Brahms: Die schöne
Magelone. Nikolay Borchev, baritone; Boris Kusnezow, piano. Genuin. $18.99.
Decades: A Century of Song,
Volume 2—1820-1830. Anush Hovhannisyan, soprano; Sarah Connolly,
mezzo-soprano; John Mark Ainsley, Robin Tritschler and Luis Gomes, tenors;
Christopher Maltman, baritone; Malcolm Martineau, piano. Vivat. $18.99.
Gordon Getty: The Canterville
Ghost. Alexandra Hutton, soprano; Jean Broekhuizen, Denise Wernly and
Rachel Marie Hauge, mezzo-sopranos; Timothy Oliver, tenor; Jonathan Michie and
Anooshah Golesorkhi, baritones; Matthew Treviño, bass; Oper Leipzig and Gewandhausorchester conducted by
Matthias Foremny. PentaTone. $19.99 (SACD).
Jonathan David Little: Sacred and
Secular Choral and Polychoral Works. Navona. $14.99.
Brian Belet: Compositions for
Computer, Live Instruments, and Voice. Ravello. $14.99.
It would be logical to
assume that composers seeking a genuine connection with audiences would turn,
above all, to the human voice, enhancing the usual communicative power of
speech with music that would emphasize and underline arguments and emotions.
This is not quite right, though. Although many composers do use the voice this
way, others treat it as simply another instrument, focusing on how it sounds
rather than on what is being said – or use it to present the narrative basis of
a story whose emotional underpinnings are then captured and enhanced by
instrumental accompaniment. It is this latter approach that Brahms takes with Die schöne Magelone, a
curious song cycle that comes as close as anything in Brahms’ oeuvre to opera. It is not an opera, not
at all, but much of the vocal writing is operatic or near-operatic, the 15
songs are collectively substantial in length (50-plus minutes), and the
underlying story is definitely the stuff of opera librettos. Unfortunately for
modern listeners, that story is completely obscure today, and is not well told
by the songs themselves. The songs are contained within a work by Ludwig Tieck
(1773-1853) called The Romance of
Magelone the Fair and Peter Count of Provence, but Tieck’s plot is quite
intelligible without the songs (which Tieck and Brahms both called “romances”);
the vocal material forms an adjunct to the story rather than an integral part
of it. Without knowing the story, though, the songs’ meanings are obscure. For
most listeners today, the music – vocal and instrumental – is the reason to
hear Brahms’ Magelone cycle, and the
meaning is at best secondary, at worst insignificant. And it is as a purely
musical experience that the performance on Genuin, by baritone Nikolay Borchev
and pianist Boris Kusnezow, excels. Borchev’s pronunciation of the German text
is not always idiomatic, but his involvement in the music comes through
strongly throughout the cycle, and Kusnezow’s excellent pianism places him in
full partnership with the singer and, indeed, at times in the forefront of the
collaboration, his instrument commenting forcefully on the verbiage. Brahms
created these songs with considerable care, for example using simple strophic
form only for a single brief song expressing the forthright feelings of a
secondary love interest who is not really much of a challenge to Magelone. The
other strophic songs are varied each time verses are repeated – and many songs
are in rondo-like ternary or expanded ternary form rather than being strophic
at all. It is possible to admire Brahms’ elegant structuring of individual
songs and the cycle as a whole even while noting that the word “cycle” is a bit
of a misnomer here: for those unfamiliar with Tieck’s work – in which some of
these “romances” occur within the narrative and others are commentaries upon it
– the overall sequence and its individual parts will have little real meaning.
Yet for all that, Die schöne
Magelone is a fascinating and unjustly (if
somewhat understandably) neglected work, and one very much worth hearing
in a performance as good as this one.
If Brahms’ Magelone is a somewhat rarefied
experience, so, to an even greater degree, is a Vivat CD series called Decades: A Century of Song. The century
referred to is the 19th. The series’ first volume included songs
from 1810 to 1820, and the second volume offers ones from 1820 to 1830. There
are nine by Schubert, three by Glinka, three by Bellini, two by Carl Loewe
(1796-1869), and one each by Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Louis Niedermeyer
(1802-1861). Lovers of lieder will
certainly enjoy this mixture of the familiar and less-known, and all the songs
are performed with relish and emotional understanding by first-class singers.
The mingling of musical cultures here – Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Russia
– in interesting, and the specific selections contain some surprises: Mendelssohn’s
lasts only a minute and a half, while one of Loewe’s is six minutes long and
the offering from Niedermeyer lasts seven-and-a-half (longer than anything here
except Schubert’s Ellens Gesang). As
an exploration of classical song in various geographical areas during one
specific decade, this CD is quite intriguing. It is also quite distinctly
limited as to likely audience interest: it seems primarily intended for
listeners who have already decided that they want to collect the entire
decade-by-decade series of discs.
Gordon Getty’s one-act, one-hour
opera The Canterville Ghost is also a
targeted rather than general-interest release. It is quite well-done in its
handling of Oscar Wilder’s novella, his first published story (1887): Getty has
a fine sense of the contrast between Old World and New World that lies at the
heart of the tale, in which Americans move into a haunted castle and refuse to
be frightened by the resident ghost. Getty is not the first contemporary
composer to create an opera based on this story: Alexander Knaifel did so back
in 1966. And the novella has been adapted in many other media, including film
and television. So Getty’s handling of it as a rather traditional opera, using
his own libretto, is quite fine but on the straightforward side. In Wilde’s
story, the American family’s 15-year-old daughter, Virginia, eventually helps
the ghost find peace and move on to the next world, and the way in which she and
the ghost learn from each other is ultimately the point of the story. Virginia
is not exactly heroic, however – she is simply willing to take the ghost
seriously. Getty casts Virginia (Alexandra Hutton) in a rather more heroic mode
than is strictly necessary, and as a result the ghost (Matthew Treviño) is somewhat less the center of
attention than he is in Wilde’s tale. In operatic terms, this certainly works,
and the two characters’ voices are particularly well contrasted (she being the
only soprano in the cast and he the only bass). Wilde’s story itself repays
multiple readings, since it includes the clash of values between Old and New
Worlds, the meaning of growing up, and some meditations on life, death and
love. Getty’s opera is more of a surface-level treat, but it is a treat
nevertheless – for those interested in a story with 19th-century
sensibilities being clothed in contemporary musical dress (the opera was first
performed in 2015). The PentaTone recording is very fine, and opera lovers
looking for something new – and not musically overstated – will find The Canterville Ghost involving, if not
particularly haunting.
Getty’s musical language is
essentially tonal, his essential focus being on communicating the meaning of
the words of his libretto. Other contemporary composers, however, handle the
human voice differently, often drawing as much attention to it for its own sake
as to what it is saying. A new Navona recording featuring works by Jonathan
David Little moves more in this direction. There are six pieces here, three
sacred and three secular – but one of them, Woefully
Arrayed, is offered first as a very extended (25-minute) sacred piece and
then a second time, at the CD’s conclusion, with the sacred elements removed
and the music therefore becoming secular and being reduced in length by half.
Little’s approach to choral music calls attention to itself as much as to what
the singers are saying. For instance, he likes to position singers above and
around the audience, which is scarcely a new technique, even in sacred music
(Wagner, for example, used it to excellent effect in Das Liebesmahl der Apostel), but which Little makes integral to
much of his work. Kyrie and Gloria on this CD are both sonically
impressive and show understanding of older vocal forms, but some of their
pauses and strong contrasts between loud and soft passages draw greater
attention to Little’s compositional techniques than to the words of the
singers. On the secular side of things, Wasted
and Worn, intended as a memorial to painter John William Godward
(1861-1922), features some beautiful vocal writing but little sense of either
mourning or celebration of Godward’s life. That
Time of Year, a sensitive setting of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, is more
effective, although the layering of voices tends somewhat to obscure the
gorgeous cadences of the bittersweet poem. The various performers here handle
the music well, and many elements of Little’s works are effective and even
affecting; but taken as a whole, the pieces tend to distract attention from the
words rather than use the vocal lines and ranges to focus more strongly on the
meaning of the texts.
Little is, however, more
traditionally respectful of the voice than is Brian Belet, whose music on a new
Ravello disc is far more concerned with electronic manipulation of vocal sounds
than with using humans’ vocal capabilities as a conduit for better
communication with other humans. Belet is a performer on computerized
electronic equipment, using the Kyma System to produce tones and soundscapes
not otherwise to be found in nature. In one of the 10 works here, Remembering Allen, it is Belet’s own
voice that is combined with Kyma, while in Name
Droppings there are multiple voices used, and in Sea Lion Mix the voices and Kyma are indeed mixed with the barks of
sea lions. Belet creates musical soundscapes in which the human voice is simply
a tool used to create and evoke sounds: two of the pieces here, Difference (No Doubt It Queues) and An
Abstract (Differences (Queues)), contain nothing but a computer- processed
voice. Like many other contemporary composers, Belet draws attention to himself
and the presumed cleverness of his constructs through titles, here including (Disturbed) Radiance for piano and Kyma
and Still Harmless [Bass]ically for
electric bass and Kyma. For listeners not already enamored of computerized and
electronically modified sound environments, a little of Belet’s material will
go a long way, and the preponderance of Kyma will wear thin quickly: it appears
as integrally in Lyra for violin and
Kyma as in Summer Phantoms: Nocturne
for piano and Kyma. The pieces here were recorded over nearly two decades, from
1997 to 2016, and all are in a single continuous movement except the
three-movement System of Shadows,
which is for C trumpet, B-flat flugelhorn and the inevitable Kyma – and which
considers celestial phenomena with a 21st-century version of sounds
of the sort that were innovative when produced by György Ligeti 50-plus years ago and by Edgard Varèse a full century in the past, but are now rather
passé. In the works of Belet and other, similar composers, the communicative
potential of the human voice is beside the point: its sonic production and Belet’s
ability to manipulate it are what this material is all about. Seventy-plus minutes
of this kind of treatment of voice (and instruments) will be far more than
enough for all but the most dedicated fan of music whose craftsmanship is
undoubted but whose ability to put non-superficial messages across to listeners
is quite beside the point.
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