Glory of Orthodox Chant

The Glory of Byzantium, Byzantine Choir of Greece/L. Angelopoulos, Melodi Choir/Divna Ljubojević (released on April 11, 2006)

Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, Byzantine Choir of Greece/L. Angelopoulos (released in 1994)

The last time I reviewed Byzantine chant was a live concert by the Romeiko Ensemble at St. Matthew's Cathedral almost three years ago. What this tells me is that I am not listening to enough Byzantine chant, a deficit that I have been remedying with a new recording from two specialist choirs, alternating odd and even tracks, the Byzantine Choir of Greece and the Melodi Choir.

Both groups feature their respective soloist against an underlying choral drone and in alternation with responses. Lycourgos Angelopoulos and the Byzantine Choir of Greece, based in Athens, present the much more traditional all-male sound, with the microtonal bends and drones that Angelopoulos imported to Western chant when he worked with Marcel Pérès and Ensemble Organum on some of the best recordings of liturgical chant ever created. The Byzantine Choir of Greece, or rather the Greek Byzantine Choir as it has also been known in English, had a well-received recording of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, too. Once you hear that sound, it is hard to get it out of your head: the microtonal ornaments in track 8, "Then He shall speak to them in His anger," will blow your mind if your normal sound world is the chromatic scale. Angelopoulos sings his solo sections with the authority of John the Baptist, and the men of his choir, fixed over the immutable ison, or drone, have a most authentic liturgical sound.


The first sound we hear on this disc, however, is Serbian singer Divna Ljubojević with the Melodi Choir. This was a gutsy move on her part to join with the most revered performers of Orthodox chant, and unfortunately she sounds hopelessly lightweight by comparison. Here as elsewhere, Ljubojević (b. 1970) goes only by her own first name -- Divna, like Madonna or Cher -- and that affectation is indeed a sign that her performances are tinged by a pop ethos. The tone of this voice is too precious, suited more to a Disney standard, although her early training was with nuns in Serbia. There is nothing wrong with updating this music, especially since so much Byzantine liturgical music was not notated until the post-medieval period, sometimes as recently as the 19th century. In fact, the Melodi Choir has recorded three new pieces by Ljubojević herself, most of it instantly forgettable. It's still pretty enough listening, but it is out of place in alternation with Angelopoulos's group. My only other complaint is the completely insufficient liner notes, which have no texts or translations and no source information, something that largely reduces the possible function of this recording from musicological interest to meditative aid. For that purpose, the even-numbered tracks on this CD are very well suited.

Jade M2-36161

Summer Opera 2006: Elektra

There was a single concert performance of Strauss's Elektra last month at the Tanglewood Festival. I would have liked to have heard it, not least because of the casting: Lisa Gasteen (Elektra), Christine Brewer (Chrysothemis), Felicity Palmer (Klytemnestra), Alan Held (Orest), and Siegfried Jerusalem (Aegist). Having James Levine back at the podium didn't hurt either. Richard Dyer was there (Levine marshals the ferocity of 'Elektra', July 18) for the Boston Globe:

The music is both opulent and, in a peculiar way, austere. It contains the most modern music Strauss ever composed, yet it tells the ancient Greek myth in terms of turn-of-the-century Vienna, complete with delirious waltzes. Even Strauss may have been terrified by "Elektra" and its implications, because he never composed anything this red in tooth and claw again, anything that ran along the nerves with this degree of intensity.

You really have to be born to sing the title role, the most demanding part ever written for dramatic soprano. Lisa Gasteen probably wasn't, but her performance was far more than a brave stab. She doesn't have the tireless and blazing top notes the music requires, and until she was fully warmed up, some of those high tones dragged a little flat. Later on, in the Recognition Scene, she found it difficult to project some quieter phrases over the orchestra. But the Australian soprano's powerful voice boasts a beautiful glowing, ruby timbre, deployed with vigor and insight. And she is a theatrical presence who can command attention even when standing still.

As Chrysothemis, Elektra's sister who yearns for domesticity, soprano Christine Brewer poured out torrents of radiant sound. In concert dress, the veteran British mezzo Felicity Palmer looked more like Auntie Mame than a tragedy queen, but she brought dignity to the part of Klytemnestra, which is often reduced to grotesque, unmusical caricature. Her voice communicated brazen assurance; her imagination revealed the queen's inner demons. Baritone Alan Held was a match for the steadiness and nobility of the trombones as Orest, and tenor Siegfried Jerusalem contributed a vivid cameo as the craven Aegisth.

Anthony Tommasini also mentioned this performance in a review (At Tanglewood, James Levine Transforms Students Into Pros, July 17) for the New York Times:

And talk about rehearsing! On Saturday night Mr. Levine conducted an exceptional roster of singers and the students of the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in a concert performance Richard Strauss’s “Elektra.” For all their talent and experience, most of these young musicians have not come close to playing an opera like “Elektra” with a conductor as versed in the genre as Mr. Levine. He devoted nearly 17 hours to rehearsing the orchestra in this blazing, complex and still shocking score. The hard work paid off. Seldom has a frenzied ovation been more deserved.

I need to get up there to Tanglewood next summer.

Opera on DVD: "Mitridate"

Available at Amazon: W. A. Mozart, Mitridate, Rè di Ponto, directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle (re-released on April 11, 2006)

While the 14-year-old Mozart was traveling in Italy with his father, he received a commission to create an opera for the court theater of the Duke of Milan. In 1770, his opera seria Mitridate, Rè di Ponto was premiered there as part of the Christmas festivities. The libretto is an Italian translation and adaptation, by Vittorio Amadeo Cigna-Santi, of Jean Racine's tragedy Mithridate (or, rather, Giuseppe Parini's Italian translation of that play). The opera was performed 21 times in Milan that winter and then promptly forgotten until the 20th century, and it is still very rarely performed. Mozart would premiere two more operas in Milan, Ascanio in Alba (1771) and Lucio Silla (1772).

	Mozart, Idomeneo, Metropolitan Opera (May 31, 2006)
	Mozart, La Clemenza di Tito, directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle (May 9, 2006)

This film version of the opera, re-released on DVD in honor of the Mozart Year, was originally released in 1987 and directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle. Ponnelle is the unifying link of the three Mozart DVDs I have reviewed this year, along with Idomeneo on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera and La Clemenza di Tito, like Mitridate filmed on location with a prerecorded soundtrack. For the antique setting of Mitridate -- the Crimea in the first century B.C. -- Ponnelle selected the stunning background of Andrea Palladio's neoclassical Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, Italy. The sound is usually the Achilles' heel of this sort of project, and here the singers, recorded in the Casino Zögernitz in Vienna, are made to sound as if they are in the echo-prone spaces of a vast Palladian edifice (even adjusted, clumsily, for distance from the camera). The effect can be jarring. The story is made even more confusing than the original libretto, with three roles created in Milan by castrati, and sung here by two women (the satin-voiced Ann Murray, as Sifare, and an overdark and unfortunately forced Anne Gjevang, as Farnace) and a boy soprano, Massimiliano Roncato (a soloist from the Gorgonzola Boys' Choir), in the role of Arbate, Governor of Nymphæa. Ponnelle, in his most daring liberty, transforms the latter role into Mitridate's youngest son, commenting on what has happened in his family.

The music is beautifully performed, with Nikolaus Harnoncourt leading the Concentus Musicus Wien, and the singing is generally excellent. However, the principal advantage of making an opera into this sort of film is to avoid the stagy nature of opera productions. A good example is Petr Weigl's shockingly graphic film version of Dmitri Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, from 1992. There actors, not singers, mouth the words and create the filmed action. By contrast, Ponnelle's film still looks very much like a staged production, to the degree that it probably would have about the same look if it had been recorded live on an opera theater stage. Pet Halmen's outrageous costumes -- enormous skirts supported by poles, enormous hats, ridiculous wigs -- have nothing to do with the libretto's setting (as I mentioned before, these flamboyant productions were probably the model for Paul Brown's costumes in the Santa Fe Lucio Silla). In a Bonus Track on the DVD, Ponnelle explains (in German -- he spent much of his youth and adult life in Germany), why he made the film in Vicenza, a narration that refers to the legendary acoustics of Palladio's theater (irrelevant, since the sound was recorded elsewhere) and to the possibility that Mozart may have passed through Vicenza on his Italian travels and come into contact with the work of Palladio (intriguing, but not based on any provable fact).

Gösta Winbergh is a potent, vengeful, wide-eyed Mitridate, one of the great tenor roles in Mozart's operas, an unjust predecessor of the perfect ruler lionized in La Clemenza di Tito. Yvonne Kenny is splendid as Aspasia, the woman promised to Mitridate and pursued by both of his feuding sons (the castrato roles mentioned above). This Mitridate is a fascinating visual document of the stylized sort of production that Ponnelle really pioneered in his career, and musically it beats out the only other version of DVD, from the Royal Opera in the 1990s, which is just as odd visually as Ponnelle's. I sincerely hope that one of Ponnelle's other major video collaborations with Harnoncourt, the three operas of Monteverdi mounted by the same team at the Zurich Opera in the 1970s, will soon be released on DVD.

Trust the Man

Director Bart Freundlich's new movie, Trust the Man (released on August 18 -- view the online trailer), tries so hard. It combines things that should make me like it, like its smart New York locations, Julianne Moore in a self-referential role as a famous actress (Rebecca), and Maggie Gyllenhaal (Elaine) and Billy Crudup (Tobey) breaking into an incestuous literary world. Garry Shandling's turn as a slightly creepy marriage counselor -- best line in the movie, "Rebecca, think about having sex with Tom [licks his lips], possibly doggy-style" -- was icing on the cake. Freundlich is about my age and has a son who is a couple years older than Mini-Critic, and the movie seemed like a humorous exploration of the experience of becoming a father that I thought might be like the best film of its kind, John Hughes's She's Having a Baby. Indeed, the scene that David Duchovny (Tom) has with his son, who is seated on the toilet, about burping, farting, and pooping is so true that it must be based on real experience. No one made this clear to me before I became a father, but children need to learn pretty much everything from their parents. That means, quite literally, everything.

Some people like romantic comedies (the "rom-com market," as they say at Premiere) with cloying, tied-up endings, precisely because they crave fantasy. I was moderately entertained by Trust the Man -- because I like movies that are slow and filled with dialogue -- up to the final scene, in which both of the leading couples are reconciled in ways that just rang false. At first, it seemed that Freundlich, who also wrote the screenplay, was going to parody the hackneyed romantic comedy ending, by having Billy Crudup leap in slow motion to knock down the usher trying to prevent Duchovny from reaching his wife on stage. Tragically, he then allowed his movie to descend into the worst kind of weepy sentimentality, as not only one but both couples are publicly reconciled, to the teary approval of the theater audience crowd in premiere formalwear. There are even cheap one-liners from the extras.

In my experience, real reconciliation involves people who retain all the traits that caused the problems in the first place but agree as adults to find a common ground. Then there is the rom-com wet dream of reconciliation: he does want to get married and have kids, after all! Aww! It's a shame, because Freundlich has a talented cast who seemed very much at ease with one another. Julianne Moore, who in real life happens to be married to Bart Freundlich, is at her radiant and intelligent best. Billy Crudup's hilarious Tobey is the person that many men really are inside, making grilled cheese sandwiches on a portable grill in his car, writing an article while he waits to move his beloved vehicle to a parking space on the opposite side of the street at just the right moment. The movie grasps at the same sort of Manhattan whimsy, slightly perverse, that Woody Allen should have trademarked, but ultimately it becomes much more Sleepless in Seattle than When Harry Met Sally.

Dip Your Ears, No. 69 (Telemann Cantatas)

G.P.Telemann, Komm Geist des Herrn, L. Rémy et al. cpo

I always appreciate good Telemann and am happy when record companies explore his vast output. While Archiv does a good job covering his orchestral output, no other company does him as proud as cpo, which not only focuses on orchestral and chamber music but has also done a particularly notable job in opening his choral works to our ears. They do so, also, in their latest issue, "Komm, Geist des Herrn" (released on July 25th), a title the CD takes from the longest of three featured late cantatas of Telemann’s.

Stemming from the last decade of his life (1681-1767), this cantata, “Kaum wag ich es,” and “Er kam, lobsingt ihm” are precious works that allow us to understand (if not agree with) the opinion at the time, that Telemann was a greater composer than Bach. He was certainly more prolific than Bach (hard to believe, already) and perhaps as a consequence not quite as consistent in the quality of his output. But if forced to do so, I could come up with any number of Bach cantatas that I find less satisfying than “Komm, Geist des Herrn,” set to a text by Friedrich Gottlieb Kloppstock in turn based on the venerable Luther text “Komm heiliger Geist, Herre Gott.”

For four soloists and string orchestra enriched with three trumpets, timpani, and oboes, this is festive music that sounds alive, sprightly even (noteworthy coming from a nearly 80-year-old composer), and most importantly: it is superbly performed. One would hope that the specialists of the Telemannisches Collegium Michaelstein under Ludger Rémy would know how to perform this music well. They do and leave nothing to be desired. But the soloists are the real delight and perhaps surprisingly so. Too many intriguing recordings of semi-obscure works are let down by soloists that are notably of second rank. Not here, where Dorothee Mields (soprano), Elisabeth Graf (alto), Knut Schoch (tenor), and Ekkehard Abele (bass) perform impeccably.

To compare to Bach again, I have heard more recognizable names in notable cantata projects (Koopman, Gardiner, Suzuki) sing less pleasingly. Any Baroque vocal recording could benefit from so clear and accurate a soprano as Mrs. Mields’. (Although I myself had never heard of her before, this is apparently not a revelation: Mazaaki Suzuki, Philippe Herreweghe, Ivor Bolton, and Gustav Leonhardt have all worked and recorded with her.) The young Ekkehard Abele is an equal joy to listen to, but then mentioning two soloists seems unfair to tenor Schoch (who, incredibly, has 80 recordings to his name) and alto Graf, whose contributions are not lesser.

This exploration of the late cantatas by Telemann is a wonderful addition to the collection of anyone who already loves Bach cantatas or Telemann’s work and wants to go beyond the Tafelmusik, Violin Concertos, and Paris Quartets. Happily recommended.

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cpo 777 064-2

Bye-Bye, Tower Records

Update, 08/21/06: At 12:00 last night, Tower Records has filed for bankruptcy. Rather than bad news, this might be good-ish news as buyers will now not have to take over all of Tower's liabilities. Allegedly, Tower is already talking to several interested parties. Liquidation is therefore unlikely, though most small stores will probably not survive. Tower DC, for all its problems, is an attractive enough store to make the cut - depending on the deal a potential new owner might offer. The sale of Tower is planned to be completed within the next 60 days. Meanwhile Tower Records has managed to negotiate with companies to receive (select) new releases. If anything interesting happens, I will post it here.

Tower Records, unless a deep-pocketed fairy swoops down to save it, will go out of business in a matter of weeks. With somewhere between 90 and 120 million USD owed to its major suppliers, WEA, Sony/BMG, EMI, and Universal have ceased to supply the Tower chain until bills are paid – which Tower announced it would (could) not. So far, no buyer has been found for the chain that has had recent financial problems and not managed to turn around, despite the DVD boom of the last few years. Given that Tower Records must be one of the most mismanaged companies in America, this does not come as a surprise – but it is sad news, nonetheless.

Among the leftovers that will survive should be the online part of Tower and possibly a handful of the most successful stores – three in New York, one on Sunset Blvd., and Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Washington and Rockville stores (never mind Virginia's) might not be among them, loss-making as they are and have been. With Tower’s fall, we also witness the fall of the last retail store that carries a “deep-catalogue” section of classical music. Even if Tower’s classical departments in D.C. and Rockville have shrunk from a truly impressive, all-wishes-fulfilling size to slightly more modest dimensions, they still offer over 30,000 different titles and make ‘browsing’ a reality that that simply does not exist with on-line stores. Choosing between twenty different versions of each of Mahler’s symphonies or browsing a ludicrously large Pfitzner, Ries, and Raff section won’t be possible anymore. With Borders and Olssons’s having shrunk their classical sections to a pathetic two rows (why even bother), the only alternative at all in D.C. remains Melody Records, though they have perhaps a tenth of Tower’s stock.

Browsing in stores for classical music as opposed to looking on-line for classical music are two fundamentally different ways of shopping and being exposed to music. The qualitative difference of which may not be fully appreciated until a few years down the road, once Tower has become but a memory of the past. The breadth and depth of catalogue will be more difficult to support by even the smaller labels, simply because it is more likely to stumble upon a Schreker opera or Schoeck songs or Boehm organ works in a store than it is to do an Internet search for them. In light of the absence of brick & mortar stores, record guides such as Fanfare or American Record Guide will become more important, assuming they stay in business. Better still might be a service like the one offered by Bob McQuiston and his Classical Lost and Found. A bi-weekly newsletter highlights the latest in “great music by forgotten composers and forgotten music by great composers” – with audiophile recommendations thrown in to boot.

Until Tower goes out in a blaze, you might take advantage of its Harmonia Mundi sale, which lasts until the first week of September. A little guide to what is particularly enchanting among all the labels that this sale includes can be found here.

Figaro at Wolf Trap

Maureen McKay (left) and Ailyn Pérez as Susanna and the Countess, The Marriage of Figaro, costumes by Gabriel Berry, Wolf Trap Opera, 2006, photograph by Stan Barouh

Friday night, I took Mini-Critic along for the final production from Wolf Trap Opera this summer, Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro. He made a lot of friends and was extremely attentive to the first half of the opera. Because he got a little fidgety toward the end of the first half, we moved to the far aisle so we wouldn't bother anyone. By "Dove sono i bei momenti," he was sound asleep. I will intersperse his comments with my own.

When I ended up at the Filene Center by mistake last weekend, I thought that the capacity crowd for folk music was there for classical music. What a difference a week makes! Figaro is about as perfect as an opera buffa can get, and it can usually make even a pretty good production, like this one, into something enjoyable. Although the weather cooperated with a dry and pleasantly breezy evening, vacationing Washingtonians did not turn up in great numbers, filling somewhere between a third and a half of the theater and lawn. I wrote last year, when Wolf Trap Opera slashed a full staging of Rossini's La Cenerentola with several performances down to a single, semi-staged concert version, that opera in the Filene Center is probably a lost cause, and my opinion has not changed. It is, I'm afraid, bordering on unfair to throw younger singers into this kind of venue. The issue, I would guess, is that there is not enough room in the Barns for a full orchestra. However, several performances in the Barns, more or less full, without the need for amplification, must be preferable to an undersold night or two in the echo cavern.

The opening scene on stage as we took our seats -- the staging is by Robin Guarino, with sets by Donald Eastman and costumes by Gabriel Berry -- was enchanting. The bedframe suspended on a rope, over a modest room of furniture in dustwraps, delighted Mini-Critic's eye. (It was the first thing he mentioned to his mother the next morning, although he was disappointed that Figaro did not use a tape measure to measure the space for the bed. This was the only part of my brief -- and censored -- explanation of the plot that stuck in his mind.) A rope-and-pulley system to lift the new bed up to an upper floor apartment in the Count's residence, where servants usually live, was a nice and realistic touch. The hay on the floor, I thought, must have been the packing material for the couple's belongings. It seemed traditional but pleasing enough. The hay remained, however, with the bare wood of the platform exposed throughout the opera. It was a pretty shabby château, and for whatever reason, the Count and Countess had to park their old carriages in the romantic pine grove of the final act. Robert Wierzel's slanting auroral and crepuscular lighting added some much-needed warmth.

Other Reviews: Stephen Brookes, 'Figaro': A Triumph of Mozart Over Matter (Washington Post, August 21) Stephen Brookes, A Summer Night's Figaro (Most of the Shebang, August 21) — in which the critic admits that the picture may not have been as rosy as it sounds in his review in the Post T. L. Ponick, Wolf Trap Opera's 'Figaro' a sparkler (Washington Times, August 21)

The singing was just fine, but no member of the cast distinguished himself or herself. The voices I had heard in the Barns sounded much better there. Perhaps it was a bad night for the sound technicians, but from where we sat, there was occasional distortion and unexplained metallic scraping sounds coming from the speakers. Maureen McKay was an attractive but underpowered Susanna, while Ailyn Pérez's Countess was certainly present, but her tendency toward sharpness was pronounced. Faith Sherman did a nice job with Cherubino's gorgeous arias, now sung so often by every mezzo-soprano from the cradle that they are difficult to perform with any sense of spontaneity. Although Sherman was not very convincing as a man, she seemed to be just fine with Guarino's decision to have her leap into the orchestra pit in Act II. (Another highlight for Mini-Critic was when I took him up to the orchestra pit to see the instruments and the pad that she leapt on to from the stage.) There was fine comic acting from Ronnita Nicole Miller (Marcellina), Matt Boehler (a scarecrow-like Bartolo), and Chad Freeburg (a very fay Basilio).

There were some embarrassments from the orchestra, led not very decisively by Ari Pelto. Tempos were up and down, and there were more than a few discrepancies between stage and pit, mostly due to singers rushing. While the wind playing was generally fine, the violins lacked unity and I have never heard worse horn playing in a professional situation, as far as the sheer number of missed notes. In a Wolf Trap season that has had several successes (Orpheus, Roméo et Juliette, Le Comte Ory), this was a relative low point. There is always so much to enjoy in Mozart's music, but it must be said that this particular rendition was more ordinary than not.

UPDATE:
We get letters here at Ionarts, oh boy, do we get letters... If we write anything negative, we get angry comments that are transparently the work of friends or acquaintances of the performers. The people who submit such vitriolic comments inevitably do so anonymously.

Bernardaud Sculptures

Sculptures by Sam Bakewell, in White Spirit: The Expressiveness of White, Fondation d'entreprise Bernardaud, Limoges

In the Ionarts household, we are happy to have china from Bernardaud, a pattern (Louvre) we selected while living in France. At the company's home base -- the Fondation d'entreprise Bernardaud, in Limoges -- there is an interesting art exhibit right now, through October 30. I read an article by Alain Londeix (Corps chauffés à blanc chez Bernardaud, August 12) about it in Le Figaro (my translation and links added):

In the former kiln room, a tunnel of the famous Bernardaud porcelain factory, in Limoges, sculptures and stunning installations in faïence or porcelain merge technical rigor with creative talent. They are placed on the floor, hanging from the walls, or suspended in space. There is the strange atmosphere of a Baroque grotto, along the lines of Jean Cocteau's designs for La Belle et la Bête. At the invitation of CEO Michel Bernardaud, ten young artists under the age of 40 -- sculptors, designers, or decorators, coming from France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Great Britain, or the Netherlands -- have used ceramic in works where the human body, cut into pieces, is at the center of inspiration. That is the central theme of this exhibit called White Spirit: The Expressiveness of White. [...]

It is up to the individual visitor to find the resonances in these inventive artistic pieces. To the organic apples of French artist Carole Chebron, the response comes from the surrealistic cupfuls of animal teeth in porcelain, long canine teeth, by the Belgian artist Marieke Pauwels. To the stunning little cushions, suspended in air, by Swiss artist Ruth Amstutz, there is a reply from British artist Sam Bakewell's capturing of the wrinkles and tension of feet, expressing agony or ecstasy.

The artists not mentioned in this excerpt are Karel Goudsblom (Netherlands), India Madhavi (France), Linda Molenaar (Netherlands), Aino Nebel (Germany), Clare Twomey (Great Britain), and Mariette van der Ven (Netherlands). It is good that modern artists are using porcelain.