Memorable Recordings in 2021

Those that have followed this site for some time may recall that there was not a “Memorable Recordings in 2020” article. Instead, due to pandemic conditions, my “Month-by-Month Memories” article for that year included months that were memorable for an encounter with a recently released recording. This year’s “Month-by-Month” article, on the other hand, basically chronicled the transition from streamed performances to the return to “physical” concert-hall settings. As a result, “Memorable Recordings” returned to its original state as a retrospective review of “album content.”

The good news is that listening to recently-released albums occupied a generous amount of my time, encouraging a more positive outlook than that of reading the daily news reports about the pandemic. Thus, when I looked back on what I had written, I realized how much had been accumulated in terms of raw quantity. As I made note of those articles that revived positive memories, I realized that the list was growing faster than I anticipated. It was clear that my listening experience could not be distilled down to another month-by-month account. Instead, I was ultimately able to filter my list down to ten items, three of which were based on articles written during a single month.

I do not view the resulting compilation as a “top ten” list. There was too much diversity across the selections to establish any viable criteria for rank-ordering. As a result, I shall order my list according to the chronology of when the articles were written. As in the “Month-by-Month Memories” article, each item will have a hyperlink to the text source that triggered my memory. The resulting list is as follows:

• Azica Records launches UNCOVERED series. This series was launched by the Catalyst Quartet, consisting, at that time, of violinists Karla Donehew Perez and Jessie Montgomery, violist Paul Laraia, and cellist Karlos Rodriguez. The objective was to “uncover” artists in classical music that have been overlooked, especially because of race or gender. The first Azica album was released at the beginning of this past February, presenting three compositions by the British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who became known among New York musicians as the “African Mahler.” Catalyst would subsequently launch an Uncovered series for San Francisco Performances, and the three compositions on their album were performed during their first two programs this past October and November. On those occasions they were joined by the “guest soloists” on the recording, pianist Stewart Goodyear and clarinetist Anthony McGill, respectively.
• Sony Classical releases the complete recordings of Artur Rodziński leading the New York Philharmonic for Columbia Masterworks. Regular readers probably know by now that I find “anthology” releases to be a valuable resource when it comes to understanding the different approaches that performing artists take to interpretation. Nevertheless, I had to confess that I was drawn to this collection because it included one of the first long-playing albums that I heard in my childhood. Sadly, Rodziński’s four-year tenure involved a problematic relationship with the ensemble’s manger Arthur Judson. HIs Wikipedia page states that he resigned at the end of his fourth season, while Virgil Thomson’s autobiography states, more bluntly, that he was fired. Thus, like his predecessor John Barbirolli, he was a victim of “social dynamics” that had nothing to do with the quality of his work.
• Gidon Kremer continues to record the music of Mieczysław Weinberg. Kremer has recorded on a diversity of labels. ECM New Series provided him with a particularly generous platform for his recording Weinberg’s chamber music with his Kremerata Baltica ensemble. However, at the beginning of this year, Accentus Music release a Weinberg album that featured Kremer performing the Opus 67 violin concerto with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra conducted by Daniele Gatti. This provided an opportunity to experience the interplay of a soloist in a concertante setting, which left me wondering if I would ever have the opportunity to listen to this concerto in a concert hall.
• Tommy Flanagan Solos on Storyville. This was a good year for revisiting jazz masters of the past. Three of them made it onto my list, the first being pianist Tommy Flanagan. He is one of the two artists that I was fortunate enough to listen to in performance prior to his death. This particular album was originally recorded in Zürich, Switzerland, during a single session on February 25, 1974. It was not released, by the Danish Storyville label, until 2005, after which it went out of circulation. Fortunately, Storyville decided to reissue the album this past June.
• Paul Badura-Skoda plays Franz Schubert’s sonatas. This is another reissue, this time of recordings made between 1991 and 1996. Over the course of making studio recordings of Schubert’s twenty piano sonatas, Badura-Skoda played five fortepianos, all in his own personal collection and all made in Vienna between 1810 and 1846. Sadly, Badura-Skoda died in September of 2019; but he had become one of the primary authorities for historically-informed performances of Schubert’s keyboard music. He is another artist whom I was fortunate enough to enjoy in a concert setting, making this album a high-ranking personal favorite.
• András Schiff conducts and performs Johannes Brahms. Unless I am mistaken, I have never had an opportunity to listen to either of Brahms’ two piano concertos, Opus 15 in D minor and Opus 83 in B-flat major, in a performance at which the soloist also conducted the orchestra. However, this past June ECM New Series released an album on which Schiff did just that, performing with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. The result was impressively convincing. However, given how much detail Brahms wrote into the solo piano part, my conjecture is that a good deal of Schiff’s leadership was probably channeled through the orchestra’s Concertmaster Kati Debretzeni!
• Neuma Records releases a Pamela Z survey. Many readers probably know by now that I do my best to keep up with Z’s performances, particularly those taking place within the San Francisco city limits. The release of her a secret code album allowed me to revisit several of the works that I had first encountered at one (or more) of her recitals. At those recitals, the visual experience was often as stimulating as the auditory one; but the album offers the opportunity to focus more intently on subtleties in auditory quality that may pass by too quickly in a “real time” concert experience.
• Sviatoslav Richter plays Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. All of the selections on this album will be familiar to those who enjoy the “First Viennese School” repertoire. Nevertheless, Richter is one of those performers that could throw a new light on familiar repertoire. Thus, no matter how many different albums I have of Mozart’s solo piano music, a Richter recording never fails to seize my attention and pull it in a previously unconsidered direction. The same can be said for the piano music of Joseph Haydn (although I have to confess that I can count on recent recordings by Emanuel Ax, as well as “historical” Richter recordings, to achieve that same effect).
• Lee Morgan at The Lighthouse. As I previously observed, my serious collection of jazz recordings only began after I returned from Singapore in August of 1995. By getting on the Blue Note mailing list, I learned about the three-CD Lee Morgan collection Live at the Lighthouse and relished adding it to my collection. The tracks were taken from performances in Hermosa Beach at The Lighthouse on July 10, 11, and 12, 1970. The selections on those three CDs were the only compositions that Morgan’s combo played over the course of those three evenings. This past August Blue Note released a complete account of all of the Lighthouse sets, providing a richer perspective of how much in-the-moment spontaneity guided the combo through multiple performances of the same tune. Such an exhaustive account may not be for everyone; but, as I put it in my article, the thoroughness of these recordings offers “some joyous lessons in how listening to jazz is more about the ‘making’ than about ‘what is made.’”
• A Love Supreme in Seattle. The final jazz selection on the list involves another account of “live” music-making. My guess is that just about every enthusiastic follower of the music of John Coltrane has a copy of the Impulse! studio recording of his A Love Supreme suite, which was made in a single session on December 9, 1964. On this album Coltrane led a quartet, whose other members were McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums. The quartet then took the entire suite on tour, during which a second recording was made in Antibes based on “live” recordings made on July 26 and 27 of 1965. Impulse! subsequently released a “Deluxe Edition” two-CD set, coupling the studio recording with the one from Antibes. However, this past October 22 Impulse! released an entirely new album of another “live” recording, this one made at The Penthouse in Seattle late in 1965. For this performance the quartet was expanded to include two additional saxophonists, Pharoah Sanders and Carlos Ward, and a second drummer, Donald Garrett. This performance extended the four movements of the suite with four “Interlude” movements, allowing for much more highly embellished improvisations, providing another rich example of “making” taking priority over “what is made.”