My First Reviews: CD REVIEW Magazine

STRAUSS

The Virtuoso Johann Strauss: Paraphrases and Arrangements of Favourite Strauss Melodies by Rosenthal, Tausky, Godowsky and Schulz-Evler

LABE (piano)

(Dorian Discovery DIS 80102)

TT: 73.31 (DDD)

Full price

* * (*)

Godowsky was the one who used to play two Chopin études simultaneously, just to make them sound harder.  A difficult feat; and one would have hoped it was impossible.  The transcriptions here share the same tigerish bravura, and if you recall the old cartoon of Liszt, in a monsoon of fingers stripping the keys off a piano, you might be able to appreciate the wars of calculated attrition that virtuosi used to embark on with their fists.

This is what the pianism of a lost age was all about.  When Moriz Rosenthal quipped that Schnabel failed his Austrian Army medical because he had no fingers, he referred not to the fumblings of later years but to the young man’s seamless, glistening fluidity of passagework.  With Rosenthal too, the notes used to run together like butter.

The loss is ours.  Notions of vulgarity and superfluity are the labels we bring to what has fallen flat: and the trick of the great showmen was to aerate their confections with the brio and wit that gives all art its vitality.  If there is a soberness about life today that resists such music, look no further than Shura Cherkassky (last representative of a generation) to realise the perceptiveness and animating strength of the musicianship that has gone.

Labé begins with a Rosenthal transcription, and immediately it settles his credentials with the right juxtaposition of gushing expansiveness, mock-bashfulness (we must not forget the significance of cultural melodrama and obliquity in the rutting season of fin-de-siecle Viennese), sparky insinuations and tumbling octaves.  The plan is always the same – an obtuse introduction, and contrasting sections which are then whipped into a delirium of spun sugar – and I could only wonder at the technique with which Labé has mastered both their torrential outbursts and pearly web of sound.

A strong personality needs to hold this stage; and one or twice I found myself wondering whether Mr Labé had quite the presence I needed.  High spirits, affirmation and self-surmounting parody coalesce and separate so rapidly that it takes guile and strategy to impose a fresh identity on them.  The other side of the coin is Labé’s alacrity in grasping the different demands of the music.  This matters in teasing out the colours of what is, after all, a pastiche of a pastiche: for every piece is based on operatic transcriptions using the techniques developed in Annees de Pélèrinage.  In Tausig’s Wahlstimmen Labé’s ticklish, almost feathery lightness of touch reveals the post-Lisztian chromaticism, the sophisticated modulation and structural cogency of the genre.  You may reject it as much as the perfumed delinquencies Ludwig of Bavaria tried on Wagner (and what the Mad King did for castles in the air these pieces do for sound) but only Godowsky dragged them into the mud. In his Metamorphosis of Wine, Women and Song the argument gets waylaid in the gush of notes, and briefly I noted a lack of incision and sparkle: Labé’s lack of irreverence, of flair as well as overt, winning charm.  Elsewhere there’s resplendent crispness and a sort of fey hedonism that come close to ideal.

No matter that these pieces work as the derivations of better composers than their creators ever were, so that with the least of them what seems left is the paper-thin smirk of Liszt at his most trite, or clapped-out formulae at their most threadbare.  No matter if by the end of this disc you think you’ve taken enough of it all to sink the October Revolution.  Try Schulz-Evler’s Arabesques on the Blue Danube for the most blistering pianism I’ve heard this year, conjured from an entranced shimmer of sound.   If I say I was reminded of canon-balls made of sorbet, I mean it as the highest compliment.  The recording, too, is top-flight.

MESSIAEN

Piano Music: Visions de l’Amen (1943), Petites Esquisses d’oiseaux (1985); Piece pour le Tombeau de Paul Dukas, Fantaisie Burlesque, Rondeau (1943)

DDD

79′ 04″

Unicorn Kanchana DKP (CD) 9144

PETER HILL (piano) with (for Visions de l’Amen) BENJAMIN FRITH (piano)

Full (three star * * *) recommendation

There are tough penalties for a musical pioneer.  The effort to forge a new creative language has always involved what you can only call self-interrogation – punctuated by exhaustion, the limbo where lack of creative ideas has to be trans-substantiated by any sort of faith one can lay hands on: the trudge through commissions for test-pieces, and a dead mass of academic duty.  Messiaen saw it all, and it must have been gruelling for someone who owed so much to chimerical inspiration.

This present disc is the last in a survey which has encompassed all the scars and experiments of his mountainous career.  It gives you pieces from the beginning and the end, and makes clear a struggle to sail clear of pastiche which can only be described as heroic.  Fascinating too, as Messiaen pares his techniques to the bone, to watch the germs of ideas develop into major influences on the 20^th  century.

The 1936 Piece pour le Tombeau de Paul Dukas is typical of his early style.  The Debussy of Voiles and General Lavine is clear, shading into Ravel, but already there’s the profusion of massive splintered light, the spade-like chords, which could only be Messiaen.  The Fantaisie of 1932 presents a dolly’s cake-walk of a burlesque, framing an interlude which tries to float on air like a diaphanous veil, yet which is stifled in its own protracted length.  Soviet Socialist Realism itself never showed more elephantine self-regard than this: and if Les Six are in there too, it’s their endless capacity for tastelessness.  Over and over you go, like an engine that refuses so start, chewing away at its own dry gears.  The gem here is a busy Rondeau, bubbling up with easy insouciance, and Hill’s refusal to overplay his hand reduces the scale ideally for pieces whose strength is an intimacy stripped clean of romantic posturing.

The Petites esquisses come from end of Messiaen’s life, with the extraneous labels of early works long gone.  Apparitions of the spirit of birdsong, these; and sharing its sense of liquidity.   Not that you’ll find any old birds.  He presents metaphors for creation, which shimmer in their glistening and fickle invention, in a musical idiom where recitative and improvisation have been integrated into something entirely personal which is so polished, yet pliable for creative developments.  Seldom has spontaneity sounded so cohesive or so wise.  It is played by Hill with gossamer agility, and is just as quirky and obsessive as birds are.  I began to glimpse what kept Messiaen going: his status as naive visionary. It’s a tradition matched oddly by the English mysticism of John Clare and Samuel Palmer, and it shares with them a horizon of boundless air.  Yet the music celebrates a classical economy of means.  The skylark, aptly, is a clamorous toccata.

Visions de l’Amen has a crucial place between the first and the later pieces.  Depicting the formation of the universe, it is a primeval egg itself, consuming and transcending influences: and in its way, a prodigious feat of motifs and rhythm tautly and resolutely meshed.  I think it was Breton (Messiaen’s contemporary) who said that beauty had to be convulsive; and if the tolling momentum of this music reminds you of the motion of continents, so too the fusion of gamelans and western liturgy culminate in a final and ringing euphoria which seems to boil and yet remains lustrously serene.  Mr Hill’s performance matches grace and finesse with playing of tensile agility: inevitably – almost mesmerically – right.

For anyone who values Twentieth Century music (and for those who don’t) this is a major issue.  It is as well recorded as you could ever hope to hear.

BEETHOVEN

Piano Sonata No 30 in E major, Op 109.   No 31 in A flat, Op 110.   No 32 in C minor, Op 111

ASHKENAZY (piano)

(Decca 436 076-2)

TT: 65:08 (DDD)

Full price

* * *

Ashkenazy has had several versions of the Beethoven sonatas, and they’ve been amongst the best recordings he has made.  Like anyone else, he sees Beethoven through the filter of later composers: in lighter movements, with the impressionism and intimacy of Chopin; elsewhere, with Schumann’s muscular dramatic force.  Nothing wrong in either of them.

First movements fare especially well.  It has been said that Opus 109 is one of the profoundest things in music, that you should play it as though you’ve known and possessed it for a lifetime.  And so Ashkenazy does. Throughout this sonata, he finds the ideal middle ground between Gilels’ compelling meditation and Pollini’s fidelity to the printed page.  For Pollini, structural strength comes at the expense of self-expression; but with Ashkenazy it isn’t so.  His manner is unaffected, creating recitatives where phrases answer each other with a twist of nuance that leave a listener’s understanding transformed.

If there are traces too of the complications and laborious force that Ashkenazy is prone to, he fails only by high historical standards.  I have to say that hearing Schnabel here is to enter another world: a thread of miraculous imagination unfolding at the pulse of a human heart.  By comparision, all modern pianists give us a certain amount of amiable gristle.

Ashkenazy’s rare miscalculations have to do with the role that movements or variations play.  The Prestissimo of Opus 109 becomes a glutinous inter-ruption, every effect strained to the limit.  Compare it to Schnabel’s genuine foil: those nebulous possibilities, made striking and searching by being understated.  Schnabel has a visionary quality; tension played off against introspection, each sounding inevitable, his playing uniquely acute.  In the Scherzo of Opus 110, Pollini revels in the spiky humour of an superior parody which Ashkenazy drags down.

More often, amongst recent pianists, Ashkenazy has the field to himself  – and for one reason.  So much of this writing seems to be transfigured candour; a confessional that he catches in mid-flight, through which inessentials are purified and stripped clean.  In the last movement of Opus 110, Gilels and Pollini stand for different ways of missing the point.  Much though I admire Pollini’s contrast of fugal and development sections, the playing is too fluent, the speed almost perfunctory: and the struggle which seems crucial to Beethoven’s notion of transcendence has been dissipated.  Gilels, aiming for poetic withdrawal, slows the tempo to a level of prissiness.

It’s Ashkenazy who affirms here an incandescence and monumental scale.  For Opus 111 too he gauges ideally the weight of the music, in an account which is at once spacious, impulsive, terse and opulently massive.  Even the closing bars of the first movement seem to smoulder penumbrally, without any of the customary hysterics.

But this is also the work in which (amongst modern readings) Ashkenazy is most effectively challenged and perhaps outshone.  Pollini recorded it later than the other sonatas: and both his recording and inspiration are in a new league.  The Maestoso gets the magnificent athleticism of irresistible force, batting clear once-immovable objects in all directions.  Rhetoric and momentum are used together in an argument of lean concision where everything fits, everything works: pedalling, shading, and a razor-sharp way with sotto voces.

 

In the Arietta, predictably, Schnabel is like nobody else: timelessly natural, formidably simple in its concentration, but seeming to float with something of the luminous intensity of dreams.  Yet Pollini recreates much of this stature, its unforced eloquence and microscopic discernment of gradations: reducing it finally to a shimmering whisper, the haunted intensity of the last trill eloquent in its control of motion within stasis.  The playing is masterly in its control of spans: spanned time, and an evolving musical dialectic.

The important thing, Pollini has said, is to understand the necessity of the notes; and in Opus 111 he plays as well as he has ever done.  But just where you think Ashkenazy is beginning to meander, his mercurial insight and control of colour create a poignant acknowledgment of reminiscence and growing revelation.  Elsewhere in these works, he can be uniquely satisfying.

PORTRAITS OF FREEDOM

COPLAND: Fanfare for the Common Man, Lincoln Portrait; Canticle of Freedom; An Outdoor Overture.  HARRIS: American Creed, When Johnny Comes Marching Home.

 JONES (speaker), SEATTLE SO/SCHWARZ

 (Delos DE 3140)

TT: 61:30 (DDD)

Full price

* * *

Propaganda is the half-silvered mirror through which each of us deludes himself that he touches reality.  Not the dead generations, which to Marx weighed like a nightmare on the imagination of the living; but the mental furniture, the symbols of solidarity and worth, by which people in the developed world reassure ourselves that we own truth itself.

Now, this is a disc about the iconography of a nation’s dreams.  And it has never been a characteristic of dreams to admit self-scrutiny, let alone realism, let alone wit.  Dreams are a phosphorescent wash of platitudes.  Yet dreams remembered reveal undercurrents of obsession like nothing else, and that too is very much what the disc is about.

Schwarz’s performance of the Fanfare for the Common Man makes clear his talent for wiping clean a legacy of candyfloss.  It is graceful, considered and inevitable.  The composer’s own eager version (Sony) kept brashness in its place.  For Schwarz a mist of long farewells has begun to settle: but his contemplation brings greater range, and it is splendidly played.

Much of the music is about the simulated orgasms of the impotent, for Copland’s petrified philanthropy, with its overlit and limited orchestration, is endlessly the same.  The Outdoor Overture brings more flying trumpet arpeggios.  If you think Rimsky had the capacity to tread water without saying anything, here’s a scum as thin as oil borne down on ozone and Mental Hygiene, convulsively overwrought or gelatinously smooth.  Take away the zeal with which it crashes at you and it sags to a torpor – and this is what Schwarz, crushed already under a weight of mythology, gives us.  It’s a moot point, for he picks up bounding pace later, and the central interlude glides more elegantly than the composer’s own.   But no. It took Copland’s audacity to bring a potboiler across.  You can’t rarify the leftovers.  You go for the jugular or nothing.

The Lincoln Portrait (and this is Copland at his finest) still relies on the Gettysburg Address to haul its parts together.  Formal rigour, you recall, has never featured amongst freedom’s priorities.  I like the advocacy with which Schwarz shapes fulminating chords towards an eruption of sorts, and a keenness that makes Copland’s own opening seem stiff.  Like many composers playing their own music, he took too much for granted.  Perhaps structural lines emerged more cleanly then, and Henry Fonda’s deadpan delivery kept the narrative’s effusive flush (“He was six feet four inches tall!”) firmly throttled in the corner.

For this is a magniloquent balloon of words.  James Earl Jones is a good artist, but he has to pound every line into such significance that dignity and heroism fall flat in their bid to outpace each other. Be warned: if these performances establish a trend, the next one will come in a flurry of lilac bubbles and echo-effects.

*

Aspirations across the world are as quirky and provincial as dialects; and nothing is easier to drag down than sincerity  – even if there is more authentic America in five minutes of Bernard Herrmann than in an hour of this Sunday School regalia.  Yet Copland too is music for an unmade film epic the world has forgotten: couched in an idiom on which composers for the movies (now fashioning their bonsai reincarnations of L’Apres Midi) have turned their backs.  All one can say is that the playing on the Delos issue is as good as you could ever wish to hear.

A big sense of open air is what I’ll remember: more so than the theme-park dissonances of Canticle of Freedom, like Janacek with all the blood leached out of him.  The campfire spirit has always been dismal for expressing angst or private emotion: any inner struggle that gives the arts their chance to evolve.  Instead it creates mercilessly, horribly public music, like a stuck smile.

One piece alone breaks the mould.  Roy Harris’s When Johnny Comes Marching Home, a series of reckless and brilliant transformations, offers something very clever, sophisticated: fully the equal of Shostakovich’s public hack-work.  And this glimpse of what might lie beyond brings an interesting comparison.

Soviet artists, on their own assembly-line for interminable festivities, had the drilling to keep their craftsmanship, their similacrum of emotion, in working order.  Portraits of Freedom brings us the language of the perpetual imperative mood, like an advertiser riding a nervous breakdown.  Perhaps it is a characteristic of marketing cultures that they degrade human lyricism into a scream.  Beneath them there is no substance other than a vacant cloud, packaged in strategic complicity.

But think of Alexander Nevsky.  Propaganda may not be art, yet it comes closest when it acknowledges at least the possibility of despair.  This, more than anything, is the reason for the greatness of Soviet music; and for the collapse of the culture that gave it birth.  True freedom must be the freedom to make mistakes.

SCHUBERT

The Hyperion Schubert Edition, Volume 19: Schubert in full flower

SONGS: Nachtviolen, Gott im Frülinge, Im Haine, Der Blumen Schmerz, Die Blumensprache, Die Rose, Vergissmeinnicht, Der Liebliche Stern, Am See, Die Sterne, Die Sternennächte, Nach einem Gewitter, Beim Winde, Auf dem Wasser zu singen, Abendlied, Auf dem See, Suleika I, Suleika II.

DDD

69′ 34″

Hyperion CDJ33019

FELICITY LOTT (soprano), accompanied by GRAHAM JOHNSON (piano)

Full (three star * * *) recommendation

Graham Johnson’s thematic survey of Schubert’s songs has itself become a minor masterpiece, intelligent and uniquely revealing.  To approach the lieder through the images and emotions they portray isn’t new, of course: think of Fischer-Dieskau, or Ely Ameling.  Yet the encyclopaedic zeal of Hyperion’s project sets it apart as a landmark in recording.

There’s a reason too why it is indispensable to a grasp of something as basic as Schubert’s thinking.  Schubert’s motivation is surely never to do with musical argument.  It is about human experience; but the experience of man as an extension of nature – nature as gateway to a world of the spirit which for Romantics was a higher reality, yet nature as something implacable in its capacity for cruel dissolution.  Just as the composer was enlightened and ultimately destroyed by his friends (and there’s so much of their poetry here) so it was to predestination that Schubert owed everything, including his knowledge of his own appalling fate.  The diversity of creation might serve as a cipher for human hope, its power for the fact that each of us is ultimately and horribly alone; but for Schubert it had more immediate significance.  It was the force with which his daily inspiration and state of health ebbed and flowed.  Take a letter from 1826:

I am not working at all – the weather here is truly appalling.   The Almighty seems to have forsaken us altogether,  for the sun refuses to shine. It is May, and we cannot sit in any garden yet. Appalling!  Ghastly!  And the most cruel thing on earth for me.

So much is understandable for a syphilitic, whose body was corroding as his inner vision became more acute, and whose decay fluctuated with the seasons much as an AIDS victim suffers today.

Now, seen in this light, symbols of fidelity and modesty (Dame’s violets, the flower of Aphrodite) are also those of “clinging through thick and thin”, as Johnson himself puts it.  An image of poisoned love, as well; but that was after the composing of Nachtviolen in 1822.  Yet on any evidence, Nachtviolen is no longer a song about a flower.  It addresses a significant element in our moral condition.  It is about a land of childlike rapture, of purity and the lacerating vulnerability of innocence.  And this, distilled into music, lies at the heart of its sense of balm within haunted and suspended time.

The rococo elegance of Gott im Frülinge is more than a pantheist’s nostagia for an age in which emotion was apprehended more simply and clearly than it is for us.  It finds Schubert’s most optimistic expression of a profound melancholy for what had been lost, and could never be regained.  “Art concealing art” says Johnson; and so – miraculously, inimitably – it is.  No wonder the Viennese used to say that “this time the popular composer has gone too far.”  The universe of his thinking – the universality of his themes – was as far beyond their perception as the stars through which Schulze, in his poem Der liebliche Stern, explores a decline into self-delusion and madness.  Schubert’s significance is in the fact that his music is never contained in its form; its modernity is in its fervour and elusiveness.   No wonder the  persona of the Harper’s Songs was that of the outsider, cast out and wandering under the moon.  That again is another story; but the withered leaves and pathetic fallacy of the songs here, their sense of violation (“flowers proclaim our suffering”), are more than a portent.

It is the pristine insight of an outsider that lifts his music into a timelessness which the faded and sentimental iconography of its literary inspiration could never attain.  Listen to Der liebliche Stern, a little masterpiece of ambiguity here almost perfectly sung, and you realise that Schubert has no need to follow every nuance of these words.  This is because each song presents a world-view which is pervasive and compelling.  He gives us a portrait, not of a mood, but of what it is like to be such a person.  The richness of his suggestion – the resonance between Schubert’s experience and our own – is what lifts it into supreme artistic experience.  But what makes it magical is its sense of contradictions assimilated and made fertile.  The words of Auf dem Wasser zu singen might almost be his epitaph: “May time disappear on shimmering wings: I vanish myself from changing time.”  The half-light of ambivalence, the sense of stasis within motion, of languor within palpitating ardour: all of this, poised between classical discipline and romantic introspection, adds to Schubert’s unique lucidity and stature.

It’s during the same song that you remember how tough competition for the repertoire has become.  Felicity Lott brings crisp didacticism and dramatic range.  As previously in her partnership with Johnson, there is an attempt to create an unfolding narrative within each lied.  Illuminating stuff, at its best; yet elsewhere it throws out the baby with the bathwater.  Here, the piano part has to be coloured and over-romanticised in an effort to counterbalance a sense of urgency and unrelieved momentum.  With Elizabeth Schwarzkopf there was more of Schubert’s infinite subtlety, his entranced and seamless concentration.  Because Schwarzkopf pointed the notes selectively, she brought across its sense of dance-like motion and, in a luminous simplicity of conception, the ephemerality of hope.   There was a level of discrimination at work which makes today’s singers hint at sentimentality, overcoloured and overblown.  In Nachtviolen, the sluggish pace on Hyperion reduces Einstein’s “masterpiece of mysterious intimacy” to something for which no phrase is left unturned.  Very much a performance in its prime, but Schubert’s evanescence seems to demand that discovery is more than something left in the rehearsal-room.

With Ms Lott, Die Blumensprache is a model of creamy ardour.  For Ely Ameling it was about knowing naivety, but Ms Lott is a knowing performer in a riper sense.  She is second to none in her power and voluptuous intelligence – and like Mr Johnson, she’s a splendidly alert and perceptive artist.

BRAHMS

3 Intermezzi, Op 117, 6 Klavierstücke, Op 118; 4 Klavierstücke, Op 119

AFANASSIEV (piano)

 (Denon CO-75090)

TT: 69.20 (DDD)

Full price

(*)

These last piano works were written for Clara Schumann, whose dwindling strength brought the need for intimate music rather than strenuous force. “It’s wonderful” wrote Clara, “how he combines passion and tenderness in the smallest of spaces.”  If many of these pieces are saturated with a sense of decayed and forfeited mortality, their world leads as easily to autumnal fulfilment and glancing good humour.  Often the simplest idea – an inversion or widened tonal interval – forms an entry-point to a lifetime’s experience, distilled into moments.  Yet it can all stay intractable: dour and hesitant, desultory, saturnine: its meaning so easily lost in unleavened tedium or inflated heroics.  Brahms isn’t about either.

The most interesting comparison here is between Emmanuel Ax and Stephen Kovacevich.  In Opus 117, much though I admire Ax’s orchestral scope, I am troubled by his tendency to overplay a hand – melodrama which distorts Brahms’s logic and exhausts resources, leaving not enough left to say.  It’s tough competition that prevents my recommending him; but I was struck by Kovacevich’s capacity to say more within a sparser tonal palette: a sense of both evanescence and cohesion, of shifting light.  In No 2 Ax reveals his deft sense of fleeting effects, but No 3 is full of fortuitous little stabs and distortions.  I was reminded of Brahms’s relation to Schumann: and both composers bring to their closing bars a sense of summation or fading memory.  With Ax, you need a little more of that.

Opus 118 is different.  Ax is the performance to go for if you like your Brahms spacious and granitic.  There’s a magisterial strength which is at the same time alive to the music’s adventure and imperative force: a new agility and aptness to the thinking, keenly sensitive to moving currents.  Number 2 brings passion tempered by sharp nostalgia, even if for me Kovacevich still knaws more leanly at what the music is about.  In Number 4 Ax creates an interplay of suggestions and recollections which builds its way towards what he sees as a towering climax, but which from Kovacevich’s standpoint might subside into a grandiloquent clutter.  Yet Ax feels his way into these pieces more palpably than anyone else.  It is a performance for those who like to hear a musician thinking.

There is a lack of self-indulgence to both pianists that makes you feel you are eavesdropping on a private confessional.  Ax’s range is bigger: diffident or lucid insinuations, all with this silky tone; and in Number 5, a sense of balm and unfolding wonder which makes Kovacevich sound abrupt.  But there is a proportioned passion about Kovacevich which makes him more direct on every level.  He brings both animation and longing to even the most wraith-like apparitions, and better than anyone else he lays bare the inevitability of it all.

Where does Afanassiev fit?  Absolutely nowhere.  This is playing that couldn’t give you a scale of C major without reading The Flying Dutchman into it.  Opus 117 brings mountainous labour to the task of missing every point: an obstacle course of battles to be won for no other reason than portentous novelty.  Opus 119 is a campaign at half-speed to find spurious voices and tolling bells in place of Brahms’s own, wonderfully subtle sonority.

When every gesture is a gasping mannerism, the most basic elements of music are eroded to nothing.  This is a sermon on pieces which speak for themselves.

If you want all these works on one disc, Radu Lupu gives a performance in which any trite option is turned aside and almost every page says something new.  The sound may be a little dated, and Lupu now plays these pieces with an even sharper fidelity.  But after Afanassiev, the musicianship is in a different league.

 

PAGANINI

Violin Concerto No 1, Op 6; SARASATE: Carmen Fantasy, Op 25

PERLMAN (violin), RPO/FOSTER

(EMI Classics CDC 7 47101 2)

TT: 45:51 (ADD)

Medium price

* * *

One day, somebody will have to write about the way rhetoric shapes (or more often, stifles at birth) musical creativity.  After all, how would you describe Beethoven in the Hammerklavier?  A sort of tortoise gawping at heaven, I suppose.  Then there’s this piece by Paganini.  It’s a twenty-one gun salute done in rubber-bands: a confection of endless manic pirouettes and curlicues and stage-whispers through a megaphone, where passages of gasping bathos are apt to explode into bubbles.  The second movement, like the preamble for a cadenza that never comes, has the significance of a starling squawking in an empty bucket.  Or so I’d thought.

But Perlman is master of this repertoire.  This is the music he lifts into something superb.  Conjuring tricks, in music as anything else, have to do with special sensibilities.  You lay out so clearly what people reasonably expect, and turn it upside down with a flick of the wrist.  There’s a capricious quality which makes sudden sense as brighter possibilities reveal themselves: all part of the same game-plan, carried out with sly ease, the same neatness of step.

And so the famous performance has resurfaced continually since its issue in 1972.  Rightly so, for everything about it preens itself.  Beecham said you should only regard bars as the boxes into which music is packed: and here it soars above them into exuberant, mellifluous life.  When they say that you can’t play something better than it is, don’t you believe it.  Perlman has found the heart of this work and given it an iridescence you never believed it possessed.  He has the quality of a supreme actor for whom every effect is planned, yet comes as naturally as breathing.  In the first movement the strut and flourish nearly bursts seams, yet it is held in place by a showman’s command of the hand-on-heart gesture and throwaway line.

If this has the quality of the best silent film in the world, that’s how it should be; yet everything is exactly judged.  It is the skill of a virtuoso to take everything within a whisker of where it might run into parody, and never to slip over the edge.  The bravura runs, which in other hands sound like stratospherically drilled teeth, have a dazzling fire and zest: in the Adagio he finds more depth than anyone else; it holds together marvellously.  The Rondo, tripping vitality, exhausts superlatives: the scales more pert, the cantabile more seductively sweet, the pianissimos wittier….in the end I burst out laughing as much from incredulity as delight.

For the Sarasate the recording is better still, and Perlman matches it with a dark, throaty tone.  Whether he captures Carmen’s sultriness or her forlorn hope, the playing is passionately terse.  I was going to say that he out-sings singers; for he makes the opera sound like pastiche, not the other way round.  Whilst the pace is exhilarating (as Perlman never allows himself to be distracted by mawkish side-issues) he is capable too of lacerating nostalgia, where the line almost throbs in its luxurious, sinuous enchantment.  Elsewhere, of course, notes fly like bullets.  Listen for a week and you may still not be sure how he pulls off every effect, or appreciate the discernment of each choice he makes.  What I do know is that this is a disc you must hear.

WALTON

Façade; STRAVINSKY: L’Histoire du Soldat

WARFIELD (narrator), SINFONIA DA CAMERA/HOBSON

(Arabesque Z6644)

TT: 74.55 (DDD)

* (*)

Igor Glebov, notable enemy of Shostakovich, blew the gaff on the poisonous dog-biscuit of latterday Stravinsky.  “He is the last representative of a superior refined civilization, but a civilization tired of itself, used up.  There is no future in music whose force resides in its own weakness.”

If you detect Uncle Joe Stalin’s marzipan-covered icepick behind that appraisal (and you would be right to do so, jabbed firmly around the third vertebra) try this one from Beecham: “I see, behind his façade of ingenious notes, no evidence that Stravinsky has arrived at wisdom, even yet.”

The habits of fastidious obsession, the scalpels and rubbers laid like dissecting tools on his composing table: all of it hints at a magpie for whom moral neutralisation was chic.  The cracks in the persona of an upright composer are exactly where Stravinsky’s final greatness is to be found: an idiom cauterised past bleeding or irony, and alienation as ripe as Brecht’s.

The splendid Nimbus issue of The Soldier’s Tale shows how clearly it inhabits the same baying and foggy wasteland as the Rite, the sybarite orientalism of Firebird; now fused into sharper, leaner form.  As narrator, Christopher Lee brings the gravitas and sardonic resonance – not to mention a vocal agility – to make every role striking.

This new Arabesque version too comes up well. Hobson as conductor has an astringency that Hobson the pianist lacks; it suits the snap and mechanisation of such music well.  The trouble is that William Warfield sounds like a radio play.  He lacks Lee’s grip on withering cadences: desultory gaps and silences that engulf more and more as the suite, with compelling and sinuous concentration, struts and minces and spits its way to the inevitable conclusion.  Lee’s soldier is tired, worldly-wise; but Warfield’s merely squabbles.  And if Warfield’s Devil sounds like the child who found its pile of pennies knocked over, Lee’s insinuates himself like a tapeworm.

Everything about the Nimbus is artfully planned.  The music’s power to undercut itself, fanfares which taper into emptiness, the sense of voluptuary crumbling into acrid dust.  But I think there’s a reason why the new account sounds like the matinee recital of a conventional fairy-tale.  Moral points have to be laid in spades when there is only half an hour to make them; and abridging the suite means that its shadows are lost.

It becomes a trot through the spring fashions of 1918.  If this were all there was to the music, we should have to agree with Glebov.  Yet there is so much more.

The tumbling word-plays of Façade also hint at deeper sedition.  It has the quality of a particularly lugubrious half-hour’s debauchery, held in a drain.  It ought to leave the impression of a snake (gorged on children scrubbed pink and dowagers in emeralds and leathery skin) moulting an opera-jacket – all virulence and melancholy, congealed through the moral anaesthesia of the deadpan and absurd.  Glassy affectation may be very much part of this masque, but it is never effete.

What makes it irresistible?  Frustrated sensuality, I think: a blend of what is lascivious, svelte and desiccated: the dry percussion clattering like a mantis.  Pears and Sitwell, in their ideal Decca issue, know the world of Evelyn Waugh and Chelsea surrealists, and they know when to let go.  Because they are authentic, they can afford to take themselves seriously: and their pithy automatism is like nothing else.  Anthony Collins, their conductor, creates effects which are as sharp as they are understated. But Hobson reduces everything to a sort of fey caricature, and since Façade is above all an experiment in rhythm, overplaying it destroys everything.

Mr Warfield, floundering in its quicksand of shifting effects, tries manfully.  It’s as alien as medieval Chinese.  For if Stravinsky is timeless, Walton (like Mr Bellacre) is the navy-blue ghost of the Twenties.  As with Sunset Boulevard, it was the pictures that got small.  No wonder the mildewed new world of the homely, post-war era left him with little to say.

 

J S BACH

English Suites No 1 in A major, BWV 806; No 3 in G minor, BWV 808

RICHTER (piano)

 (Stradivarius STR 33333)

TT: 52:08 (DDD)

Full price

* * *

Now that Leonhardt’s set has gone, piano versions of the Suites are the only ones available.  Schnabel said that Mozart was too easy for children and too tough for virtuosos; and with Bach the challenge is greater still.  His works loom in the abstract, lacking even tempo markings, ready to be plundered by an instrument charged with a ravenous expressive capacity their composer never imagined.  The risk – for a pianist – involves making the writing into something it never was: sentimentality or bland, uncomprehending routine.

Now, if the stakes in a piano performance are heightened, so are rewards. Andras Schiff brings to these pieces the freshness of an improvisation, balanced between imaginative discovery and impeccable regard for the printed page.  All his trademarks are there: rising cantabile lines shaded into gestures and asides; rhythmic buoyancy, with a floating accompaniment and a melting way with cadences.  Never one to overstate a case, he is one of the few pianists who can still lift the expected into a surprise.

If Schiff risks just a hint of sounding coy, Glenn Gould’s battles lie elsewhere: working through texture rather than colour, digging out internal symmetries and inversions.  The eccentricities are legendary but it’s glib to mention them here, for his perceptiveness is never in doubt.  The problem is that Gould’s concentration dissolves into capricious quirks, which make a too-easy counterfeit for vitality.  There’s something hamstrung about an approach in which intelligence is crushed through a wringer to the point of perversity: and the more I listened, so the more what at first was mesmerising, crumbled into Higher Spoof.

But Richter gives you the best of both worlds.  He lacks Schiff’s overt emotional gloss, and rivals Gould’s discernment in matters of parts and voicing.  Like Gould, he knows how accented motifs spur the music along; yet he matches Schiff in fine inflection.  I liked his vibrant energy and analytic rigour: an animating concentration which is probing, individual and entirely right.

Credit has to be divided between Richter and Schiff.  The BWV 806 Gigue and its finale show Schiff both more inventive and technically controlled.  Richter’s Bourree I (BWV 806) is at a higher voltage, and uses the fullest expressive range.  He is inimitable in the BWV 808 Sarabande, lending it an elegiac suspension between motion and numbed, wounded lassitude.  Perhaps he sees this movement as the core of the piece; yet in the Gavottes he manages a brightness, an appreciation of development and variety, that leaves other recordings standing.

For a spontaneous and wonderfully resilient account of all six Suites, look no further than Schiff.  Go to Richter for a lifetime’s experience of pacing an unfolding structure, a series of mutually enhancing contrasts whose occasional deliberation is offset by a master pianist’s command of resources.  Listen to Gould for a commentary – tantalizing, exasperating, bludgeoning – on modern Bach performance, which it itself a commentary.

You might conclude that Gould’s fast movements, which brim with a spirit of dancing, fare best.  Otherwise, if the embalmed Lenin could reach a keyboard with all his latterly-presumed dialectic and wisdom: it would sound like this.

THE ENGLISH ANTHEM Volume 3

Church Music of Attwood, Elgar, Harris, Harwood, Holst, Parry, Saxton, Stanford, Tavener, Walton, Wesley, Wood

CHOIR OF ST PAUL’S CATHEDRAL/SCOTT

(Hyperion CDA 66618)

TT: 66:15 (DDD)

* * (*)

A state of awe, as emotions go, is a limiting commodity; and it makes a tundra out of everyday living.  Yet it’s the hallmark of English choral life.  Think of the milkiness Fauré brought to church music, and you can see what the English tradition gained.  Think of Monteverdi’s Vespers or even Rachmaninov’s, and you realise how immeasurably more we have lost.  You have to come prepared for fluent mediocrity, the bland expertise of Walton’s Set Me a Seal.  Perhaps it is a matter of changing fashion that Elgar’s Give unto the Lord begins to sound like the school song of an Edwardian borstal; less so that, in a palpitating echo, its rapid fire of oratory just doesn’t work.

But there’s more to the story than shock-waves of new and great music finding their reverberations in a provincial puddle.  Craftsmanship has always been the ability to make something more than it is; and what the English tradition wrung from its limitations was aching, crepuscular intensity.  “The valley of the shadow of death” repeats Stanford; and nostalgia is at the core of this music: not in its modern sense of sentimentality with a bank-balance, but in the remembrance of a lost and golden age which strikes the heart in its transfigured desire.  If sorrow, said Dorothy Parker, is tranquillity remembered in emotion, nostalgia is a sublimation of what was worthwhile and then, through conflict, lost.  The image of this music is of summer evenings dwindling into twilight, and the twilight of an era caught in haunted, suspended time – a longing compounded of surrender and despair, lifted by noble regret for the passing of what had never been.

And this is quintessentially English.  If Stanford’s The Lord is my Shepherd rises from a pang of melancholy and relapses into valediction, it is worthy too to take its place amongst the Romantic lieder from which its lessons came.  Not the Shepherd on the Rock, perhaps: but it was from Wagner that Stanford learnt to write a score where every part is equal in a whole; and everything glows together.

John Taverner emerges as well as anyone.  Lavish in its dissonances,  revelling in a welter of sound as canonic parts throb together – modern, yet in the same tradition as Wood’s liquescent Expectans Expectavi and Harris’s Faire is the Heaven, which follow it.  It’s the consistency of this thread of development that proves fascinating, as different influences worked their effects: the music of the First World War clearly the same stuff from which Walton’s orchestral works were to come.  There is a strong and muscular vein of curiously English ardour and English craftsmanship.

But you have to wait for the Victorian Renaissance to find anything worthwhile.  Attwood’s Come, Holy Ghost is everyday Georgian unctuous-ness; his thirty-two operas are something you would have to be nailed to the floor to endure.  Wesley’s In Exitu Israel is a mole’s conception of bliss, tangled in counterpoint.  Disappointments are inevitable in a disc as adventurous as this.   I wish I sensed a trace less English tweeness and mustiness in Saxton’s hand-me-down Berio, which at last breaks free from its origins into something more like Milton’s adamantine fire.  The best composers are those who play to the acoustic.  Parry’s There is an Old Belief bursts into fanfares, polychromatic splinters dissolving on silence yet changed within their last seconds.

Arthur Hutchings used to say this music lay under the mange of revulsion.  It still does.  Only Hyperion’s issues of the Worcester Cathedral Choir offer any of the same pieces, and they do reveal Scott’s tendency to gush on a line.  Where in the Elgar St Paul’s protests too much, Worcester gives it elegiac space, its transitions luminously composed.  St Paul’s is strikingly disciplined, and registers are more secure; but there is a metallic hardness to the trebles that does little for the sense of rest which is this music’s enduring state.  Significantly, though, Scott eases the Stanford down better than anyone; and it’s in pianissimos that his imagination seems to have freest rein.   The result is music-making which is limpid with fugitive, glistening effects.

Even to those of us for whom their beliefs have crumbled into a cipher, the anthems leave like nothing else the vision of resonant air and boundless, limitless, numinous peace.

 

MOZART

Piano Sonatas in G major, K283; in D major, K284; in C major, K330

MARIA JOAO PIRES (piano)

DDD

72′ 38″

Deutsche Grammophon 437 791-2

Full (three stars * * *) recommendation

Through the new clichés of each age, we reappraise the past.  Mozart’s piano concertos?  A known quantity: dialogues between equals, they’re supposed to be; so never tip the balance too far for your soloist.  But the sonatas?  They might as well live on the moon.  If only they did.  They have a leanness and attack that symphonies and concertos can only hint at.

Well, sometimes they do.  But in K283 Ms Pires finds a lightness of touch that seems absolutely apt for music which, said Schnabel, was too easy for children and too difficult for virtuosi.   Her stance is one of lucid affection and ease, supple in its passagework, with enough clarity to allow voices to float eloquently on melodic lines.  What more could there be?

Elegance too, in K284, but it was here I found my first doubts.  You see,  these early sonatas may well be influenced by J C Bach, but I can’t believe in a level of finish that denies us any access to the moment of creation, and makes it sound stillborn.  I watched the dynamic contrasts, sanitised until their proportions were out of true.  I wondered about the cut-and-thrust (whether dramatic or contrapuntal) that animates the operas and quintets alike, and I tried to recall Alan Blyth’s comment about Mozart’s level of incision, about it being his capacity to disturb that was amongst his most enduring characteristics.

My difficulties stem not from Ms Pires, but from the tradition her playing represents.  She inherits a modernism left bruised and bewildered by its encounter with authenticity, conscious to a fault of the limitations that must be forced upon a modern instrument if Mozart is to be reined back to his proper place and time.  You contemplate the stifling indistinctions of an age reduced to a temperance party in the dark by its puritans.  I grappled with memories of the incandescence – the verve and pungent discipline of means, a brusqueness verging on anger – that Richter brought to the sonatas, and I thought back to the fading trace of Arrau’s distinction and gravitas.

The K330 sonata highlights this conflict of direction.  Ms Pires is fatter in tone than the old performances, yet her playing is impeccably judged.  Today’s decorous gauze of pedalling is there, but everything stays springy when the music depends on it.  “Mould the phrases” we were told as children: and so – as if with a rolling pin – she does.  In the finale she matches, for agility of thinking and illumination, any account I can remember.

But now let’s compare Horowitz’s (DG) seductive distinction, from his first bar to the last.  It is to hear music revealed in its fleeting transitions and dazzling liquidity of effects.   Horowitz’s emancipation of rhythm and sonority, his variegation of colour and weight, create what I can only call iridescent eloquence.  He has a superior wit and poise for which Mozart is as much a delight as a source of discovery, a game of gesture and surprise: a personal contact to be explored and recrafted.  Mice must feel like this, whilst being toyed with by the cat; and it makes today’s playing  sound not so much virginal as downright impotent.  Seldom has refinement in musicianship sounded so animated and spikily resilient as it did for him.  Ms Pires is second to none only so long as Mozart must never astonish us.

The decay of any composer persists after him.  But then, we seem to present Mozart as music about which there is nothing left to be discovered.  In the end, I wonder if we even know who he was.

SCHUBERT

Songs for Male Chorus

Robert Shaw Chamber Singers, conducted Robert Shaw

Telarc CD 80340

Total time: 62:22 (DDD)

Full (three star * * *) recommendation

“The standard of inspiration” wrote Benjamin Britten of Winterreise, “is past explanation.  Every time I come back to it, the mystery remains.”  Little wonder that Gute Nacht came to mean more in Britten’s performance than anything else.  For both composers, night and nature allow a retreat from the brittle realities of their time into a a half-lit ambivalence and dreamlike suggestibility.  There, more than anywhere else, Schubert takes the hedonism of the Viennese and lifts it into a sort of rapture.

The songs for chorus are neglected music for a dead form of music-making.  It doesn’t matter that Schubert’s command of harmony and shifting key allows him truly to find a world in a grain of sand.  Die Nacht (“See how the clear stars move in the heaven’s meadows”) creates phosphorescent stillness within bars, and Shaw recreates perfectly its entranced ebb and flow.  Wehmuth is about the atmosphere that envelopes a mood.  Then the nuances of words can look after themselves; yet this mercurial tonality means that within scene-painting Schubert is able to fuse a story of individual human loss.  It’s the Romantic world-view of life and death within a pastoral landscape, unifed by the rhythm of a tolling bell, and you realize that only one composer could make the major sound quite so poignant.

There are other ways to sing these pieces.  In Standchen Sarah Walker (Hyperion’s Collected Edition, Volume 8) creates a delicate animation that makes more compelling sense of a song which, after all, is poised on tiptoe. The repeated motif “leise”, the prancing spring of Graham Johnson’s accompaniment, capture both the immediacy of experience and the quality of a fable.  With Shaw you have altogether smoother, flatter progress, and if Martha Hart has a luscious voice, she’s also a little more inclined to rush fences.  Nachthelle, for Shaw, flows like a fast wave: and throughout his disc transitions are – no, not underplayed, but taken for granted.  Now, if you feel modulation is Schubert’s masterstroke, then something has been lost.  Yet I wonder whether Shaw isn’t the one who’s right.

Laying on expression is a modern habit, and unsubtle dramatics are something that seems to have made Schubert himself wince.  Shaw has always been a choral conductor in a high flight, and he surrounds himself with singers whose precision and ensemble are superlative.  Time and again he matches the dancing brightness of a composer whose vision is the least sentimental of any Romantic.  Sentimentality is predictable, and in his breadth of imagination Schubert outpaces our expectations as effortlessly as he outshone the resources of his own audiences.  Widerspruch, the story of a wanderer confronting nature’s vastness, spins the certainty of the Marche Militaire on its head – and how well Shaw catches a serpentine change of phrasing at the moment of realisation.

But there are so many episodes worthy of Winterreise or Schwanengesang here.   The frozen episode within Grab und Mond, perhaps, which fore-shadows Ihr Bild: the vacillation between major and minor in Die Einsiedelei, with a moral ambiguity that leaves the words behind: or the dissolving musical contexts of Nachthelle which allow Schubert to depict first the earth, then the poet’s motivation, and finally the sky.  Repeatedly the poems describe the lightness of night, and if an evocation in music of Samuel Palmer’s glimmering world is for you, this collection is a discovery and a delight.

ROSSINI

Six Quartets for Flute, Clarinet, Horn and Bassoon

ENSEMBLE WIEN-BERLIN

 (Sony SK 52 524)

TT: 72:54 (DDD)

Full price

* * *

The classical era is about the whirrings of a majestic clockwork, whose every motion seemed certain.  Beyond lay a world of subtle and illimitable expressive potential: a superior intimacy whose distinctions became possible because every formality lay in place.  Never before or since has ritual permitted such eloquent gestures.

These quartets are the string sonatas which Rossini wrote when he was 12, but rearranged by Friedrich Berr.  Rossini, now with the sheen of a lifetime’s experience, chose to change nothing.  Rightly so: for the sonatas were always more than charm and festive innocence.  If they take their formal cue from Haydn, their stylistic verve is straight from Mozart.

You will never hear that better than on this Sony issue.  It isn’t playing for those who expect a raucous operatic banter.  But beneath a serene surface its animation comes from almost microscopic discernment and melting civility. Seldom has diplomacy sounded so eloquent or so satisfying.  In the First Quartet it is not melodrama but the cleanness of the pointing, the lithe technique and coolly tapered phrases, that get to the nub of what Rossini is about.  Excellent though the Serenata of London (ASV) are, their creaminess is inclined to overweigh itself and drag at those moments where it ought to soar; and the sense of expectancy at the heart of the music begins to pall.  It’s then you begin to realise what lies beneath the Ensemble Wien-Berlin’s urbane face: their precision and attack: the variegation and suppleness of their inflection and narrative sense, their almost epigrammatic crispness of timing.

Occasionally I needed something else.  The Serenata bring warm affection which can leave the Ensemble Wien-Berlin sounding diffident, pallid.   But you need more than a sort of mellifluous fluency.  The refined laughter of the La Tempesta wants an exuberance that the graceful Serenata miss.  Listen now to the Ensemble Wien-Berlin: light and transparent, and you won’t hear the dynamics of pulse or changing tension thought through better than this.  It is music-making on a refined and cogent plane, revealing Rossini not as a the pygmy virtuoso of high notes we have made him today, but the archetype of craftsmanship and grace perceived as the rival to Beethoven.

The Ensemble catch the fragility and spring-like innocence which underpins this precocious, breathtaking facility of form.  This is the music of childhood, reappraised and lifted through the filter of adult sensibilities whilst losing nothing of its pristine clarity of intention.  The Ensemble’s command of resources is formidable, and it allows freedom and fidelity of a very special kind.  There is the simplicity that comes from a conception in which coarse gesture has been assimilated into a higher and more perceptive whole: music which seems to play itself, and which – in its spring and darting intelligence – is a microcosm of the best that the mature composer was to become.  In the Ensemble Wien-Berlin’s hands, the Quartet No 6 in F (unobtainable on the other versions), gains much from Mozart: his sense of inquiry raised into burnished and radiant summation.

Perhaps their closest rivals are the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (Hyperion) in a performance which crackles with stylish and spiky invention.  But if this is authentic playing to remind you that we perceive music purely as the sound it makes, the gloss of the Ensemble’s effects eludes them: as so often in authenticity, it’s a case of jabbing contrasts rather than convincing transitions.  “Music through an open window”, Alfred Einstein said of Haydn; and so too the Fourth Sonata is in the Ensemble Wien-Berlin’s hands.  Where the Orchestra reveal the limits of their sustaining power and articulation, the Ensemble’s liquidity is supreme: and with it, a bird-like airiness and sense of fresh sight.

FANTASIAS, PAVANS AND GALLIARDS

English music for keyboard by Byrd, Johnson, Philips, Morley, Bull, Randall, Farnaby, Gibbons, Tomkins.

GUSTAV LEONHARDT (harpsichord and virginals)

DDD

59′ 47″

Philips 428 153-2

Full (three * * * star) recommendation

Think back to a different world, where music drew its strength from a community of song and dancing, and the modern prima donna was unknown: where art was defined by brightness and vigour.  To us the keyboard works of the Sixteenth and early Seventeenth Centuries may suffer the stigma of early music, but to its contemporaries it was the currency of a sophisticated and bustling culture; with the devices of later composers – counterpoint, chromaticism – in place ready to be picked up for whatever purpose its successors might happen to favour.

These are works which are uniquely English in their secular and businesslike manner, in crispness and candour alike.  True, the Pavan was described by Morley as “a kind of staid musicke, ordained for grave dancing” and almost all the pieces are what we should now call four-square.  But listen now to Peter Philips’ Passamezzo (a form in which common chord sequences were used as grounds for variations in the form of a fast pavan) with its volatile runs and strident fanfares – and acknowledge a muscularity to the construction, which is every bit as virtuosic in its imagination as it is in its demands from the performer.  Philips, one of so many Catholic whipping-boys, was imprisoned following a conspiracy to assassinate Elizabeth I; and the brutality of that time (Tregion died in prison: others were exiled for their “immorality”) adds a gloss to the tart sentiments expressed in its musicianship.

But listen again to Orlando Gibbons’ miniatures, with something of the quality of sculpted seashell, and you’ll realise why Glenn Gould admired so much yet another composer we’ve shunted off to the backwaters.  The titles of the pieces – toyes, fancies, fantasias – hint at the inventive freedom concealed within an apparently sober idiom: a sense of fantastic and exuberant convolution through which the thinking is always clear, as if constraints themselves defied the writing to press ahead and say more.  Philips and his command of resources might surprise you; but hear the Galliards and Almans of John Bull, and prepare to be disarmed by charm.

Leonhardt brings none of the assault and battery that lesser harpsichordists apply to this era.  His rubato and rhythmic inflexion is of the subtlest kind, and it informs the driving power and natural sweep of a conception in which a First Division musician gains the most by playing music just as it was written.

We need to value works of this eager appetite for life.  Never again would England have such an impact on composers across Europe.

SALUT D’AMOUR

“Old sweet songs” by Novello, Ketelbey, Gilbert and Sullivan, Elgar etc.

THE LONDON CONCERT ARTISTS

(ASV White Line CD WHL 2070)

TT: 72.18 (ADD/DDD)

Full price

* * (*)

“Pink bon-bons with snow in the middle” said Debussy, with characteristically generous spirit, of Grieg.   It’s a phrase that might seem alarmingly apt for this collection from The London Concert Artists: one false move, we surmise, and we are prone to find ourselves deep amongst the faded annals of the Twee.  When Gilbert and Sullivan remind you that “its merriment is slow, alas” your heart sinks at the prospect of an endless recital of the dirges Bertie Wooster used to sing in the bath.

How wrong you would be, given the musicianship one finds here.  The disc takes its title from Elgar and Jennifer Partridge manages a melting intimacy in her piano arrangement of the gorgeous piece, lilting affectionately, just a mite inclined to stress the obvious.  Alan Schiller aims for the same enraptured quality when he tackles Rubinstein’s Melody in F, and pulls it off as well as I can remember.   In Dear Little Café, Julia Meadows brings luxurious ardour to Noel Coward’s surprisingly astute awareness of key-relationships.  It’s a winner, this one.

The parlour music of the Nineteenth Century reveals its usual crisis of style: aiming at the shifting light and eager capacity to surprise of Schubert’s Moments Musicaux, yet always falling back earthbound.  Like all the best pop songs, Home Sweet Home runs out of steam within the first line.  Facing its banalities, either you should opt for a sort of laconic knowing, or affect enough gusto to carry buffalo before it.  If you have to be tawdry, the worst thing in the world is to be modest with it.  True, an alternative is the searching and luminous revelation Andras Schiff gave us in his Decca recording of the Songs without Words; but Mendelssohn was good enough to take such scrutiny, and most of the pieces here are not.

It is a performance of Mendelssohn’s I would that my love which hints at the only flaw in the London Concert Artists’ music-making.  There’s an earnestness, a want of spontaneity and forward impulse.  How much does their calculated poise (that of studious dignity) get in the way?  In trying to sell every bar for more than it might be worth, one can fail to appreciate real inventiveness.  A lack of jauntiness afflicts Novello’s Ascot Gavotte: the witty swoops are undercharacterised, the crescendi need more mischief to them.  Contemplating this lack of a spring in the step, you realise how little humour dates; by its side, religiosity and patriotism, pall.

An agreeable frisson of kitsch still twinkles through.  Excelsior (belted out here with exactly the right conviction) is “Erlkonig” festooned with chintz: Richards’ Warblings at Eve is a Song without Words arrested in its growth and crawling like a fly through chewing-gum.  But then, half the fascination of this disc lies in its music’s tiny incarnations of what was going on between greater composers at the time.  Alan Schiller salvages notable poignancy from amongst the twittering birds and lugubrious pathos of the Monastery Garden.  Our flurry of handkerchiefs stopped in its tracks, we notice that, with its resonant bass, here is a performing flea’s reminiscence of Debussyesque orientalism and Cathedrals under the Sea.  The massive, soaring chords in the treble are from Schumann; caught in mid-flight between Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov.  No man, you remind yourself, is an island.

The record stands as chronicle of an era now as shadowy as a sepia portrait, its ephemeral weaknesses and lost strengths.  It is real fun.  And some of the melodies are rather good, aren’t they?

SCHOENBERG

  Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra, 1933 (after Handel’s Concerto Grosso Opus 6 No 7)*; String Trio, Op 45 (1946)

LENOX QUARTET (members), with *LSO/FABERMAN

 (Phoenix PHCD 121)

TT: 41:09 (ADD)

Full price   [No recommendation]

 

I remember seeing a cartoon once for which the punchline read, “The fool! He’s on the piano!”  And sure enough, escaped from a bowl perched on a suburban upright, there was a goldfish in a two-inch diving suit filled with water, tottering over the keys.

Questin Crisp said that wit lodged between form and content.  Not only wit – and its devices of anticlimax, the plundered and flawless logic of the absurd – but everything that makes art into meaning.  Art (like science) is a filter for making sense of experience: a portrait with the power to create meaning afresh.  An ability to generate new logic, new language, is its central, crucial feature – and with it, a capacity to forge an architecture which sweeps aside our old imagination.  To do this, creative artists calculate and confront themselves: they see their work as an outsider does.  When this happens, a trade in options and meanings is on the cards: a dialogue propelled by its own rationality and self-justification.  I think this is what makes art as important as breathing, and gives artists their passionate urge to speak.

The painter Paul Klee used to talk about going for a walk with a line.  All arts are a game of gestures and possibilities: strategies through which a listener’s imaginings of what is about to happen are raised, dissipated, redefined.  You enter an artist’s vision, and step back to see how much it has changed your own.  James Joyce spoke of epiphanic moments, those instants of revelation where all expectation is suddenly transformed.  One realises then that imagination takes more than the free and uncluttered sight that children have.  It is a marshalling of resources which take flight on their own terms, a superbly purposive and logical spontaneity.

Since Pulcinella, the stakes in Neoclassicism are high, and mediocrity is a crusade into a land where all the eggs have been sucked.  But why is it that Stravinsky’s pastiches work so well?  Why can you identify the Soldier’s Tale as inverted burlesque, a parody which has ceased to be parody: which has risen into its own sound-world?  The stratagems and aplomb with which he reveals his incongruities have something to do with it: the composer as conjurer, taking what decent souls in the rain reasonably assume, and flicking it on its head.  The quality of creation is the quality of its choices: and for a virtuoso with a world of technique at his command, there are as many meanings to be explored as there are skins on an onion – an adventure through Chinese boxes and illusion.

But if the pillaging of old music pits modern resources and fresh thinking against abandoned world-views, Schoenberg’s ability runs the gamut from A to A.  Here we have one of those discs where brittle and splenetic ineptitude coalesces at every level.  “This”, as advertisers used to say, “is something to cherish”.  Rarely do you find anything that aspires to vigorous opera buffa, and achieves a baleful sludge of inadequacy.  Handel’s original is about pace, resilience, dialogue, and disciplined economy of means.  None of this survives its transition into the grotesque: not the half-light of ambivalence – as in Kafka or Mahler, where dissonance forces new scrutiny or understanding – but a grotesque unrelieved by purpose, control or insight.

It was the spark and grace of the Baroque and early Classical age that Stravinsky grasped so well. In this Concerto Grosso, what are almost echo-effects create (more than anything by Beethoven) Wagner’s ‘apotheosis of the dance’, for there’s an instinct at work by which elements arise as part of a unity which is both homophonic and contrapuntal.  Schoenberg’s turgid orchestration unbalances its symmetry, and reduces a sense of miraculous unfolding to stale inertia.  His intentions in doing so remain plodding and opaque.

It’s disappointing to watch music as rich as tapestries subside into an understain.  I left with the memory of a florid mass of redundancy,  flagging and reinventing itself to avoid collapse.  Its interest lies in the sentimentality with which the 1930’s saw past eras: for Schoenberg provides a euphonious kitsch as though the Busch Quartet had been recast in saccharin, with a wave of piano arpeggios for good measure.  Fortuitous too, because the use of the same clichés at radically different moments undermines any sense of context.

“Art,” said D H Lawrence, “must contain the essential criticism of the morality to which it adheres.”  In Schoenberg’s Handel there can be no criticism, because nothing of the essentials has been understood.  It offers imagination without form, ritual without discernment – at best, sterility: at worst, chaos.  Neither holds much prospect for the future.

The recording is primitive and the performance sounds like a first take.  Both improve for the Opus 45 Trio, which as authentic composition has more of the quality of a coiled spring.  But where classical sonatas transform themselves in recapitulation, Schoenberg gives us no more than dead repeats.  This is another case of the technique that failed to grow and was left behind, of fame that became more of a withered irrelevance.  Any great composer rises above his imitators.  Schoenberg never did.

PROKOFIEV

Peter and the Wolf: Symphony No 7; Summer Day; Winter Bonfire

 FORRESTER (narrator), ORCHESTRE METROPOLITAIN/GROSSMANN

 (CBC SMCD 5118-2)

TT: 58.13, 57.25 (DDD)

Mid-price

 * (*)

The question was always the same: how to deal with Stalin?  An endless need for enigma and circumlocution drew forth some of music’s fragrant oozlum-birds, alongside its emptiest and most corrosively bitter utterances.  Yet Prokofiev, said Rostropovich, was childlike in many ways.  A love of fairy-tales and enchantment, where the tartness of his natural idiom could be crisply fringed in icing and a dazzling swirl of taffeta, proved safe haven for the man to whom (reports Shostakovich) it was all so incessantly “amusing”.

For there is little here of of Schumann’s almost painfully sharp rapport with childhood; but the work of an outsider who is well aware of when he is meant to sound gauche.  The charm, the tenderness and vulgarity alike, can be devastating.

The Seventh Symphony has something of this crocodile rictus in its coy and euphoric glut of sound.   No whirring tumbrils, with their shards of burnt and flaking metal.  Prokofiev is never happier with the nightmare of Soviet Realist ritual than when it means a universe of cuckoo-clocks, a holiday brochure for a vegetarian heaven.  No wonder he wrote birthday presents for Stalin.  But aspiring dictators have always loved “terrors that did not terrify”, and Prokofiev could have been the little darling to any of them.  He is the perfect embodiment of that joyless mirth that is the defining crust of dogma at its most stale and paternalistically stolid.

No, this is too harsh; even if the Seventh is a tiger which cannot decide whether it is meant to be paper or not.  A long-limbed work, you might call it, like very superior Khatchaturian; where muscular heroism is circumscribed by pussy-footing nostalgia.  Its saving grace (and grace features strongly) is easy, swirling motion.

It is this sweetness and lithe, springy elegance that Jarvi (on Chandos) captures so well.  He understands the music’s needs for precision and almost creamily sleek understatement, its need to breathe.  Ms Grossmann’s small orchestra sounds undernourished, unbalanced: and it does little for fluency or a sense of culmination.  In the Moderato, Jarvi’s sense of fleetness through clear water is inimitable, whereas Ms Grossmann gives us splinters.  Of course, episodic conceptions work where different elements take flight on their own terms.  But here, it fails to happen.

The rest of Grossmann’s performance has much to commend it.  For the Allegretto there’s a sparky agility – refreshing lightness, too, in the third movement.  This is playing of intelligence rather than instinct, by a conductor who knows how to draw spiky characterisation from limited resources.  I just wish she’d let herself go: do more to match Jarvi’s sense of burlesque or his final, hushed farewell.  We need to be swept up in Prokofiev’s vision with its fresh, tripping sense of the brightness of things.  Ms Grossmann is a bystander.

In Peter and the Wolf, the most relevant comparison is with Phillip Schofield’s new issue on EMI.  Both narrators affect the demeanour of one struck by a stuffed eel, but which with children passes for awe.  Mr Schofield, apart from being the motive force that sets a million tiny hearts fluttering, reminds you less of the favourite aunt from whose cavernous lap and iron grip you once struggled vainly to escape.  The EMI reading is altogether more mischievous, with bags of good humour, and conducting too which is deftly and freshly pointed.

Perhaps this is not the point in the CBC account.  It seems intended as an introduction to music for young children; so that Peter emerges out of a summer dream, and the symphony from a winter’s journey, complete with sound effects.  However Ms Forrester’s exclamations of “Yum, Yum!” might be received in the Dress Circle of the Royal Festival Hall, I expect five year-olds will find it magical.

For those of us whom age withered long ago, Gielgud’s Peter (EMI) remains first choice.  The urbanity of its opening creates sharper contrasts with a climax which explodes in vibrant sound.  The range, the judgment and splendid spirits of this Virgin CD make it shine; for (alone amongst these issues) it has charm.  It comes with a first-rate version of Carnival of the Animals, whereas Mr Schofield is cobbled together with two old recordings which have feet of suet.

SCHUBERT: A RECITAL

Simon Keenlyside (baritone): Malcolm Martineau (piano)

EMI Eminence CD-EMX 2224

TT: 71:04 (DDD)

* * (*)

Schubert, as Alfred Einstein used to remind people, had nothing to do with the florid emotionalism of the Romantic era.  His music is always about an atmosphere that redefines itself as it develops, and this as much as any ambivalence gives it the vitality and suppleness of endless self-inquiry.  Even the simplest songs shift their ground through means which are as diverse as they are subtle; and by the end we (just as much as the composer, as much as the poet) have always learnt something new.  This quality of reflexivity – of introspection, if you like; at any rate, a process by which every word comes to mean more, every phrase is a fresh option – accounts for the stature of music which is as transparent as the thinking of children, yet as daunting to musical strategists as it ever was.

Not by any stretch of imagination, the sort of thing you’d use to call cattle home across the Sands of Dee.   Mr Keenlyside has magnificent vocal equipment, but sometimes music gets in the way.  Still, time is all he needs.  If there are moments here which are not so much beefy as the sort of thing a rottweiler could chew to feel the nourishment, your impression is of the unleashing of perhaps a major talent, which already has much to say that is formidably right.

It’s a pity that the opening song, Der Einsame, is his weakest.  Fischer-Dieskau for Philips brought a laconic edge and bouncing rhythm – an element too of quizzical interrogation to Alfred Brendel’s accompaniment – which makes this new version sound like a trudge, confusing inertia for weight.  Getting contexts right is the problem, and the slowness of Standchen means that imaginative touches are already consigned to a lost cause.  Listen to Elizabeth Schumann in this music, and you’ll hear how more than the appropriate register has been lost.  As much as anything, An Silvia demonstrates the resources that vintage performances bring to this challenge of a meaning which evolves through each successive verse.  Schwarzkopf was hypnotically slow, of course; but both Fischer-Dieskau and Gerard Souzay changed their resonance and intonation to create a narrative structure.  Mr Keenlyside just offers repeats.

He’s best at sustaining a mood.  Der Jungling an der Quelle reveals the smoothness of this golden voice as it catches Schubert’s essential levitation, his ability to create motion within stillness.  A couple of songs come from Schubert’s period of pantheistic mysticism, which was filled with nostalgia for the purity of ancient Greece.  Lied eines Schiffers is one of them, in which Mr Keenlyside’s dramatic awareness animates what must always be more than a simple evocation of calm waters.  A tough test, and he passes it well.  Die Götter Griechenlands is another, disarmingly well done; and the singer understands its sense of forlorn inquiry which subsides at last to a whisper.  Prometheus commemorates the embitterment against fate (in mythological guise) of a composer fighting for his life and here (as in Waldesnacht) Keenlyside’s power and control, pushed beyond anybody’s reasonable limit, are memorable.  Yet Der Wanderer an den Mond, like Einsame, needs more of Fischer-Dieskau’s clipped intensity.  As in a fidgetty Heidenroslein, it’s the ability to let go that seems elusive.

Auf der Bruck, more Schubertian defiance, is perhaps best thing on the disc.  Keenlyside attacks it with an eagerness that makes even Souzay seem pale, although the older man’s expertise in slicing and squeezing vocal lines whipped up a palpitating energy.  Yet Nachtviolen is magically seamless, and the EMI partnership has mastered its sense of almost imperceptible growth.  No-one summoned as well as Schubert the co-existence of fragile reminiscence and lacerating immediacy.  How well Mr Keenlyside grasps it.

MENDELSSOHN

 Symphonies Nos 3 and 4

LONDON PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA/WELSER-MOST

 (EMI Classics CDC 7 54263 2)

TT: 66:27 (DDD)

Medium price

* (*)

The Fourth Symphony has been used for climbing practice as much as anything else in the repertoire.  Yet at his death, Mendelssohn’s dissatisfaction is known with a work which, after five exhilarating minutes, can seem to evaporate into a great fog of vacuity.  The apparent sameness of pace within each movement, their seeming lack of contrast or development, relapse into meaninglessness for a conductor who only grasps the thinking behind A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

I doubt this is what troubled Mendelssohn.  The real challenge is that he is a Romantic, like Chopin, for whom Bach and Mozart mean more than Beethoven: his melodic lines lucid and springy, his inner structures vital and crisply, fastidiously wrought.  There is, too, a hidden agenda to this symphony which no cliché of Italian sunshine can illuminate.  Mackerras makes the shadows that run through it palpable: the slow movement plaintive and self-consumed, the finale chilling, sinking to the poisoned whispers Chopin delivers at the end of the Funeral March Sonata.  I wish Mackerras were as persuasive elsewhere.  But his opening seems brusque and the scherzo has an odd pallor to it.  Norrington too, after a cracker of an opening, lets his middle movements become strangely itchy.

This is tough competition, and Welser-Most is as good as anyone in the scherzo.  His Allegro vivace opens well too: the string line gets squeezed and bounced along effusively, nothing hurried.   Yet there’s a hint of what is to come in its clutter of over-fed, cloyed lines.  Washy recording is much of the problem; yet for whatever reason, the second and final movements are dead weight, their few effects superficial and flaccid.  Everything is so well-mannered.  But we need to hear more than a tepid Wagnerian gush of sound.

The question is one of resources.  Peter Maag digs into his, creating episodes and internal dialogues that draw, from the weakest orchestra here, a reading of considered elegance, perhaps the subtlest of them all.  Heard after Welser-Most, its clarity of focus puts it in a different world.

Winner by a nose is Abbado; for a performance which keeps its wit, style and natural animation from the first bar to the last.  Welser-Most is for those who like their Mendelssohn overstated and unthreatening: an endless surfeit of milky breakfasts.  As your old Mum used to say, “I’ve left the lumps in”.

The field for the Third Symphony is less crowded; but it’s here you realise why the prospects that Welser-Most sets up so promisingly, often disappoint.  His is a disc built up from a multitude of small effects, which fail to gel.

It works best over short stretches, where the music’s label or his own instincts allow him to forfeit this miniature, tunnel-vision.  There’s an almost vocal quality in the first movement’s opening: seductively ripe strings in the scherzo as well, answering the woodwind with a brightness that almost matches Norrington’s excitement and feeling of mischief.  Both conductors summon joyfully what I can only call a sense of satisfied yearning.

Still, music is about expectations; and in order to speculate, you have to accumulate.  When parts dictate wholes, the sweep of a performance is lost.  When there is no reflexivity between details and the whole, they become isolated, fortuitous, lacking proportion.  In the first movement, Welser-Most’s slow speed backs him into a sort of heroic blandness, with no room for the organic tempo changes by which Norrington’s bravura surge gains its flexibility, its detail and urgency.  Who was it said that dullness is full of mean little inaccuracies?

There’s a splendid cohesion to Norrington’s reading.  He creates arch-structures, each part with different effects, in which later sections answer and are given context by earlier ones: scarified glissandi in the first movement, a lustrous freshness elsewhere.  Worthy though Welser-Most is, he cannot match the pliancy and variation by which Norrington gives the music this passion, its sense of apt adventure.

POULENC

Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra; Stravinsky: Dumbarton Oaks Concerto; Milhaud: Scaramouche; Matton: Concerto for Two Pianos (1964)

ANAGNOSON, KINTON (piano duo), KITCHENER-WATERLOO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA: ARMENIAN

 CBC SMCD 5120

TT: 70.09 (DDD)

Full-price

* * (*)

At the time when Mahler was saying that a symphony should be like the world, Frenchmen by birth or spirit were discovering what it was the bilious Teutonic sound-world never dreamt of.  Poulenc’s concerto was written when the revolt into style was well underway, and has so much more cunning than the fanatic conjunction of Bach, Mozart and Balinese gamelan music that we suspect.  Parodies of sacred cows fly past quicker than you can count them; but it takes something else to account for the stamp this work has left on concertos from Ravel to Britten.

A pummelling of ideas has much to do with it; for this is music with the energy of a mastodon on pistons, having woken up to find that someone has inflicted a blue-rinse on it during the night.  And then there’s the logic of the absurd: impeccable, innovative and deadly serious.  So well he uses incongruity to control colour and pace, with waves of kitsch liable to descend at any moment of crucial transition.   A viscous puddle of Romanticism gets swept into the last raucous showdown, for whilst Poulenc may not be the magician that his heroes were, he’s a rattling good juggler.  Not a bar is superfluous, and nothing is as you expect – except for the ethereal glaze of windchimes in to which his arch-structures always dissolve.  Whilst Schoenberg was labouring on his impacted little fossils, Poulenc was revealing his aplomb in making three centuries his own.

I say this because different performances leave you with impression of a radically changed work: and the question has to be whether to seek out what the piece might try to be, or to play for known strengths.  Its score appeals for precision throughout, and Duchable and Collard (Erato) – irreverent, rigorous, caustically sharp – make you more aware than anyone of the music’s disciplined lineage.  But listen now to Anagonoson and Kinton in the Larghetto: much more of the enchanted world, and the Finale too is airy and delicately etched.  Ingenuous, perhaps; and in the Allegro given to romanticised heroics, yet rationally consonant throughout.  How much of a brisk straight line is the concerto supposed to be?

What troubled me a little was the Canadian team’s fondness for rubato and acceleration.  Throughout this disc there is a hint of artifice or deliberation, a lack of natural dash, that never quite convinced me.  EMI, in their Composers in Person series, have just released Milhaud himself playing Scaramouche.  It sounds marvellous: whether in the clipped, boiling energy of the Braziliera, or in the lilting tenderness he brings to the second movement, even through the fog of old shellac.  With Anagono-son and Kinton, the finale shows a trace of the professional duettists’ mechanised sheen, always counting in their heads.  It is at their more introspect, again, that they show their best.

Dumbarton Oaks is Stravinsky’s knotty homage to Bach, where the 18th century whips into shape music which more and more pursues a labyrinthine and mischievous life of its own. In piano arrangement it inevitably gets slowed down and sanitized, its strands reined in by sounding the same. Less of stylistic abduction, and more a milky affability; yet Anagonoson and Kinton’s friable, laconic snap draws as much from it as you can.

Roger Matton’s 1964 Concerto makes an apt conclusion to it all, not least in highlighting the difficulties that patchwork must face in sustaining long arguments.   Here is the Far East for a later generation, woven into the textures of Bartok and Stravinsky at their most lustrous, or Poulenc himself in its sonorous interludes.  If you can imagine Les Six reared on fudge and served at a post-modernist subscription concert, this is it: not disagreeable, especially when set alongside Magyar night music transplanted to the monastery garden.  Pastiche works better when (as with Stravinsky) it confronts itself. And yet – written whilst other composers were trying to mount an eggshell in a spider’s web – here’s a disc filled with music which is festive, bustling and humane.

SCHUBERT

Trio for No 1 for Piano, Cello and Violin in B flat, D898: Notturno for Piano, Violin and Cello in E flat, D897

 Trio ex Aequo

Discover DICD 920110

Total time: 55:46 (DDD)

 Two star (* *) recommendation

There’s Schumann’s assessment of the Trios: one lyrically feminine, he said, the second an angry meteor.  Emotionally the lyrical one is more complex; and if Schumann was trying to highlight both a voluptuous and ardent vulnerability at work, how right he was.

All this is as strange as most of Schubert’s music must have seemed, to a world still filled with Mozart and Beethoven.  The B flat is one of Vienna’s most quicksilver apparitions, where a gossamer lightness of texture often seems charged with almost orchestral sonority.  The gloss of eagerness and yearning: the impulsive gallops up and down the keyboard and exuberant asides: the martial rhythms and childlike confidences (often dissolving into each other) give it a quality which transcends joy.  What I mean is that the piece has a sort of knowing innocence, and this creates a conversation between equals of special intimacy.  Yet it is the rare and happy fusion of opposites that makes it so deftly elusive.  This is what we, as much as Schubert’s contemporaries, boil down into the myth of “sociability”.

The sweet-toned but grey account from the Trio ex Aequo enters a cruelly competitive market, even at its modest price.  The newest contender (from Philips Classics in a double-disc overview of the Trios) is the first and briskest of the Beaux Arts’ shots at the piece, and it is an unfolding delight: its interplays just as eloquently mischievous as the Borodin Trio on Chandos, but with a cohesion which the Borodin’s floundering exchange of confidences never finds.  Charm is there in spades, a boisterous incisiveness too, but without ever losing sight of both overall scale and the proportions each episode needs to bring it to vibrant life.  Freshness and instinct aptly considered – not the depth of the Beaux Arts’ later performances, perhaps; but not their sense of formidable digestion either.  In the Andante it is the quality of phrasing that gives a sense of daydreams skimming and evaporating.  The rest presents a model of effervescence (flightiness, almost) through poised understatement.   In these moments, Schubert creates a simultaneous existence of emotional palpability and levitation which places him in an unmistakeable expressive tradition.  In the visual arts, it ran between Odilon Redon and Bonnard.  Of course, Schubert is equal to either of them.

Unfortunate, then, that first movement of the Trio ex Aequo’s conception is the weakest.  It shows you Cleopatra’s barge gliding serenely through the drains: a lugubrious juggernaut of style which substitutes mannerism for diction, reverence for insight, and awe for a capacity to seize the moment and make sense.  Where the Beaux Arts brought revelation one is here reminded of a cow which has caught sight of heaven, transfixed perhaps by the sheer occasion of watching Sarah Bernhardt flounce through the meadows on her wooden leg.

The broad strokes of the Notturno suit the Trio ex Aequo best, and they play very well indeed.  The slow movement of D898, revealing a violinist of major talent, hints at the same warmth and suppleness.  It is a lack of context and crucial transition which lets their good ideas down, which makes worthiness into dullness: the sheer space they have to make for themselves to say anything worthwhile.  Where the Trio ex Aequo offer us the coagulated mire of endless sincerity the Beaux Arts, and the sense of liberation they bring to every bar, bring home this music’s capacity for infinite hope.

PROKOFIEV

Sviatoslav Richter (piano): “Live in Japan”

Volume 1: Piano Sonata No 6 in A, Opus 82 (1940): Piano Sonata No 9 in C, Opus 103 (1951): Piano Pieces from the ballet Cinderella.  Total time: 66′ 31″ (AAD).   Memoria 991-001

Volume 2: From Visions Fugitives, Opus 22 (1915-17): Légende, Opus 12 No 6: Danza, Op 32 No 1: Valse, Op 32 No 4: Pensées, Op 62 No 3; Sonatine Pastorale, Op 59 No 2: Paysage, Op 59 No 2: Rondo Op 52 No 2, from Le Fils Prodigue: Valse Op 96 No 1, from War and Peace: Suggestion Diabolique, Op 4 No 4.  Total time: 46′ 03″ (AAD).  Memoria 991-002

* * *

The surprising thing about Soviet Realism, like the dog on its hind legs, is that it worked at all – let alone so well.  With the Nineteenth Century clapped out, with composers denied the right to strike into fresh musical language, all that was left for them was heroic and incestuous pastiche.

Yet pastiche allowed an Indian summer of musicianship: and it is one to which Richter’s serious, almost austere analytic insight is well attuned.  Nobody listens to him for a debutante’s idea of small-talk, but for enough strength and rigour to make the competition go limp at the knees.  Playing in the grand manner, certainly; yet tempered by the discernment that lies behind that flat old phrase, “letting music speak for itself”.  Dullness, it’s said, is full of mean little inaccuracies; and you will not hear Prokofiev made more scrupulous or captivating than it is here.  Where other pianists try to lose themselves in a dusting of notes, Richter leaves an indelible stamp on whatever he plays, and makes it entirely his own.

What a portrait these discs provide.  The finale of the Sixth Sonata brings a characteristic fusion of electrified energy and poise: Number 9 is about elegant and sophisticated clarity of diction, and the rest reveals a master tactician’s control in spinning melodic lines.

It’s not the first good performance of these pieces, of course. In one of the supreme recordings of the 1980’s, Ivo Pogorelich got to the burlesque behind what often seems like the endless, laboriously transfigured banality of the Sixth.  He managed to give it the dreaminess and fleetness of an improvisation.  Richter is more deliberate.  Like Prokofiev, he thinks in rhythms and sonorities; and this is ideal discipline for a composer who seems to flounder if you allow the music too much free rein.  Now Opus 82 is presented as a bony, intractable form, leached clean of Romantic affectation, and inevitable in its cyclic structure.  You see at last the purpose gripping beneath the surface.

The domestic Prokofiev of the Ninth Sonata suits Richter like nobody else.  John Lill (ASV) brings greater warmth, but he lacks such a sense of unfolding possibilities.  These later works were inspired by Beethoven and it’s Richter, the dedicatee here, who finds inner meditation and imposing growth: an essential renewal in the first subject’s final appearance.  He thinks of phrases as movement – often slower than his rivals, but how buoyant he is.   The reason?   It has to do, I think, with awareness of symmetries and developing cadences: contrasts seamlessly controlled, the thinking eloquent and proportioned throughout.

Visions Fugitives are astringent in a way that reminds you of Beethoven’s Bagatelles, but with something too of the crepuscular glow of Scriabin or Debussy.  Ephemeral, springy, always compact and fresh, they have a quirk of storytelling and reminiscence: a narrator’s sense of summation and illuminating afterthoughts.  In No 3, Nikolai Demidenko (Conifer) proves more agile, and this gives him better control in a miniature set of variations whose whole point lies in a dissipated flourish of force.  But Richter brings more than a hard knot of concentration.  There is, again, that subtle weighting and inflection; a range of colour or voices that recalls Richter’s flair for impressionist music.  No 18 trickles as hypnotically as Satie, yet it’s better than Satie ever was: and Richter’s pathos is made more intense – not less – by its restraint.

A waltz from the Cinderella suite has a quality of charmed revelation, helped by a lifetime’s grasp of timing and articulation.  The recording, salvaged from an amateur cassette, is better than you’d think.  Well, a bit.

BEETHOVEN

Piano Concertos Nos 1-5: Bagatelles Op 33, Op 119, Op 126, WoO 52 and 56

LILL (piano), CBSO/WELLER

(Chandos CHAN 9084-86)

TT: 78.44, 79:23, 77:42 (DDD)

Full price

* * (*)

If you saw John Lill a decade ago, and concluded he was one of those British worthies who were never bland enough to find themselves wafted onto the South Bank Show, you need to listen again and hear how a  formidable musical personality has come of age.

He presents the First Concerto neither as a last wilting glance at the galante era, nor as the exercise in horseplay that has become customary since Michelangeli.  It falls naturally in the cycle, overlapping the worlds of Haydn and a Third Concerto that foreshadows Brahms: new sections opening with an ease that comes not from extraneous labels, but from their inner role.  I was reminded briefly of Solomon’s command of immense dynamics and his sense of civilized, uncrowded space.

It is the sense of homogeneity across the set – of disciplined, unadorned growth – that is so impressive.  The playing has the rugged sobriety is always had, but the dogged nagging at long passages has gone.  In its place is a new self-possession and mettle: a sophistication and convergence of means.  The Second Concerto, immaculately phrased, is a search for all sorts of subtle pleasures.

What prevents me from recommending Lill as a first choice is the release of Murray Perahia at mid-price.  The difference is that Perahia’s are accounts in which every detail is proportioned and thought through, whereas Lill keeps the impulsiveness of a big, multi-faceted personality: overt warmth in which emotionalism is always held in place by searching fidelity.  There is much to be said for both; but I was won over by Perahia with his miniaturist’s power of concentration on a grand and wholly satisfying scale.  He has a discrimination that makes even the Chandos issue sound crass and breathless, as if its perception were clogged by issues of a lower order.  Listening to Perahia in the Third, you remind yourself that virtuosity consists not only in what you can do, but in what you can afford to leave for granted.

The real problem is that Haitink is much more shrewd an accompanist than Walter Weller is.  He produces creative intervention, a dialogue between equals in which Perahia’s gestures are answered with other possibilities, other options.  His Third is spiky and intense, with a tensile spring that makes Weller sound perfunctory and undernourished – a plodder, despite faster tempi.  Lill’s playing has tremendous dynamism, but there is a certain fatness and restlessness to it; the orchestra needs to be sharper to give it the balance it deserves.  And Perahia’s Fourth, with its luminous sense of discovery, exists on a different level.  Easy to make it sound heartfelt, perhaps; but the Andante, like all pathos, pulls two ways: towards a feeling of flux and also of dead, chilled inertia.

The Emperor sums up this difference in tack.  For Lill it has monumental, visceral strength – but a bloated scale too which destroys perspectives, for every part has to be distorted to retain proportion.  It’s a tribute to his magnetic intensity that, heard by itself (and I wouldn’t advise you to listen to Kempff at the same sitting) it so nearly works.

But to Lill, the meaning of the music is fixed.  Perahia, a master strategist, gives it the impression of being endlessly re-affirmed and recrafted.  The Rondo has rarely been faster, and rarely has it sounded less forced in splendid fluency and lack of strain.  The slow movement makes no attempt at romanticised awe.  Its gracefulness is unimpeded by the decaying wedding-cake of oratory that Wagner and Liszt tried to force upon Beethoven, and which Beethoven never knew.

GERSHWIN   

Rhapsody in Blue (jazz band version): Michael Finnissy arrangements: The Gershwin Songbook: Piano Concerto in F

 MACGREGOR (piano), LSO/DAVIS

 (Collins Classics 13622)

TT: 76.09 (DDD)

Medium price

 * (*)

What is authenticity?  Something deeper than the Hallelujah Chorus not being sung by a cast of thousands, all reared on black pudding.  It has to do with any music finding its right voice.

“Being true to yourself” is a recent stigma for creative people to be lumbered with.  The reality is likelier to be Telemann writing background music for his employer’s meals, or Gershwin hoarding melodies against frantic deadlines.  But in the Twentieth Century, the prestige of that sterile label, Composer and Serious Artist, carries ever more irresistible magic.  For Gershwin, begging lessons from Ravel, it must have been near the end of the rainbow.

The one dire passage on this disc is when you come to Michael Finnissy’s arrangements of songs, transplanted to a strange inert world, its aspirations beyond Debussy and Rachmaninov, without the innovation or vitality that made either feasible.  Finnissey acknowledges that Gershwin’s genius was to catch a changing moment; so here is a gummy amber in which passing insects can be trapped for ever in durable form.  You can’t make a fossil out of spontaneity.  The more the music wilts, the more messages are thrown out with the medium.  I was reminded of the apparitions that used to afflict Bram Stoker after a surfeit of crabs.  It’s times like this that cause you to slump under your headphones, and contemplate the long dark tea-time of the soul.

But Gershwin’s own improvisations, crushed too under their Sunday best of modish chromaticism, have a range that makes tunnel vision read like a panorama.  Shura Cherkassky could make it all sound fabulous.  It takes very special talent to beguile you in song after song: voluptuary flair, agile and volatile, with its quiet retrospections and special timing: knowing when to play for sincerity or race for burlesque.  You need to sound like someone going on a spree between satin sheets.

Now, this is just what Carl Davis has; and he makes you feel the Rhapsody must be the music that made New Yorkers glad to be alive. Real tabasco, as P G Wodehouse would say: calculating the right dusty haze of lasciviousness and ennui.   But so much is ripely characterized, so much happens in the orchestra that the soloist won’t take up, that the tail wags the dog.  Modesty suits Ms MacGregor’s style well, but she is polite where there should be the dash that with Gwyneth Pryor – playing these works on Pickwick – makes them dazzle.

It is interesting that where Gershwin lampoons other genres (Strike Up the Band, Clap Yo’ Hands) he lifts satire into an artform beyond itself; it  crackles.  Ms MacGregor’s cadences have the right dying fall to them, sly and velvety.  Do It Again sounds the way young love should, and the Piano Concerto suits her well: crisp, elegant technique aligned to the needs of a work less flighty than the Rhapsody, where perhaps she feels more in control.  But there’s no joyous gasp of air in S’Marvellous: none of the effervescent sweep its words demand; one wonders if the pianist knows them.  The texture stays flat and uniform, for where there ought to be as many glints of wit as there are steps in an Astaire tap routine, this disc has feet of clay.  No champagne here so much as the nourishing mug of Bovril a concert pianist takes when she has resolved she Needs to Have Fun.

It’s about being able to see a genre from the outside, and calculate effect: a chameleon-like sensitivity to changing mood and movement.  But lack of awareness is the Achilles heel for both Ms MacGregor and Gershwin, when each becomes self-conscious.  You see them collide, both going in the wrong directions.  Still, this Collins issue offers as many belting tunes as it is possible to cram on a disc; and the sound is spectacularly good.

BEETHOVEN

 Piano Sonatas Opus 2 Nos 1 in F minor, 2 in A major, 3 in C major

 HOBSON (piano)

 (Arabesque Z6637)

TT: 78:26 (DDD)

Full price

* One star recommendation

I think it was Tovey who compared Beethoven’s sense of humour to a dog’s; and these early pieces are full of the surprise, the brio, the gallops up and down keyboards, that make the thinking behind his verdict clear.  But more besides: a hint of monolithic growth that anticipates the Hammerklavier, of the mesmeric control of timespans that makes the last sonatas uniquely challenging.  There is also something to Opus 2 more insidious than either distinction – charm.   A fine performance needs the quality of laughter to it; and an eager, tensile spring.

This is not a way to ease yourself into Beethoven by halves.

I remember hearing Brendel play the second of these sonatas at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, almost a decade ago; and I was struck by the surge he brought to its first movement, using pivotal phrases to link the widest range of expressive techniques.  The Largo was all about luminous transitions, and you could only admire the refinement with which every effect was given its context – the proportions and range of a performance which seemed at once spontaneous and created from inner meditation.  These are also the hallmarks of Schnabel in EMI’s Collected Edition: a sense of experiment and glowing rightness, something which is at the same time skittish and as eloquent as a recitative.

Now, Ian Hobson gives us playing so wholesome you could send it to collect Grandmother from the clinic.  In the A major work the staccatos are pedal-led almost primly, with a neatness I would give my thumbs for.  Yet motion is lost, and since it’s pace that holds this music together, what survives is a residue of clotted overpreparation.   His Largo is an attempt to make a statue out of a movement which, in that process, loses its true grandeur.  When insight shrinks from the relationship between parts, the cut-and-thrust is forfeited that makes Beethoven work.  You end up with an undis-cerning millwheel of sound, from which repeats protract themselves towards the infinite.  This is the sort of length for which one is not grateful.

The impression is of a table with no food on it, although you love the way Mr Hobson has ironed the napkins.  In the end I identified with the hostess who said, “Why don’t you go away and write all of this down?”  Jenö Jandó’s disc (Naxos) has these same sonatas; and whilst it too is unrelieved by sensibility into the inner subtleties that make the first two of them live, it has sharper instincts.

For Brendel, the first movement of Opus 2 No 3 was a sort of joyful collision between suavity and momentum; although I noticed how cleverly he made space for his effects to take flight.  Actually, cracked heads are what this music is about; it is the repercussions of making irreconcilables work together that set a stamp on the first truly Beethovenian sonata. In Brendel’s hands it might almost have been an unfolding narrative.  But you need to listen to Schnabel to hear how strikingly the finale can soar.

Not that you’d glean too much from Mr Hobson.  At last the straitjacket comes free, but it’s a case of playing which is palatable rather than revelatory: a perfunctory feel for timing which reveals too little sense of wider implications.  The Adagio is overcooked to the point where all that’s left is grey and limp; and it is the fact he tries so hard in the the Scherzo that makes contrasts fall together into the thresher of (oh dear, I hate to say this) stifling indistinction.

Music so tightly meshed has to sound inevitable, or it means nothing.  And Jando again, however bruising his occasional bouts on the megaphone, is really more interesting than this.

SCHUBERT

String Quartet in E flat, D87; String Trios in B flat, D471: in B flat, D581

 L’Archibudelli

Sony Classical Vivarte SK 53982

Total time: 63:51 (DDD)

 Full three star (* * *) recommendation

A fascinating disc, this, taking you from Schubert’s first worthwhile quartet (he was 16) and ending with his farewell to the music-making he could expect from his family.  He was then under twenty: 1815 and a crop of great songs were behind him, yet still he was preparing for his future as assistant schoolmaster.  Music “of filigree and rococo delicacy”, someone called these chamber pieces; but they’re more than that, with growing harmonic complexity and sense of adventure.  Beneath the decorous veneer there lurks something odd and tantalizing, which within a decade would open into the visionary horizons of the last great works.

The straightest performance on this excellent authentic disc from L’Archibudelli is of D87.  They make it sound the work of an older composer than we’re used to (Einstein observed a lack of ‘vigilance’ in its construction), with none of the gallumphing jollity modern performances wallow in: straight, forthright, intelligently sober until a cracking finale, which is as crisp as spring air.  Yet throughout, these are performances of eloquent grace and stature – D581 edgily alert, bouncy and immaculately phrased, with a dark vein of fantasy in its second movement brought out as by no-one else.  Its capacity for drama and ambivalence, too, comes as a revelation.  In D471 the witty accents and mirrored inflexions are etched with perfect clarity in Sony’s excellent recording.

Fascinating too, to compare L’Archibudelli’s playing of the trios with the vintage Grumiaux performances reissued by Philips (438700-2) on a DUO double-disc.  Dated sound there, of course; and swooning portamentos alongside the urbanity and animation – the domesticated modesty, I’m tempted to say – that to our ears set early Schubert properly in his era.  Perhaps we’ve been indoctrinated; but there’s something about performance with modern instruments that brings out the curiously innocent ardour that seems at the heart of the music.  For L’Archibudelli, the hollow resonances of timbre make this sort of interpretation inconceivable.  With the varnish-stripping all the coyness goes, but with it, Grumiaux’s capacity to underplay and surprise.  Where thematic development for L’Archibudelli comes in the form of a perfunctory spurt of tempo, Grumiaux’s greater articulatory range – the colours and textures available to a modern quartet – allow an unfolding structure to be fashioned more overtly.

What’s gone with authenticity is any temptation to sentimentalise, or make things cloy.  What replaces it is modern research.  An Andante sostenuto has turned up for D471, with a poise and chromaticism worthy of early Mozart, as well as the hymnal compactness of line and harmony Schubert probably learnt from Haydn’s baryton trios.  He’d yet to gain the flicker of major and minor modalities that makes his mature music elusory, or to grasp the candour of raw emotion rather than the artifice of studious deliberation.

But did the composer to whom there was no truly happy music, ever learn exuberance?  To Grumiaux, I think he did; or at least, in D581, a burnished elegance that leaves L’Archibudelli seeming penny-plain.  But then, in the Andante, it’s the cleanness of authenticity that grabs you and makes you listen afresh: with darting suggestions and a fragility of timbre that make Grumiaux sound unctuous, overfed.  In the Menuetto, both teams find melancholy sweetness, directness that disarms us, earnest remembrance and courageous gaiety: a bittersweet world already lifted beyond emotion into higher purity.  Brisker L’Archibudelli may be, yet each group catches the sense of longing behind this mercuriality and strangely precocious wisdom.

EIGHT FAVOURITE OVERTURES

Handel: Arrival of the Queen of Sheba; Beethoven: Leonora No 3; Mendelssohn: The Hebrides; Brahms: Academic Festival Overture; Mozart: The Marriage of Figaro; Schubert: Rosamunde; Rossini: The Thieving Magpie; Berlioz: Le Carnaval Romain

 ROYAL PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA/BATIZ

 (ASV Quicksilva CD QS 6076)

TT: 69.52 (DDD)

Mid-price

* * (*)

Every favourite overture?  Well, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and William Tell are missing; but the rest are present and correct.

The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba lacks the effervescence of authentic instruments, of course.  The oboes’ articulation keeps perky and crisp, but a modern orchestra’s range and tone is something which promotes sleek refinement.  Yet it’s not just beside John Eliot Gardiner that Batiz seems glossy.  The brio of  Beecham’s famous gallops up and down the scale have gone as well.  In their place there is urbane and fastidious smoothness, whose allure is considerable.

The growls at the opening of Leonora No 3 are a bit of a paper tiger – but Batiz knows how to hang on to a note, letting it take its time, whilst tension gradually screws itself up.  Halfway through the Beethoven you realise what to expect of this disc: balanced between sophisticated diction and winning intelligence in seizing musical opportunities, with an occasional excess of civility.  If the mountainous growth of the Beethoven is somehow underplayed, it ends with a proper headlong exultation, only lacking that bluff, abrasive edge.

These are the features that make Batiz’s Brahms so natural.  Its opening bars are given an ideal fusion of gravitas and forward impulse.  Klemperer may have stressed the monumentality of the Academic Festival Overture, of inexorable growth towards the last climax.  In its place, Batiz offers a breath of fresh air.

I began to be troubled by a sameness in orchestral balance: predictable and muddled, the woodwind well forward.  This is sound which contributes to a pervasive sense of undercharacterisation.  Transitional sections seem underpowered.  Batiz is not one of those conductors whose musicianship is so diverse that he sounds like different interpreters in different works.  There is a performance of The Hebrides by Peter Maag (an underrated Mendelssohnian) in which the central episode slows to a shivering torpor.  You won’t find imagination as individual as that here, despite eloquence which never ceases to be satisfying.  At the finale of the Berlioz there is none of the burnishing that Maazel brings to orchestral showdowns; instead, a sort of flabby geniality. The Thieving Magpie lacks swagger and wit: it needs more insouciance than this.  Rossini Rockets sound best when they start from demure beginnings.  It pays to hold back on the starting blocks, rather like the little girl with the curl in the middle of a sulk.

This is too harsh, but it’s in the less bravura pieces that Batiz is most distinguished.  With Rosamunde, the crepuscular quality of Schubert’s music – the heavy wistfulness and infinite longing of Romantic sehnsucht, dripped through Goethe and Heine – aches; and how well Batiz grasps the fragile quality of Schubert’s idiom (its use of telling silences, its asides and subtle agitations), caught seemingly between ardent hope and the inevitability of failure.  It is a performance to set well ahead of the field.  The Marriage of Figaro too is as enjoyable as I’ve heard: lithe, electric energy almost free of freneticism.

There’s more to music than the fizzy bits.  But if this is one of those discs which Classic FM plays before its ping-pong results, Favourite Overtures surmounts its purpose through craftsmanship.  You can’t ask more than that.

NED ROREM

Day Music: Night Music

Day Music: LAREDO (violin), LAREDO (piano)

Night Music: CARLYSS (violin), SCHEIN (piano)

 (Phoenix PHCD 123)

TT: 45.08 (ADD)

Full price

* *

Ned Rorem is a novelist besides a Pullitzer Prize-winning composer, although whether he does invisible mending as well is not divulged.  At any rate, Day Music was a 1971 commission from Iowa State University, and Night Music followed on its heels.

Despite their ventures into atonalism, I was reminded of the obsessive circuitousness of Cesar Franck’s chamber music.  The same flighty obliqueness and nagging weight are there; that same sense of stale, churning air.  Yet here is a composer who knows exactly his resources, and puts them to telling use.  In the desiccated stasis of Day Music’s third movement, Extreme Leisure, there is no doubting the sophisticated modulation and solid craftmanship he has invested in something akin to a languid, deliberate nervous tic.  The inspiration, Rorem admits, is Le Gibet: and whilst it lacks Ravel’s haunted intensity of ritual, it too evokes a flat horizon of catatonic numbness and exhaustion: the staring lucidity that follows a journey of terminal waste, the eyes that cannot close.

Messiaen is an influence, with Bats sharing the rhythmic motifs and sonorities of Catalogue D’Oiseaux, shorn of opulence and transplanted to this pithy, powdery terrain: now something mutable, hermetic, and scarified.  He matches Messiaen’s fondness for convulsive asides and flecks of soured, glancing light.  If I say I was reminded too of Dali’s early landscapes, there’s a hint of Dali’s predisposition to kitsch: the trills and augmented fourths follow just so; for there is still an anonymity to this music, which has yet to outgrow its influences.

It works best where it returns to febrile self-corrosion and torpor.  But scabrous mutilations make a sad substitute for a living range of idiom.   Mosquitoes and Earthworms resorts to the virtuosic scrubbing which was fine in Sarasate’s day, yet the mention of insects and night-music reminds you of Twentieth Century music’s earlier pioneers – and beside them, Rorem’s passing effects are consistently more impressive than his sense of growth.

Another Ground, significantly, is an ostinato.  If you might be deterred by Rorem’s limitations, consider too the combination of trickling ephemerality and throbbing pace that underlies his self-consumed world: difficult to see how this implosive music could develop, perhaps; but there is much about it that remains compulsive, both dizzy and sinister.  I don’t know whether you’ve seen Odilon Redon’s lithograph of the spider: but if you can imagine it pinned out on a white tile under an arc-lamp, here it is.

Both performances are first-rate, but the recording is better for Day Music – which is also the more richly inventive of these two suites.

HAYDN

Symphonies Numbers  97 and 98

LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/SOLTI

(Decca 433 396-2)

TT: 49.47 (DDD)

Full price

* *

Solti spent his youth bursting musical fuses; and nowadays, even if his idiom has mellowed into something more pliant and introspective, he keeps that vital bounce which should make sense of music as festive as this.  Writing of these symphonies, H C Robbins Landon notes both their boisterous command of form and endless innovation.

And the trouble is that, with marvellous collections available at mid-price, the competition is too tough for Solti to revert to bad old days.  Listen to the opening Allegro of No 97 for a summary of what goes wrong: its Bar 76 subject reduced to so much pecking.  With this latest recording, we have a case of more effort achieving less.  There’s a brusqueness which misses Haydn’s essential ebullience and good humour; the sheer ease and fluency, the range of voices that others summon effortlessly, are nowhere to be found.

Simply a difference in taste?  I think not.  This movement works by an interplay of contrasts – not of form, but of tension, texture and phrasing – which give each strand its life and flavour.  For Solti babies get thrown out in a frenzied displacement of bathwater.  The spring and snap, the internal dialogue: both disappear.

Of course there are good things.  The Adagio non troppo, nowadays prone to become a laborious wallow, is restored to its authentic pace.  And the LSO shines in its tonal precision and finesse.  But there’s little sense of surprise in the minor variation; the metronome simply ticks away.  In Haydn, rests and pauses – however brief – have a vital function.  They are the packaging within which different motifs and episodes are placed, the basis of Haydn’s rhetoric.  For Solti they are invariably snatched.  Throughout this symphony, there is a superficial moulding which confines itself to what goes on inside each phrase.   There’s a fuzziness towards overall proportions, a loss of dynamic light and shade and therefore – however big the orchestra – a loss of scale.

The minuet and finale fare best, with much of the poise we might have heard from the beginning.  But however plausible they are, the spirit is oddly uninfectious.  There could be more point and suavity to the running strings; when Davis is silkily insinuating in his presence and charm, Sir Georg seems prosaic.

Number 98 works more perceptively because, I think, it sets Solti a more obvious challenge.  The Allegro’s ambiguity and darker colours demand organic directness rather than a relapse into threadbare didactic mannerism: and in the opening he achieves operatic eloquence throughout its declamatory gestures.  Perhaps Jochum managed what I can only call greater humanity, within music-making just as robust as this.  But with Solti a sense of menace bubbles away beneath a surface that Jochum never hinted at.  There’s a feeling of motion, too, that makes Szell’s venerable set seem gritty and four-square.

At a concert you’d say these were admirable performances.  Yet where Solti is at his best, Davis and Dorati are better still.  Elsewhere he can be graceless,  styleless.  The sheer sound of a modern big band lacks agility beyond a narrow range of tempi.  It lumbers.  Now, speed – informed by style – can generate verve; conductors from Toscanini to Norrington remind one of that.  Not so here.

Culminations of a lifetime’s adventure, these last Haydn symphonies are quintessentially works of discovery.  Not a moment need be routine.

SCHUMANN

Davidsbündlertänze, Op 6; Fantasiestücke, Op 12

FRITH (piano)

(Naxos 8.550493)

TT: 62:34 (DDD)

Bargain price

* (*)

Naxos have found a healthy place for themselves in the bargain basement of the market, with performances which are always good or better, and recording which often knocks the opposition for six.

The competition for these Schumann works is less cut-throat than you’d think.  They have a frankness about them, which means that veteran pianists who weigh them down with meanings Schumann never intended, are heading straight for the elephants’ graveyard.  But what a coupling they make: the Fantasiestücke all about art concealing art, the Davidsbündlertänze full of the meaty assertiveness that swept piano writing to the end of the century.

Not that anyone could accuse Mr Frith of overplaying.  The Fantasiestücke get a nice, small-scale reading which tends to box itself in.  The sincerity of feeling is never in doubt, yet the lack of inner tension or expectancy mean that only a slightly flaccid rubato is left to develop much expressive strength.  Warum? is an old test of the techniques you use to create a seemingly artless sense of dissolving, misty possibilities, its last bars almost a curtain opening up on a noctilucent world of memory.  Frith is on to something of the sort, but he hasn’t built the piece up enough for it do do more than falter.

You need to be adept at a kind of very superior afterthought, and the whole that sparks into more than the sum of its parts, to master this radiant profusion of ideas that seem to tumble over one other.  Here, Ende vom Lied is really a little dull.  There is a pallor to playing which has to find its way as carefully as this, a calculation that gets in the way of effect.  Listen to Rubinstein (eventually to be reissued at mid-price) for the electric charge that needs to lie over these pieces: compounded of voluptuous innocence, darting intuition, and (as with so much early Schumann) the brightness of undimmed hope.

The Davidsbündlertänze suit Frith much more: bullishly straight in the fireworks and better still in moments of reverie, which have disarming simplicity and easy motion.  Yet beyond them he gives you a flat, even surface.  If Carnival was a mask, said Schumann, here was the face beneath; and here too is a game of capricious innovations that leaves Frith behind.  Perhaps Ashkenazy is better at catching the enigmatic and complex vulnerability that lies behind its voracious, soaring reach and aching desires; and whilst his account of the Fantasiestûcke is not the most subtle thing he has done, it carries more weight than this Naxos issue.

A case of less reserve and greater reserves, you might say.  But for the money, Mr Frith gets three cheers.

HAYDN

The Creation (sung in English)

UPSHAW, HUMPHREY, CHEEK, MURPHY, McGUIRE: Atlanta SO/SHAW

(Telarc CD-80298)

TT: 106:58 (DDD)

Full price

* *

I’ll say it: however much we British ignore the fact, The Creation is the pinnacle not only of Haydn’s work but of the musical Enlightenment.  It aligns Handel’s zest with something Handel could never imagine, for Haydn reconciles the needs of theatre (often with explosive force) and his most personal expression, beginning with a gauzy veil of harmonies whose innovation seems to prefigure Wagner.

It is this blend of visionary concentration and assurance that Robert Shaw, at his best, summons so well.  Listen to Chaos (inspired by Herschel’s theory of planetary formation from swirling gas): an awed intensity of imperceptible growth, the strings lifting as if from nothing: the clarinet given sinewy, flexuous weight: the orchestral chords broken, plangent, friable.  It’s as if Simon Rattle’s version has both a violence and a superficial certitude that rides over the music’s real strength and negates the triumphant, famous burst into light.  The Atlanta Chamber Chorus, a choir well into the First Division, makes the CBSO ensemble sound distinctly rough in Despairing cursing rage.  And Rattle rushes his fences in The heavens are telling, ending in an indiscriminate scramble which seems tasteless beside the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra at its most elated.

If only the rest of Shaw’s recording were as good.  The notes tell us of a labour of love; and it sounds like an old performance in both its attention to detail and lack of surprise.  With Shaw you find summery affection, and authentic robustness, which can make Rattle sound impulsive and fitful.  But it’s Rattle who brings across the the joy of the work; and there is a clarity, a lightness, an elasticity and range to his conception that won me over more often.  If he hints as a performance caught too early in its development (so that it overstrains its form) it is testament to playing which make the glories of this piece surprise you as if for the first time.  He has an appetite and sense of happy discovery which still allows his singers the space in which to give their best.

The main problem lies with some of Shaw’s soloists.  Jon Humphrey as Uriel brings a sense of tepid routine to a crucial narrative role.  At In splen-dour bright  Shaw sets up a subterranean shudder of sound for him, only for a display of limpness which elsewhere struggles for extremes of pitch.

Not everyone is affected.  John Cheek as Raphael has a mettle and richness which demands more bite from the orchestra during Haydn’s syncopated jokes about the ponderous beasts.  Whilst both sopranos have an occasional tendency to squawk, Dawn Upshaw as Gabriel brings sleek pointing to her aria, Now robed in cool refreshing green: lusciousness which outshines even Rattle’s Arleen Auger, although Auger is technically assured.  Ms Upshaw was a welcome find for me, but Philip Langridge as Rattle’s Uriel is a winner.

If you prefer Haydn on period instruments, go for Hogwood.  Those won over by Rattle will find it po-faced; but if you suspect the CBSO version might be as much about its conductor as the composer, Hogwood is a good alternative.  Shaw too is high on a less-than-ideal list, but he offers gentility rather than enlightenment: a hint of monochrome which, however fine its parts, doesn’t flare into life quite as often as it ought.

June 16, 2015June 17, 2015 by Stephen Jackson Categories: Author, Classical music, Contemporary Music, Critic, Journalist, Magazine, Publishing, Schubert, Stephen JacksonTags: 19th Century, Chamber Music, Classical Music, Classicism, Composer, Contemporary Music, Feature-writer, Franz Schubert, Journalist, Lieder, Magazine, Nineteenth Century, Piano, Reviewer, Romanticism, Song, Stephen Jackson, Symphony, Writer Leave a comment