the Das Alte Werk Complete Bach edition (Teldec, now sounding somewhat dated). Most of these pieces, with the exception of Singet dem Herrn and especially the meaty Jesu, meine Freude, are not major works in terms of length, but each one has gorgeous moments and something substantial to say -- as a set, like everything this encyclopedic composer grouped together, they encompass a range of techniques. Gardiner's new version, recorded live in London's church of St John's Smith Square last year, is different from his older one principally in the fleetness of his fast tempos (and BWV 231 being replaced by BWV Anh.159), shaving a couple of minutes off each of the longer motets. The full sound of the whole choir, especially at the end of the larger works, is thrilling. It supplants his older recording and now leads the pack for its streamlined sound.

Of the motets only BWV 230 has an accompaniment written out, and that is only a continuo line, but there was a tradition of accompanying this kind of piece with continuo, which is what Gardiner chose to do in his new recording, or also to double the vocal parts with instruments. This is what Masaaki Suzuki and Bach Collegium Japan chose to do with their much more full-voiced version, combining a larger choir, more vocally powerful soloists, and a lavish instrumental consort. Suzuki is able to give a much broader sweep to the grander sections, but in Gardiner's new version one feels much closer to the singers, especially in those passages reduced to just a few voices. Suzuki takes some daring tempi, too, fast enough to be able to squeeze BWV 118b (O Jesu Christ, meins Lebens Licht, now generally considered a cantata although Bach called it a motet) onto the program, with only a minute more than Gardiner's timing. The fastest performance of the motets yet to reach my ears is an absolutely frenetic reading by Voces8, with the Senesino Players (Signum, also released in 2010), thrilling at times but also going off the rails a bit.

Around the same time as the Bach Collegium Japan recording, the Washington-based Bach Sinfonia performed all of Bach's motets, with a recording made shortly thereafter, at the Spencerville Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Silver Spring. This is also a large-scale rendition, with sixteen singers, five of whom are soloists, plus strings, woodwinds, and continuo organ, akin to the sound of Suzuki's interpretation but not as finished in terms of intonation and vowel unity (the singers, after a marathon week at that point, frankly sound a little tired). Locally, these pieces have generally been the domain of the Washington Bach Consort, but the last time I heard that group perform one of them, it was a disappointment. Director Daniel Abraham also includes BWV Anh.159, along with the six motets thought to be part of Bach's set, and has time to add an extra seven minutes worth of alternate chorale settings for BWV 225 and 226. One of the best features is a thorough booklet essay on the motets by none other than Daniel Melamed, who teaches at Indiana University.

In Brief: September Is Here Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to online audio, online video, and other good things in Blogville and Beyond. (After clicking to an audio or video stream, press the "Play" button to start the broadcast.) There is so much this week that you had better get started.

• Skip Sempé conducts Capriccio Stravagante in music by Samuel Scheidt, Johann-Heinrich Schein, and William Brade, at the Utrecht Early Music Festival. [France Musique]


• Watch a performance of the Brahms German Requiem from the Annecy Classic Festival, with the Maîtrise de Paris and soprano Diane Higbee. [Medici.tv]


• Listen to a performance of Sofia Gubaidulina's Die sieben letzten Worte for accordion, cello, and orchestra, plus music by Bach and Piazzola, with the Camerata Salzburg at the Carinthian Summer Music Festival. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Listen to Nikolaj Znaider and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra perform an all-Mendelssohn program, at the Proms in London. [France Musique]


• From last December, Bernard Haitink conducts an all-Strauss concert with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Eine Alpensymphonie and the Four Last Songs with Anja Harteros. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Vivica Genaux performs a concert of Baroque music with Collegium 1704, at the Cordes Festival in Prague. [France Musique]


• Watch Daniele Gatti conduct the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra in music by Wagner and Strauss, in London. [BBC Proms]


• Watch a concert for children at the Annecy Classic Festival, with music by Haydn, Glazunov, and Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, performed by the European Camerata. [Medici.tv]


• A performance of Purcell's The Fairy Queen, with the Sfera Armoniosa Orchestra, Netherlands Chamber Choir, and soprano Johanette Zomer, from the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• From London, Yefim Bronfman performs with the Berlin Philharmonic and Simon Rattle, in Brahms and Lutoslawski. [France Musique]


• The other concert by the Berlin Philharmonic in London, with music by Ligeti, Wagner, Sibelius, Ravel, and Debussy. [BBC Proms]


• Listen to Patrizia Ciofi and Laura Polverelli in a bel canto program with the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris, conducted by Luciano Acocella. [France Musique]


• From the Salzburg Festival, the Cleveland Orchestra and Franz Welser-Möst perform music by Lutoslawsky and Smetana. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Watch a recital by Bertrand Chamayou, with music by Franck, Debussy, and Saint-Saëns, from the Annecy Classic Festival. [Medici.tv]


• Another recital, by pianist Hisako Kawamura, winner of the Queen Elisabeth Competition, with music by Mozart and Beethoven. [Medici.tv]


• A third recital from Annecy, this time with pianist H. J. Lim (about whom everyone is talking), playing Ravel and Rachmaninoff. [Medici.tv]


• Denis Matsuev also played at Annecy, with the Orchestre des Étoiles du Lac Baïkal in Liszt's first piano concerto. [Medici.tv]


• Joshua Bell, Steven Isserlis, Dénes Várjon, and others play chamber music by Suk and Martinů and by Dvořák and Smetana at the Salzburg Festival. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Jordi Savall conducts a program of music in honor of Joan of Arc, with Hesperion XXI and La Capella Reial de Catalunya, at the Festival de Fontfroide. [France Musique]


• Also from the Festival de Fontfroide, Jordi Savall performs a concert of music for the viola da gamba by Marin Marais, Mr. de Sainte Colombe, Mr. De Machy, and Bach, called La Rêveuse. [France Musique]


• Listen to a Glyndebourne production of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, presented in London. [BBC Proms]


• Soprano Ida Falk Winland and mezzo-soprano Marie Lenormand join the children of the Maîtrise de Radio France in music of Purcell and Bach, from the Festival de Radio France Montpellier-Languedoc Roussillon. [France Musique]


• Listen to Donizetti's Le Duc d'Albe, in the version completed this year by composer Giorgio Battistelli, from the Vlaamse Opera in Antwerp. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Listen to whizkid organisto Cameron Carpenter play his souped-up arrangements of Bach in London. [BBC Proms]


• Listen to Lorenzo Ghielmi conduct La Divina Armonia in music by Buxtehude, Bach, Nicolaus Bruhns, and Georg Böhm, from the Utrecht Early Music Festival. [France Musique]


• Watch Martyn Brabbins conduct the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in Herbert Howells's Hymnus Paradisi and Edward Elgar's First Symphony. [BBC Proms]


• It was a concert from almost a year ago, but how about the Berlin Philharmonic's performance of Mahler's eighth symphony, with Christine Brewer, Soile Isokowski, Nathalie Stutzmann, Matthias Goerne, and others, paired with motets by Lotti and Tallis, at the Berlin Music Festival? [France Musique]


• Go even farther back, to 1977, for a performance of Puccini's Edgar, starring Renata Scotto and Carlo Bergonzi with the Opera Orchestra of New York. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]

Briefly Noted: Per la Vergine Maria

Per la Vergine Maria, Concerto Italiano, R. Alessandrini (released on June 28, 2011) Naive OP 30505 | 1h03

We enjoy Concerto Italiano's releases of lesser-known 18th-century sacred music -- the last one was a pairing of Mass settings by Pergolesi and Alessandro Scarlatti. This disc, from last year, brings together settings of Latin Marian texts: Claudio Monteverdi's Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a 6 voci; three 8-voice settings of the Magnificat by Pietro Paolo Bencini (c. 1675-1755), Padre Soler (1729-1783), and Giacomo Carissimi (1605-1674); two settings of the Salve Regina, for nine voices by Alessandro Melani (1639-1703) and for four voices by Alessandro Scarlatti; and Stravinsky's 4-voice setting of the Ave Maria. The settings are all rather simple, in mostly homophonic textures, performed with one singer to a part and the continuo accompaniment realized by organ and two theorbos. The sound is magnificent, capturing some, but not too much, of the generously resonant acoustic of the location, the Basilica of Santa Barbara in Mantua. The musical performances are all top-notch, too, with an ensemble of nine lovely voices blended into a cohesive ensemble of various combinations. There are some passages that feature one or more solo passages, with only one long solo, rendered plangently by soprano Monica Piccinini, in Melani's lovely Salve Regina. Bencini's virtually unknown setting of the Magnificat, with its meditative repetitions of two-chord patterns and affecting chain sequences, should be on every choir conductor's radar, as should the pieces by Scarlatti and Carissimi. Concluding with the Stravinsky miniature is a clever way to trace the connection between the beginning and end of the tonal era.