Stravinsky: Chant du Rossignol; Favn i Pastushka; Divertimento from “Le Baiser de la fée”; Pulcinella Suite. Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by JoAnn Falletta. Naxos. $19.99.
Music from Armenia: Works of Ashot Zohrabyan, Koharik Gasarossian and others. New Focus Recordings. $39.99 (4 CDs).
A rather oddly assorted set of works showcasing Stravinsky in his neoclassical mode, the latest Naxos CD from JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra is distinguished more by exceptionally fine playing than by any particularly revelatory interpretations of the repertoire. The disc bears the title “Fairy Tales,” which is accurate as far as it goes but somewhat limited in scope: these four works are really, in the main, explorations of nonexistent locales through rethinkings and reimaginings of pre-Stravinsky composers whose influence shaped Stravinsky’s own musical thinking – particularly in its earlier form. Chant du Rossignol draws from Stravinsky’s first opera, The Nightingale, a venture into chinoiserie that was strongly influenced by Rimsky-Korsakov. The orchestration is a highlight and is handled with considerable sensitivity under Falletta’s direction: solo trumpet, muted strings, violin-flute duet and other elements of the score are brought forth with care and considerable beauty. Favn i Pastushka (“The Faun and the Shepherdess”) is a setting of a Pushkin poem about the erotic awakening of a 15-year-old shepherdess and her unsuccessful wooing by a woodland god – ending in her death by drowning. The rather dour story sounds more Tchaikovskian than anything else: this is the earliest work on the CD, dating to 1906 (two years earlier than Stravinsky’s first work on The Nightingale). The songs are presented with warmth and as much emotional heft as they can handle by mezzo-soprano Susan Platts, and the orchestra holds forth with particular lushness in the strings, resulting in a work that, although slight, is more pleasant musically than in its mythic/pastoral narrative. The other works on the disc postdate World War I: the ballet Pulcinella was first heard in 1920, the ballet Le Baiser de la fée in 1928. The orchestral extracts and arrangements heard here are later than their balletic sources and altered in various ways – Stravinsky was in some ways Handelian in his reuse of his own material – but they are effectively atmospheric in their own right. Divertimento is Stravinsky’s orchestration of his violin-and-piano transcription of music that in turn followed the composer’s creation of an orchestral suite from the ballet – the provenance of these things can get complicated where Stravinsky is concerned. Like the Pushkin setting, Divertimento and the ballet to which it connects are Tchaikovskian – quite deliberately in the case of Le Baiser de la fée, for which Stravinsky actually used various little-known, not previously orchestrated Tchaikovsky works as the basis of his own music. Also like the faun-and-shepherdess tale, Le Baiser de la fée is a dark story, but the beauties of the music and rhythmic subtleties that Stravinsky brings to it produce an overall feeling of warm engagement that is somewhat at odds with the more dismal elements of the narrative. As for Pulcinella, whose music is the best-known on this CD, this is Stravinsky deriving 20th-century material from works thought to have been written by the 18th-century composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi – although later scholarship discovered that, as with Brahms’ famous variations originally thought to be on a theme by Haydn, some of the “Pergolesi” music was composed by others. In any case, Stravinsky’s subtle handling of the original material neither transcribes nor arranges anything – instead, he uses his sources as inspirations for his own concept of a farce featuring traditional comedic characters. Falletta makes sure to emphasize the overtly humorous portions of the music – the sarcastic exclamations from double bass and trombone in one movement, for example – while aptly balancing the fun with sensitive presentation of its variety of more-lyrical elements. The Pulcinella Suite is in many ways an update of the suites of the 18th century – an aspect of its cleverness and of Stravinsky’s successful appropriation of his source material. It is played with suitable elegance and enthusiasm by the Buffalo musicians, and serves as a pleasant conclusion to a disc that, although something of a mishmash conceptually, is enjoyable and enjoyably lightweight throughout.
The exoticism is considerably more serious and less fairy-tale-like on a substantial New Focus Recordings release of music from Armenia – a land likely to be sufficiently unfamiliar to most music-loving audiences so that only the name of Aram Khachaturian, whose Sonata-Song for viola solo and Sonata-Monologue for violin solo are included in this four-disc set, will likely be known to most listeners. This is a major production on all levels – with more than four hours of music in all – and is especially noteworthy for two entire CDs focused respectively on piano music by Koharik Gazarossian (1907-1967) and chamber works by Ashot Zohrabyan (1945-2023). The collection, led and in part performed by violinist Movses Pogossian, is an extremely ambitious one, intended not only to showcase individual Armenian composers but also to reflect Armenian sociopolitical and geopolitical history from the waning days of the Ottoman Empire through the genocide of 1915-1916, the years under the domination of the Soviet Union, and the eventual emergence and reemergence of Armenian culture in more-recent times. The sheer volume of material here is impressive, although by definition the release will appeal in full only to audiences seeking to delve deeply into both the music and the history of Armenia in the 20th and 21st centuries. Its self-limitation is what makes this admirable collection a (+++) offering. Generalizing about the material is well-nigh impossible and would do a disservice to the individuality of the composers. Even individual creators emerge in varied form here – for example, Zohrabyan’s three string quartets and two sonatas for, respectively, piano and cello-and-piano, have very different sounds and use differing compositional techniques, while the two Khachaturian solo works showcase a side of this composer rarely experienced by listeners (both pieces are very late works, the Sonata-Song of 1976 being Khachaturian’s last significant composition before his death in 1978). Audiences interested in sampling the diversity and wide-ranging musical creativity of Armenian composers will find plenty to explore here, including items by Vahram Sargsyan (born 1981), Aram Hovhannisyan (born 1984), Ghazaros (Lazarus) Saryan (1920-1998), Artur Avanesov (born 1980), and Tigran Mansurian (born 1939); there is also one very short piece by Komitas Vardapet (1869-1935), who is generally regarded as the founder of Armenia’s national school of music. The actual arrangement of material on the discs is somewhat questionable: Zohrabyan’s two sonatas are interpolated amid his three quartets, while Avanesov’s music appears in one place on the first disc and five on the fourth CD – in the latter case with other composers’ works alternating with his. Given the general unfamiliarity of the material, it would have been more effective to bundle the music in ways that would allow audiences to experience the similarities and differences in each individual composer’s output (at least the elements of it offered here). Instead, there is a somewhat scattershot approach: the reasons for the music being offered in this particular sequence are by no means clear. The motivation for the total collection, however, is very clear indeed. Anyone interested in exploring some generally well-crafted and frequently moving music from a nation and culture whose appearance in concert halls and on recordings is limited will find this variegated set of sensitive, well-played pieces to be nothing short of revelatory.
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