(++++) MINING THE PAST

Holst: Sāvitri; Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda, Third Group; Four Songs for Soprano and Violin; The Evening-Watch; Hammersmith—Prelude and Scherzo; The Perfect Fool—Ballet Suite; The Planets. Ariadne. $24.99 (2 CDs).

Josef Tal: Exodus; Walter Kaufmann: Indian Symphony; Marcel Rubin: Symphony No. 4, “Dies Irae.” The Orchestra Now conducted by Leon Botstein. AVIE. $19.99.

     Gustav Holst (1874-1934) turns out to be an Impressionist of a very specific, unusual and engaging kind. The fascinating artistic rediscovery of Holst on a two-CD Ariadne release provides an unusual chance to hear and contrast Holst’s one super-big hit, The Planets, with the occasionally performed Hammersmith—Prelude and Scherzo, and with various other pieces that are considerably more obscure. Holst’s preoccupations with the music and culture of India, with astrology, with the concept of English “national music,” and with scene-painting of various sorts make for a highly varied body of work that is difficult to characterize because, as this recording shows, its character is fluid and keeps shifting. This release delves deeply into the past for its performances, which date to 1945-1965. Other than The Planets, the half-hour chamber opera Sāvitri is the longest work offered, and its odd sonic otherworldliness gives it as much of an evanescence as portions of The Planets possess. Holst wrote his own libretto for this work about tricking Death by accepting a boon and then cleverly asking for life – which is attainable only by banishing Death, at least for a time. The verbiage is philosophical and repetitive, and the flow of set pieces gives the work more expansiveness than its modest total length would indicate. Soprano Arda Mandikian, tenor Peter Pears, baritone Thomas Hemsley, and the English Opera Group Chorus and Orchestra under Sir Charles Mackerras perform in this live recording from 1956. Several other vocal works are presented after Sāvitri. The third of Holst’s four collections of Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda includes elegant scene-painting in four settings for female voices and harp – a highly evocative and very skillfully employed combination. The title is a trifle misleading, since these are not traditionally religious works but portraits of specific circumstances and the gods associated with them – this being perhaps clearest in the second of them, Hymn to the Waters. The live recording here, from 1965, features Michael Jefferies on harp and the Purcell Singers under Imogen Holst, the composer’s daughter and advocate and a fine composer in her own right. Four Songs for Soprano and Violin – another very interesting aural mixture – features Honor Sheppard and Nona Liddell in another 1965 performance. These are settings of medieval religious poetry that provide a fascinating complement to and contrast with Holst’s handling of Sanskrit hymns. Next on the CD, The Evening-Watch for mixed chorus, also from 1965, again offers Imogen Holst and the Purcell Singers, here with mezzo-soprano Pauline Stevens and tenor Ian Partridge. This choral work is the first of a set of two motets and is based on a text by a 17^th-century English metaphysical poet – further demonstrating how wide a net Holst cast for content as well as sound. The first CD in this release concludes by showing Holst as an entirely instrumental tone-painter, with his Hammersmith evoking a riverside district of London – first the river itself, then the people in the area, and then the river again, underlining its foundational importance to the population. The 1965 performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Norman Del Mar is an effective and fine-sounding one. There are, however, limits beyond which even the best audio restoration cannot go, and the second disc in this release bumps up against them. It opens with the ballet music from another short Holst opera, The Perfect Fool – unfortunately not the entire work, which is deucedly difficult to come by. This is a recording from 1945 by the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Malcolm Sargent, and yes, that is the orchestra long conducted by Arturo Toscanini – and the recording was made in the notorious Radio City Studio 8-H whence so much Toscanini material emerged in so disappointingly compressed and ill-sounding form. Sargent does a fine job with the music itself, but even with highly skilled modern restoration techniques, the muddiness and stolidity of the aural experience are, if not execrable, certainly far from admirable. These conditions are equally disappointing in The Planets, a 1946 recording from a better venue – Symphony Hall, Boston – featuring the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Women’s Chorus under Sir Adrian Boult, who knew the score inside-out and had conducted the work’s world première performance. But even with Arthur Fiedler as chorus master, the voices here do not stand out for clarity, and the orchestra sounds anything but pinpoint-accurate in attack and sectional balance. Thankfully, there are much better versions of these works otherwise available, and equally thankfully, this CD – best thought of as a bonus accompanying the first one in this two-CD set – does have substantial historical value. It is the first disc, though, that is truly revelatory of Holst’s subtleties of sound, of thought, of philosophy, of musical expression.

     There is a direct connection with India, but a very different one from Holst’s, on a  new AVIE release featuring rediscoveries of works from the 1940s by 20^th-century Jewish composers who were displaced by the Holocaust. The expressions here are more directly experiential and much less emotional/intellectual than those of Holst. Leon Botstein and The Orchestra Now start with a sensitively played exploration of Exodus for baritone solo and orchestra by Josef Tal (1910-2008). The familiar Biblical story of the escape of the Jews from slavery in Egypt – obviously a tale with tremendous resonance for Tal – is interpreted by the composer in five movements that draw on the Psalms as well as the book of Exodus itself; the work is sung in Hebrew, with the emphatic baritone solo supplied by strong-voiced Noam Heinz. Although Tal was influenced by Schoenberg, Exodus is by no means strictly a twelvetone work – though it does not disclaim 20^th-century compositional techniques in general. Its most dramatic portion, The Passage of the Red Sea, is handled with strength and commitment, and the celebratory material that follows is effective in a rather cinematic way. The work is well-made, but somewhat superficial: it is difficult to imagine it withstanding repeated hearings particularly well. Next on the disc is Indian Symphony by Walter Kaufmann (1907-1984). This work was actually written in India, to which Kaufmann escaped before making his way to England (and eventually the United States). The symphony deliberately incorporates a raga into its construction, but its aural landscape is emphatically that of Europe despite some passes at exotic-sounding harmonies and rhythms – the gentle repetitiveness of timpani in the second movement being especially effective. The overall effect of the work is somewhat on the bombastic side, with the third movement in particular sounding if anything rather too determinedly triumphant and cheerful. More substantial than the Tal and Kaufmann works is Symphony No. 4, “Dies Irae,” by Marcel Rubin (1905-1995). Indeed, Rubin’s piece, the fourth of his 10 symphonies, is nearly as long as the other two works on this disc put together (although for some reason the CD lists this 35-minute symphony as lasting 10 minutes and 19 seconds). Rubin’s symphony starts with an extended Kinderkreuzzug (“Children’s Crusade”), whose highly effective string-solo opening sets the stage for an increasingly difficult and dramatic, rhythmically variable and often quite intense exploration of wartime, war-torn themes that surely reflect Rubin’s personal experiences to a considerable degree. The symphony, far from building to a triumphal or exuberant overcoming-obstacles sort of conclusion, ends with a rather brief and surprisingly melancholy third movement, labeled Pastorale-Andante, that is all the more affecting in its deliberate avoidance of the deepest sorrow or the celebration of horrors overcome. Whether this work is titled Dies Irae or War and Peace (its original label), it is all the more effective for eschewing easy and overt scenes of horror or quiet – indeed, it is in no way overdone or exaggerated, and is all the more moving as a result. Taken as a whole, this is a (+++) CD, because the pieces by Tal and Kaufmann, although admirable in intent and well-crafted, are not especially revelatory or memorable outside their historical context. Rubin’s Symphony No. 4, on the other hand, has about it a timeless quality that transcends its actual time period and gives it continuing resonance and relevance even some 80 years after it was composed.