Michel Corrette: Les Délices de la Solitude—Sonatas, Op. 20. Michelle Kesler and Miranda Wilson, cellos. MSR Classics. $14.95.
Bach: Toccatas, BWV 910-916. Francesco Tristano, piano. Naïve. $16.99.
D. Scarlatti: Sonatas K1, 9, 27, 32, 34, 96, 141, 149, 159, 175, 208, 209, 291, 322, 377, 380, 430, 466, 491, 513, and 531; A. Scarlatti: Sonata in D minor, “Arioso.” James Brawn, piano. MSR Classics. $14.95.
Steven Ricks: Medusa in Fragments; Baucis and Philemon. New Focus Recordings. $18.99.
Michel Corrette (1707-1795) managed to straddle two very different musical eras while remaining firmly committed to the earlier of them. Although he died four years later than Mozart, Corrette was firmly and always a Baroque composer, allowing new musical trends and approaches to sweep by largely unheeded. While this has landed him in a sort of purgatorial ignominy from a creativity standpoint, it is worth encountering his music from time to time if only to be reminded how very well-made and refreshing his thoughts and approaches were – even if they were more-or-less outdated by the end of his lifetime. A new MSR Classics release features six thoroughly charming and engaging Corrette sonatas for two cellos, which were written when Bach was still alive (1739) and fit quite neatly indeed into the Baroque worldview. The six pieces, bearing the charming overall title Les Délices de la Solitude (“The Delights of Solitude”), are essentially three-or-four-movement Baroque suites, featuring the expected dances (Allemande, Sarabande, Corrente, Giga) and the musical forms associated with Bach’s time (Fuga, Preludio, Aria). Michelle Kesler and Miranda Wilson play the music with verve and style, allowing the richness of tone inherent in a pair of cellos to complement the enjoyably upbeat pacing of many of the movements, notably those designated Presto. There is nothing substantial in this music – the sonatas are all seven to nine minutes long, and there is little differentiation between the three-movement ones and the two in four movements (Nos. 4 and 5). There is some well-managed tonal richness in the sole minor-key sonata (No. 2 in D minor), but nowhere is there any mining of emotional depth – that would be out of place in this era and certainly in Corrette’s output. Kesler and Wilson are especially well aware of the importance of rhythmic clarity in the dance-derived movements, which as a result have a certain degree of very pleasant “swing” to them. This is quite a short CD – 48 minutes – but it encapsulates quite a lot about Corrette’s music and his never-faltering commitment to a musical time period in which he continued to dwell for more than half a century after composing these small gems.
It is interesting to juxtapose Corrette’s musical thinking with that of Bach, who was already expanding the notion of a freer compositional method and less-restrained use of instrumental capabilities decades before Les Délices de la Solitude. Back around 1710, Bach created seven toccatas for keyboard that are already imbued with forward thinking and rhythmic sensitivity that Corrette, all those years later, never really attained (or, to be fair, aspired to attain). Intriguingly, Bach wrote five of the seven toccatas in minor keys – by no means a typical approach for studies like these – and included in them a number of formal elements (fugues are prominent) but no dance movements, thus differentiating them from suite structure. Dance rhythms do creep in here and there, though, as in the third movement of BWV 912, which is as bright a Fuga as one could possibly expect. The exact reasons for creation of the toccatas are unknown, but they sound rather like teaching exercises, sometimes quite overtly (as in the first movement of BWV 911) and at other times more subtly (the Adagio of BWV 913). Bach’s toccatas are about the same length as Corrette’s sonatas, but since there are seven by Bach and only six by Corrette, the new Naïve disc featuring Francesco Tristano is longer – about 58 minutes. The music also comes across as considerably more varied and, even several decades before the Corrette and even as possible training works, less stodgy. It is, unfortunately, a bit difficult to recommend Tristano’s CD wholeheartedly, for the very clear and obvious reason that he plays the toccatas on a modern piano (a Yamaha). This is a constant underlying frustration where Tristano’s Bach is concerned: this is his third Bach recording (following the Partitas and English Suites), and while it is played with just as much sensitivity and skill as the earlier releases – including some notable pointillism in some of the faster movements – the fact remains that the sound of a piano just does not meld very well with the sensibilities underlying this music. Of course, this is an ongoing and never-to-be-resolved issue: pianists have long since claimed Bach’s keyboard works as their own, as well they should, but in some of Bach’s keyboard material, the piano is more ill-fitting (compared with the harpsichord or clavichord) than in other works. The toccatas do not work very well as piano pieces, which means that this is a (+++) CD for listeners interested in the actual sound of these Bach offerings. But it has to be said that within the self-imposed limitations of using a modern keyboard instrument, Tristano delivers sensitive, well-balanced and frequently charming performances.
The issue of instrumental appropriateness also results in a (+++) rating for a very well-played and generous (77-minute) MSR Classics recording of a nice selection of Domenico Scarlatti harpsichord sonatas – styled “keyboard sonatas,” of course, when played on the piano, as they are by James Brawn. A very short encore by Domenico’s father, Alessandro, is a nice touch at the conclusion of the CD, but the real meat of the matter is Brawn’s choices among the 555 sonatas and his handling of their various moods, pacing, and technical complexities. Part of the joy inherent in listening to the Scarlatti harpsichord sonatas involves discovering how performers overcome their manifest difficulties, which in some cases make them into very complex undertakings for any harpsichordist. Those difficulties are less apparent in performances on piano, but they are there nevertheless, and none of them seems to concern Brawn to any degree. Indeed, there is a fluidity to his playing that makes a good case for some of these works as piano pieces – the delicate “Aria,” K32, for example, which has a charming if somewhat inappropriate-for-its-era delicacy that turns it into something of a proto-salon piece. The faster and brighter pieces come across as studies of a sort: for example, “La Caccia,” K96, is all about rhythmic contrast and a kind of crescendo/decrescendo approach that is foreign to the harpsichord but that is effective from a pianistic standpoint. Brawn clearly relishes the emotionalism that he finds lurking in sonatas such as “Cantabile,” K208, and he does not hesitate to use the piano’s emotive capabilities to bring the emotive elements to the fore. And Brawn has fun with the quick pace of sonatas such as “Tarantella,” K531 – although here as elsewhere he is a touch too fond of crescendo/decrescendo tactics. In some ways it is probably best to think of this recording not as a foray into Scarlatti but as Brawn’s highly personal extraction for 21st-century listeners of rhythms, harmonies and emotions that the pianist has discovered within old manuscripts and is eager to bring into the present day using the capabilities of a contemporary instrument. The disc is a lot of fun when considered from that standpoint – but for what Scarlatti was really all about, well-considered harpsichord performances are even more important than is the case when it comes to the keyboard music of Bach.
Of course, contemporary musicians do not revisit the past solely by means of instrumental choices. Composers, in particular, often journey back by choosing the concepts of their works and then clothing tales in olden style in very modern dress indeed. That is the approach of Steven Ricks (born 1969) in two works on a New Focus Recordings CD. Ricks works in the electroacoustic medium, which scarcely lends itself to representational approaches to the past but which certainly offers interpretative leeway when it comes to a “past” that never really existed – the mythological. Both works on this disc juxtapose ancient tales with hyper-modern aural aesthetics – a combination that will certainly not be to all tastes but that Ricks, within his chosen medium, uses skillfully. Thus, the monodrama Medusa in Fragments is a non-linear retelling of the story, or part of the story, of Medusa: a sense of alienation pervades the material (electronics are especially good at conveying that), and although a soprano voice figures prominently in the work, it is pre-recorded, making it part and parcel of the electronic fabric within which the music unfolds. As tends to be the case with much electroacoustic material, Medusa in Fragments has more of the intellectual than the emotive about it, and while its overall intensity is clear enough, it reiterates its material rather too insistently and seems to go on longer than the content fully justifies. The other work on this (+++) CD, however, is even more extended and extensive: Baucis and Philemon is a full-fledged chamber opera, and here Ricks uses techniques that go beyond the strictly electronic. There is straight narrative, clearly pronounced declamatory singing, a representation of a thunderstorm, and an interesting intertwining of some acoustic instruments with electronic sounds that expand upon or contrast with the aural environment. Because Baucis and Philemon is broken down into a dozen sections, it does not feel as extended (or overextended) as Medusa in Fragments. Furthermore, the very simplicity of some of the sounds in Baucis and Philemon – birdsong and water, for example – gives the chamber opera an accessibility that the monodrama lacks. The use of such touches as a solo cello and piquant piccolo gives the material aural variety beyond that of most electroacoustic music, although the actual words spoken and sung spend rather too much time insisting that they are profoundly meaningful when in fact they are more-or-less commonplace. It is tempting to think of Baucis and Philemon as an intermittently successful experiment in operatic (or at least staged) form, although in reality there have been many modern pieces created with analogous if not identical components. Nevertheless, listeners who may wonder whether contemporary sound can be used to illustrate (if perhaps not illuminate) thoughts and ideas of the past will find a number of elements in Baucis and Philemon that are worth thinking about, even if the totality does not ultimately coalesce into anything particularly profound or revelatory.
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