From the archives
Andrew Mcgregor takes in a new collection marking the Vienna years of a great Hungarian conductor...
István Kertész left his early career in Budapest after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and found a new home for his music-making in London and Vienna. Decca has already released The London Years, highlighting Kertész’s fine recordings of Bartók, Kodály and Dvoˇrák with the LSO. The new set is Kertész in Vienna (Decca 483 4710; 20CDS + Blu-ray Audio), and his debut with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1961 is one of the few duplications: Dvoˇrák’s New World Symphony, in a brasher but more spontaneously projected performance than with the LSO five years later. Kertész was already a noted Mozartean, and you shouldn’t miss the complete recording of La clemenza di Tito, for the superb contributions of Teresa Berganza, Brigitte Fassbaender and Lucia Popp. The double album of highlights from other Mozart operas is highly enjoyable, and while issues of Mozartean style surface in Mozart Symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic, the two G minor Symphonies and Haffner are beautifully shaped. Avoid the Mozart Requiem, though; despite the presence of Ely Ameling and Marilyn Horne, the Vienna State Opera Chorus sounds underrehearsed. The main reasons to explore the set are the Brahms and Schubert Symphonies. Kertész started with the Unfinished and Great C major in 1963, producing such rich hues and deep shadows that Decca build the rest of the cycle around them. There’s a weight and breadth that might not be as fashionable in Schubert today, but also an unerring sense of trajectory – these performances never drag. The deeply satisfying sound is even more apparent on the Blu-ray Audio disc, HD mastering that makes the most of the Decca engineering in Vienna – some might think it’s worth it for this disc alone. But the Brahms, too, is special, the Vienna Philharmonic responding with warmth and commitment. Kertész drowned in 1973, still only 43, in the middle of sessions for Brahms’s Haydn Variations. The orchestra returned to the studio, with no conductor, to complete Kertész’s last recording. What a tribute to a relationship, and a life, that ended far too soon. supremely vocal in their blithe new tune over vibrant pizzicato double basses. The recording is a bit close for strings, generally in need of more air around them, but does wonders with moments like this.
Leader Pieter Schoeman’s toneabove-the-usual tuned violin accentuates his E natural with supreme acidity as the scherzo’s ‘Friend Death’, while the oboe playing is exquisitely sorrowful in a slow movement superb of articulation in the main theme and variations, but a little too rushed as anguish spills over. Sofia Fomina guides us gently through the finale’s heavenly delights and terrors; the last couple of minutes are sheer paradise, string portamenti (slidings from note to note) characterful as throughout, low harp splendidly present. You’ll learn a lot from Jurowski’s characteristically thoughtful investigation. David Nice PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★
Myaskovsky
Symphonies Nos 1 & 13
Ural Youth Symphony Orchestra/ Alexander Rudin
Naxos 8.573988 58:26 mins
What an odd if undeniably striking way for the excellent Ural Youth Symphony Orchestra to debut on disc. Neither of these symphonies is obviously grateful material for young musicians. The First was a student exercise for the 27-year-old Myaskovsky, evolved in the summer of 1908. Even in the revision of 1921 it moves slowly but surely, avoiding conventional slow introduction-to-allegro behaviour in the first movement; cellist and conductor Alexander Rudin shapes the orchestral playing compellingly both here and in the central Larghetto. Myaskovsky is true to his essentially sombre temperament, shunning the lively scherzo beloved of countless other Russian composers, and the finale is a bit of a slog.
There’s no doubt about the grim quality of the Thirteenth Symphony, though; it seems to have come after a depressive lacuna, in times when troubles were brewing for Soviet composers (the premiere took place in Chicago in 1933). Austere wind and brass writing is sometimes whittled to only two instruments; there are throwbacks to the opening eeriness in The Rite of Spring’s second part, but also prophecies of Shostakovich’s spare late symphonies, 40 years in the future. Again, there’s interpretative understanding here; Rudin takes the credit for that, the players for following him with such instinct and maturity. David Nice PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Poulenc • Saint-saëns • Widor
Saint-saëns: Symphony No. 3 (Organ); Poulenc: Concerto for Organ, Strings and Timpani; Widor: Symphony for Organ No. 5 – Toccata Christopher Jacobson (organ); Orchestra de la Suisse Romande/ Kazuki Yamada
Pentatone PTC 5186 638 (hybrid CD/ SACD) 65:31 mins
It’s good to find Widor’s Toccata here no longer treated as a speed test but, as Widor wanted and as both his metronome remark and his recording testify, as a piece of music.
The pairing of the Saint-saëns and the Poulenc works surprisingly well on a number of fronts, not least because both are essentially conflicted compositions. Although the blazing C major ending of the Symphony suggests a Beethovenian triumph, Saint-saëns referred to the work not only as ‘terrifying’ but as ‘this terrible thing’. Seen in this light, the end may possibly appear as protesting too much against the angst of the C minor passages that precede it, shot through as they are with bits of ‘Dies irae’. Whatever the truth of this, the rich recorded sound makes this ending properly impressive, and my only reservation is that at the end of the D flat movement the organ doesn’t obey the morendo marking – a tiny point, but this flirting with extinction does feed into the above mindset.
The Poulenc is slightly less happy, partly because it needs a sharper, more direct sound, and also because the composer’s view of it as ‘grave, noble, austere’ and ‘15th-century’ demands at times a roughness and a sense of danger to counteract both the swooning, dreamlike passages and the jolly, fairground ones. The very opening here is rhythmically a touch bland – in Duruflé’s 1961 recording, on which Poulenc
collaborated, the right-hand dots are practically double dots, suggesting Buxtehude in one of his wilder moods. Roger Nichols PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★
Stanford
Overture in the style of a tragedy; Verdun: Solemn
March and Heroic Epilogue; A Welcome March; Fairy Day; A Song of Agincourt
Codetta; Ulster Orchestra/
Howard Shelley
Hyperion CDA 68283 65:32 mins Spending an hour with Sir Charles Villiers Stanford is always rewarding, though you never quite know how you’ll find him. Will he be wearing Brahms’s overcoat? (Yes, in parts of the 1903 Overture). Will he be Irish? (All the time, somehow or other, whether in melodic contours or rhapsodic glee.) Will he be trying to be Elgar? (Yes, unsuccessfully, in A Welcome March, bustling but fairly weak). Will he drift into fairyland? (Yes, magnificently, in Fairy Days, three orchestral part songs written in 1912, before innocence ended with World War I). I could go on.
The variety of moods in these miscellanea, lovingly performed by the Ulster Orchestra and Howard Shelley in congenial sound, is one of its most attractive features, and even the works which don’t quite come off still provide happy listening. A Song of Agincourt, written in 1918 to commemorate Royal College of Music members killed in the war, overcomes its wandering ways with a fount of warm melody and vigorous use of the 15th-century ‘Agincourt’ song, later used by Walton in his film music for the film Henry V. Heartfelt but bitty, the Verdun memorial
– his second Organ Sonata in orchestrated form – survives as a fascinating period piece.
And the most winning work? Definitely Fairy Days, with fey, dated poetry transformed into fine art through constantly modulating, simple harmonies, sweetly sung by sopranos and altos from the choir Codetta, and the most luminously delicate instrumental textures. Stanford as Mendelssohn, perhaps; and it’s lovely. Geoff Brown PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Gateways
Qigang Chen: Wu Xing (The Five Elements); La Joie de la souffrance; Kreisler: Tambourin chinois; Rachmaninov: Symphonic Dances Maxim Vengerov (violin); Shanghai Symphony Orchestra/long Yu
DG 483 6606 74:21 mins
The earliest of Qigang Chen’s works included here – the fivemovement suite Wu Xing (The
Five Elements) – dates from 1999 and reflects the composer’s studies with Olivier Messiaen during the 1980s. Each element – water, wood, fire, earth and metal – is evoked via a series of ear-tweaking, often apparently weightless sonorities that inter-relate with a deeply compelling, organic sense of growth.
La Joie de la souffrance is effectively a violin concerto in ten main sections, premiered by Maxim Vengerov in advance of the 2018 Isaac Stern International Violin Competition, where it was played as a contemporary set-piece by all six finalists. Chen’s style has changed considerably over the intervening years towards (20th-century) interwar Romanticism, at times variously reminiscent of Walton, Prokofiev and Barber. Vengerov plays with commanding authority and haunting eloquence, revealing in the seventh section ‘La Beauté solitaire’ (Solitary Beauty) a golden-toned, poetic introspection that captures the moment as if spellbound.
Clark Mcalister’s enchanting orchestration of Kreisler’s
Tambourin chinois provides the perfect encore before the Shanghai players storm away with a performance of Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances that uncovers a vein of modernism in its textural restlessness, which often lies hidden beneath a gentle haze of reflective nostalgia. Instrumental lines emerge from the music’s textures with an openness and directness that startles at times by comparison with the sunset opulence of established favourites from Eugene Ormandy (CBS/SONY), André
Previn (Emi/warner) and Vladimir Ashkenazy (Decca). The recording, captured in Shanghai’s Symphony Hall, captures everything with both clarity and precision. Julian Haylock PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★