Poster for Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (from Wikipedia, provided by DreamWorks Pictures, complies with Wikipedia non-free content policy and fair use under United States copyright law)
This final account of the anthology of recordings made by Simon Rattle with the Berlin Philharmonic may best be described as “odds and ends from the twentieth century.” That would account for all but one of the remaining CDs, since there is one “outlier,” which is the original soundtrack from the 2008 film Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. I must confess that I did not know that this movie existed, even though its cast included Dustin Hoffman, Alan Rickman, and Ben Whishaw.
Not long before I began my freshman year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a friend loaned me a couple of soundtrack albums based on films by Federico Fellini. This was a whole new genre for me; and, during my freshman year, I spent many happy hours at the Brattle Theatre catching up on Fellini’s films. The composer for those films was Nino Rota, who would eventually establish a name for himself on his own, particularly in opera.
The score for Perfume, on the other hand, was a joint effort by Tom Tykwer, Johnny Klimek, and Reinhold Heil, all performing on electronic gear. The Berlin Philharmonic is joined by the State Choir of Latvia along with three vocal soloists, sopranos Chen Reiss and Melanie Mitrano, and boy soprano Victor de Maizière. As is often the case for a product conceived by a committee, the music really does not hold up very well on its own (and, for that matter, the film did not do very well, particularly in the United States). Nevertheless, it was included in the anthology for the sake of completeness!
Where my own listening was concerned, the remaining selections all triggered different pangs of nostalgia. The most satisfying was Richard Strauss’ Opus 60, the suite of incidental music he composed for a performance of the Molière comédie-ballet, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme. Jean-Baptiste Lully composed the music for Molière, but Strauss composed music for Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s adaptation of the play. His version plays up many of the eccentricities of the title character, making for an engaging listening experience. Unfortunately, on this CD, Opus 60 is preceded by Opus 40, the “Ein Heldenleben” tone poem, whose “protagonist” is even more laughable than Molière’s creation!
To some extent the revival of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana cantata also comes across as more than a bit laughable, half a century after it was all the rage. (Actually, it was already a butt of jokes when it showed up on television in the soundtrack for a cigar commercial.) Nevertheless, I have to say that I enjoyed the personalities evoked in the vocal solos by baritone Christian Gerhaher, tenor Lawrence Brownlee, and soprano Sally Matthews.
An entire CD is devoted to Carl Nielsen with Rattle conducting two of his concertos. The first of these is the flute concerto with Emmanuel Pahud as soloist. This is followed by Sabine Meyer taking the solo part in the clarinet concerto. The remainder of the album is the wind quintet with Pahud and Meyer joined by bassoonist Stefan Schweigert, Jonathan Kelly alternating between oboe and cor anglais, and Radek Baborák on French horn. While Nielsen’s music is no longer the “great discovery” it was during the second half of the last century, I have to confess that revisiting all three of these compositions was an enjoyable experience.
On the other hand, I am not quite sure what to make of Rattle’s decision to add Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” following the last two movements of Gustav Mahler’s ninth symphony. I suppose the conductor decided that, in the interest of filling out the CD, one good Adagio deserves another. Where my own listening was concerned, however, there was just too much cognitive dissonance!
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