Blasco de Nebra's Sonatas

M. Blasco de Nebra, Keyboard Sonatas 1-6 / Pastorelas 2/6, J. Perianes (released on May 11, 2010) Harmonia Mundi HMC 902046 71'27"

All pianists looking for some 18th-century alternative programming should put the name of Manuel Blasco de Nebra (1750–1784) on their list. He was organist at Seville Cathedral, like his father before him, and his father also happened to have been Soler's teacher. Blasco de Nebra the Younger wrote many keyboard works -- subtitled "para clave y fuerte-piano," so meant for either harpsichord or the new instrument that had made its way to Spain at that point -- but only thirty (or so) works survive, mostly in manuscript copies (including one set here in Washington, in the collection of the Library of Congress -- there are likely a few others lurking around in archives somewhere, waiting to be discovered). In his sonatas he favored a multi-movement format, with rudimentary sonata-allegro forms in many of them, showing the influence of Haydn and others, while maintaining a love of flashy figuration from Scarlatti and Soler. Spanish pianist Javier Perianes is not the first to record them, as there is a projected complete set in the works from Pedro Casals, also on modern piano (Naxos), and selections have been offered by Carole Cerasi (harpsichord and fortepiano, Metronome) and Tony Millan (piano, Almaviva). Having heard none of them except Perianes, I am in no position to recommend a choice, but the Perianes recording is enough to recommend the composer, and Perianes offers a clear, rhythmically vital performance that is a fine introduction. He also programs two of the pastorelas, which have the feel of mini-suites, composed of an introductory slow movement, a litling, pastoral inner movement, and a closing minuet.

Orchestral Works by Adès

T. Adès, Tevot / Concentric Paths (inter alia), Various Ensembles (released on March 23, 2010) EMI 4 57813 2 | 66'43"

Since hearing The Tempest, the recent opera by Thomas Adès, in Santa Fe, we have been impressed with the strength of the British composer's musical ideas. These four recent pieces give more reasons to admire his inventive orchestration: if none of them turns out to be a masterpiece, they are endlessly fun and varied listening. We heard Adès himself conduct his violin concerto ("Concentric Paths") with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra a couple years ago, with the same violinist, Anthony Marwood (who premiered the work), featured here in a worthy performance with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. The theme that links the three movements is circular motion, leading Adès toward a sort of minimalist style, using motoric repetition in overlapping cycles or phases. The same ensemble also offers a minor work worth hearing, Three Studies from Couperin, a 2006 adaptation of three of François Couperin's keyboard pieces (Les amusemens, Les Tours de passe-passe, and L'Âme-en-peine), reconceived for orchestra as music that somehow remains Couperin but becomes thoroughly modern in color. For example, the first movement, cast as a sort of wheezy old squeezebox, just runs out of power and slows almost to a complete halt in an extreme, drawn-out rallentando Adès added; the second spins in a sort of Coplandesque Shaker dance, with the embellishments on the repeats allowing Adès to explode the original reserved orchestration from within.

Last year Hannu Lintu led a performance of the Overture, Waltz, and Finale from Powder Her Face with the National Symphony Orchestra, an augmented version of those three parts of the composer's first opera, on the scandalous life of the Duchess of Argyll. The performance on this disc, by the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, is the least polished of the three ensembles featured here, but something about the slightly slipshod exuberance of the performance suits the boozy humor of these fizzy, jazz-filled episodes. The main work on the disc, a single-movement tone poem called Tevot, reached my ears for the first time in this gargantuan performance by the Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle. The title is taken from the Hebrew word for 'ark,' and Adès has said that the image that he had in mind was of the earth floating through space as an ark for humankind. As such it is a sort of post-Straussian exploration of the massiveness of space, with the orchestra deployed to circumscribe something infinite. Hints of Britten's sea interludes in Peter Grimes are heard here and there, but much of the language, especially exploiting treble and bass extremes, is now easily thought of as pure Adès. It is a grand, calamitous noise.

In Brief: Summer Festival Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond.

• Robert Lepage has turned in an eye-popping production of Stravinsky's Le Rossignol (matched with some other fairy tale pieces) at the Aix-en-Provence Festival. After soundly booing the awful Don Giovanni directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov, the audience went berserk in ovations for this selection of Renard, stagings of some vocal pieces and the Trois pièces pour clarinette, and Le Rossignol staged with puppets, Chinese shadow play (made by hands at one point, and then by acrobats), and Japanese marionnettes. [Le Figaro]


• Want to see the Lepage production yourself? Try the online video. [ARTE Live Web]


• Speaking of rare Rossini, the Opera de Paris is performing La donna del lago, and in her review Francis Carlin calls the staging, by Lluis Pasqual, "laughable." [Financial Times]


• The Fondation Maeght has opened a new retrospective of the works of Alberto Giacometti. [Le Point]


• Artscape, the free-for-all summer festival up in Baltimore, does have a few classical offerings. Tim Smith has the skinny. [Baltimore Sun]


• More summer festival goodness, with videos of Martha Argerich and friends, Yuja Wang, and others -- from the Verbier Festival. [Medici.TV]


• Tyler Green notes that some paintings that Richard Diebenkorn made for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation have surfaced quietly at the Hirshhorn Museum. [Modern Art Notes]


• Some audio of more summer performances: countertenor Lawrence Zazzo in some lute songs, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Munich Philharmonic in Vienna (with Christian Thielemann, including Eine Alpensinfonie), Leon Fleisher at the Aldeburgh Festival, Concerto Köln at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées (in Brahms, German Requiem), Les Talens Lyriques at the Abbaye aux Dames de Saintes (in Couperin's Les nations), Grétry's Andromaque from Montpellier, Nino Rota's opera Napoli Milionaria at the Festival della Valle d'Itria, a song recital by Sandrine Piau from Montpellier, and much more. [France Musique]


• Another perspective on that awful Don Giovanni in Aix-en-Provence. [Financial Times]


• This week saw the passing of one of the greats, conductor Charles Mackerras. [WETA FM 90.9 Blog]
  
  Mackerras previously at Ionarts: Mozart symphonies (February 27, 2010) | Così fan tutte (July 1, 2009) | More Mozart symphonies (December 12, 2008) | La Clemenza di Tito (January 1, 2007) | The Bartered Bride (January 13, 2006) | Charles Mackerras at 80 (August 20, 2005) | Dido and Aeneas (March 29, 2005)

More of Julia Fischer's Schubert

Schubert, Complete Works for Violin and Piano, Vol. 2, J. Fischer, M. Helmchen (released on April 27, 2010) PentaTone PTC 5186 348 | 67'04" Online scores: D. 574 (op. posth. 162) | D. 934 (op. posth. 159) | D. 940 (op. 103)

The first volume of Schubert's works for violin and piano from Julia Fischer and Martin Helmchen struck my ears as lovely but not essential listening, ranking below the Schubert disc by Andrew Manze and Richard Egarr on historical instruments. This is not for lack of regard for Julia Fischer, whose cancellation of an April 3 concert this past spring was a bitter disappointment, although Joseph Lin should be applauded for stepping in to play the same program of three of the Bach solo violin works. The problem was certainly not Martin Helmchen either, who is shaping up to be one of my favorite Schubert players. While I would still favor Manze/Egarr over the first volume of Fischer/Helmchen (only if there is room for only one of them on your shelf -- why not have both if you can?), this second volume has enough to recommend itself as a companion to either of those discs. If paired with Manze/Egarr, you would end up with two performances of the last violin sonata (D. 574, A major) and no Rondo brillant (only on Fischer's Vol. 1). What you get with Fischer's Vol. 2, however, is the C major fantasia (D. 934, op. posth. 159), a delightful piece in a restrained, mysterious performance. The theme of the Andantino movement recalls harmonic progression of Schubert's Rückert song Sei mir gegrüßt (vi, V/vi shifting chromatically back to V), and the variations introduce some startling rhythmic effects, not least the almost tango-like syncopations in the pianist's left hand of the second variation. There is one other unusual point about this CD, which ends with the lagniappe of the F minor fantasy for piano, four hands -- featuring Helmchen with none other than Julia Fischer (not sure who is primo and who secondo). She has studied the piano as well as the violin, but this was the first time she has made a recording as a pianist. The result is not as good as Evgeny Kissin and James Levine's live performance of this gorgeous work, but as a curiosity well worth a listen.

Bernard Herrmann in Montpellier

The summer festivals are well under way in southern France, including the Festival de Radio France in Montpellier. One of the operas on the schedule is a particular favorite of mine, Wuthering Heights by Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975), whose most famous work is probably still the terrifying score to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (composer and film director pictured at right). Renaud Machart was there to review the concert performance (broadcast live on France Musique and available for online listening at their invaluable Web site), the first in France (Un opéra de Bernard Herrmann révélé à Montpellier, July 16), for Le Monde, an article which opens with an unexpected diatribe (my translation):

We remember being made red in the face, during a televised round table, by a colleague who, describing the music of an opera by Franz Schreker (1878-1934) given at the Salzburg Festival, had described it as "hollywoodienne." All he had done was regurgitate the old saw about the ultra-lyrical and lush music of many central European composers between the two world wars. If such music sounds "hollywoodienne," it is only because the classic sound of the best of American film music was invented by these composers, for the most part immigrants to the United States as a result of the Nazi threat, beginning in 1933. Some of them, like Erich Wolfgang Korngold, were skilled composers who were famous and respected; others, like Franz Waxman (1906-1967), spent their royalties on festivals of European avant-garde music in Los Angeles. Many of them tolerated, against their will, the extreme demands imposed by the studios, which asked them to write on demand, at rapid speed, and with short deadlines! But the most gifted of them enjoyed the better part of a prince's income.

What does he think of the actual work?

But Bernard Herrmann was "Brooklyn Bernie" and not an exiled Jew. He surely had an inferiority complex in that his classical works never found real success. His difficult character did not help: when it came to staging his opera Wuthering Heights, written between 1943 and 1951 after the Emily Brontë novel, the composer obstinately refused to allow any cuts to be made in its three hours of music. The opera was staged only posthumously, in 1982 in Portland. Herrmann did manage to self-finance a concert performance, in England, followed by a recording. A few very rare copies (3 CDs, Unicorn Kanchana) can be purchased at premium prices through online sellers.

Machart likens the style of the score to the "English pastoral school (Delius, Bax, Vaughan Williams)" and ranks it of high quality, although he found the libretto lacking drama (Machart does not point out that it was written by the composer's first wife, Lucille Fletcher -- a bad idea from the start). Without a staging the work challenged its listeners, an already small audience reportedly leaving in droves at intermission. The performance, conducted by Alain Altinoglu, was excellent, according to Machart, especially an outstanding young mezzo-soprano from Montpellier named Marianne Crebassa, who even accompanied herself on the piano in the scene at the opening of the third act. If you have never heard this opera, you have 30 days or so to listen to the broadcast online through the France Musique Web site. Click on the little headphone symbol in the box headed by the word "(ré)écouter."

Isabelle Faust's Beethoven

Beethoven, Complete Sonatas for Piano and Violin, I. Faust, A. Melnikov (released on September 8, 2009) Harmonia Mundi HMC 902025.27 | 3h38 Online scores: Beethoven, Violin Sonatas 1–10

Last week it was Isabelle Faust's new recording of three of Bach's six pieces for unaccompanied violin. She brings the same approach -- part personal vision, part historically informed performance (HIP) practice -- to this new recording of Beethoven's ten sonatas for violin and piano. She is paired with Russian pianist Alexander Melnikov, and once again they have turned for help to HIP specialist Andreas Staier, who cut his teeth as harpsichordist of Musica Antiqua Köln and happens to have been one of Melnikov's teachers. So, although the instruments are modern, the tempi are often fleet, the rhythm taut and vivacious, the violin's vibrato kept to a minimum, the articulations crisp and varied, and the dynamics exquisitely shaped but leaning toward the contained. It is a recording that is so alluring across all ten sonatas, captured in superb sound, that it could serve quite nicely as one's only recording of these outstanding pieces.

With perhaps one caveat. The recording of the 'Kreutzer' (no. 9, op. 47) is the same, I think, as the one released on her earlier recording, where it was paired with Beethoven's violin concerto. If one went directly to that disc first upon opening the set -- the only drawback to the set is the packaging, which places the booklet at the center of an outwardly folding box, glued into place, making reading onerous -- it might turn you off from the whole thing. The sound seems closer, making Faust's more muscular gestures a little in-your-face, and the sound of the other nine sonatas has a better balance. The 'Kreutzer' is also a little over-urgent in interpretation, too, although it has many pleasant surprises, like the arpeggiated cadenza Faust adds to the first movement, on the repeat of the exposition at measure 27 -- on the C major chord, where there is a fermata (so why not?), in imitation of what the score indicates for the pianist to do nine measures later. With the other sonatas, some of which the musicians encountered for the first time preparing for this recording, there seems less history, less searching for the outlying interpretation. A bonus DVD, on the reverse side of the fourth disc, includes a little "Making of" video. It shows the musicians and their recording engineer, Martin Sauer, both being very critical and thoughtful of each phrase and also relaxing between sessions. At one point, Melnikov flies a remote-controlled helicopter around the studio, landing it on the piano.

Some listeners may be put off by the incisive quality of playing. My first recording was Itzhak Perlman and Vladimir Ashkenazy (Decca/London), and it still has considerable appeal but it would no longer receive my highest recommendation, especially because it remains expensive in re-release. The other more recent recordings that are most in competition with Faust are Gidon Kremer and Martha Argerich (DG, hard to find now as complete set), which has unfortunately been repackaged in an 8-CD set with Brahms and others' violin sonatas or, much better, as Volume 7 of DG's Complete Beethoven set, again with a few other pieces (pretty affordable as an MP3 download). Edging it out slightly is Augustin Dumay and Maria João Pires (also DG), primarily because it is on a good sale at the moment at Arkiv Classics (marked down 40%). For something more "old school" (one should have more than one take on these works), there is David Oistrakh and Lev Oborin (Philips, discounted complete set) or Arthur Grumiaux with Clara Haskil (Brilliant Classics, complete set discounted in re-release). Grumiaux later began a complete set with Claudio Arrau (Philips/Eloquence, not digital), but completed only six of the ten sonatas, sadly not including the 'Kreutzer', which is a fatal flaw. For historical appeal and local flavor, there is also Joseph Szigeti's complete set with Claudio Arrau (Vanguard Classics), recorded in live concerts at the Library of Congress (the sound is mono, scratchy and not very good, but these are great performances).

8½ Turks in Italy at Wolf Trap Opera

P. Gossett, Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera Rossini, Il Turco in Italia, C. Bartoli, Zurich Opera, F. Welser-Möst

For several seasons now, the Wolf Trap Opera Company has been mounting a most daring succession of operas, in many ways more interesting fare than much larger companies present. This summer is a particularly good example, with a charming production of Rossini's lesser-known Il Turco in Italia, heard at its final performance last night, sandwiched between a bizarre adaptation of Mozart's Zaide and a much anticipated staging of Britten's masterful A Midsummer Night's Dream next month (August 13 to 17).
Il Turco in Italia continues the theme of East-West interaction from Zaide, reversing the flow of immigration from Rossini's earlier comedy L'Italiana in Algeri, with Turks visiting Naples. Premiered at La Scala in 1814, it has been rare until recently: this spring Covent Garden staged it, not necessarily to good effect because of an odd production, and it is on for next season at Los Angeles Opera.

Listeners may think that they know their famous Italian operas, but as scholar Philip Gossett has shown magisterially in his Kinkeldey Award-winning book on Italian opera, Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera, few areas of music history are so difficult to sort out. Gossett used an example of one of the most famous operas, Rossini's Barber of Seville, and Bartolo's aria A un Dottor della mia sorte, which early on had been eclipsed by an easier substitute aria composed by Pietro Romani, Manca un foglio, even to the point that it was being printed as "preferred" in published editions of the opera. "Thus, a change made to suit the needs of a particular singer had become writ," Gossett concludes, "[and] a 'tradition' had been born" (p. 218). Indeed, Gossett uses Turco as an example of a particularly complicated opera, because it was not only performed in multiple versions but also published in Paris in a completely different version (as Gossett points out, still being reprinted by Kalmus well into the last century!). Margaret Bent's critical edition of the score, for the Pesaro Complete Works, sorted out the many changes Rossini made during later revivals, as well as the matter of pieces in the original score not actually by Rossini (including the finale to the second act, which even in the first version Rossini took from another composer). Bent's edition was, rightly so, the score on the podium of conductor Eric Melear at Wolf Trap.

(L to R) Catherine Martin, Michael Sumuel, Chad Sloan, Michael Anthony McGee, Angela Mannino in Il Turco in Italia, Wolf Trap Opera, 2010 (photo by Kim Pensinger Witman for Wolf Trap Opera)

Terrible storms hit the Washington area last night, lashing my route to Wolf Trap with hurricane-like rain and making me miss the first ten minutes of the performance. That was a shame because in the middle of a rather boring typical Rossinian overture -- for how many repetitions can one stand to listen to the same harmonic progressions? -- is an unexpected, melancholy horn solo. Sad to say, from what I did hear, the orchestra in the Barns sounded a little too much like amateur hour by comparison to the polished performance of the younger musicians gathered in front of Lorin Maazel at the Castleton Festival earlier this month. Too much imprecision in the violins and horns, too many intonation problems in the winds (but a lovely trumpet solo from Chris Gekker in the second act), too much rhythmic misalignment between the stage and the pit. Part of this has to be the fault of conductor Eric Melear, but much of the performance sounded under-rehearsed and unfinished: a Rossini comic opera may appear easy on the surface but the coordination of all those bubbling lines takes discipline and rehearsal.

The vocal cast was topped by Michael Anthony McGee's Don Geronio, not only because of a suave voice (although with the worst tendency to rush) but because he created a vivid schlump of a character, a hapless husband right out of a Marx Brothers movie. Angela Mannino sang a meringue of a Fiorilla, Geronio's flirtatious wife, with flawless intonation, fairly good agility in the fioriture, and an airy tone that had none of the vocal weight familiar from earlier interpreters of the role. Michael Sumuel brought a big voice to Selim, the Turkish prince who lands in Naples, although he veered nasal at the top and was plagued by intonation problems. Catherine Martin was a fierce Zaida, and David Portillo had a smooth, incisive sound as Narciso, even hitting, mostly solidly, the outrageous high note in his big aria in the second act but opting to skip the second high note some tenors add at the end.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, Cast of Wolf Trap's "Turk in Italy" works hard, but singing, like story, is uneven (Washington Post, July 12) Tim Smith, Wolf Trap Opera's 'Il Turco in Italia' (Baltimore Sun, July 12)

The production was a charming updating of Felice Romani's libretto to the 1950s Italy of Federico Fellini's movies. Turco concerns a poet struggling to find a subject for his next opera buffa, copying it eventually from the crazy events that surround him. Director Gregory Keller based his production on Fellini's iconic metafiction 8½ -- a film about a film director, Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni), struggling to make a film, made at a time when Fellini himself was struggling creatively (score by Nino Rota). The exceedingly simple set design (Erhard Rom) featured a painted backdrop with a view of Vesuvius from one of the islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea (not Fellini's Roma, which was a little jarring), complete with little lights that twinkled starlight in the night scenes, as well as two plain white archways moved into various positions, and a plaster-like reproduction of the Venus de Milo. Starlet costumes (designed by Alejo Vietti) made sense for the sexual permissiveness of the story, which meshed easily with the work of the director of La dolce vita. Keller's acting direction was particularly effective, creating memorable characters, as well as a hilarious cat-fight between the prima and seconda donne at the end of Act I and a memorable setting of the beautiful unaccompanied Quintetto of Act II. Most importantly, the director did nothing to undermine the libretto even while giving it a new twist, even playing Fiorilla's gorgeous final scena -- the one truly sad moment in the opera, as she appears truly saddened to be disgraced by the divorce Geronio pretends to be enforcing -- as sincere regret. Philip Gossett quite rightly noted that to try to play that scene comically is a mistake: "Beverly Sills, in the New York City Opera revival of 1977, sang it as if it were a facetious 'mad scene', at the end of which she threw herself on the ground, then lifted her head and winked at the audience, bringing down the house but completely falsifying the opera" (p. 219). Just so.

The final staged production of the Wolf Trap Opera season is Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream next month (August 13 to 17). Two recitals, with the excellent Steven Blier, are also on the calendar: Latin Days, American Nights (July 18) and Invitation to the Dance (August 1).

Quatuor Mosaïques Continues with Schubert

Schubert, String Quartets D. 173 / 810, Quatuor Mosaïques (released on April 27, 2010) Laborie (Naïve) LC06 | 65'21" Online scores: Schubert, D. 173 | D. 810

We have attested to the fine Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven -- both live and on disc -- played by Quatuor Mosaïques. The group, formed in the 1980s by cellist Christophe Coin and other members of Nikolaus Harnoncourt's historically informed performance (HIP) ensemble Concentus Musicus, plays on 18th-century instruments (the Joseph Guarnerius in the hands of first violinist Erich Höbarth is slightly older, dating from 1683) with gut strings. As noted of the group's recent work on a disc of music by Boëly, this is not a performance for listeners who do not enjoy the typical aspects of HIP sound. The leaner, warmer sound does produce some remarkable effects in these Schubert pieces, however, especially in the variations on Schubert's song Der Tod und das Mädchen in D. 810, which gives that quartet its nickname. The four instruments create a halo of amber sound in this hushed movement that seems like Death's welcoming embrace -- that is, not the terrifying apparition of the "wilder Knochenmann" the maiden perceives (poem by Matthias Claudius), but the friend come to offer rest rather than punishment. Even as some of the more active figuration percolates through the movement, the gentle tread of Death's feet always shines through the ensemble, a sense of comfort that reaches its apogee in the G major ppp conclusion of the movement.

The HIP sound also plays very well in the third and fourth movements, where the greater soft side of the spectrum creates other unexpected textures. As always, one misses some of the heft of the modern strings at more forceful movements (all those fz markings, for example), especially in the first movement of D. 810, for which the really fine recent recording by the Jerusalem Quartet is better by comparison. While the quartet audibly knows D. 810 very well -- a career-long obsession for some of the players, a matter touched on in the liner essay -- D. 173 seems less familiar, judging by some minor ensemble disagreements (made worse by a sound capture that is at times too close, making possible the hushed wonder of D. 810's slow movement but also revealing all the flaws in D. 173). The slender D. 173 is a nice piece but nowhere near the achievement of D. 810. The combination of a late quartet with an early one -- if such a distinction makes any sense for a composer who died so young -- follows the formula of the quartet's "first volume" of Schubert, released over a decade ago and now not so easy to find. If a complete Schubert quartet set is a goal, it could be competitive and at the very least an interesting choice.