Sousa: Music for Wind Band,
Volume 15. Marine Band of the Royal Netherlands Navy conducted by Keith
Brion. Naxos. $12.99.
Grieg: Complete Symphonic Works,
Volume V—Music to Henrik Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt”; Six Orchestral Songs; Two Lyric
Pieces; The Mountain Thrall; Norwegian Dances. Camilla Tilling, soprano;
Tom Erik Lie, baritone; WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln conducted by Eivind Aadland. Audite. $19.99 (SACD).
Vivaldi: Twelve Concertos, Op. 7.
Federico Guglielmo, violin and conducting L’Arte dell’Arco; Pier Luigi
Fabretti, oboe. Brilliant Classics. $11.99 (2 CDs).
The risk of providing
complete, or simply extended, series of pretty much any music is that no one
produces material of the same quality all the time. There is lesser Mozart,
lesser Bach, lesser Beethoven. On the other hand, the great thing about hearing
the totality of a composer’s production in one form or another is to have a
chance to make up one’s own mind as to whether the less-known works deserve
their relative obscurity – or whether they are less frequently heard just as an
accident of history or because of factors incidental to their musical quality.
The excellent Naxos series of Sousa’s music for wind band, whose 15th
and penultimate volume features Keith Brion conducting yet another of the
international bands that seem thoroughly at home with this quintessentially
American music, contains not a single Sousa piece that could be described as
well-known. Indeed, four works here – including the three longest on the CD –
are world première recordings. But
it is very difficult to understand why these pieces are so rarely played,
compared with better-known ones, for everything on the disc has the same naïve
charm, fine sense of rhythm and excellence of band orchestration for which
Sousa is justly famous. If there is nothing here with the lilt and sheer verve
of The Washington Post, The Liberty Bell
or The Thunderer, there is also
nothing that deserves to languish as these pieces have. The longest work on the
disc, The Band Came Back, is also the
oddest: a collection of tune snippets used at Sousa band performances to
reassemble the musicians on stage after intermission. Created in 1895 and
differing at different performances, it is heard here in a version from 1926 by
Sousa’s assistant conductor, cornetist Herbert L. Clarke. The other world premières are excerpts that Sousa
assembled in 1894 from his 1884 operetta, Désirée;
the “electric ballet” from Act II of his 1899 retelling of the Aladdin story, Chris and the Wonderful Lamp; and a
fascinating arrangement that Sousa made of Chopin’s Nocturne No. 11, which includes offstage as well as onstage brass
instruments. The remaining pieces here, although they have been recorded from
time to time, are mostly rarities. They are the marches Prince Charming (1928), Across
the Danube (1877), Magna Charta
(1927), Legionnaires (1930), Volunteers (1918), Pet of the Petticoats (1883), Ben
Bolt (1883), and Yorktown Centennial
(1881), plus a rather odd tango-with-foxtrot-elements called Gliding Girl (1912). The wide date range
of the music offers listeners an ideal chance to hear the ways in which Sousa’s
style changed – and did not change – over time. And individual pieces have
standout elements showing just how creative Sousa could be: Ben Bolt, for example, is made up of
multiple popular tunes transformed into march rhythm, while Volunteers, written to honor workers
building warships, includes riveting, sirens and anvils. Like the earlier
volumes in this first-rate series, this one shows Brion to have a thorough
understanding and appreciation of Sousa’s music and to be a band conductor of
considerable élan.
The fifth and last Audite
SACD of Grieg’s symphonic works, conducted by Eivind Aadland, also fulfills the
promise of the earlier issues. Little on this disc will be familiar to most
listeners: the recording includes Grieg’s orchestral arrangements of his own
songs as well as various dances and short lyrical pieces. One thing confirmed
here is Grieg’s reputation as a miniaturist: the works range in length from two
minutes to six-and-a-half. Grieg captures multiple moods by juxtaposing short
works rather than by developing sections of longer ones; that is especially
apparent here. The only work with any real continuity is the Norwegian Dances, in whose four
movements Grieg explores a march and three Hallings; the suite, originally
written for piano four hands, is quite effective in this form. Two Peer Gynt excerpts sound quite
interesting in the orchestral versions here, especially Dance of the Mountain King’s Daughter, whose orchestration includes
piano, harp and xylophone. Moodiness comes through clearly in the two
orchestrated Lyric Pieces, while Six Orchestral Songs – taken by the
composer from a wide variety of his song cycles – are all affectingly sung by
soprano Camilla Tilling. There is also a single, extended song here for
baritone, The Mountain Thrall, which
Tom Erik Lie handles with appropriate drama and anguish. But Audite provides no
texts for any of the songs, and that is a significant lack in a CD that is half
made up of vocal music – especially since the booklet spends four pages on the
background of the two singers, which is really overkill. Nevertheless, for
listeners intrigued by Grieg and able to track down the songs’ words online,
this disc brings its series to a very fine close, with Aadland showing once
again that he is highly sensitive to the rhythmic and harmonic nuances that are
so important for thorough appreciation of Grieg’s music.
Vivaldi’s concertos provide
tremendous enjoyment all the time, and particularly so when played by a
violinist such as Federico Guglielmo, with his superb understanding of period
style and his use of authentic instruments not only for himself but also for
the ensemble he leads, L’Arte dell’Arco. Brilliant Classics has already
released absolutely first-rate recordings of Guglielmo’s readings of the Op. 3
and Op. 4 concertos, among others, and it is reasonable to ask why those
collections are heard so often while Op. 7 is almost completely unknown. The
reason is that at least some of these concertos are not by Vivaldi at all, and
there is scholarly argument over which ones are. The dozen works in Op. 7 may
have been rushed out by an unscrupulous music publisher, of which there were
many in Vivaldi’s time, to take advantage of the popularity of the composer’s
other concertos. Little is certain, or is likely to become certain, about just
how Op. 7 came to be – but many of these works, whether by Vivaldi himself or
by someone imitating his style, have considerable interest in their own right; and
their very rarity makes it interesting to hear them, especially when one can do
so in such a wonderfully played and well-priced recording as this. Op. 7
includes two six-concerto portions, each starting with an oboe concerto and
proceeding with five violin concertos. Scholars agree that the oboe concertos
are certainly not by Vivaldi; Guglielmo includes them here anyway, as a sort of
appendix, and they are quite harmless if not particularly noteworthy. Listeners
can play their own guessing game with the violin concertos, which are arranged
helter-skelter on the discs for no apparent reason (they appear in the sequence
11, 10, 4, 2, 3, 6, 12, 8, 9, 5). Trying to decide whether a given concerto is or
is not by Vivaldi can be fun, but it is worth remembering, again, that even
great composers did not produce works at the same high level all the time, so a
lesser piece here may simply be lesser Vivaldi. For example, of the two
minor-key concertos, No. 4 in A minor has so many deficiencies of sound and
structure that it is hard to imagine it being by Vivaldi, while No. 3 in G
minor has enough felicitous touches so that it certainly seems that it could be a Vivaldi work. The chance to
form one’s own opinion about the provenance of the music is one pleasure to be
had here. The other is simply the quality of the playing: no matter who wrote
these pieces, Guglielmo and his forces deliver them with as much enthusiasm and
authenticity as they are ever likely to receive.
No comments:
Post a Comment