(++++) TWILIT TONES

Elgar: String Quartet; Carissima; Fauré: String Quartet; Préludes, Op. 103—Nos. 4, 8 and 9. Eusebius Quartet (Beatrice Philips and Sofia Kolupov, violins; Adam Newman, viola; Hannah Sloane, cello). SOMM. $18.99. 

Ignaz Brüll: Violin Sonatas Nos. 2 and 3; Suite for Violin and Piano. Brian Buckstead, violin; Irena Ravitskaya, piano. MSR Classics. $14.95. 

     There is a great deal of crepuscular music associated with the last years of Romanticism and the early 20^th century. The moodiness was scarcely new in that time period – brooding and the entire Romantic era go together – but as harmonic structures loosened and composers sought new sound combinations, while geopolitical events cast an aura of gloom that is clearer retrospectively but was somewhat evident even in its own time, darker sounds crept into more and more composers’ works and often cast a pall over concerts in the later Victorian era and thereafter. The overall ethos is one thing that the string quartets of Elgar (1917) and Fauré (1924) have in common. They have other superficial similarities as well: each is its composer’s sole work in the form; both are in E minor; in both, the slow movement is the longest; and both follow the traditional three-movement pattern of Allegro-Andante-Allegro, with a qualifying adjective for the tempo indications here and there. The works, however, were written at very different times in their composers’ lives, and it is to the credit of the Eusebius Quartet that its performers do such a fine job of exploring both the similar aspects of these works and their differing sounds. Elgar’s quartet is the more immediately appealing of the two, managing the tricky balance of intimacy and depth of feeling, on the one hand, and emotional restraint, on the other, with considerable skill. Elgar was recovering from a bout of poor health when he wrote the quartet, and although it is not overtly autobiographical, its delicate balance of feelings could very well reflect his gradually returning physical vigor. The quartet features some notable instrumental touches, such as the absence of the first violin in the first 22 bars of the second movement, and the use of mutes throughout that movement’s extended coda. Although the quartet is a work of wartime, its predominant impression is one of quiet that hovers somewhere between peace and resignation; its mood is largely contemplative, and the Eusebius Quartet conveys that admirably in its recording for the SOMM label. Fauré’s quartet is more acerbic, dissonant and morose than Elgar’s, and more interesting intellectually if somewhat less affecting emotionally. It dates to the last year of Fauré’s life, a time when he – like Beethoven and Smetana – had lost his hearing. And like some of Beethoven’s late quartets, Fauré’s seems to reach for a sound world beyond what audiences would expect, one audible more through inward perception than traditional aural absorption. The austerity of this work’s sound, well-communicated in the Eusebius Quartet’s performance, contrasts with the greater richness of Elgar’s quartet and, in sometimes surprising ways, with the underlying Romanticism that remained a touchstone for Fauré right to the end: he lived for only one month after finishing his quartet. Ultimately, these two works have more differences than similarities, but their Weltanschauung is similar and is reflective of the time period in which both were written. The CD also includes, as if for a touch of leavening, four string-quartet arrangements by Iain Farrington of shorter pieces that communicate more straightforwardly than do the quartets. Elgar’s Carissima, originally written for small orchestra, is graceful, simple and pretty. The three Fauré Préludes, from a set of nine created for piano solo, vary in mood. No. 4, the only one in a major key (F), shares some of the gentle nature of the Elgar encore, while No. 8 (C minor) is more intense, and No. 9 strongly reflects the twilight mood of Fauré’s quartet and its time period – and is written, like the quartet, in E minor. 

     E minor is also the key of one of the sonatas by Ignaz Brüll on a new MSR Classics CD. Brüll (1846-1907) is almost completely unknown today, although the second of his eight operas, Das goldene Kreuz (1875), was quite successful for a time. Brüll was well-known as a pianist – he regularly played with Brahms in private performances of Brahms’ works – so it is scarcely a surprise that the piano elements of his violin-and-piano works are well-crafted and expressive. As Brian Buckstead and Irena Ravitskaya show, however, Brüll did not allow the piano complete dominance in this chamber music: he had a finely honed sense of appropriate balance of the two instruments, allowing each considerable expressive potential. The expressiveness, however, is very firmly in the late-Romantic idiom, infused with some genuinely morose feelings but also possessing a sense of the gestural, as if Brüll knows what is expected of music in the Brahmsian and post-Brahmsian vein and has no desire to move beyond those expectations. The three-movement Sonata No. 3 (1899) explores its E minor tonality thoroughly, but with emotion that is more evanescent than deeply felt – it is noteworthy that the second movement, where darkness and depth might be expected, is an Andante con moto that is pleasant but emotionally superficial. The four-movement Sonata No. 2 in A minor (1890) is similarly unchallenging in terms of emotive capacity: here the slow second movement is marked Cavatine—Andante, and again the pleasantries abound, including some lovely use of decorative violin trills, but profundity is altogether absent. And the following lighthearted Scherzo and concluding dancelike Allegro ma non troppo sound much more congenial than intense and belie the potential drama of the sonata’s home key. As well-performed as the sonatas are, they indicate little more than that Brüll was a composer of a specific period with little interest in moving beyond the typical strictures of his time. He actually seems somewhat more comfortable in major keys, including the A major of his Suite for Violin and Piano (1882), whose five movements’ pleasantries are disconnected from each other. Here hints of somewhat surprising creativity peek through, as in the unexpected minor key of the second-movement Scherzo and the gentle sway of the third-movement Reigen (“dance”). The work as a whole is insubstantial but enjoyable – indeed, that description applies to the entirety of this (+++) CD. No listener will likely deem Brüll a significant rediscovery on the basis of this disc, but anyone interested in some of the forgotten byways of late Romanticism will here experience the ephemeral enjoyment of the twilight of a major musical era.

(+++) FORMS OF MODERNITY

Sarah Louise Bassingthwaighte: Cape Flattery; Concerto for Double Bass and Orchestra; Let There Be Sparrows, then; A Mountain Symphony. Steve Schermer, double bass; London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Bobby Collins and Jonathan Pasternack. Aria Classics. $18.99. 

Music from SEAMUS, Volume 34. New Focus Recordings. $16.99. 

     Modern composers have a myriad of influences from which to choose and a nearly infinite variety of compositional processes and approaches available from which to craft their works. The specific methods and sounds each composer selects are determined in large part by the type and size of audience that each seeks to reach, in addition to whatever content, whether “pure” or programmatic, the music is intended to possess. The four works by Sarah Louise Bassingthwaighte (born 1967) on a new Aria Classics CD all have extramusical associations and illustrative purposes, and all use traditional acoustic instruments and typical orchestral forces to paint their sound pictures. The symphonic poem Cape Flattery is intended as a portrait of the land at the farthest northwest point of the continental United States. As in many similar “landscape” works by other composers, it reflects variegated scenes and weather events through differing pacing, orchestration and music that contrasts the intense and emphatic with the almost-lyrical. It is well-made but will be most effective for listeners who already know the place to which it refers, or at least the surrounding region – it lacks the atmospheric tone painting of works that reach out beyond a specific time and place, such as Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave overture. Bassingthwaighte’s Concerto for Double Bass and Orchestra is considerably more interesting. Here the supra-musical inspirations are subsumed within a work that is intriguing on its own terms and that moves effectively from a rather extended slow movement (titled Lachrymae but not overdoing a sense of tearfulness) through a nicely proportioned Scherzo to an energetic concluding Pesante feroce that displays double-bass virtuosity in a way rarely heard since the days of Giovanni Bottesini. The people involved in the inspiration for the work, soloist Steve Schermer and conductor Jonathan Pasternack, present it with strong commitment and understanding, and listeners intrigued by the very notion of a double-bass concerto will certainly be drawn to the piece, especially the back-and-forth between solo instrument and ensemble in the finale. Let There Be Sparrows, then (the final word of the title uncapitalized) is supposed to be bird-focused, poetry-focused (its title comes from a line in a poem by Shaun O’Brien), and focused on Dietrich Buxtehude, whose D minor Passacaglia provides the basis of its theme-and-variations form. This is rather a lot of freight for the music to carry, and its determinedly contemporary aural world – more of a bow to the avant-garde than are the other works on this disc – makes the various connections rather attenuated. The most expressive and interesting element of the work is its delicacy (it is scored for chamber orchestra), which tends to be at odds with portions of its soundscape, almost as if its avowedly contemporary elements are constantly under threat of being overtaken by a rather sweet lyricism. The inevitable birdsong-like elements actually fit rather imperfectly into a sound world that is more elusive than precise. A Mountain Symphony is more matter-of-fact and forthrightly illustrative than works such as Hovhaness’ Mysterious Mountain symphony, although it uses similar tonal language. Like Cape Flattery, Bassingthwaighte’s symphony is intended to portray and display impressions of a specific landscape, and like that single-movement work, the two-movement symphony consists of variegated instrumental sections designed to show the many moods of a mountain region and, by extension, of people experiencing it. There is nothing particularly groundbreaking in the work’s expressiveness or its rather forthright portrayals of varying environments. But it is well-crafted and has some especially effective integration of percussion into its structure – along with an almost achingly sweet violin solo and some other well-considered individual-instrument touches. The London Symphony Orchestra does a first-rate job with all the music, with Bobby Collins conducting everything other than the double-bass concerto (in which Pasternack leads the orchestra). Bassingthwaighte is a skilled orchestrator whose works on this disc are at their best when they are least insistent on being “about” something and most content to be offered simply as high-quality experiential presentations that are sufficient unto themselves. 

     Bassingthwaighte’s pieces tend to reach out to a fairly wide audience, even when some are rather self-limited because they reference specific places or circumstances with which few people will be familiar or acquainted. The audience for works from SEAMUS, the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music of the United States, is quite different and is self-identified as an “in crowd” for people who enjoy a venue in which the avant-garde composers who use SEAMUS as a membership society can test and sometimes extend the limits of acoustic instruments, voices, and electronics of all sorts. The 34^th  volume of SEAMUS creations, available on New Focus Recordings, offers nine pieces that fit quite comfortably into the SEAMUS universe and that are, by design, aimed by SEAMUS members (who perform on electronics) at other SEAMUS members – and perhaps a small “extended family” that finds productions and sounds of this sort congenial. Every work here, whether for electronics alone or for electronics plus something else, can be, indeed must be, experienced through the lens of the non-musical. Patrick Reed’s Premier D’Aion is about reincarnation and life cycles, using sound that moves through its own life cycle along with a supporting video (not seen on the CD, of course) that was created using artificial intelligence – which is, if you will, a “life” of its own. Leah Reid’s Jouer mixes electronics with amplified soprano saxophone (played by Kyle Hutchins); in line with its title of “play,” it is supposed to reflect adult and children’s games, sports events, casinos and more (and it has some distinctly amusing elements, as when the saxophone perkily plays “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” above electronic sounds). Andrew Burke’s I Wasn’t Thinking is supposed to be a journey through guided meditation, using everything from fixed-media electronics to cellphones and including visual elements (again, not available on the CD). Kerem Ergener’s In Praise of Shadows supplements electronics with flute (Lea Baumert), percussion (Chase Gillett), and violin (Aaron Gonzales), and is tied to a book of the same name by Japanese novelist Jun'ichirō Tanizaki – familiarity with which is a necessity for understanding of the piece. From the cycle Images by Liann J. Kang, for electronics and alto saxophone (Jack Thorpe), this CD includes Blue Air and Traces, the intent in both cases being to put across abstract and intangible ideas through aural impressions – which are indeed abstract and intangible, although no direct connection between these aural images and any specific ideas is determinable. Mickie Wadsworth performs both with her voice and with electronics in Mirror, Mirror, whose idea is to ask rather than answer the existential question of what stares back at someone who stares into a mirror. Oliver Harlan’s xerox In (the first word not capitalized – a frequent affectation in avant-garde titling) sounds like what people who are not particularly enamored of electronic music would expect it to sound like, being a series of repetitive noises including taps, bumps, squeaks, squeals, clangs, feedback and so forth, gradually accumulating atop each other until a final “outer-space-like” chord that eventually fades away. And the rain washed away the fear (no capital letters at all) features the voices and on-electronics performances of Aleu Botelho and Paul J. Botelho in a piece wherein the vocals are augmented, extended, electronically processed and otherwise modified, all with the intention of exploring the source of whatever people hear and the difficulty of knowing just what that source is. Everything here is very earnest, very sincere, and very unlikely to appeal in any way to people who are not already fully committed to the worldview and aural approach for which SEAMUS and its members stand.

(++++) 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.