Fully illuminated Fauré with no half-measures
Roger Nichols is truly delighted by this magical performance of the composer’s orchestral works
The Secret Fauré II
Fauré: Berceuse; Romance in B flat; Ballade in F sharp; Élégie in C minor; Masques et bergamasques; Pavane; Allegro
Axel Shacher (violin), Antoine Lederlin (cello), Oliver Schnyder (piano); Sinfonieorchester Basel/ivor Bolton Sony 19075936402 66:35 mins Fauré expressed extreme aggravation at being interpreted as ‘a composer of the halflight’, where everything was vaporous and insubstantial, never deigning to reach deep into the heart of the listener. Those who felt there was something insubstantial about the man himself were astonished when, as the new director of the Paris Conservatoire in 1905, he drove a coach and horses through hallowed traditions, earning the nickname Robespierre.
Ivor Bolton and his players have clearly taken his aggravation seriously and the result is pure delight. Not that delicacy is banished: in the Pavane, after the woodwind opening (the solo flute senza vibrato as were the French flutes of Fauré’s time), the high strings enter almost imperceptibly, to magical effect. At the other end of the sonic spectrum, the climaxes in the Ballade for piano and orchestra are as loud as anything in Rachmaninov, and as emotionally powerful.
One novelty is the Allegro from Fauré’s Symphony in F of 1870-72, abandoned after its first performance in 1874 and never included by him in his worklist. Although one cannot fault his taste – it really is rather dull – it does show how hard he must have worked to reach the mastery of his middle years.
Perhaps the jewel of the programme is Masques et bergamasques, where
Fauré reworked ideas from old pieces, its sinuous lines played here with manifest affection and understanding; though this is to ignore the Élegie for cello and orchestra, in which C minor achieves all the gravitas traditionally ascribed to it.
PERFORMANCE ★★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★
Hear extracts from this recording and the rest of this month’s choices on the BBC Music Magazine website at www.classical-music.com
John Luther Adams
Become Desert
Seattle Symphony/ludovic Morlot Cantaloupe Music CA21148
40:22 mins (CD plus DVD)
How long can a musical breath last? This one lasts 40 minutes, with no ruptures. You either listen entranced, sucked into the slowly mutating tissue of sounds; or you listen aggravated, twiddling your thumbs. There are not many other alternatives. That is the way with John Luther Adams’s ecologically-minded slabs of ‘sonic geography’, not least this successor to Become River and Become Ocean (winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for music).
With global warming, our entire planet might become desert, though the score’s largely gentle aural wash, piquantly sprinkled with pings and tings, doesn’t make the prospect seem terribly alarming. Adams sustains the epic breath by gradually lowering, then raising, the music’s pitch, and subtly bleeding different colours – timpani rolls, plangent horns – into and out of the cloudy notes and harmonies hanging in the air. Ludovic Morlot and his Seattle forces sustain the journey marvellously well.
The album contains two discs: a CD of the music alone, and a DVD of music plus images taken by Adams in Mexico in the Sonoran Desert. My experience is that sound alone is best, leaving listeners blissfully floating on their own imaginings. Or, of course, tearing out their hair. You never know. Geoff Brown
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Brahms • Dvo ák
Brahms: Symphony No. 3; Dvoˇrák: Symphony No. 8
Bamberg Symphony Orchestra/ Jakub Hr a
Tudor 1743 (hybrid CD/SACD) 75:53 mins Some months ago I waxed lyrical about the first instalment in Jakub Hr a’s cycle of Dvo ák and Brahms symphonies with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra. This sequel, pairing Brahms’s
Third with Dvo ák’s Eighth, proves to be just as stimulating, again
Masques et bergamasques is the jewel of the programme
prompting me to think afresh about the different ways in which both composers approach symphonic composition in these works.
In the Dvo ák, Hr a vividly projects the outdoor nature of the composer’s invention with its frequent allusions to birdsong, village dance music and military fanfares. This is most effectively transmitted in the beautifully paced and atmospheric slow movement, where Hr a conjures up a variety of pictorial allusions, from the dark and mysterious stillness to the bold and triumphant climaxes, without sacrificing any formal cohesion. Likewise, a subtle fluidity in the manipulation of tempo enables him not only to bring a wealth of different colours to the various transformations of the main theme of the Finale, but also build up a real head of steam so as to bring tremendous impetus to the Symphony’s closing bars.
Brahms’s Third is a much more introverted and emotionallyelusive work. In contrast to other more forthright interpretations, Hr a restrains the dynamic levels in the first movement, so perhaps underplaying the score’s heroic aspects. As compensation, however, he encourages his orchestra to treat the work like chamber music; the resulting subtle interplay between various instruments brings vast musical rewards, particularly in the grace and fluidity of the middle two movements.
As in the previous release, the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra delivers superbly responsive playing, wonderfully oakveneered string sound matched by mellifluous and highly expressive wind and brass, and the recording is superb. Erik Levi
PERFORMANCE ★★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★
Copland • Dvo ák • Ives
Ives: Washington’s Birthday; Dvoˇrák: Symphony No. 9 (From the New World); Copland: Quiet City Solistes Européens Luxembourg/ Christoph König
Rubicon RCD1037 60:01 mins
Yet another recording of Dvo ák’s New World Symphony? It turns out, however, that the point of this recording is precisely to suggest the salience of Dvo ák’s pioneering amalgam of black and Native Indian folk influences for two subsequent generations of New World composers.
Completed – insofar as anything by Charles Ives ever was – in 1913, Washington’s Birthday opens in drifting skeins of string texture evoking the bleakness of winter
– a kind of atonal Delius – then launches into a crazy polytonal barn dance of traditional tunes, before retreating again into the cold and darkness. It receives a convincing enough performance, though Ives surely expected tubular bells, not the glockenspiel apparently used here, and the recording could be more clearly defined.
The Dvo ák is decently done under Christoph König, with some shapely woodwind solos from the Solistes Européens Luxembourg, but falls short of the spaciousness and epic glamour of the best recordings. And these are necessary qualities in a work of striking material and sonic gestures, but often somewhat mechanical symphonic procedures compared with the richly idiosyncratic inventions of his previous symphonies.
Copland derived his Quiet City for trumpet, cor anglais and strings in 1940 from the incidental music to a failed play featuring the nocturnal improvisations of a jazz trumpeter, and in a good performance it can cast a mesmeric spell. But the trumpeter here phrases prosaically and the recording, evidently live, is at a higher, closer level than the rest of the disc, precluding any really quiet playing. Bayan Northcott PERFORMANCE ★★★ RECORDING ★★★
Elgar • Holst
Elgar: Enigma Variations; Holst: The Planets
Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra/ Andrew Litton
BIS BIS-2068 (hybrid CD/SACD) 82:42 mins
This is not a unique pairing – EMI successfully coupled two originally quite separate recordings by Adrian Boult of those works. Both are a series of ‘portraits’ by English composers – indeed,
The Planets makes some fleeting references to Enigma – yet they also present a very effective foil to one another.
In Enigma, Andrew Litton is close-focused in detail compared to the familiar sweep of Boult’s recording, with very precise yet lively orchestral playing – notably the swirling strings in ‘Troyte’. Litton goes for bold contrasts, and not just between variations: in the ‘R.P.A.’ (Richard Arnold) variation, the contrast between the woodwind episodes with the noble violin melody is more striking than usual, suggesting the surprising quality of Arnold’s wit. Boult’s recording, though, captures the character of all the variations within a broader vision of the work, compared to Litton’s at times self-consciously drawn series of episodes.
In The Planets, again, Litton offers refreshing insights in virtually every movement. In the second half of ‘Mars’, there’s a dramatic rallentando before the calamitous chord that brings the juggernaut to a halt – as if one were seeing a disaster unfold in slow motion.
And in ‘Jupiter’ after the ‘big tune’, the chattering woodwind that accompany the syncopated theme’s return has a wild avian quality.
Less happy are the strings’ upward scoops in the final pages of ‘Saturn’: though presumably emulating Holst’s own 1926 recording, here – particularly in Litton’s far slower tempo – the effect is blatant and tasteless. A pity given so many good qualities elsewhere. Daniel Jaffé PERFORMANCE ★★★ RECORDING ★★★★★
Mahler
Symphony No. 4
Sofia Fomina (soprano); London Philharmonic Orchestra/
Vladimir Jurowski
LPO LPO-0113 59:07 mins
You can never spend too much time with Mahler, and it’s significant that this is the second of two live Royal Festival Hall Fourths that Vladimir Jurowski has given, in ever-closer ties with his London Philharmonic Orchestra. There’s no pretending that the LPO violins initially have the sheen of the Vienna Philharmonic – peerless under Claudio Abbado on DG – but as details accumulate in the thorny path through the forest at the first movement’s heart, there are wonders, not least four unison flutes