An interview with Jean-eff lam Bavouzet
Why did you want to embark on this album series?
We take for granted the masterpieces of Beethoven and sometimes we forget the multitude of very good composers who wrote wonderful pieces around the same time. I already had the beautiful Clementi sonata and the amazing Dussek up my sleeve, as I played them about 30 years ago. It is a very dear project that I was happy to elaborate with the help of Marc Vignal, the brilliant French musicologist.
Did you make any particularly interesting discoveries?
What interested me was the mutual influences; they had very common ground of musical language then. For example, to learn the very fast Presto of the Hummel sonata, I had to start by playing it slowly, and in doing so I realised that it sounded exactly like Beethoven’s Op. 110. Then there was chromatic scale, which at that time was really just an effect. By pure coincidence, I realised that the Dussek, Clementi and Hummel sonatas have passages that were written exactly the same way, with chromatic scales, And they were all at crucial points in the piece, related to the recapitulation of the movement.
Which composer were you most surprised by?
I’m so grateful that Marc Vignal turned my attention to Josef Wölfl, a composer I must admit I didn’t know before. I was sorry that a composer who was able to write such a perfect and charming sonata as the one on the album could be so unknown. There are even more surprises coming in Volume 2, but I’m not going to tell you what!
Falla • Granados
Falla: The Three-cornered Hat; Nights in the Garden of Spain; La vida breve – Interlude & Dance; Granados: Goyescas – Intermezzo Jorge Federico Osorio (piano);
The Orchestra of the Americas/ Carlos Miguel Prieto
Linn CKD 625 70:55 mins
The infectious two-act ballet, The Three Cornered Hat, is the atmospheric opener to this recording of two of Manuel de Falla’s key works. Written after the influential composer’s return from Paris to Spain after the outbreak of the First World War, the ballet, commissioned by Diaghilev, is partnered with the work that inspired the ballet impresario to knock on Falla’s door, Nights in the Gardens of Spain. In between, a contrast is offered with Granados and his short, dreamlike Intermezzo from Goyescas.
The youthful Orchestra of the Americas – members are aged between 18-30 – produce a sound full of vitality under conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto in their second recording for Linn, that marries well with Falla’s joyous and superbly expressive orchestral landscape. The folk melodies underpinning The Three Cornered Hat are played with great verve and character, from the opening punchy brass fanfare to the whirling ‘jota’ of the final dance.
Nights in the Gardens of Spain is more impressionistic than the ballet, yet it is also quintessentially Spanish in character, an evocative three-part nocturne for piano and orchestra given a shimmering outing by pianist Jorge Federico Osorio and Prieto’s orchestra. Sarah Urwin Jones PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★
Feldman
Coptic Light;
String Quartet and Orchestra* *Arditti Quartet; ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra/michael Boder, *Emilio Pomarico
Capriccio C5378 53:22 mins
In 1972 Morton Feldman surprised his NYC artistic circle by moving to Buffalo where he taught at the University until his death in 1987. The works on this absorbing release prompt a look back at his ensuing compositional journey: from the painterly distillation yet expansion of 1986’s Coptic Light – his final and possibly greatest orchestral work – to an earlier prototype in 1973’s String Quartet and Orchestra.
The two works have much in common, not least since Feldman returned in Coptic Light to a halfhour length that seems modest
alongside the extended durations to which he’d increasingly been drawn. But here, with the capable Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra – conducted by Michael Boder, then Emilio Pomàrico and joined by the Arditti Quartet – it’s Feldman’s progressive refinement of colour that’s most striking.
In both pieces, shading and timbre meld with attack and decay as structural foundations within a hushed overall dynamic. The subtlety of the Arditti’s weaving in and out of the orchestra emphasises how little the earlier work resembles a conventional concerto, while the later work is an immersion in sonic chiaroscuro, offered as parallel to the warp and weft of Coptic textiles. Steph Power PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★
Franck
Le Chasseur maudit; Psyché*; Les Éolides – Symphonic Poem *RCS Voices; Royal Scottish National Orchestra/jean-luc Tingaud
Naxos 8.573955 69:19 mins
The four symphonic poems Franck wrote between 1875 and 1888, although all proclaiming their indebtedness to Liszt and probably to Saint-saëns as well, fall into two quite distinct categories: gentle atmospheric (Les Éolides, Psyché ) and dynamic virtuosic
(Le Chasseur maudit, Les Djinns). I must admit to finding the former by far the less interesting. The, mostly well-behaved, women here described led Franck into an easy reliance on short phrases repeated somewhat obsessively, given some sort of life through changes of key but never really lifting off. In this recording delicate textures, though occasionally spoilt by obtrusive horns, are given their due, but for me Psyché becomes simply boring after a while, the harmonic changes too predictable in their placing; also the sopranos at full volume in the movement ‘Amour, source de toute vie’ present a vibrato that doesn’t really chime with the ethereal text.
Les Éolides again depends greatly on repetitions of short phrases, but a major feature of these is the dynamic hairpin soft-loud-soft, I presume intended to represent the gusts of wind summoned up by Aeolus’s daughters, and I would have liked these in general to have covered a wider dynamic range.
On every front Le Chasseur maudit is far more enjoyable, the story of the cursed huntsman who refuses to have any truck with mass clearly speaking to the conscience of Franck the devoted Roman Catholic. Conductor and orchestra respond. Roger Nichols
PERFORMANCE ★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Kernis
Color Wheel; Symphony No. 4 ‘Chromelodeon’
Nashville Symphony/
Giancarlo Guerrero
Naxos 8.559838 51:29 mins Commissioned for the 2001 opening of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s new home, Verizon Hall, Aaron Jay Kernis’s Color Wheel is a 22-minute orchestral concerto. Its celebratory panache is brilliantly captured by Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony as it spins not only through the colour spectrum but the stylistic spectrum as well: granite dissonances, pensive calm, nervous jazz, Hollywood shock and awe – so many characteristic American sounds find a home with this prize-winning composer, jostling inside a variation chain in fussily luscious orchestrations. Weak ending excepted, it’s an exhilarating ride, blessed with a clear recording that vividly captures the music’s whirlwind textures.
Much less convincing is the Fourth Symphony, Chromelodeon (2018), where similar sounds and moods are pushed through a grander three-movement structure. Kernis’s energy and technical skills remain startling, but his struggle for symphonic significance exposes more limits than strengths in his use of the subtitle’s constituent parts (chromatics, colour, melody). Notes pile up to a choking degree and the finale is empty chatter, while the central slow movement that chews over Handel’s aria ‘Laschia ch’io pianga’ remains more meretricious than meaningful. Luckily, the fretful first movement, labelled
‘Out of Silence’ and opened with tinkling bell sounds, is satisfyingly intriguing. Fortified by extravagant percussion and tottering, drunken brass, Guerrero’s players give the Symphony their all. Geoff Brown PERFORMANCE ★★★ RECORDING ★★★★
Rimsky-korsakov
Capriccio Espagnol; Russian Easter Festival Overture; Scheherazade
Elise Båtnes (violin);
Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra/
Vasily Petrenko
Lawo LWC 1198 74:57 mins
Here is an attractive modern recording of Rimskykorsakov’s three most popular orchestral works. A wonderfully exuberant and sunny
Capriccio Espagnol, followed in total contrast by the Russian Easter Festival Overture, more pagan than Christian with its magically scored episodes and hypnotic repetitions.
Vasily Petrenko and the
Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra offer a polished and mostly straightforward account of the symphonic suite Scheherazade, with the violin solos representing the heroine attractively played by the orchestra’s leader, Elise Båtnes. Although producer Andrew Walton’s realistic concert hall balance results in some details of Rimsky’s richly textured score being obscured, the sound is as lovely as the composer surely intended.
My only real disappointment is the third movement, ‘The Young Prince and the Young Princess’. It starts well, Petrenko’s flowing tempo and unsentimental interpretation allowing the melody’s tender expressiveness to tell. But towards the end, at the instruction Pochissimo più animato (‘a little more lively’), Petrenko does not simply go faster but continues to accelerate as if impatient to finish. This is surely against the music’s character: with its beguiling variation of the earlier procession and its sighing phrases, its poignancy lies in the sense that, even as time presses on, the lovers long for their moment together to linger if not stand still. Hence the would-be closing phrase heard no less than four times, two of them after the significant instruction Poco rit (‘more slowly’). As it is, Petrenko insensitively charges up to that instruction, then suddenly slows down. A pity, because otherwise this is a lovely album. Daniel Jaffé PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★
Schoenberg
Pelleas und Melisande; Erwartung*
*Sara Jakubiak (soprano);
Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra/ Edward Gardner
Chandos CHSA 5198 (hybrid CD/SACD) 67:36 mins
Two years after completing his radiant early sextet Verklärte Nacht, Schoenberg was encouraged by Richard Strauss to write a symphonic poem on Maeterlinck’s play Pelléas et Mélisande, completing the massive 40-minute score in
1903 and conducting its premiere in 1905. While still just about adhering to key signatures, the music sweeps a chromatic counterpoint of Wagnerian leitmotivs though a wave-like sequence of often thickly scored textures. Edward Gardner and the Bergen Philharmonic are little more successful than previous performers in defining every teeming inner part of the more complex passages, but offer a finely characterised account of a work of awesomely emergent mastery.
By 1909, tonality, thematic ideas and formal boundaries were all abandoned. In his halfhour monodrama Erwartung (Expectation), as his hysterical soprano protagonist searches a moonlit forest for her lover, whose dead body she eventually stumbles across, the music unfolds in a hallucinatory stream of consciousness of iridescent detail and nervy frissons, the scoring shifting in density and colour by the second. Sara Jakubiak is impressively accurate in the fiendishly chromatic soprano role and Gardner and his orchestra respond with sensitised volatility, though some of the more delicate high string writing seems to evaporate in the resonance of Bergen’s Grieghallen. Simon Rattle’s marginally clearer CBSO recording of 1995 with the plangent Phyllis Bryn-julson remains the benchmark here – but only just. Bayan Northcott. PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★
Shostakovich
Symphonies Nos 1 & 5 London Symphony Orchestra/ Gianandrea Noseda
LSO Live LSO 0802 (hybrid CD/SACD) 81:51 mins (2 discs)
Here, in this third instalment of Gianandrea Noseda’s ongoing Shostakovich symphony cycle, are relatively straightforward yet brilliantly executed interpretations of two of the most familiar works. The Italian conductor is especially convincing in probing their darker recesses, as in the First Symphony’s Lento or the Fifth’s Largo. Despite the Barbican’s unforgivingly dry acoustic, Noseda generates a tremendous degree of atmosphere throughout the latter movement’s despairing lament, the LSO strings cutting through the texture with intense passion in the throbbing climaxes and with spine-tingling foreboding in icy cold pianissimos.
Perhaps the Fifth’s opening paragraph doesn’t sound quite as arresting as in the 2015 live recording from Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony on DG. Yet Noseda is just as effective as his Latvian colleague in negotiating the tricky accelerando into the ominous middle section, and the recording captures the percussive piano and rasping lower brass with great immediacy. Even more memorable are the disembodied closing bars of the first movement which sound especially haunting here.
Noseda’s deadpan approach works well in highlighting the mock triumphalism of the coda to the Fifth’s finale. However, it is less convincing in the Fifth’s Scherzo and the first two movements of the First which are a bit too straitlaced, understating the caustic wit that is just as essential an ingredient in Shostakovich’s musical armoury as his emotional angst. Erik Levi PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★
R Strauss
Don Juan; Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche; Also sprach Zarathustra
NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra/ Krzysztof Urba ski
Alpha Classics ALPHA 413 65:09 mins Since Decca released
Solti’s Chicago interpretations of the three most famous symphonic poems as The Richard Strauss Album, orchestras and conductors have often presented the group as a recorded calling-card, a token of instrumental virtuosity and sonic prowess. This latest is respectable and at times individual, though there’s no pretending that the North German Radio strings have the sheen of the Vienna or Berlin Philharmonics. Krzysztof Urba ski, in tandem with fine engineering, favours essential textural clarity, right from the pulsing wind behind the leaping first endeavour of
Don Juan; and while the lover’s adventures sometimes lose direction – the oboe solo in the second lovescene is too bland to keep focus – the dovetailing and quick-changes of
Till Eulenspiegel are impressive,
kicked off with a superb horn solo – the department as a whole is very fine – soon joined by a personable D clarinet. There’s also a deft fleck from the ‘big grimace’ which caps discordant mocking of the town pedants to the winsome ‘off and away’ street tune.
Zarathustra comes and goes in terms of excellence: an impressively broad start, a slightly under-lustrous string hymn, a vivid second fugue and a slightly less energetic rise to convalescence. Most original, to my ears, is the easing of tension after the ‘dance-song’ and before the Dionysiac drive to the sounding of the midnight bell; warm horns cushion a passage that sound startlingly fresh. Good enough to sing the merits of these ‘operas for orchestra’, the performances lack just the last degree of consistent theatricality to join the big-league recordings. David Nice PERFORMANCE ★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Russian Colours
Arensky: String Quartet No. 2 (arr. Zhislin); Borodin: String Quartet
No. 2 – Notturno (arr. Zhislin); Glazunov: Saxophone Concerto (arr. Zhislin)*; Rachmaninov: Vocalise (arr. Zhislin); Tchaikovsky: String Quartet No. 1 – Andante Cantabile (arr. Zhislin)
Camerata Tchaikovsky/
Yuri Zhislin (*viola)
Orchid Classics ORC100136 62:05 mins Of these five transcriptions, the bigger works are relatively unfamiliar, while the single Tchaikovsky, Borodin and Rachmaninov movements form an extended ‘pops’ encore (the virtual running-together of tracks seems like an error). The revelation is Arensky’s so-called Second
String Quartet, which I first heard played by violin, two violas and cello, though it’s scored originally with two cellos. The dark colours underline an elegiac homage to Tchaikovsky, whose simple ‘Legend’ from his Children’s Songs is the second-movement theme. That is more familiar as the string-orchestra Variations (including an extra one not in the quartet score). Yuri Zhislin, music director and founder of the crack string band formerly known as the Russian Virtuosi of Europe – some top names here are obviously not Russian – has arranged the outer movements and the rest of the programme himself. The players treat the first of Arensky’s religious chants detachedly, not so vocally – it returns in the movements which follow – yet their way with the finale’s requiem music is haunting. The other theme here is familiar from Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov and the second of Beethoven’s Rasumovsky Quartets, to which Arensky pays homage.
Glazunov’s Concerto for alto saxophone and strings, with the solo part deftly transferred to viola as played by Zhislin, is more meandering but blends Russianstyle and typically pretty themes. There’s some inspired singing in Tchaikovsky and Borodin, but Rachmaninov’s Vocalise really needs a voice or solo instrument to carry its melodic line. Dry sound leaves the relatively small group exposed at times, but this is quality playing and programming, no doubt. David Nice PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★