Copland:
Billy the Kid; Grohg. Detroit
Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leonard Slatkin. Naxos. $12.99.
Ibert:
Les Amours de Jupiter; Henri Sauguet: Les Forains; Massenet: Ballet Suite from
“Hérodiade.”
Estonian National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Neeme Järvi. Chandos. $18.99.
Sousa:
Music for Wind Band, Volume 18.
Trinity Laban Wind Orchestra conducted by Keith Brion. Naxos. $12.99.
Beethoven:
Egmont—Incidental Music. Matthias
Brandt, narrator; Olga Bezsmertna, soprano; Beethoven Orchester Bonn conducted
by Dirk Kaftan. MDG Gold. $18.99 (SACD).
Copland’s Billy the Kid (1938)
marked the start of his “American” period, in which he deliberately reached out
to wider audiences than he had previously sought by simplifying much of his
musical writing, using folklike tunes and sometimes actual folk music, and
working in a tonal medium to which audiences could easily relate. He was
scarcely the first American composer to incorporate common and even commonplace
music into broader classical structures: the endlessly innovative Charles Ives
had done so nearly half a century earlier. But Copland was the first to reach
out so deliberately beyond traditional classical-performance attendees, and Billy the Kid was so successful that
Copland later produced two more ballet scores, Rodeo and Appalachian Spring,
in much the same manner. Again, these were ballet
scores, a fact to which modern audiences – accustomed to hearing them only in
the concert hall and usually only as suites – tend to give short shrift.
Leonard Slatkin, however, is well aware of the intended danceability of Billy the Kid, and his excellent new
reading with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra is both balletic and highly
satisfying when heard strictly as music. The suite from this ballet
incorporates almost all of its elements, so it is surprising that the full
ballet is not heard more often. The missing pieces create a full “story arc”
for a tale that Copland begins and ends in “once upon a time” mode by starting
and concluding with a section called “The Open Prairie.” Slatkin has a firm
grasp of the modern elements that Copland did
include here, notably involving rhythm and considerable (although tamed)
dissonance. The score sounds fresh and bright, and the orchestra responds
strongly and effectively to its longtime music director (now music director
laureate). And this Naxos recording also includes a second complete ballet, a
genuine rarity that shows Copland in highly innovative as well as exploratory
mode. This is Grohg, which dates to
1925, when Copland was in his mid-20s and immersed in the Parisian musical
scene – which at the time was obsessed both with ballet and with film. Grohg has elements of both, being based
loosely on the famous silent film Nosferatu,
which in turn was based loosely on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The half-hour of music in Grohg proceeds without a break, effectively drawing the audience
into a bizarre world in which a necromancer animates corpses, returns them to
their coffins, and at the end fades into nothingness. The plot vaguely
resembles that of Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin, which dates to almost the same time
(1924), but the music is quite different and is evocative of the lurid scenes
in only a general way. Copland treats Grohg
as a grim fairy tale, much as he was later to treat Billy the Kid as a legend of the American West rather than the
factual recounting of the life and death of a young outlaw. Slatkin clearly
relishes the chance to present Grohg
in recorded form, focusing on the elements that make it very much of its time
and place while never losing sight of the fact that this work, like Billy the Kid, was intended to be
danced. This is an exceptional pairing of Copland ballets in performances that explore
them fully and to fine effect.
Copland left Paris and the Parisian ballet scene behind, but other
composers remained immersed in both for many decades. A new Chandos CD offers
two infrequently heard and very tuneful ballets from 1945 by the moderately
well-known Jacques Ibert and the little-known Henri Sauguet. Ibert’s Les Amours de Jupiter, which loosely
parallels and expands on a hilarious scene in Offenbach’s Orphée aux enfers, in which the gods confront the supposedly morally
upright Jupiter with stories of his many affairs, offers a delightful set of
five tableaux representing dalliances
with Europa, Leda, Danae and Ganymede, followed by a reconciliation with Juno.
Ibert’s catholic style serves the ballet very well, sometimes echoing Chabrier
and Delibes while at other times indulging in the rhythmic variety, syncopation
and wry humor in which his own works abound. The ballet gets a first-rate
reading from the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra under Neeme Järvi: everything moves along enthusiastically, the
smooth orchestration is highlighted by fine sectional balance, and the overall
feeling of amusement and wry humor is pervasive. Järvi and his ensemble do an equally fine job with Les Forains (“The Show Folk”), which is
essentially a set of danceable circus-focused character pieces for orchestra
rather than a fully plotted ballet. Sauguet (1901-1989) dedicated the ballet to
the memory of Erik Satie, who had introduced Sauguet to Diaghilev in 1924, in
the midst of the postwar Parisian ballet obsession, and thus started Sauguet
down a compositional road that eventually led him to create more than 20
ballets. Les Forains is neatly
written, its music doing a fine job of identifying the various “show folk” who
appear with the circus, from the marchlike opening scene-setter to the melodic
entry of the troupe and the aptly chosen musical and dance forms for individual
performers. A brilliant galop that pays homage to Offenbach is the work’s
climax, after which the entry music reappears and becomes exit material. Les Forains might be more effective on
stage than in concert form: it seems rather obvious, although pleasant, as
heard here. But because it is unfamiliar and is so well presented by Järvi and the orchestra, it offers considerable enjoyment.
Between these two mid-20th-century works is a short offering from
the 19th: the brief ballet suite from Massenet’s Hérodiade (1881/1884). Like Sauguet’s ballet, this is a set of
character pieces, in this case representing four national types: Egyptians,
Babylonians, Gauls, and Phoenicians. The first three groups are portrayed in
pieces lasting less than two minutes each, the fourth in a three-minute entry;
everything is pleasant and energetic if not particularly consequential, and the
whole suite is, like everything on this CD, very well played.
It is often forgotten that “March King” John Philip Sousa was also a
stage composer – indeed, many of his 200-plus compositions were stage works.
Operetta was his specialty, and he not only gave the form uniquely American
twists but also found plenty of ways to reuse his stage tunes in works for his
band. The 18th volume in Naxos’ excellent series of Sousa’s music
for wind band shows Sousa’s relationship to the stage unusually clearly – and
not only where his own music was concerned. Five of the six works on this CD
are world première recordings: only Stag Party (1885), a compendium of songs that students might sing
during a night on the town, has been recorded before. Of the five debut
recordings, three have a stage focus. The
Merry-Merry Chorus (1923) arranges a series of opera choruses for band
performance, the inclusion of one from HMS
Pinafore and, at the end, of the Anvil
Chorus from Il Trovatore being
particularly enjoyable. An incidental suite assembled by conductor Keith Brion
from arrangements of music to Sousa’s The
Charlatan (1898) offers four excerpts from this once-popular operetta. And
the portrayal of Fanny from Chris and the
Wonderful Lamp (1899) – a thoroughly Americanized version of the Aladdin
story – also draws on the world of operetta. Also on this disc is Among My Souvenirs (1928), a nostalgic piece
based on a popular song of the time; and the CD concludes with the second part
of the very lengthy March of the Pan
Americans (1915), a compendium of national anthems whose first half was
heard on Volume 17 of this series. The totality of this work (which is not a
march, despite its title) runs 40 minutes, so splitting it makes sense. The
second portion includes the anthems of Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay,
Peru, El Salvador, Uruguay and Venezuela, presented in alphabetical order. It
concludes with Sousa’s arrangement of The
Star Spangled Banner – even though that was not yet, in 1915, the official
national anthem of the United States – in a rather strange double setting, the
first time familiarly and the second distinctly reminiscent of Wagner’s Tannhäuser overture. Sousa’s band was famous for its world
tours, and Brion is on a world tour of his own with this Sousa series,
conducting a wide variety of bands in a wide variety of places. This volume
features a very fine ensemble from Trinity Laban Conservatoire in London, and
the students play this American music as if it belongs firmly on the world
stage – which is just where Sousa himself placed it.
Like Sousa, Beethoven is not generally thought of as a stage composer,
with his sole opera, Fidelio, being
seen as exceptional. But he did write music for various other forms of
performance – including the ballet The
Creatures of Prometheus and the incidental music to the play The Ruins of Athens. And then there is Egmont. In 1809-10, Beethoven created
music to accompany the staging of Goethe’s 1787 drama of people yearning for
freedom and heroically standing up against tyranny – a plot quite similar to
that of Fidelio. Only the overture is
frequently heard today, and it encapsulates the drama as thoroughly as Leonore
Overtures Nos. 2 and 3 sum up the plot of Fidelio.
The full music for Egmont, though,
contains nine numbers in addition to the overture, and all nine are heard on a
new MDG Gold release featuring Dirk Kaftan conducting the Beethoven Orchester
Bonn. There are two songs among the nine pieces, both given to Egmont’s doomed
lover, Klärchen, and both offered with suitable strength and
determination by soprano Olga Bezsmertna. Most of what happens in the play,
however, is traced by narration in this recording – and while Matthias Brandt speaks
and emotes well, he is recorded at a substantially and irritatingly lower level
than the music, for no apparent reason. Taken as a whole, this release is a real
disappointment for English speakers who are not also fluent in German, with the
result that it gets a (+++) rating despite the fine orchestral playing and
overall high quality of the presentation. The problem is that the narration has
been created specifically for this presentation, using various words by Goethe,
but the narration is not presented with the recording – not even in German –
and listeners are not given anywhere to find it online. The words to Klärchen’s two songs are provided, but in German only,
leaving English speakers without knowledge of the songs’ content – although
translation of the lyrics is available online for people who search for it on
their own. On top of everything else, this is a short disc, lasting less than
46 minutes. So it really is a recording strictly for German-speaking Egmont enthusiasts – a group that
deserves to be a large one, given the quality of Goethe’s writing and
Beethoven’s music, but is scarcely a general audience. Beethoven’s full music
for Egmont deserves to be heard more
often, and even if Goethe’s entire play is not performed, a version providing
connective tissue among the nine intra-play pieces is worth hearing. But a
recording that tantalizes by promising a full Egmont and then makes itself intelligible only to a subset of
people potentially intrigued by the material is, by definition if not
necessarily by intent, an offering of limited interest.
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