In Brief: 24 Violins Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to online audio, online video, and other good things in Blogville and Beyond. (After clicking to an audio or video stream, press the "Play" button to start the broadcast.)

• A concert I mentioned this summer and looked for in vain online has finally shown up in an audio stream: the reconstruction of the 24 Violons du Roy, with Patrick Cohën-Akenine playing violin and Roger Norrington conducting, play music of Lully, Campra, Lalande, Desmarets, and Marais at the Festival de Radio France et Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon. [France Musique]


• The Ensemble Gilles Binchois performs a selection of Renaissance chansons put together by musicologist David Fallows, from the Rencontres de musique médiévale at the Abbaye du Thoronet. [France Musique]


• From the Turku Music Festival 2012, Emmanuelle Haïm leads Le Concert d'Astrée in Monteverdi's Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, with Sandrine Piau, Topi Lehtipuu, and Rolando Villazón. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Maria Cristina Kiehr, Furio Zanasi, and Stephan MacLeod join Concerto Soave for a performance of music by Monteverdi, Salomone Rossi, Dario Castello, and Giovanni Trabaci, from the Festival de Radio France et Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon. [France Musique]


• From the Brunnenthaler Konzertsommer 2012, the La Cetra ensemble from Basel and countertenor Matthias Lucht perform music by Alessandro Scarlatti, Handel, Agostino Steffani, Antonio Caldara, and Corelli. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• The Ensemble Doulce Mémoire plays early Baroque music from France at the Festival de Radio France et Montpellier-Languedoc Roussillon. [France Musique]


• A performance of Verdi's I Vespri Siciliani from the Wiener Staatsoper, with Ferruccio Furlanetto. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Listen to René Koering's 2008 opera Scènes de chasse from the Festival de Radio France et Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon. [France Musique]


• James MacMillan leads the Tonkünstler-Orchester Niederösterreich and Arnold Schoenberg Chor in his own Credo, plus music by Britten and Vaughan Williams. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• From the Festival Messiaen au pays de la Meije, new music by Grisey, Boulez, and Manoury. [France Musique]


• Watch Paavo Järvi conduct the Orchestre de Paris playing sacred music by Poulenc, Prokofiev's third piano concerto with Lang Lang, and Stravinsky's Firebird. [Cité de la Musique]


• More Stravinsky as Vladimir Spivakov conducts the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France in Le Baiser de la fée plus some Tchaikovsky with cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras. [France Musique]


• From the Internationale Haydntage 2012, Adam Fischer leads the Österreichisch-Ungarische Haydnphilharmonie. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Renaud Capuçon, Yann Levionnois, and David Kadouch join the Orchestre National de France for Beethoven's triple concerto, plus Strauss's Ein Heldenleben, at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. [France Musique]


• Manfred Honeck conducts the Verbier Festival Orchestra in Brahms, Strauss, and Korngold's violin concerto with Leonidas Kavakos. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Members of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France play music by film composers, including Philip Glass (third string quartet), John Williams, and Bernard Herrmann, at the Festival du Film Américain de Deauville. [France Musique]


• From the Schwarzenberg Festival, baritone Michael Volle and pianist Helmut Deutsch perform Brahms's Die schöne Magelone, with Thomas Quasthoff reciting some of the poetry by Ludwig Tieck. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• The Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse's season opener features Shostakovich's fifth symphony and Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 17 with Menahem Pressler as soloist. [Medici.tv]


• Cellist Marie-Elisabeth Hecker and pianist Martin Helmchen join for a recital of music by Bach, Schubert, Schumann, and Beethoven. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• From Antwerp, Marc Minkowski leads Les Musiciens du Louvre in three Schubert symphonies (nos. 3, 4, and 6). [France Musique]


• A classic performance of Donizetti's Linda da Chamounix, conducted by Tullio Serafin in 1956 at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, with Antonietta Stella, Cesare Valletti, and Giuseppe Taddei. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]
  

Stephanie Blythe's Monochromatic 'American Songbook'

Brahms, Wagner, Mahler: Songs of Love and Sorrow, S. Blythe, Ensemble Orchestral de Paris, J. Nelson (re-released, 2011)

Vocal Arts D.C. opened its new season last night with a somewhat disappointing recital by Stephanie Blythe, at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater. Not disappointing because of the celebrated mezzo-soprano's voice, which makes a glorious sound, but because the repertory, a survey of the "American Songbook," was really not the sort of music one would ideally like to hear her sing (and therefore not among our top picks for the month). To be sure, she sang all of it well, and she has enough personality and vocal heft to bring a recitation of the phone book to life, meaning that her handling of this lighter material was more compelling than most opera singers who half-ass their way through jazz and Broadway standards. It could have been worse -- Blythe's other American Songbook recital is devoted to Kate Smith.

In her program note, Blythe explained that the kernel of the recital was in the opening work, a set of songs by James Legg (1962-2000) on the wry, sometimes bleak poetry of Emily Dickinson. Legg, who composed these songs with Blythe's voice in mind, set the texts thoughtfully and with an ear to the poetry -- which Blythe and her able accompanist, Warren Jones, put front and center by reciting the poems before they performed the songs and not including the texts in the program. The musical idiom was tonal, jazzy, and a little saccharine, and one had the sense that if it were not Blythe at the helm the result would have been a lot more boring. In the final song, 'Tis not that dying hurts us so, you could hear Legg searching for something profound to bring the set to a satisfying end, but he did not find it. This point was brought home even more by the Samuel Barber set of James Joyce songs, op. 10, that followed it. Barber, a far superior composer, accomplished much more in just three songs of much greater variety, with especially the booming, martial final piece, I Hear an Army, cutting through the sugary aftertaste of everything that had come before it.

Other Reviews: Robert Battey, Mezzo Stephanie Blythe sang big in a small hall (Washington Post, September 17) Joshua Kosman, Stephanie Blythe: poetry and pizzazz (San Francisco Chronicle, October 15, 2011) Georgia Rowe, Mezzo-Soprano Stephanie Blythe: One in a Million (San Francisco Classical Voice, October 13, 2011)

The Barber was the exception in a rather narrow view of what exactly the American Songbook is. In this case it was essentially one style, that of one strain of American popular song, heard in a second half of zippy songs by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Ray Henderson, Lew Brown, and Buddy DeSylva. (That the performers did not feel the need to recite the poetry in the second half spoke volumes about the difference between the two halves.) Jazz standards like these are at their best templates for more improvised performances than what Blythe and Jones could present, in which a classic song is the basis for a re-creation of something new. Cranking up the loud, nasal side of her voice, Blythe channeled something of the sound of Ethel Merman, and her storytelling gift and boisterous sense of humor were assets in Porter's hilarious Song of the Oyster, for example, but by the standards of jazz performers, it was bland stuff. The same was true of Jones's slightly lackluster technique in a "dizzy fingers"-style piece by Zez Confrey.

Bel Canto Weekend

Donizetti, Anna Bolena, M. Callas, G. Simionato, N. Rossi-Lemeni, Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala, G. Gavazzeni (live, 1957) Bellini, La Sonnambula, C. Bartoli, J. D. Flórez, I. D'Arcangelo, Orchestra La Scintilla, A. De Marchi (2009) W. Ashbrook, Donizetti and His Operas P. Gossett, Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera

This weekend at Ionarts will be largely devoted to listening to (hopefully) beautiful voices, beginning with tonight's Vocal Arts D.C. recital by the redoubtable Stephanie Blythe (the first half at least -- life is too short to listen to opera singers perform dinner theater music) and followed by two bel canto classics, the opening of Washington National Opera's production of Donizetti's Anna Bolena on Saturday and Washington Concert Opera's performance of Bellini's La Sonnambula on Sunday afternoon (if you buy now, ask about the half-price tickets, announced yesterday). The last two were our top picks for the month of September, and we have spent some time this week listening to two outlier recordings of these works.

Anna Bolena is an opera that has yet to be reviewed live in the history of Ionarts, since we missed the production at the Metropolitan Opera last year, the first in that august house's history, in which Anna Netrebko did not quite come up to snuff. The La Scala Anna Bolena, recorded live in 1957 (EMI), has the sound drawbacks expected of a live recording, removing it from consideration for most desirable recording of this opera. The attraction, of course, is that it features Maria Callas in the title role, one for which she was justly renowned and in her only available recording. There are better options for overall sound and for the beauty of singing in the title role, including Leyla Gencer (Andromeda), Beverly Sills (DG), and Joan Sutherland (Decca). The opera, premiered to acclaim in December 1830 in Milan with the dream billing of mezzo-soprano Giuditta Pasta and Giovanni Battista Rubini as the doomed lovers (a year in which the prolific composer had already completed three new operas for the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples), has yet to get the critical edition treatment in the new Donizetti Complete Works, but William Ashbrook covered the background extensively in his magisterial study of Donizetti's operas.

Donizetti made some major revisions to the opera after the premiere, not unusual as he sought to tailor the music to his cast. It was a watershed moment, as Donizetti notes that the opera, "externally at least, marks the great turning-point in Donizetti's career." Ashbrook notes that Donizetti finally had a good libretto to work with (by Felice Romani, also available in English), and the many affecting moments in it offered him "the dramatic emphasis he had long been seeking," releasing in him "a vein of Romantic pathos that was to become his particular trademark." It is this quality that is perfectly suited to the timbre of Callas's voice, skilled as she was at deploying the grain and power of her unusual tone to a meaty role. Conductor Gianandrea Gavazzeni kept the pace moving (along with the cuts often made to the score, preventing the performance from running too long), while allowing the singers the room needed to manipulate their complicated lines. Mezzo-soprano Giulietta Simionato makes a cutting but also sympathetic Giovanna, lovely in the duets with Callas, while Nicola Rossi-Lemeni is a glowering presence as Enrico and Gianni Raimondi is an ardent Percy.

La Sonnambula was premiered on March 6, 1831, also in the Teatro Carcano, the main competition for La Scala in Milan (we last reviewed it live at the Baltimore Opera in 2005). It was also created for mezzo-soprano Giuditta Pasta as prima donna and Rubini in the lead tenor role and used a libretto by Felice Romani. Of this coincidence, Ashbrook noted, "It would be difficult to find a parallel instance of one opera house in a single three-month season introducing two operas of such high merit as Anna Bolena and La Sonnambula. From this season on, the names of Donizetti and Bellini, as long as the latter lived, would be linked as the two outstanding Italian composers of opera (Rossini having retired)." Philip Gossett, in his entertaining book Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera, lists La sonnambula as one of the few Italian operas of the period that "exist in a unique version identifiable with the composer," mostly because they were staged only once. Cecilia Bartoli is the first mezzo to make a recording of the role as it was originally written, using the new critical edition by Luca Zoppelli and Alessandro Roccatagliati, which undoes the transpositions and vocal extensions that refashioned the title role for high soprano and reverses the cuts that had become widely accepted.

Whether you will be interested in this recording largely depends on your opinion of Bartoli's voice, which some listeners find affected and over-agitated. As someone who not only tolerates but admires Bartoli's voice, I was naturally attracted to this beautifully packaged 2-CD set and, although others may be turned off by the sometimes kooky characterization of Bartoli's performance, found it compelling. Also attractive is the playing of the Orchestra La Scintilla, a fine historically informed performance ensemble here ably conducted by Alessandro De Marchi. The rest of the cast, if anything, will be of greater interest to a wider array of listeners, beginning with Juan Diego Flórez who is an excellent Elvino, a role that Bellini tailored to Rubini's unusually high-placed voice with three pieces "written in keys that seemed even in the early 1830s to be stratospheric." Most tenors sing these pieces in lowered transpositions (including Flórez, in a rare deviation from Bellini's original score in this recording). Such changes put Amina's role, when she interjects lines in pieces sung by Elvino, into low mezzo territory. "In short, as the role is printed in modern editions," Gossett observes, "Amina is a mezzo-soprano when she sings with Elvino, a soprano when she sings alone. No wonder singers have such a difficult time wrapping their vocal cords around the part." Ildebrando D'Arcangelo's Rodolfo, Gemma Bertagnolli's biting Lisa, and a generally fine supporting cast round out the disc.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Schoenberg

Grandfather Arnold and grandson Randol share their birthday but by a day. The well-wishes apply to both.

Briefly Noted: Brautigam's Mozart Concertos

Mozart, Piano Concertos Nos. 17 and 26 (“Coronation”), R. Brautigam, Die Kölner Akademie, M. A. Willens BIS-1944 SACD | 55'04" [Vol. 1 | Vol. 2]

Ronald Brautigam’s complete traversal of the Mozart keyboard concertos, with Die Kölner Akademie, now has a third installment, due out from the Swedish BIS label later this month. It is the latest large project from the Dutch fortepiano specialist, who has released complete sonata cycles for Mozart and Beethoven, all performed on reconstructions of appropriate historical instruments by the American-born builder Paul McNulty.

For this disc Brautigam plays on McNulty’s copy of a fortepiano built around 1795 by the Salzburg-born maker Anton Walter, presumably fairly close to the earlier Walter fortepiano that Mozart acquired in 1782. The instrument’s lighter, more tinkling sound may take some getting used to for those accustomed to Mozart on a Steinway, but it has a beautiful tone, unlike the sometimes awkward clatter of some fortepianos. It helps Brautigam give a less weighted touch to this finesse-oriented music, in a pleasing envelope of sound from the older instruments of the Cologne-based historical instrument ensemble.

Conductor Michael Alexander Willens grew up in Chevy Chase (Md.), before heading off to study at Juilliard, and now serves as music director of Die Kölner Akademie. With Brautigam, he hits pleasing tempi in all six movements of the two concertos recorded here, no. 17 in G major and no. 26 in D major, the latter known as “Coronation” because Mozart later performed it in the week after the coronation of Emperor Leopold II. As explained in an authoritative booklet essay by Mozart specialist John Irving, the group’s performances are authentic down to the choice of scholarly edition for the score and choice of instrumentation. Brautigam plays Mozart’s cadenzas in no. 17 and supplies his own for no. 26, since none by Mozart survives.

Final Notes from the 2012 Salzburg Festival ( 16 )

Cleveland Orchestra • Franz Welser-Möst

The two Cleveland Orchestra concerts were not much less weird than that of the Berlin Philharmonic. Not by much, but a little. Mainly because Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra is a more easily appreciated work than his Third Symphony, especially for people who had come primarily for Bedřich Smetana’s Má Vlast. Or at least two thirds of it, seeing how the set of symphonic poems was split between the first and second concert. (The second concert contained—half 0dd, half interesting—Lutosławski’s Concerto for Piano, “Má Vlast cont.”, and DSCH Sy.6.) The starting time of 9PM apparently indicated this year: “Danger, modern music may be performed”. Enough people got the hint, judging from the lot of empty seats in the Grosse Festspielhaus. A pity that not more (European) listeners would want to exploit the rare opportunity to hear one of the world’s most exalted orchestras—one of the few that can always compete with the elite orchestras of Europe.

They certainly showed up the Berlin Philharmonic in Lutosławski. Layer upon layer, each fitting exactly, Franz Welser-Möst constructed this Concerto with painstaking precision from which rose an irresistible pull. What I said about the work (and the performance, given that the BRSO is perhaps the European Orchestra that most resembles the Clevelander’s technical ability) in 2009, when Mariss Jansons conducted it in Munich, applies here, too:

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From the 2012 ARD Competition, Day 5

Day 5, String Quartets, Round 2

The first impression the Anima Quartet makes is that they sound very different from the expected. There’s a sense of timidity, for lack of a better word, behind a screen of expressive business. Theirs is a light tone, silvery and flitting, that first seems like interpretative inefficiency, but soon works its own enchanting ways. Especially in the second movement of the Mendelssohn Quartet op.44/2 which turns out particularly suited to that sound. What may have started out as strangeness was eventually channeled, via a decreasingly nervous slow movement, into a happily frenzied finale. Almost unnoticed, they also managed to keep a titillating alertness throughout the entire work, without a movement or even just a part of it slacking off. That might be more of an achievement in Brahms, true, but even so it’s a quality that can scarcely be overestimated.

Their style—if one can speak of “style” after hearing them only once—would seem top bode well for Ligeti’s First Quartet, which demands brawn and dark stained sound much less than it does charged nervousness and a penchant for the weird and pale. The Anima Quartet had the latter, but they also brought a burnished tenacity to the first half of the Métamorphoses nocturnes, and an air of surprising confidence—as if Ligeti had been in their repertoire for years, rather than being a newly learned acquisition for this competition. If the quartet was ultimately still note-bound, at least it was very well told off the page.

The Anima Quartet’s generally faster tempi—somewhere between trying to prove something and always keeping the music on the run—might have had something to do with their ability to keep the ears firmly tied to the music. The effect of their playing is hard to describe: Nothing impresses in any immediate sense… if anything one might think of a thing or two to criticize. And a little later one looks back, wondering how the music just played could have been so particularly entertaining. I can easily imagine an audience enjoying an evening of chamber music by these performers and leave, delighted, attributing the good time had on the music and general circumstances, not the interpreters. In that sense, theirs is an involuntarily self-effacing way. If I ran a chamber music series, I’d hire them any day… whether I’d advance them to the semi final of the ARD competition is another matter. (And indeed, they did not make the cut for the semi finals.)

The Armida Quartett was back, and confirmed in Richard Schumann’s Quartet in A, op.41/3 their civilized sound, on the light and elegant side which is their one facet of which the offer variations, but no real deviation. As it was, the Schumann—easily tanked by thick, romantic performances (true for virtually all Schumann repertoire)—took very well to the Armida Quartett’s way with him. The way the dug into the second movement with chugging momentum was terrific, and where I had quibbled with the first violinist’s performance before, there were scarcely any quibbles left. The Allegro molto vivace Finale, was propulsive, not profound.

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From the 2012 ARD Competition, Day 4

Day 4, String Quartets, Round 2

All the ten participating string quartets were given a chance to present themselves again in the second round—a nod not only to the limited number of those who had shown up, but also to the relative proximity of the shown accomplishments. (Which was certainly true for the second day of the first round.)

The South Korean Novus String Quartet, like four other participants, had opted for Ligeti’s 1954 Quartet No.1 in the second round. It’s a work that has just about become mainstream fare among ‘contemporary’ quartets, and rightly so. Little wonder that Luciano Berio’s Notturno, Pierre Boulez’ Livre pour quatuor, Franco Donatoni’s La souris sans Sourire, Hans Werner Henze’s Quartet No.5, György Kurtág’s Officium breve, Conlon Nancarrow’s Quartet No.1, Helmut Lachenmann’s Quartet No.3, and Wolfgang Rihm’s Quartet No.9 got no takers. Only Henri Dutilleux’s Ainsi la nuit, the other contemporary classic, was as popular with four picks, while the Acies Quarett and the French Quatuor Zaïde bucked the trend with Wolfgang Rihm’s Quartet No.4 and Iannis Xenakis’ Tetras, respectively.

They hopped into the grateful Ligeti’s Métamorphoses nocturnes with gusto and a sinewy, full bodied sound, shy on atmosphere at first, and with unimaginative pizzicatos (which, granted, is the international standard for string players at all levels), but great piano-pianissimos. Some atmosphere arrived yet, but not the grasshoppers, cicadas, and ‘David Lynch’ that I usually associate with the work, but more beeping cartoon Martians and “Red Dwarf”.

Their lean and pointed, rhythmically compelling Dvořák was rather straight-laced and got under way, tightly squeezed, with awfully little lilt. Their very harmonious-homogenous second movement displayed the viola from its finest sounding side, the third movement started très explosif, but as with much of the other movements, the beginning seemed to promise more than the follow-through delivered. That became noticeable when the last movement, slow to the point of phlegmatic, became a little long in the tooth...

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