Briefly Noted: Slatkin's Copland ballet cycle

A. Copland, Complete Ballet Scores, Vol. 3, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, L. Slatkin (released on March 8, 2019) Naxos 8.559862 | 62'49-"

Aaron Copland composed music for six ballets, although only three have been widely performed and recorded. Conductor Leonard Slatkin has taken a special interest in this side of Copland's oeuvre. After leaving the National Symphony Orchestra, where his tenure had mixed results, Slatkin went on to an institution-rejuvenating stint with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Among several admirable projects was a complete survey of the Copland ballet scores, all in their comprehensive versions, a series of performances captured on disc for the Naxos label. This third and final installment pairs the well-known Billy the Kid, from 1938, with the first ballet Copland composed, the curious, pleasing Grohg.

The composer's three most popular ballets -- Rodeo, Appalachian Spring, and Billy the Kid -- all share the signature Copland sound, somewhat saccharine Americana influenced by folk music and redolent of a mythologizing view of this country's history. The earlier Grohg, on the other hand, is something altogether different. Copland began it in 1922, at the suggestion of Nadia Boulanger, with whom he was studying in France for much of that decade. A chance encounter with Friedrich Murnau's horror film Nosferatu that year led Copland and his friend, the writer Harold Clurman, to create a scenario about a necromancer for the ballet. A monstrous creature, Grohg falls in love with people who have just died -- an adolescent, an opium addict, a prostitute. He revives their corpses with his magic, only to be rejected by them. The mind boggles at what a choreographer like Alexei Ratmansky could do with this ballet.

Vol. 1 Vol. 2

As Copland wrote of the piece's composition, "This ballet became the most ambitious undertaking of my Paris years: I had no choreographer, commission or contact with a major ballet company." It was essentially a massive graduate thesis project, and as such was left unpublished. The music shows Copland soaking up the atmosphere of 1920s Paris, a city that had just heard the premieres of Stravinsky's ground-breaking ballets and Debussy's Jeux. "There was a taste for the bizarre at the time," Copland continued, "and if Grohg sounds morbid and excessive, the music was meant to be fantastic rather than ghastly. Also, the need for gruesome effects gave me an excuse for ‘modern’ rhythms and dissonances. Until Grohg, I had written only short piano pieces using jazz-derived rhythms."

Slatkin's is not the first recording of Grohg, an honor that goes to the Cleveland Orchestra under the late Oliver Knussen. (Knussen also conducted the first recording of another rare Copland ballet, Hear Ye! Hear Ye!, with the London Sinfonietta, offered on the same disc.) Slatkin and the DSO give a technicolor rendition of this unusual score, as well as an elegiac performance of the more familiar Billy the Kid. All three discs are both an affordable way for a collector to acquire all of Copland's ballet scores, as well as a testament to the fine partnership of Slatkin and the DSO, an orchestra that has revived along with its city, now that Slatkin has stepped back to take the position of Music Director Laureate.

On ClassicsToday: Mahler Third with the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra & Jonathan Nott

The Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra’s Mahler Cure

by Jens F. Laurson on March 27, 2019 in Concerts, Reviews

Musikverein, Vienna; Saturday, March 16, 2019—There is either a glut of Mahler on the concert circuit or you can’t ever get enough Mahler. There is no middle ground. Mahler is appealing stuff on many levels, not the least that you can easily impress with the music at rather less rehearsal expense than you could with, say, Haydn. Also: the musicians are already there, so they might as well be used—lest you get a letter from a subsidy-conscious politician about efficiency concerns (as happened to the Vienna Symphony not long ago). Granted, not all of this applies to the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra’s performance of Mahler’s Third at the Musikverein, one of three Mahler symphonies in six performances over the course of just nine days at that venerable house alone... Continued on ClassicsToday

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Dip Your Ears No. 230 (Leo Ornstein's Heterogeneous Box of Chocolates)

Leo Ornstein, Piano Music vol.2 Arsentiy Kharitonov Toccata Classics

A Russian, born in the Ukraine, the prodigious composer-pianist Leo Ornstein (~1893-2002) immigrated with his family to the US where he arrived, in New York, in 1906. His music is a heterogeneous mix that can remind of anything between Antheil, Scriabin, Messiaen, Ravel, Rachmaninoff, even Kapustin: An eclectic array of styles of which this disc of his piano music, however, only shows Ornstein at his most well-behaved. A Morning in the Woods (1971, “A/B its lacey melodic threads and gentle chord voicings against Chick Corea’s rhapsodic solo improvisations.” - Jed Distler), his collected Waltzes (covering an hour's worth of music composed between 1958 and 1980), and the early Suite Russe (1914) make for an easy introduction to the composer.

One of his Waltzes (“Allegro con moto ed bravura”) breaks out of brilliant bar-pianism pleasantry and hints at waters running deep and fast. His international idiom, which may strike an American, French, and Russian inflection on occasion, but never ostentatiously so, may lull one into supposing that this is inauspicious stuff. Not so: The Pianist Arsentiy Kharitonov turns it into great music—or at least something pretty close to it. It will make you want to explore the first volume of this series and hope for a third.

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On ClassicsToday: Beethoven Cycle No.176 from WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne

Mightily Superfluous Excellence: Saraste and Beethoven Cycle No. 176

by Jens F. Laurson

Raise your hand if you really, truly need another, a new set of the nine Beethoven symphonies—the 176th* such cycle? No one? I thought so. Well, maybe you are a fan of Jukka-Pekka Saraste or the West German Radio Symphony Orchestra and you were at... Continue Reading

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Briefly Noted: Rousset Surveys the Nations

F. Couperin, Les Nations, Les Talens Lyriques, C. Rousset (released on January 25, 2019) Aparté AP197D | 109'01"

While Washington's concert presenters gave us a lethal overdose of Leonard Bernstein's music last year, the anniversary of a far more prolific and talented composer went largely unnoticed. Only Christophe Rousset, on an extraordinary visit to the Library of Congress last fall, offered a tribute to François Couperin, a composer distinguished from other members of his family by the epithet "The Great." With his ensemble Les Talens Lyriques, Rousset has also released a complete recording of the composer's fourth collection of chamber music for instruments, published as Les Nations in 1726, a few years before the composer's death.

Each suite in Les Nations is named for one of "the four political powers – French, Spanish, Imperial (the Holy Roman Empire), and the Savoy dynasty of Piedmont – that for many years influenced Couperin’s world," as esteemed French musicologist Catherine Cessac puts it in her savant booklet essay. The music, however, is largely reworked from earlier sources, as Couperin himself explained in the preface to the collection, making it more a survey of his own trajectory as a composer. The four suites all open with a long "sonade," a trio sonata in which Couperin gives homage to the Italian music of Corelli and Lully, "both of whose compositions I shall love as long as I live." An array of dazzling, shorter dance pieces in the French style fills out the rest of each suite, merging the true "nations" of the collection, France and Italy.

Rousset achieves a diverting range of sounds from his small ensemble -- two violins, two traverso flutes, two oboes, bassoon, viola da gamba, theorbo, and himself at the harpsichord -- covering the four parts (two treble lines, sustained bass instrument, and continuo). Varied instrumentation movement to movement yields any number of registrations from intimate to full. While all the playing is at the highest level, the pastel breathiness of the flutes is especially striking, as in the slender "Gavote" of the second suite, L'Espagnole, a compact, quiet minute of concentrated charm. Even the locale of the recording is apt: the Galerie dorée of the Hôtel de la Vrillière, once the residence of the Comte de Toulouse, second legitimated son of Louis XIV and his mistress, Madame de Montespan, and harpsichord student of François Couperin. Now it is the home of the Banque de France, which has opened the restored space to musicians and occasional public visits.

In the US Catholic Herald: When a Protestant powerhouse turned to Catholic music

When a Protestant powerhouse turned to Catholic music

Jens F Laurson

 21 March, 2019

The Frauenkirche stands beside the Elbe in Dresden, the capital of Saxony (Getty)

Dresden, 1650. The Thirty Years’ War, officially over for only two years, hadn’t just decimated the population of Saxony – which, technically, would suggest a reduction by 10 per cent. Between disease, famine and murder, it had wiped out a gruesomely unimaginable two thirds.

Death was more present than life – a fact that did not spare the great court ensembles of the Saxon Elector, Johann Georg I and that of his eldest (surviving) son, the future Johann Georg II... continue reading

The CD that goes with this article:

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Dip Your Ears, No. 229 (OK Stravinsky in the Cards for Gergiev)

I.Stravinsky, Petrushka (1911 Version), Jeu de Cartes Valery Gergiev, Mariinsky Orchestra Mariinksy

Valery Gergiev is as streaky a conductor as they come. Sensational, awful, and perfectly fine if eventless recordings follow in unpredictable order and ratio. This release of Petrushka (in the 1911 Version) and Jeu de Cartes feels like it was recorded on the go, rather than have love and labor poured into it. That approach, not foreign to Gergiev, can yield results that are exciting (usually with orchestras that haven’t already drunk too deeply from the Gergiev cup), but here especially Petrushka remains just that: A rather fine run-through that sounds good enough only until one encounters knock-out recordings conducted by, say, Boulez (either), Chailly, Dohnanyi, the composer himself, or, if it must be the 1911 version, Andrew Litton. If you are looking for Jeu de Cartes, there’s nothing to regret opting for this version, but you could also just go back to Chailly and be every bit as well served.

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Briefly Noted: Sudbin's Beethoven (CD of the Month)

L. van Beethoven, Sonatas, op. 110-111 / Bagatelles, Y. Sudbin (released on March 1, 2019) Bis BIS-2208 | 62'53"

Yevgeny Sudbin has long been a favorite here at Ionarts, for his delightful recital discs devoted to single composers, especially Domenico Scarlatti, Scriabin, and Haydn. As far as Beethoven, the Russian-born pianist has only recorded the piano concertos so far, until this disc pairing the last two Beethoven sonatas with the six Bagatelles of op. 126. These are all pieces composed in the last half-decade of Beethoven's life, and they are all rather compact, expressive, and highly unorthodox. This sits quite nicely in the area of strength for Yevgeny Sudbin, who excels in picking out the most exquisite details through the means of an unflinching technical assault on a score.

The movements of the rather short op. 110 sonata are, in some ways, like four bagatelles (with the Adagio and Allegro portions woven together in the third movement), and Sudbin plays the piece to the hilt, bringing out the quirky sides of each one. The second movement especially, with its snatches of Unsa Kätz häd Katzln ghabt ("Our cat has had kittens") and Ich bin lüderlich, du bist lüderlich ("I'm a slob, you're a slob"), is fast and witty. The concluding fugue is a tour de force of clarity in the voicing of each appearance of the subject, on one hand an intellectual exercise and on the other, moments of levity that lighten the weight of the tragic Adagio.

Moods pass quickly across the face of the op. 111 sonata, given maximum contrast by Sudbin in this powerhouse performance. The Allegro outbursts are intense, hammered but with differentiation of voices, and the dreamy sections distant and meditative. The "Arietta" is poetic and hushed, its individualized variations again recalling a kinship with the form of the bagatelle. Sudbin avoids turning the dotted-rhythm variation into an anachronistic "boogie-woogie" (pace Jeremy Denk), as Beethoven never heard swing rhythm after all. The late Bagatelles of op. 126, far from being throw-away trifles, are late-period miniatures, experimental kernels heard in more expanded form in larger pieces of the same period, including parts of the sonatas included on this disc. Sudbin mines them for every quirk and bizarre turn of phrase.