Mahler: Symphony No. 10 (version
by Deryck Cooke). Seattle Symphony conducted by Thomas Dausgaard. Seattle
Symphony Media. $16.99.
Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto;
Brahms: Symphony No. 2. Chloë
Hanslip, violin; Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by JoAnn Falletta.
Beau Fleuve. $17.
Schumann: Cello Concerto; Dvořák:
Cello Concerto. Carmine Miranda, cello; Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra
conducted by Petr Vronský.
Navona. $14.99.
John Corigliano: Symphony No. 1;
Michael Torke: Bright Blue Music; Copland: Appalachian Spring—Suite.
National Orchestral Institute Philharmonic conducted by David Alan Miller.
Naxos. $12.99.
Arthur Butterworth: Symphonies
Nos. 1, 2 and 4. BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Arthur
Butterworth (No. 1) and Christopher Adey (No. 2); BBC Northern Symphony
Orchestra conducted by Bryden Thomson (No. 4). Lyrita. $14.99 (2 CDs).
Rudolf Haken: Music for Viola.
Rudolf Haken, viola; Rachel Jensen, piano. MSR Classics. $12.95.
Leonard Bernstein: Larger Than
Life—A Film by Georg Wübbolt. C Major DVD. $24.99.
The pull of the Romantic era
extended well beyond the 19th century, with which it is usually
associated, and indeed continues in the 21st. The bending of form to
emotional expressiveness, one of the most salient characteristics of
Romanticism, continues to attract composers even as their techniques for
evoking expression evolve. Thus, those who try to determine a Romantic endpoint
are doomed to failure. Was Sibelius, who died in 1957, the last Romantic? Then
what about Einojuhani Rautavaara, also Finnish, born in 1928 and self-described
as a Romantic? He still writes music with a Romantic bent – and Sibelius
himself stopped composing anything new of significance about the time Rautavaara
was born. Perhaps Rachmaninoff, who died in 1943 and wrote his final work, the Symphonic Dances, in 1940, was the last
of his kind? But there is really no “last.” There are only composers who
accepted, adopted and adapted the approaches and techniques of Romanticism and
bent them to their will in new ways, whether by deliberately turning their
backs on key elements (as Schoenberg did) or by accepting those elements and
giving them a new, distinctive and highly personal stamp (as Mahler did).
Mahler’s unfinished Symphony No. 10 manages to be both a pinnacle of
Romanticism and a very clear bridge beyond it. It is a work whose
artist-as-tragic-hero elements are abundantly clear, to an even greater degree
than in his Sixth Symphony: by the time of the Tenth, Mahler’s wife, Alma, was
having an affair with the architect Walter Gropius and Mahler was desperately
trying to cope. Mahler’s final symphony is both intensely emotional (and
emotive) and extremely carefully structured. It is an arch whose central movement,
“Purgatorio,” is the shortest symphonic movement that Mahler ever wrote; and it
is a work whose unique-in-Mahler elements range from an extremely dissonant
climactic first-movement chord to the genuinely eerie sound of a muffled bass
drum at the conclusion of the fourth movement and in the fifth. It seems
inevitable that the symphony end peacefully but with a measure of
inconclusiveness, and it does, in a quietly ambivalent close. Mahler completed
the first and third movements of his Tenth and left the others tantalizingly
close to being playable. The first and still best performing version of the
entire symphony, by Deryck Cooke, is spare, at times even harsh, in ways that
show how far past Romanticism Mahler looked in this work – or would have looked
if he had finished it as Cooke did. Of course that would not have happened, but
perhaps Mahler would have made his Tenth even more intensely ascetic than it is
in Cooke’s performing version. It is best to regard Cooke’s Mahler Tenth as a
very fine completion of an extended sketch of a work whose shape Mahler had
determined but whose ultimate orchestration and overall sound would likely have
been different in important respects from the ones Cooke proffers. Yet ultimately
this does not matter: Mahler, whose temperament was even more wholly Romantic
than his techniques, so clearly communicates anguish and uncertainty in his
Tenth that a conductor has only to follow the music, scarcely to lead it, for
it to have a deeply moving effect. Thomas Dausgaard seems fully to understand
the emotional underpinnings of the Tenth, and his live November 2015 performance
with the Seattle Symphony, presented on the orchestra’s own label, glows with
fine playing, abundant emotional involvement and a clearly articulated sense of
the music’s careful structure. This is in every way a very fine Mahler Tenth –
not the one Mahler would have created if he had lived to and beyond his 51st
birthday, but as convincing a reading of this more-than-sketched,
less-than-finished work as listeners are likely to encounter.
Backing up a few decades
into the height of Romanticism lands listeners amid some of the most popular
classical works of all time – which retain their appeal despite the many, many
times audiences have heard them both in concerts and in recorded form. The
opportunity to make a new recording of such works can be irresistible, but it
is one best approached cautiously, since the bar for a quality performance is
extremely high when a work has been played and recorded so many times. The new
Buffalo Philharmonic recording of Brahms and Tchaikovsky, offering readings
recorded live in January 2016 on the orchestra’s Beau Fleuve label, has one hit
and one miss and gets a (+++) rating. The Tchaikovsky concerto is a delight. Twenty-nine-year-old
Chloë Hanslip treats this work
by the 38-year-old composer as a burst of youthful joy and passion, subsuming
its darker elements beneath warmth, lyricism and a joie de vivre that one rarely experiences in Tchaikovsky but that
makes perfect sense in this particular piece. JoAnn Falletta goes along with
and helps heighten the effect of the interpretation with accompaniment that
carefully includes Hanslip’s instrument at times and holds back and thus heightens
the soloist’s effects at others. Ultimately this is a superficial performance,
making no attempt to discover, much less plumb, any depths in the concerto. But
this piece happens to be one that can survive and even thrive under this kind
of treatment, especially when the soloist simply sounds so good. The orchestra
sounds excellent here as well, with plenty of warmth and fine ensemble work. It
almost seems to be a different orchestra and a different conductor in Brahms’
Symphony No. 2. This reading is a genuine disappointment, almost wholly without
warmth and filled with the sort of unnecessary rubato that lesser conductors use to try to heighten audience
involvement but to which a leader of Falletta’s caliber should not have to
resort. The very end of the symphony, for example, proves only that the
musicians can stay together at a breakneck pace that is wholly inappropriate
for the music. Also, for some reason, Falletta omits the exposition repeat in
the first movement – a serious error that badly damages the expansiveness of
the movement and the overall balance of all the symphony’s elements. Falletta
is better than this. So is Brahms.
A new Navona CD includes two
other highly popular and very Romantic concertos, those for cello by Schumann
and Dvořák, and here too one
performance is more attractive than the other – although the disparity is less
than in the Buffalo Philharmonic’s case. Carmine Miranda, another superb
twentysomething soloist (he is 26), is filled with fire and expressiveness in
the Dvořák. There is nothing
surface-level here: Miranda delves deeply into the work’s emotional core,
contrasting its occasional ebullience with a level of dark intensity that never
seems far away. Many cellists emphasized the considerable disparity between the
basic march tune and the emotion-soaked slow section in the final movement, but
Miranda goes beyond this, finding similar antitheses throughout the work and
highlighting them again and again. This is an unusual interpretation and one
that bears repeated listening. The Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra under
Petr Vronský is not quite as
convincing as is Miranda – tutti
passages here will often make listeners eager for a return of the soloist – but
the musicians’ playing is very good and quite idiomatic, even if the conducting
is rather foursquare. Soloist and conductor seem more fully attuned to each
other in the Schumann concerto, but the result is a somewhat weaker reading of
this work than the Dvořák
receives. Miranda’s approach is similar: he looks for areas of strong contrast
and seeks to highlight them repeatedly. But Schumann’s concerto is more
thoroughly through-composed than Dvořák’s and offers fewer opportunities for delving into disparate moods
and emotions. Here Miranda’s handling of the concerto seems somewhat forced, as
if he is trying to make Schumann’s expressiveness into something akin to Dvořák’s when in fact it is quite different.
Again, the interpretation is unusual and interesting enough to be worth hearing
repeatedly, and the CD deserves a (++++) rating for its innovation as well as
the sheer quality of Miranda’s playing. But on balance, the intriguing approach
here fits Dvořák more
comfortably than it fits Schumann.
Romantic expressiveness, if
not the officially designated Romantic era, persisted into a time very remote
from that of Schumann and Dvořák. By
the late 1980s, nearly a century after Dvořák’s Cello Concerto and more than that after Schumann’s, a distinctly
modern composer, John Corigliano (born 1938), turned to a Romantic form and
approach to communicate the same sort of strong emotions for which Romantic
music is known – but using techniques honed many decades later. Composed in
1988 and first heard in 1993, Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1 used a very large,
certainly late-Romantic-scale orchestra to try to express feelings associated
with what he described as a “world-scale tragedy,” in the form of AIDS. This is
essentially a war symphony, of AIDS as a war against Corigliano’s friends and
of the medical war against the disease. Corigliano uses an orchestra large even
by Mahlerian standards, primarily because of a gigantic percussion component
that includes two glockenspiels, crotales, two vibraphones, xylophone,
marimba, chimes, snare drum, three tom-toms, three roto-toms, field drum, tenor
drum, three bass drums, suspended cymbal, tam-tam, three temple blocks,
tambourine, anvil, metal plate, brake drum, triangle, flexatone, police
whistle, whip, and ratchet – plus harp, piano, four mandolins and a large complement
of more-traditional orchestral instruments. But where Mahler used his huge
orchestras primarily as extended chamber groups, presenting individual elements
within them with tremendous delicacy and using the full instrumental complement
with care and in contrast to the sections involving relatively few instruments,
Corigliano goes for all-out intensity and noise time and again, seeking an epic
scale by piling on climax after climax at insistently high volume. The symphony
is filled with personal references, not personal to Corigliano himself, as in
Mahler’s works (which are largely
about himself), but references to three specific people who died of AIDS and
were meaningful to the composer. Listeners need to know the references to get
the full effect of the music – one reason this rather bloated symphony has not
aged very well, even when played as effectively as it is on a new Naxos
recording by the National Orchestral Institute Philharmonic conducted by David
Alan Miller. For all its brashness and intensity, the symphony is less
effective than another work on the CD, Michael Torke’s Bright Blue Music (1985), which offers a much more downplayed form
of Romantic-style communication through its lyricism and beauty. And the
simplicity of the suite from Copland’s well-known Appalachian Spring (1945) trumps both the newer works precisely because of its simplicity: the music is
actually constructed with great skill, but it does not constantly call
attention to itself and its message, instead unfolding with balletic warmth and
a deliberately naïve but nevertheless heartfelt style of communication that
shows one effective direction composers were able to use when going beyond
Romanticism while not abandoning some of its precepts, such as tonality. The
orchestra here is made up of conservatory students, and it sounds fine in all
these pieces; the CD as a whole gets a (+++) rating because the three works on
it fit rather uneasily together and the main piece, Corigliano’s, simply does
not wear very well in its overdone intensity.
Corigliano is not, by a long
shot, the only post-Romantic composer to have gravitated to the symphony when
seeking to communicate on a large scale. The relatively little-known British
composer Arthur Butterworth (1923-2014) composed seven symphonies, along with more
than 150 other works in forms usually thought of as Romantic (including
concertos for violin, viola, cello, guitar, bassoon, trumpet and organ). Like
Charles Ives in the United States, Butterworth was inspired by band music, becoming
a trombone, cornet and trumpet player because of his love of the sound of
massed brass. Although he was a professional orchestral trumpeter for a time,
he gave up performing when in his late 30s in order to focus on composition. His
works are well-constructed and show considerable sensitivity to the real-world
requirements of performance. A new two-CD release on the Lyrita label offers
the unusual chance to hear three Butterworth symphonies and listen to the
composer himself conducting his favorite, the First, which was his breakthrough
work. This symphony was first played in 1957. This recording, from 1976, is
unfortunately of poor quality (it was made from a BBC transmission), but it is
an interesting historical documentation of music that might be called
post-post-Romantic – because the symphony, with its strong British and
Scandinavian flavor, clearly recalls (but does not slavishly imitate) Vaughan
Williams, Sibelius and Nielsen, each of whom found his own way past the
Romantic era and into new forms of symphonic expressiveness. Butterworth’s Symphony
No. 2 (1964), heard here in a 1975 performance, offers less tone-painting and a
greater sense of drama and lyricism in a kind of film-music package. It is a
work of considerable variety, with pastoral elements, periods of calm, folklike
material, a bit of a march, and an effective contrast of jollity and solemnity.
Symphony No. 4 (1986), presented here in a recording of its première performance, is closer to No. 1
in spirit, the first movement in particular reminiscent of Sibelius (the ostinato passages are directly in the
Finnish composer’s debt) but with a Nielsen-like passage of insistent timpani
at its climax. The second movement starts suspensefully, then lightens; the
third has stillness at its core but is occasionally interrupted by brass
outbursts using more-dissonant harmonies than Butterworth generally employed;
and the finale, a moto perpetuo,
recalls elements of the first three movements and whirls to a well-wrought
climax. Strictly in performance terms, this is the best reading of the three
here, but all the recordings, despite some technical imperfections, are well
worth having for anyone interested in exploring Butterworth’s music. The
limited reach of the composer, and the less-than-ideal sound, make this a (+++)
recording, but it is one well worth hearing for those interested in 20th-century
British symphonies as they evolved from works of the Romantic era.
Butterworth was unapologetic
about writing music that remained largely within the Romanic purview. The same
is true of Rudolf Haken (born 1965), a fine violist whose early works for his
favored instrument – heard on a new MSR Classics CD – are so firmly within
Romanticism as to qualify as throwbacks. Four of the five pieces here are the
creations of a teenager – a remarkably skilled one who, by age 10, had
conducted his own orchestral music. The most-recent work on the CD is Polonaise for Viola and Piano (1990), a
virtuoso showpiece filled with unexpected harmonic and rhythmic twists. It
keeps sounding as if it is veering off the tracks into unexpected territory,
then abruptly pulls back, as if Haken is having fun at the expense of performer
and listener alike. It contrasts well with Für
Fritz (1980), also for viola and piano, a playful, harmonically rich and
very difficult display piece in the Kreisler mode, filled with chromaticism and
delicacy that are almost impossible to balance – although Haken himself clearly
knows how to produce the effects he wants. This is the earliest work on the CD:
Haken was 14 when he wrote it. The remaining three pieces here – all five works
are world première recordings –
date to only one year later, 1981. One is the Suite in A minor for Solo Viola, a classy updating of the Baroque
suite that invites, indeed requires, Romantic interpretation: there is some of
the poise of Bach and Telemann here, and the movements’ dance titles are those
of the old suites, but the music itself has definite Romantic flair and expressiveness.
Also here is Fantasia in F-sharp minor
for Viola and Piano, an easier work to play than some of the others on the
CD, but no less attractive for its comparative simplicity. Indeed, the grace of
its first movement, brevity and panache of its Scherzo, lyricism of its Adagio
and drama of its finale make it a particularly satisfying piece for both
performer and listener. The last work on this (++++) disc is Sonata in D minor – Haken has a notable
fondness for minor keys, another of his Romantic leanings. This is the longest
and most substantial piece on the CD, its three movements running a full
half-hour and requiring intensity of focus from both violist and pianist
(Rachel Jensen is a very fine accompanist and partner throughout the recording).
The sonata is firmly Romantic in structure and almost equally so in tonality. The
first movement uses sonata form effectively and includes a nicely integrated central
fugato section; the second is a
well-wrought theme and variations; and the finale is all energy and joy – a
very impressive conclusion to a work that it is hard to believe was created by a
contemporary composer in his mid-teens. Haken has moved away from Romanticism
more recently, falling into the now-familiar contemporary habit of mixing
classical elements with ones from genres such as jazz, rock and Oriental music.
But his early and largely Romantic viola works are in many ways more intriguing
than his later ones, because they explore territory on which so many modern
composers have turned their backs and show that there is still a great deal to
be said in the Romantic idiom.
Romanticism had its time on
the podium as well as in composition – indeed, Mahler as composer-conductor
exemplified it in both venues. In more-recent times, another composer-conductor
was often considered to be the epitome of the Romantic temperament. That was
Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), a strong advocate and prolific conductor of
Mahler’s music and a podium showman whose excesses and exploits have been the
stuff of musical legend for decades. There have been many attempts to explore
Bernstein’s complex personality, none of them fully satisfying but virtually
all offering some degree of insight. A 52-minute documentary by Georg Wübbolt fits the pattern well, if not
particularly innovatively. It offers the usual mixture of scenes of Bernstein,
snippets of his activities (conducting and otherwise), background on his life
and his musical interests, and comments by those who knew and interacted with
him. Actually, the film is most notable for those comments, because there are
so many of them – not only from fellow conductors (Gustavo Dudamel, Kent
Nagano, Marin Alsop, Christoph Eschenbach) and from Bernstein’s own children
but also from members of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Additional comments
by Dudamel, Nagano and Alsop appear in a 24-minute bonus section of the C Major
DVD on which the film has been released, resulting in an hour and a quarter of
material on Bernstein in all. Wübbolt
makes an attempt to showcase aspects of Bernstein’s life and career that
sometimes get short shrift, such as his roles as an educator and as a sort of
American musical ambassador to the world. Unfortunately, this material gets
short shrift here as well, since Wübbolt
packs his film with so much of the usual material on Bernstein: his highly
involving (and, to some, vastly overdone) podium performances; his popular
compositions (but there is virtually nothing here on his more-serious, less
immediately appealing music); his accomplished pianism; his use of television
to reach young people; and so on. One of the things that made Bernstein a
Romantic figure was his larger-than-life emoting on the podium and sometimes
off it, including his willingness, even determination, to play to the largest
audience possible – as when he conducted Beethoven’s Ninth after the fall of
the Berlin Wall, at Christmas 1989, with "Freiheit"
("Freedom") replacing "Freude" ("Joy") in the
final movement. A consummate showman, Bernstein was nevertheless not always the
best advocate of the music he conducted: his many unwarranted tempo changes,
his stretching and compressing of works (especially Romantic ones) in ways the
composers never intended, were as much a part of his conducting as were his
sometimes surprising attentiveness to music with which he was not usually
identified (some of his Haydn, for example, was excellent). What Leonard Bernstein: Larger Than Life
misses are some of the controversies and negatives that balance the positive
elements with which the film is filled. Romantics of all kinds lived and worked
on a grand scale, but their lives writ large were scarcely perfect exemplars
for their time or the times that came afterwards. Wübbolt’s film is a (+++) production
that plumbs no new depths where Bernstein is concerned, but does a fine and
generally forthright job of showing the many ways in which he was admired and
some of the many people who admired him. It will take a more nuanced director
than Wübbolt to produce a
more-balanced view of Bernstein, one showing how his Romantic temperament
sometimes betrayed him and brought him, at least in some quarters, as much
disdain as admiration – a fate indeed befitting many Romantic figures as far
back as the 19th century.
