Offenbach:
Maître Péronilla. Véronique Gens, Antoinette
Dennefeld, Chantal Santon-Jeffery, Anaïs Constans, Diana Axentii, Éric Huchet,
Tassis Christoyannis, François Piolino, Patrick Kabongo, Loïc Félix, Yoann
Dubruque, Matthieu Lécroart, Raphaël Brémard, Jérôme Boutillier,
Philippe-Nicolas Martin, Antoine Philippot; Chœur de Radio France and Orchestre
National de France conducted by Markus Poschner. Bru Zane. $42.99 (2 CDs).
Vieuxtemps:
Grande Sonata for Piano and Violin, Op. 12; Franck: Andantino quietoso;
Mélancolie; Fauré: Berceuse, Op. 16; Saint-Saëns: Élegie, Op. 143;
Saint-Saëns/Ysaÿe: Caprice d’après l’Étude en forme de Valse. Bruno Monteiro, violin; João Paulo Santos, piano.
Et’cetera Records. $15.
Christopher
Tyler Nickel: Concerto for Piccolo; Concerto for Four Wagner Tubas. Sarah Jackson, piccolo; Oliver de Clercq, Laurel
Spencer, Valerie Whitney and Holly Bryan, Wagner tubas; Vancouver Contemporary
Orchestra conducted by Clyde Mitchell. AVIE. $19.99.
Stage works were all the rage in 19th-century France, with
tremendous competition among composers and performing venues not only in the
high-minded and serious sphere of opera but also in the decidedly
lighter-hearted and often modestly risqué field of operetta. Offenbach was by
no means the highly dominant figure in lighter music in his lifetime that he
appears to be retrospectively, certainly not after the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) changed the face of Europe and
not coincidentally brought Offenbach into disrepute and bankruptcy because of
his German birth and connections to the Second Empire. The nature of
Offenbach’s music changed after 1871, moving more toward the lyricism and
warmth of opéra-comique and away from
his stock-in-trade opéra-bouffe, with
its ever-present slapstick and on-stage confusion. Offenbach was so prolific
that a great many of his 100-or-so stage works remain quite obscure – for a
variety of reasons, only very rarely involving the quality of the music. One of
the most interesting of these from the postwar years is Maître Péronilla, a very late work (1878) for which Offenbach
himself wrote the libretto. In line with its stated aim to rediscover and
explore French musical heritage from 1780 to 1920, Palazetto Bru Zane has
assembled, in its usual lovely book-and-CD packaging, a thoroughly winning
account of Maître Péronilla from a
June 2019 performance at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. The story involves a scheme
through which “elderly” aunt Léona (age 39, but insisting repeatedly that she
is 29) tries to prevent the 19-year-old Manoëla from marrying the love of her
life, Alvarès, whom Léona wants for herself. Thanks to some clever machinations
and a hard-of-hearing notary, Manoëla ends up inadvertently and scandalously
married both to Alvarès and to the old, ugly and perpetually befuddled Don
Guardona (the work was originally going to be called Les Deux Maris de Manoëla, but that seemed a
bit too scandalous). Through the courtroom artistry of the title character, who
is Manoëla’s father – a famous maker of chocolate and a onetime practicing
lawyer – everything is sorted out in the end, with Alvarès getting Manoëla and
Léona hooking up, not unwillingly, with Guardona. Offenbach’s libretto is not particularly
coherent, especially in the initial setup of the premise, and it is hard to
escape the feeling that he focused much less on the story than on the chance to
create various thoroughly winning songs that tend to have little or nothing to
do with advancing the dramatic action (hence the comparatively chilly reception
of Maître Péronilla in
its own era, when it played only 50 times, and its near-total obscurity
afterwards). Be all that as it may, the recording led by Markus Poschner gives
the work as much impetus as it is likely ever to have. Poschner paces the
numbers very well, keeping the action moving (albeit occasionally at the
expense of some of the lyricism) and facilitating the interplay among the many
characters (20 or so separate roles – another likely reason for the piece’s
obscurity). The really wonderful musical numbers include a Malagueña solo that
was the work’s biggest hit by far; Péronilla’s Couplets du Chocolat, extolling the virtues of being a
chocolate-maker rather than a lawyer; and the waltz from the second-act finale,
Mon coeur, prenons courage, fault-il gémir
toujours! The best singing here comes from Antoinette Dennefeld as
Frimouskino, the friend of Manoëla and Alvarès whose machinations bring about
the happy ending. But other voices are quite fine as well. Anaïs Constans is
suitably naïve if a touch heavy as Manoëla, Chantal Santon-Jeffery sings well as
Alvarès despite a voice that is slightly pinched at the top, Véronique Gens is
suitably unpleasant (in a comic way) as Léona, and Éric Huchet handles the
title role with aplomb. Although casting complexities and a less-than-effective
libretto make further revivals of Maître
Péronilla unlikely, the first-rate music and the chance to hear the ways in
which Offenbach continued to develop his art toward the end of his career and
life make this recording very much worth having and this stage work very much
worth experiencing.
The French composer most focused on showing the continuing validity of
non-stage music in the 19th century was Camille Saint-Saëns, and
there was some intriguing instrumental focus in French-speaking Belgium as
well. Much of this music, like much of Offenbach’s, remains obscure today – and
as a result is well worth exploring by interested performers and audiences
alike. An especially pleasant rediscovery is the Grande Sonata for Piano and Violin, Op. 12, by Belgian violinist/composer
Henri Vieuxtemps (1820-1881), who nowadays is best-known for turning
Beethoven’s Violin Concerto into part of the standard repertoire through his
tireless advocacy of the music. Vieuxtemps, although a considerable virtuoso in
his own right, focused more on lyricism than fireworks in his music – in fact,
in string quartets he preferred to play the viola, whose sumptuous sound and
warmth led him to write a viola sonata that is now one of his few fairly
well-known works. Much less familiar is this Grande Sonata, whose combination of lyrical beauties, majesty and
patient thematic development comes through to excellent effect in a very
well-balanced and thoughtfully conceived performance by Bruno Monteiro and João
Paulo Santos. Charm and grace pervade the second-movement Scherzo, which Monteiro and Santos handle with just the right
degree of delicacy, but the real gem of the sonata is its third-movement Largo, ma non troppo, a movement whose
initial hymnlike theme eventually builds toward a radiantly intense climax
offering near-religious fervor. After this, the well-balanced finale is notable
for not containing over-the-top
elements, and it is very much to Monteiro’s credit that he does not overplay
the music or try to turn it into any sort of display piece: this movement’s
success lies in elegance, not fireworks. Vieuxtemps’ 45-minute sonata takes up
most of a new Et’cetera Records disc, with the balance of the CD given over to
shorter works that in many cases are just as neglected as the Grande Sonata, and just as undeservedly.
Franck’s Andante quietoso features an
elegiac violin melody interacting with a regular bass-line piano pulse in an
attractive salon-music idiom. Franck wrote it in 1843, when he was 21, for
himself and his violinist brother to perform in, yes, salons, and its poise and
pacing look forward to later Franck works – including Mélancolie, written in the mid-1880s but not published until 1911,
long after Franck’s death. This is essentially a solfège exercise, and a very
effective one as heard on this disc. Much better-known is Fauré’s Berceuse, Op. 16, although its original
violin-and-piano version (specifying violin con
sordino) is less familiar nowadays than the composer’s later one for violin
and orchestra. This little work is quite popular and has been arranged for many
instruments, but Monteiro and Santos make a strong case for its original
scoring, which does not dispel its air of conventionality but which allows for
an attractive presentation of its soft dynamics and pleasantly rocking
accompaniment. Saint-Saëns is present as well on this nicely programmed CD. His
late (1915) Élegie – actually the
first of two, the second dating to 1920 – is not often heard, having a rather
unsettled atmosphere because of its tonal ambiguity and ongoing modulations. It
has the feeling of improvisation about it, which Monteiro and Santos
communicate effectively. This recording then ends with Caprice d’après l’Étude en forme de Valse, the only outright tour de force on the CD.
Violinist/composer Eugène Ysaÿe (1858-1931) here arranged the last of
Saint-Saëns’ 1877 Six Études pour piano,
Op. 52, which is really not much like a waltz (its title notwithstanding).
The work, which is undanceably quick, is full of bravura writing in which
Monteiro and Santos revel as they bring this wide-ranging yet focused recital
to a fully satisfying conclusion.
Of course, it is not necessary to return to the 19th century or even the 20th to find music that is off the beaten path but that is nevertheless worth exploring – in some cases precisely because it is off the beaten path. A new AVIE disc featuring very recent works by Christopher Tyler Nickel (born 1978) is a short CD – just 45 minutes – but one that provides plenty of sonic engagement and a modicum of thoughtfulness in the creation of two works featuring solo instruments that are rarely heard front-and-center. Nickel’s skill as a film composer is evident in the way he paces and maintains the aural attractiveness of his 2022 Concerto for Piccolo, commissioned by the soloist and conductor who offer it here. The difficulty of setting a high-pitched and usually quiet instrument against a full orchestral complement is adeptly handled by Nickel by having much of the solo part take place against portions of the ensemble rather than the entire Vancouver Contemporary Orchestra. This works somewhat better in the slow central movement than in the more-angular, more-emphatic opening one. The dancelike but, as with Saint-Saëns’ Étude en forme de Valse, undanceable finale pulls the piccolo into its highest register, setting it against brass exclamations in a way that produces an effect akin to that of a piano being played at the bottom and top of the keyboard simultaneously. The piercing piccolo cadenza near the movement’s end contrasts with the emphatic tutti that concludes a work worth hearing once but perhaps not a great deal more often. The 2021 Concerto for Four Wagner Tubas is something quite different. Wagner tubas, four-valve brass instruments that combine tuba and French horn elements and are actually close to horns than tubas in sound, are well-known in Des Ring des Nibelungen, for which they were created, but otherwise rarely heard – and never as a solo quartet, as they are in Nickel’s work. Much less frantic than the piccolo concerto and filled with a level of lyricism not often found in Nickel’s music, the Concerto for Four Wagner Tubas may put listeners in mind of Schumann’s 1849 Konzertstück for Four Horns and Orchestra, although it owes nothing directly to that work. It is worth noting, however, that Schumann kept his three-movement piece on the short side and made sure to keep each movement distinct from the others, while Nickel creates a longer work in which the massed sound of the Wagner tubas is paramount and the first two movements strive for (and sometimes attain) a similar level of magisterial pronouncement within which the solo instruments – almost always as a group – sound forth. It is only in the lighter finale that Nickel explores the Wagner tubas’ ability to produce hunting-horn calls, strongly rhythmic passages and a certain level of brightness, although here too they function mostly as a subsection of the orchestra rather than as individual solo instruments. The Concerto for Four Wagner Tubas is a more-interesting work than the Concerto for Piccolo, and both will certainly be attractive to performers on the respective solo instruments. But this (+++) CD is likely to have little staying power for listeners in general: it contains intriguing experiments that are intellectually engaging, but not much that is likely to be musically nourishing over the longer term.
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