NOTTURNA Johann Gottlieb Janitsch, Sonate da camera, Vol. II (ATMA) ****
Montreal period-performance oboist Christopher Palameta (who spent three seasons with Tafelmusik in the mid-2000s) and his wind-focused chamber ensemble Notturna are back with a second volume of Chamber Sonatas by German Baroque composer Johanan Gottlieb Janitsch.
As was the case for the first album, in 2009, this outing is a pleasure in the choice of music as well as the interpretations. (For full details of the album and audio samples, visit ATMA's website by clicking on the group's name at the top of this review.)
This may be Vol. II, but the musical material sounds like the pick of the crop. Four of the five pieces on the disc are world-premiere recordings.
Palameta and his consort perform with breathtaking elegance. One of the hallmarks of this music, most of which dates from Janitsch's later years (he lived from 1708 to 1763), is that the instruments need to blend with each other seamlessly -- which is not easy to achieve when you have the very different timbres of transverse flute, oboe d'amore, cello and harpsichord to combine.
All five of the sonatas collected here feature a mix of transverse flute, oboe and oboe d'amore over continuo. The three Sonate da camera were most likely written to be performed at the composer's weekly Friday salons at his home in Berlin, where he worked as one of the musicians in the Prussian court of Frederick the Great.
This is gorgeously crafted music, following a slow-fast-fast, three-movement form that was popular in Germany at the time. Notturno's careful work only serves to make the music more beautiful. Janitsch's craft becomes more impressive the more one listens.
The final two pieces are titled Sonate de chiesa, but were not meant to be performed in church. Unlike the typical Baroque Sonata de chiesa, which has four movements, these have three, with the middle movement a delicately executed fugue.
And if you're not really in a listening mood, the pieces make a fine, breezy backdrop for a summer's day.
As François Filiatrault eloquently points out in the accompanying booklet, music was an integral part of Shakespeare's plays -- as references, as actual songs to be performed and as background music played by an offstage consort. In this new album, Canadian countertenor Daniel Taylor brings together his favourite collaborators in his Theatre of Early Music for a rich, 21-track sampler of all things musically Shakespearean.
Of course, we get the title song -- performed this time by tenor Charles Daniels instead of Taylor. Also present is veteran soprano Emma Kirkby in this beautiful-sounding recording made in London's Henry Wood Hall last June. Taylor sings solo for eight of the songs, including the gorgeous opener, "By Beauteous Softness," set by Henry Purcell and accompanied by Elizabeth Kenny on lute.
Taylor's voice, still lush, has darkened over the past few years, adding an even deeper lustre to the melancholy he clearly cherishes. Although the selection of songs covers all moods and occasions, the preponderance is for introspection, if not outright lament. And no one does this as well as Taylor these days.
Kenny is a pleasure in a solo Galliard by John Dowland. Fabulous soprano Carolyn Sampson brings a powerful, lithe delicacy to "If Music be the Food of Love," in another Purcell setting. Baritone Neal Davies does well in the ensemble songs as well as in his one solo: John Dowland's "If My Complaints Could Passions Move."
Taylor has ceded one song -- Robert Johnson's setting of "Where the Bee Sucks" -- to fellow countertenor Michael Chance, if for no other reason than to show how rare is the depth of a voice like Taylor's.
My only wish from the booklet, which includes all the lyrics, would have been to give a little bit of context or history for each song.
Overall, this is a carefully crafted, nicely performed outing that could, ideally, have used a bit more variation in tempo and mood. That said, there could hardly be finer accompaniment to a rainy summer afternoon.
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There isn't a video available to go with the new disc, so here is a diversionary treat both upbeat and humorous featuring Carolyn Sampson, singing "I Myself Shall Adore" from Handel's Semele at the BBC Proms last year with Harry Christophers and the Sixteen:
CDs for review arrive faster than I can listen to them, so many end up forgotten in the monthly jumble. One overlooked recent release I slipped into the player yesterday contained the first complete recording of the piano music of Luise Adolphe Le Beau by Croatian-born pianist Ana-Marija Markovina, who is virtually unknown in North America.
The 25 pieces by Le Beau (1850-1927) turned out to be a fine listen. Judging from the opus numbers, the disc is arranged chronologically. The earliest pieces could be forgotten works by Franz Schubert. The composer gets harmonically and texturally more adventurous as time passes. Markovina plays with an easy technique and restrained elegance in this recording made in Belefeld, Germany last May.
Liking what I heard, I pulled out the CD booklet to find out more about Le Beau. In its 20 pages (in standard European style, there are three languages represented), all I could find in the pseudo-learned gobbledygook and meanderings of Dr. Helmut Reuter of Bremen University was that Le Beau was born into a music-loving family in Baden-Baden, and counted the Clara Schumann, Brahms and Liszt among her composer friends.
I scanned YouTube for something helpful, and found a couple of Lieder and this lovely piece for cello and piano that is entirely representative of Le Beau's style:
The Helios label has reissued an excellent 1997 British recording of music for violin and piano by Antonin Dvorák, interpreted by violinist Anthony Marwood and pianist Susan Tomes.
The disc's programme showcases the composer's wide range of styles. You'll find all the details as well as audio samples here.
A salon piece like the Op. 100 Sonatina in G Major, one of the gorgeous pieces Dvorák wrote while vacationing in Iowa, gets the gossamer treatment from both Marwood and Tomes.
The duo changes approach and really dig into their instruments in the brooding (and misleadingly titled) Op. 15 Ballad.
The most notable thing about this recording is balance and clarity. The violin and piano are equal partners in all of these elegant performances.
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There isn't anything on YouTube from this album, so, instead, here are Marwood and Tomes joined by cellist Richard Lester in Dvorák's "Dumky" Piano Trio No. 3, in E Minor, Op. 90 (If you only have time to listen to one clip, I recommend the second, which begins with the third of the piece's six dumkas):
If you really love this trio, there is a gorgeous recording of it by Toronto's Gryphon Trio on the Analekta label. Details here.
The first piece on Songs Without Words, a new solo-piano abum by noted accompanist Julius Drake on the Canadian label ATMA, has held me spellbound. It's out of the middle of Robert Schumann's Pieces for Children, Op. 68, from which comes "The Happy Farmer," which I played as a 5- or 6-year-old.
It never would have occurred to me to look there for adult music. I sat down to play "Mignon" myself and realised that it would be very difficult for a beginner pianist to actually do this piece justice, because it relies as much on the piano as the pianist's fingers to move the piece forward.
I'm putting the wonderful simplicity of this music out there as my Mother's Day offering. It's the simple things that are the easiest to take for granted -- and are the most difficult to live without.
(Click on the image of the score, if you want to see it larger.)
Here is Brazilian pianist Rosiane Lemos, just having fun at a piano (she wrote her Master's dissertation on Schumann's Pieces for Children, so she has been living with this music for a while):
Drake didn't forget to choose a couple of Felix Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words for his album, which sounds and feels like an anti-encore album.
There is nothing on video by Drake that illustrates the album. Instead, for a wonderful clip of Emil Gilels playing Mendelssohn's "Duetto" from the Op. 38 Songs Wihout Words in a 1983 Moscow recital, click here.
I'm off for March Break and, given that my blog may or may not be present as part of the Star's entertainment offerings when I return, I figure it's a good time to pause and thank you, gentle reader, for popping by to visit and share in these miscellaneous musings, listenings and bits of news.
If I counted right, this is my 847th post since the first on March 16, 2009. I was, with the rest of my colleagues at the Star, encouraged to start a blog in the paper's effort to reach as many people as possible every day and also add to the variety of different voices that readers could find under the broad umbrella of a daily news organization.
The Old Skool printed Star still gets more than a million reads every day, as far as I know. Yesterday, for the first time since April, 2009, I saw the traffic figures for my blog and immediately understood why my managers see no point in having me spend a couple of hours every day working on it. I'm told my blog was more popular than many others under the Star's purview, but, to put it bluntly, for me they were a powerful slap in the face. The metaphoric red marks will take a little while to fade from my bestubbled cheek.
My little history with my little blog is a tiny microcosm of the well-documented struggles all news organizations are having with shifting reading and interest habits. Don't let any pundit, expert or visionary convince you otherwise: There isn't a single news organization out there that has any clue what combination of information and social media tools are the right mix to gather up a critical mass of readers while bringing in enough revenue to pay for the delivery of credible news and opinion. It is all a process of trial and error.
In the meantime, what we do -- and what format we do it in -- will continue to be in constant flux.
That said, I've had a ball with this blog. It's been a brilliant way to ask myself questions, to explore new music and to distract my wandering mind with a few grains of sand in the world's giant classical-music sandbox.
I've sometimes begrudged but largely enjoyed the discipline of having a daily post ready by 9 am (I'm slacking off already: it's 9:20 am as I write this) and it could be that I've become so addicted to the post-dog-walk Dear Diary routine that I'll want to continue this blog regardless of whether it enjoys the Star's official blessing.
But we'll see.
I can't very well say goodbye without a musical salutation influenced by the mind-blowing images from yesterday's earthquake in Japan.
Here are Edward Elgar's 1899 Sea Pictures, gorgeously sung by British mezzo Sarah Connolly in a 2006 Naxos recording with the Bournemouth Symphony led by Simon Wright.
I've included the poems (with the lines and verses clumped together to save space):
1. Sea Slumber-Song, by Roden Noel Sea-birds are asleep, The world forgets to weep, Sea murmurs her soft slumber-song On the shadowy sand Of this elfin land; ‘I, the Mother mild, Hush thee, O my child, Forget the voices wild! Isles in elfin light Dream, the rocks and caves, Lulled by whispering waves, Veil their marbles bright, Foam glimmers faintly white Upon the shelly sand Of this elfin land; Sea-sound, like violins, To slumber woos and wins, I murmur my soft slumber-song. Leave woes, and wails, and sins, Ocean’s shadowy might Breathes good-night, Good-night!’
2. In Haven (Capri), by Alice Elgar Closely let me hold thy hand, Storms are sweeping sea and land; Love alone will stand. Closely cling, for waves beat fast, Foam-flakes cloud the hurrying blast; Love alone will last. Kiss my lips, and softly say; ‘Joy, sea-swept, may fade to-day; Love alone will stay.’
3. Sabbath Morning at Sea, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning The ship went on with solemn face; To meet the darkness on the deep. The solemn ship went onward, I bowed down weary in the place; For parting tears and present sleep Had weighed mine eyelids downward. The new sight, the new wondrous sight! The waters around me, turbulent, The skies, impassive o’er me, Calm in a moonless, sunless light, As glorified by even the intent Of holding the day glory! Love me, sweet friends, this sabbath day, The sea sings round me while ye roll Afar the hymn, unaltered, And kneel, where once I knelt to pray, And bless me deeper in your soul Because your voice has faltered. And though this sabbath comes to me Without the stoled minister, And chanting congregation. God’s Spirit shall give comfort. He Who brooded soft on waters drear Creator on creation. He shall assist me to look higher, Where keep the saints, with harp and song, An endless sabbath morning, And on that sea commixed with fire, Oft drop their eyelids raised too long To the full Godhead’s burning.
4. Where Corals Lie, by Richard Garnett The deeps have music soft and low When winds awake the airy spry, It lures me, lures me on to go And see the land where corals lie. By mount and mead, by lawn and rill, When night is deep, and moon is high, That music seeks and finds me still, And tells me where the corals lie. Yes, press my eyelids close, ’tis well; But far the rapid fancies fly To rolling worlds of wave and shell, And all the lands where corals lie. Thy lips are like a sunset glow, Thy smile is like a morning sky, Yet leave me, leave me, let me go And see the land where corals lie.
5. The Swimmer, by Adam Lindsay Gordon With short, sharp, violent lights made vivid, To southward far as the sight can roam, Only the swirl of the surges livid, The seas that climb and the surfs that comb. Only the crag and cliff to nor’ward, And the rocks receding, and reefs flung forward, Waifs wreck’d seaward and wasted shoreward, On shallows sheeted with flaming foam. A grim, grey coast and a seaboard ghastly, And shores trod seldom by feet of men – Where the batter’d hull and the broken mast lie, They have lain embedded these long years ten. Love! when we wandered here together, Hand in hand through the sparkling weather, From the heights and hollows of fern and heather, God surely loved us a little then. The skies were fairer and shores were firmer – The blue sea over the bright sand roll’d; Babble and prattle, and ripple and murmur, Sheen of silver and glamour of gold. So, girt with tempest and wing’d with thunder And clad with lightning and shod with sleet, And strong winds treading the swift waves under The flying rollers with frothy feet, One gleam like a bloodshot sword-blade swims on The sky line, staining the green gulf crimson, A death-stroke fiercely dealt by a dim sun That strikes through his stormy winding sheet. O, brave white horses! you gather and gallop, The storm sprite loosens the gusty reins; Now the stoutest ship were the frailest shallop In your hollow backs, on your high-arched manes. I would ride as never a man has ridden In your sleepy, swirling surges hidden; To gulfs foreshadow’d through strifes forbidden, Where no light wearies and no loves wanes.
It's been a while since the excellent Norwegian female a cappella Trio Medieval has recorded a disc. In advance of the release of their latest, A Worcester Ladymass, next Tuesday, NPR is offering a free sneak peak on its website. It's a fantastic mix of great sound, serious scholarship and accessible new music.
The trio -- Anna Maria Friman, Linn Andrea Fugelseth and Torunn Ostrem Osum -- sounds wonderful in this 13th century Mass setting, found at a Benedictine abbey in Worcester. As the introductory article at NPR notes, pages from the manuscript had been removed to bind and repair other books. English composer Gavin Bryars set the missing Credo and the closing Benedicamus Domino.
The original music is a fascinating hybrid of organum (plainsong with an, in this case, moving pedal point/accompaniment) and freer polyphony. Bryars didn't try to mimic the Worcester style at all, but his additions somehow manage to fit in very nicely.
Whenever you kill hundreds of thousands of people, you're going to get some of their culture, too. Among the casulalties of World War I was a Parisian group that was more than a salon and less than the Arts & Crafts movement in England and the United States.
The Parisians called themselves la Société des Apaches, which in pre-politically correct form is meant to mean Society of Hooligans. They met every Saturday. Their anthem is said to have been the opening theme of the second movement of Borodin's Second Symphony:
There were writers, critics, composers, poets, publishers, interior decorators, textile artists (a sample pictured above is by Edouard Benedictus who also, I think, invented safety glass), musicians and painters among their ranks. Their unofficial leader was Maurice Ravel, who even created a fictional member of the group, Gomez de Riquet, just for fun. Ravel dedicated the pieces in Miroirs to this scrappy gang.
One of the members was composer and music critic Florent Schmitt, born in 1870 (making him five years older than Ravel). His music was very popular in France at the turn of the 20th century but here's another example of a composer who outlived his times. By the time he died in 1958, Schmitt was all but forgotten (it didn't help that Schmitt made a show of being a collaborator during World War II).
Excellent younger French pianist Vincent Larderet has done the world-premiere recording of Schmitt's piano transcription of his reworked 1911 ballet score for La Tragédie de Salomé, which was first performed in 1907 -- a work Stravinsky praised as a masterpiece of Modern music.
Larderet has filled out the Naxos CD with a three-piece suite called Ombres, written near the close of World War I and dripping with drama and melancholy. The second, Mirages, features a 1920 tribute to Claude Debussy and a piece dedicated to Alfred Cortot.
All of this music makes incredible technical demands on the pianist -- which Larderet overcomes with panache. His playing is remarkable for its ease as well as style. Although tonal, the music isn't easy to digest; it's the sort of listening experience that improves over multiple tries, as the composer's craft begins to show itself more clearly.
Here is Schmitt's colourful 1924 orchestration of Mirages. The conductor is Jacques Mercier:
I was very much looking forward to Alexandre Tharaud's recital for Music Toronto last night. When he cancelled, I decided to spend the evening at home.
I was doing some post-dinner reading and came across the name of French pianist Marcelle Meyer, pictured at left with six of her composer friends (Les Six: Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud and Francis Poulenc).
Her story and legacy has inspired Tharaud, so I thought I'd check her out. My reading and then listening on YouTube turned into a fantastic, intimate piano recital (having nice speakers on my home computer helps a lot).
There is something Tharaud said in an interview last year that goes to the core of what we hear when we listen to an interpreter.
This is my own translation: "A pianist who hides behind a text probably doesn't realise that he is presenting himself naked on disc. When I listen to a pianist, I hear the composer and the interpreter's life in equal aprts.
"When Marcelle Mayer plays Mozart, I hear as much of Mozart's times as I do of Marcelle Meyer's."
Meyer, born in the northern city of Lille in 1897, entered the Conservatoire in Paris when she was 14. The legendary Alfred Cortot was her main teacher. Between her incredible musicality and marriage to actor Pierre Bertin in 1917, Meyer quickly arrived at the centre of French cultural life and became a fierce champion of contemporary French music.
She premiered pieces by Eric Satie and the second book of Preludes by Claude Debussy. She left a small but impressive stack of discs, recorded just when the quality of sound reproduction made a significant leap forward in the 1940s and '50s.
Meyer also championed the keyboard music of the Baroque era -- Couperin, Rameau and Bach, in particular.
She was planning a North American tour in 1958 when she died suddenly at her sister's piano.
Amazon.ca says it has one copy of a 17-CD box set containing all of Meyer's commercial recordings, issued in 2007 by EMI Classics.
Here is a little recital for you, ending with a clip from a concert in Rome (where she plays Manuel de Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain) from six months before her death. What impresses me the most by Meyer's playing is the absolute clarity of her thinking. We don't play Baroque music like this any more, but, in listening to her play, I find a lot to love. Her Ravel and Debussy are magical, and give us some insight over how the composer wanted the music to sound.
Instead of some Mozart, I've inserted a Haydn sonata in the middle. It's a noisy recording, unfortunately, and a bit ungainly in interpretation.
We'll start, as everyone should (he wrote, primly), with J.S. Bach -- in this case the mind-twisting "Chromatic" Fantasy and Fugue, in D minor, BWV 903. The penultimate clip is with our special guest, Darius Milhaud, the composer, on the other piano:
Versailles Spectacles, the organization in charge of a small, year-round opera season and summer musical entertainment at the Château de Versailles near Paris, today unveiled a spectacular summer festival called Venise Vivaldi Versailles, running from June 24 to July 17.
The co-producer of the festival is the record label Naïve, which will be celebrating the conclusion of a massive, 12-year project to record all of Vivaldi's music (a project that has included Canadian contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux, back when she was starting out).
The aesthetic inspiration comes from the extravagant parties thrown in and around the palace by King Louis XV (1710-1774). (Details here.)
Mezzo Cecilia Bartoli and red-hot countertenor Philippe Jaroussky present solo recitals, Jordi Savall leads a performance of Vivaldi's opera Teuzzone, William Christie leads staged performances of Lully's opera Atys, there will be several different interpretations of Vivaldi's Four Seasons -- and John Malkovich is doing a musical play on the life of Casanova.
There will be evenings of fireworks mixed with performance art and music, and even a Baroque-themed masked ball at the Orangerie on July 9.
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One of my favourite of the Naïve Vivaldi recordings is La Senna festeggiante (Festival time on the Seine). There is a single, undated, manuscript copy of the score for this serenata (a secular mix of vocal and instrumental movements that's a cross between a cantata and an opera) at the National Library in Turin. The extensive background notes that came with my copy of the Naïve album -- the 12th in the Vivaldi series, and the first of his secular voal music, back in 2001 -- say that the piece was written between 1722-25, a time when Vivaldi was the favourite composer of France's ambassador to Venice, the Comte de Gergy.
You can find all of the details on this album here.
Written as the culmination of a day-long party, the Italian serenata was sort of like an English masque. La Senna festeggiante is totally over the top -- and fabulous. Unfortunately, it's too obscure to draw tourists to Versailles, so it won't be part of the summer lineup.
But that doesn't mean we can't listen to the Overture. This is from a live, 2009 performance by period-performance ensemble Il delirio fantastico led by Vincent Bernhardt:
John Terauds started at the Toronto Star as a freelance writer in 1988, and has been on staff since 1997. He began writing on classical music in 2001, and has been the full-time classical music critic since 2005.
He is also the organist and choir director at St. Peter's Anglican Church, a parish founded in 1863 in downtown Toronto.
If he's not listening to, writing about or playing music, it means he's either asleep, unconscious, walking his dog -- or all of the above.
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