Rare classics
Classical music picks by RICHARD OSBORNE
Where classical recordings are concerned, 2020 and 2021 stand every chance of being remembered much as the 1968 and 1969 Bordeaux vintages were. With despair.
The blunder of the year must be Deutsche Grammophon’s ill-fated decision to press ahead with recording the five Beethoven Piano Concertos with Krystian Zimerman and a ‘socially distanced’ London Symphony Orchestra. ‘It was a bit like sending smoke signals across the mountains,’ said conductor Simon Rattle. And so it sounds.
Still, all has not been lost. Limited communication between soloist and orchestra might, for other reasons, have been a feature of Icelandic prodigy Víkingur Ólafsson’s Proms debut. His solo recitals, however, remain something other. His latest anthology Mozart & Contemporaries (Deutsche Grammophon 4860525 £12.75 prestomusic.com) is very fine, with music by Galuppi, CPE Bach, Haydn, and Cimarosa all getting red-carpet treatment.
The year’s most remarkable record must be Proust, Le Concert Retrouvé (Harmonia Mundi HMM902508 £9.56 prestomusic.com), a recreation of the private concert hosted by Marcel Proust at the Ritz in Paris in 1907 in honour of his friend, Gaston Calmette, the controversial editor of
Le Figaro. The choice of music, from a pièce de clavecin by Couperin to Liszt’s transcription of the
Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan, provides a remarkable insight in the mind of this most fastidious, yet at the same time most impassioned, of music lovers. Fauré’s first Violin Sonata sits at the heart of the programme, a work Proust describes in Sodome et Gomorrhe as ‘inquiet, tourmenté, schumannesque’.
Fauré was unable to attend the recital but Proust’s friend and former lover Reynaldo Hahn, whose music opened and closed the evening, did. Violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte and pianist Tanguy de Williencourt – whose very names have a Proustian ring – recreate this most intriguing and therapeutic of programmes as though they’d been there.
Francophile music-lovers, for whom Hahn’s Ciboulette and André Messager’s Véronique are priceless late additions to the French tradition of opéra comique, will be charmed by Messager’s 1926 musical comedy
Passionnément (Bru Zane, BZ1044 £26.35 prestomusic.com).
As with all releases from this super-civlised Venice-based label, the disc comes as part of an elegantly produced and richly informative 200-page hardback book, complete with French and English texts. The texts are crucial here, since they include the spoken interludes (not included on the CD) of this somewhat Wodehousian tale of a philistine American millionaire’s attempt to rip off a cash-strapped young Frenchman whilst trying to protect both himself and his glamorous actress wife from all things French.
The French pride themselves on their mastery of the clandestine affair, though there’s quite a lot of that, more earthily expressed, in British folksong – The Foggy, Foggy Dew, for example, made famous in a setting of incomparable slyness and charm by Benjamin Britten. We still don’t know precisely how many Britten folk-song settings there are, but the 47 included, by English tenor Mark Milhofer and Italian pianist Marco Scolastra in Britten: Complete Folk Songs (Brilliant Classics 2CD 96009 £9.25
prestomusic.com), seem near enough. This delightful pair of discs is notable as much for Milhofer’s ripe tone and exemplary diction as for the sense of rural theatre the performances generate, something Britten himself clearly relished.
The Britten reminds me of two fascinating but little-known English operas about which I wrote in these pages in June: John Eccles: Semele, libretto by William Congreve (Academy of Ancient Music 2CD AMM012 £32.50 prestomusic.com) and Stephen Dodgson’s Margaret Catchpole: Two Worlds Apart (Naxos 3CD 8660459-61 £19.99
naxosdirect.co.uk). To which might be added a superb documentary and accompanying set of CDS about the 2016 rebuilding of the organ of
King’s College, Cambridge, which I review this month, A Legend Reborn: the Voice of King’s, Fuge State Films 2DVD + 2CD FSFDVD013 £38.50 prestomusic.com).
Earlier this autumn, the fabulous Berlin-born Viennese soprano Gundula Janowitz was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by
Gramophone. The award sent me back to her role in actor-director Otto Schenk’s classic 1972 staging of Vienna’s favourite New Year revel, Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus (Deutsche Grammophon DVD 0734371 £15.50 prestomusic.com). Conducted by Karl Böhm with a peerless all-viennese cast, the last-act appearance of Schenk himself (now 91 and still with us) as Frosch the inebriated jailer is alone worth the price of the disc.