Tuesday, May 28, 2019

Sony Maintains Columbia’s Middle-Brow Spirit

Adrien Perruchon and Jae-Hyuck Cho on the cover of their new recording (from the Amazon.com Web page for this album)

I cannot remember where I was living (or visiting) when I encountered a classical music radio station whose motto was, “Music that gives your minds a rest.” I suspect this happened sometime around the turn of the century, a time when both the performance and recording of the “serious music” repertoire was beginning to enjoy the fruits of scholarship (frequently historically-informed) and argumentation, rather than just cranking out the same-old-same-old that had been stock-in-trade for both classical and jazz labels during the second half of the twentieth century. The Cassandra of those bad old days was Amiri Baraka, then writing regularly for Down Beat under the name LeRoi Jones.

In an article entitled “Jazz and the White Critic,” Jones sounded the warning tocsin against the dangers of the influence of (mostly white) middle-brow writers trying to shape the tastes of those visiting jazz clubs and listening to jazz recordings. Indeed, in the latter category, middle-brow thinking had “infected” production operations at many of the major record labels; and one of the most notorious of those labels was Columbia Records through its (mis)treatment of such jazz masters as Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus. (Miles Davis was also a Columbia artist; but he enjoyed defense through assertive colleagues, such as Gil Evans, and would eventually develop a backbone of his own.)

Furthermore, Columbia “production values” were no kinder to the classical genre than they were to jazz. Both composers like Igor Stravinsky and performers such as pianist Oscar Levant and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky suffered the strains of decision makers more concerned with “product” than with performance. The Columbia Records catalog would eventually become the property of Sony in the Sony Music Entertainment division, which has become responsible for keeping legacy content in circulation, primarily through compact disc releases. Meanwhile, Sony Classical Records now has its own production department; and I am happy to say that, every now and then, I encounter a release that clearly goes beyond the boundaries of middle-brow thinking. On this site, my most recent encounter actually took place almost exactly two months ago, when I wrote about the world premiere recording of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s cello concerto. However, in the immortal words of Aristotle, “one swallow does not make a summer.” Middle-brow thinking is still alive and well where recorded music is concerned; and Sony Classical Records is as likely a place to find it as any.

This brings us to the debut concerto recording made by South Korean pianist Jae-Hyuck Cho. This is a Sony Classical Records release that couples Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 15 (first) concerto in C major with Franz Liszt’s first concerto in E-flat major. As a sign of our prevailing “digital age,” Amazon.com is currently selling this album only as an MP3 download; and even Google is not particularly disposed to provide information about physical CD releases. Perhaps this is a harbinger of the extinction of the physical release as we used to know it.

The album also marks the debut of the young French conductor Adrien Perruchon, who leads the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Recordings were made in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, but there is no indication that they were made during concert performances. Bearing in mind that it is difficult to identify the impact of editing, the chemistry between soloist and conductor appears to be a good one; and, for the most part, the sense of balance provides a clear account of details in the orchestral contributions, as well as the virtuosity of the soloist.

Nevertheless, for all of that clarity, the performances emerge as rather disquieting reminders of the “bad old days” of my youth. This is particularly the case where Beethoven is concerned. Perruchon did not seem to show much interest in reducing his string section to numbers consistent with those that would have accompanied Beethoven when he first played this concerto in 1795. (The Grove Music Online entry written by Joseph Kerman, Alan Tyson, and Scott G. Burnham suggests that Joseph Haydn may have been the conductor at this concert.)

On the other hand the Liszt concerto holds up very well with the combination of Cho’s aggressive virtuosity (worthy of the adjective “Lisztian” regardless of the connotations the reader might infer), which could not have been better matched to Perruchon’s full-throated orchestral work. For that matter, by the time we get to the “scherzo movement” (scare quotes because the concerto was written as a single uninterrupted movement), there is a delightful sense of humor in the way the triangle fills in gaps of silence. (Having attended concert performances of this concerto, I have always enjoyed the percussionist who knows how to relish this triangle part.)

The bottom line, then, is that, while this may be an unabashedly middle-brow product; it is, at least, a well-crafted one. I doubt that I shall listen to this recording very much in the future; but there is some chance that I shall consult pieces of it from time to time, particularly when they involve how Beethoven is interpreted when the orchestral resources are much larger than what the composer would have expected. Besides, who knows where the “historically-informed pendulum” will swing over the course of this decade?

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