The Little Tin Box: A Collection of Childhood
Memories.
The 5 Browns. Steinway & Sons. $17.99.
Vivaldi: Argippo. Emőke Baráth and Marie Lys, sopranos;
Delphine Galou and Marianna Pizzolato, contraltos; Luigi De Donato, bass;
Europa Galante conducted by Fabio Biondi. Naïve. $20.99 (2 CDs).
Thematically related but somewhat
thrown-together musical programs can be a lot of fun to listen to, provided
that the audience finds their overall themes congenial. The Little Tin Box is a highly personal presentation by the 5
Browns (Desirae, Deondra, Gregory, Melody and Ryan) of music remembered from
childhood and, in the case of these top-quality pianists, likely performed
then: each of the five started studying piano at the age of three. The memories
are sanitized, with the Steinway & Sons release calling them “a reclaiming
of [childhood’s] sweetness and beauty” involving “finding greater meaning in
the light by having survived the dark.” The three female siblings were sexually
abused by their father for nearly a decade, so their assertion of positive
childhood memories through this music has something that is more than a touch
plaintive about it. However, the music itself has little in it that is
bittersweet: most of it is familiar encore-like material, either written for
solo piano and arranged for the 5 Browns or created for orchestra and heard
here in piano arrangements. It is not necessary to know the “through darkness
to light” undercurrent of the CD in order to enjoy it – indeed, it may help not to know it, since the music is mostly
plain and simple and is played expertly and without apparent chiaroscuro. The 5
Browns are heard individually as well as in two-piano and five-piano
arrangements. The works include Smetana’s Vltava
(Die Moldau); Grieg’s Anitra’s Dance
from Peer Gynt; Mozart’s Rondo alla Turca from the K. 331 solo sonata
and Allegro con spirito from the
two-piano sonata K. 448; Dr. Gradus ad
Parnassum from Debussy’s Children’s
Corner; Emile Waldteufel’s Skater’s
Waltz; the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5; The Current, a work written and played
by Ryan Brown; Couperin’s Les Barricades
Mystérieuses from the second book of pièces
de clavecin; five of the 13 Kinderszenen
by Schumann; and a delightful (but, in context, somewhat odd) improvisation by
Desirae’s six-year-old daughter, Poppy Luch, called I Wish I Could Turn Back into a Kid. The pleasant pastiche feeling
of the recording makes specific comments on its contents somewhat irrelevant.
The flowing-water material in the Smetana may not sound particularly convincing
when heard on five pianos; the very slow start to Rondo alla Turca and the jazzy improvisations within it are
scarcely Mozartean (although the movement from the two-piano sonata is
first-rate); Beethoven’s Fifth is delivered with high drama and contrasts
nicely with the comparative calm of The
Current immediately afterwards; Schumann’s Bittendes Kind (“Pleading Child”) takes on unintended darkness in
this context, and the simple beauty of Träumerei
(“Dreaming”) comes with more seriousness than the music itself holds; and it is
hard to know how to respond to the concluding I Wish I Could Turn Back into a Kid – Poppy’s voice, introducing
it, is full of enthusiasm; the music itself is scarcely significant except in
context; and the underlying sentiment, again in context, is a trifle puzzling.
The title The Little Tin Box speaks
to the concept of opening a tinkly little music box and hearing whatever
melodies may emerge from it – a sweet notion, and one that fits this mishmash
of a musical mixture well enough. The disc, for those who can hear it strictly
on the surface level with which the music is delivered, is quite enjoyable. For
those who, knowing something of the family history of the 5 Browns, cannot hear
it that way, the CD is jarring in ways that neither the composers nor the
performers could have intended.
Pastiche was actually a musical form of its own for a time: it was a common and respected approach to opera in Vivaldi’s era, and a form that Vivaldi himself used. To create pasticcio, an impresario/composer would assemble material from multiple composers, write some connective-tissue music, work from a libretto that could itself have elements of hodgepodge about it, and have the resulting assemblage performed by itinerant opera companies. This is how Vivaldi’s pasticcio opera Argippo (1730) was offered in productions in Vienna and Prague. The original version of the opera is lost, which makes the work fit rather uneasily into Naïve’s long-running and always excellent Vivaldi Edition, which is designed as a set of presentations of Vivaldi music held at the National University Library of Turin. But awkward or not, the Vivaldi Edition has now made a version of Argippo available as the 64th entry in the two-decade-long series – the numbering itself being a trifle odd, since this two-CD set comes out later than the 65th release, Il Tamerlano, which itself has elements of pasticcio through its inclusion of arias by other composers: Geminiano Giacomelli, Johann Adolf Hasse and Riccardo Broschi. Argippo as heard in this recording is a critical edition prepared as recently as 2019 and including in its 19 arias music by Giovanni Battista Pescetti, Johann Adolph Hasse, Nicola Porpora, and others. Bernardo Ticci, who reconstructed the opera from manuscript material, has produced about as coherent a work as can be expected in a Vivaldi-era pasticcio or, for that matter, in some of Vivaldi’s own operas – which is to say, it is not very coherent at all. The libretto by Domenico Lalli overflows with the same elements heard in many operas of the time by Vivaldi and others: political and personal intrigues, family rivalries and conflicts, lovers’ passion and misunderstandings, and outsize emotions that overflow and are by and large over-the-top. This is the stuff of which opera, especially Italian opera, would consist for hundreds of years, so the improbability of Argippo is largely irrelevant to the quality of its music – much of which is very high-quality indeed. Among the high points are the always-reliable Delphine Galou singing an aria di furore in Act I, Se lento ancora il fulmine, and Marie Lys warmly presenting an Act III love tune, Vado a morir per te. Fabio Biondi directs the singers and the ensemble Europa Galante with skill and a determination to keep the music plowing bravely ahead even when the plot thickens or thins for little reason, as it does repeatedly. The result is a recording that will be of considerable interest to Vivaldi fans and to listeners interested in some of the byways of operatic history, even though Argippo is not, in and of itself, particularly noteworthy. It does, however, demonstrate that contemporaries of Vivaldi were as capable as he was of producing effective operatic material – and that Vivaldi could function with considerable skill as a musical assembler and theatrical producer, not just as a composer.
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