Classical Month in Washington (September 2015)

Fall is around the corner, so we have already made our Top 25 Picks for the classical music season, a year of many significant anniversaries for concert presenters. In each month, though, there are many performances we could not include in the season preview. Here are a few options that look to be intriguing for the month of September.

Violinist Lana Trotovšek

Last September's concert by Lana Trotovšek was a season highlight. The Slovenian violinist returns for a recital with pianist Anna Shelest at the Embassy of Slovenia, sponsored by the Embassy Series (September 11, 7:30 pm).

Vocal Arts D.C. celebrates its 25th anniversary by opening its season with a recital by mezzo-soprano Susan Graham and pianist Jake Heggie in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater. She will sing Iconic Legacies, a new song cycle by Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer, plus music by Schumann, Berlioz, Bachelet, and Hahn. Note the new start time for Vocal Arts events this year (September 12, 7 pm).

The Tuesday free concert series at the Church of the Epiphany is going full guns this month. The recital of lute songs by alto Barbara Hollinshead and lutenist Howard Bass should be a good one (September 15, 12:10 pm).

The season-opening galas of the area's symphony orchestras are to be avoided, if listening is your focus. The first subscription concert by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, however, should be worth hearing, with Anna Clyne's Masquerade and Strauss's Alpine Symphony. Olga Kern joins as soloist in Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (September 17, 8 pm at Strathmore; September 18 and 19 at the Meyerhoff).

The following weekend the BSO debuts its new contemporary series, Pulse. It's the flavor of the month for area concert presenters, combining classical music somehow with indie rock or whatnot. The stuff that comes early in the evening is not of much interest to us, but it concludes with the BSO performing Philip Glass's third symphony at the Meyerhoff (September 24, 8 pm). Later that same weekend, the BSO performs a program of Prokofiev, Glazunov (the violin concerto with concertmaster Jonathan Carney as soloist), and Beethoven, with Juanjo Mena as guest conductor (September 26, 8 pm at Strathmore; September 25 and 27 at the Meyerhoff).

Music by Jenny Olivia Johnson, Nathan Lincoln-DeCusatis, Armando Bayolo, and other living composers will be on the program for the Great Noise Ensemble's season opener at the Atlas Center (September 19, 8 pm).

Another anniversary celebrated this year is fifty years of the concert series at Baltimore's Shriver Hall. Pianist Yefim Bronfman kicks things off with a recital of music by Prokofiev and Schumann (September 20, 5:30 pm).

Washington Performing Arts opens its season with a recital by two golden oldies, violinist Itzhak Perlman and pianist Emanuel Ax, in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall (September 28, 7 pm).

See the complete calendar after the jump.

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Perchance to Stream: Assumption Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to online audio and online video from the week gone by. After clicking to an audio or video stream, you may need to press the "Play" button to start the broadcast. Some of these streams become unavailable after a few days.

• From the Bayreuth Festival, listen to a performance of Lohengrin starring Klaus-Florian Vogt and Petra Lang. [France Musique]


• Juanjo Mena conducts the BBC Philharmonic in Messiaen's Turangalila-Symphonie. [BBC Proms | Part 2]


• Michael Fabiano and Ana María Martínez star in the Glyndebourne Festival's production of Donizetti’s Poliuto, directed by Mariame Clément. [Glyndebourne]


• Diego Torre and Ferruccio Furlanetto star in a performance of Verdi's Don Carlos, recorded at the Sydney Opera House. [ABC Classic]


• Ivan Fischer conducts the sixth and seventh symphonies of Beethoven with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, recorded in Amsterdam. [France Musique]


• From the Royal Albert Hall, the Glyndebourne Festival performs Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio. [BBC Proms | Part 2 | [Part 3]


• Matthias Goerne joins the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to sing Lieder by Strauss and Schubert, with Jaap van Zweden also conducting Beethoven's fifth symphony at a concert recorded last February. [CSO]


• Leonard Slatkin conducts François Dumont, the Britten Choir, and Orchestre National de Lyon in Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé. [France Musique]


• Listen to the Brahms second symphony and the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, with Anne-Sophie Mutter as soloist, with Riccardo Muti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic at the Salzburg Festival. [ORF]


• Violinist Lisa Batiashvili joins the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, under Andris Nelsons, for a concert recorded last month in Bad Kissingen. [RTBF]


• The Arnold Schoenberg Chor, under Erwin Ortner, perform music by Schubert and Brahms, recorded at the Styriarte Festival. [ORF]


• Listen to the past week's concerts from the Proms in London. [BBC Proms]


• Violinist Julia Fischer joins the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra and conductor Lionel Bringuier, for music by Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, and Beethoven. [RTBF]


• Listen to a performance of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, starring Simone Kermes and Nuria Rial, recorded at the Teatro Real de Madrid in 2013. [RTBF]


• Violinist Christian Tetzlaff, cellist Tanja Tetzlaff, and pianist Lars Vogt perform string trios by Schubert and Dvorak, recorded at the Salzburg Festival. [ORF]


• A concert of concertos, featuring Martha Argerich and friends, recorded in Lugano in June. [RTBF | Part 2]


• Ton Koopman conducts the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France in a performance of Haydn's Il mondo della luna, Beethoven's second symphony and Mozart's 25th symphony. [France Musique]


• Baritone Christian Gerhaher and pianist Gerold Huber perform Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, selections from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and Kindertotenlieder, recorded last month at the Salzburg Festival. [ORF]


• Paolo Carignani leads the Vienna Symphony at the Bregenz Festival, in a performance of Rossini's Messa di Gloria. [ORF | Part 2]


• Vilde Frang and friends perform chamber music by Kodály, Tchaikovsky, and others, recorded at the Salzburg Festival. [ORF]


• I Musici di Roma perform at the Carinthischer Sommer festival, with trumpeter Gábor Boldoczki in music by Rossini, Torelli, Vivaldi, and others, recorded last month at the Stiftskirche Ossiach. [ORF]


• From the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the ensemble La Sfera Armoniosa plays music by Vivaldi, Kapsberger, and Monteverdi, with countertenor Maarten Engeltjes, recorded in 2013. [France Musique]


• Harry Christophers conducts music by Palestrina, Victoria, Schütz, and Kuhnau, recorded in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. [France Musique]

Dip Your Ears, No. 204 (Schulhoff for String Quartet)

E.Schulhoff, SQ4ts Nos.1 & 2, 5 Pieces for SQ4t, Aviv Quartet Naxos

Schulhoff for String Quartet

The string quartets of Schulhoff’s are masterpieces, on par with the best of the 20^th century. If you look or listen beyond the first page of String Quartet No.1 (1924), inauspiciously black with notes and an unisono assault on the listener, things turn immediately to the charming, and then to unbridled fun. The viola friendly quartet features lots of sul ponticello whispering, there are slides, tickles and spider-feet, pizzicato picking, au talon bowing, and col legno knocking… in short: it’s a whole bag of fun and stomps around the block with gusto. I remember hearing the quartet live for the first time with the Dutch EnAccord Quartet and what a revelation that was! Much the same goes for the barn-burning razzmatazz Five Pieces for String Quartet, arguably his best work for string quartet.

The performances here are good and the sound is varying but decent, but the main reason to pick the Aviv Quartet’s renditions on Naxos are availability, economy, and convenience – having both quartets and the Five Pieces in one place. If Capriccio decides to reissue the Petersen Quartett recordings (which cover the complete works for String Quartet except for the Divertimento, plus the Violin Sonata, the Duo, and the Sextet), that will be the obvious first choice with neither sound- nor performance-qualms of any kind.

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À mon chevet: 'Cold Mountain'

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

When supper was done, Stobrod took his sack off the ground and drew from it a fiddle and set it across his knees. It was of novel design, for where the scroll would normally be was instead the whittled head of a great serpent curled back against the neck, detailed right down to the scales and the slit pupils of the eyes. It was clear Stobrod was proud as could be of it, and he had a right, for though the fiddle was far from perfect, he had fashioned it himself during the months of living fugitive. His previous instrument had been stolen from him during his trip home, and so, lacking a model, he had shaped the new one from memory of a fiddle's proportions, and it therefore looked like a rare artifact from some primitive period of instrument-making.

He turned it front and back so they could admire its faces, and he told them the story of its creation. He had spent weeks tramping the ridges to cut spruce and maple and boxwood, and when they were cured he sat for hours on end knifing out fiddle parts. He cut forms and clamps of his own devising. Boiled the wood of the side pieces soft and shaped them so that when they cooled and dried they set to the forms in smooth curves that would not come unsprung. He carved the tailpiece and bridge and fingerboard freehand. Boiled down deer hooves for glue. Augered out holes for the tuning pegs, pieced it all together, and let it dry. Then, he set the sound post with aid of a wire, dyed the boxwood fingerboard dark with the juice of poke berries, and sat for hours carving the viper's head curled over against its body. Finally, he stole a little tin of varnish from a man's toolshed in the dark of night and put the finish on it. Then he strung it up and tuned it. Even went out one night and trimmed a horse's tail to hair his bow.

He then looked upon his work and thought, I've almost got my music now, for he had but one job left, the killing of a snake. For some time, he had speculated that putting the tailpiece to a rattlesnake inside the instrument would work a vast improvement on the sound, would give it a sizz and knell like no other. The greater the number of rattles the better, was his thinking on the matter. He described it along the lines of a quest. The musical improvement he was seeking would come as likely from the mystic discipline of getting the rattles as from their actual function within the fiddle.

-- Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain, pp. 289-91

This book was the source work for Jennifer Higdon's first opera of the same name, reviewed at Santa Fe Opera last week. Most critics liked the opera a lot better than I did, but my admiration for the book is another matter. The wonderful Collected Works Bookstore, on Galisteo St. in Santa Fe, had a copy signed by the author, who was in town for the premiere, and it has been absorbing reading. The passage quoted here, where Ruby's father, Stobrod, plays on his rustic fiddle is only one of many memorable passages in the novel that completely fell flat on stage. Sometimes music imagined is better than music heard. How Stobrod acquires the tail end of a large rattlesnake is another story, too long to quote here.

Briefly Noted: Motets from the Hiller Collection

Motetten der Hiller-Sammlung, Sächsisches Vocalensemble, M. Jung (released on July 10, 2015) Carus83.269 | 70'25"

German composer Johann Adam Hiller (1728–1804) was also a music theorist and editor of music publications. From 1776 to 1791 he supervised the publication of six volumes of four-part motets and arias for use in German-speaking churches. These collections included his own music, as well as that of composers he admired, including his teacher in Dresden, Gottfried August Homilius (1714–1785). This new disc gives a sampling of some of the pieces in those volumes, which have also been published by the company that released the recording, Carus Verlag. Other composers featured include Johann Gottlob Harrer (1703–1755), the short-lived successor of J.S. Bach in Leipzig; Theodor Christlieb Reinhold (1682–1755); Christoph Ludwig Fehre (1718–1772); Johann Heinrich Rolle (1716–1785); Johann Gottfried Weiske (1745–1806); Christian Friedrich Penzel (1737–1801), student and copyist of J.S. Bach in Leipzig; and Carl Heinrich Graun (1704–1759), the biggest name in a list of mostly minor Kapellmeisters.

Matthias Jung leads the Sächsisches Vocalensemble in even performances, in tune and generally balanced. The sound was captured in the Annenkirche in Dresden, where both Fehre and Reinhold were organists, with a lot of ring and long decay. These motets, none of which one is likely to call a masterpiece, could provide some much-needed diversification for the average Sunday offerings of many churches, Lutheran and otherwise. None are that far beyond the ability of an average church choir.

Briefly Noted: Bach's Lutheran Masses from Japan

J.S. Bach, Lutheran Masses, Vol. 1, J. Lunn, H. Blažíková, R. Blaze, G. Turk, P. Kooij, Bach Collegium Japan, M. Suzuki (released on July 10, 2015) BIS-2081 | 65'30"

Other than the famous B Minor Mass, with music for the entire Latin Ordinary, Bach set the so-called Lutheran Mass, which was only the Kyrie and Gloria from the Catholic service. Created during his tenure in Leipzig, these pieces are adaptations of Bach's own earlier music, mostly cantata movements. The last time these pieces were under review here, it was in the recording by Cantus Cölln with Konrad Junghänel (Harmonia Mundi, 2007). Now Masaaki Sukuki and Bach Collegium Japan have released the first volume of their recording, continuing to round out their complete Bach edition.

This disc has the first two of Bach's settings of the Lutheran Mass, and the delightful interpretation of BWV 235 has enough to recommend it. In the "Christe" section of the Kyrie, Bach does not mark the motif that runs through all the voices as staccato (but also not legato), but Suzuki has all the parts really separate the notes, to whimsical effect. Suzuki then smooths the return of the "Kyrie" section back out, a choice that accentuates the leaps up and down a tritone that come in the middle and at the end of the motif, which is also quite charming. BWV 236 is a less pleasing piece to my ear, more in a backward-looking style and with all five voice parts doubled by instruments. The reading of the "Quoniam" movement in the Gloria sounds a little off: the oboe solo sounds rhythmically unstable especially on the slurred 32nd-note motif, the tenor soloist is a little on the whiny side, and they do not always line up well.

Suzuki rounds out the disc with four little Sanctus movements, all short and sweet, especially BWV 241, which is a rather complex double-chorus confection. It also includes a version of the Kyrie, with the outer movements adapted from the work of Italian composer Francesco Durante, an interesting nod to Bach's interest in all sorts of other composers' work, from Palestrina onward. This disc comes on the heels of a recording of the Lutheran Masses by The Sixteen with Harry Christophers, which is mostly sung with one voice per part and some doubling to cover breathing in long phrases (Vol. 1 / Vol. 2). It is also good listening, but their reading of BWV 235 is just not as interesting: Christophers takes that "Christe" motif legato, with the last note kept short, probably more in keeping with the score, but once you have heard what Suzuki does, it is hard to forget.

Production Photos from the Bayreuth Festival's Götterdämmerung

After the excellently sung, superbly conducted, and rather warmly received Rheingold, Walküre, and Siegfried, the last of the tetralogy’s operas, Götterdämmerung, felt like a triumph. Never mind the boos, when Castorf came out, which were eventually overtaken by the counter-bravos… the show was grand, the singing just about as good as it can be possibly wished, the orchestra continued very nearly at the impossibly high standards set by the Rheingold, and the hours just flew by. Even the usually interminable first act was enthralling throughout, and maybe for the first time no one minded Waltraute (Claudia Mahnke) waltzing on stage late in the game to prolong matters by chatting with her sister for seemingly forever...

Full review on Forbes.com. Click on excerpted images below to find a higher resolution version of the full picture.

All images courtesy Bayreuth Festival, © Enrico Nawrath

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Washington Season Preview, 2015-2016

Donald Runnicles

Almost nothing is happening now as far as classical music in Washington. Fall is just around the corner, and with it more concerts than one person can ever attend. (Trust me: this comes from personal experience.) At the end of every summer, Ionarts offers you a season preview for the upcoming year: what are the twenty-five concerts we think everyone should most want to attend? It was an exceptionally tough selection this year, because on the first run through all the announcements, there were sixty-some performances that seemed unmissable. Here it is, though, whittled down to be extra-selective: so save the date and arrange your budget accordingly.

OCTOBER:
1. The National Symphony Orchestra opens its subscription season with a program of Mozart (the overture to Magic Flute), Elgar (Serenade for Strings and Enigma Variations), and Strauss (Four Last Songs). The primary reason is not soprano Olga Peretyatko as soloist in the Strauss, although she is a singer we want to hear, but because Donald Runnicles will be at the podium. He is a fine conductor, and his commitment as music director of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra ends in 2016. The NSO, let us not forget, is looking for a successor to Christoph Eschenbach, and Runnicles might be a possibility, if experience wins out over youth (October 1 to 3).

2. Mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton is one of the singers you want to hear right now, and she gives a recital for Vocal Arts D.C. in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater (October 15).

3. Pianist András Schiff is undertaking an interesting Last Sonatas cycle. Washington Performing Arts presents the second installment (October 26) and third installment (February 24) in the Music Center at Strathmore.

4. Any calendar year with two recitals by Evgeny Kissin is a good year for Ionarts. Washington Performing Arts brings the Russian pianist to the Kennedy Center Concert Hall for a recital of music by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Albeniz, and Larregla (October 28).

5. Cellist Steven Isserlis plays on gut strings, not always to the best effect in later music. His recital with fortepianist Robert Levin, playing an all-Beethoven program, should be top-notch when presented by Washington Performing Arts in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater (October 29).

6. Composer Meredith Monk has appeared in the Washington suburbs a couple of times in recent years. Any performance of hers is worth hearing, and her concert with her vocal ensemble at the Library of Congress will also be free (October 30).

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