(+++) A MATTER OF CONTEXT

Prokofiev: Suites from “Cinderella” and “Romeo and Juliet.” Ian Scott, clarinet; Jonathan Higgins, piano. Divine Art. $18.99.

Music for Recorder and Piano by English Composers. John Turner, recorder; Peter Lawson, piano; Richard Whalley, prepared piano. Divine Art. $25.99 (2 CDs).

Lei Liang: Garden Eight; Katharina Rosenberger: Torsion; Haydn: Piano Sonata Hob. XVI:49; Toru Takemitsu: Rain Tree Sketch, Rain Tree Sketch II; Iannis Xenakis: Evryali. Mari Kawamura, piano. Furious Artisans. $16.99.

     Without knowing the reasons for and the reasoning behind certain releases of music, it is impossible for listeners to relate to CDs as the performers wish. The discs’ titles and/or the listing of the music they contain simply do not do an adequate job of explaining why this particular material is presented in this particular way by these particular performers. So audiences must bring something extra to many CDs – not only an interest in the music but also a willingness to see and hear the material in accordance with the performers’ intentions as well as the intentions of the composers. As a general rule, this is more easily said than done, and releases of this type tend to be self-limiting in audience reach because they require pre-listening “homework” before someone can even decide whether a CD is worth adding to a collection – or even worth hearing more than a single time. On a comparatively broad basis, a CD of this sort may contain music in a form in which it has not been heard before – as is the case with the Divine Art release of clarinet-and-piano versions of excerpts from Prokofiev’s ballets Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet. The underlying purpose here is to present, for the first time, the arrangements of some of these pieces for clarinet and piano by Bolshoi Theatre clarinetist Bronislav Fedotovich Prorvich. From Cinderella he arranged The Dancing Lesson, Winter Fairy, Passepied, and Adagio. From Romeo and Juliet he arranged Juliet’s Entrance, Masks, Dance of the Knights, and Mercutio. In each case, this led to a mini-suite of about 13 minutes’ duration, created in the 1950s but not previously recorded. Ian Scott, working with Malcolm McMillan, arranged seven additional Cinderella numbers and five more from Romeo and Juliet to produce the suites heard on this recording, on which Scott plays clarinet and Jonathan Higgins is the pianist. The purpose here is to showcase the clarinet’s capabilities in this music; to bring Prorvich’s work to light; and to present well-known works in a way they have not been heard before. All this is fine, and certainly the warmth of the clarinet fits much of this music very well indeed – although, it should be pointed out, not as well as Prokofiev’s original and very sensitive orchestral settings. Everything here sounds good and is played well, and the CD is an enjoyable curiosity that will be of special interest to clarinetists and to listeners who have become somewhat jaded by the original Prokofiev scores and will welcome the chance to hear portions of them in a new guise. It is hard to imagine, though, that anything here will supplant audience interest in hearing the music – whether the full ballets or excerpts from them – as Prokofiev intended.

     The context of a two-CD Divine Art set with the overall title “The Whistling Book” is somewhat different and somewhat more obscure. This offering of English music for recorder and piano, like the Prokofiev CD, includes older material and newer, but the motivation of the whole thing is different: it builds on a 1998 release of recorder works and adds to that earlier material both through remastering for improved sound and by the addition of previously unrecorded material. Unlike the Prokofiev music, what is heard here will likely be unknown to virtually anyone who does not play the recorder, and even to many people who do. This is therefore an exploratory release that should be of considerable interest to recorder players but will inevitably be somewhat less sanguine for non-performers, given that it offers two full hours of pieces that are all short enough to be encores: some are individual works, some are suites consisting of brief works, but in all cases the material is short and to the point. Furthermore, the music, although mainly tonal and often danceable and light, is all from the 20^th and 21^st centuries, resulting in a certain inevitability of sound that is often quite pleasant but tends after a while (that “while” being less than two hours) to wear thin. The composers included on the first disc here are Geoffrey Poole (born 1949), Michael Ball (born 1946), Alan Bullard (born 1947), Alan Rawsthorne (1905-1971), Nicholas Marshall (born 1942), Douglas Steele (1910-1999), John  Addison (1929-1998), and Robin Walker (born 1953). Those on the second disc are Walter Leigh (1905-1942), Arnold Cooke (1906-2005), Anthony Gilbert (born 1934), John Turner (born 1943), David Ellis (born 1933), John Golland (1942-1993), Richard Whalley (born 1974), and Kevin Malone (born 1958). With the exception of Whalley’s Kokopelli, written for prepared piano and performed on that instrument by the composer, all the works use a standard piano to go with the recorder – several different recorders, actually, all played with skill and obvious devotion by John Turner. The admirable way that Turner and pianist Peter Lawson handle these works provides them with as much individuality and differentiation as possible. But even when some composers assemble suites using old-fashioned movement designations (Rawsthorne, Turner, Golland), while others favor more-modern titles for individual sections (Poole, Bullard, Gilbert), and still others contribute single pieces rather than groups of them (Ball, Marshall, Steele, Leigh, Cooke), the fact remains that for most listeners this will be “much of a muchness” of pleasantries of various sorts. There is a lot to enjoy here in small doses, but the dosage totality is such that the recording seems primarily designed to draw recorder players to recent or fairly recent music of which they are likely unaware, so they can incorporate it into their own practices and recitals.

     The concept underlying Mari Kawamura’s recital on a new Furious Artisans CD is even more rarefied – and considerably more difficult to grasp. The context that Kawamura uses for her presentation of disparate and apparently quite unrelated piano works is that of an ancient Japanese concept called Ma, which encompasses the notions of interval or emptiness but also of movement within silence. This is a heady contemplative foundation to bring to an hour of piano performances, but without knowing it, the selection and sound of the specific works on this disc will seem entirely arbitrary and will be difficult, if not impossible, to understand and appreciate. Kawamura builds her recital around Garden Eight by Lei Liang (born 1972) – breaking up the work into six portions and following each of the first five with a contrasting or complementary work, then closing the whole CD with the sixth. The parts of Liang’s piece are Tian—Heaven, Di—Earth, Dong—East, Nan—South, Hsi—West, and Bei—North. The first of these is followed by Torsion by Katharina Rosenberger (born 1971), the second by a Haydn piano sonata, the third by Rain Tree Sketch by Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996), the fourth by Takemitsu’s Rain Tree Sketch II: In Memoriam Olivier Messiaen, and the fifth by Evryali by Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001). The individual modern works are complex in themselves, their referents are important to understand (such as Takemitsu’s to Messiaen), and their styles are germane to Kawamura’s interest in silence and what occurs within it. Haydn’s sonata, on the face of it the oddest piece to include here (as well as the longest by far), actually makes a certain amount of sense, since Haydn had an unerring ability to get the silences right within his music – and music itself is, after all, a mixture of silence with sound-that-fills-silence. Stylistically, of course, the Haydn does not fit with anything else on the disc, but this is a philosophical release rather than, strictly speaking, a musical one. Kawamura plays everything well, but never makes the case through the music itself that the underpinnings of her recital have something of crucial importance to communicate to listeners at large. Certainly this selection of material has considerable meaning to this particular performer, and listeners whose feelings happen to resonate with hers will find much that is thoughtful and thought-provoking on the CD. But it does not really work as a musical experience, even if some small group of listeners will find that it does succeed as a philosophical one.