The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Jacques Ibert and Ork Records: New York, New York
Ork Records: New York,
New York (Numero Group) In 1975, Terry Ork, a veteran of Andy Warhol’s Factory, established what is considered the first punk record label. With its owner’s passion for the music at CBGB and in the Lower East Side, Ork Records released the first 45s of Television and Richard Hell, along with solo work by Big Star’s Alex Chilton, and much more. This past fall, Numero Group packaged highlights of this label with a gorgeous book and dropped it on the holiday wish list of anyone who is into punk rock or New York City’s music history. Stretched across two CDs or four LPs, this is a raucous collection of shaggy, energetic music from a time when attitude trumped amateurism — not that some of these people didn’t have chops — and it is undeniably the rock release of the year. The production is exactly what you’d expect from such a release; the guitars are grimy and the drums loud. The biggest surprises here are versions of songs that are shot through with a degree of adrenaline that listeners may not be used to, such as The Feelies’ barn-burning take on their classic “Fa Cé-La” or Richard Lloyd’s boisterous cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Get Off of My Cloud.” As rock music continues to wane in mainstream culture, this is a great reminder of how powerful it is
when new waves of it come crashing in. — Robert Ker
JACQUES IBERT The Ballad of Reading Gaol (Naxos) Oscar Wilde’s poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” is well known to music aficionados hereabouts since it served as inspiration for Oscar, the Wilde-centered work Santa Fe Opera premiered in 2013. In 1921, Wilde’s publication had given rise to the first orchestral work of Jacques Ibert, a threemovement symphonic poem of yearning, cinematic contours that he later said would probably qualify as his “Op. 1” — although he did not actually assign opus numbers to his works. An evocative reading of the piece launches an all-Ibert CD from the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, directed by the autodidact Swiss conductor Adriano (one name only, like Drake or Adele). Ibert had clearly cut his teeth on Debussy, and particularly on the opera Pelléas et Mélisande, which keeps kibitzing from the sidelines. From the same period comes his Trois pièces de ballet (Les rencontres), which is considerably more jolly and nods instead to Ravel’s La valse and Stravinsky’s
Petrushka. The short tone poem Féerique (from autumn 1924) is a pleasing discovery, sounding like a glistening response to Debussy’s faun but with a passing kick from Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which had premiered seven months earlier. Ibert is most remembered for his neo-Renaissance pieces, and a delightful one inhabits nine tracks here: his Suite Elisabéthaine (1942), consisting of music he wrote for a French production of