Brahms: Sextets. Soloist
Ensemble of the Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam (Ursula Schoch and Nienke van
Rijn, violins; Vincent Peters and Jeroen Quint, violas; Johan van Iersel and
Benedikt Maria Enzler, cellos). Bayer Records. $19.99 (SACD).
Ives: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2.
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Andrew Davis. Chandos. $19.99
(SACD).
Quincy Porter: String Quartets
Nos. 5-8. Ives Quartet (Bettina Mussumeli and Susan Freier, violins; Jodi
Levitz, viola; Stephen Harrison, cello). Naxos. $12.99.
Alkan: Trois Petites Fantaisies;
Minuetto alla tedesca; Marche Funèbre; Marche Triomphale; Petits préludes
sur les 8 gammes du plain-chant—No. 6; Capriccio alla soldatesca; Le tambour
bat aux champs; 25 Préludes, Op. 31—No. 8; Esquisses, Op.
63—No. 49. Vincenzo Maltempo, piano. Piano Classics. $13.99.
Reynaldo Hahn: Le Bal de Béatrice
d’Este; Concerto provençal; Sérénade;
Divertissement pour une fête de nuit. Ensemble Initium and
Orchestre des Pays de Savoie conducted by Nicolas Chalvin. Timpani. $18.99.
Some composers seem to have
thought in pairs, Brahms definitely being one. His four symphonies are
essentially pairs, with Nos. 1 and 2 strongly contrasted and written just a
year apart, after which six years passed until No. 3 – which strongly contrasts
with No. 4, written two years later. Brahms wrote two serenades for orchestra,
two piano concertos, two sonatas for clarinet or viola and piano, and other
paired pieces – including his two early sextets (1859-60 and 1864-65). Unlike
the very different symphony pairs or paired serenades, though, these sextets
have a great deal in common in their sound and approach, with a richness that
is often described as “autumnal” where Brahms is concerned even though they are
music by a man in his late 20s and early 30s. The Concertgebouw Orchestra of
Amsterdam, one of the world’s finest ensembles and one with exceptionally well-burnished
strings, has a nearly ideal sound for the music of Brahms, and the six players
offering these sextets are true to the orchestra’s quality: the music sounds
warm, at times almost glowing, and the structural approach that Brahms took
here – using formal classical models but altering them through, among other
things, asymmetrical musical subjects – comes through very clearly and not at
all academically. These are major-key works (in B-flat and G, respectively),
but as so often in Brahms (and in an even more pronounced way in his later
music), they have periods of minor-key-like melancholy that never quite becomes
sadness but instead presents a kind of wistful pathos. There is probably some
biographical reason for this where the sextets are concerned: they were written
after Brahms, who never married, precipitated a breakup with a woman to whom he
had secretly become engaged, and there is some evidence in the musical themes
themselves that this subject was on the composer’s mind when writing these
works. Yet whatever autobiography Brahms may have inserted here is irrelevant
to enjoying and being moved by the music, which the Concertgebouw players handle
on a new, very well-recorded Bayer Records SACD in a way that beautifully melds
their formal structure with their emotional underpinnings.
The pairing of Ives’ first
two symphonies is a convenience of recording rather than anything integral to
the works themselves, but in fact they make a fascinatingly contrasted duo –
and share certain elements as well as containing some that are strikingly
different. Ives is in many ways a quintessentially American composer, but a
very fine Chandos SACD featuring the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under Sir
Andrew Davis shows just how internationally understandable his music has now
become: these are first-rate performances that thoroughly explore the
essentially European nature of the first symphony and the much more overtly
nationalistic American elements of the second. Symphony No. 1 dates to 1898 and
was Ives’ graduation project at Yale, under the supervision of the very
conservative and by all reports prickly Horatio Parker, an important composer
and educator of the time but by no means one willing to encourage Ives’
experiments in tonality, hymn-tune use, popular songs or other forward-looking
elements. Redolent of Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Dvořák, Ives’ First has little of the composer’s unique personality about
it, yet it is a very well-made work with some fine melodies, and it shows a
thorough mastery of sonata form, counterpoint and other traditional
compositional techniques that Ives was later to jettison – but with which he
was clearly quite familiar (and at which he was certainly adept). Symphony No.
2, which spans the 19th and 20th centuries, dates to
1897-1901, and its slow movement may be the one that Ives originally planned
for the earlier symphony but had to remove because it was too harmonically daring
for Parker’s taste (although it scarcely sounds that way today). The themes of
Ives’ Second, unlike those of his
earlier symphony, are often drawn from hymns, folk songs, marches, even student
songs, and even listeners who do not recognize the specific tunes will sense a
level of humor and playfulness here that is absent in Symphony No. 1. Yet by
and large, the lighthearted elements are encased in traditional, serious
symphonic form, and it is this that makes the pairing of these symphonies and
their first-rate handling by Davis so intriguing: Ives knew quite well how to
write conventional Romantic-era symphonies, and very deliberately tuned his
back on them and on this type of music in general. In a sense, the final chord
of Symphony No. 2 – an 11-note dissonance added by Ives decades after he
initially composed the symphony – is a perfect metaphor for looking both back
and ahead. Its sound is as startling as can be and in that sense seems very
much of the 20th century, but its origin is in a 19th-century
dance-band custom of ending an evening by having every player play any note at
all, as loudly as possible.
As the 20th
century progressed in American music, the influence of European-focused
composers and teachers such as Parker (1863-1919) faded, being replaced by that
of other composer-educators such as Quincy Porter (1897-1966) – who, like Ives,
attended Yale University and was taught by Parker. Ives himself was always an
outlier in American music, his works almost wholly unknown until close to his
death in 1954 – but today it seems quite apt to have music by Porter performed
by a quartet that takes its name from Ives. A new Naxos CD of Porter’s String
Quartets Nos. 5-8 (he wrote nine in all) complements a 2008 release by the same
performers of Quartets Nos. 1-4; in fact, parts of the new recording date to
2008, although the performances were not completed until 2012. These are
mid-century quartets (1935, 1937, 1943 and 1950), and all look back in exactly
the way that Ives’ music did not. They are short, none running even 19 minutes,
and uniformly well-constructed. All were written after Porter returned to the
United States from three years in Paris, and all show solid familiarity with
string writing and a rather modest use of dissonance (which became more
pronounced in works that Parker wrote later than these). The eighth quartet,
the shortest of these four, is the most structurally interesting, being in two
movements (the first featuring slow-fast-moderate sections) and concluding with
an Adagio molto espressivo rather
than the expected quick finale. Porter’s chamber music is not as well-known as
his orchestral works and not as influential, but this CD shows its strengths
clearly and in well-balanced, idiomatic performances that fully explore the
quartets’ sophistication and careful construction.
The notion of pairing is not
a significant one in the Porter quartets, but it is important in a new Piano
Classics recording of music by Alkan. Vincenzo Maltempo, a first-rate
interpreter of this repertoire with a deep understanding of Alkan’s
peculiarities, excellent qualities and limitations, here offers a recital that
seems at first glance like a hodgepodge: a collection of largely unrelated
works taken from various sets of Alkan pieces, composed at different times in
the composer’s life (1813-1888). There is, however, method rather than madness
to Maltempo’s selection for this recording. He performs here on a restored Érard piano – Alkan’s favorite
instrument. The specific piano used by Maltempo postdates Alkan – it was built
in 1899 – but it is still constructed in the Érard manner, and the manner of other pianos designed prior to
the Steinway innovations of the 1850s. For example, Steinway created cast-iron
frames made in a single casting, and invented crossed strings that produce
wonderful evenness and purity of sound. But Alkan did not initially have access
to such instruments and had long since stopped giving public recitals by the
time they became available. Like Bach writing for the harpsichord or clavichord
– rather than the piano – Alkan wrote for an instrument different from modern
ones, a piano whose bass and highest treble ranges had an inherently different
sound from that of the middle range. And Alkan incorporated the effects of
those sonic differences (which it would be wrong to deem limitations) into his piano
works. Maltempo has chosen for this recording a group of works that he feels
showcase to particularly good effect the advantages of playing Alkan on an Érard. Among them are two pairs: Marche Funèbre and Marche Triomphale (Opp. 26 and 27) and Capriccio alla soldatesca and Le tambour bat aux champs (Opp. 50 and
50bis). Maltempo makes an excellent case for using an Érard to show the contrasts between these paired pieces: the drum
effects alone in the Marche Funèbre
are enough to show the special qualities of this piano. Equally impressive is
the concentrated tragedy of Le tambour
bat aux champs, which, like its companion piece, subtly (and sometimes not
so subtly) undermines the notion of military glory. Every work on this CD
showcases elements of the special sound and percussive – and expressive –
qualities the piano Maltempo uses. For example, there is distinctive
near-modernity in Trois Petites
Fantaisies, especially in the first and third pieces, with the
near-childlike sound of the middle piece serving as a strong contrast. And in
the eighth of the 25 Préludes,
Op. 31, there is an absolutely stunning level of originality in expressing
the work’s title, which is, with quotation marks, “Chanson de la folle au bord de la mer” (“Song of the madwoman on
the seashore”). The tone painting here is truly remarkable, and a considerable
amount of its effect comes from the sound world of the Érard on which Maltempo performs the piece. This is a fascinating
disc from start to finish.
Of lesser but still
considerable interest is a new Timpani CD of music by Reynaldo Hahn, born the
same year as Ives (1874) but, unlike the American composer – who essentially
stopped creating music around 1920 – continuing to produce works until the end
of his life in 1947. A naturalized Frenchman born in Venezuela, Hahn is best
known for his songs. He was a child prodigy and for a time a considerable
presence in the musical life of Paris, being not only a composer but also a
conductor, music critic, diarist, theater director, and even a salon singer. Hahn’s
music is well-crafted and pleasant, not particularly challenging, and generally
– like Porter’s – something of a throwback to earlier times. One pair of pieces
on this disc has been recorded before; the other pair is of world première recordings: the unpublished Sérénade for flute,
oboe, clarinet and bassoon, which dates to 1942, and Divertissement pour une fête de nuit for winds, piano,
percussion and string quartet (1931). The former of these is pleasant chamber
music with attractive interaction among the winds. The latter is atmospheric
and interestingly scored, its four movements variously establishing nighttime,
presenting a lakeside scene, and offering concluding al fresco waltzes. There is a certain persistent delicacy to Hahn’s
music, which has some characteristics of Impressionism, coupled with a grace
and neoclassical balance: Hahn as a conductor specialized in Mozart, and some
of his music’s poise may come from that source. There is expert detailing in
these works, akin to that in Hahn’s prose – a characteristic he shares with
Marcel Proust, his lifelong friend and sometime lover. The early (1905) Le Bal de Béatrice d’Este, a
seven-movement suite for winds, piano, two harps and percussion, shows this
just as clearly as does the late (1944) Concerto
provençal for flute, clarinet, bassoon and strings. This last work
is a three-movement suite that sounds nothing like Respighi’s Pines of Rome but that pays similar
musical tribute to trees, in this case in France rather than Italy: plane
trees, pines and olive trees. There is something of the affected, occasionally even
a touch of the effete, in Hahn’s music as heard on this disc: it seems more of
the salon than of the concert hall. Smooth on its surface, much of the music
sounds as if there is little if any depth beneath the well-polished exterior.
The performances here are very fine and clearly committed to the pieces, but
the works themselves make this a (+++) recording – albeit one of special
interest to anyone wanting to explore some less-known French music of the early
to middle 20th century.
