(++++) FAITH AND CLARITY

Bach: St. Matthew Passion. Thomas Cooley, tenor; Paul Max Tipton, bass-baritone; Sherezade Panthaki, soprano; Reginald Mobley, countertenor; James Reese, tenor; Harrison Hintzsche, baritone; Cantata Collective conducted by Nicholas McGegan. AVIE. $44.99 (3 CDs). 

     An exceptionally clear-headed and clearly sung St. Matthew Passion from Cantata Collective shows just how meaningful Bach’s music remains in our secular age – and how involving it can be even for those without any particular faith, much less Bach’s Lutheranism. As was customary for Passions, Bach’s says nothing about Jesus’ Resurrection – its entire reason for being is to explore Christ’s pain and suffering, and the wrongs done to him in fulfillment of Biblical prophecies. The result is a far more humane-feeling work than would exist if the Resurrection, the central miracle of Christianity, were its core: this is a story about suffering and redemption, about betrayal and sacrifice. And on that basis, although it is religious through and through, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion becomes a vehicle for expressions of despair, fear, worry, and eventual hope – emotions thoroughly familiar even to audiences that do not share the belief system underlying the music. 

     What this means – and what is communicated with exceptional skill and beauty by Cantata Collective – is that the arias and choruses expressing everyday worshippers’ feelings about Jesus’ suffering, and reactions to it, take on greater emotional heft than does the foundational narrative about the events of Christ’s last days on Earth. The Gospel-based narrative is delivered everywhere with sensitivity and understanding by Thomas Cooley as the Evangelist, and the comments and proclamations of Jesus are handled with suitable gravity and intensity by Paul Max Tipton. But again and again, what impresses in this beautifully balanced performance are the thoughts and reactions of the everyday people of Jesus’ time, as expressed through choruses and the individual voices within them. 

     What Bach does with such brilliant sure-handedness in his St. Matthew Passion is to establish a grand layout – two orchestras and two choruses, plus soloists – and then generally use only selected elements among the available performers, reserving the massed forces for specific purposes. This approach becomes a way of emphasizing the emotional underpinnings of Scripture and its importance to the lives of ordinary people of Jesus’ time, and by extension of Bach’s era (and later periods as well). The careful and sensitive pronunciation of the work’s texts, even though these performers are not native German speakers, lends additional meaning to such statements as “the scourges and bonds and what you have endured – my soul has merited them.” It is undeniably true that the texts have full meaning and resonance only for those who share Bach’s religious beliefs, or other Christian ones. But it is also true that the expressiveness of Bach’s music creates a kind of transcendence of the spiritual material, allowing emotional participation in the St. Matthew Passion even by those who do not accept its narrative at face value. 

     The sheer quality of the vocal and instrumental performances under the absolutely first-rate direction of Nicholas McGegan makes this three-CD release from AVIE an outstanding one. McGegan’s unfailing and unfailingly stylish approach to the totality of the St. Matthew Passion as well as its individual elements produces a highly memorable experience from start to finish. Sherezade Panthaki, who sings the soprano arias and the words of Pilate’s wife, is especially commendable for purity of tone and lightness of delivery. The tenor arias are well-handled by James Reese, the bass ones and voice of Pilate by Harrison Hintzsche: everything is delivered with suitable but not overdone emotion and with close attention to the sound of the words and the way they blend with their instrumental underpinnings. Countertenor Reginald Mobley, who sings the alto parts, is a touch shaky and a bit over-emphatic from time to time, but on the whole gives a very creditable performance. And the small solo parts given to chorus members – Jennifer Paulino as the Maids whose comments lead to Peter disavowing Jesus three times, Jeff Fields as Peter, Chung-Wai Soong as Judas – are uniformly delivered with care and sensitivity. The instrumental material is excellent throughout, with the members of Cantata Collective, supplemented by additional performers, playing with strong understanding of period style and unflagging attention to balance and precision of intonation. Interestingly, this St. Matthew Passion reaches out all the more effectively beyond its core audience because of its sheer musicality: even a listener who does not understand the German text and does not try to follow a translation as the music progresses can be pulled into the emotional world of this work through the sheer loveliness of Bach’s music. Even the irreligious may thus be able to experience, to some extent, the feelings evoked by the substantial use of minor keys and dark instrumental coloration to express sorrow – and, eventually, hope – in the most beautiful way possible.

(+++) AS AMERICAN AS….

Aaron Larget-Caplan: Guitar America 250. Aaron Larget-Caplan, guitar; Irina Muresanu, violin; Charles Coe, Jeffrey Lependorf and Trevor Neal, spoken word. Navona. $20. 

Kip Winger: Violin Concerto “In the Language of Flowers”; Symphony of the Returning Light. Peter Otto, violin; Nashville Symphony conducted by Giancarlo Guerrero. Naxos. $19.99. 

     The evolution and eventual revolution of England’s American colonies into the United States of America are being predictably and in many ways suitably celebrated on the 250^th anniversary of the United States’ Declaration of Independence – even as internal and external questioning and geopolitical turmoil and uncertainty remind historians (if no one else) that the world of 1776 was in some ways just as chaotic, disturbed and uncertain as the world of 2026. Then as now, music was very much a part of life, and then as now, it could be a means of unification or division, depending on how it was created and used. Aaron Larget-Caplan’s new Navona recording, whose rather unwieldy full title is Guitar America 250: Revolutionaries and Rockstars, is largely in celebratory vein; but it does acknowledge, often and largely intentionally, some of the inherent challenges and contradictions of the American experience. Most of the release is musical, and most of the music is arranged by Larget-Caplan as well as performed by him. And those aspects of the recording are very fine indeed: Larget-Caplan is a first-rate guitarist with a strong command not only of the technical side of performance but also of the guitar’s emotional range and evocative capabilities – elements of which composers as diverse as Vivaldi, Sor and Tárrega were well aware but that are not always brought forth as effectively as they are here. The hint of this being something more than a jingoistic display is, however, clear from the first track, which is not The Star-Spangled Banner (originally a British drinking song called To Anacreon in Heaven, one of many ways in which “American exceptionalism” is less than clear-cut) but Leonard Bernstein’s America, from West Side Story – a song whose portrayal of the United States through members of the 1950s Puerto Rican diaspora is far from completely celebratory. The Star-Spangled Banner is heard after this, and afterwards there are various expected tracks: America the Beautiful and God Bless America, for example, and Battle Hymn of the Republic – originally John Brown’s Body, a Civil War entry whose origin tends to be largely ignored in favor of its religious fervor. Also here are Simple Gifts, Over There (another war-originating song), and more. Again and again, Larget-Caplan shows his sensitivity as both arranger and performer: there is genuine beauty in many of the familiar tunes, and a freshness in their sound that keeps even the best-known ones enjoyable to hear. But a great deal of the recital, which includes 14 world première recordings in its 21 tracks, goes beyond now-traditional material to include elements such as Paul Simon’s America, Van Halen’s 316, Alan Hovhaness’ Mystic Flute, and three entries from John Cage – one of them a reading by Jeffrey Lependorf. Cage’s words fit uneasily into the overall atmosphere here, and the other word-only tracks will certainly not be to everyone’s taste – including the last of them, read by Larget-Caplan himself, which uses the First Amendment text with repeats of “no law” and other words to make some rather heavy-handed political points. As a whole, the recording is “occasional music” in the sense of being intended for a specific occasion – and is also, occasionally, non-musical by intent and design. That gives it a sense of personalization but also likely reduces the chance that listeners will continue to enjoy it, or at least some parts of it, after the occasion for which it was created recedes into memory. 

     Contemporary American music, like contemporary American society, tends to be polyglot, and modern composers frequently straddle multiple genres or combine elements of different musical forms in their attempts to produce something distinctive. The extent of their success varies widely and tends largely to depend on how seamlessly they mix differing material into an effective (and, hopefully, aurally digestible) new recipe. Kip Winger (born 1961), for example, is a onetime metal-rock bass guitarist and songwriter who grew up in a jazz-musician family and eventually turned to writing ballet – which in turn led to commissions for the two works receiving their world première recordings on a new Naxos CD. Winger’s history is interesting enough, but the effectiveness of his music depends on the works themselves rather than the provenance of their creator. Certainly Winger’s Violin Concerto “In the Language of Flowers” (2024-2025) provides plenty of opportunities for soloist Peter Otto, for whom it was written, to show off his virtuosity – starting with the extended cadenza that opens the entire work. Somewhat surprisingly, the music turns intensely lyrical right after that cadenza, and if the floral titles of the four movements (Forsythia, Viscaria, Ambrosia, Wisteria) bring little clarity to the work’s emotional compass, the music really does speak effectively for itself. And Otto, in turn, speaks effectively for the music: he handles its performance complexities with apparent ease and seems to revel in the unusual rhythms and fantasia-like structure that pervades the individual movements as well as the concerto as a whole. Some of the exclamatory orchestral indulgences and uses of the upper extreme of the violin’s range are a touch overdone, and after a while the theatricality of the dips into lyricism becomes a bit much – although the warmth of the third movement is winning and provides the basis for an effective contrast with the finale, which interestingly echoes Shostakovich in some of its harmonic explorations (and, less appealingly, in some of its bombast). Symphony of the Returning Light (2018-2020), described by Winger as autobiographical, is intriguingly designed around Morse-code rhythms that are reflected in the titles of its four movements: S.O.S., Eleos, Metamorphosis, and Metanoia. However, once again the music needs to stand on its own in order to have any staying power: its structural underpinnings are a curiosity, but requiring audiences to study them in order to appreciate the work is no more reasonable than insisting that listeners study Berlioz’ love life in order to be moved by his Symphonie fantastique (which Winger cites as one of his models). Winger’s use of a MIDI keyboard to produce the Morse code that becomes the basis of each movement gives his symphony a suitably modern gloss, but what is more interesting is Winger’s handling of the orchestra, which shows considerable skill, and the very involving way in which Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony bring forth Winger’s musical thinking. Unfortunately, some of that thinking tends to confuse noisiness with emphasis and ostinato with inevitable forward momentum: Winger handles the orchestra very ably, and the players give the symphony their all, but the music itself, whatever individualized experiences it may be intended to illustrate, comes across as in large part superficial. It flows well enough, and the foundational Morse code is an intriguing design element, but ultimately the work is not especially convincing on its own terms: it does not reach out to an unenlightened audience – that is, one unfamiliar with its reasons for being – to any significant extent. Requiring listeners to equate Eleos with “Mercy” and Metanoia with “Change of Heart” in order to taste the full flavor of the musical material actually makes the symphony less effective, not more: the work shows how well Winger has moved among musical genres but suggests that, like America itself, he still has some adapting and growing to do in order to arrive at an even better place than the one that he and the country currently occupy.

(++++) BOLD STEPS AND MISSTEPS

Bizet: Carmen. Adèle Charvet, Julien Behr, Florie Valiquette, Alexandre Duhamel, Gwendoline Blondeel, Ambroisine Bré, Matthieu Walendzik, Attila Varga-Tóth, Nicolas Certenais, Halidou Nombre; Chœur & Orchestre de l’Opéra Royal conducted by Hervé Niquet. Château de Versailles Spectacles. $42.99 (3 CDs + DVD). 

     Everybody knows Carmen, and everybody loves the opera’s mixture of high drama (or melodrama) and gorgeous music. Or so it seems. But it was not always so. Bizet’s masterwork was something of a dud at its March 1875 première, and something of a shock, too: it is essentially a verismo opera, in effect the first of its kind – or at least a bridge between traditional 19^th-century dramatic operas and the verismo stage works that would become popular in the decades after Bizet’s death and remain so into the 20^th century. 

     Carmen was conceived as an opéra comique, which most decidedly does not mean “comic opera” but refers to a style akin to that of Singspiel, meaning that the musical numbers are separated by dialogue. Bizet’s work is thus in the line of succession that leads from works such as Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail to modern Broadway shows. But the moral “lowness” of the characters, which retrospectively seems forward-looking, is something that early audiences found shockingly depraved – as does the killing on stage of the principal character, which looks ahead to much later on-stage deaths in works such as Bernstein’s West Side Story. 

     Trying to re-create the opening night of Carmen is thus something of a fool’s errand, for the only way to approximate its effect would be to re-establish the entire society within which the première occurred – including the Victorian-era sense of morality and immorality plus the exigencies of unamplified voices in a venue lit by gas lamps. Making matters seemingly even closer to impossible is the lack of definitive information on what the March 1875 staging and costuming looked like – a few sketches survive, but they are scarcely comprehensive. Nevertheless, Hervé Niquet and a solid, often splendid cast undertook the near-impossible in performances of Carmen on January 14 and 22, 2025 – the results of which are now available for listening and viewing pleasure on a CD-plus-DVD release from Château de Versailles Spectacles. 

     The DVD is the real gem here, since the visual elements of the production have been so carefully and lovingly assembled and the entirety of the opera truly comes alive only when seen and heard as opera, which was once described by Franco Zeffirelli as “a planet where the muses work together, join hands and celebrate all the arts.” Certainly the working-together elements are abundantly present here, along with a truly impressive level of attention to detail, from the use of period instruments to the well-thought-out attempt to costume the characters appropriately for the time and to provide stage settings that change locales efficiently (not requiring the three half-hour intervals of the original production) while staying as true as possible to the appearances that the original audience would have encountered. 

     None of this would matter, of course, if the music were not handled with all the élan and panache it requires; but Niquet and the singers – certainly including Adèle Charvet as Carmen, Julien Behr as Don José, Florie Valiquette as Micaëla, and Alexandre Duhamel as Escamillo – treat the entire work as fresh and new, not as a museum piece, resulting in a commanding performance that is immensely enjoyable when heard on this release’s CDs, even without the visuals of the included DVD. This is an absolutely top-notch Carmen by any standards, independent of its attempt at historicity. 

     That said, the production itself makes one curious choice, and the presentation of the recording makes several. The notable performance oddity is the inclusion of the recitatives composed by Bizet’s friend, Ernest Guiraud, for an October 1875 performance of Carmen in Vienna. They are now standard in the vast majority of Carmen stagings, and there is nothing wrong with the recitatives themselves, which in a sense opened the door to the opera’s worldwide popularity: Bizet had died after the 33^rd performance of Carmen, but not before signing a contract for the Vienna production, and the recitatives were intended to position Carmen as a “grand opera” and bring it international prominence. They helped do just that – although, interestingly, the Vienna staging for which they were written actually ended up using a mixture of the original spoken dialogue and the newly composed recitatives. What is arguably a miscalculation in the Niquet-led performances is that the recitatives did not exist on the opera’s opening night, which the creative team behind the staging was otherwise at such pains to reproduce. The “first night” authenticity is thus sacrificed on the altar of giving the opera in a form with which the audience would be familiar. 

     Even setting that matter aside, there are some peculiar decisions involving the presentation and packaging of this otherwise exemplary recording. The enclosed 72-page booklet includes no libretto – only a bare-bones summary of the action that is less than exemplary. There is also no information on the singers, who are scarcely household names internationally. Instead, there are extensive notes on production elements, with essays both by and about Niquet, director Romain Gilbert, costume designer Christian Lacroix, set designer Antoine Fontaine, and lighting designer Hervé Gary. This material is very worthy indeed, and provides valuable insight into the manifest challenges of mounting the whole production – but omitting anything about the singers is an odd decision. For that matter, it would have been interesting to have something from the sound and camera side of things about the way in which this release overcame the considerable difficulties inherent in recording live opera performances – but there is nothing. 

     Nor is there anything explaining the musical “bonus” material included here. It consists of four alternative presentations of iconic elements of Carmen: the Séguédille and Chanson bohème, the extended scene between Carmen and Don José at Lillas Pastia’s tavern, and the very last scene of the opera. In these “bonus” elements, Carmen is sung by Éléonore Pancrazi and Don José by Kévin Amiel; the other singers are the same as in the main recording. The circumstances of the role changes are not explained anywhere. 

     On balance, this Carmen is notable on many levels and excellent on virtually all of them, and its studious re-creation, to the extent possible, of the opera’s opening night, is something of a marvel to behold. Peculiarities of presentation aside – although the inclusion of the Guiraud recitatives in this context is very difficult to ignore – this is a thoroughly satisfying recording that reproduces some of the excitement that Bizet and librettists Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy certainly intended to deliver to the first-night audience, even if most of those initial attendees turned out not to be quite ready to receive it. This is a Carmen that straddles their time and ours – an affirmation of the now-firmly-established prominence of Bizet’s masterpiece within the operatic canon.

(++++) AS PERSONAL AS POSSIBLE

Busoni: Fantasia nach J.S. Bach, BV 253; Bach/Busoni: Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004—Chaconne; Bach/Rachmaninoff: Partita No. 3 in E, BWV 1006—Prelude, Gavotte, Gigue; Bach/Gabriele Leporatti: Partita No. 3 in E, BWV 1006—Loure, Menuet I & II, Bourrée; Rachmaninoff: Piano Sonata No. 2. Gabriele Leporatti, piano. Etera Classics. $19.99. 

     A major attraction of a new Etera Classics CD featuring Gabriele Leporatti is the chance to delve deeply not only into musical creation but also into musical re-creation: the thoughts that go through pianists’ minds when encountering keyboard works by earlier composers, and the way those thoughts manifest themselves in reproduction of those works and, in some cases, in recomposed – not merely performed – versions of the earlier material. Both Busoni and Rachmaninoff were distinguished pianist/composers, and both thought deeply about Bach – who never saw or wrote for the modern piano – and found ways to bring the Baroque master’s works into their own 20^th-century era. That Bach’s music continues to intrigue musicians in similar ways is shown by Leporatti’s own compositional contribution to this CD. 

     The personalized elements of this piano recital cover considerably more than a century. Busoni’s Fantasia nach J.S. Bach, BV 253 (wrongly designated “BWV 253” on this recording, which would actually make it a Bach work!) was created by Busoni in 1909, after his father’s death. This is thus a highly personal work for Busoni on two levels: that of a tribute to Bach and that of a memorial to his father, to whom the work is dedicated. It uses three Bach pieces as sources: the chorale variations Christ, der du bist der helle Tag, BWV 766, and the chorale preludes Lob sei dem allmächtigen Gott, BWV 602, and Gottes Sohn ist kommen, BWV 703. A work of searching emotionalism with a very strong Romantic feeling about it, the piece in no way attempts to bring Bach’s aural environment onto a keyboard different from the ones for which he wrote – rather, it tries to transport Bach’s Lutheranism into a much later and already more-secular age, seeking meaning on a different level by incorporating fragments of Bach’s chorales into a deeply felt work that treats Bach’s themes as building blocks for an emotionally meaningful memorial. 

     Leporatti leans fully into the Romanticism of Busoni’s Fantasia and, indeed, keeps an apt Romantic (and post-Romantic) sound in all the works on this disc, with lots of pedal and a series of grand gestures and dramatic emphases throughout. The second work on the CD, Busoni’s version of the Chaconne from Bach’s D minor Partita, BWV 1004, is much better-known than the Fantasia but is clearly cut from the same cloth: it is very pianistic, very strongly emotional, and very weighty in a manner different from that of Bach’s original – thoroughly un-Bachian in sensibility and sound but sharing an underlying level of communicativeness with its source. Leporatti’s highly dramatic handling of the material, including rubato that fits Busoni’s milieu but is quite foreign to Bach’s, makes the work strongly declamatory in ways untrue to its time of origin but quite fitting to its time of reconstitution. 

     Rachmaninoff’s handling of Bach in his 1933 arrangement of the first, third and sixth movements from the Partita, BWV 1006, contrasts interestingly with Busoni’s expansive transcriptions. Rachmaninoff is much truer to Bach’s esthetic than Busoni is: the underlying Baroque material is kept clearly on display even as the coloristic effects, of which there are many, dominate the overall sound of the movements. Leporatti here shows his delicate side, never trying to make the piano sound like a harpsichord, much less like the solo violin for which the Partitas were written – which in any case is impossible – but bringing the contrapuntal elements of Bach’s writing more to the fore and not using deeply resonant chords to enlarge or obscure them, as in the Busoni material. The Rachmaninoff transcriptions are more immediately engaging than Busoni’s, less inclined to monumentality bordering on turgidity – and are followed by some interesting transcription work that cements Leporatti’s own personal connection to this material from a compositional standpoint, as he offers his own versions of the second, fourth and fifth movements of this Prelude. This could easily come across as overreaching on Leporatti’s part, but instead emerges as a journey through a kind of expressiveness that differs both from Rachmaninoff’s and from Busoni’s: there is gentle lyrical flow in all three movements, bringing in elements akin to Busoni’s expansiveness while generally retaining Rachmaninoff’s focus on ensuring that Bach’s foundational forms and melodies remain clearly audible and in the forefront. The movements constitute an étude of sorts, an exercise in pianism as well as transcription, and proffer Leporatti’s feelings about interpreting this Bach music in ways that go beyond simply playing it. 

     Leporatti then concludes the CD with Rachmaninoff’s Piano Sonata No. 2, which is not Bach-derived but which bookends the disc by showcasing Rachmaninoff’s personal soundworld and emotional expressiveness in much the way that Busoni’s Fantasia puts his on display. Leporatti plays the second (1931) version of the sonata, which is shorter than the first (1913) and technically somewhat simplified. Listeners familiar with the work tend strongly to prefer one version or the other; but in this context, what matters most is the emotional intensity – some of it over-the-top, as is often the case in Rachmaninoff – and the way in which, in the context of this CD, the music complements that of Busoni and shows the very considerable distance, on multiple levels, between Bach and both of the later composers. In truth, the Rachmaninoff sonata does not fit especially well with the rest of the material on the disc, but that fact simply highlights the very strong personal elements that run through the entire CD: this recording is as much a journey into the mind and heart of Leporatti as it is one into the thinking and feeling of Busoni and Rachmaninoff regarding Bach and their own pianistic environments. In some senses, this is a production that will be most appreciated by pianists, for whom its intricate web of transcription and interpretation will be especially insightful. The recording does, however, reach out effectively to a more-general audience, allowing listeners to experience reinterpretations of Bach not only within the context of the 20^th century but also within that of the 21^st, in which the Baroque master quite clearly still maintains relevance and meaningfulness.