(++++) WINNING THE POOH

Winnie-the-Pooh: The Complete Collection of Stories and Poems. By A.A. Milne. Decorations by E.H. Shepard. Farshore/HarperCollins. $40. 

     Have we really had a hundred years in the Hundred Acre Wood? Oh yes, we have: the very first appearance of Winnie-the-Pooh was in 1925, not in a book but in the London Evening News. And my goodness, how much Pooh there has been in the past century – including, among many, many other offerings, a thick and wonderful (and wonderfully thick) book called Winnie-the-Pooh: The Complete Collection of Stories and Poems, which came out in 1994. And now, to the joy of a world that needs Pooh and friends now more than ever, that 432-page 1994 volume is available anew, and is as sweet and silly and charming and chock-full of enjoyment as ever. 

     Now, it must be pointed out that although the Pooh tales and poems are scarcely weighty, there is a lot of weight in this collection of them: four pounds of it, not counting the handsome slipcase into which the book slips when not in use. That is a great deal of heft for the self-described “Bear of No Brain at All,” but perhaps it is aptly reflective of Pooh’s personal heftiness, which does not prevent him from floating aloft beneath a small balloon but does result in his inability to exit Rabbit’s house after rather too much overindulgence in rather too many comestibles. 

     Since a four-pound book measuring a bit more than 8½ inches in one direction, about 11¼ in another, and some 1½ in a third (that being thickness) is rather a lot for small hands to manage, this particular Complete Collection of Stories and Poems invites – nay, nearly demands – parental/adult participation in the discovery/rediscovery of Poohdom. And sitting side by side while perusing Pooh is assuredly a Good Thing, because encouragement of family togetherness is Useful and Pleasant and will hopefully result in yet another generation falling in love with the feeling of being transported to a land where, had we but world enough and time, many of us would greatly love to dwell. 

     Although the original black-and-white E.H. Shepherd “decorations” (such a charming term!) are colorized in this edition, as in most Pooh publications for lo, these many years, they are not made garish or vivid, but retain the not-quite-treacly level of amusement and appropriateness-to-the-occasion that they have possessed ever since they first enlivened (and elucidated) A.A. Milne’s mildly marvelous tale-telling. The Milne/Shepherd collaboration is a minor miracle of melding: there have been other illustrations of the Pooh stories and poems, and other versions of the characters (notably from Disney); but while those approaches are apt in their own ways and have charms of their own, there is nothing quite like the original Milne/Shepherd mashup when it comes to a perfect balance of verbiage and visuals. 

     One of the voluminous pleasantries of having this single-volume Complete Collection of Stories and Poems is the way it gives young readers if they are so inclined, and parental figures if they are so inclined, a touch of respite from the hither-and-thithering of Pooh and his friends. The reason for this is that while the two Pooh story collections, Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928), are all about Pooh and Piglet and Eeyore and the rest of the denizens of the Hundred Acre Wood, the two poetry collections in which Pooh appears – When We Were Very Young (1924) and Now We Are Six (1927) – are not Pooh-focused. Indeed, Pooh shows up only a single time in the earlier collection, and is not yet named Winnie: he appears as Edward. And in the later collection, Pooh is to be found just 11 times in the 35 poems. So these books, which appear after the story collections in this single-volume Complete Collection of Stories and Poems, function as appendices of a sort, and a chance to turn away from a Pooh focus for a while so as to return to it with renewed vigor, or at least enjoyment, afterwards. 

     Additionally, the arrangement of this Complete Collection of Stories and Poems offers, not particularly intentionally, a corrective to the nearly inevitable sense of weepiness inspired by the end of the second story grouping – a conclusion in which Christopher Robin has to leave the Hundred Acre Wood because he cannot simply “do nothing” anymore. In this final tale, the animals disappear one by one until only the boy and his bear are left in “an Enchanted Place” in the forest and go off together, resulting in a final scene that Milne considered matter-of-fact but that generations of readers have found to be tear-provoking. Because that scene appears in the middle of this Complete Collection of Stories and Poems, with the two poetry books presented afterwards, there is a pleasant sense in which Pooh and all his Pooh-ness live on and continue to delight even after the professed end of Christopher Robin’s time in the Hundred Acre Wood. And such a pleasantry is no less than Pooh deserves; no less than readers of any age and any time period deserve. The Hundred Acre Wood, heretofore a place of gentle magic and sweet nostalgia, remains one a hundred years later, and hopefully will still be seen as such a hundred years hence.

(+++) FOUNDATIONS AND FEELINGS

Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. “0”; Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 5; Clementi: Piano Concerto in C. Anna Khomichko, piano; Heidelberg Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Mino Marani. Genuin. $18.99. 

György Kurtág: Játékok—selections; 8 Klavierstücke, Op. 3; Bartók: Mikrokosmos—Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm; 15 Hungarian Peasant Songs; Meredith Monk: Ellis Island; Charles Mingus: Myself When I Am Real; Ligeti: Etudes, Book 1, No. 4—Fanfares; Schubert: Ungarische Melodie. Julia Hamos, piano. Naïve. $16.99. 

     Beginnings are slippery. The new Genuin CD featuring Anna Khomichko is actually titled “Beginnings,” but only one of the three works on it has what could be called “startup” quality. That is Beethoven’s first E-flat piano concerto, WoO 4, also known as No. “0.” This concerto is about as different as can be from the later E-flat “Emperor” concerto, but that is scarcely surprising in light of Beethoven being only 13 or 14 when he wrote it, at a time when he was to a great extent under the spell of the works of J.C. and C.P.E. Bach. An interesting thing about this concerto is that it almost never sounds the same twice, because there are just about as many orchestrations as there are performances: Beethoven gave some indications of orchestral plans, but nothing specific has survived. So the concerto was orchestrated and arranged first by Willy Hess and since then by Hermann Dechant, Mari Kodama and Kent Nagano, and Ronald Brautigam – whose orchestration, a particularly well-conceived and idiomatic one, is used by Mino Marani and the Heidelberg Philharmonic Orchestra. The concerto is highly virtuosic, almost a display piece in proto-Lisztian guise, filled with strong dynamic contrasts, extended complex passages (for example, in thirds in the first movement), complicated ornaments, wide leaps, and a finale characterized by headlong momentum. Khomichko plays the work with considerable relish and finds a good deal of charm in it to go with the somewhat overdone elements. However, her use of a modern concert grand – a Steinway D, no less, on which she plays her own very elaborate first-movement cadenza – somewhat vitiates the effectiveness of the interpretation, since this work was explicitly conceived pour le Clavecin ou Fortepiano: so says its sole surviving version, a two-piano reduction. Khomichko and Marani do a very fine job with the music, which is fascinating in part because it does not exist in definitive form. The delicacy of the second movement is especially winning. But this rendition should not be confused with ones that pay more attention to the instruments that Beethoven was actually writing for and performing on during his early years in Bonn. As for the other works heard on this so-called “Beginnings” CD, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 5, K. 175, is obviously not his first, but it is indeed his first fully original one: the four prior concertos are usually referred to as pasticci because they are arrangements of the works of other composers (combined with some original material). C.P.E. Bach proves to be as significant an influence for Mozart as for young Beethoven, and it is interesting that Beethoven was actually younger when he wrote his No. “0” than Mozart was when he created his No. 5 at the age of 17. Once again, Khomichko and Marani handle this music with sensitivity, elegance of a galant sort, and a pleasantly forthright approach. However, once again, a modern grand piano and elaborate Khomichko-created cadenza (here in the third movement) are not really appropriate for this material, giving the undoubted pleasantries a sort of aural asterisk. Piano construction was in fact a major focus of the third composer heard on this CD, Muzio Clementi, who took over the manufacturer Longman & Broderip in 1798 and for years produced some of the best pianos in Europe. It was not until about 1810, though, that Clementi’s firm made pianos with as many as six octaves – a fact that further cements an understanding of just what sorts of keyboard instruments Mozart and young Beethoven would have known, composed for and played, and how different they were from modern pianos. As for Clementi’s own concerto on this disc, it is certainly not a beginning of anything; it just happens to be the only one by Clementi that has survived – in a manuscript copy from 1796, which is likely a decade or more after the work was written. This is a well-made if not particularly significant work, less display-oriented than Beethoven’s No. “0” and less galant than Mozart’s No. 5. It sounds quite good in the performance featuring Khomichko and Marani, and the lack of authentic, apt piano sound is less of an issue here, simply because the concerto is not well-known and most listeners will have no more-historically-informed reading with which to compare it. Taken as a whole, this is a very pleasant CD that shines an enjoyable light on some less-than-familiar music, rendering the material pleasurable in much the same way as, say, a good piano presentation of Bach’s harpsichord works: nothing here sounds as the composers intended it to, but everything is well-played and convincing on its own terms, the not-quite-apt title “Beginnings” notwithstanding. 

     The title of the new Naïve recording featuring pianist Julia Hamos refers to beginnings of a different sort. The CD is called “Ellis Island,” referring to the place in New York through which some 12 million immigrants passed between 1892 and 1954. Almost everyone who arrived there was allowed into the United States to start a new life in the New World, and it is this sort of beginning to which Hamos, whose first language was Hungarian, devotes a very personal selection of music by a very wide variety of composers. It is the exceptionally individualized nature of these musical selections that somewhat limits the effectiveness of this disc, since the music itself does not tie together particularly strongly – the connections come from the meaningfulness of the works to Hamos, and will be fully appreciated only by others for whom they have equal meaning. Hamos does play every work on the disc with feeling and stylistic sensitivity, but listeners not imbued with their own Eastern European immigrant experience will find the works’ sequence on the jarring side. The keyboard sweeps contrasted with individual notes, pounding chords succeeded  by gentle passages, and ever-present Webernesque miniaturization of Hamos’ chosen pieces by György Kurtág contrast with the milder dissonances and more strongly rhythmic dances and folksongs by Bartók. Ellis Island by Meredith Monk (born 1942) has a quiet delicacy and consistent flow that make it quite unlike the Kurtág and Bartók works, while Myself When I Am Real by Charles Mingus (1922-1979) exists in an altogether different space and time as an extended, meditative work of contemplative lyricism. György Ligeti’s Fanfares is rapid, jazzlike and without any of the clarion calls its title suggests. And Schubert’s Ungarische Melodie, which ends the disc, is wistful, nostalgic, and harmonized with a beauty and simplicity that pretty much put all the other works to shame. Many of the individual pieces here are well worth hearing – those by Bartók come across particularly well – but the totality of the disc never quite gels except within the context that led Hamos to choose to present these specific pieces in this specific sequence. The whole endeavor is undoubtedly heartfelt, and all the music is well-played and offered with sensitive understanding. The CD will have considerable meaning and emotional resonance for listeners who connect with it viscerally, as Hamos herself clearly does. Others, however, will most likely find that the various parts of the disc do not add up to a thoroughly effective totality. The CD is ultimately more experientially oriented and narrowly tailored than it is musically convincing.

(++++) NOT QUITE THE END

Mahler: Symphony No. 9. Park Avenue Chamber Symphony conducted by David Bernard. Recursive Classics. $20.98. 

     One of the most distinctive elements of Mahler’s style is the way he calls for a huge orchestra and then is so often sparing in his use of it, focusing on individual sections and often on single instruments or small instrumental groups, reserving the full orchestral sound for times when he wants to make specific points. Chamber versions of Mahler’s orchestral music do exist, notably those made under the auspices of Arnold Schoenberg for his Society for Private Musical Performances. And an understanding of the special sound and balance within a chamber orchestra can bring considerable insight into Mahler’s music even when an ensemble – its title notwithstanding – is no longer chamber-music size. That is the case with the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony, now a full-scale group of more than 80 musicians that is still conducted by David Bernard with a clear understanding of its chamber-size roots and the exigencies of performing with a smaller collection of players. It is the chamber-related elements of Bernard’s Recursive Classics reading of Mahler’s Ninth that are among the performance’s most attractive, since the many solos within the symphony stand out here as clearly as if the musical collective were much smaller than it actually is. 

     The first movement starts very quietly and delicately, and the melodic lines are very clean and clear, as they would tend to be with a smaller grouping – but a sense of swelling and momentum quickly establishes itself. The movement sounds thoughtful rather than almost dismal, as it does in some performances. The emotionalism is if anything rather understated, with the horn punctuations adding touches of warmth. The pacing is on the fast side, although it never feels rushed – it is more a matter of being propulsive, which is not an adjective usually applied to this movement. But Bernard does not hesitate to slow down when that is called for, giving portions of the movement a feeling of expansiveness. This could be a somewhat divisive interpretation, but it is convincing because the instrumental solos within the movement, a characteristic that gives it its texture, are all put forward with admirable clarity and no sense of straining to be heard while struggling to emanate from a large ensemble. Harp, flute, violin, timpani, horn: each has its carefully crafted place in the overall soundscape. The sense of quiet beauty at the movement's end is particularly notable; there is certainly nothing portentous here. 

     There is a level of puckishness to the start of the second-movement Ländler, followed by a rather halting and awkward rhythm that supports the stop-and-go sound of the movement well. The strong emphases later in the movement fit the music to good effect, with timpani accents providing enough stolidity to create the impression of a kind of stomping dance. This is a curiously episodic, emotionally uncertain and somewhat unstable movement that Bernard holds together essentially by force of will. The sequence of solos as the movement ends is emblematic of its peculiarly unfocused aural and emotional world, and Bernard ensures that the movement ends in the same quirky spirit in which it began. 

     Bernard's third movement is a tour de force from the start. Here there is a communicative tightness that stands at the opposite emotive end from the second movement. Compressed, energetic and determined, the movement strides forth boldly and determinedly and its momentum never flags. However, the grotesque elements are somewhat downplayed here, the exclamations of individual instruments coming across as more decorative and less pointed than in some performances. The burnished brass and the slightly echo-y sound go a long way toward making this movement warmer than it often is. By somewhat de-emphasizing the grotesqueries, Bernard makes for a lesser contrast between the third movement and the finale, whose opening is not as shocking a contrast as it is in some other readings. 

     As the concluding Adagio opens, pronounced dissonance at the start quickly gives way to a warm flow that indicates this will be a deeply emotional movement throughout, and so it proves to be. Now the strings really come into their own, by turns yearning and deeply expressive. The movement's pervasive lyricism is anything but depressed or resigned: the sense here is of flow and continuity throughout, with this movement as a symphonic capstone that also hints of more to come. Bernard's reading in some ways produces parallels with the finale of Mahler’s Third, which also flows in a strong current of lyricism that, however, is conclusive in D major in a way that this finale in D-flat is not. Not quite. There is nevertheless in both finales a sense of having arrived at a far-from-predetermined destination, and feeling content with being there. As the finale of this Ninth progresses, Bernard turns up the emotional temperature without straying into overstatement: throughout the symphony, there is a sense of careful control that at times can be a bit much (it would have been all right if the third movement had sounded as if it was on the verge of explosive disintegration) but that in this Adagio ensures momentum constantly toward a journey's end of which there have only been hints in the three earlier movements. And it is a very satisfying conclusion indeed: this was not Mahler's final symphony, and in this performance the final portion is scarcely death-haunted, instead moving surely toward a Mahlerian view of the peace that passeth all understanding, and at the very end evaporating into the ineffable.

(+++) LANGUAGES SPOKEN AND UNSPOKEN

György Kurtág: Kafka Fragments. Susan Narucki, soprano; Curtis Macomber, violin. AVIE. $19.99. 

Barbara Harbach: Choral Music II—Advent and Christmas; Lent and Easter; The Reformation; Assorted Sacred Anthems; Secular Anthems; Spirituals. Apollo Voices of London conducted by Genevieve Ellis; Timothy End, piano. MSR Classics. $14.95. 

     Except in the very broadest sense, music is not the universal language that it is so often said to be. Yes, certain sounds and rhythms, alone and in combination, produce certain physiological responses in humans – and in other primates, for that matter. But just how those responses are felt and interpreted, and just which sets of sounds and beats and harmonies lead to what sorts of feelings and reactions, is culturally (and perhaps physiologically) determined to so great a degree that music is far less universally communicative than, say, pain, which simply hurts. It is not even possible to see music as the opposite of pain, or one opposite, since different kinds of music produce very different types and levels of pleasure, and sometimes create no affect at all. Even within one small sliver of the musical world – say, classical music, broadly construed – the differences in type, form, and effectiveness of communication vary so broadly that imagining any sort of universality is naïve in the extreme. 

     Take this a step further: even contemporary classical music, which is a niche within a niche, and even vocal contemporary classical music, which nests even further within a kind of auditory matryoshka, communicates in so many different ways and to so many different effects that no glimmer of experiential universality remains. The result is that vocal performances and recordings are self-limited not so much by differences in spoken/sung language – although that is certainly one factor – as by the underlying limitations of musical communication through the specific forms and sounds chosen by different composers to express their ideas. 

     The contrast could scarcely be greater than in the case of new recordings of music by György Kurtág on the AVIE label and by Barbara Harbach on MSR Classics. Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments is one of the composer’s longest works, running almost 55 minutes in the new recording by Susan Narucki and Curtis Macomber. But it is very much true to Kurtág’s compositional minimalism and his longstanding debt to Webern: the majority of its 40 elements last a minute or less. Completed in 1986, Kafka Fragments also shows strong evidence of Kurtág’s ongoing devotion to the avant-garde in Western music and to incorporating, within an ultra-modern idiom, references to Bach, Schumann and other composers whose music communicates very, very differently. Furthermore, Kafka Fragments stands as a kind of multimedia event, as if its musical elements are not in themselves sufficient to put across Kurtág’s concept: the score contains specific instructions for visual things the musicians are supposed to do during the performance – the violinist moving between two separate music stands, for instance. And what does all this specificity actually say, or what is it supposed to say, to an audience? Kurtág never really makes that clear: Kafka Fragments is not a literary compilation but an assemblage of texts from Franz Kafka’s diaries, letters and notebooks. The whole work is divided into four parts, although Part II contains only one setting, Der wahre Weg (“the true path”), which is the longest piece within the assemblage. Kurtág studiously avoided creating or imposing any sort of narrative overview on the pieces, and indeed rearranged them after initially composing the work – apparently deciding that the initial musical (and not literary) expression of Kafka Fragments would be better served by presenting the pieces in a changed order. Certainly the sequence is not random – not to the composer, anyway – but because the individual items are thoroughly disconnected from each other and from the whole, stylistically and expressively, there is a feeling of randomness about the entire thing. What can performers do with this song cycle that is also a voice/violin duet with theatrical elements and overtones? Narucki and Macomber handle Kafka Fragments as just that – fragments – making no attempt to interconnect the pieces and allowing each to produce its own unique sound world (often one that lasts a very brief moment indeed before flickering, or sometimes bursting, into silence). Macomber’s participatory intensity is notable in making this performance a true partnership, as is evident from the very start, with the violin’s back-and-forth rocking in the first fragment followed by its screechy skittering and top-of-range penetrating sound in the second. Narucki handles the vocal demands of the music very skillfully, nicely contrasting the pieces built on overtly trivial observations with those of an existential bent, having no apparent difficulty with the occasional folksong-like elements or the more-frequent leaps, yelps and Sprechstimme. Ultimately, Kafka Fragments is a study in extremes both of music and of meaning, with brief periods of ethereality contrasted with equally brief ones of dramatic emphasis. It is actually a work that is amenable to a great variety of successful interpretations whose effect depends on the singer’s vocal flexibility and tonal richness, and on the violinist’s emotive intensity and willingness to stride into the foreground at some times while subsiding into more-traditional accompaniment at others. Listeners enamored of modern vocal music delivered with uncompromising intensity will be as strongly drawn to this reading of Kafka Fragments as those with other predilections will be repelled by it. 

     The elusive communicative power of Kurtág stands in strong contrast to the direct and much more audience-friendly approach of Barbara Harbach, whose work continues to appear on MSR Classics in a long-running series: this latest release is Volume 19. This is the second disc devoted to Harbach’s choral music and, like the first, features works collected under rather arbitrary content headings and given fine-grained and carefully balanced performances by Apollo Voices of London under Genevieve Ellis – with solid piano support from Timothy End. These works, all of them world première recordings, were composed over a span of more than four decades (1975-2017), but all share Harbach’s identifiable vocal style, which includes clarity of words (whose communication is foremost in all these pieces), a mixture of sweet and slightly acerbic harmonization, and a lack of interest in the sort of experimentation and expressive obfuscation in which a work such as Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments is steeped. The 25 pieces on this Harbach disc are almost all in the two-to-four-minute range, but seven of them are collected to particularly good effect in Luther Cantata (1991), the most-substantive piece on the CD and the only one in the section that is aptly called The Reformation. The effusive, proclamatory nature of some portions of this work contrasts to good effect with its sweeter elements and its more deeply emotional ones – notably From Deepest Depths I Cry to You, featuring solo male voice and a piano part that underlines the intimacy of the words. It is scarcely surprising that Luther Cantata both opens and closes with Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, but Harbach handles the famous hymn differently at the start and finish and uses it effectively to provide a sense of progress for the piece as a whole. Harbach’s determination to make even familiar texts newly expressive is especially apparent in the CD section called Assorted Sacred Anthems, which includes five psalm settings (from 1991, 2017 and, in three cases, 2002) – and in which the familiar Psalm 23 is set as The Lord Shepherds Me. The works presented under the section titles Advent and Christmas and Lent and Easter are comparatively straightforward, although pleasant enough. But the final two sections of the disc, including a total of four pieces under the titles Secular Anthems and Spirituals, take the CD as a whole in some new directions: here Harbach sets some traditional words and some by Helen Keller, Christina Rossetti and Jonathan Yordy, in all cases doing so with attentive focus on the meaning of the material and on disposing the chorus so as to maximize the impact of what is being sung. Harbach’s determination to move the audience in specific ways and specific emotional directions stands in stark contrast to Kurtág’s comparative lack of concern about audience perceptions and willingness to have each listener take something different from his Kafka settings. Together, Harbach and Kurtág demonstrate, without intending to do so, that music is best regarded not as a universal form of communication but as an infinitely malleable one that can be put to a myriad of uses for as many purposes as there are composers, performers and listeners.