Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 4;
Dona nobis pacem; The Lark Ascending. David Coucheron, violin; Jessica
Rivera, soprano; Brett Polegato, baritone; Atlanta Symphony Chorus and
Orchestra conducted by Robert Spano. ASO Media. $18.99 (2 CDs).
Milhaud: L’Orestie d’Eschyle.
Soloists, percussion ensemble, Chamber Choir, University Choir, Orpheus
Singers, UMS Choral Union and University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra
conducted by Kenneth Kiesler. Naxos. $29.99 (3 CDs).
Cécile Chaminade: Piano
Music. Joanne Polk, piano. Steinway & Sons. $17.99.
Ralph Vaughan Williams
famously said that he was not sure, after the fact, whether he really liked his
Symphony No. 4, but it was what he meant to write at the time he wrote it. That
was in the mid-1930s – the work was first played in 1935 – and the piece has
been a knotty one ever since. Its dissonance is pronounced, its tension and
drama almost unrelieved, and it is one of only two Vaughan Williams symphonies
to end loudly (No. 8 is the other). The work stands in such strong contrast to
the composer’s better-known, more-familiar pastoral music that it sometimes
barely seems to be by him at all. Yet its language, in orchestration, harmony
and rhythm, is unmistakably his, and even though it stands outside the primary
body of his work, it is a symphony that deserves to be heard much more frequently.
The new Robert Spano recording with the Atlanta Symphony, on the orchestra’s
own label, is broad-scale and a touch on the slow side, but the music’s
intensity comes through clearly, and its pronounced overall severity is very well
communicated: the concluding fugal epilogue stands here as a true capstone. The
symphony contrasts very strongly with The
Lark Ascending, which dates to 1914 in its original form for violin and
piano and to 1920 in the better-known version heard here, for solo violin and
orchestra. Styled a Pastoral Romance,
this lovely and delicate work, its solo part feelingly handled by concertmaster
David Coucheron, moves onward and upward in a spiral of beauty and warmth, reflecting
and going beyond the 1881 George Meredith poem that inspired it. Naïve and
forthright in expression, with a solo part that soars higher and higher and
draws the audience along with it, The
Lark Ascending has long been one of Vaughan Williams’ most-popular works
for its uncomplicated approach, its accessible sound, and its carefully crafted
orchestration. The performance here is particularly effective because of the
contrast between this music and that of the Fourth Symphony. Also on this
two-CD set is the 1936 cantata, Dona
nobis pacem, and it too contrasts fascinatingly with the symphony. Set to a
text consisting of sections of the Mass and the Bible, poems by Walt Whitman,
and – of all things – a political speech by John Bright (1811-1889), Dona nobis pacem was written as the
clouds of war were again building over Europe, and it constitutes the
composer’s heartfelt (if naïve) plea for peace through a reminder of the
depredations of wars past. The fact that the work seems apposite to the world
today is a measure of Vaughan Williams’ ability to reach well beyond his own
time to tap into universal feelings and longings. The phrase Dona nobis
pacem ("Give us peace"), set in multiple ways, resounds through
the music and knits the work together. In the Spano performance, soprano
Jessica Rivera and baritone Brett Polegato deliver their lines with feeling,
and the chorus sings with warmth and clear diction, with the result that the
cantata as a whole offers uplift untouched by irony and seeming, if anything,
particularly apt in light of current geopolitical events.
Neither the Fourth Symphony
nor Dona nobis pacem is particularly
well-known among Vaughan Williams’ works, but both are vastly more familiar
than is L’Orestie d’Eschyle among
those of Darius Milhaud. It took Milhaud more than a decade (1913-23) to complete
this sprawling, highly ambitious setting of all three Aeschylus Oresteia plays: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Furies. This is an early work by Milhaud (1892-1974) and is
quite uneven, not only in the lengths of its parts but also in the composer’s
approach to the material, which ranges from the conventional to the genuinely
original. Agamemnon emerges as a
short and rather ordinary prelude to the rest of the work: the setting of a
single scene of the play, for soprano and chorus, is intended as part of a
stage performance of the whole drama, and gives little hint of what is to come.
There is much more to Les Choéphores
(Milhaud’s title for The Libation Bearers,
which he used in a Paul Claudel translation): here he employs full orchestra,
15 percussionists, very complex choruses and an odd – and oddly effective – rhythmically
notated speech that retains a feeling of considerable modernity even a century
later. Even this half-hour portion, though, pales before the 95-minute
treatment of Les Euménides (The Furies). Here the orchestra is
expanded even further, including saxophone and saxhorn quartets, and the music
reaches out in ways comparatively typical of Paris in the 1920s but tending to
sound more like Stravinsky of that time than like the Milhaud of Le boeuf sur le toit, which dates to
1920 – three years before Les Euménides.
The new Naxos release of the complete L’Orestie
d’Eschyle is highly ambitious, being a reading by many of the same forces
who so brilliantly handled the equally daunting Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Bolcom – who
studied with Milhaud and was the prime mover behind the April 2013 presentation
recorded here. This was the first-ever North American performance of L’Orestie d’Eschyle, and this is the
first complete recording of the score. And all of that is well and good, but
the question for listeners is whether the whole endeavor is worthwhile and the
performers as good as they need to be. The answer is a qualified yes: this is complex
music, requiring a very large number of participants (120-piece orchestra,
320-voice choir), and it is also uneven music – frequently quite interesting
but at times rather pedestrian. The soloists, especially soprano Lori Phillips
as Clytemnestra and baritone Dan Kempton as Orestes, are fine, but the combined
choruses do not always enunciate clearly enough (although the libretto,
available online from Naxos, helps a great deal). The musicians include
professionals, amateurs and students, and while everyone clearly approaches the
project with considerable enthusiasm, there are ragged edges in both singing
and playing here and there – although it must be said that the very large group
of percussionists is highly impressive. L’Orestie
d’Eschyle does not really hang together very well – it is not a strongly
unified work, feeling sometimes like opera, sometimes like oratorio, sometimes
like a stage play with music. In parts, it is compelling, but as a whole, it is
intriguing for its scoring and intensity rather than emotionally gripping for
its story. It is highly unlikely that this work will ever enter the mainstream
of musical performance, but the chance to hear it at all – in a very fine, if
scarcely flawless, performance – is an extremely welcome one, and kudos are due
to Bolcom, Naxos and the University of Michigan performers for making it
available.
The scale is much, much
smaller, far more intimate, on a new Steinway & Sons recording of piano
music by Cécile Chaminade
(1857-1944), performed by Joanne Polk. This is a combination of avowed salon
music, finger exercises, and one large-scale work designed with considerable
seriousness: Sonata in C minor, Op. 21
(1893). In traditional three-movement form, this is an earnest work that
indulges in mild chromaticism and fairly typical late-Romantic emotional
exaggeration – well-crafted but scarcely riveting. The études performed by Polk, even if intended primarily as
developmental tools for performers, are more intriguing, showing that Chaminade
had considerable skill as a miniaturist. Four excerpts from Études
de Concert, Op. 35 (1886) comprise Scherzo,
Automne, Fileuse (Spinner) and Impromptu.
Also here are individual pieces: Étude Symphonique, Op. 28 (1884),
Étude
Mélodique, Op. 118 (1906), Étude Pathétique, Op. 124
(also 1906), and Étude Romantique, Op. 132 (1909). These are all attractive works that can fairly be called pièces caracteristiques, reflecting not
only virtuoso requirements but also the stances or emotions their titles are
intended to evoke. But they are not avowed salon music, as are the other three
pieces here: La Lisonjera (The
Flatterer), Op. 50 (1890), Les
Sylvains (The Fauns), Op. 60 (1892), and Autrefois (Bygone Days), Op. 87, No. 4 (1897). It is easy to
dismiss these short pieces as “lesser” music, but difficult to do so without
also dismissing the similar works of, say, Chopin or Field. True, there is not
a great deal beyond pleasantries on this CD, not much to stir the soul or
invite deep thought or considerable introspection – not even in the sonata. But
there is a considerable amount of very well-made music that stands firmly
within the French Romantic tradition, played with strong commitment and
understanding by Polk and highlighting a voice with enough individualistic
qualities to make listeners wonder what other neglected Chaminade pieces may
lie out there. There are in fact quite a few: even her works with opus number
run to Op. 171 and include not only solo-piano music – in which she, a virtuoso
herself, specialized – but also a ballet, a number of songs and even a Konzertstück (although not a
full-fledged concerto) for piano and orchestra. Hopefully there will be more
Chaminade releases to come.
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