CD Review: John Jones

J. Jones, Eight Setts of Lessons for the Harpsichord, M. Meyerson (released on May 27, 2016) Glossa GCD921808 | 107'03"

Charles T. Downey, CD reviews: Mitzi Meyerson
Washington Post, September 2

Mitzi Meyerson loves to explore the dusty corners of the harpsichord repertory. Her series of recordings for the Glossa label has resurrected music by Gottlieb Muffat,Claude-Bénigne Balbastre, Georg Böhm, Giovanni Battista Somis and Richard Jones — none of them exactly household names. Her latest discovery is “Eight Setts of Lessons for the Harpsichord,” composed by John Jones in the 1700s (with no relation to Richard Jones). This Jones served as organist and choirmaster at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, where, at the end of a distinguished, four-decade career, he was succeeded by Thomas Attwood, who had studied in Vienna with Mozart.

These harpsichord lessons, a varied mixture of dance pieces and other movements, have never been recorded before. The third set consists entirely of dances, in almost the order standardized by Bach and others. Meyerson gives the two-voice Courante a genial simplicity, which trails off innocently. The Saraband, which she takes after no pause, exchanges melodies between hands, the echo played on a stop with a nasal buzz. The set’s concluding Gavot takes on Scottish bagpipe colors, with some wrong-note grace notes in the opening drone and plenty of Scotch snap rhythms. A lute stop, or something like it, serves as the mandolin-like accompaniment of the Siciliana that opens the fourth set.

Other pieces reveal the Italianate influence of Handel and other composers in London. Although many of the movements are simple in texture, making an impression with liveliness of rhythm and melody, Jones also shows a more organ-like use of counterpoint in the fifth set’s opening movement. The quasi-improvisational opening movement of the sixth set has the feel of an intonatio or toccata, part of an overall impression that Jones’s aim was to cover as broad a range of musical styles as possible.

Throughout these performances, Meyerson did not feel bound by the written score, adding fanciful embellishments or triumphant cadences; truncating repeats or adding partial repeats as tags; and filling in chordal textures. Perhaps because the ending of the eighth set was not grand enough, Meyerson inverted the last two movements, ending with the heavier March. She appends a more virtuosic Brillante in the same key (D), drawn from the 17th grouping of movements in Jones’s later “Lessons for the Harpsichord” — a preview, one hopes, of more Jones to come.

SEE ALSO:

John Jones, Eight Setts of Lessons for the Harpsichord (London, 1754)
---, Lessons for the Harpsichord (London, 1761)
Charles T. Downey, Mitzi Meyerson at LoC (February 25, 2014)

Dip Your Ears, No. 213 (A Seven-Seal One Man Show)

#morninglistening to #FranzSchmidt on @OehmsClassics w/@Phil_Hamburg. Trying to listen wit… https://t.co/CB2lRQTb1y pic.twitter.com/xF3Fx57EsP

— Jens F. Laurson (@ClassicalCritic) August 30, 2016

Franz Schmidt is one of the great 20^th Century romantics and his oratorio, The Book of the Seven Seals is his grandest, certainly most ambitious work. (The symphonies are much more accessible and best to start with; for example No.4, the re-issued Welser-Möst recording of which was on the Best Recordings of 2006 list.) Franz Schmidt has a chapter in Surprised by Beauty and it merits

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Dip Your Ears, No. 212 (Alice Sara in Wonderland)

#morninglistening to #Grieg w/@BRSO, @esapekkasalonen, @alicesaraott on @dgclassics, title… https://t.co/KqyF65in44 pic.twitter.com/8q7TvPuhmQ

— Jens F. Laurson (@ClassicalCritic) August 25, 2016

Alice Sara Ott’s latest release is titled “Wonderland”, because, well “Alice”, you know, finds herself enchanted in Grieg’s Lyric Pieces. It makes for a catchy play on words and suggests a concept album. Not surprising, because these days, every release from Deutsche Grammophon seems to be a little bit of a cross-over release; chasing the Zeitgeist, but with shoelaces tied together. It fits that Alice Sara Ott writes in the generally lucid liner notes how these Lyric Pieces (what with trolls and elves and speluncean royalty and lepidoptera being depicted) are a ‘Wonderland’ to her.

On the cover she’s is surrounded by what are – I think – paper origami butterflies, a reasonably subtle hint at Grieg’s Sommerfugl (op.43/1) and perhaps Alice Sara Ott’s half-Japanese background. In a PR department’s mind she is probably considered the ‘classical’ answer to her ‘romantic’ contemporary pianist colleague Yuja Wang (born in 1988 & 1987 respectively); sharing an instrument, the technical skill (Ott’s perhaps not quite as furiously prodigious), and beauty – where Ott scores high(er) on classical beauty and dress – even with the occasional skin-tight

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…Johanna Martzy, a favorite violinist of conductor Ferenc Fricsay to work with (they recorded a famous Dvořák Violin Concerto together), was forgotten after a short, splendid career in the 50s. Perhaps time was not ready for the likes of her – or Erica Morini, another Fricsay collaborator. Or it was her illness, or not giving into the amorous advances of powerful producer Walter Legge (who produced this recording for HMV/EMI), or the birth of her daughter and subsequent focus on motherhood that kept her out of the limelight. Whatever the reasons…

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Perchance to Stream: End of Summer 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.

• Listen to a performance of Handel's Ariodante, starring Marina Rebeka (Ginevra), Yuriy Mynenko (Ariodante), Clara Meloni (Dalinda), and others, conducted by Diego Fasolis and recorded last April at the Lausanne Opera. [Ö1]


• Jordi Savall conducts Le Concert des Nations, La Capella Reial de Catalunya, and soloists in a performance of Purcell's The Fairy Queen, recorded last June in Barcelona. [Ö1]


• From the Rencontres internationales de Musique Médiévale du Thoronet, medieval polyphony performed by the Ensemble Gilles Binchois and the Ensemble Tavagna. [France Musique]


• Listen to Marek Janowski conduct this year's production of Das Rheingold at the Bayreuth Festival. [France Musique]


• From the Salzburg Festival, Daniel Harding conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in music by Eötvös, Brahms, and Mahler. [France Musique]


• Watch Tugan Sokhiev conduct the Deutsche Symphonie-Orchester perform Musorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, recorded in Berlin. [ARTE]


• Watch several productions from the Glyndebourne Festival, including this summer's Barber of Seville. [Medici.tv]


• From the Styriarte Festival, Andrés Orozco-Estrada conducts Concentus Musicus Wien and the Arnold Schoenberg Chor in Beethoven's ninth symphony, with soloists Regula Mühlemann, Elisabeth Kulman, Steve Davislim, and Florian Boesch. [Ö1]


• Have a listen to what was on this week at the Proms in London. [BBC Proms]


• The Symphonieorchester Vorarlberg, conductor Gérard Korsten, and pianist Aaron Pilsan perform music by Miroslav Srnka, Mozart, and Strauss at the Bregenz Festival. [Ö1]


• David Robertson conducts the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in George Lentz's Jerusalem and two symphonies of Schumann. [ABC Classic]

• From the Festival de Radio France, the Orchestre National de Montpellier, under conductor Michael Schönwandt and with mezzo-soprano Karin Deshayes, perform Carl Nielsen's Suite for Orchestra, op. 34, Ravel's song cycle Shéhérazade, and Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade. [Ö1]


• Soprano Jodie Devos and mezzo-soprano Caroline Meng perform arias and duets by Massenet, Chausson, Rossini and others, accompanied by the Giardini Quartet and recorded at the Festival Palazzetto Bru Zane in Paris. [France Musique]


• Music by Handel and Telemann from Il Botto Forte and countertenor Flavio Ferri-Benedetti, recorded at the church of Brunnenthal bei Schärding. [Ö1]


• From the Rencontres Musicales de Vezelay, the vocal ensemble Aedes and Les Surprises perform Bach's St. John Passion under conductor Mathieu Romano. [France Musique]


• Neville Marriner conducts the Mozarteumorchester Salzburg at the Salzburg Festival, with violinist Alina Pogostkina as soloist, in music by Mozart. [Ö1 | Part 2]


• From the Styriarte Festival, music by Bartók, Gershwin, and others performed by clarinetist Daniel Ottensamer, violinist Chouchane Siranossian, and pianist Christoph Traxler. [Ö1]

• Music by Stravinsky and others with the Academia Allegro Vivo, conductor Bijan Khadem-Missagh, singer Caroline Jestaedt, and saxophonist Michaela Reingruber. [Ö1]


• Listen to Alan Gilbert conduct the New York Philharmonic in Ravel, Nielsen's clarinet concerto, and Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. [NY Phil]


• Chamber music by Mark Simpson, Kurtág, Schumann, and Stroppa performed by clarinetist Mark Simspon, violist Antoine Tamestit, and pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, recorded at the Salzburg Festival. [Ö1]


• Have another listen to the performance of Janacek's Makropulos Affiar, with Jiri Belohlavek conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra and a cast starring Karita Mattila, recorded at the Proms in London. [France Musique]


• Listen to the recording of Verdi's Don Carlo starring Giulio Gari (Don Carlos), Leonie Rysanek (Elisabeth), and Robert Merrill (Posa). [Ö1]

CD Reviews: Rautavaara's 'Rubáiyát' / Stenz's Henze

Charles T. Downey, CD reviews: Late works by late composers Rautavaara, Henze
Washington Post, August 26

E. Rautavaara, Rubáiyát (inter alia), G. Finley, M. Pohjonen, Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, Helsinki Music Centre Choir, J. Storgårds (released on May 13, 2016) Ondine ODE1274-2 | 59'29"

Einojuhani Rautavaara, Finland’s leading composer, died in July. This new disc from the Ondine label, which has produced more than 40 recordings of Rautavaara’s music, contains some of his final works. If the death of Pierre Boulez earlier this year signaled the end of serialism’s attempted stranglehold on composition, Rautavaara had already found one way around that dogmatic dead end. Having experimented with the 12-tone technique and other modernist approaches, he changed direction after his fourth symphony (“Arabescata”) and, more convincingly than some other more purely neo-Romantic composers (Pärt, Tavener, Górecki), sought a mixture of tonal harmony and melodic dissonance.

The oldest piece on this release is four choral excerpts from Rautavaara’s last opera, “Rasputin.” They are some of the best parts of that unwieldy and fascinating work, premiered in Helsinki in 2003. In particular, the last of them, “Loista, Siion, Loista!” (“Shine, Zion, shine!”), is a riotous orgy of sound, with litany-like repetitions and apocalyptic clatter of percussion. “Into the Heart of Light” (Canto V), premiered in 2012, was the last of Rautavaara’s Canto string orchestra pieces, a series of compositional self-portraits he had been creating since the 1960s. While Canto V opens in lush tonal harmony, the frequency of dissonance is heightened, until in the last four minutes, the violins soar together in an arching series of chromatic clusters. Clashing minor seconds suggest the intensity of bright light.

John Storgards leads loving, informed performances by the Helsinki Philharmonic and Helsinki Music Center Choir. In “Balada,” premiered in 2015, Rautavaara set surrealist Spanish poetry by Federico García Lorca, somewhat awkwardly and monotonously, in a work — sung here by tenor Mika Pohjonen — that was originally conceived as an opera but that perhaps should have been left in Rautavaara’s desk drawer.

The baritone Gerald Finley and London’s Wigmore Hall played a crucial role in Rautavaara’s completion of a long-planned song cycle on the hedonistic verse of medieval Persian poet Omar Khayyam. Finley premiered the version for piano in 2014, using the rhymed English translation by Edward FitzGerald, “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” and he is the skilled soloist here in the orchestral version. Instrumental interludes flow from the ends of the first four songs, as if, in the composer’s words, “this music did not want to stop and simply should flow onward,” like the wine that yields miracles.

***

H. W. Henze, Symphony No. 7 (inter alia), Gürzenich-Orchester Köln, M. Stenz (released on June 10, 2016) Oehms Classics OC446| 65'46"

The German composer Hans Werner Henze was a brilliant orchestral colorist. The best parts of his late opera “L’Upupa und der Triumph der Sohnesliebe” (“Upupa and the Triumph of Filial Love”), for example, were the intricate, gorgeous combinations of wind instruments, delicate tinkling percussion, and recorded sounds of bird wings and birdsongs. The German conductor Markus Stenz, now the principal guest conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, who conducted the world premiere of “L’Upupa” at the Salzburg Festival in Austria in 2003, has recorded two collections of Henze’s orchestral music with his former group, the Gürzenich-Orchester Köln, the second released this summer.

The new disc centers on Henze’s seventh symphony, composed from 1983 to 1984. Henze conceived the work’s four movements in homage to the traditional Germanic symphony. The first movement, “Tanz,” is rhythmically effervescent. Masses of chaotic dissonance rise up here and in the otherwise lush “mourning ode” movement that follows. Henze connected the symphony to the life of Friedrich Hölderlin, a poet who had a mental breakdown in Tübingen, living his last 36 years in a tower room overlooking the Neckar river. The finale, an instrumental rendition of Hölderlin’s poem “Hälfte des Lebens” (“Half of Life”), is the best part of this often too-cacophonous symphony; here, Henze’s orchestration is at its most colorful, somehow sheltered from total chaos. Stenz delivers one of the fastest recordings of this work on record.

Henze was even more effective in smaller orchestral pieces. The “Seven Boleros” are short, evocative pieces for a large orchestra, originally written for Henze’s opera “Venus and Adonis.” Fandango and other Latin rhythms enliven the texture. Fun saxophone solos are complemented by traces of castanets and snare drum. Any conductor thinking of programming Ravel’s “Boléro” should instead put this in its place, while still calling the program “Boleros” to get people to buy tickets.

Two miniatures round out the selection. “L’Heure Bleue,” a chamber arrangement of music from “L’Upupa,” is a musical tribute to the infinite changing shades of blue at dusk on the Mediterranean coast, as Henze saw it from his home in Italy. “Overture for a Theater” was commissioned by the Deutsche Oper Berlin to mark its 100th anniversary, in 2012; it’s a barnburner that ends with an apocalyptic clamor. It turned out to be the last piece Henze completed; he died only a few days after he attended the performance.

SEE ALSO:
Charles T. Downey, Opera on DVD: 'Rasputin' (Ionarts, November 29, 2006)

Michael Hoffmann, The unquenchable spirit (The Guardian, November 19, 2004)

Friedrich Hölderlin, Hälfte des Lebens (Half of Life)

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