Dvořák New and Old

Dvořák, Symphony No. 9, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, M. Alsop (released on May 27, 2008) Naxos 8.570714S Online score: Symphony No. 9 | Symphonic Variations

We have been hearing Marin Alsop go through the Dvořák symphonies with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the eighth and the sixth this past season, the Symphonic Variations and the ninth the season before that. The latter pairing was released on CD at the end of last season, and it has been in my CD player for a couple stints since then. The BSO plays with ear-splitting might and incisive unity of attack, but once again Alsop puts an overly heavy mark on the score, tending to shave time off other readings in the fast movements and dragging out the slow ones. The charming Symphonic Variations fares much better from this approach, a work where the constantly shifting tempi and textures favor an idiosyncratic handling section by section. By report -- for example, Alsop's podcast interview -- she has studied the scores of these 19th-century composers very closely, but it is difficult in a work like the ninth symphony, available in so many recorded versions, to find something new to say. At this point, the BSO is playing at a level to make its concerts exciting and worthwhile listening, but are their live performances at a level capable of making a recorded legacy?

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Dvořák, Symphony No. 9, La Chambre Philharmonique, E. Krivine (released on September 30, 2008) Naïve V 5132

Emmanuel Krivine has made something of a name for himself, not least for his work with La Chambre Philharmonique, formed since 2004 on a more or less ad hoc basis by members from various European orchestras. Their recording of Mendelssohn symphonies was good, if not quite rave-worthy, and he has turned in a strong appearance on the podium of our own local band. The big symphonic work that anchored that 2007 concert with the NSO, Dvořák's ninth symphony, is the focus of Krivine's latest release with LCP. Krivine's take on the so-called "New World" symphony, which is mostly just as influenced by Czech folk music as Dvořák's other works (in spite of the composer's reference to Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha in the slow movement and his study of African-American folk song while in the United States), is equally good if not great. The possibility of hearing this all-too-famous work in something approximating its original light is intriguing. The occasional imprecision of the winds and brass in crucial spots, but at the same time their amber mellowness, is due to the LCP players' use of mostly 19th-century instruments. Add in as a bonus a Schumann rarity, the op. 86 Konzertstück for four horns -- not unrecorded but worth hearing with the four Viennese horns from the 19th century presented here.

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Emmanuel Krivine returns to conduct the National Symphony Orchestra this evening, leading performances of Chopin's first Ravel's G major piano concerto (with Yundi Li), Pascal Dusapin's Apex, and Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique (January 22 to 24).

Yevgeny Sudbin's Inaugural Visit

Scarlatti, Sonatas, Y. Sudbin (released on March 29, 2005) BIS SACD 1568

Yevgeny Sudbin comes to Washington this Saturday to play a recital at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, sponsored by Washington Performing Arts Society. The Russian pianist, still in his 20s, has amassed an impressive discography, and his recordings and live performances have garnered positive, sometimes wild critical acclaim. His recital program was originally supposed to open with a set of three Scarlatti sonatas, all recorded on his 2005 Scarlatti CD for BIS, but they have been replaced with a second Haydn sonata. One should hope for some Scarlatti sonatas as encores, because Sudbin's Scarlatti is one of the best recent performances on piano, a Steinway D in a concert hall in Sweden. The technique is sparkling, nearly faultless, and Sudbin looks for and finds as many different colors and textures as he can, an appreciation of the goal of the sonatas that Sudbin makes clear in his unusually fine liner essay. In keeping with the style of performance in the 18th century, Sudbin adds little flourishes and embellishments, more on repeats. Perhaps a bit oddly, he tends to do this more in sonatas with quick tempi, like K. 427, than in slow sonatas like K. 197, where one would expect a much more ornamented approach.

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Scriabin, Sonatas 2, 5, 9, and other works, Y. Sudbin (released on October 30, 2007) BIS CD 1508

Jens has already given Sudbin's Scriabin disc very high marks, and there is little for me to add. Unfortunately Sudbin is not going to play any Scriabin at the Kennedy Center either, although one can hope for an etude or other small piece as an encore. Recent live performances of Scriabin by Garrick Ohlsson and others, especially the sonatas (few and far between, actually), have not been exemplary, until we go back to Håkon Austbø in 2005. Players with superlative technical prowess, into which category Sudbin definitely falls, tend to have the best handle on the works of Scriabin, because they are able to give a diabolical impression in the ultra-demanding passages: Marc-André Hamelin (among complete sets, preferable to Ashkenazy, which has been in my collection for years, but perhaps not to Austbø, who also happens to be the most budget-friendly), Yuja Wang (developing), Mikhail Pletnev, and Sviatoslav Richter come to mind. It is sometimes hard to reconcile the strangeness of many parts of the sonatas, like the frenzied opening to no. 5, with the Chopinesque tepidity of some of the small pieces. Sudbin bridges the two extremes with an edgy neurotic approach to the prettier, lightweight works that does not shy away from accepting their beauty.

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Bryce Morrison has written that Sudbin is plagued by "nervous tension" in live performances, but the proof will be in hearing Sudbin's recital on Saturday, when listeners will get a taste of Sudbin's Haydn, Chopin, and Medtner, as well as what is likely to be a memorable performance of Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit. The recital has already sold out (you can try contacting WPAS directly about tickets), but we will have a report early next week.

SVILUPPO:
We may get some Scriabin after all -- during the Miami performance of this recital program, reviewed by South Florida Classical Review, Sudbin substituted two Scriabin mazurkas for the Medtner Fairy Tales originally announced.

There's Art In D.C. Too!

With all eyes on the Presidential Inauguration this week, some of the best views are in the form of special exhibits in the museums and galleries. I'm a crowd avoider, so I stick to the side streets, far from the Mall.

The best grouping of galleries in Washington seems to be on 14th Street, where Jason Hughes's new work, Manifest, part of a three-artist show called Lucid Dreaming at Curator's Office, is a mesmerizing beauty. It offers up luscious hues of green, churning with graphic symbolism; but beware of the unknown.

Symbolism built on a foundation of fear, violence, and intimidation -- that is how one might describe Al Farrow's haunting, fortresses of worship at Irvine Contemporary. These sculptures are meticulously constructed of tarnished brass bullet casings, supported by a structure of handguns, and the walls covered by a haunting stucco of shotgun pellets. It is also mesmerizing, but -- extremely intimidating.

For a lighter, airier exhibit -- literally -- there's Etsuko Ichikawa's swirling drawings at Randall Scott Gallery. Ichikawa uses a glassblower's rod with molten glass to "draw" free-form imagery on sheets of rag paper -- quite nice. I'd love to see the flamers.

Missa Gloria tibi trinitas

Taverner, Missa Gloria tibi trinitas, Ars Nova Copenhagen, P. Hillier (released on November 18, 2008) Ars Nova 8.226056 Online scores: Missa Gloria tibi trinitas

The first volume of Paul Hillier's series on the music of Taverner and the Tudor era was a warm, clean recording of Taverner's mass on the popular song The Western Wynde. Two years later, Hillier and his Danish choir, Ars Nova Copenhagen, have released the second volume. Recorded around the same time as the first, at 2005 and 2006 sessions in St. Paul's Church in Copenhagen, this program was built around Taverner's other famous setting of the Latin Ordinary, the Missa Gloria tibi trinitas. This six-part polyphonic Mass is best known for having given rise to the genre of the In Nomine (generally for viol consort), discussed in a review last week. Hillier's version is not wanting for competition, but its fleet tempi, perhaps overly so, make it stand out. The Gloria, for example, clocks in at 9:47, compared to Harry Christophers with the Sixteen (12:29, on Hyperion) an Peter Phillips and the Tallis Scholars (10:25, on Gimell); Hillier's versions of the other three movements are generally the shortest, too.

Hillier has matched the Mass not with another major work but with a selection of shorter pieces that might have accompanied the Mass in its original liturgical setting. Some proper chants and antiphons for the Feast of the Trinity include Gloria tibi trinitas, which was the first antiphon of Vespers on that day and provided the cantus firmus of Taverner's polyphonic Mass. The other polyphonic works are by composers from just before or just after the height of Taverner's career, to round out a typical day in a Tudor period English chapel. These include settings of the Magnificat by Robert Fayrfax (for Vespers) and the hymns Christe qui lux es and Te lucis ante terminum (both for Compline) by Robert White, William Byrd, and Thomas Tallis. These services, at the beginning and end of the liturgical day, frame the normal placement of the Mass in the middle of the day, although the texts selected here are not specific to Trinity.

The arrangement of voices is quite similar to both the Sixteen and the Tallis Scholars, with women's voices on the top two lines and the resulting high tessitura. Hillier's approach tends to make the fuller textures a little more transparent in the inner voices, so that only three sopranos tend to dominate, with the male voices divided into four parts. The tenors have an even sound, reserved at its strongest for when they are at the top of the texture, in the many sections for reduced voices. It is an excellent performance of an intriguing program, which comes in value-wise somewhere between the other two, slightly older performances at present prices.

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À mon chevet: Hallelujah Junction

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

On an early evening in the spring of 1976 I had a revelation while driving along a ridge in the Sierra foothills -- not Saul on the road to Damascus, but Dogjam on the road to Downieville. At the time I listened to music on a bulky portable Sony cassette deck, a TC-158, about the size of a small satchel, with built-in speaker and a carrying strap. [...] That evening, beside me on the seat of my old Karmann Ghia convertible, the Sony was playing a recording of music from Act I of Götterdämmerung. As I threaded the car along the sharp curves and looked out on mist lingering in the narrow ravines and riverbeds beneath the steep mountain ridges, I listened intently to the shapely ascents and descents of Wagner's melodies and the rich, constantly morphing harmonic world they described. Wagner had not been much on my mind in those days, and certainly the whole world of his dramatic theory, his mythological poems, and his long, complicated operas was far removed from my notions of cutting-edge contemporary music. But this music, especially the quiet opening bars of "Dawn and Siegfried's Rhine Journey," with its graceful leaps of sixths and sevenths and soft cushions of string chords, spoke to me. I said out loud, almost without thinking, "He cares." I was puzzled by my own statement. Who "cares"? Evidently Wagner. "What does he care about?" That was harder to answer. I was experiencing an intuition not so much about Wagner as about myself and the nature of my relationship to music.

During my late teens, in the course of learning chromatic harmony, I'd been introduced to the cycles of Robert Schumann's Lieder, a miniature universe of heightened emotive states and sudden bipolar eruptions of feeling-tone complexes, all expressed in a harmonic palette of the most subtle gradations of tonal ambiguity. Part of my study involved listening to a single pitch, a C sharp, for instance, and then noting carefully how the role of that C sharp changed in the course of a movement or a song. For both Wagner and Schumann any individual pitch was forever relative, being at one moment the center of gravity and then, in a flash, suddenly reduced to the status of a distant satellite, its authority robbed by the mysterious alchemy of tonal relationships.

-- John Adams, Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life (2008), pp. 100-101

Adams has some pretty tough, critical things to say about Minimalism in his autobiography. The way that he writes about other composers' music, like that of Wagner in this passage, helped me understand better why Adams so resists having his music labeled as Minimalist, what his other influences were in how he conceives his own compositions. The connection to Wagner is very telling for many passages in Adams.

Ionarts at Large: Jansons Lets His Soloists Shine

Mozart, Horn Concertos 1-4, D.Brain / H.v.K., Philharmonia Available on Amazon.com Available on Amazon.co.uk

Mozart, Concertone, Sinfonia Concertante et al., Julia Fischer et al. / Y.Kreizberg / NChO Available on Amazon.com Available on Amazon.co.uk

Martinů, Oboe Concerto et al., V.Neumann, CzPO Available on Amazon.com Available on Amazon.co.uk

Martinů, Works for Violin & Orchestra, v.1, Hogwood et al. / CzPO Available on Amazon.com Available on Amazon.co.uk

Every so often, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra presents its own members as soloists. When they do so, they don’t sneak one of their own in for a warhorse, coupled perhaps with a mighty symphony (which invariably feels like admins having tried to do a concerto “on the cheap”), but with a dedicated evening advertised as such, played at a smaller venue, and—of course—conducted by their boss, Mariss Jansons.

The venue for the one-off concert on Saturday, January 17^th, was the acoustically excellent Prinzregententheater, sold out to the last of its 1000 seats. Solo hornist Eric Terwilliger (Bloomington, IN), who had performed so admirably in the last BRSO concert of the year, started it off with Mozart’s Horn Concerto in E-flat K 447. After a few niggles, the lips warmed up, things ran very smoothly for him. (Incidentally, there’s no pose that’s not awkward holding a horn when one isn’t actually playing it.)

“Lovely” is the name of the game for K 190, Mozart’s Concertone for Two Violins and Orchestra in C. When it is played as well as it was by Antonio Spiller and Irina Simon-Renes, Mozart seems so incredibly easy; child’s play, indeed. And yet, any lesser performance can cruelly expose the difficulties that lie beneath the Mozartean surface. Both soloists blended in with the orchestra which is to say that they—thankfully—didn’t treat it as the virtuoso showpiece it decidedly isn’t. They did their job so well, and with such grace, that the occasional oboe solo (Ramon Ortega Quero) just about turned the work into an accidental triple concerto.

There was no sense of duty here—only the unalloyed enjoyment of music-making. Being part of a professional orchestra, playing day in and out, that joy isn’t easy to maintain, but it’s the only good reason to perform music in the first place. (After all, who wants to seen and hear players fiddle through under-rehearsed, menial Mozart?) When delight is present (and combined with the quality of these BRSO’s players), performances become radiant, playful interpretations, and the result unabashedly gorgeous.

A virtuoso concerto for double bass is a bit like an evening of soprano arias for elephant. Surprisingly agile despite its size, finely spun and funny-looking, detailed, but also cute and eliciting a warm, slightly patronizing feeling: “Oooh, look—how adorable!” Well, adorable might be the wrong word, but it wasn’t far off as regarded Philipp Stubenrauch’s performance of the lighthearted Johann Baptist Vanhal Concerto in D. Three (!) cadenzas (if you get the chance to shine only every few years, you might as well take advantage of it), the first by H.K.Gruber, the others by the soloist himself, gave enough opportunity to Stubenrauch to strut his very impressive stuff, as did his encore of Knut Guettler’s “Variations on Greensleeves” Thunderous applause made up for the lack of opportunity to again shine thus in the next few years.

Martinů was good to hear as a conclusion to this evening of classical confections. Hiding in Martinů’s vast output are many gems, and the more Martinů I hear, the more I tend to consider (them) gems. The Oboe Concerto for Small Orchestra and piano must be counted among them. On that note, Hyperion’s series unearthing the orchestral works with violin ought to be singled out for praise.

Its wistful, overripe romanticism, its soft modern grain, and its classical proportions evoked a similar response in me as a very good performance of the Elgar Cello Concerto might. With Stefan Schilli as its astutely articulate, round toned ambassador and its concise form packed with great music and lucidly expressed, fresh ideas, the Oboe Concerto won the most heartfelt approval of an already enthused audience. That British emotional reference might have been aided by Schilli’s encore: the first of Britten’s Metamorphoses after Ovid.

On the Radio

Tune your radio dial to 90.9 FM on Mondays at 9 pm to hear Front Row Washington, broadcasts of recent concerts in the area's concert halls. Here is the program of this evening's installment:

January 19, 9 pm
Eroica Trio
Candlelight Concert Series

The program included Lalo's first piano trio (C minor), the Trio-Sinfonia (2007) by Kevin Puts, and Mendelssohn's first piano trio (D minor, op. 49). As far as I can determine, there were no reviews published of this concert, including here at Ionarts.

It Will Be an Incredible Day

Driving around the National Mall on Saturday, I could feel the excitement. At first glance the theme has to be porta-potties, thousands of them, over 4,000 to be more exact, lining the National Mall from the Capitol area all the way to the Lincoln Memorial; including side streets and along the Pennsylvania Avenue parade route. Where do they all come from? Are all 50 states represented?

Tuesday's inauguration of Barack Obama will be a defining moment in our history. A stark example of this was portrayed by historian Jesse J. Holland, in a segment on the News Hour this past Friday. He discussed the building of the Capitol and the fact that the majority of the laborers were African-American slaves. The grounds in front of the podium where Mr. Obama will deliver his address, where thousands of chairs are now set up, was once a tent city, where these workers and skilled craftsmen lived during the construction.

Whatever your political persuasion, Tuesday's inauguration of the first African-American President of the United States will be a defining moment, full of celebration and many tears. Washington has never felt so full of positive excitement. Good luck, Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden, and to us!

UPDATE:
For more coverage of the Inauguration from the Washington, D.C., angle, we direct you to DCist. Since there is not really much to cover in terms of classical music and the arts, Ionarts will be staying out of it. -- Ed.