(++++) A MAN FOR TWO GENRES

John Williams: Orchestral Music. Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by John Williams. Deutsche Grammophon. $19.98 (2 CDs).

     There is a common misconception among classical-music lovers and non-fans alike that classical music is a world apart from all other forms – a world above them if you favor the genre, a world remote from them if you do not. A consequence of this thinking is the belief that composers who have reached in the last few decades into non-classical genres, such as jazz and non-Western music, are bold trailblazers who are finding ways to unite the more-esoteric realm of classical music with various more-popular types, such as film music.

     All this is demonstrably false and can be rather enjoyable to debunk. When it comes to film music, for example, the very first score specifically written for a movie was created by none other than Camille Saint-Saëns – for the 1908 film L’assassinat du Duc de Guise. And the very first score composed frame by frame was created by none other than Erik Satie, in 1924, for a movie called Entr’acte – for which Satie also invented the first-ever system for synchronizing music to specific frames. And over time, it was classical and classically trained composers who not only participated in the film world but also often came to create works without which the films would have been far less memorable and successful: Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Copland, Bernstein, more recently John Corigliano and Philip Glass – and what would Citizen Kane or Psycho have been like without the music of Bernard Herrmann?

     So the reality is that the line between the classical and non-classical fields can be so thin that it disappears altogether. This is certainly so in the work of masters of film music including, quite emphatically, John Williams. Born in 1932, Williams is still going strong and scarcely resting on his many laurels – but he clearly does not mind trotting out a good selection of his well-known, well-thought-out compositions for a new two-CD Deutsche Grammophon release featuring Williams as both composer and conductor. And Williams here leads nothing less than the magnificent Berlin Philharmonic, an ensemble capable of making even the trivial sound important. Not that Williams’ music is trivial – but it has never before sounded quite the way it does here. The orchestra makes some compromises in its justly famous warm, beautifully rounded tones, especially by modifying the brass section to include brighter-sounding American trumpets – the result being that it gives a kind of surface polish to Williams’ music that stands in considerable contrast to the orchestra’s handling of, say, Richard Strauss. But the ensemble gives Williams all the elegance, all the panache, and all the respect that it lavishes on the more-central classical repertoire, with the result that Williams’ music, however intimately connected it may originally have been with the films for which it was created, here takes on a concert-hall life of its own that shows with just how much care Williams composes and just how well he understands the Romantic-era scoring and emotional heft in which he specializes.

     It is easy to grasp the feelings evoked on the screen by listening to these Williams works, whether or not one actually knows the films. Williams conducts Olympic Fanfare and Theme, Superman March, and music from such blockbusters as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Jurassic Park, two of the Indiana Jones movies, several films in the Star Wars canon, and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. He also offers a suite from the less-known, less-successful Far and Away, plus a lovely Elegy for Cello and Orchestra in which soloist Bruno Delepelaire thoroughly explores a somewhat more-intimate side of Williams than is usually present in his film work. Listeners get to hear not only Williams’ music but also Williams himself: he sprinkles some introductions and comments throughout the recording. Most of the music here is familiar and some, in truth, is hyper-familiar. But none of it has previously sounded as distinctive, and as distinctly “classical,” as it does here. In this recording, the roots of Williams’ art show clearly through orchestral interpretations that more than do justice to his thinking – they bring his works far beyond their original purpose of illustrating and underlining visual material and show them quite able to stand entirely on their own in a concert setting. Very few composers’ movie music is this worthy of being heard in a non-film context: certainly the early material by Saint-Saëns and Satie has curiosity value, but those composers’ greatness lies elsewhere. Williams’ excellence, it is clear, lies not only in his ability to enhance visual experiences for a film audience but also in his skill at creating music that deserves to be performed and perceived for its own inherent qualities, not simply for the effectiveness with which it functions as part of a theatrical experience.

(++++) SONGFUL SOLOISTS

Prokofiev: Violin Concertos Nos. 1 and 2; Sonata for Solo Violin. Tianwa Yang, violin; ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jun Märkl. Naxos. $13.99.

Saint-Saëns: La Muse et le poète; Chausson: Poème symphonique: Vaughan Williams: The Lark Ascending; Anatol Kos-Anatolsky: Poem for Violin and Orchestra; Kenneth Fuchs: American Rhapsody (Romance for Violin and Orchestra); Myroslav Skoryk: Carpathian Rhapsody. Solomiya Ivakhiv, violin; National Symphony of Ukraine conducted by Volodymyr Sirenko; Sophie Shao, cello. Centaur. $15.99.

     The tonal excellence of youthful violinists Tianwa Yang (born 1987) and Solomiya Ivakhiv (born 1980) stands out immediately in two new recordings, one focusing on a single composer and the other featuring six very different ones whose works partake of certain emotional resonance in common. Yang’s handling of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1 is the highlight of a recent Naxos release. A youthful piece, dating to 1917 (when Prokofiev was 26), this is a work of much more lyricism, charm and warmth than is usual in Prokofiev’s music, perhaps because the beautiful violin melody that opens the first movement was inspired by the composer’s love interest at the time. There is a kind of luminous quality to much of the concerto, a feeling of beauty sometimes barely concealed and sometimes bursting forth with a kind of naïve simplicity that gleams and sparkles. Yang, ably abetted by the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra under Jun Märkl, gets to the heart of the music and plays it with just the right combination of virtuosity and apparent simplicity to make the whole concerto a very emotionally satisfying experience. Even when more-typical elements of Prokofiev’s style come through in the central Scherzo, Yang keeps them whimsical rather than sarcastic, wry rather than intense, with the result that the work’s overall impression becomes one of airiness and lushness – despite the concerto’s technical demands. Yang also does a fine job, if not quite to the same exceptional degree, with the better-known and more-typical-for-Prokofiev second concerto, written in 1935. Here lyricism takes a back seat to a kind of emotionally spare approach mingled with the sort of sardonic wit for which Prokofiev is known. The second concerto is darker and cooler than the first, its mood sometimes reserved, sometimes downright chilly. All this does not fit Yang’s generally bright and ebullient style quite perfectly: her playing is excellent (as, again, is that of the orchestra), but a certain amount of the intensity and disturbance of the music is missing. This tones down the impact of the concerto to some extent, although there is nothing wrong with preventing the work from coming across as bleak and dour, as it sometimes can. Yang’s performance here is one that bears repeated hearings even though, or perhaps because, it is not instantly captivating. Yang herself, without accompaniment, also offers here the Sonata for Solo Violin of 1947, a single-instrument version of a piece originally written for an ensemble of child violinists. The work is not exceptionally difficult but is scarcely simple, and Yang seems quite comfortable with its comparatively naïve outlook, its lyricism, its folk-like elements, its hints of nostalgia. As she does in her performance of the first concerto, Yang in the sonata shows herself finely attuned to Prokofiev’s milder and more openly graceful style, comfortable with the sunnier side of a composer whose darkness and sardonic elements are more frequently brought to the fore.

     There is little that is dark on Ivakhiv’s new Centaur CD, which interestingly offers three well-known rhapsodic works and three that are almost wholly unknown. Saint-Saëns’ La Muse et le poète, whose title comes not from the composer but from his publisher, is a conversational work for violin and cello: Ivakhiv and Sophie Shao adeptly toss themes back and forth, offering what is mostly tender and rather surface-level music in a performance that neatly alternates between the playful and the poetic, if scarcely the profound. Chausson’s Poème symphonique is a more-virtuosic work, featuring several cadenzas and sounding almost like a concerto movement (or one-movement concerto). Like Saint-Saëns’ piece, Chausson’s explores multiple moods, but it does so with greater intensity and more contrast between darkness and light – and Ivakhiv explores its multiple elements with sensitivity and care. Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending also includes multiple cadenzas, along with folk-like material and a structure that places simplicity at the service of a subtle evocation of avian flight and the bird’s existence somewhere between Earth and heaven. Ivakhiv’s performance here is itself subtle and carefully evocative, warm without being overdone or over-expressive. In all these works, the National Symphony of Ukraine under Volodymyr Sirenko supports the soloist with feeling and understanding, allowing her to remain front-and-center while underlining aspects of each composer’s aesthetic to fine effect. Ivakhiv and Sirenko also are well-matched for the three works on the CD that are not likely to be known to most listeners. Poem for Violin and Orchestra by Anatol (or Anatoliy) Kos-Anatolsky (1909-1983) has warmth and lyrical flow reminiscent of Tchaikovsky, with a kind of unforced beauty in the solo part that contrasts with orchestral sections that have greater intensity and would not be out of place as film music. American Rhapsody (Romance for Violin and Orchestra) by Kenneth Fuchs (born 1956) is, perhaps surprisingly, similar in approach and effects: it includes spun-out melodies, several cadenzas, contemplative solo sections interspersed with more-assertive orchestral material, and an eventual sense of transfiguration emerging not through hard-won battles but through more-contemplative means. The final work on this disc differs in mood from the others: Carpathian Rhapsody by Myroslav Skoryk (1938-2020) is filled with dance rhythms and clear folk-music elements – it is a display piece in ways that the other works here are not, with only the slow and emotive opening (which returns at the end, mingled with the dancelike material) having something of a rhapsodic feel. This is a particularly well-chosen, well-blended program of music for violin and orchestra, both in the way it mixes better-known with less-known material and in the way it shows multiple composers bringing their own ideas and approaches to the concept of rhapsodic music.

(++++) BACK AND FORTH AND FORTH AND BACK

Otto: A Palindrama. By Jon Agee. Dial. $10.99.

     Eschewing the ease of “Madam, I’m Adam” and “Able was I ere I saw Elba” – the two palindromes most likely to be familiar to fans of the form – Jon Agee has created a truly magnificent 142-page graphic novel told entirely in palindromic form.

     Well, not entirely entirely. This is, after all, a graphic novel, and since narrative palindromes are somewhat limited by their very nature – they must fit the story arc as well as reading the same backward and forward – a great deal of Otto is done entirely in drawings. Which happen to be wonderful, so the wordless panels are almost as much fun as the word-bedecked ones.

     Almost. The real charm of this book, not only for the younger readers for whom it is intended but also, most definitely, for adults, is the amazing variety of clever wordplay appearing on page after page, along with the whimsical and gently surrealistic settings through which Agee takes his modest young adventuring hero.

     Not that Otto wants an adventure; he happens upon one when gazing into the wonton soup he is having for dinner with his parents (“Nosh, son!”). A gaze into the swirling broth transports Otto – in his mind, and quite delightfully – to a beach where all sorts of odd and amazing things happen. As an airplane flies by promoting Abba and a sign warns, “Step on No Pets,” Otto glances through binoculars at a bird upon a boat and asks Mom, “Emus sail, I assume?” Shortly thereafter, a beachgoing, human-size rodent (“Was it a rat I saw?”) attracts the attention of Otto’s pup, Pip, and it is Otto’s Pip pursuit that leads our hero to all manner of weird, wild, wonderful places and people. As he wanders, he gently refuses a food offer from a sari-wearing woman: “‘Wanna potato pan?’ ‘Naw.’” But he happily quenches his thirst with red-ice cider. Then he helps Mr. Alarm get Dr. Awkward off some railroad tracks before a speeding train going “Toot!” rushes past. Later, Otto interacts with a woman who observes specific types of cars going by: “A Toyota” – several of them, in fact, but “Sad, no Hondas.”

     Still seeking Pip, Otto takes a ride to Grubsburg in a pickup truck driven by a pleasant woman: “Sir, I’m Iris.” And in an urban setting, the palindromic pace picks up, with one truck saying “Walsh’s Irish Slaw” and another promoting “Stahl Hats,” while billboards proclaim “Regal Lager” and “Lion Rock Corn Oil” and a street preacher holds up a sign reading, “Do Geese See God?” Otto sees some remarkable people here, each introduced by Iris and delightfully illustrated in accordance with palindromic naming: “Remarkable Melba Kramer,” “Sir Ron Norris,” “Evil Cara Clive,” “Odd Ike Kiddo,” “Taco Cat,” and more. Otto leaves the truck when he thinks he sees Pip, but it turns out to be a different dog, so further urban exploration is necessary – at a bookstore where titles in the window include “ZONE by Ben Oz,” and at a newsstand featuring “Game Mag.” There is also an unpleasant encounter on the street with a meat-carrying bully: “I’m Al, a slob. My symbol: Salami!” Palindromic graffiti adorn walls, and city painters create a dot pattern on buildings, with which Otto helps – but his dot is runny, so removal is necessary and “Todd erases a red dot.” A fresh-produce market proclaims “We dye no honeydew” as Otto continues on his way into a “Mueseum” – the one palindromic error in the book, although it is quite forgivable because it allows descriptions of art including “a dog, a pan, a pagoda” and “a car, a man, a maraca.” This is clearly a museum of modern art, of which not everyone approves: “‘Gustav Klimt milk vats?’ ‘Ug.’”

     Otto eventually opens “Door by Lily Brood” and finds himself in a maze, then in a wooded outdoor area where a well-dressed owl goes “Gag!” because, as a nearby robotic bird explains, “Mr. Owl ate my metal worm.” Wandering into a nearby cemetery, Otto encounters an elaborate memorial to “Noon,” and a well-dressed nearby woman explains, “No one made killer apparel like Dame Noon.” Walking past numerous odd-but-apt tombstones (“Del was awled” with a picture of a sharp tool, for example, and “So, Ida, adios!”), Otto eventually comes to a beach, where a seagull goes “kwawk” and a duck goes “quouq” (which really is just as good as “quack,” if not better). Several adventures later – one in a rowboat, one in a cave – Otto is back at the beach where his journey began, and where his parents are calling for him. And then he is safely at home, where soup is still on the table, but he has higher priorities: “‘Wonton, Otto!’ ‘Not now!’” And the book ends with Otto playing outdoors with Pip, as a nearby bird, seen earlier during the dream adventure, utters a concluding “peep!”

     Otto: A Palindrama is above all a book filled with wordplay, but it is also a remarkably good, cogent, thoroughly enjoyable graphic novel, replete with strange and memorable characters and a series of mundane-but-not-quite-usual happenings that meld beautifully with the illustrative format. Agee gives credit at the back of the book to various people who contributed some of the memorable palindromes, but of course he created many of them himself, and deserves credit for the whole concept and for producing a work that is equal parts silliness and subtlety. Hopefully it will inspire readers young and old to a new appreciation of the amusement potential of English. Maybe some will even imagine their own additions to the book – for example, making up a scene in which the hero would react to being shown some slime by a professorial type: “‘Goo, Otto!’ ‘Oog!’”

(++++) MASTERY MISCONSTRUED

Sir Malcolm Arnold: Symphonies Nos. 1-9 (complete); English Dances, Sets 1 and 2; Four Scottish Dances; Four Cornish Dances; Four Irish Dances; Four Welsh Dances. National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland and Queensland Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Penny. Naxos. $42.99 (6 CDs).

     In the mid-1950s, Malcolm Arnold – not yet Sir Malcolm – wrote a wonderfully parodistic piece called A Grand Grand Overture for the Hoffnung Music Festival, organized and named for music-focused cartoonist and raconteur Gerard Hoffnung (1925-1959). Arnold’s work included three vacuum cleaners and a floor polisher and was dedicated to U.S. President Hoover (a “hoover” being the common British term for a vacuum cleaner). Although this piece was not Arnold’s first foray into lighter classical music, it is in some ways emblematic of the composer’s reputation, which relies heavily on film scores, dances, and tuneful amusements of many sorts – often created with considerable wit and offbeat tributes to other music (A Grand Grand Overture incorporates firearms, along the lines of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture).

     Those who see a more serious side of Arnold tend to see it in his personal life more than in his music: he was under the care of the British Court of Protection from 1979 to 1986, had made two suicide attempts, had been treated for alcoholism and depression, and was known to be highly promiscuous. But Arnold, born in 1921, returned to public and compositional life in 1986 and lived an additional 20 years – during which his music, which had fallen into disfavor, garnered renewed interest.

     It turned out, for those willing to look and listen, that Arnold was not only capable of hummable tonal short pieces but also had considerable skill as a symphonist, and indeed, his nine symphonies are as worthy a legacy in their way as are the nine of Ralph Vaughan Williams. In fact, Arnold’s nine end with a work that, like the ninth symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler, stands as a capstone-cum-new-direction for the composer – although certainly not a piece destined for the popularity of the ninth symphonies of Beethoven and Dvořák.

     Tracing Arnold’s symphonic development turns out to be a fascinating and very worthwhile journey, one handled with considerable skill by Andrew Penny and the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland in recordings made from 1995 to 2000 and attended by the composer himself. Naxos’ splendid six-CD re-release of these recordings of Arnold’s symphonies is revelatory of the music and the man who made it, again and again. The chronologically sequential presentation makes it abundantly clear where Arnold began as a symphonist and where he went with the form between his first symphony (1949) and his last (1986). These are not generally lengthy or grandiose works: five are in three movements, the rest in four, and while the final symphony lasts more than 45 minutes, none of the others lasts as long as 40.

     Penny is remarkably sensitive to the structure and nuances of all the symphonies, and it is hard to imagine a more-compelling version of this cycle. The first symphony, in three movements, is classically proportioned and establishes the sort of intense finale that Arnold favored in most of these works. The second (1953), in four movements, features a melancholic slow movement with a prominent bassoon theme. The third (1957), in three movements, contains echoes of Sibelius (with whose symphonies Arnold’s have some similarities); the fourth (1960), in four movements, uses West Indian and African rhythms and instruments to fine effect. The fifth symphony (1951), another four-movement piece, skillfully uses a carillon and contains tributes to several of Arnold’s friends and colleagues (shades of Elgar!); it also has a distinctly Mahlerian slow movement. The sixth, seventh and eighth symphonies all revert to three-movement form. The sixth (1967) incorporates more jazz and popular influences than Arnold previously employed; the seventh (1973) is emotionally intense and at times genuinely strange, as in a ragtime march that suddenly appears in the very extended first movement; the eighth (1979) is by turns discordant, martial, severe and perky.

     None of these symphonies leads in a straight-line fashion to Arnold’s Symphony No. 9. This expansive four-movement creation is more strongly weighted to the finale than any of Arnold’s other symphonies: the last movement is almost as long as the first three together, in the manner of Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang. Arnold’s last symphony sounds odd, certainly by comparison with his earlier ones, being filled with repetition (not quite in minimalist style), a sense of themes presented without development, and a strong contrast between the pastoral second movement and the noisy, brass-focused third. The finale is marked Lento and is as different from Arnold’s usual symphonic conclusions as it can be: bleak, sad to the point of being funereal, despairing until its very last bars, it is a difficult movement to hear and understand, although it connects as viscerally to a listener’s emotions as does the finale of Mahler’s Ninth, which Arnold acknowledges as an influence. Penny and Arnold actually discuss this work in a 10-minute interview appended to the performance of the symphony, and their discussion sheds considerable light on the darkness of this music, without ever fully elucidating it.

      With or without the interview, Arnold’s Ninth is a tough nut to crack and a clear indication that the view of Arnold as primarily a film-and-light-music composer is seriously misguided, if not altogether wrong. The fact that Arnold did produce a great deal of bouncy, pleasant, effective music is worth remembering, and Penny ensures that listeners are aware of this aspect of the composer as well as his serious, symphonic side: the sixth disc in this boxed set includes all six sets of Arnold’s dances, with Penny here leading the Queensland Symphony Orchestra in performances that, like those of the symphonies, were attended by the composer himself. Like the symphonies, the dances are presented chronologically, the two English sets from 1950 and 1951 being followed by the Scottish from 1957, Cornish from 1966, Irish from 1986, and Welsh from 1988. The consistent verve and high spirits of the dance music, the folklike elements and mild melancholy, contrast strongly with the feelings and effects in Arnold’s symphonies, with the result that the totality of this re-release provides as complete a picture of Arnold as a multifaceted composer as listeners are ever likely to encounter – a most welcome chance to acknowledge a more in-depth view of Arnold than has often been held in the past.