Briefly Noted: Blue Heron's Peterhouse Set

Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, Vol. 4, Blue Heron, S. Metcalfe (released on August 14, 2015) BHCD1005 | 65'51"

Vol. 1 (2010) [Review] Vol. 2 (2012) Vol. 3 (2013)

Back in 2010, we took note of Blue Heron's project to record all of the music from Nick Sandon's reconstruction of the music in the Peterhouse Partbooks. This set of partbooks was probably copied around 1540 for use at Canterbury Cathedral, just after the Benedictine monks who had cared for the cathedral for centuries were driven out by the plunderers of Henry VIII's reformation. Peterhouse, one of the colleges at Cambridge, later acquired the books as part of its attempt to establish its own chapel and choir, but at some point the set lost its tenor partbook and several pages of the treble part, which Prof. Sandon has had to recreate.

Of the fifty-some pieces in this extraordinary source, largely unstudied before Sandon's work to restore it, forty are unica, unknown in any other source. The completions heard on these discs, while speculative, are the closest we are likely ever to come to this music in its original form, unless by a miracle the missing parts turn up somewhere. Blue Heron, based in Boston, still may not measure up to British counterparts like the Tallis Scholars and Stile Antico in terms of perfect intonation and musical sense, but the group seems to improve each time their sound reaches my ears. In Volume 4, the centerpiece is Missa Spes nostra, an extremely beautiful setting of the Latin Ordinary for Trinity Sunday by Robert Jones (fl. 1520-1535), a musician employed by the Royal Chapel under Henry VIII. The Sanctus, often the most gorgeous movement of a Renaissance polyphonic Mass in my experience, is a high-water mark both for this piece and for Blue Heron. The Kyrie, not set to polyphony, is sung in the form of a Sarum plainchant, in an odd style which is the low point of the disc. Thanks to Alex Ross, whose mention of this disc in his Best of the Year post brought the project back to my attention. Many delights await you, and a fifth and final disc is reportedly on the way.

Pierre Boulez (1925-2016)

Mahler, conducted by Pierre Boulez Wagner, Das Ring der Nibelungen (dir. Patrice Chéreau), Bayreuth Festspiele, P. Boulez

Pierre Boulez est mort! The lion of modernism died yesterday, at age 90, and is survived by all those phenomena he advocated destroying over the years -- opera houses, the Mona Lisa, the Paris Opera, history. While he was a tyrannical Futurist when it came to new music -- "We live in a century of libraries, drowning under the weight of amassed documents," he said in 2011, "They decry the Taliban for destroying everything, but civilizations are destroyed to be able to move on.” -- his greatest achievements were at the podium as a conductor, bringing an incisive clarity to old, even classic scores. His work in the Patrice Chéreau Centennial Ring Cycle is an eternal Ionarts favorite, and his conducting has featured in these pages, thanks to our European correspondents. We have had a few chances to hear some of his music performed in recent years here in Washington, but it has mostly left me unmoved. One can only hope that certain rigid compositional pieties will die with him.

To mark his passing, France Musique has published a multimedia tribute, Boulez à Facettes : de la fulgurance au plaisir, and you can watch a recent long (fascinating) interview with him from the Cité de la Musique (en français). You can also watch the 2015 tribute concert at the Philharmonie de Paris, at which Boulez's beloved ensemble, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, performed his composition Répons, with Matthias Pintscher conducting. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra also has a tribute page, as does the New York Philharmonic.

France Musique has also made available an old live recording of a concert that Boulez conducted in 1981, with the Orchestre National de France and the Choeur de Radio France. In addition to Stravinsky's Le Chant du Rossignol and Schoeberg's Pélleas et Mélisande, soprano Phyllis Bryn Julson is soloist in Boulez's composition Le Soleil des eaux.

Twelve Days of Christmas: 'Birthday Cantatas'

J.S. Bach, Birthday Cantatas (BWV 213/214), J. Lunn, R. Blaze, M. Sakurada, D. Wörner, Bach Collegium Japan, M. Suzuki (released on November 13, 2015) BIS-2161 | 73'17"

Some people get a bicycle or a video game console for their eleventh birthday. In 1733, Crown Prince Friedrich Christian of Saxony got a Bach cantata for his, and his mother, Maria Josepha, Queen of Poland, got one for her 34th birthday in the same year. We took note of Masaaki Suzuki's set of Bach's secular cantatas with the fourth volume, released last year. The cycle continues with a disc that brings together these two birthday cantatas in a performance that has many pleasing qualities. Most listeners are likely to know this music in a different form, since Bach recycled most of the movements from these cantatas in his Christmas Oratorio the following year. That piece's famous opening chorus, Jauchzet, frohlocket, auf, preiset die Tage, was first composed as the first movement of Maria Josepha's birthday cantata, Tönet, ihr Pauken! Erschallet, Trompeten! (BWV 214), that line of text explaining the opening timpani strikes and heraldic tripled trumpet parts.

Bach did not compose any operas, but the secular cantatas, which are often composed of dramatic scenes involving allegorical characters, are the closest one is going to get to a guess at how a Bach opera might have sounded. For example, the young prince's birthday cantata, Laßt uns sorgen, laßt uns wachen (BWV 213), is also known as Hercules am Scheidewege (Hercules at the crossroads). Hercules, played by the alto soloist, is torn between Lust (soprano) and Virtue (tenor) until he decides on Virtue. At the end the bass, as Mercury, draws a parallel between the choice of Hercules and the princely dedicatee. Soprano Joanne Lunn is limpid at the high end, if just a whisper at the low, in the gorgeous aria Schlafe, mein Liebster, where Vice attempts to seduce Hercules, re-purposed somewhat curiously in the Christmas Oratorio as the Virgin Mary's cradle song to her newborn son. Hercules's aria Treues Echo dieser Orten, with its obbligato part for oboe d'amore and echo response ("Nein!" or "Ja!"), is just lovely, although countertenor Robin Blaze's stridency at the top of the range is one of the disc's disappointments. Makoto Sakurada has heroic strength and flexible agility in the big tenor aria, while the intonation of the natural horns in BWV 213 is a little hair-raising at times.

Twelve Days of Christmas: 'A Maltese Christmas'

G. Abos, A Maltese Christmas, Kölner Akademie, M.A. Willens (released on November 13, 2015) cpo 777978-2 | 67'53"

Michael Alexander Willens and his Kölner Akademie continue to produce remarkable discoveries in their series of discs on the CPO label. Their latest recording features three previously unrecorded sacred works by Girolamo Abos (1715–1760), a composer born in Malta but who worked in London and Naples, where he taught Giovanni Paisiello. The sound was captured during a live concert last January in honor of the composer's 300th birthday, in St. Paul’s Anglican Pro-Cathedral (Valletta, Malta) during the Valletta International Baroque Festival.

Although billed as music for Christmas, the three pieces here are all set to general texts, meaning they could be performed as a set on any major feast: the Benedictus Dominus Deus Israel canticle for the end of Lauds, the Magnificat canticle (SATB) for the end of Vespers, and a Mass for two choruses (both SSATB, like the Benedictus setting, and only the Kyrie and Gloria movements). One can hear much of the young Mozart's style of the early Salzburg sacred music in these pieces, likely by way of Paisiello, especially in the way he uses the voices more as a way of unfurling unusual harmonic progression more than as contrapuntal lines. The orchestral writing is mostly doubling of voices, with a few unexpected moments, like the charming duet of the bass soloist with an earnest bassoon in the "In sanctitate" movement of the Benedictus. The Gloria movement of the Mass, with its heraldic trumpet parts and expansive choral and soloistic writing, should be on many choir wish lists. The ensemble of ten singers makes an excellent group sound, with some pleasing individual contributions, with soprano Maïlys De Villoutreys standing out as particularly beautiful.

À mon chevet: 'La Place de l'étoile'

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

'Now to work, my boy. You leave immediately for the Haute-Savoie. I have just received an order from Rio de Janeiro: "Young French mountain girl. Brunette. Husky." From there, you will move on to Normandy. This time the order is from Beirut: "Elegant French girl whose ancestors fought in the crusades. Good provincial landed gentry." The client is clearly a lecher after our own hearts! An emir who wants to avenge himself for Charles Martel...'

'Or the sack of Constantinople by the crusaders...'

'If you prefer. In short, I have found what he requires. In the Calvados region... A young woman... descended from a venerable aristocratic family! Seventeenth-century château! Cross and Lance heads with fleurs-de-lis on a field Azure. Hunting parties! The ball is in your court, Schlemilovitch. There is not a moment to lose. We have our work cut out for us! The abductions must involve no bloodshed. Come, have one last drink at my place, then I will accompany you to the station.'

Lévy-Vendôme's apartment is furnished in the Napoléon III style. The vicomte ushers me into his library.

'Have you ever seen such exquisite bindings?' he says, 'I am a bibliophile, it is my secret vice. See, if I take down a volume at random: a treatise on aphrodisiacs by René Descartes. Apocrypha, nothing but apocrypha... I have single-handedly reinvented the whole history of French literature. Here we have the love letters of Pascal to Mlle de La Vallière. A bawdy saga by Bossuet. An erotic tale by Mme de La Fayette. Not content with debauching the women of this country, I wanted to prostitute French literature in its entirety. To transform the heroines of Racine and Marivaux into whores. Junia willingly copulating with Nero as a horrified Britannicus looks on. Andromache throwing herself into the arms of Pyrrhus at their first meeting. Marivaux's countesses donning their maids' uniforms and "borrowing" their lovers for the night. As you can see, Schlemilovitch, being involved in the white slave trade does not preclude being a man of culture. I have spent forty years writing apocrypha, devoting myself to dishonoring the most illustrious writers of France. Take a leaf out of my book, Schlemilovitch! Vengeance, Schlemilovitch, vengeance!'

-- Patrick Modiano, La Place de l'étoile (trans. Caroline Hillier), pp. 49-51

French writer Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014, but this is the first time I have read any of his books. This was Modiano's first book, presented under the mentorship of Raymond Queneau, and it reportedly contains some biographical details from the life of Modiano's father. It is part of a new edition in English of Modiano's Occupation Trilogy, and its outrageous protagonist, Raphaël Schlemilovitch, has one of those truly memorable narrative voices, mingling fantasy and outright lies with semi-truths in a mix that is virtuosic and possibly off-putting. In this passage Schlemilovitch takes up the offer of a shady viscount to help him procure girls from around France to be abducted and sent off to brothels in other countries.

Perchance to Stream: 10th Day of Christmas 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.

• Andrei Petrenko leads the Mariinsky Theater Chorus in Rachmaninov's Vespers, plus arrangements of popular Russian Christmas songs. [RTBF]


• Watch a performance of Handel's Messiah from Paris, with the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris and the choir Accentus, plus Carolyn Sampson, Matthew Rose, and other soloists. [Philharmonie de Paris]


• Olivier Schneebeli leads a performance of Marc-Antoine Charpentier's Funeral Music for Queen Marie-Thérèse in the Chapelle Royale at Versailles, with the ensemble La Rêveuse and Les Pages et Les Chantres du Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles. [France Musique]


• A program of arias by Handel and Purcell on the subjects of monsters, sorceresses, and magicians, with Le Concert d'Astrée, soprano Patricia Petibon, and baritone Nahuel di Pierro, conducted by Emmanuelle Haïm, recorded last October at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris. [France Musique]


• From last September a performance of Gluck's Orphée et Eurydice recorded at Covent Garden, starring Juan Diego Florez (Orphée), Lucy Crowe (Eurydice), and Amanda Forsythe (Amour), the Monteverdi Choir, and English Baroque Soloists, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner. [ORF]


• Listen to a production of Strauss's Capriccio, conducted by Andrew Davis at Lyric Opera of Chicago, with a cast starring Renée Fleming, Anne Sofie von Otter, Bo Skovhus, and others. [RTBF]


• Romina Basso stars in a performance of Orfeo ed Euridice by Johann Joseph Fux, with Antonio Florio conducting the Cappella della Pietà de' Turchini, recorded in 2010 at the Wiener Konzerthaus. [ORF]


• Charles Dutoit leads the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in music of Ravel, Debussy, and Berlioz (Te Deum), with tenor Joseph Kaiser. [ABC Classic]

Read more »

Classical Music Agenda (March 2016)

Jordi Savall

The classical music calendar for the month of March is rich indeed here in Washington. There are easily twice as many concerts as the number normally included in this monthly agenda, but after much deliberation, here are the Top 10 picks plus a couple lagniappes.

MAKE IT OLD:
Jordi Savall, conductor and humanitarian, will play his primary instrument, the viol, at a highly anticipated solo concert at the Phillips Collection (March 6). The intimate acoustic in the museum's Music Room is one of the selling points.

Keyboard specialist Andreas Staier visits the Library of Congress this month (March 9), playing the harpsichord. In this program he "contemplates the concept of melancholy in music from 17th-century France and Germany."

Ionarts favorite Rachel Barton Pine returns to the free concert series at the National Gallery of Art, playing a concert of the complete works for solo violin by J.S. Bach (March 27).

MAKE IT ORCHESTRAL:
Markus Stenz leads the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in an intriguing performance of Beethoven's overture and incidental music to Goethe's Egmont, with narration by Kwame Kwei-Armah (March 12 at Strathmore; March 11 and 13 in Baltimore). Lars Vogt joins as soloist for Beethoven's first piano concerto.

Conductor Kent Nagano comes to the Kennedy Center Concert Hall with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal (March 14), presented by Washington Performing Arts. The program combines two works premiered in 1913, the overplayed Rite of Spring and Debussy's often forgotten Jeux, with Daniil Trifonov providing the solo fireworks in Prokofiev's third piano concerto as entr'acte.

Mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey

Washington runs the gamut of Russian pianists that week, as it turns out. Nikolai Lugansky plays the first Brahms piano concerto with the National Symphony Orchestra (March 17 to 19), while Osmo Vänskä will also conduct Beethoven's sixth symphony. Denis Matsuev joins the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra with Music Director Emeritus Yuri Temirkanov for Rachmaninoff's third piano concerto, plus Tchaikovsky's fourth symphony (March 17 at Strathmore; March 18 to 19 in Baltimore).

Joshua Bell continues to expand his repertory, playing a Mozart concerto with the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields (March 18) in the Music Center at Strathmore. Bell, who has been the ensemble's music director since 2011, also takes part in performances of some Mendelssohn pieces.

OTHER:
Another Ionarts favorite, mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey, stars in the performance of Donizetti's La Favorite (March 4) by Washington Concert Opera at Lisner Auditorium. NB: This performance is on a Friday, which makes getting to the venue much more difficult than the presenter's accustomed Sunday evening time.

The Dover Quartet quickly became an Ionarts favorite, too, and will return to Washington for concerts at Dumbarton Oaks (March 6 and 7). They will play music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Caroline Shaw, and Dmitri Shostakovich.

Virtuoso tenor Lawrence Brownlee returns for a Wolf Trap Opera alumnus recital with Kim Pensinger Witman at the piano (March 25) in the Barns.

PLUS DANCE:
The New York City Ballet comes to the Kennedy Center Opera House early in the month, with two different programs: modern choreographies by Balanchine, Martins, Peck, and Wheeldon (March 1, 2, and 4), and Bournonville's La Sylphide (March 3, 5, and 6).

The Washington Ballet gives the company debut of Hamlet, the choreography Stephen Mills created for Ballet Austin (March 23 to April 3) in the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater. Mills combined sections of Glass's music from a range of pieces, including the first violin concerto, but the dancers will perform to a recording in this version.

PLUS KIDS:
Both Master Ionarts and Miss Ionarts enjoyed the kids concerts of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra when they were little, although we had to drive to Baltimore for them. The BSO presents Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, in a kids performance with Bob Brown Puppets at Strathmore (March 12).

See the complete calendar after the jump.

Read more »

À mon chevet: 'Between the World and Me'

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

Now at night, I held you and a great fear, wide as all our American generations, took me. Now I personally understood my father and the old mantra -- "Either I can beat him or the police." I understood it all -- the cable wires, the extension cords, the ritual switch. Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing your killed by the streets that America made. That is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protection racket. It was only after you that I understood this love, that I understood the grip of my mother's hand. She knew that the galaxy itself could kill me, that all of me could be shattered and all of her legacy spilled upon the curb like bum wine. And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of 'race', imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world's physical laws.

This entire episode took me from fear to a rage that burned in me then, animates me now, and will likely leave me on fire for the rest of my days. I still had my journalism. My response was, in this moment, to write. I was lucky I had even that. Most of us are forced to drink our travesties straight and smile about it. I wrote about the history of the Prince George's County police. Nothing had ever felt so essential to me. Here is what I knew at the outset: The officer who killed Prince Jones was black. The politicians who empowered this officer to kill were black. Many of the black politicians, many of them twice as good, seemed unconcerned. How could this be? [...]

My curiosity, in the case of Prince Jones, opened a world of newspaper clippings, histories, and sociologies. I called politicians and questioned them. I was told that the citizens were more likely to ask for police support than to complain about brutality. I was told that the black citizens of PG County were comfortable and had 'a certain impatience' with crime. [...] According to this theory 'safety' was a higher value than justice, perhaps the highest value. I understood. What I would not have given, back in Baltimore, for a line of officers, agents of my country and my community, patrolling my route to school! There were no such officers, and whenever I saw the police it meant that something had already gone wrong.

-- Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, pp. 82-85

It is now time for a short break from my binge-reading of Balzac's La Comédie Humaine to go through some of the books I received for Christmas. This book has sealed the reputation of journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, who won a MacArthur Grant and the National Book Award for Nonfiction this year. Although it is a slender and slightly repetitive book, it was perfectly timed to capture the mood of disgust in the United States about the injustice of how some police officers are allowed to use lethal force with impunity. In Washington we have been reading Coates's work for some time, during and after his years as a student at Howard University. He was set on this subject in some ways by his reporting on the murder of Prince Jones in Prince George's County (for example, in Washington Monthly in 2001).

As he points out again in his new book, Jones was killed by a black police officer, and in that 2001 article he goes farther in making his point about how the problem goes beyond race: "Prince George's shows integration taken to its most extreme, perhaps perverted, end---black people with the inalienable right to drive the same luxury cars, buy the same sprawling houses, and be just as apathetic as America's white elite." Coates describes his meeting with Prince Jones's mother, but he does not mention that in 2006, the Jones family received damages in a civil case against the officer who killed Prince Jones. Juries in civil cases have shown that Americans know that what these police officers are doing is wrong and should not be protected by the legal system. Crime statistics are at an all-time low, so it is time to make sure that children in all neighborhoods feel safe as they walk to school, rather than feeling they are the targets of police brutality. It is a good goal to set for the New Year.