Chamber-sized performance of Kindertotenlieder hits emotional and musical core of Mahler's intentions

Last night, one week after singing his last performance as Orestes in the Canadian opera Company production of Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride, Rusell Braun stood on stage at Koerner Hall for an intense, all-Mahler programme that began with a performance of Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children) that I'll treasure for a long time.

Also on the program was Das Lied von den Erde (Song of the Earth). The accompanists were a chamber ensemble of strings, winds, piano, harmonium and percussion made up of the Smithsonian Chamber Players as well as Royal Conservatory of Music faculty and alumni. The chamber arrangements were crafted by American cellist Kenneth Slowick, in the spirit of Arnold Schönberg's short-lived, post-World War I Society for Private Musical Performances.

(Slowick conducted, wearing an eye patch. I was told that he almost didn't make it to the concert because of a detached retina, wasn't allowed to fly, and so drove up to Toronto from Washington D.C.)

The tenor for Das Lied was Thomas Cooley, who did a nice job, but who sounded strained negotiating some of Mahler's very difficult vocal leaps. Braun, however, was flawless, curling not only his gorgeous baritone but every nuance of possible expression around this arresting music.

After sitting through the concert, I think I prefer the chamber arrangements to Mahler's original full orchestration. The small number of people on stage, as well as the nakedness of each instrumental part further underlines the subject matter, of a person confronting the intense emotions and loss and the inevitability of all things coming to an eventual end, weighed against the eternally regenerative cycle of life.

The songs are written in such a way that the singer is a lone wanderer among the crowd of people and emotions, which are represented by the instruments. They all intertwine in a strange harmonic tangle and travel from dark to light and then back again.

(I imagined it staged as a chamber opera, with the orchestra members and singer moving around a lamplit sitting room with a view of mountains through a large window.)

There are many examples of fine music depicting the messiness of human life, but few pieces present it in as concentrated and highly defined form as Kindertotenlieder. I would have been content to simply hear those five songs performed again after intermission, to further savour the many, many layers of meaning and expression.

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I could suggest something to listen to from YouTube, but am not going to. There's a very fine performance of Kindertotenlieder by Dietrich Fischer Dieskau, with conductor Lorin Maazel, from the 1960s, but it just doesn't have the same impact as what I heard last night.

Concert review: Gergiev and Mariinsky Orchestra thrill, entertain and provoke at Roy Thomson Hall

Here is the review I've filed for tomorrow's Star:

It’s nice to have a 229-year history, but the question for Russia’s Mariinsky Orchestra always remains, what can you do for us tonight?

Thrill, entertain and provoke was the answer for an enthusiastic audience at Roy Thomson Hall on Friday evening.

The program represented a deep, sharp sliver of modern history made up of three Russian pieces premiered between 1910 and 1926. The orchestra, led by jet-setting longtime music director, Valery Gergiev, was brilliant. The piano soloist, veteran Russian powerhouse Alexander Toradze, was unorthodox.

Even in a city as richly blessed with symphonic music as Toronto, there are few concerts in a season that open the ears and eyes as widely as this one did.

An all-purpose band that accompanies opera and ballet as well as giving its own concerts, St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre musicians have visited 43 countries on dozens of tours since Gergiev took over in 1988.

This program, representing the core of the 20th century Russian canon, is something these musicians can likely play from memory, but nearly every note left the stage with the clear immediacy of a freshly energized ensemble.

In Igor Stravinsky’s 1919 version of his 1910 ballet suite, The Firebird, Gergiev and his orchestra played up the tension between sensuality and rhythmic drive to great effect.

Equally compelling was Dmitri Shostakovich’s sardonic Symphony No. 1 – an expertly structured piece a then-19-year-old wrote for his conservatory graduation.

The conductor stood on the floor at the orchestra’s focal point, without a podium or a baton. He didn’t keep time. Instead, Gergiev relayed his instructions with gently fluttering hands, more veteran choir director than orchestra leader.

The resulting sound was fluid, transparent and utterly compelling.

Less of a sure thing was the evening’s concerto, the fearsomely difficult Piano Concerto No. 3, a touring showpiece Sergei Prokofiev wrote for himself in 1921.

Toradze marked his performance with exaggerated contrasts. He played the loud, brash passages with extroverted panache, but quieter sections sounded as if he were challenging himself to play the piano as discreetly as possible, to not wake the neighbours during a late-night practice session at home.

(Ironically, Prokofiev himself was kicked out of his Paris apartment for making too much noise at the keyboard.)

Through much of the concerto, Toradze’s piano became just one more shade amidst the orchestral colours, which is not the point of programming a solo showpiece.

It did, however, cast this warhorse of a composition in a new light, and that was worth the price of admission, as well.

 

Liszt's 'Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude' carries my Thanksgiving wishes this year

I've been hugely enjoying Janina Fialkowska's new Liszt Recital album from ATMA Classique, which is a treat from beginning to end. This is one of the year's definitive tributes to Franz Liszt, whose 200th birth anniversary falls on Oct. 22.

The disc's programme is a mix of fireworks and fireside, with the extravagant Valse-caprice No. 6 and Valse de Faust (a memory of Gounod's opera) bookending Liszt's respectful transcriptions of six Chopin songs, Gretchen (a transcription of the middle movement of his Faust-Symphonie) and Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude.'

Failkowska achieves something extraordinary in her blend of flawless technique, complete control and a feeling of genuine spontaneiety. Her playing is never strident or showy or, in moments of total reflection, slack. This is much, much more difficult to achieve than it sounds.

Rather than being in the presence of an ego, the album left me with the impression of being in the presence of a (very) good and faithful servant of the composer.

The piece that has affected me the most is Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude, which I listened to a lot as a tween (it was an Angel LP by Georges Cziffra, if I remember properly). Fialkowska's interpretation is positively ethereal.

The piece is one of a set inspired by the 1830 collection, Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, by French poet Alphonse de Lamartine, which, a couple of years later, deeply affected a 22-year-old composer madly in love with the Comtesse d'Agoult. (Liszt wrote the 10 pieces in this set piecemeal, and didn't get them published until 1853.)

The poem goes on (at length) in signature Romantic style how, after great inner turmoil and unhappiness and some time spent savouring the manifold pastoral charms of the countryside, the Grace of God has calmed and comforted the soul. "Un nouvel homme en moi renaît et recommence," writes Lamartine (A new man is reborn in me).

For those of you who can read French, here is the final, breathless, stanza:

Conserve-nous, mon Dieu, ces jours de ta promesse, 
Ces labeurs, ces doux soins, cette innocente ivresse 
D'un cœur qui flotte en paix sur les vagues du temps, 
Comme l'aigle endormi sur l'aile des autans, 
Comme un navire en mer qui ne voit qu'une étoile, 
Mais où le nautonier chante en paix sous sa voile ! 
Conserve-nous ces cœurs et ces heures de miel, 
Et nous croirons en toi, comme l'oiseau du ciel, 
Sans emprunter aux mots leur stérile évidence, 
En sentant le printemps croit à ta providence; 
Comme le soir doré d'un jour pur et serein 
S'endort dans l'espérance et croit au lendemain; 
Comme un juste mourant et fier de son supplice 
Espère dans la mort et croit à ta justice; 
Comme la vertu croit à l'immortalité, 
Comme l'œil croit au jour, l'âme à la vérité. 

 

The full magic of Fialkowska's performance comes from being able to earnestly render Liszt's caresses and sighs with a determined energy, and to carefuly dissimulate the technical hurdles (and there are many) with a gauzy, ethereal peace.

(It helps that Fialkowska recorded on one of Canada's finest concert instruments, a Hamburg-built Steinway at the Palais Montcalm in Quebec City.)

Because Fialkowska's performance is not available on YouTube, I listened to many well-known names looking for something that could rival her interpretation, to share here.

The best I could come up with is a 1948 recording by the late, great French pianist Raymond Trouard (1916-2008), on a funky sounding Pleyel grand. Trouard had as one of his teachers Emil von Sauer, a student of Liszt's.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Filmmaker Michael Lawrence tells me a field of wheat played Bach for Steve Jobs

Music-loving American filmmaker Michael Lawrence sent me a note this afternoon about a tribute to Steve Jobs he has put together, in which Jobs calls the computer the greatest tool ever devised by humans, "a bicycle for our minds."

Here is Lawrence's note to me, followed by the video.

Like so many people around the world, I have been thinking of Steve Jobs since his passing. The outpouring has been almost surreal. 

I could not have made BACH & friends without his computers and software.

In 1989, I filmed an interview with Steve for my Library of Congress film and what a special day that was.   I remember very fondly every minute of the time I spent with him.  I still have the NeXT coffee mug he gave me.

A few years back, I put up a clip from the interview on YouTube and it has been viewed over 400,000 times - 34,000 views just yesterday alone.  

I didn't know Steve Jobs loved Bach until Mike Hawley asked me to send Steve and his wife Laurene a copy of BACH & friends.  Mike shared that Steve was one of his closest personal friends.  I found this quote of Steve talking of Bach:

"I had been listening to a lot of Bach. All of a sudden the wheat field was playing Bach. It was the most wonderful experience of my life up to that point. I felt like the conductor of this symphony with Bach coming through the wheat field.”  Quote from "Return to the Little Kingdom: How Apple and Steve Jobs Changed the World" by Michael Moritz

 

Salon des oubliés: A Bohemian composer who was more highly regarded than Mozart in their day

UPDATE, OCT. 14, 2011: Ben Dunham, editor of Early Music America, wrote a complaint to the Star that I had not obtained permission to reproduce a pdf of the article by Christopher Hogwood here. Since the article is intended for members only, and I hadn't asked for permission, I have removed the link. Non-members or non-subsribers should email info@earlymusic.com if they would like to request the article.

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I apologise for the poor quality of the image, of Sun of Composers, a 1799 engraving by Augustus Kollmann published in the German Musical Times (Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung).

It shows J.S. Bach at the centre, surrounded by Haydn, Handel and Graun in a holy trinity. Radiating out in primary and secondary leaves are the lessers, which include Gluck, Mozart, Pleyel and Telemann. Next to Mozart is Leopold Kozeluch (a Germanized form of Kozeluh), someone I had never heard of.

It's a beautiful lesson in how the rankings of today will likely mean nothing at all a century (or two) from now.

Period performance master Christopher Hogwood has written an essay on Kozeluh in the current edition of Early Music America. Born in Bohemia in 1747 and living to the age of 70, Kozeluh's life began in the dying days of the Baroque world, and ended in the stormy musical waters of Beethoven's time.

Hogwood believes that the composer should be better known, if, for nothing else, as a key bridge figure of 18th century music.

You can read the article in PDF form here -- it is accessibly written and filled with interesting details.

What caught my eye, in particular, was how Kozeluh resolutely held out as a champion of the amateur musician, writing music that enthusiastic part-timers could prepare for their at-homes -- the sort of fans and supporters that went from being the bedrock of music creation and publishing to being totally left behind by anyone considering themselves to be a "serious" composer in the 20th century (I've read more than one disparaging musicological remark about late-19th and early-20th century composers who wrote art music for popular consumption).

Hogwood has just completed editing all 50 of Kozeluh's keyboard sonatas for Bärenreiter. The first volume is out, and the others are forthcoming. No other editions exist, but you can check out some scanned samples i the Petrucci library here.

From what I can see and hear, there's a lot to like.

Here is a very nice example, a Symphony in G minor with an elegant sense of proportion, development and structure, performed by the London Mozart Players, under Matthias Bamert:

On his birthday, Glenn Gould offers wise words on the tension between curators and inventors

This being the day Glenn Gould would have turned 79, I sat down to sample another one of the 10 DVDs that Sony Classical has released in the new boxed set, Glenn Gould on Television: The Complete CBC Broadcasts.

I chose "Music for a Sunday Afternoon," for obvious reasons, plus wanting to hear him play Mozart (Sonata No. 13 in B-flat) and Beethoven (Sonata No. 17 in D minor -- the Tempest).

I can't warm up to his interpretations, but I loved his 4-minute introduction, where he explains how he can't possibly say anything original about Beethoven in such a short space of time. He does, however, say something that comes from the core of the interpreter's art.

He speaks of how Beethoven straddled Classicism and Romanticism, paying homage to the past while nodding to the great effusion of personal expression that would mark the 19th century. He call this "the inventor at odds with the museum curator."

This is exactly what anyone interpreting music from the past faces -- as well as anyone trying to judge or appreciate a concert. There is a tradition to honour, and an act of creation to carry through. Both walk arm in arm.

Some performances are the acts of museum curators. We can walk away appreciating their form or the inherent beauty of the music. But the real spark comes when the performer stirs in an act of invention, bringing an immediacy and energy to the score.

Love or hate the interpretations, Gould brought that tension to every note he played, and that's what made him so special.

It was precisely this energy that animated the Toronto's Symphony's season-opening concert a few days ago. It was an energy that reminded me how much I already miss my old job as music critic, but also lifted my mood instantly -- as, I think, it felt like it did for most people sitting in Roy Thomson Hall.

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The CBC has launched a new Gould site full of interesting stuff to check out. You'll find it here.

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To do any job well, one needs to be totally present for it. In my new life as a business reporter, it has meant very limited time to listen, read or play music over the past four weeks.

I can't imagine being able to make a meaningful contribution to the appreciation of music under these circumstances but, I'm realising today, that if I feel sufficiently inspired, I might put a word or two down here once in a while, as long as the Star keeps this blog up on the website.

My farewell piece in the Star focused on passing love of music on to children

Because it's buried online, I thought I'd post my farewell article as a critic, which appeared in print, in the Star on Aug. 20:

For six years, people not involved in the business would look awestruck when I told them I was a music critic.

“You mean you go to concerts for free?” was a typical reaction.

“I’m working when I go to a concert,” was my prepared reply. But I could tell from the looks on their faces that they didn’t think work had anything to do with it.

I think these people were on to something.

Many have said that the act of making or listening to music connects us the eternal. The sound is ephemeral, its effects linger, but what, for me, makes it truly eternal is how the love and appreciation of music gets passed along from old to young.

Since becoming a full-time music critic six years ago, I have written 2,357 articles, reviews and arts-calendar blurbs. I have listened to about 2,000 CDs, watched in excess of 300 DVDs of operas, classical concerts and documentaries. I have attended nearly 1,000 live performances.

Now, as the Star calls me to new challenges elsewhere in the organization, I’ve sat down to figure out what made me tell people, over and over again, that I had the best job in the world.

I’ll be able to spend the long, dark winter evenings of my dotage replaying the glorious and the ghastly highlights in my head.

Most vividly etched in my soul is not the music itself but my encounters with people who work selflessly every day to make Toronto one of the great musical cities of the world and who do everything they can to light the spark of love and appreciation in each new generation.

It is natural for a lowly, quiet Canadian to look longingly at the gilded opera houses and concert halls of Europe. Our venues may not be covered in gold leaf but, thanks to the drive and stubborn determination of people like late Canadian Opera Company general director Richard Bradshaw and Royal Conservatory of Music CEO Peter Simon, we have an opera house and a recital hall worthy of the world’s finest.

These are not just buildings. They are manifestations of a vibrant civic cultural life.

I’m grateful my job gave me front-row seat for seeing them come to be.

Our singers, violinists, pianists, brass players, directors and conductors are the tip of a massive iceberg. There is even more going on under the waves, out of sight, and too often out of mind.

Music – any kind of music, from jazz to pop to classical – demands powerful acts of will before it can come to life. It takes people, time, inspiration and a lot of effort before the first note of a symphony can reverberate in Roy Thomson Hall.

The process includes patrons, who have over the past decade handed over millions of dollars so that classical music and opera of international calibre can thrive in Toronto. Then there are the dedicated administrators, marketers and arts council officers who keep the wheels of our culture industry turning season after season.

Ultimately, what really keeps a culture alive is adults passing it along to their offspring.

As one musician told me a while ago, “Children are not our future; they are our present.”

I couldn’t agree more.

I was brought to uncontrollable tears of joy four years ago as I watched a little 7-year-old girl -- so set back by Down syndrome that she couldn’t focus her eyes or coordinate her limbs -- respond to the work of music therapists at the Holland-Bloorview Rehab facility in Leaside.

Music shot a bolt of pure light into a darkness that the world could not otherwise penetrate.

I witnessed Moshe Hammer, a violinist with an international career, arrive at a middle-school gymnasium in the Jane and Finch neighbourhood with an armload of instruments for children whose parents would never be able to afford paying for a music lesson.

Every week, for the past three years, Hammer and a growing team of volunteers have given of their time and talent to teach and mentor in that area’s schools. The Hammer Band now numbers more than 100 tweens and teens, spreading the musical gospel in a part of the city desperately in need of inspiration.

Tireless former opera singer Ann Cooper Gay introduced me to the noisy, creative world of her Canadian Children’s Opera Company, so that I could be reminded how children don’t understand the meaning of the world “difficult.”

I had the privilege of meeting Adrian Anantawan, who didn’t let a missing forearm stop him from becoming a fine professional violinist. If that weren’t inspiration enough, he has made it his life’s mission to help other children with disabilities realize able-bodied dreams.

Sitting perched high above Harbourfront in a living room filled with a lifetime of travel and teaching, composer Michael Colgrass revealed more to me about the nature and power of creativity in the space of two hours than I had experienced in all of my 40-plus years.

It is no coincidence that he spends a lot of time working with children.

The vast majority of musicians and music teachers barely make the hop over the poverty line, but the love at the very core of their being won’t allow them to do anything else. They don’t know the meaning of nine-to-five. But they do know that passion is infectious.

Going to a concert or listening to an album opens but the tiniest window into a world of human wonder and striving – a world in perpetual growth and regeneration.

Listening to music is only a finger-tap away. making a connection with a real, live artist takes a tiny bit more of an effort. But I promise, it’ll never feel like work. 

 

I say goodbye to all this with an ode to my great, old, pain-in-the-ass piano teacher, Vesta Mosher

Me and Vesta Mosher last weekend

I'm back from an intense summer trip -- my high school graduating class organized a 30th anniversary reunion.

The visit was also an excuse to drop in on the one person who has done more to influence how I listen to and how I make music today: Vesta Mosher, my old piano teacher from high school.

Through her persistence and cajoling and, yes, grumpy threats, she somehow caught my teenage imagination and opened my sensibilities to the million-and-one ways in which an interpreter can approach a piece of music.

Many teachers give lessons prescriptively, Vesta would sit me down, for hours on end, to analyse music so that I could come up with my own prescription that was true to historical practice, tradition and a sense of musical narrative.

It's only been since I wrote my first concert review for the Star, slightly more than 10 years ago, that the true value of what Vesta imparted came into focus. I feel indescribably lucky in having had a teacher like that.

Vesta was a true mentor, inviting me into a world of ideas that went far beyond music. She spent time with me that no sane teacher would ever dedicate to a passing student.

I've visited with her several times over the years, but this time felt special.

Vesta turns 82 this fall. Four years ago, she fell asleep at the wheel and drove her car off the highway. She spent a long time in hospital and, even though she shouldn't, she continues to live at home, by herself, with severe physical disabilities and a failing memory.

It was my first visit with Vesta since the car accident, and I was very conscious of how this could be the last time that I can still get access to the core of a vibrant, tireless teacher, orchestra conductor, accompanist, music festival organizer and civic pain-in-the-ass.

Of course, Vesta wanted to know what made me think I was qualified to be a critic. She wanted me to tell her what I meant by a musical narrative. She challenged me on the definition of musicality.

Unlike the cringing teenaged me, I could now smile, laugh and challenge her right back, knowing that she was just being her Socratic self, enjoying the act of questioning more than coming up with possible answers.

Vesta gets visitors, but few people play for her. She asked repeatedly, so I obliged with something I hoped I wouldn't mangle too badly, one of my favourite Haydn Sonatas. 

"That was musical," was her simple reply.

"You were one of my best students, you know."

I asked her why she had never told me that 30 years earlier.

"Because it wouldn't have been good for you," she snapped back.

In my adolescence, Vesta called me a lazy ass, over and over again. She was right, of course.

This morning, fresh from vacation, I found out that I am no longer music critic but a reporter for the business desk at the Star -- a bit of news that still has my head spinning a bit.

So, that's the end of the line for this blog, as well. It really has been fun -- in the same kind of way that my lessons with Vesta were: I got to think and question and listen and wonder every single day.

These are the things that make not only music, but anything in life, worthwhile.

So, what piece of music does one choose for an exit like this? One that contains thought, question and wonder, of course.

Simplicity, in the beautiful, Shaker sense, is also present in Dmitri Shostakovich's Op. 87 Prelude and Fugue in C Major, the key where everything begins and ends, as played by the composer himself. Neither the playing nor the piano are perfect, but that is part of the charm, too:

 

Old paper opens a window onto Toronto's rich performing arts life during the depths of the Great Depression

I came home from my trip to find a yellowed piece of newspaper on the balcony. Someone had torn out the movie and concert ads for late January.

The big movie is Mae West's She Done Him Wrong, which was released in 1933. Two performances in one venue on Jan. 27th means that it was 1934, when this would have been a Saturday. (Sunday was the city's big day off, when, I'm told, Eaton's department store would pull drapes across its window displays so that people walking home from church on Sunday would not be tempted to think of worldly goods.)

Among the options at the Eaton Auditorium, the city's recital hall of record in the day, are:
-Onegin "world premiere contralto" on Jan. 25, tickets $1, $1.50 and $2
-English Boy Choristers under conductor Carlton Borrow, Jan. 27 (25 to 75 cents)
-Myra Hess "penomenal English pianist" on Jan. 27 ($1 to $2)
-Ted Shawn "and Ensemble of Male Dancers" Jan. 29 (50 cents to $1.50)
-Dusseau "brilliant soprano" on Jan. 31 ($1-$2)

The world's finest came to Toronto even during the Great Depression. Today, a few days of performing arts programming would include a wide age range among the artists. I was struck how all the grown-up performers from January 1934 were in their mid-40s.

I was also struck by how ephemeral the work of performing artists is. Even though these people lived at a time of reasonably good recording technology, very few people watch or listen to what they left behind.

Even though we think we are recording and archiving today's performing arts for future generations, for the majority of the audience, it naturally is the living artist who holds the greatest appeal.

So, the concert listing turned into an opportunity to sample a ghost's gallery of past greats.

*Let's start with Swedish-born, German contralto Sigrid Onégin (1889-1943), who should have been billed as the world's premier contralto.

Here she is singing the famous aria from Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice:

*The English Boy Choristers were the touring group of the 125-student London Choir School, which supplied the capital city's churches with choristers from 1915 to 1958. It was a brilliant idea, ensuring that every (Anglican) church could have a well-trained treble or two -- someone who would grow up to be an asset among adult singers. The Church of England subsidized the Choristers' world tours.

*Ted Shawn (1891-1972) was a key figure in the modern dance movement in the United States, and the founder of the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, which inaugurated its 78th season yesterday. Shawn founded the festival the summer before his troupe's performance at Eaton Auditorium.

Here's a clip of some tame choreography by Ted Shawn: "Choeur Danse," from 1926:

*The reference to the brilliant soprano is for Jeanne Dusseau, born in Scotland in 1893 as Ruth Cleveland. She studied voice, married Quebec baritone Lambert Dusseau in 1919, and spent much time singing in Canada. One of her early accomplishments was being cast as Princesse Ninette/Orange No. 3 in the premiere of Prokofiev's The Love of Three Oranges in Chicago, in Dec. 1921. After retiring from the stage, she taught in New York City and Washington, D.C. I couldn't find a death date.

Here is one of only two pieces of music she ever recorded commercially, the "Easter Hymn" from Pietro Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana, in 1939:

*The last performances goes to British pianist Myra Hess (1890-1965). There is a simplicity to her interpretations that makes her deep, deep artistry seem effortless.

The first piece is a clip with conductor Humphrey Jennings from a World War II film that includes one of her many morale-boosting performances at the National Gallery in London. I've followed it with a moving live performance of Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 2 with Bruno Walter and the New York Philharmonic in 1951 (note how noisy the audience is during the opening minute and in the final movement).

The closing clip is of her own transcriptions of Bach and Scarlatti, recorded in 1958.

 

Max Reger's suites for solo cello are worthy of being placed alongside J.S. Bach's

I'm off for the next 10 days, and don't expect to be posting, unless I'm so bowled over by something that I have to share it. But I can't leave without putting in a plug for some unduly neglected works.

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Photo: Mark Thompson

The unaccompanied cello suites by J.S. Bach have not only inspired performers and listeners, they have also inspired composers.

German composer Max Reger (1873-1916) is a case in point. He wrote three suites for unaccompanied cello (at the same time as a three-suite set for solo viola) just before World War I.

I've tried living with Reger's works for piano and organ, but find that I usually end up getting motion sickness from his endless chromaticism. But the cello suites are different. They are neo-Baroque, tightly structured and tonally anchored. It also looks like they are also ferociously difficult.

It's different to study and work with a piece of music versus just listening to it, but my impression is that these pieces by Reger deserve to be recognized as something special.

I've pieced together a recital for you, with the help of German cellist Guido Schiefen (pictured). I would prefer hearing more lyrical interpretations, but he does an amazing job in laying out the gorgeous structure of these pieces:

SUITE NO. 1 IN G MAJOR, OP. 131

SUITE NO. 2 IN D MINOR, OP. 131

SUITE NO. 3 IN A MINOR