FAKING IT?
posted by James Reel
I'm watching the inauguration online, and Yo Yo Ma et al. are performing, but all the crowd noise has magically disappeared and the instruments have some reverb. Is what we're hearing an earlier recording?
I'm watching the inauguration online, and Yo Yo Ma et al. are performing, but all the crowd noise has magically disappeared and the instruments have some reverb. Is what we're hearing an earlier recording?
Tonight, the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music will present a concert by the Borromeo Quartet, including the world premiere of a work we at AFCM commissioned from Robert Maggio. The program also includes one of my favorite string quartets, the first in Beethoven’s “Rasumovsky” series. Not long ago in Fanfare, I reviewed a four-channel reissue of a classic recording of that quartet. Here’s that review, and as a bonus my review of the latest installment in Osmo Vänskä’s SACD Beethoven symphony cycle.
BEETHOVEN String Quartets: in F, Op. 59 No. 1, “First Rasumovsky”; in B-flat, Op. 18 No. 6 * Quartetto Italiano * PENTATONE PTC 5186 175 (Hybrid multichannel SACD: 68:00)
It should seem odd to say that PentaTone is rescuing Quartetto Italiano’s Beethoven from oblivion; the ensemble’s highly regarded Beethoven cycle has been a catalog mainstay since its LP release in the 1970s, and its various reissues and repackagings in the CD era. But “rescue” is correct in one sense: Philips has never issued the material in the quadraphonic format in which it was recorded, and now PentaTone begins to rectify that with a single, tantalizing four-channel SACD derived from the original tapes of two of Beethoven’s most attractive and immediately accessible quartets.
The first priority, though, should be the performances, and these are rightly classics. The readings are poised and flowing, sensitive to a variety of articulation, attacks and details of dynamics, but not as hyper-dramatic as many more recent efforts. Without underplaying the scores, Quartetto Italiano provides interpretations that should be very attractive to listeners who find even the finest contemporary efforts (Emerson, Prazak) to be excessively intense and nervous.
The recorded sound as presented here is better than ever: the musicians are close to the microphones but not claustrophobic, and their instruments come through with wonderful transparency and precise placement. We should be urging PentaTone to remaster the entire Quartetto Italiano Beethoven series, but given the current market, perhaps this is the most we can hope for. It may be only a single disc, but it’s very fine indeed. James Reel
BEETHOVEN Symphonies: No. 2; No. 7 * Osmo Vänskä, cond; Minnesota O * BIS SACD 1816 (hybrid multichannel SACD: 75:49)
Here concludes one of the finest available Beethoven symphony cycles. As Osmo Vänskä’s Minnesota series has progressed, the phrasing has gradually lost some of the intricate detail of the early volumes, but all the other virtues remain steady: bracing but not bludgeoning tempi, crisp attacks and releases, and tremendous clarity of texture from the all-important basses to the top. The orchestra performs with a precision and intensity evoking its Dorati days, but now with more refined execution in more flattering acoustics—plush but not overbearing reverberation, and a soundstage that’s wide, deep, and exactly charted. In both the symphonies at hand, this is big-band Beethoven in which the woodwinds make themselves heard assertively and elegantly across the strings, while the brass and timpani create an essential element of the texture without dominating it. The pristine engineering has much to do with this success, but it all begins with the musicians.
Perhaps most essential for these two symphonies, especially the Seventh, is rhythmic clarity, which Vänskä and his Minnesotans provide to the utmost. This is especially rewarding in the Seventh’s first and third movements, where rhythms as well as melodies are articulated exactly, but also with a vivacious litheness. Detailed articulation pays dividends in the slower music as well, particularly the Second Symphony’s first-movement introduction and the Seventh’s Allegretto.
In their heft and muscularity, Vänskä’s Beethoven performances call to mind Karajan’s early-1960s cycle, which is available as a two-channel SACD reissue. But whereas Karajan tends to conduct in big, boldface paragraphs, Vänskä remembers to highlight individual phrases along the way. Paavo Järvi has a very fine chamber-orchestra Beethoven cycle nearing completion, but among large-orchestra versions, Vänskä’s is the preferred SACD traversal, and one of the most desirable in any format. James Reel
Here’s an interesting development: Tonight’s New York Philharmonic broadcast will feature the orchestra’s New Year’s Eve pops program, rather than the scheduled performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony under the baton of Mahler fanatic Gilbert Kaplan, the well-heeled musical amateur obsessed with Mahler’s second symphony, and a man who has bought his way onto the podiums of most of the world’s leading orchestras. Kaplan has even recorded the work twice, once for Deutsche Grammophon. Kaplan’s recent NYP performance got the customary respectful reviews, but some musicians in the orchestra thought the performance was a tragedy, and the griping, including a blog by a trombonist, got significant coverage last month. I wonder if the negative publicity led the Philharmonic’s management to pull the concert off the broadcast schedule?
As Robert Rappaport has already blogged, the Arizona Public Media site has a new book and author feature up, and you can find it here. Look down on the bottom left of the page, and you’ll find an audio feature that I did last October, an interview with Jennifer Lee Carrell about her Shakespeare-saturated mystery novel Interred with Their Bones. By the way, I also reviewed the book for the Tucson Weekly.
Bad economy means less newspaper advertising means lower page count means I have to cram reviews of two theater productions into a single story in the latest Tucson Weekly. “To say that the main characters in Tell Me on a Sunday and Hedwig and the Angry Inch—both shows that opened here last weekend—are unlucky in love hardly begins to describe their stories. These are two intimate shows of dashed hopes and disillusion.” That’s how the review begins, and you can read the whole thing here.
Written for Fanfare magazine:
DISTLER Harpsichord Concerto; Music for Knight Bluebeard * Huguette Dreyfus (hc); Martin Stephani, cond; German Bach Soloists; Stefan Malzew, cond; New Brandenburg Phil; Katharina Wingen (sop); Stefan Livland (ten) * MUSICAPHON 56860 (hybrid multichannel SACD)
Hugo Distler was a very accessible and important composer of German choral music and organ music from the early 1930s to the early 1940s; war-related despair led him to suicide in 1942, at age 34. His professional positions involved choral conducting and the teaching of that practice, so he had little motivation or opportunity to write purely instrumental music, other than organ works for church use. The Harpsichord Concerto that occupies the first half of this disc suggests that he might have become a compelling though not original voice in midcentury German orchestral music.
Its first movement is a typical example of the period’s Neoclassicism, more motororic and percussive than, say, Frank Martin’s spidery Harpsichord Concerto. The slow movement is particularly redolent of Hindemith in its harmonic structure and melodic intervals. The third, variations on a theme by Samuel Scheidt, begins in a gently piquant style that would later be associated with Rodrigo’s Fantasia para un gentilhombre, but soon reverts to the engaging sewing-machine manner of the first movement.
The string orchestra, as recorded, is large enough to swamp the soloist occasionally, and its tone is unnecessarily harsh at times, especially at the beginning of the second movement. The reason is something found only in the small print: This is a DSD surround-sound remastering of a recording made in 1964, and while there’s no obvious gimmickry going on in the rear channels, the basic sonics remain hampered by the limitations of the original production (not exactly state-of-the-art in its time). That said, this remains a performance of commitment and vitality, though not perfect instrumental balance.
The incidental music for the play Knight Bluebeard comes from a 2002 concert performance, and includes scattered applause at the ends of a couple of internal tracks, plus a small amount of ambient audience noise between numbers. Distler wrote the score for an ill-fated 1940 production of Ludwig Tieck’s happily nonsensical 1797 treatment of Perrault’s Bluebeard tale, and gave the harpsichord a constant role in the proceedings. Partly, that’s because Distler recycled a few bits and pieces of the concerto into the new score, which involves winds as well as strings, plus vocalists in a couple of brief numbers. The movements are of variable interest, but the slow music again shows the greatest debt to Hindemith. The performance is certainly able, but not enough to persuade anyone that this is a neglected masterpiece. Here, the ensemble is recorded in an over-resonant space that slightly dulls the impact of the wide frequency range (at least we get all the overtones of the harpsichord and triangle).
This disc is strongly recommended for the concerto. James Reel
James Reel's cranky consideration of the fine arts and public radio in Tucson and beyond.
