DSO Streams Beethoven and Mendelssohn

Screen shot of Jonathan Biss at the keyboard performing with Delyana Lazarova conducting the DSO

Early yesterday evening my wife and I once again enjoyed our dinner while watching a live-stream of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO). Conductor Delyana Lazarova prepared a straightforward overture-concerto-symphony program, with an intermission prior to the symphony. That symphony was Felix Mendelssohn’s Op. Posth. 90, his fourth symphony given the title “Italian.” The concerto soloist was Jonathan Biss, performing Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 19 (second) piano concerto, composed in the key of B-flat major. The program began with the overture that Carl Maria von Weber composed for this three-act opera Oberon.

Biss used to make regular appearances in San Francisco. One of my earliest articles on this site was written in March of 2007, when I wrote about a recital he performed with particular attention to Robert Schumann’s “Kreisleriana.” That selection was preceded by compositions by both Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven; and I was struck by how Biss made one of the Mozart selections, movements from the K. 533 piano sonata in F major, sound as if they has been composed by Schumann!

I am happy to report that, yesterday evening, Biss made Beethoven sound like Beethoven. Opus 19 is an early work, and Beethoven composed it in high spirits. Biss found just the right sensitivity in his touch to convey those spirits without overplaying them. This often involved cheerful interjections of comments from the ensemble, and Lazarova knew just how to play her side of the dialogue. As might be expected, Biss responded to the audience applause with an encore. Sure enough, he selected more Beethoven: the Adagio cantabile (second) movement from one of the composer’s early piano sonatas, Opus 13 in C minor, given the title “Sonata Pathétique.”

Lazarova’s approaches to the instrumental selections were as spirited in rhetoric as the sonata was. Weber’s opera took a French medieval tale and seems to have examined it through the lens of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream. These days, the opera (when it is performed at all) is more likely to be presented in concert, rather than in a staged version. Nevertheless, the overture stands well on its own and tends to be popular among most concert lovers. That includes the audience for last night’s DSO performance!

In introducing her program, Lazarova declared Mendelssohn to be “the only composer to make a minor key seem heavy.” I assume she had in mind the tarantella movement that concludes the “Italian” symphony. She clearly enjoyed conducting this music; and, for the most part, the DSO musicians seemed to enjoy her enjoyment! I must confess that this is one of those compositions that I feel I have encountered too many times, but the freshness of Lazarova’s interpretation definitely got the better of me!

This is a conductor I would be happy to encounter again under other circumstances (in case anyone in Davies Symphony Hall happens to be reading this)!

Arthur Stockel’s New Weber Album for Aparté

Clarinetist Arthur Stockel on the cover of his debut album

This coming Friday, Aparté will release the debut album of French clarinetist Arthur Stockel. He is currently Principal Clarinet for the Orchestre Philhamonique du Luxembourg, and he performs as a soloist with them for recordings of the two clarinet concertos by Carl Maria von Weber, Opus 73 in F minor and Opus 74 in E-flat major. The conductor for these performances is Leo McFall. Between these selections there is a recording of the much earlier (Opus 34) quintet, which he plays with the members of the Hanson Quartet (which also records for Aparté). These musicians are violinists Anton Hanson and Jules Dussap, Gabrielle Lafait on viola, and cellist Simon Dechambre.

By way of disclaimer, I should state that I am not a stranger to Weber’s clarinet repertoire. Back in my secondary school days, I worked on the Opus 26 Concertino; and, thanks to “friends of the family,” I was fortunate enough to perform it at a “salon,” which included several professional musicians. This was the first time I had taken on such a “serious” task; and I was more than a little relieved by the satisfaction of my audience! Nevertheless, undergraduate life at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology left little time for recreation; and I decided that my time would be better spent at the campus radio station, where I presented a program entitled Music of the Twentieth Century.

Having established my context, I can now admit all three of the Weber compositions on this new album were new to me. Nevertheless, there were no end of thematic tropes that readily reminded me of “old times!” Sadly, while Weber was prolific, many know him either for his operas or as the cousin of Constanze, who had married Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. As a result, I can probably be forgiven for thinking that some of the thematic passages on this album remind me not only of Weber’s Opus 26 but also of Mozart’s K. 581 clarinet concerto! However, in spite of those “ghosts of familiarity,” I have now come away from listening to Stockel’s new album several times; and this has become one of my choices when I feel a need to raise my spirits!

SFP to Present Recital Debut of Fleur Barron

Mezzo Fleur Barron (from the SFP event page)

Mezzo Fleur Barron will probably not be a stranger to those that partake of performances in the Civic Center. According to my records, her most recent appearance took place in Davies Symphony Hall, when she sang the title role in Kaija Saariaho’s opera Adriana Mater, with the San Francisco Symphony conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen and staged for the limited available space by Peter Sellars. At the end of this month, she will return to San Francisco, this time making her recital debut with San Francisco Performances (SFP), joined by pianist Kunal Lahiry.

She has prepared a program entitled The Power and the Glory. According to the advance material I received from SFP, the program was conceived to “explore the impacts and legacies of colonialism throughout the world, highlighting songs that reflected the attitudes of their times, and may now be appreciated in an entirely new light.” When I read that material, my first impulse was to raise my left eyebrow à la Spock (if anyone still remembers Star Trek)! Nevertheless, I find it hard resist a program in which Carl Maria von Weber will be rubbing shoulders with Gustav Mahler, not to mention Arnold Schoenberg and Kurt Weill, who probably never rubbed shoulders with each other!

This performance will begin, as usual, at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, February 26. Also as usual, the venue will be Herbst Theatre, which is located at 401 Van Ness Avenue, on the southwest corner of McAllister Street and directly across Van Ness from City Hall. SFP has created its own Web page for further information. Prices range between $70 and $50. Those wishing to attend can also call 415-677-0325 to make purchases.

SFIPF: Tanya Gabrielian Solo Recital

Last night the San Francisco International Piano Festival (SFIPF) got off to a rocky start, at least for those of us that opted for a livestream of the performance. The performance took place in the Old First Presbyterian Church, presented by the Old First Concerts (O1C) series. O1C has been one of the best sources of live-streamed content, the result of an impressively rapid learning curve to compensate for pandemic conditions. Unfortunately, neither SFIPF Founder and Artistic Director Jeffrey LaDeur nor opening night solo recitalist Tanya Gabrielian seemed to know “the drill” when using a microphone for the benefit of both the immediate audience and the remote one. Presumably, those in the “physical” audience were satisfied; but those of us in cyberspace heard nothing but garbled text.

Fortunately, there were no faults at all when it came to listening to Gabrielian’s piano performance. This was good, since there was much to attract and hold the attention of the serious listener. Indeed, considerable imaginative thought seems to have gone into preparing the program.

The first half of the program consisted of eight relatively brief selections, all of which were transcriptions for solo piano by Alexander Siloti. The very idea of such transcriptions can be traced back at least as far as Franz Liszt (who, more often than not, added generous embellishments to the music being transcribed). Siloti may well have been as prodigious as Liszt in preparing transcriptions. These days, however, he is recalled for only one of them, Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 855a, the prelude from the E minor prelude-fugue coupling in the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 855).

Gabrielian seems to have sympathized with those of us that feel we have had enough of that transcription in encore selections. Instead, she chose for her Bach selection the BWV 565 coupling of a toccata and fugue in the key of D minor. This was her opening selection, which proved to be effective for seizing the attention of the serious listener. Nevertheless, eight Siloti transcriptions tended to strain the attention of even the most serious and dedicated listener, sometimes because the music simply did not lend itself to transcription (Maurice Ravel’s setting of the Hebrew Kaddish text for solo vocalist) or because we have already heard it too many times (the last of Niccolò Paganini’s caprices, originally composed for solo violin). That was the final transcription that Gabrielian played, and I would have preferred her to wrap things up a bit sooner.

The second half of the program made for a diverse but somewhat odd collection. Gabrielian began with a short piece by Aaron Copland entitled “Three Moods,” which made for an engaging departure from what we usually expect of Copland. This was followed by the “Meditation for the Left Hand” by Leopold Godowsky, which provided Gabrielian with an opportunity to present the strength of her left hand. Nevertheless, the overall duration was too long and repetitive to sustain serious attention. The program then concluded with Carl Maria von Weber’s Opus 39 sonata in D minor, which overstayed its welcome even more exhaustively than Godowsky’s “Meditation” did.

This made for a long evening, but Gabrielian still had the energy for an encore (but not, apparently, any need to introduce it to the audience).

BBC Legends 3: Klaus Tennstedt’s Second Album

Conductor Klaus Tennstedt is the only performing artist in the latest BBC Legends series to be represented by more than one CD. This may be because the tenth CD is devoted only to a single composition, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 125 (“Choral”) symphony in D minor. As was previously observed, that album occupied the midpoint of the total collection. As a result, there is a certain element of symmetry in having the fifteenth CD, halfway between the tenth and the last, return to Tennstedt.

Once again he is leading the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the Royal Festival Hall, this time on two different concert dates. The entire album provides a “journey” through the nineteenth century. It begins, appropriately enough, with an overture, the one composed by Carl Maria von Weber for his three-act opera Oberon. This is followed by another major achievement in the symphony genre, Franz Schubert’s D. 944 in C major, often called the “Great” to distinguish it from the D. 589 C major symphony, often called the “Little.” The album then concludes with a “symmetric return” to another overture, this one by Johannes Brahms, his Opus 81, given the title “Tragic Overture.”

This makes for such a satisfying chronological journey that it is a pity that the recording sessions did not follow that chronology. The Weber and Schubert selections were recorded on October 7, 1984. However, the final selection on the album was recorded earlier on April 7, 1983. Ironically, the plan for the CD would probably have made for a very engaging listening experience in its own right.

Indeed, that plan was so engaging that I never succumbed to that feeling of “saturation” that arose when I was listening to the Beethoven CD. The music itself was just as familiar to me as Beethoven’s Opus 125 was. However, what mattered was that the “journey” based on the ordering of the tracks was an imaginative one. By virtue of the overall plan, not one of those three familiar compositions left me with a here-we-go-again reaction. Furthermore, the freshness of the plan seemed to direct my attention to the freshness of interpretation that Tennstedt had brought to each of the three pieces, even though he could not have considered the underlying “chronological plan.”

This raises a point that may well deserve further examination. There is no questioning that a well-executed performance can be appreciated for its in-the-moment qualities. However, the track ordering of a CD has its own in-the-moment qualities, which almost always have more to do with the production team behind the CD than with any of the contributing performers. Put another way, there are distinct differences between the phenomenology of listening to a concert performance and that of listening to a recording. Now I need to retreat to some secluded spot to see if I can tease out just what those differences are! Most likely, phenomenology will have to share space with Hermann Weyl’s pioneering Symmetry monograph!

Profil Releases Early Friedrich Gulda Recordings

Many readers probably know by now that I have had a fair amount on interested in the recordings of performances by the Austrian pianist and composer Friedrich Gulda, who was born in Vienna on May 16, 1930 and died in Steinbach am Attersee (also in Austria) on January 27, 2000. I first became aware of him during my graduate student years, when the Musical Heritage Society released a box set of his performances of all 32 published piano sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven. More recently, the release of five albums of his performances based on remastered tapes recorded by Südwestrundfunk (SWR, southwest broadcasting), the public radio service for the southwest of Germany, served as a major factor in keeping me occupied under pandemic conditions.

courtesy of Naxos of America

All five of those albums were released on the SWR>>music label early in 2021, and they provided a rich profile of how Gulda approached the compositions that he brought into his repertoire. Ironically, a much more different profile of Gulda was made available a little over a month ago when the Profil (yes!) label released a six-CD collection entitled The Young Friedrich Gulda. The earliest of the recordings was made when the pianist was in his late teens in London in December of 1948. At the other end is a collection of recordings made in September and October of 1957 accounting for Beethoven’s Opus 13 (“Pathétique”) piano sonata and selected compositions by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. By way of perspective, those last recordings predate his Beethoven sonata project by about a decade.

Readers may have observed that this “biographical” (scare quotes intended) account overlooks entirely the years of World War II. This was a period when Gulda first cultivated interest in jazz. This was a bold move, since he was living under Nazi occupation and the government had prohibited such music being played. Nevertheless, he and his friend Joe Zawinul were rambunctious teenagers, who relished venturing into “forbidden” territory. (Hopefully, some readers will associate Zawinul’s name with either Weather Report or recordings he made with Miles Davis.) This side of Gulda’s interests was documented in the third of the SWR>>music albums, which consisted of recordings made at the 1971 Heidelberger Jazztage.

However, while Gulda was not afraid to be adventurous during the War, his early ventures into recording were, for the most part, dutifully straightforward. The single CD devoted to Beethoven piano sonatas comes across as preparation for his complete-sonatas project. It is complemented by the other First Viennese School CD devoted to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, coupling the K. 576 sonata in D major with two piano concertos, K. 503 in C major and K. 537 in D major, both performed with the New Symphony Orchestra in London, conducted by Anthony Collins. There is also a single CD for Frédéric Chopin, which pairs the four ballades with the first piano concerto, Opus 11 in E minor, this time with Adrian Boult conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

The composer that received the most attention is Claude Debussy. One CD is devoted to both of the Préludes books, and the following CD begins with Suite bergamasque, the Pour le piano suite, and “L’isle joyeuse.” The remainder of that second CD is devoted to Maurice Ravel, beginning with the Valses nobles et sentimentales collection, followed by the finger-busting Gaspard de la nuit suite, and concluding with the more modest sonatina.

The other symphonic offerings are Carl Maria von Weber’s Opus 79 “Konzertstück” in F minor and Richard Strauss’ “Burleske” in D minor. Gulda performs the Weber with Volkmar Andrae conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. The Strauss offering is again conducted by Collins, this time leading the London Symphony Orchestra. It is preceded by a selection of thirteen Strauss songs with Gulda accompanying soprano Hilde Güden.

This makes for an impressive span of diversity for a young up-and-coming pianist. If the interpretations tend to the conventional side, that is probably because Gulda was still “testing the waters.” Nevertheless, there is much to draw attention to his keyboard talents in this collection, even if the more adventurous side of those talents had yet to emerge.

Masur’s Early Nineteenth-Century Repertoire

As I continue to work my way through the Warner Classics 70-CD box set of recordings made by conductor Kurt Masur, I realize that I had neglected to add Franz Schubert to what I had called my “Beethoven+Mozart” category. This may have been because Schubert’s music was limited to a single CD, one of whose tracks consisted on Franz Liszt’s transcription of the D. 760 “Wanderer” fantasy. This was one of the New York Philharmonic recordings featuring pianist Boris Berezovsky as the soloist. Masur had previously recorded this music with pianist Michel Béroff performing with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra on an album devoted entirely to Liszt. The only other composer represented on that CD was Carl Maria von Weber, whose Polonaise brillante was also transcribed by Liszt.

This may be a lame excuse for coupling Schubert with Weber, rather than Beethoven and Mozart. However, that is how things turned out in my efforts to classify all of the content over such a large collection of CDs. The fact is that, in trying to establish the early nineteenth century as a category, both Weber and Schubert emerged. in this particular collection, as “bit players.” Setting aside the Liszt transcriptions, Weber is represented only by his two clarinet concertos, Opus 73 in F minor and Opus 74 in E-flat major; and that CD has “bonus tracks” of clarinetist Sharon Kam playing the Opus 48 Grand duo concertant with pianist Itamar Golan. (The concertos were recorded with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.) In addition to Berezovsky playing Liszt’s take on D. 760, the Schubert CD frames that selection with two symphonies, D. 200 in D major and D. 759 in B minor, best known as the “Unfinished.”

These are all engaging performances that deserve multiple listening experiences. However, Masur’s real attention was drawn to three composers born on three successive years: 1809 (Felix Mendelssohn), 1810 (Robert Schumann), and 1811 (Franz Liszt). Mendelssohn is represented by all five of his symphonies, his two piano concertos, the Opus 22 Capriccio brillant, and the incidental music composed for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Opus 21 overture and the Opus 61 collection of the rest of the music.

Where this repertoire is concerned, I had the advantage of listening to Masur conduct an all-Mendelssohn program with the San Francisco Symphony in March of 2011. This included both the Midsummer music (with chorus and vocal soloists) and the Opus 90 (“Italian”) symphony in A major. That was a memorable evening for me in Davies Symphony Hall; and, to a great extent, the Gewandhaus recordings in this collection reawakened those memories.

Schumann is given a somewhat more modest account, which is still comprehensive. The four symphonies are coupled with two of the three concertos, the Opus 54 piano concerto in A minor and the Opus 129 cello concerto, also in A minor. The soloists are Cécile Ousset and Natalia Gutman, respectively. All of the Schumann recordings were made with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. This may strike some as a rather modest share; but, taken as a whole, these six compositions give Schumann’s approach to orchestral composition a fair shake.

Wilhelm von Kaulbach’s 1856 portrait of Franz Liszt (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

The fact is that the lion’s share of this portion of the collection goes to Liszt. Most of that share is devoted to the thirteen symphonic poems; and they basically earn Liszt the status of one of the “founding fathers” of program music. The collection also includes the two piano concertos and a modest assortment of other compositions, most of which have narrative connotations. There is more than enough here to convince the listener of just how adventurous Liszt could be. Nevertheless, Mazur’s commitment to being comprehensive is likely to require more than the usual degree of patience where the attentive listener is concerned. This is music that is better sampled in pieces; and, even at the piece-by-piece level, some of the works go on for longer than most listeners might prefer.

Quite honestly, when confronted with this Liszt collection, I was reminded of the motto that used to be associated with the Sunday edition of The New York Times: “You don’t have to read it all, but it’s good to know it’s all there!”

Mitropoulos in the Early Nineteenth Century

This second article about the performances offered in Sony Classical’s Dimitri Mitropoulos: The Complete RCA and Columbia Album Collection will focus on composers active during the first half of the nineteenth century. This is a period in music history that often has many serious listeners cringing over the prospect of another same-old-same-old performance. More often than not, I tend to be one of those listeners; but it did not take long for me to appreciate that Mitropoulos was not one to follow the beaten path of others.

I suppose that the portion of this repertoire that had the greatest impact on my listening practices involved the music of Felix Mendelssohn. Just about any Mendelssohn performance I have experienced, in concert as well of on recordings, has left me with the impression of an interpretation that was skilled but glib. This has definitely been the case in past encounters with the symphonies, only two of which are included in the Mitropoulos anthology. One of these, however, has two different performances, one with the Minnesota Orchestra and the other with the New York Philharmonic. This is the Opus 56 (“Scotch”) symphony in A minor. On the Philharmonic album it is coupled with the Opus 107 (“Reformation”) symphony in D major.

All three of these recordings convey a sense a sense of urgency in Mitropoulos’ intense (but never over-the-top) approaches to tempo. These are interpretations that leave the serious listener on the edge of his/her/their seat. However familiar the score may be, one attends to the recording intently, wondering what Mitropoulos will do to each successive episode in the score. To some extent that urgency also arises in his approach to conducting the Opus 64 violin concerto in E minor with Zino Francescatti as his soloist.

The “seeds” of Mitropoulos’ rhetoric also emerge in his Minnesota recordings of Robert Schumann symphonies. These account for Opus 61 (the second) in C major and Opus 97 (the third “Rhenish”) in E-flat major. Recordings from this period also include Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 11 (first) piano concerto in E minor, as well as Carl Maria von Weber’s “Jubilee” overture. These recording also hold the attention, but the grip is not as compelling.

After his move to New York, Mitropoulos shifted his recording attention to Hector Berlioz. Once again, this involves placing the all-too-familiar Opus 14 “Symphonie Fantastique” in a refreshingly new perspective. Most important is that Mitropoulos brings to light ventures into unconventional instrumentation that were clearly intended by the composer but are often “smoothed over” by too many conductors. Mind you, this may well have involved a first-rate working relationship between the conductor and his engineering team; but the results are eyebrow-raising, however they came to be!

That relationship also surfaces in his recording of the Opus 17 “Romeo and Juliet.” Probably because of limitations of space, the album consists only of the orchestral score, meaning that the vocal movements have been elided. Having listening to Opus 17 in its entirety in concert, I cannot complain about those elisions. There is something disheartening about watching vocalists (particularly favorite vocalists) just sitting there twiddling their thumbs over most of the course of the evening!

On the other hand the one remaining album features soprano Eleanor Steber. It includes the Opus 7 “Les nuits d’été” (summer nights), followed by a selection of songs with orchestral accompaniment. This is definitely a satisfying approach to music that deserves more attention than it tends to get. The one problem is that the sleeve for this CD only includes the texts for the Opus 7 songs (and those are barely legible). The accompanying book has the information about the remaining songs on the album, but no texts are provided anywhere.

Finally, on the Minnesota recording of Mendelssohn’s Opus 56, rather than coupling the symphony with another symphony, there is a performance of the Opus 22 Capriccio Brillant in B minor. The solo pianist is Joanna Graudan. The final track of the album is then devoted to Mendelssohn’s own orchestral arrangement of the Scherzo movement from his Opus 20 octet in E-flat major. The tempo for this movement is Allegro leggierissimo, and Mitropoulos is particularly impressive in how he can elicit that leggierissimo from a full ensemble. To some extent that effect arises from his almost breakneck pace, making this performance as stunning as the original setting for eight strings (if not more so).

Kremer’s DG Chamber Music: 19th Century

Having accounted yesterday for violinist Gidon Kremer’s latest ECM New Series album of Mieczysław Weinberg’s solo violin sonatas, I shall return to working my way through the 2015 Deutsche Grammophon (DG) collection, Gidon Kremer: Violin Sonatas and Other Chamber Works. I began this month by writing about the eighteenth-century selections in this collection; and this morning I shall move on to the nineteenth century. This is the century that receives the most attention in the anthology.

In that context the most generous allocation goes to Franz Schubert with three CDs. These account for the three sonatinas for violin and piano: D. 384 in D major, D. 385 in A minor, and D. 408 in G minor. Taken as a whole, those pieces fill a single CD. Another CD is devoted to the D. 574 sonata in A major (not published until after Schubert’s death) and the D. 934 fantasia in C major (also published posthumously). The remaining CD is devoted entirely to one more posthumous composition, the D. 803 octet in F major.

The last selection was recorded during performances on the tour of a program entitled Music from Lockenhaus – Gidon Kremer and Friends. Before Kremerata Baltica was launched, Kremer founded the Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival in 1981; and in 1987 Kremer took that show on the road. The Lockenhaus musicians that joined him for D. 803 were violinist Isabelle van Keulen, violist Tabea Zimmermann, cellist David Geringas, bassist Alois Posch, clarinetist Eduard Brunner, hornist Radovan Vlatković, and bassoonist Klaus Thunemann. I had the good fortune to listen to D. 803 in concert back in the Eighties, and I have been a sucker for it ever since. However, my overall “Schubert addiction” has me “hooked” on all three of the CDs in this collection.

In order of quantity, the next composer to receive “multiple” attention is Johannes Brahms with performances of all three of the violin sonatas: Opus 78 in G major, Opus 100 in A major, and Opus 108 in D minor. These are also personal favorites. While I still prefer Schubert over Brahms, Kremer’s chemistry with pianist Valery Afanassiev definitely draws attention to the virtues of all three of these sonatas. The final “multiples” composer is Robert Schumann with the two sonatas he composed late in life: Opus 105 in A minor and Opus 121 in D minor. Kremer performs these with pianist Martha Argerich. While she has never been my favorite pianist, I was glad to see the attention given to Schumann’s chamber music in this collection.

That leaves two remaining composers at the opposite ends of the timeline. At one extreme there is Carl Maria von Weber’s piano quartet in B-flat major. This is music that deserves more attention than it receives. Performing with violist Veronika Hagen, cellist Clemens Hagen, and pianist Vadim Sakharov, Kremer makes a convincing case for listening to this music. At the other extreme one encounters Ferruccio Busoni with his Opus 36a (second) sonata in E minor. This is another recording that Kremer made with Afanassiev. All of the movements of this sonata are played without interruption, concluding with a set of six variations on a theme capped off with a coda. I have had a long-standing interest in Busoni’s compositions, so its mere presence in this collection is sufficient to draw my attention! The more familiar I become with the Busoni canon, the better equipped I shall be to evaluate specific performances!

Benny Goodman Orchestra on SWR JAZZHAUS

courtesy of Naxos of America

Those that have been following this site for some time are probably aware of my interest (facilitated by Naxos of America) in the SWR JAZZHAUS albums of recordings of jazz performances taken from radio broadcasts in Germany. (SWR is the South-Western Broadcasting network in that country, previously known as SWF for Südwestfunk.) Indeed, since the onset of the COVID pandemic, my spirits have been lifted by two releases in the Jazz Heroes series, the “heroes” being Dizzy Gillespie and Oscar Pettiford.

This past November I learned that SWR JAZZHAUS also had a Big Bands Live series, which had released an SWF Jazz-Session program from October 15, 1959 performed by the Benny Goodman Orchestra. Probably because of distribution problems, the CD version only appears to be available from overseas sources, such as Presto Music; but, as of this past January 7, the album has been available for download from an Amazon.com Web page. Furthermore, the full-album download includes the PDF of the accompanying booklet (eight pages, two of which are in German).

The program consists of two sets, each of which would fit comfortably on a single CD. The first consists of nine tracks, the first of which is a very brief, but obligatory, account of Goodman’s “theme song,” “Let’s Dance,” composed by Gregory Stone and Joseph Bonime. (For those unfamiliar with this tune, it is a jazzed-up version of one of the waltz themes in Carla Maria von Weber’s “Invitation to the Dance.” Given that Hector Berlioz had orchestrated Weber’s original piano version, a jazz account of that source strikes me as fair game!) The remaining seven tracks would fill a second CD. The last of them is a medley of seven tunes from the Goodman Band repertoire, including favorites, such as Louis Prima’s “Sing, Sing, Sing” (With a Swing).”

This session also featured Anita O’Day as guest vocalist. Indeed, one might even say that Goodman’s own clarinet work tended to take second place to O’Day’s vocal interpretations. As a result, Goodman comes across as graciously modest in his performances as a soloist, paying more attention to leading an ensemble to support O’Day.

Mind you, that ensemble had some familiar members that, these days, tend to be better known for their combo work. The most notable of those would be Red Norvo on vibraphone and Flip Philips on tenor saxophone. Indeed, Goodman’s “orchestra” is actually more of a “large combo” of ten instrumentalists (including Goodman himself). In the context of my own preference for the combos on the Jazz Heroes album, I found this account of Goodman more engaging than what I expect from “big band” performances.

McGill-Chien Duo Makes Recording Debut

courtesy of Naxos of America

San Francisco readers may be familiar with clarinetist Anthony McGill, even though his “day job” is Principal Clarinet of the New York Philharmonic. He came here to visit almost exactly a month ago as guest artist in the Uncovered series curated by the Catalyst Quartet for San Francisco Performances. The occasion was a performance of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Opus 10 clarinet quintet in F-sharp minor, which this group had previously recorded for a series of albums, also entitled Uncovered, produced by Azica Records.

When I wrote about that performance, I began as follows:

It is a bit hard to listen to this quintet without thinking of Johannes Brahms Opus 115 quintet in B minor. Both are in a minor key, which evokes a variety of emotions of introspection. It would not surprise me to learn that the Brahms quintet inspired Coleridge-Taylor to undertake his Opus 10. Nevertheless, if there are “reflections” of Brahms in Coleridge-Taylor’s score, they are the reflections of the many facets of a finely-cut gem.

As a result, I came away more than a little curious about how McGill would approach the Brahms repertoire. It turns out that McGill had recorded Opus 115 with the Pacifica Quartet for an album released by Cedille Records in May of 2014.

Exactly a month ago Cedille released its latest album of McGill, and the new release also accounts for Brahms’ interest in the clarinet towards the end of his life. The release is a duo album of McGill performing with pianist Gloria Chien. The two of them present Brahms’ two Opus 120 sonatas, the first in the key of F minor and the second in E-flat major. Since this accounts for less than 45 minutes of music, the album also includes “before” and “after” selections. The earliest work is Carl Maria von Weber’s Opus 48 “Grand Duo Concertant” in three movements. The most recent is Jessie Montgomery’s duo “Peace,” which she composed in 2020 for either violin or clarinet and piano.

I have to say that I have long had considerable interest in not just the Brahms catalog in general but also those works he composed late in his life. Some readers may know (perhaps through reading my articles) that, at the age of 57, following the premiere of his Opus 111 (second) string quintet in 1890, Brahms thought it was time to retire. Then he happened to listen to performances by the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld, and in 1891 he composed both the Opus 114 clarinet trio in A minor and the Opus 115 clarinet quintet in B minor. This led to what some inclined to prankishness have called “the potato chip effect.” Brahms could not composed just one (or even) two pieces of chamber music for Mühlfeld; and in 1894 he concluded his “streak” with the two Opus 120 sonatas.

Back when I played clarinet in high school, these pieces were all beyond my grasp. Having gotten over any obsession with playing them, I can now sit back and enjoy listening to them without any pangs of frustration. One result is that I have already accumulated a variety of recordings, each of which holds my attention in its own characteristic way; and those recordings have supplemented a generous number of opportunities to listen to these pieces in performance. In that context I have to say that McGill is up against a lot of competition, and I am not yet sure what impact he will have on my listening practices.

On the other hand my interest in Montgomery’s work has been slowly but surely increasing. The only track on this album that is shorter than “Peace” is that of the Allegretto grazioso (third) movement of the first clarinet sonata. Without succumbing to the repetitive structures that characterized minimalism at the end of the last century, Montgomery seems to know how to express volumes with limited resources in a short period of time. To paraphrase Buckminster Fuller, she knows how to say more and more with less and less. I look forward to encountering “Peace” in performance in either the clarinet or the violin version.

Gidon Kremer on Warner: Nineteenth Century

Cover of the collection being discussed (from the Amazon.com Web page)

Readers may recall that I spent some of my time at the end of October and the beginning of November anticipating the Warner Classics release of Gidon Kremer: The Warner Collection by working my way through the earlier Deutsche Grammophon (DG) 22-CD box of concerto recordings that were anthologized to celebrate Kremer’s 70th birthday (on February 27, 2017). Originally scheduled for release on November 12, the Warner collection of 21 CDs was delayed until after Thanksgiving, becoming available this past November 26. To be more accurate about the title, none of these recordings were made originally for Warner. They were made for Teldec, EMI Classics, and Erato, all of which are now Warner “properties.”

When I wrote about the DG anthology, I partitioned the repertoire historically into compositions from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century. The Warner anthology does not include any eighteenth-century music. The nineteenth century selections are decidedly fewer than those of the twentieth. Thus, I shall begin with the nineteenth century, taking more time to assess the full scope of Kremer’s twentieth-century repertoire.

For the most part these are all concerto recordings. Once again, the concerto by Ludwig van Beethoven (Opus 61 in D major) is the most impressive offering. Readers may recall that Kremer’s recording with Neville Mariner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields was one of the high points of the DG collection. This was because Kremer used it as a platform to perform cadenzas composed by Alfred Schnittke. The Warner recording was made with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt. This time Kremer uses Beethoven’s own cadenza as a point of departure; but, inspired by Schnittke, he adds his own set of provocative twists, including adding a piano part, played by Vadim Sakharov, to the cadenza passages. The resulting cadenzas are thus as eyebrow-raising as those Schnittke had concocted.

Beyond that, this modest collection is even more modest because two of the concertos are given two different recordings. The concerto by Johannes Brahms (Opus 77 in D major) was recorded with both Herbert von Karajan (with the Berlin Philharmonic) and Harnoncourt (with the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam). More surprising is that there are two accounts of the concerto by Robert Schumann (WoO 23 in D minor). This time Harnoncourt is again conducting the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, and the other conductor is Riccardo Muti leading the Philharmonia Orchestra.

Schumann also figures in the modest chamber music offerings. Kremer is accompanied by pianist Martha Argerich in a performance of the Opus 121 (second) sonata in D minor. Then there is a duo album with pianist Andrei Gavrilov, which features Carl Maria von Weber’s Opus 48, which he entitled “Grand duo concertant;” and the CD concludes with a short set of variations by Gioachino Rossini.

Barbirolli at Hallé: 19th-Century Assortment

The remainder of the nineteenth-century repertoire performed by the Hallé Orchestra conducted by John Barbirolli amounts to a relatively mixed assortment. Indeed, in the Sir John Barbirolli: The Complete Warner Recordings collection, many of the nineteenth-century selections share CDs with either the eighteenth century or the twentieth. On the basis of the reproduced images of LP album covers on the CD sleeves, I would hazard a guess that these colocations have more to do with Warner Classics trying to fill individuals CDs as efficiently as possible, rather than providing collections of “good neighbors.”

Consider the twentieth CD in the box. It begins with the Viennese Gemütlichkeit of Franz von Suppé and Johann Strauss (both father and son), which then segues across the Atlantic Ocean to the fourth of the Bachianas Brasileiras suites by Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos. The listener is then shuttled back across the Atlantic to the Finland of Jean Sibelius for “The Swan of Tuonela” from his Opus 22 Lemminkäinen Suite. The journey then ends at the 1952 Salzburg Festival, which hosted the world premiere of Richard Strauss’ opera Die Liebe der Danae (the love of Danae). Barbirolli conducts two symphonic fragments from this opera arranged by Clemens Krauss, who had conducted that premiere.

To be fair most of these recordings were made during a single two-day recording session in January of 1955. Nevertheless, the organization of recording sessions rarely takes into account how appropriate listening experiences should be planned. Thus, when the LP albums were released, one grouped together Villa-Lobos, Sibelius, and Richard Strauss, while the other was the Gemütlichkeit collection.

An illustration of Peer Gynt for an 1896 book of Norwegian folk tales (by Peter Nicolai Arbo, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Only two of the CDs are devoted to a single composer. The composer on one is Edvard Grieg; and it makes for an appealing departure from the ordinary, particularly where the music for Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt play is concerned. Rather than confine himself to the two suites that Grieg prepared, Barbirolli extended those eight selections with another four, arranging the twelve tracks in their “order of appearance” in Ibsen’s narrative. This includes vocal solos by sopranos Patricia Clark and Sheila Armstrong and the Ambrosian Singers chorus adding to the frenzy of the Mountain King episode. The other composer to fill an entire CD is Hector Berlioz, whose album couples the Opus 14 “Symphonie fantastique” with three instrumental excerpts from the Opus 24 “dramatic legend” La damnation de Faust (the damnation of Faust).

Sadly, only two of the Brahms symphonies are included in this collection, Opus 90 (third) in F major and Opus 98 (fourth) in E minor. Curiously, each is introduced by one of Carl Maria von Weber’s opera overtures, coupling the early nineteenth century to its latter decades. The good news is that Barbirolli would later record the entire cycle of Brahms symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic. Similarly, Mahler is represented only by his first symphony in D major; but most of his symphonies were composed in the twentieth century. The Mahler tracks are preceded by the overture to Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel opera (whose premiere in Hamburg, following its first performance in Weimar, was conducted by Mahler).

Taken as a whole, this is a “what you get is what you get” assortment. The performances are consistently perceptive, often providing the attentive listener with new approaches to old chestnuts. There is also one twentieth-century offering that allows Barbirolli to exercise his sense of humor, the divertissement that Jacques Ibert composed in 1930. Sadly, I have never heard this performed in concert; and I have not heard a recording of it since my undergraduate days. I was glad to discover that the music is still as funny as it was when I first encountered it.

Barbirolli at Hallé: First Viennese School

Having completed my coverage of the 78 RPM recordings of performances conducted by John Barbirolli in both Great Britain and the United States, I can now move on to the “higher fidelity” recordings found on the remaining 82 CDs in Sir John Barbirolli: The Complete Warner Recordings. As I observed when I first began this project, dividing this collection into a manageable set of categories is more challenging than it was when I discussed the Decca recordings of Herbert von Karajan. Fortunately, there is a “top level” classification that will probably be the most viable, particularly because it is the one that RCA used in organizing their anthology of the recordings of Arturo Toscanini.

The Free Trade Hall in Manchester, home of the Hallé Orchestra during Barbirolli’s tenure (photograph by Bernt Rostad, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)

That organization is based on the ensembles being conducted. Barbirolli’s major affiliation was with the Hallé Orchestra, based in Manchester. When Hamilton Harty announced in 1932 that he would spend some time conducting overseas, four guest conductors were invited to lead the ensemble during his absence. Barbirolli was one of them, the other three being Edward Elgar, Thomas Beecham, and Pierre Monteux. As a result the Hallé Orchestra figured significantly in the 78 RPM albums that Barbirolli recorded; and he was invited to return to the ensemble after he left the United States.

To call Barbirolli’s subsequent tenure with the Hallé productive would be the height of understatement. It did not take me long to realize that this category was in dire need of division into subcategories. On the grounds that I have to start somewhere, I shall follow the lead of the Decca project by beginning with the CDs devoted primarily to the First Viennese School composers, but restricting my attention to orchestral music. After that, however, I have to depart from the chronological approach. Given Barbirolli’s contribution to the recorded repertoire, I feel that the “Viennese” category should be followed by an “English” one, again for orchestral music, covering the recordings that Barbirolli made of British compositions, regardless of when they were written. Where “everything else” is concerned, the bulk of the recordings involve nineteenth-century compositions. However, I shall provide yet another subdivision, first grouping the music of Antonín Dvořák together with that of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, after which the remaining nineteenth-century composers will be allotted a single subcategory. Then, there will be a separate category for Jean Sibelius, whose repertoire crosses from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Finally, the concertante and vocal Hallé recordings will fill out Barbirolli’s recordings with the ensemble.

The remaining instrumental offerings will involve three groupings of ensembles:

1. The Philharmonia Orchestra and the New Philharmonia Orchestra
2. The London Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Orchestra
3. The “continental” ensembles: the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, and the Orchestre de Paris

The final recording will then cover the opera albums. It goes without saying that this project is likely to take some time; and, as they like to say in advertising, the organization will be subject to change without notice! That said, let me now turn my attention to the six First Viennese School CDs in the collection.

As in the Karajan collection, the primary offerings are the symphonies. I was impressed that Joseph Haydn should get the most attention with a single symphony on three of the CDs in this group. In “order of appearance” these are Hoboken I/ 83 (“The Hen”) in G major, Hoboken I/96 (“Miracle”) in D major, and Hoboken I/88 in G major. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven both only get two symphonies.

However, the first Mozart symphony, K. 201 in A major, is an impressive one, particularly with the opening in medias res measures that leave the listener wondering if (s)he missed something. Barbirolli’s approach elicited just the right combination of effects, a clear sense of beginning but an equally clear sense that the beginning had interrupted “something else in progress.” The other Mozart symphony, K. 551 (“Jupiter”) in C major, is far more familiar and known for the complex counterpoint in the final movement, given a distinctively clear account through Barbirolli’s leadership. There is a similar contrast in the two Beethoven selections, the early Opus 21 (first) in C major and the later Opus 83 (eighth) in F major. In the full canon of Beethoven symphonies, these two have the most explicit reflections of a sense of humor, and Barbirolli definitely wanted to make sure that listeners “got the joke.”

More important is that this is a First Viennese School account that includes Franz Schubert. Ironically, he is represented by two performances of the same symphony, D. 944 (“Great”) in C major. I suspect that Barbirolli decided that his first monaural long-playing recording did not provide an adequate acoustic account of how Schubert had deployed the full resources of a symphony orchestra. I am inclined to agree. However much I have internalized this music, I felt that more of the subtle details of instrumentation could be apprehended in the stereophonic recording.

This category also includes two “honorable mention” appearances. The CD with the Hoboken I/96 symphony has an overture by Carl Maria von Weber, composed for his opera Die Freischütz. Weber had little to do with musical life in Vienna; but Mozart’s wife Constanze was Weber’s cousin (and made it a point to remind others of this fact, particularly after her husband’s death). There are also two brief selections by Felix Mendelssohn, who, like Weber, was German and never advanced very far into nineteenth-century practices.

Finally, I should offer a note of clarification to those that have already bought this collection and have been listening to the CDs. Two of them cross category boundaries: One concludes with Jean Sibelius’ Opus 105 (seventh) symphony in C major; and the other concludes with Johannes Brahms’ Opus 90 (third) symphony in F major. Both of these break sharply with the rest of their respective albums, and they will be discussed for their presence in their appropriate categories!

Profil Presents Sinopoli as Conductor and Composer

courtesy of Naxos of America

About two weeks ago Profil released its latest anthology, a set of five CDs collected under the title Giuseppe Sinopoli & Staatskapelle Dresden. Note that, unlike the last Profil anthology discussed on this site, the word “conductor” is not included in the title, even though the cover photograph (see above) shows Sinopoli wielding his baton. The reason is that two of the tracks in this collection were recorded after Sinopoli’s death, providing examples of his efforts as a composer. Sinopoli died on April 20, 2001; and the earlier of these two recordings was made shortly thereafter, on October 6, 2001. Peter Ruzicka conducts the Dresden ensemble in a performance of a symphonic fragment that Sinopoli extracted from his opera Lou Salomé, which is probably his most famous composition. The other track has Sylvain Cambreling conducting with cello soloist Peter Bruns playing the third in a series of compositions entitled “Tombeau d’Armor.” This recording was made from concert performances on March 5 and 6, 2004.

The CD with these two tracks also includes one of Sinopoli conducting his own music. “Hommage à Costanzo Porta” amounts to a deconstruction of polyphonic motets by the sixteenth-century Italian composer of that name. Sinopoli’s “commercial” recordings suggest that he was particularly interested in the music of Webern during his tenure in Dresden. His approach to Porta suggests familiarity with the similar approach that Webern took with the six-voice polyphony included in Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1079, The Musical Offering. Sinopoli’s piece is much shorter, but it takes more adventurous departures from its source material.

When it comes to Sinopoli’s achievements as a conductor, I have to confess that my experiences have been relatively limited. My “first contact” came from his recording with the Czech Philharmonic of Johannes Brahms’ Opus 45 Ein deutsches Requiem, which was included in Deutsche Grammophon’s “complete edition” vinyls of Brahms’ music. Ironically, when that collection was reissued on CD, the Sinopoli recording was replaced by one of Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Vienna Philharmonic, perhaps in response to bad feelings that grew out of critics, such as Norman Lebrecht, writing at great length about their discontent with Sinopoli leading the Philharmonia Orchestra.

For my part, on the other hand, I have found it difficult to take seriously anything I have read that Lebrecht has written. I have the Deutsche Grammophon box of all of the Mahler recordings that Sinopoli made with the Philharmonia Orchestra, and I have never been discontented with any of them. As a result, I was particularly interested in comparing his recording of Mahler’s ninth symphony made at the end of his career with the Philharmonia in 1994 with the one he made in Dresden in 1997. My bottom line: The Philharmonia recording is much better engineered, but the recording on Profil seems to have been made during a single concert performance. I would not want to pass on either of them.

In terms of quantity, Mahler definitely dominates the Profil collection. In addition to the ninth there is a 1999 recording of the fourth with soprano Juliane Banse. Those that can manage with German will probably also appreciate a little over fifteen minutes of commentary from Sinopoli included on the same CD as the symphony itself. The only other composer to have two pieces recorded is Richard Strauss with both the Opus 24 “Death and Transfiguration” and the Opus 40 “Ein Heldenleben” (a hero’s life) tone poems. Both of these seem to have been recorded at the same concert, which took place on January 10 and 11, 2001. Personally, I am not sure that I could have taken that much Strauss on a single concert program; but I am happy to report that Sinopoli knew how to play up the music in Opus 40 without giving in to all of the composer’s personal preening!

There is also a concert recording from September 22, 1998 that couples two overtures, Carl Maria von Weber’s for Oberon and Richard Wagner’s for Rienzi. For those that like dramatic intensity, these two make for a good pair. Personally, I wish the CD had pressed them back-to-back rather than inserting Heldenleben between them. One would have better sense of Weber having been part of Wagner’s “roots” when he was just beginning to venture into serious opera.

The remaining selection in the collection is Robert Schumann’s Opus 120 (fourth) symphony in D minor. I have lost track of the number of recordings I have of this symphony. This Sinopoli recording is unlikely to drag me away from my preference for Sergiu Celibidache, but those not as familiar with this symphony may benefit from Sinopoli’s approach to the score.

My only real discontent is that Profil was not able to provide a wider account of Sinopoli’s work in Dresden. However, that just means that I am all the more depressed that he succumbed to a heart attack at the age of 54. This is a case in which we have to take what we can get; and, not withstanding Lebrecht’s ongoing campaign (at least I think it is ongoing), there is much to value in this final stage of Sinopoli’s recorded legacy.

Lewis Couples Schubert to Weber in Latest Album

courtesy of PIAS

This Friday PIAS will release a new harmonia mundi album of the latest project by pianist Paul Lewis. Over the course of my writing, I have accounted for three two-CD albums of Lewis playing the solo piano music of Franz Schubert. The new album will present one of the sonatas he has not yet recorded, D. 575 in B major. This time, however, the Schubert selection will be preceded by a sonata by Carl Maria von Weber, his Opus 39 (second) sonata in A-flat major.

Schubert was a little more than ten years younger than Weber. Ironically, he came to know both Weber and Ludwig van Beethoven in the same year, 1822, but never established much of a relationship with either of them. Nevertheless, if one is to think in terms of how “abstract” music began to take on “dramatic” qualities, one could probably draw a relatively clear line that would run from Beethoven through Weber to Schubert. For those who cannot wait to trace this line, Amazon.com is currently taking pre-orders on the Web page for Lewis’ album.

Regardless of that encounter, it is unclear how much Schubert knew or thought about Weber. He probably knew that Weber’s Euryanthe opera had been a failure; but that would, at best, have been cold comfort for the fact that his own ventures into opera were no more successful (and probably less). The more interesting question would have been whether he knew of Weber’s four-hand piano music (a genre in which Schubert excelled prodigiously) or the extent to which Weber worked in shorter forms for solo piano as well as sonatas. It would not surprise me if those of us that have built up libraries of recorded solo piano performances have better knowledge of Weber than Schubert ever bothered to acquire!

Sadly, that knowledge does not do a new recording of Opus 39 many favors. For better or worse, Weber seems to have had a toolbox of tropes that would serve him well in the genre of chamber music (including solo piano music). It will not take much familiarity with the Weber catalog to detect at least some of those tropes in Opus 39; and the fact that they tend to emerge as “all-purpose” devices tends to undermine the composer’s efforts to evoke intense dramatic undercurrents. Nevertheless, Lewis certainly does what he can to cast Weber’s sonata in a positive light.

Ironically, D. 575 was composed in August of 1817, meaning that it predates his encounters with Weber and Beethoven. Unfortunately, it was never published during Schubert’s lifetime. The music only saw the light of day in 1844 thanks to Anton Diabelli’s publishing company. (For the record, Schubert was one of the “composers other than Beethoven” to have contributed a variation to the waltz theme that Diabelli circulated among 51 composers. Weber, on the other hand, was not on Diabelli’s list!)

It is also worth noting that Weber’s sonata was first published in 1816, meaning that there is at least some possibility that Schubert was aware of it before he began work on D. 575. However, it is unlikely that Weber served as a source of influence. If Schubert needed motivation to get his juices flowing from earlier solo piano compositions, it is much more probable that he would have turned to the piano sonatas that Beethoven had completed by then (such as the Opus 57 “Appassionata” in F minor, which had been published in 1807). This is not to suggest that Schubert used any of Beethoven’s sonatas as models. However, there are adventurous qualities in D. 575 that may have been prompted by Schubert’s efforts to play Beethoven sonatas; and those listening to this album may well come to the conclusion that the results of those efforts do a good job of leaving Weber’s Opus 39 trailing in the dust.

My personal feeling is that Weber would have been better served by an all-Weber album, rather than one coupling him with Schubert; and, for my own part, I would have been happy to have another two-CD album of Lewis playing Schubert come my way!

Gould Before his Break with Public Concerts

courtesy of Naxos of America

Last year was when I first began to take an interest in historical recordings released by Urania Records. As readers can probably guess (if they do not actually recall), I was attracted to Urania for their recordings of pianist Sviatoslav Richter, both of which were two-CD sets. The first of these came out at the beginning of April and consisted entirely of piano sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven. This was followed by the July release of an album that devoted one CD to Franz Schubert and the second to Franz Liszt.

The most recent of these two-CD albums was released this past Friday; and the pianist now being presented in Glenn Gould. The collection consists almost entirely of works for piano and orchestra, the only exception being Beethoven’s WoO 80 set of 32 variations in C minor. As of this writing, Amazon.com has yet to offer it in physical form; but it is available for download as an MP3 album.

Those familiar with Gould’s biography will know that all of these recordings were made before April 10, 1964, the date of his last public performance. Not one to mince words. Gould called the institution of the public concert a “force of evil” and even laid out his argument in a manifesto given the acronym GPAADAK for “Gould Plan for the Abolition of Applause and Demonstrations of All Kinds.” One of the more notorious instances of his ideology came on April 6, 1962, when he performed Johannes Brahms Opus 15 (first) concerto in D minor with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Due to a disagreement over tempo, Bernstein preceded the performance by addressing the audience to absolve himself of responsibility for the results.

Ironically, the Urania collection begins with that same concerto recorded only half a year later on October 9 with Peter Adler conducting the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. The tempo is, indeed, slower than what many would wish to associate with this concerto; but, to be fair, there is no metronome marking in the Breitkopf & Härtel edition of Brahms’ collected works edited by Hans Gál. The only tempo marking is Maestoso. “Majesty” has connotations of stateliness, which would mark a significant departure from the tendency of many conductors to play the movement as if it were a Mahlerian Stürmisch bewegt (the tempo marking for the second movement of that composer’s fifth symphony, which translates as “moving stormily”). Perhaps Gould was aware of Bernstein’s tendency to bring out the Sturm und Drang (storm and drive) in all things and was determined to push the pendulum in the opposite direction.

If that were the case, then there is no questioning my siding with Gould. The fact is that Brahms crammed an awful lot of notes into the first movement of his Opus 15 concerto, not only for the piano soloist but also for the ensemble. Churning up a stormy rhetoric runs the risk that many of those notes will get lost in the bombast. Both Gould and Adler seem to have shared the opinion that the audience should have the best possible opportunity to listen to all of those notes; and, while the recording technology has its limitations, this is a refreshingly clear account of a youthful, but still well-considered, effort.

The other concerto included in this album could not be more different, Beethoven’s Opus 19 (second) concerto in B-flat major. This recording was made in Stockholm on October 5, 1958 with Georg Ludwig Jochum conducting the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Like the Brahms concerto, this is an early composition; but its rhetorical stance is one of intimacy, which suggests that the orchestral resources should be those of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, rather than those of Mahler. Gould not only appreciates the intimacy of Beethoven’s rhetoric but also acknowledges how much the young Beethoven could take pleasure in the exercise of wit (perhaps while giving I-can-do-that-too nods to his former teacher, Joseph Haydn). Opus 19 is a concerto in which both the soloist and the ensemble can kick back and have fun with Beethoven’s score; and this recording makes it clear that all performers willingly bought into this attitude.

The other two concertante offerings on this album are both single-movement selections. Carl Maria von Weber’s Opus 79 Konzertstück in F minor is coupled with the Brahms, while Richard Strauss’ “Burleske” is coupled with the Beethoven. The Weber recording was made in Toronto in 1951 with Ernest MacMillan conducting the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, while the Strauss is another Baltimore recording with Adler conducting, made on January 3, 1962.

At the end of last year, I put forth the “modest proposal” that young pianists might be better served in performing Weber’s music before being pushed by “proud parents and relatives” into the Beethoven repertoire. Opus 79 is a perfect example of music that allows any number of opportunities for showing off technical dexterity free of any obligation to acknowledge Beethoven’s capacity for subtlety. As might be expected, Gould is as playful with Opus 79 as he is with Beethoven’s Opus 19; and in the Weber case his playfulness more than adequately compensates for an overall structure that does not run as deep as what one encounters in Beethoven. That playfulness is just as evident in the Strauss selection, which comes across as a confrontation between piano and timpani that is delivered with engaging mock seriousness.

Do these recordings refute Gould’s manifesto? Perhaps the real question is whom Gould wished to target. While I can appreciate Gould’s attitude towards many audiences, I have to wonder if his decision to bail on the concert stage was actually one to bail on New Yorkers. Living at a time when air travel was becoming more commonplace, he probably appreciated that, even if he chose to play only in remote locations, there might well be a core of fanatics that would follow him anywhere (not to mention New York Times critics with the budget to write about performances outside the five boroughs). Furthermore, touring only to more remote locations would probably not be cost-effective. Better to reject the whole scene in favor of a more conducive comfort zone!

Berlin Classics’ Collection of Weber’s Clarinet Music Gets American Distribution

This past February Berlin Classics released a two-CD album of the complete works for clarinet by Carl Maria von Weber. The clarinetist was the impressive young soloist Sebastian Manz, Principal Clarinet with the SWR Symphonieorchester, affiliated with Southwest German Radio (SWR) and administratively based in Stuttgart. The album divided neatly into one CD for chamber music and the other for orchestral works with the orchestra conducted by Antonio Méndez. The best-known chamber music is the Opus 34 clarinet quintet, which Manz plays with the casalQuartet. The remaining chamber works are performed with Martin Klett on piano. Until this past April, this album was only available through import; but it is now being distributed in the United States by Naxos of America.

In making these recordings Manz is not shy about acknowledging the influential role of jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman. Goodman was one of the first to record the second concerto (Opus 74 in E-flat major); but there was some controversy about his “jazzing-up” his performance with his own knapsack of rhetorical twists. Manz had no problem with Goodman’s approach. (For that matter, I do not have any problem either. It is hard to imagine that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ever “stuck to the text” when playing one of his piano concertos. Most likely he was taking liberties with that text long before he got to the cadenza!)

As a result, this is a highly personalized approach to playing Weber. If Weber’s own composition devices tended to be on the predictable side, Manz shows no problems in presenting them to the attentive listener with a refreshing layer of spontaneity. It is highly likely that most of the works on this album will be “first contact” encounters for all but clarinet students and enthusiasts. On the other hand pieces like the Opus 34 quintet and the Opus 26 concertino in E-flat major tend to get a fair share of exposure. The result is that it will be through these pieces that most listeners will be able to appreciate how Manz puts his own personal stamp on the music.

There are many who would quickly dismiss Weber for lacking the depth of his better-known contemporaries. However, this is a recording that prioritizes the making of music over the documenting of it. Manz is definitely a music-maker of the first order; and this album provides a first-rate introduction to his skills.

My only quibble has to do with the nuts-and-bolts of the production process. While the booklet provides many useful thoughts about the music itself, the reader learns about Klett’s contribution as pianist only in passing. An even greater slight is the failure to name the members of the casalQuartet. This may be Manz’ album, but all contributing musicians should be acknowledged for what they have contributed! Finally, there is no explicit explanation for the presence of Lars Olaf Schaper’s name on the back cover. He plays bass in the SWR Symphonieorchester; but he has been singled out because a bass has been added to the string quartet in the performance of the Opus 34 quintet (meaning that it has become a sextet)!

The San Francisco Performances 2017–2018 Virtuosi Series

The San Francisco Performances (SFP) Virtuosi Series is notable for its eclectic scope. Rather than focusing on a single genre or medium, the series brings together four outstanding performers, each with his/her own distinctive way of establishing his/her reputation. The emphasis of the four concerts in the 2017–2018 season will be on chamber music, but that involves honoring my person conviction that jazz is chamber music by other means. All of the concerts will begin at 7:30 p.m. in Herbst Theatre. The entrance to Herbst is the main entrance to the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue, located on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. The specific dates and their related performers are as follows:

Tuesday, November 7: Violinist Leila Josefowicz will make a welcome return to SFP. Those who try to follow her regularly know that she has also been a well-received visitor to Davies Symphony Hall for performances with the San Francisco Symphony. For this recital she will be joined by pianist John Novacek. The core of her program will consist of two twentieth-century sonatas written within half a decade of each other. The earlier of these will be the first of Sergei Prokofiev’s two sonatas for violin and piano (Opus 80 in F minor), which was completed after the end of the Second World War in 1946, although the composer began work on it in 1938. The Prokofiev sonata will be complemented by Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s 1951 sonata for solo violin. The program will conclude at the very end of the twentieth century with John Adams 1995 “Road Movies.” The opening selection will be Friedrich Hermann’s arrangement of Jean Sibelius’ Opus 44 “Valse Triste,” originally written as incidental music for Arvid Järnefelt's 1903 play Kuolema (death), whose author was the composer’s brother-in-law.

Friday, November 17: This program will offer the jazz perspective on chamber music. Regina Carter has had a long-standing relationship with SFP; and, between 1997 and 2001 she was the first SFP jazz Artist-in-Residence. She also received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2006. She honored her connection to SFP by writing “What Ruth Felt,” which she played at A Heartfelt Gala at the end of last September, a special concert to honor SFP founder and President Emeritus Ruth Felt. For her next visit she will lead a quintet in a program entitled Simply Ella. The legacy of jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald will be honored with performances of Carter’s own arrangements of iconic works performed by Fitzgerald ranging from love ballads to the mind-bending scat singing in her bebop interpretations.

Thursday, February 8: Jörg Widmann will return, once again, in his joint capacity as clarinetist and composer. He will be joined by pianist Gilles Vonsattel. Three of his compositions will be performed during the second half of the program. These will be his “Circus Dances” for solo piano, a set of five fragments (Bruchstücke, with no apparent connection to Max Bruch) for clarinet and piano, and a solo fantasia for clarinet. The other composers included on the program will be Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, and Carl Maria von Weber.

Wednesday, February 21: The final “visiting virtuoso” in the series will be flutist Emmanuel Pahud, who will be joined by pianist Alessio Bax, no stranger to the Bay Area, particularly through his involvement with Music at Menlo. The program will begin with Francis Poulenc’s sonata for flute and piano. The remainder of the program will involve Pahud taking the solo part in works originally written for other instruments. These will be Franz Schubert’s D. 821 sonata in A minor for arpeggione and piano, Schumann’s Opus 73 set of three fantasy pieces (Fantasiestücke), originally intended for clarinet and piano, and Mendelssohn’s 1838 violin sonata in F major, which was not published during the composer’s lifetime.

Subscriptions are now on sale for $240 for premium seating in the Orchestra and the front and center of the Dress Circle, $200 for the Side Boxes, the center rear of the Dress Circle, and the remainder of the Orchestra, and $140 for the remainder of the Dress Circle and the Balcony. Subscriptions may be purchased online in advance through a City Box Office event page. Orders may also be placed by calling the SFP subscriber hotline at 415-677-0325, which is open for receiving calls between 9:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m., Monday through Friday. Single tickets will go on sale on July 31.

Live from Locarno: it’s Sviatoslav Richter!

Almost exactly a month ago, Naxos of America announced the release of a concert recording of a performance deemed to have significant historical value by many of the admirers of the pianist Sviatoslav Richter. The recital took place in Locarno in the Italian region of Switzerland on September 18, 1966. The venue was the church of San Francesco, which was secularized in 1814 (explaining the use of a lower-case “c”). The concert was produced and broadcast by Radiotelevisione della Svizzero italiano.

The CD of this concert was originally produced by the Italian Ermitage record label, based in Bologna. Last year Ermitage was added to the “distribution family” of Naxos of America as Ermitage / Symphonia. The impact of that distribution has not yet propagated to Amazon.com. However, this Richter CD does have a Web page; and, presumably, sales of new copies of this recording will now be effected through Naxos of America. Meanwhile, that same Web page includes a customer review (filed from Venezuela), which will give the curious a good idea as to why this recording has attracted so much enthusiasm.

At the very least it provides an excellent document of Richter at his most vigorous. This is most evident in the final selection, Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 82 (sixth) sonata in A major, the first of his three “war” sonatas. Three of the sonata’s four movements are dominated by intensely martial rhetoric, reinforced by Prokofiev’s unrelenting use of dissonance. Relief only comes during the waltz of the third movement, whose expressiveness suggests that it could have served either of Prokofiev’s romantic ballets, Romeo and Juliet or Cinderella. Richter’s sensitivity in playing this movement is all the more evident in its contrast with the unrestrained aggression of the other three movements.

Equally energetic is Richter’s approach to the last two of the four Brahms selections on the program, the G minor ballade (the third of the six Opus 118 pieces) and the E-flat major rhapsody (the last of the four Opus 119 pieces). Here, again, Richter’s intensity is highlighted through its contrasts with the far more sensitive rhetoric of the first two selections, the C major capriccio (the last of the eight Opus 76 pieces) and the E minor intermezzo (the fifth of the seven Opus 116 fantasies). Readers may recall that I singled out Richter’s approach to Brahms’ Opus 83 (second) piano concerto in B-flat major as a high point of the 24-CD box set Sviatoslav Richter: The Complete Warner Recordings; and his performance of these four shorter pieces is just as impressive.

Those who know their Richter may be somewhat surprised by the opening selection, Carl Maria von Weber’s Opus 49 (third) sonata in D minor. This sonata provides a useful reminder that Weber was one of the earliest voices in the rise of the Romantic movement that occupied most of the nineteenth century. There is a certain Janus-faced quality to this sonata, looking back of how the “Classical style” had advanced through the likes of Ludwig van Beethoven and seeking out its own way to advance in new directions. Weber’s role in the rise of Romanticism is often overlooked, but Richter’s performance makes it clear that the pianist did not wish that role to be ignored. He clearly saw himself as an advocate for Weber’s assets, and he succeeded admirably.

If the new Naxos of America release has a flaw, it is in the accompanying booklet. This may well simply be a translation of the Italian text for the original Ermitage release. However, the only reference to this recording having come from a live performance identifies the city as Lugano, rather than Locarno; and the date of the performance is never given. This is one of those recordings that is likely to have high appeal to collectors, so it is a bit unfortunate that the sort of metadata that collectors tend to seek has been neglected.