Critic’s Notebook: Bruckner 4th on the Organ. A Mistake.

Also reviewed for DiePresse: Ein Warnschuss des Brucknerwahnsinns

Bruckner symphonies on the organ. Obvious pursuit or dubious pleasure? An evening at the Konzerthaus suggested strongly one over the other.

It was my own darn fault. I wanted to go hear Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony that Monday, January 22nd, in the Konzerthaus. Played on the organ! Not that it wasn’t promising to hear Hansjörg Albrecht, a fearfully gifted organ virtuoso and long-time director of Munich’s Bach Choir, perform the task at hand and feet. He has, after all, just recorded all (well, 10 of 11) of Bruckner’s Symphonies in transcriptions, each on a different organ in the various cities Bruckner used to operate in. (I even wrote the liner notes for the first couple of releases, so I still feel slightly invested in that daring project.) Also, just the idea of hearing a well-known work from a different angle has its attractions. That’s why I am such a sucker for transcriptions, in the first place. And that’s why I found myself in the Great –meagerly filled – Hall, for it is one of the great ironies of the organ concert that the space a grand instrument demands is in inverse proportion to the space it takes to seat those who are willing to hear it. Generally, that’s a pity – and the Konzerthaus is to be lauded for treating its instrument to a subscription cycle of concerts, when it would make more economic sense to simply rent out the hall on those nights, instead.

A.Bruckner Symphony No.4 (Organ) Hansjörg Albrecht Oehms Classics

As it were, there were things working against the evening being as enjoyable as I had – naively – hoped. There’s the nature of the beast to consider. Why hear Bruckner’s symphonies performed on an instrument for which they were decidedly not meant in the first place? Bruckner, fine organist though he was, and despite several features in his treatment of the orchestra that remind us of the organ, wrote his symphonies for the orchestra in the secular setting of a concert hall. Had he wanted to write for the organ, he might have produced more than five, six middling, incidental works for it. Yes, given those parallels and failing the survival of Bruckner’s grand improvisations, it’s tempting to hear what Bruckner’s compositions sound like on ‘his’ instrument. But can those inherent difficulties be overcome to provide for unfettered entertainment?

Not on the 1913 Rieger Organ of the Konzerthaus, at least. Yes, with its 116 stops it’s the largest of its (mechanical) kind and the largest organ Rieger has ever built, until Helsinki’s Musiikkitalo will be completed, later this year. It’s been recently overhauled. It’s tantamount to a national monument among concert organs. But I have never been able to enjoy it, except, perhaps, in an accompanying role, no matter which organist has performed on it – Olivier Vernet, Cameron Carpenter, or now Albrecht. It’s a finicky thing, keys seem to respond just by looking at them, the slightest slip of the finger sounds like a major mishap, and the relatively short reverb of the hall does not help to give any glory to its ungainly sound. It’s either hushed or blaringly loud, but never glorious, sumptuous. And the more one tries to be true to the very complexity of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony on the organ, the less organic – literally and metaphorically speaking – the result at hand becomes. The instrument sounds positively overwhelmed, lines are broken, and dense passages sound like clutter to which the mechanical noise only adds its own desultory note. A disappointment then, and the first warning shot of the Bruckner Year 2024, which threatens with Anton-Overkill.

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Photo © Hansjörg Albrecht

Dip Your Ears: No. 271 (Gounod, the Pianist)

Charles Gounod Piano Works Roberto Prosseda Decca, 2018

Something Different from Mr. Gounod

We know Charles Gounod as the composer of the grand opera Faust, perhaps also Roméo et Juliette, and of course the “Ave Maria” which, in any case, is mostly Bach. That’s a rather limited view for a composer otherwise so well known. This disc of Roberto Prosseda performing a selection of his piano works broadens that view most pleasantly. Gounod melodic gift shines, the works are simple, sweet, and, in the case of the Sonata for Four Hands (with Enrico Pompili) downright brilliant! Even that Ave Maria is making an appearance in its first iteration as a piano transcription, in which it is yet still closer to the Bach original – and no less delicious for it.


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Critic’s Notebook: Collegium 1704 Resuscitates Heinichen; a Crowning Achievement

Also reviewed for DiePresse: Resonanzen-Finale im Konzerthaus: Neptun macht die Ex-Geliebte zum Mann

The finale of Resonanzen, the annual early music festival of Vienna‘s Konzerthaus, landed on Neptune. And it wasn’t a safe landing: Collegium 1704 positively careened towards the blue planet and dove into the hydrogen and helium atmosphere, like Spaceman Spiff on a more reckless day. Mahvelous!

No one contributed more to art to music (and to the gene pool) of middle Germany than August II the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland. Not a feast or celebration that wasn’t garlanded with a lavish helping of the best music that debt could buy. One of these made-to-measure works, commissioned, written, and performed for and on the occasion of his son, Prince Frederick Augustus’s name day, and never again since, was unearthed, for the first time in 300 years, at the conclusion of the Resonanzen. Johann David Heinichen was the composer (whom the prince himself had ‘discovered’ in Venice and immediately hired for his father’s band in Dresden) and the large orchestral serenade he wrote for the occasion was Le nozze die Nettuno, e di Teti. Being such a fire-and-forget work, it’s not a bit less inspired for it.

The plot is simple enough. Neptune and Thetis, the fairest of the Nereids, wish to get married. A former dalliance of Neptune’s, however, Caenis, is on the scene, and she is slightly undiplomatic in her lavish reminiscence of those past romps. Although she has contented herself with Neptune moving on and wishes him and Thetis all the very, very best, this brings Suspicion (personified) unto the scene, who sees an opening to sow discontent. Finally, Caenis offers to change her sex, so that she may continue to love Neptune in her innocent ways, without causing Thetis’ fury. Not the least because understanding and love come from the same place, the wish is granted, and Caenis becomes Caeneus, a formidable early Greek hero. Suspicion is banished – not, however, without deviously suggesting, whether trust can be worth much when there is no suspicion; what the value of faithfulness is, when faithlessness isn’t even an option. (Pre-shadowing the subject of Richard Strauss’ Egyptian Helen by 200 years.)

Collegium 1704 (has it really been ten years since we last reviewed them in concert?!) under Václav Luks took their musical archaeology seriously. Despite the relatively small ensemble – four singers and an orchestra of 16 strings, two horns, two oboes, two flutes, XXX, two harpsichords, and the inevitable theorbo (the score suggests Heinichen had possibly asked for even less; after all, this was after August II had almost bankrupted his Electorate on the occasion of August Jr’s wedding bash) – the ensemble came out with a punch and didn’t let up until the last note, two hours later. Without claiming, that Le nozze die Nettuno, e di Teti “great” in the Mass-in-B-minor-sense, it is choc-full of goodness, of surprises, of tender moments and spurts, of grand arias and fabulous ensemble work and instrumental contributions. Particularly delightful is a pizzicato accompaniment to an aria about a bee collecting its nectar. The instrumentalists were essentially perfect, until the very end, when a little horn-wobble here, a briefly flat violin passage there, suggested, that Ensemble 1704 was mostly made up of humans, after all. This was that spark that had been missing, a bit, amid French elegance and English politeness.

The voices, too, were a delight. Confident and full and appropriately operatic (but not too much), Roberta Mameli, Lucile Richardot, Manuel Walser, and tenor Krystian Adam (who lent a nice baritonal swagger to his bravura aria that concluded the first half) were quite the contrast to the rather more pallid voices (excellent though they had been in their own right) of the previous Resonanzen concerts. Easily as impressive: The foursome worked just as well in its ‘choral’ ensemble passages. A joy from A to Z, varied and diverting.

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Photo © Manuel Chemineau

Critic’s Notebook: Mars – Bringer of Early Italian Baroque

Also reviewed for DiePresse: Konzerthaus: Punktgenaue Marslandung

A rocking dose of early Italian Baroque from Concerto Scirocco

“Resonanzen“, the annual early music festival of Vienna‘s Konzerthaus, circled around to Mars only to land in a heap of early Italian baroque, courtesy of the engaged and dynamic, young baroque ensemble Concerto Scirocco. The instruments signaled “authenticity” from afar. The long neck of the theorbo has become a real tell, and is well known, by now. Not so much that conical recorder that looks like a truck drove over it and bent it. It’s a zink (or cornetto; not the ice-cream). The wooden contraption, thick as a young tree and looking conspicuously like a blunderbuss, turned out to be a Dulcian, a Renaissance predecessor of the bassoon. Add to that a chest organ in combination with a harpsichord, a violin, violone, two trombones, enough actual recorders to bring back up some unwanted childhood memories, and things were ready to get under way. Composers like Biagio Marini, Marco Uccellini, Andrea Falconieri, Antonio Ferro came and went. Rarities that only specialists might know but everyone (everyone likely to go to such a concert, anyway) can readily enjoy. Especially in such spirited performances. Despite the smallish ensemble of a maximum of eight performers, the Mozart Hall was humming with energy. With a song referencing “Mars” and two with “battaglia” in the name, there was sufficient reference made to the Planet in question. And the last encore was the same as the opening piece (Marini’s Canzon VIII à 6), things thus coming – very planet-like – full circle.

Even if, by then, a sense of sameness had taken hold, there were plenty of highlights along the way that turned out very memorable, indeed. The Corale à Violino solo, for example, of William Brade’s – one of the earliest (if, apparently, apocryphal) pieces for solo violin altogether. Violinist Alfia Bakieva played, as early music parlance would have it, the heck out of that work. The trombones (Susanna Defendi and Nathaniel Wood) were terribly impressive, for their faultless agility, and the continuous continuo presence of Givanni Bellini (theorbo) and Luca Bandini (violone) gave everything a most bracing underpinning. The zink (Pietro Modesti) was formidable in substituting for a trumpet, at times, and being a sensitive chamber music partner at others. The solo passages for the dulcian of Antonio Bertoli’s, the founder of Concerto Scirocco, as called for in Antonio Bertoli’s Sonata Settima Passacaglia, had a downright jazzy, improvisatory character. A crumpled old gentlemen next to me, by whose looks you might have thought was not safe in found on public land in Portland, turned to me after the first half had been closed with Samuel Scheidt’s Canzon Bergamasca and sighed, from the bottom of his heart: “How divinely beautiful!” A sentiment that pretty much applied to the whole evening.

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Photos © Manuel Chemineau

Critic’s Notebook: More English than Toast with Marmite and Cheddar, Fair Oriana

Also reviewed for DiePresse: Resonanzen-Festival: Very charming, indeed

A delightfully frothy mix of British, all-too British baroque from Fair Oriana at Vienna’s Resonanzen Festival.

“Resonanzen“, the annual early music festival of Vienna‘s Konzerthaus, continues and on Sunday had arrived on Venus. It’s an astoundingly British planet, it turns out, courtesy the vocal duo Fair Oriana, who offered a program of better- and lesser-known English composers and those who made their living on that sceptered isle, this other Eden, demi-paradise. The program was accordingly tailored to fit the love goddess theme and was backed by a minimalist combo of cembalo, viola da gamba, theorbo (and baroque guitar), oboe (and traverse flute), as well as the amiable narrator Timothy Vaughan.

With their golden hair, golden dress with vertical folds, and classical gesturing, the two singers – Fair Oriana-founder Penelope Appleyard and Lucinda Cox (the replacement for the other co-founder, Angela Hicks) – looked as though two of the caryatid columns had flown over from the Musikverein across the road. The way these two sopranos – with similarly bright, piercing timbre; Appleyard’s a little starker, brittle; Cox a little warmer and more diffuse – presented Purcell, Pepusch, Handel & Co., was most charming, indeed -- in its gentle, genteel way downright innocent.

Penelope Appleyard had also provided the texts – faux-Shakespearean, dotted with anachronistic modern references – that Timothy Vaughan read, in English, to the amusement of the involved audience. With a carefully measured dosage of harmless ribaldry, he kept the audience chuckling along. And when the band returned after the break wearing, wait for it, sunglasses all; a baseball cap here, a leather jacket there: my, what merriment this caused. There was a heavy whiff of pre-Raphaelite music-theatricality in this, combined with the guileless charm of a college theater production – and the whole thing was more English than toast with marmite and cheddar. Handel’s “As steals the morn” und Purcells “Now that the sun” closed this pallidly-attractive, entertaining evening.

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Photos © Manuel Chemineau

Critic’s Notebook: Christophe Rousset & Atys opens Resonanzen Festival in Vienna

Also reviewed for DiePresse: Bei den „Resonanzen“ geht abends die Sonne auf

A large dose of deligthfully elegant French baqroque from Les Talens Lyriques and Christophe Rousset to open the Vienna Konzerthaus' "Resonanzen" Festival. Perhaps almost too much of a good thing?

“Resonanzen” is the name of the annual early music festival of the Vienna Konzerthaus – now in its 32nd season. Each year has to have a motto, of course, to which the concerts are then most tenuously related. This year’s is: “The Planets”, which spans nine concerts -- the Sun and eight planets (no love for Pluto here, either) – and plenty events, movies, exhibitions (including a sort of petting zoo for old instruments).

The opening concert – “Sun” – was given to Les Talens Lyriques and Christophe Rousset, ionarts-favorites in performance and on record alike. They brought with them Lully’s Atys, which befits the sun-title, given that this “tragédie en musique” is also known as “the King’s opera” for having so entertained Louis XIV… the “Sun King”.

J.B.Lully Atys W.Christie, Les Arts Florissants Harmonia Mundi

J.B.Lully Atys C.Rousset, Les Talens Lyriques Chateau de Versailles Spectacles

I’m sure it was grand entertainment, but then Louis XIV would have had the benefit of experiencing the whole thing in a presumably lavish staging, with the accompanying ballet. And a buffet. Both would have nice on this occasion, too, because without either, Atys can get a bit long. That’s not particularly surprising, really, because Lully didn’t just readily use the formulaic musical language of his time, he created many of those formulas. And he runs with them. Further: Although there’s drama near the end of this “tragédie en musique”, most of the rest is a pastoral idyll that murmurs along like the gently flowing rivulets described in the libretto of Lully-regular, Philippe Quinault: “Flow, murmur, ye clear streams / only the sound of waters / lulls the sweetness of such delightful silence.” Try not falling asleep to that!

Everything in this opera has a tendency to become lovely, sweet, cloying. That may be part of the point, but I couldn’t help to wish for Rousset and Les Talens to really kick it up a notch. To be just a wee bit less tasteful, less elegant, less refined, less excellent. He didn’t have to go full-Pluhar. But maybe a little bit in that direction. Alas, to no avail. A little thunder in the nightmare-scene just wasn’t enough for nearly three hours of rather early French baroque. (Handel and Bach weren’t even a glimmer in their parents’ eyes, when the work was premiered in 1677 – at the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, before the aforementioned excited King and an allegedly bored Parisian audience.)

Perhaps the hall was also a little big for the venture? The lack of immediacy of the accurate, pliable, but not very explosive orchestra, and the thin sound from Christophe Rousset’s own harpsichord suggested as much. The Chœur de Chambre de Namur, meanwhile, was not to be blamed: The fairly small, 21-headed, ensemble, had verve and diligence in spades and offered the greatest contrast when they entered the fray. The soloists, largely young and light-voiced, were equally fine – a little light on character but with considerable enthusiasm, led by Reinoud Van Mechelen’s experienced, cor-anglais-like tenor as Atys. Soprano Gwendoline Blondeel (Iris, Doris), too, stood out, for her round soprano voice with alto-undertones, a little unstable at first and then ever more dramatic and on-point.

It was William Christie who unearthed this work with his performances in the mid-80s and brought it back to the specialist conscience. His subsequent recording, long the only game in town, has become something of a something classic. And just this year, Christophe Rousset has added his own recording to the catalogue (the third, not counting DVDs). There’s a neat link between the two: Rousset was on second clavecin for Bill Christie, on the first recording, 37 years ago.

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Photo © Manuel Chemineau

Briefly Noted: Anderszewski's Central European Survey (CD of the Month)

Janáček, On an Overgrown Path (Book 2) / Szymanowski, Mazurkas (selected) / Bartók, Bagatelles (complete), Piotr Anderszewski (released on January 26, 2024) Warner Classics 5419789127 | 65'32"

Schedule conflicts prevented me from hearing Piotr Anderszewski's most recent area recitals at Shriver Hall, in 2023 and 2019, much to my regret. The Polish pianist's program last year included some of Karol Szymanowski's Mazurkas, which are at the heart of this new recital disc, combining sets of early 20th-century miniatures by three esteemed composers from central Europe. Anderszewski once summed up his approach to playing the piano by saying, "to be a musician is to make sense through sound." In performance, he continued, he allows himself "a certain incoherence," to be "in a world of feelings where strict logic is not the most important thing."

The sense of vivid storytelling in an uncomprehended language suits this compilation of pieces enlivened by dissonance and folk-inspired rhythm and harmony. The disc opens with the second book of Janáček's On an Overgrown Path, recorded in 2016 at Warsaw Radio. Anderszewski included the three pieces the composer never officially included in the in the second book, from 1911. Janáček eschewed the character titles he gave each movement in Book 1, providing only tempo markings. This choice gives some emotional distance from the subject matter Janáček ascribed to these pieces, a combination of memories of his childhood and the painful experiences surrounding the death of his 20-year-old daughter Olga in 1903.

The other two selections on this disc were captured last year in Berlin. Anderszewski has long championed the music of fellow Pole Karol Szymanowski, and he gives glowing accounts of six of the twenty Mazurkas published in the composer's Op. 50. Szymanowski went even farther than Chopin in his incorporation of folk elements in his Mazurkas, and Anderszewski brings out the blue-note touches, quintal drones, and imitation of folk instruments.

The complete set of Bartók’s Bagatelles, Op. 6, packs intense flavors into each of these fourteen pieces, most no longer than a minute or two. The experimental nature of this early score, completed in 1908, is announced in the very first piece, where Bartók notated the left hand in four sharps and the right in four flats. The mixture of modal colors, drawn from central European folk music, and atonal techniques revealing the influence of Debussy and Schoenberg, is bracing in Anderszewski's rendition. The final pair of Bagatelles reveal the influence of Stefi Geyer, the young violinist Bartók developed an unrequited love for around this time: a funeral elegy ("Elle est morte") and a madcap waltz ("Ma mie qui danse"), both containing a melodic motif associated with her.


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Critic’s Notebook: Alexandre Tharaud's Debut in Vienna

Also reviewed for DiePresse: Ein Oktopus hätte das nicht besser spielen können

A naughty-but-fitting local bon-mot in Austria's capital goes like this: “World famous in Vienna”. But because the arts scene in Vienna can tend to be complacent and enough unto itself, an inversion of it can be true, too, which is more frustrating still: "World famous outside Vienna". This recital might just have changed that for at least one artist, hitherto ignored at the local music-lovers’ peril.

It’s been entirely too long since I last heard Alexandre Tharaud in recital. 13 years, apparently. Alas, the long time ionarts-favorite, while enjoying a major career in most of the rest of the world, is still a neglected, little-known entity in German-speaking countries. It was telling that his recital at the Wiener Konzerthaus last Sunday was his solo-recital premiere in Vienna.

On the upside, that way it was still possible to hear the undisputed grandmaster of the small form in the Konzerthaus’ gorgeous, ideally suited mid-size Mozart Hall (when they get too popular, economics eventually dictate a move to the Great Hall), where he performed a program ideally suited to show off his skills. A selection of all-French miniatures, from Couperin to Ravel by way of Debussy and Satie. It is especially in the baroque works, be it Bach, Rameau, Couperin, or Scarlatti, where Tharaud has always been an incomparable interpreter, combining incredible playfulness with wonderful pianism, spark and wit with an air of liberation – but without expressing the extreme wilfulness of, say, a Tzimon Barto or Anton Batagov. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) If “Les Barricades mysérieuses” was a study in fluidity and clever, almost disorienting agogics, yet as crystal clear as a mountain brook, his attack elsewhere was like that of a starved hen picking at a particularly fat worm. “Carillon de Cythère” rang brightly from the Steinway, with the left hand steady as the clapper of a bell while a carillon accompanied its big sister in the right hand. All that drollery and cheek was enough to cause involuntary smiles.

tic toc choc F.Couperin Alexandre Tharaud Harmonia Mundi

M.Ravel Piano Concertos Alexandre Tharaud ONF, Louis Langrée Erato

His Debussy, six preludes from Book 1, was at least as varied, from nervous frippery to thunderous exclamations, hectic here, pensive there. Everything – except the pastel-colored impressionist cliché. When the first notes of the second half rang out, a lady behind exclaimed excitedly to her friend: “I know that one!”. The friend replied: “Me, too!”. It was established: They knew that one – the popular and memorable first of Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies. They probably also had heard some of the Gnossiennes before, those semi-precious jewels that so charmingly straddle the realm of Muzak and genius, minimalism and all-out romanticism, lowbrow and highbrow. That’s exactly how Tharaud makes them sound, too, with his supreme care, phrasing, and ever-present dash of irreverence.

Ravel to bring the curtain down: First À la manière de Chabrier, a little throw-away curtain raiser for the Pavane, which is – at least as per the later, self-disapproving Ravel, also, but involuntarily, “à la manière de Chabrier”... though really just a sweetly charming treat. Twenty years later, Ravel was more in the mood for sweet poison than honey – and accordingly laced his Viennese-esque La Valse just so. Tharaud performed his own transcription (as had Ravel himself, Glenn Gould, and probably several others) and it was a hoot. A few bitter, dark notes early on showed that this wasn’t going to end well, waltz-wise, but as far as the recital was concerned, it brought the house down. Hands were flying about, lusty glissandosi slid up and down, crashing exclamation marks exploded, deliciously hesitant grace notes rang out. All that was missing at the end, for a flourish, was for Tharaud to smash the piano shut. Bach & Piaf as encores rewarded an excited, sizeable crowd, which will all turn out again when Tharaud comes back to town.

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Photo © Manuel Chemineau