Explore & Escape - BBC Music Magazine - February 2021

VERSAILLES OPERA SIBERIAN PIANOS GIUSEPPE VERDI The story behind Louis XV’s lavish theatre

In search of Russia’s lost instruments

The political voice of Italian opera

The Th he world’s best-selling best sellinng classical music muusic magazine magaziine

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW!

Evelyn Glennie Percussion’s greatest player on the instruments that have shaped her career

Jilly Goolden The wine critic’s musical loves

Frauenliebe und -leben Schumann’s romantic song cycle

Richard Morrison Stravinsky adapted – so can we

Also in this issue

Emmanuelle Haïm We meet the French conductor

Classical collecting A guide to music memorabilia

Lewisohn Stadium New York’s forgotten venue

100 reviews by the world’s finest critics CDs, DVDs & books – see p70

JOSQUIN MASSES Hercules Dux Ferrarie D’ung aultre amer · Faysant regretz

THE TALLIS SCHOLARS Directed by Peter Phillips

Gimell

CDGIM 051

“This is the final disc in The Tallis Scholars’ complete recording of Josquin des Pres’s masses.

Perhaps it is just as well, because this reviewer is running out of superlatives for the music itself and for this choir’s performances of it.”

RICHARD TURBET, EARLY MUSIC REVIEW

“A mesmerising final chapter to this unforgettable musical odyssey.”

PERFORMANCEUUUUU RECORDINGUUUUU KATE BOLTON-PORCIATTI, BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

“Josquin’s inventiveness … is extraordinary. This glossily perfect performance pings with relish and crackles with energy. A superb end to a magnificent cycle of recordings.”

EDITOR’S CHOICE, EDWARD BREEN, GRAMOPHONE

“Two golden qualities leap out at once. One is the glorious singing. Tonal purity, articulation, ensemble spirit: everything here is sheer perfection. Phillips’ unaccompanied voices bring passion and warmth to every note. The second is the forceful appeal of Josquin’s music.

If Phillips wanted to end the series with a bang, he couldn’t have chosen a better work than the Missa Hercules Dux Ferrarie. This is a heavenly album.”

GEOFF BROWN, THE TIMES

“A perfect showcase for this genius composer and The Tallis Scholars’ trademark luminosity.”

RECORD OF THE WEEK, HANNAH FRENCH, BBC RADIO 3 RECORD REVIEW EXTRA

“An almost supernatural intensity of line, sonority, energy, and blend. If you have that 1986 disc, listen again, compare with this and marvel at how they’ve gone from strength to strength.”

REBECCA TAVERNER, CHOIR & ORGAN

“Peter Phillips began recording Josquin with the Tallis Scholars in 1986, this ninth CD bringing the sequence to a radiant close. That the Tallis Scholars’ performance is faultless is a given, and there’s such warmth and expression to their singing.

Immaculately produced, with scholarly notes and full translations.”

GRAHAM RICKSON, THEARTSDESK.COM All Josquin’s masses live over 4 days boulezsaal.de/josquin-500

Gimell.com

All Josquin’s masses on CD, DL & Streaming gimell.com/josquin-masses

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Welcome As we go to press with this issue, 2021 has barely begun – the pandemic, of course, is still with us, although the promise of an end to it all is welcome indeed. The music world faces an almighty challenge in the months to come, not just to perform live to audiences once more, but also to ensure that those audiences haven’t fallen by the wayside in the intervening year.

Music’s paths have seldom been entirely straight and smooth. Sparked by visits from Franz Liszt and John Field, ‘pianomania’ swept through Tsarist Russia from the mid-19th century and musicians did everything in their power to keep playing, despite the considerable obstacles of distance, landscape, weather and politics. Wives transported instruments thousands of miles across the tundra in the dead of winter to their exiled Decembrist husbands, while hundreds of pianos were hidden throughout Russia at the height of Communism. Bechsteins in their thousands made their way eastwards on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and European factories set up Russian outposts to feed demand, before closing down years later or rebranding as cheap Soviet instruments. Sophy Roberts’s fascinating feature on p44 tells of her epic search for these lost pianos, and reminds us that music really can overcome the seemingly impossible.

Oliver Condy Editor

THIS MONTH’S CONTRIBUTORS

Claire Jackson

Sophy Roberts

Alexandra Wilson

Journalist and critic

Journalist and author

Academic, author and critic

‘A seven-foot tamtam, an aluphone and a frog-shaped wood-block – just some of the instruments in Evelyn Glennie’s collection. It was wonderful to explore her career through these unique objects.’ Page 26

‘Part detective hunt, part ode to a place often misunderstood, my book The Lost Pianos of Siberia traces the story of Russia’s love of the piano. But it’s also about a love for music and how culture can bring us together.’ Page 44

‘When I discovered opera as a student all those years ago, Verdi’s works were my first love. I’ve really enjoyed revisiting his life and works: they remind us that opera and politics are never far apart.’ Page 62

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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February d Radio 3 an s TV listing

Contents

See p100

FEBRUARY 2021

FEATURES 26 Cover: Evelyn Glennie Claire Jackson is taken on a personal guided tour of the brilliant percussionist’s most cherished instruments

36 Opera at Versailles Paul Riley tells the story of the palace’s grand opera house, built in the dying years of the monarchy

42 Classical collecting Jeremy Pound explores music memorabilia, from cigarette cards to autographs and programmes

44 Siberian pianos Sophy Roberts on her epic travels across Russia in search of instruments with a fascinating story

48 Lewisohn Stadium Brian Wise on New York’s lost classical music venue

52 Education Chamber groups and orchestras are taking their musicmaking directly to schools, writes Andrew Stewart

EVERY MONTH The latest news from around the classical music world

25 Richard Morrison 32 The BBC Music Magazine Interview Tom Service talks to conductor Emmanuelle Haïm

60 Musical Destinations Michael White heads to Andermatt and Klosters

62 Composer of the Month Alexandra Wilson explores the politics of Verdi’s operas

66 Building a Library Natasha Loges on Schumman’s Frauenliebe und -leben

100 Radio & TV listings 104 Crossword and Quiz 106 Music that Changed Me Wine critic Jilly Goolden

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COVER: RICHARD CANNON THIS PAGE: RICHARD CANNON, MICHAEL TUREK, CHRISTIAN MILET, NIKOLAI ØSTERGAARD

8 Letters 12 The Full Score

26 Dame Evelyn Glennie

Subscriptions £64.87 (UK); £65 (Europe); £74 (Rest of World) ABC Reg No. 3122 EDITORIAL Plus each of our favourite percussion moments in orchestral music Editor Oliver Condy Triangle in Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 Deputy editor Jeremy Pound Bells in ‘Saturn’ from Holst’s The Planets Reviews editor Michael Beek Timpani in Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta Editorial assistant Freya Parr Timpani duel in the fourth movement of Nielsen’s Symphony No. 4 ‘Inextinguishable’ Cover CD editor Alice Pearson

Listings editor Paul Riley Bass drum in the Dies Irae of Verdi’s Requiem Art editor Dav Ludford Designer Liam McAuley Picture editor Sarah Kennett Thanks to Daniel Jaffé, Ian Carpenter MARKETING Subscriptions director Jacky Perales-Morris Direct marketing executive Kellie Lane ADVERTISING Advertising sales director Mark Reen +44 (0)117 300 8810 Group advertisement manager Tom Drew +44 (0)117 300 8806 Business development managers Katie Gibbons +44 (0)117 300 8812 Liz Barile-Page +44 (0)117 300 8256 Senior account manager Rebecca Yirrell +44 (0)117 300 8811

February reviews

44 Siberian adventures

Your guide to the best new recordings, DVDs and books

Perfect blend: the Danish choir Ars Nova Copenhagen

70 Recording of the Month Pärt, Shaw, Wolfe et al … and …

36 The Palace

‘This is consummate choral singing, luminous, multi-coloured and virtuosic… in a performance of deep, rapt spirituality’

of Versailles

Senior brand sales executive James McMahon +44 (0)117 300 8757 Brand sales executive Beth Gregory +44 (0)117 300 8545 Classified sales executive Tom Rutterford +44 (0)117 300 8546 Inserts Laurence Robertson +353 876 902208 SYNDICATION & LICENSING Tim Hudson +44 (0)20 7150 5170 Richard Bentley +44 (0)20 7150 5168 PRODUCTION Production director Sarah Powell Production coordinator Emily Mounter Ad coordinator Beth Phillips Ad designer Parvin Sepehr Reprographics Tony Hunt, Chris Sutch

PUBLISHING Publisher Andrew Davies CEO Tom Bureau Managing director Andy Marshall BBC STUDIOS, UK PUBLISHING Chair, editorial review boards Nicholas Brett Managing director, consumer products and licensing Stephen Davies Director, magazines Mandy Thwaites Compliance manager Cameron McEwan UK publishing co-ordinator Eva Abramik EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Jack Furness, Edward Blakeman, Chi-chi Nwanoku, Adam Barker, Rory Connolly This magazine is published by Immediate Media Company Bristol Limited under licence from BBC Worldwide

72 Orchestral 76 Concerto 78 Opera 82 Choral & Song 85 Chamber 88 Instrumental 91 Historical 92 Brief Notes 94 Jazz 96 Books 97 Audio 98 Reviews Index

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Letter

Have your say…

Write to: The editor, BBC Music Magazine, Eagle House, Colston Avenue, Bristol, BS1 4ST Email: music@classical-music.com Social media: contact us on Facebook and Twitter L ET TE Soaring sounds: the mighty organ at St Eustache, Paris

of the R

MONT H

A swell experience

GETTY, ALAMY

I enjoyed Tom Service’s article on the joys of the pipe organ (Christmas). As a (very) amateur organist for 60 years, the instrument has been a constant pleasure. I started in a village church with a two-manual that was still pumped by hand and moved on to a three-manual with a secondary swell pedal that slowly opened the whole organ, producing a volume that seemed to shake the building. Others followed, each an example of the organ builder’s craft – a one-manual specially built to accompany Gregorian chant and a small chamber WIN! 12 MONTHS instrument, lovingly built by an expert as his last work OF PRIMEPHONIC prior to retirement, stand Every month we will award out. No two are alike which the best letter with a year’s makes hearing them in Platinum subscription to situ so important. Having classical music streaming site Primephonic, giving you struggled with Messiaen lossless 24-bit FLAC access on disc, what a difference to hundreds of thousands of it made to hear him for the recordings – worth £149. The first time in the soaring editor reserves the right to shorten letters for publication. heights of St Eustache in Paris. How it enhanced the CDs afterwards!

S Edwards, Morecambe

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BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

Sibelian journeys In your January issue, Tom Service shows how Sibelius’s music evokes the wild nature of Finnish weather and landscapes. When listening to his music, particularly the symphonies, I always see a mode of travel: ocean liner crossing the Atlantic, railway train going through barren countryside, yacht in full sail, motor car chugging up to full speed, space ship circling the earth and so on. Put on a performance of any Sibelius symphony, from the slow quiet introduction going into the wide powerful Allegro, and see if you can see what I see!

Barry Valentine, County Down

Inspiring others I found David Lipsey’s feature on sponsoring young musicians (Pay it Forward, January) inspiring. His description of first meeting Kerem Hasan at a fundraiser for retired greyhounds was especially endearing, as the youngster suddenly displayed outstanding musical talent that was later to flower under the guidance of maestros like Bernard Haitink. His grateful account of the way the musicianship of another discovery of his, Iyad Sughayer, provided invaluable solace during his recent illness was also deeply moving. And the brief coda brought a lump to my throat: a simple statement that Lord Lipsey was donating

his fee for the article to the Young Concert Artists Trust.

It is salutary to be reminded that there are politicians, as well as musicians, who honour the nobility of their calling, which is to use the best of their abilities to enhance other people’s lives.

Neil Sinyard, Saxby All Saints

On the box Thank heaven for BBC Four’s recent The Sound of TV series.

I remembered nearly all of the early TV signature tunes well, though they only served to remind me of wartime and post-war wireless programmes and their equally memorable tunes. Might presenter Neil Brand be persuaded to make a follow up with ITMA, Much Binding, Paul Temple, In Town Tonight, Dick Barton etc? I would also like to know if my almost immediate love of Mahler did stem from an early Forsyte Saga serial as I suspect; I know that Elgar was used in a later adaptation but remember feeling, when I first listened to Mahler’s Fifth Symphony in concert, that I’d heard the Adagietto somewhere before…

Frank Taylor, Northampton The editor replies: While acknowledging the skill that goes into writing music for TV, there’s still a thrill to be had in hearing a familiar piece suddenly crop up midprogramme and being able to name it. Any suggestions of other good examples?

Carol conundrum Is it a deliberate decision to always print the new carol in your Christmas issue backto-back on the same page?

Each year I turn to it eagerly – I enjoy and keep them all – only to find that yet again I am forced to make an extra copy.

Can’t you print it on opposite pages so it can be read through without a turn? All I want to do is attempt to play and sing it at home, but every festive season I feel you’ve got it in for me!

Dianne Knowles, Manchester The editor replies: We print the carol this way so that readers can cut it out of their magazine without having to lose pages from other features. We can always reassess this next year, but hope you enjoyed singing and playing Freya Waley-Cohen’s carol nonetheless!

of her arrangement of ‘Rule, Britannia!’ commissioned for this year’s Last Night of the Proms – it was bold, daring and provocative, her music living up to its mandate of challenging our presuppositions, a provocative stimulus in exploring life’s vicissitudes. It brought cheer to my heart. Would there be any possibility of including that performance of this piece on your cover CD? Little of her music seems to be recorded, and living so far from centres of performance, I rely extensively on recordings.

Tony Barr, Saint Cloud, Minnesota, US The editor replies: Keep an ear out for Radio 3’s Our Classical Commonwealth on 21 Feb, which Errollyn Wallen will be presenting.

You can find details on p102.

Mighty composer

Carefully timed?

Back in November, I was especially pleased to hear Errollyn Wallen’s Mighty River among the pieces on your cover CD. As an ethnomusicologist and composer, I’m drawn to her music and her skills at weaving her background into her art, a tapestry of fine weaving with so many rich and vibrant colours. I was delighted to hear and see the broadcast

Enthusiasts for serendipity in musical numerology will no doubt enjoy the observation that David Lloyd-Jones’s recording of Gurney’s War Elegy with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus et al (Dutton CDLX7172) is eleven minutes and eleven seconds long. I’d like to think it was deliberate. Can we ask him?

Nick Smith, Swansea

Award-winning music education resource for children

Vibrant voice: British composer Errollyn Wallen

www.naxos.com • www.naxosdirect.co.uk

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Thefullscore Our pick of the month’s news, views and interviews Dame Jane Glover leads the way in New Year Honours Groundbreaking conductor one of several classical musicians named in 2021 awards

GETTY

Rightly honoured: conductor Jane Glover has been made a Dame

A damehood for conductor Jane Glover and knighthood for opera director Graham Vick have capped a rich haul for classical music in the New Year Honours 2021, which also includes awards for composer Julian Anderson and conductors Daniel Harding and Wayne Marshall.

Glover’s DBE comes shortly after she was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Gamechanger Award for her work in breaking new ground for other female conductors. Since being appointed artistic director of the London Mozart Players in 1984, Glover has gone on to become only the third woman in history to conduct at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, has held the position of director of opera at the Royal Academy of Music and is now music director of the Chicago-based ensemble Music of the Baroque.

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Graham Vick’s knighthood recognises the exceptional productions of both traditional and modern operas that he has staged at Birmingham Opera Company, which he founded back in 1987. One notable example was his innovative interpretation of Verdi’s Otello in 2009, with Ronald Samm featuring as the eponymous lead – the first black tenor to sing the role in the UK. The immersive staging was set in a former industrial plant, with 250 people from Birmingham performing as the opera’s chorus, dancers and actors alongside the professional principals and orchestra.

Elsewhere, Northern Irish pianist Barry Douglas and Grange Park Opera’s founder and CEO Wasfi Kani have had their OBEs upgraded to the CBE, an honour also awarded to composer Julian Anderson

and conductor Daniel Harding. And cellist Natalie Clein, organist, conductor and pianist Wayne Marshall and the Royal Northern Sinfonia’s former leader Bradley Creswick have all received OBEs. While the pandemic forced most musicians to experience a quiet 2020, Wayne Marshall turned his home into a recording studio, improvising on themes given to him by his social media followers and recording an album of piano arrangements of choral music by John Rutter. He also streamed weekly concerts from the organ of St Paul’s Cathedral in Valletta throughout lockdown. Conductor Daniel Harding, on the other hand, had his hopes for the year scuppered after having announced a sabbatical from conducting to become a commercial air pilot. With such plans on hold, he returned to the music world with a series of concerts with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, of which he is music director.

Honourable mentions New Year Honours 2021 DBE: Jane Glover Conductor Knighthood: Graham Vick Birmingham Opera Company founder and artistic director CBE: Barry Douglas Pianist Julian Anderson Composer Daniel Harding Conductor Wasfi Kani Grange Park Opera founder OBE: Natalie Clein Cellist Wayne Marshall Conductor, pianist and organist (above) Bradley Creswick Violinist

Thefullscore SoundBites

Winning moment: Alexander Olleson celebrates with Aled Jones, presenter Kate Bottley and Katherine Jenkins

Late call-up in Cambridge: the King’s Singers

King’s at the double Even the firmest cornerstones of the classical music calendar were rocked by the upheaval of the pandemic in 2020, and the annual television broadcast of Carols from King’s was no exception. With two cases of coronavirus ruling out any of the King’s College, Cambridge choral scholars from taking part, urgent replacements were needed to fill in the adult voices. Thankfully, the six men of the King’s Singers were all available at short notice and sang alongside the choir’s trebles, at a suitably social distance, for the cameras.

Alexander Olleson takes BBC Young Chorister crown There may have been no audience present, but the BBC Young Chorister of the Year 2020 provided an outstanding winner in Alexander Olleson from Leighton Buzzard.

Broadcast on Songs of Praise on BBC One and on Radio 2, a revamped format saw three girls and three boys compete against each other in the final at Gorton Monastery in Manchester just before Christmas – rather than naming separate boy and girl winners

as in previous years, this year’s competition awarded just the one title. Olleson, 13, who is a member of Bedford School Chapel Choir, chose Reger’s The Virgin’s Slumber Song to sing in the final, in front of a judging panel that included composer John Rutter and soprano Laura Wright, herself a former Young Chorister winner. The six finalists were mentored beforehand by singers Aled Jones and Katherine Jenkins.

A fine Finn Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen has been awarded an honorary knighthood for services to music and UK-Finland relations.

Salonen, who was born and studied in Helsinki, has been principal conductor and artistic advisor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London since 2008, during which time he has won acclaim not just for the ensemble’s performances but also for his imagination in the ways he has programmed and presented music, often involving visual and digital content.

THE MONTH IN NUMBERS

94 …per cent of adults in the UK say they would consider going to an orchestral concert, says a Royal Philharmonic Orchestra survey.

Vienna calls Meanwhile, Salonen’s fellow maestro Omer Meir Wellber has been named as the next music director of Volksoper Wien.

Wellber, who has become familiar to British audiences as the chief conductor of the BBC Philharmonic, will be taking on his new role in Austria in September 2022, following in the footsteps of illustrious predecessors that include the composer Zemlinsky.

5 …more years of fresh Rocky mountain air, as conductor Sir Donald Runnicles (above) extends his contract at the Grand Teton Music Festival.

…concerts to be streamed live on YouTube by the Royal Academy of Music this spring.

197 …nationalities in the Earth Orchestra – one player from each United Nations country (plus four more).

BBC, REBECCA REID, DONALD RUNNICLES.ORG

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First date Daniel Barenboim also has ‘Wien’ written firmly in his 2022 diary, as he has been named as the conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year concert at the Musikverein on 1 January. Barenboim, who will turn 80 later in the year, has conducted the concert on two previous occasions, in 2009 and 2014.

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Thefullscore RisingStars

TIMEPIECE This month in history

Three to look out for…

Mak Grgi Guitarist Majorcan retreat: the monastery where (right) Chopin and George Sand stayed

Born: Ljubljana, Slovenia Career highlight(s): For me, it’s been performing in venues such as the Musikverein, Walt Disney Hall, Konserthuset and Shanghai National Theatre, while also seeing my ideas for EuroStrings and the Virtual Guitar Orchestra come to fruition and make a mark on the international music scene.

Musical hero: Conductor Carlos Kleiber, for his immaculate attention to detail and colour, as well as his relentless demand for perfection.

Dream concert: A classical version of what I experienced when I supported singersongwriter KD Lang. I’d love to relive the energy of the audience in the grand hall, breathing with each phrase.

Jeneba Kanneh-Mason Pianist Born: Nottingham, UK Career highlight: Playing Florence Price’s Piano Concerto with the Chineke! Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall.

It was important for me to play a work by a black female composer and support music that isn’t represented enough in the industry.

Musical hero: I admire the way Rachmaninov develops lines of phrasing and considers such a wide range of colours in both his playing and his compositions.

Dream concert: Playing Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto with my family in the audience. I grew up listening to the work and would fall asleep while my sister Isata played the beautiful second movement.

FEBRUARY 1839

Chopin sails home from a miserable Majorcan break

Chuma Sijeqa Baritone

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O GETTY, SAM IRAHIM, JAKE TURNEY

Born: Johannesburg, South Africa Career highlight: My debut at London’s Royal Opera House – a stage I’ve always wanted to perform on. Achieving that ambition felt like proof that anything is possible if you put the work in.

Musical hero: Bryn Terfel is such a versatile performer and produces such a range of colours through his voice to show emotion.

Knowing he studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama has made me excited to study for my postgraduate degree there too.

Dream concert: Watching the Italian baritone Giorgio Zancanaro playing Iago in Verdi’s Otello – or singing the role myself!

n 13 February 1839, Fryderyk Chopin and George Sand came to the end of a winter break on the island of Majorca that they would never forget. On paper, the two were hardly a match made in heaven. Chopin was a natural introvert, whose emotional restlessness and passionate intensity were unleashed in his music rather than his personal life. Physically frail, the early signs of tuberculosis, which played a major role in hastening his death just ten years later, were already apparent.

‘Feeble, pale, coughing a great deal, he often took opium with sugar,’ one of his

pupils reported, ‘or drink a tincture and rub his forehead with eau de cologne.’

Sand (nom de plume of novelist Aurore Dudevant), on the other hand, was one of the most colourful characters on the French artistic scene. She could already boast a string of affairs and was renowned for masculinising her appearance by wearing men’s clothing, taking snuff and smoking huge cigars.

When Chopin first met her in 1836, he was fascinated and repulsed in equal measure – ‘What an unattractive person La Sand is,’ he confided to pianistcomposer Ferdinand Hiller; ‘is she really

Thefullscore

The deeply conservative Majorcans didn’t take to their celebrity visitors from the start. Chopin’s constant coughing and pale appearance led the islanders to avoid him (literally) like the plague, while Sand’s amorous liaisons, widely reported in the press, were an inevitable source of malicious gossip. Unable to find suitable or willing hotel accommodation in Palma, they ended up in a draughty monastery in Valldemossa where the persistent rain and blustery winds lowered everyone’s spirits. Having such a clearly irreligious and unmarried couple live in such accommodation only added fuel to the local scandal. Chopin promptly caught a cold, and had to wait for his specially ordered Pleyel upright piano which was delayed in transit. Weeks later it finally

There is no mistaking the impact the island getaway had on Chopin’s music

a woman?’ For her part, Sand seemed equally unsure about her attraction for the mild-mannered Pole. In a letter, she described herself as ‘confused and amazed at the effect this little creature has on me’. Yet by August 1838 she was able to report to the painter Eugène Delacroix of the ‘delicious exhaustion of fulfilled love’.

Intended primarily as a health restorative for both Chopin and Sand’s 15-year-old son Maurice – as well as to facilitate Sand’s escape from jilted former lover, playwright Félicien Mallefille – the trip to Majorca failed miserably on virtually all counts.

Planned as a two-year adventure in a bracingly exotic location, after little more than three months Chopin, Sand and her two children couldn’t wait to get away. Sand immortalised the doomed trip afterwards in her colourful 1841 travelogue, Winter in Majorca.

arrived, having barely survived the perilous journey by cart inland.

Chopin’s health swiftly deteriorated, and the local doctors did little to raise his spirits. In a letter to his friend Julian Fontana, he despaired: ‘The first said I was going to die, the second that I was dying, and third that I am already dead.’

Yet, whereas Sand never felt entirely comfortable in the monastery and its surroundings, Chopin, inspired by a treasured copy of Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘48’ Preludes and Fugues, went into creative overdrive.

If Chopin’s Majorcan sojourn had provided him with the idyllic peace and solace he urgently sought, things may have turned out very differently.

Yet there is no mistaking the profound impact the island getaway had on his music, most strikingly the galvanising C-sharp minor Scherzo, the C minor Polonaise and the 24 Preludes. That said, it would seem the nickname ‘Raindrop’, later given to No. 15, could not have been inspired directly by the sound of gently falling rain (as suggested fancifully by Sand), as the cell Chopin worked in was insulated from all external noises.

Liverpool odds: the first Grand National

Also in February 1839 1st: Franz Liszt writes to piano maker Sébastian Érard, describing a Pleyel piano he played in Bologna as ‘détestable’. For his next concert in the city, Liszt borrows a piano made by JB Streicher, the first time he is known to have performed on one of the Austrian firm’s instruments. Liszt goes on to play regularly on Streicher pianos throughout his career.

8th: John Barnett’s ‘serio-comic’ opera Farinelli is premiered at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London, with the tenor Michael William Balfe in the title role. Though the opera is based on a real-life character, the plot itself is fictional. Barnett breaks down with nerves at the premiere, but Farinelli proves popular enough to go on to enjoy more than 50 performances.

10th: The Spanish bullfighter Pedro Romero dies aged 84. Credited with turning bullfighting from a display of courage into more of an artform, he was one of the first matadors to promote the use of the muleta, the red cloth that obscures a sword. Having retired from the ring in 1799, he later became head of a school for training matadors.

24th: The Philadelphia-based engineer William Otis receives a US patent for his steam shovel. Otis’s invention enables large amounts of earth to be excavated and moved using a bucket and crane powered by a steam engine and will prove vital in major construction works such as railroads and, later, the Panama Canal.

26th: In England, the Grand Liverpool Steeplechase, later known as the Grand National, is held for the first time at Aintree Racecourse near Liverpool. With 17 runners in the field, the race is won by the George Dockeray-trained Lottery, ridden by Jem Mason and priced at 9/1 by bookmakers at the start of the race.

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Thefullscore MEET THE COMPOSER

Joseph C Phillips Jr Musical make-up: ‘I am all my influences and none of them’

Ethel Smyth gets her big Prison break Has Dame Ethel Smyth’s time come at last? A mere 90 years after its premiere, the British composer’s choral symphony The Prison has been nominated for a Grammy, courtesy of a recording by the Experiential Chorus and Orchestra on the Chandos label. It is a rare moment of recognition for

Smyth, who today is all too often remembered more for her own spell behind bars as a leading figure in the suffragette movement. Given that she died in 1944, it seems unlikely that, should she win, she’ll be appearing in person to collect the award. Though it would certainly cause headlines if she did.

DÉJÀ VU

History just keeps on repeating itself…

JENNY WOHRLE ILLUSTRATION: JONTY CLARK

Though 2020 was unremittingly awful, John Rutter (left) at least did his bit to mark the year’s best bit of news.

Invited by the Oxford Philharmonic to write something to thank the scientists behind the Oxford COVID vaccine, the British composer penned Joseph’s Carol, which enjoyed its premiere in the city just before Christmas. Composers and science have, in fact, long enjoyed each others’ company…

By far the most eminent scientist among well-known composers was Alexander Borodin. A professor of chemistry at St Petersburg’s Medical-Surgical Academy, the Russian was respected for his research into aldehydes and, in 1869, made the important discovery of the aldol reaction. Though Edward Elgar’s approach to chemistry was more homespun – often involving impressing friends with exciting concoctions – he was accomplished enough to invent and patent a device for synthesising hydrogen sulphide. It was physics, meanwhile, that interested US composer George Antheil. In 1942, he and actress Hedy Lamarr were granted a patent for a torpedo guidance system that used ‘frequency hopping’ to avoid jamming and interference – their invention was based on the model of the piano roll, an instrument used by Antheil in his Ballet Mécanique of 1926. Heading in the other direction, the great American inventor Benjamin Franklin was, in the 1770s, also the composer of a string quartet, unconventionally scored for three violins and a cello.

Joseph C Phillips Jr calls his unique style ‘mixed music’, bringing together pop, jazz and classical influences, often with a focus on social justice. His chamber opera The Grey Land explores the black American experience and has recently been released on the New Amsterdam label, with Phillips conducting his Numinous ensemble.

In 2011, I was thinking of writing an opera which centred on systemic issues in the US: racial justice, power and poverty. I was initially going to base it around the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, but in 2014 it shifted focus when my wife and I were trying for a baby and the country was experiencing protests against police brutality.

It made me reassess the world we were bringing a child into, so I decided to centre it on a mother and son moving through the world as black Americans.

I call The Grey Land a non-narrative mono-opera because it’s a story in monologue form by two characters. It isn’t written in a conventional narrative: it’s a photographic collage of these two people’s lives.

I didn’t want it to be a didactic story of ‘racism is bad’. You want to make an artistic statement filled with ambiguity and make people think a little deeper.

I write the music, but also much of the libretto. I then have to consider how to produce it. I try

and sketch out what I want to do by hand. I often spend a lot more time thinking about the concepts behind the piece.

I had to figure out a term that describes all those elements within my music: contemporary classical, popular music, R&B and rock. ‘Mixed-music’ is a term I coined, which follows the idea of mixed-race children, who are neither black nor white but are a combination of both. I am simultaneously all my influences and none of them.

My top five influences are composers Debussy, Mahler, John Adams, Maria Schneider and Steve Reich. Growing up, I saw Prince, The Beatles and Joni Mitchell as inspirations too. We stand on the shoulders of these musical giants.

I don’t want to be pigeonholed as someone who only does social justice work, but the call to respond to what’s happening in the world today is something I have to do. Opera can give you a way to empathise with others and understand yourself better.

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Thefullscore StudioSecrets

Premiere: Samantha Ege records Florence Price

DARIO ACOSTA, ROBIN BIGWOOD

We reveal who’s recording what and where...

South-West England-based music charity Sound World has stepped up to help struggling local musicians by commissioning 12 new short works by composers such as Sally Beamish, Nico Muhly and Howard Skempton. The pieces have been recorded for a forthcoming album, Reflections, available to download soon.

Composer Nigel Hess has completed a personal collection of his works called The Way of Light. The album features artists including the BBC Singers, BBC Concert Orchestra, St Catherine’s College, Cambridge Girls’ Choir and pianist Nicholas McCarthy, to name but a few. Orchid Classics will release it on 5 February.

Back in December Cordelia Williams recorded a new album of piano works at Southampton’s Turner Sims Hall. Called Night Light, it features poetry alongside a diverse programme of music by Thomas Tomkins, Liszt, Scriabin, Schumann and Bill Evans. SOMM Recordings is set to release the album in the summer.

Musicologist-pianist Samantha Ege has taken to the keyboard in the PATS Studio at the University of Surrey to make a landmark recording of solo piano works by Florence Price. It features the first full recording of Price’s virtuosic Fantasie Nègre alongside other premiere recordings. These include Price’s three Untitled Sketches and a set of Snapshots. The album will be launched by the LORELT label in the spring.

There are more premiere recordings on a forthcoming release by Hideko Udagawa.

The Japanese violinist has paired up with pianist Petr Limonov for sessions at St Silas Church, Camden Town, where they have recorded a Russian programme. At the heart of the disc, released in April by Northern Flowers, are lesser-known pieces by Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Arensky.

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BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

REWIND

Great artists talk about their past recordings This month: ADRIAN CHANDLER Violinist and director MY FINEST MOMENT Vivaldi Concerto No. 4 in F major, RV286 ‘Per la solennità di San Lorenzo’ La Serenissima/Adrian Chandler (violin) Signum Classics SIGCD641 (2020)

Quite a lot of thought usually goes into La Serenissima’s projects, but this one sort of happened by chance. It was all odds and sods that we had, like the San Lorenzo concerto, which was the thing that started it all. We actually recorded it in something like 26 minutes – we had some time left at the end of a bunch of stressful sessions and, as we’re a charity and shouldn’t be wasting money, I just said ‘let’s have a crack at this’. It worked,

and that’s kind of how everything else happened.

You could feel your shoulders relaxing; it really felt like playing for fun.

I remember my teacher, the fiddle player Rodney Friend, talking about going off to record the Britten concerto – which, let’s be fair, is a little bit harder than the San Lorenzo. He said he did two or three complete takes, a couple of patches and that was it. That sort of experience is rather unfamiliar to me, because you always expect to hear something like ‘no Ade, the E flat in bar

Thefullscore That’s a wrap: La Serenissima celebrates the end of another recording

sessions. Because you’re not addressing a group of 16 or more people, it becomes a more intimate experience.

We recorded it in the Church of St Cross Hospital in Winchester, which is a really beautiful place tucked away by the water meadows there. Everyone has always taken the mick out of me because I like recording in the depths of winter which, when it’s a church and you’ve got to play a lot of fast notes, is a bit tricky sometimes. Your fingers get really cold! They had this old gas heating system which didn’t smell very nice and you always had to turn it off between takes because it sounded like some old asthmatic saint breathing down the transept. It was a really atmospheric place to play, though.

I’D LIKE ANOTHER GO AT… JS Bach Concerto in D major, BWV 1045 La Serenissima/Adrian Chandler (violin) Signum Classics SIGCD602 (2019)

37 is still flat…’ So the fact that I was actually able to get anything down in under 15 takes was music to my ears.

I was also slightly delighted with the cover as well, being an Everton fan.

MY FONDEST MEMORY Per Monsieur Pisendel 2 La Serenissima/Adrian Chandler (violin) Avie AV2308 (2014)

The first record we made, in 2002, was Per Monsieur Pisendel, a set of Vivaldi, Albinoni and Pisendel sonatas for violin. I was able to scrape enough money together to do the second disc of Pisendel, which is brilliant music, and I think it’s just a little bit more polished than the first one. The first sounds like a bunch of lads having a good time, but this one is a bit more refined.

It was nice because there were just four of us, so it was a really good group of

I’m sure I could do the Bach on this disc a lot better. I remember the session felt as though I was in a bit of a tug of war with different sections of the orchestra in terms of tempo. Sometimes you have to know when the tempo that you wanted to play at is right; I tried to go with the slower tempo, which was against my gut feeling in that piece. I’d heard some scary renditions of it which sounded as though Nigel Mansell was driving down the M1, and I really didn’t want it to come out like that. I think it sounds a bit as though I’m driving with the handbrake on.

The piece is hard; it’s got such a big instrumentation, with three trumpets, timpani, oboes, strings; and there’s a lot going on in addition to the solo part.

I am a believer that this kind of stuff was supposed to have been played one to a part, and I think so much of Bach’s music works better like that. Having said that, I do wonder whether it was written for Pisendel at the Dresden court. If it was, chances are that it wouldn’t have been played one to a part. So, it’s a really difficult one. It would be nice to have the luxury of experimenting.

La Serenissima’s new album ‘Settecento’ is out on Signum Classics on 12 Feb

BuriedTreasure Soprano Marina

Rebeka shares some favourite recordings from her collection Raimonds Pauls Long Way in the Dunes Raimonds Pauls and his Orchestra Microphone Records MRCD525 I associate Raimonds Pauls with my childhood and the movies we watched during Soviet times.

He’s a wonderful pianist and melodist, perhaps known more in Latvia and Russia. His music is light and romantic, with a little bit of a jazzy touch. The Long Way in the Dunes was a very famous movie – it’s very easy-listening but not at all trivial.

Kancheli Earth, This Is Your Son Frédéric Bednarz (violin), Natsuki Hiratsuka (piano) Metis Island MI0009 Giya Kancheli often came to Latvia and gave concerts at the Riga Dome Cathedral.

These miniatures for violin and piano are very nice. The central piece on this disc starts out very melancholic, strange and modern, but becomes very romantic. Kancheli’s sound is somewhere between meditation and music; it creates a kind of peace of mind in the listener.

Prokofiev Five Poems of Anna Akhmatova, Op. 27 Galina Vishnevskaya (soprano), Mstislav Rostropovich (piano) BnF (Digital Release) I have to say I am not the biggest fan of Vishnevskaya’s voice; her timbre is not as soft and caressing as I would like. Her interpretation of these songs, though, is really amazing and ‘The King With Grey Eyes’ is a masterpiece. It is very demanding vocally, because of the tessitura, and musically it’s really difficult. The text is strong, very modern, and the lyrics tell a powerful story. I’m very happy that the Bibliothèque national de France released these 1962 recordings in a digital format.

Marina Rebeka’s album ‘Credo’ is out now on Prima Classic and is reviewed on p84

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Thefullscore THE LISTENING SERVICE

It’s good to be irregular We need more fives, sevens and elevens in our music, says Tom Service, who believes that irregular time signatures are hardwired into our DNA ILLUSTRATION: MARIA CORTE MAIDAGAN

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hat do the following pieces of music have in common: ‘Mars’ from Holst’s The Planets, the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony, and the main theme of Howard Shore’s score for The Lord of the Rings?

They all use the time signature of 5/4, five beats in the bar, rather than the conventional symmetry of two and fours (with occasional visits to waltzing three-time) that the vast majority of classical music is composed in.

Useful for a pub quiz, maybe, but it begs a bigger question: why are groups of other numbers apart from two, three, and four so uncommon in our music?

In the early 18th century, the writer Charles Burney knew the answer.

When Handel dared to write a few bars of five-time to dramatise the moment in his opera Orlando when the title character is on the edge of psychological breakdown, Burney criticised Handel for using ‘a division of time which can only be borne in such a situation’.

Music made in bars of fives or – heaven forfend! – sevens, could only suggest music on the edge of reason.

And yet there are musical cultures that have been obeying a rule of five for centuries: Russian wedding songs, Bulgarian folk dances, the rhythmic cycles of Indian music: five-time isn’t an aberration for those traditions, but a musical everyday, a feeling as natural as the fingers of our hands.

But it took the 19th century to escape the straitjackets of metrical symmetry in classical music: the slow movement of 20

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 1 is a sighing song in five-time and Brahms wrote a spooky vocal quartet in five; but it was Russian composers, from Musorgsky to Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky to Stravinsky, who really released the metrical genie from the bottle.

It took the 19th century to escape the straitjackets of metrical symmetry in music And in so doing, they revealed the truth that there’s nothing ‘irregular’, still less insane, about music in five – or higher numbers, like seven. The finale of Stravinsky’s Firebird is an unforgettable tune in a seamless seven, as is Bernstein’s ‘Oh, happy we!’ from his operetta Candide.

And there’s a riff in 11 quavers, four crotchets, and another seven quavers

that we’ve been singing along to for decades as one of the most natural hypermetric groupings in the world: the chorus of The Beatles’ ‘Here Comes the Sun’.

Which proves we’re all capable of instinctively feeling groups of time made from other metrical schemes aside from the marching straitjackets of twos and fours. That asymmetric richness mirrors the interacting cycles of time in the rest of our lives: from our ever-changing heartbeats to the seven days of the week, or the 1,461 days in the leap-year cycle: our music should be as dynamic as the grids of time on which our lives are composed. So, enjoy the wild ride of fives, sevens and 11s, and feel the freedom from the tyranny of four!

Tom Service explores how music works in The Listening Service on Sundays at 5pm

FAREWELL TO… Long player: Violinist Ivry Gitlis at the Cobourg Festival, 1997

Ivry Gitlis Born 1922 Violinist It was thanks to Bronis aw Huberman that Ivry Gitlis left his native Israel to study at the Paris Conservatoire in his early teens – the legendary Polish violinist heard Gitlis play and began a fundraising effort to send him to France. Born to Russian parents in Haifa, Gitlis was five when he first picked up a violin, and ten when he gave his first concert. Studies with Enescu and Jacques Thibaud were followed in 1939 by a move to England, where he served in the British Army’s entertainment unit. After World War II, his star rose in France and successful years in the US followed. He returned to France and remained an in-demand performer; he continued to make concert appearances and give masterclasses well into his 90s.

Fanny Waterman Born 1920 Pianist The creation of the Leeds International Piano Competition was seen through with a steely determination and singular vision that truly encapsulates the spirit of Fanny Waterman. Her idea for a provincial piano contest raised eyebrows ahead of its launch in 1961, but it remains the benchmark of musical competition and has brought many a keyboard star to the world’s attention. A talented pianist herself, Waterman performed regularly before World War II, but took to teaching during the war years and remained a committed teacher thereafter. Me and My Piano, her multi-volume series of manuals for pianists, were bestsellers and she firmly held the reins at Leeds until 2015 when, at the age of 95, she took her retirement.

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Fou Ts’ong Born 1934 Pianist Born in Shanghai and sent to communist Poland to study, Fou Ts’ong was one of the first Chinese pianists to achieve global recognition.

For a short time he was the toast of his home nation, but the winds of change would see him flee Warsaw for London where he sought political asylum in 1958. A poet of the piano with a particular affinity for Chopin, Ts’ong will be remembered for his lightness of touch and graceful manner in repertoire ranging from Mozart to Debussy.

Also remembered…

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British conductor Kenneth Alwyn (born 1925) made the first ever stereophonic recording of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture with the London Symphony Orchestra for Decca. A prolific recording artist and stage music director, he presented and conducted BBC Radio 2’s Friday Night is Music Night for three decades.

Organist Catherine Ennis (born 1955) championed both new talent and new organs in London. She founded the London Organ Concerts Guide and most recently served as music director at the church of St Lawrence Jewry in the City of London.

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Thefullscore fire and depth that Kleiber brings to the music is something I love revisiting. This music can never be in the background: it’s so pregnant with meaning.

And also…

I recently moved to Manchester, and while the museums and galleries have been closed, I’ve been doing a lot of walking around the city to try and learn more about its history. I’ve found a statue of Engels and learnt that the first atom was split at Manchester University – it’s been really exciting.

Delyana Lazarova conducts the Hallé’s online concert at Bridgewater Hall on 25 February

James Newby Baritone Musical connection: Christian Ferras plays Sibelius’s Concerto

Music to my ears What the classical world has been listening to this month Delyana Lazarova Conductor In the absence of much live music, I’ve been enjoying a lot of concert video recordings, including Christian Ferras’s 1965 performance of the Sibelius Violin Concerto with a young Zubin Mehta conducting. In the second movement, right at the emotional centre of the piece, the camera zooms in on Ferras and you suddenly realise there are tears rolling down his face. They play with such poise and you can really feel the connection between conductor and soloist.

I recently discovered conductor Kirill Petrenko’s recording of Suk’s tone poem Ripening with the Berlin Comic Opera Orchestra.

It is so carefully crafted, and Petrenko always brings out of an orchestra important colours 22

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

and voices, which often get lost in the texture. Suk deserves a lot more attention, which is something hopefully I can help with as a young conductor. His evocative music brings the musical traditions of Dvo ák to a new level.

The camera zooms in on Ferras and you realise there are tears rolling down his face Carlos Kleiber’s recordings of Brahms’s Symphonies Nos 2 & 4 have helped me understand both pieces so much better, and have shown me how important the conductor is in bringing meaning to music. As a 21st-century musician, I may not do certain things in the same way in terms of interpretation, but the sheer

READER’S CHOICE Hugh Anderson Oregon, US The Rogue Valley Choral in Medford, Oregon performed its annual Holiday Faire concert virtually this year. One item played by the Jefferson Baroque Orchestra was an Ariette con Variazzioni by FWH Benda and the director, Morgan O’Shaughnessey, said it reminded him of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’.

It is a delightful piece with an intricate Baroque flute solo.

O’Shaughnessey found the original manuscript online but did not find any recording of it.

So it’s great to have a recorded performance of this wonderful piece.

Recorded in 195665, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s Live in Salzburg series of recitals pretty much covers the highlights of the German song repertoire, but it is specifically his Schumann and Schubert that I find so exquisite. The flexibility of his voice was remarkable, and he also had such clarity of diction, evenness of tone throughout the range and such stunning colours.

We all know him as a great recording artist, but this shows he was just as good live.

On baritone Benjamin Luxon’s When I was one-and-twenty disc with David Willison at the piano, he sings Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad and Bredon Hill and then this beautiful mix of Gurney songs such as ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’, ‘In Flanders’ and ‘By a bierside’, which is one of the great recordings in my opinion.

Luxon has quite a rich voice with a beautiful roundness to it and he is a communicator through and through – it is like he is speaking to you.

I’ve been preparing Schubert’s Winterreise as I was supposed to be performing it in Barcelona at the beginning of 2021. I’ve been listening to all sorts of recordings of it – men, women, tenors,

Thefullscore countertenors – but the one that I can’t stop returning to is the baritone Thomas Allen’s. It’s very beautiful and probably the closest to how I myself would like to sing it. In general, whereas FischerDieskau has total ease, Allen has a more strident, strong voice that comes from the chest.

And also…

I’ve been enjoying reading Poems for a World Gone to Sh*t. It’s full of really amazing poetry, including excerpts from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, plus Philip Larkin, Emily Dickinson, Lord Byron and so on. One of my favourites is Soup Kitchens by the contemporary poet Hollie McNish, which is quite damning of the current state of life but written in a brilliant way.

James Newby’s debut disc ‘I wonder as I wander’ is out on BIS Records

Lucienne Renaudin Vary Trumpeter

I discovered Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos in a concert that I was part of earlier in the year, and I’ve listened to it so many times since.

I’ve been watching a performance

by Martha Argerich and Nicholas

READER’S CHOICE

Margaret Bevan Ilfracombe I was delighted to see Christopher Cook’s Composer of the Month feature on Adolphe Adam in the Christmas issue, not least as I had recently bought the new DVD of his Le Postillon de Lonjumeau, based on your glowing review a couple of months earlier. Why this opera isn’t better known is beyond me. What it lacks in drama, it more than makes up for in charm, memorable tunes and, above all, vocal acrobatics. In this performance, Michael Spyres is simply marvellous as the Postillon himself.

A real treat!

‘I love her musicality’: Amy Winehouse

Angelich on YouTube. There is so much I love about the piece: it’s majestic, poetic and so vivid.

Listening to this piece is a trip for me; it’s a bit like meditation and just incredibly special. I love it.

Amy Winehouse is one of my favourite artists; I love to watch her on YouTube, too. I love her phrasing and musicality – I don’t think an artist has ever moved me so much. When she’s on stage her interpretations are always different, and I love it when

she sings with just the guitar, especially ‘Back To Black’. I never got to see her live, but I recently worked with her drummer and we spoke a little bit about working with her, which was great.

I went to a concert in Paris just before the lockdown. The actor Gérard Depardieu was reinterpreting the songs of the famous French singer Barbara.

He sings and talks, so it combines music and theatre, and because the audience knows all the songs they all sing together. It was in a small hall, so it was very intimate and so powerful; I cried all the way through. It is my favouriteever concert experience, and there is a wonderful album of it too.

And also…

I’ve had a lot of spare time lately, so I’ve been reading a lot. It’s good to read about something exotic and to be able to escape while we’re all at home, though I usually I read when I travel by train or airplane for my concerts. I love thrillers and have just read The Whisperer by Donato Carrisi. It’s fiction – at least I hope it is, as it’s so horrible! I just love his books.

Lucienne Renaudin Vary’s ‘Piazzolla Stories’ is out on 26 February on Warner Classics

Our Choices The BBC Music Magazine team’s current favourites Oliver Condy Editor While editing Sophy Roberts’s wonderful piece on Siberian pianos (see p44), I was reminded of the time some years back when I listened to Borodin’s evocative tone poem In the Steppes of Central Asia while travelling on the TransMongolian railway. In just eight minutes, Borodin paints a vivid picture of a lonely caravan winding its way across the Gobi Desert, accompanied by the plodding hooves of horses and camels.

GETTY, GERARD COLLETT, SIMON FOWLER

Jeremy Pound Deputy editor My search for music with which to mark the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine takes me all the way back to 1798, when Edward Jenner first came up with the notion of vaccines in general. Rather aptly, this was the year that saw the premieres of Haydn’s Missa in Angustiis (‘Mass for troubled times’) and, more joyously, The Creation. I’ve long been a huge fan of conductor Christopher Hogwood’s recordings of both works, which burst

with energy, drama and, in the latter, sheer exuberance.

Alice Pearson Cover CD editor Passing by a tall tree covered in a flock of unusual and very vocal birds recently spurred me to have a long-overdue listen to Messiaen’s Oiseaux exotiques.

Inspired by the songs and stunning plumage of the exotic feathered fauna of India, China, Malaysia and America, Messiaen creates a fascinating soundworld with piano and small orchestra – an absolute treat for synaesthetes!

Michael Beek Reviews editor I’ve been spending more time on YouTube lately and I’m always amazed by what pops up. Most

recently I came across George Crumb’s Cello Sonata performed

by Yo-Yo Ma (left) at the US-China forum in 2011, which was fantastic. I also stumbled across a fascinating video about the Wanamaker Organ, which looms (very) large at Macy’s department store in Philadelphia.

Freya Parr Editorial assistant The dramatic bubbling winds in Mark Simpson’s Geysir have finally been captured in a world premiere recording, paired with its companion piece, Mozart’s Gran Partita. The Mozart is buoyant, light and generally lovely, but it’s Simpson’s eruption of a piece I turn to when I’m feeling despondent: eight joyful minutes of highly textured musical tension.

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Opinion

Richard Morrison Igor Stravinsky’s ability to adapt to his circumstances can inspire us all

I

guess I’m not the only one searching metaphorically for a rudder, a compass, a fair wind and a seaworthy vessel to get me through 2021.

The turmoil inflicted by COVID has cast doubt on all certainties – including, for musicians, the certainties of employment and the continuation of concert and operatic life. Where do we look for the inspiration to rebuild, refocus and regenerate after this catastrophic hiatus?

As chance would have it, one of 2021’s anniversaries points us in a helpful direction. Fifty years ago, in April 1971, Igor Stravinsky died. I remember it well.

I was a sixth-former who had already decided that, somehow or,other, I would make music the centre of my life.

Unluckily I attended a school that didn’t consider music a worthy academic subject. Such schools still exist, tragically. Nevertheless, an enthusiastic young music teacher did what he could to inspire us out of hours, as it were.

So on the day that Stravinsky died he invited a few of us round to his house, placed a pile of LPs on the table and gave us an impromptu illustrated tour of the composer’s life and works. Sustained by crisps and a party-can of a terrible, now-defunct beer called Watneys Red Barrel, we went from The Rite of Spring to The Soldier’s Tale to the neo-classical astringency of Oedipus Rex to bits of Stravinsky’s Hogarthian opera The Rake’s Progress and then onto his knotty late excursions into serialism. I can honestly say that in the half-century since then I have rarely had such a revelatory evening. It was as if a window had been opened onto 60 years of musical, political and social history.

Today I look at the thousands of music students who are just as eager, curious

and passionate as I was in 1971, but probably feeling desperately worried about continuing their training for a profession that seems more precarious than ever. I will offer just one piece of advice, and it is exactly the same as was offered to me at 16: listen, learn and be inspired by Stravinsky.

Be inspired, first, by how he dealt with tumultuous events. Yes, the pandemic has been a huge setback to anyone in music or music education.

But Stravinsky had to survive two world wars, the Russian Revolution

Stravinsky’s radical shifts of direction seem prophetic as well as opportunistic and the Great Depression. He spent nearly all his working years in exile, fleeing the Bolsheviks then the Nazis.

He constantly had to adapt to new circumstances, new surroundings, new patrons, new regimes.

He had to schmooze the rich – the likes of Coco Chanel, from whom he reputedly charmed 300,000 French francs to revive The Rite of Spring – yet also stay at the forefront of the avantgarde, making headlines and creating scandals. And he was decades ahead of his time in pioneering what today would be called multi-disciplinary collaborations with other geniuses: painters such as Picasso, choreographers such as Nijinsky and Balanchine, writers such as Auden and Cocteau. He was brilliant at ducking and weaving

between art forms, just as today’s young talents will have to be if they are to sustain careers in this fragmented, ultraeclectic era.

Then, of course, there was his music.

Back in 1971 some obituaries were fairly scathing about Stravinsky’s ‘chameleon’ ability to change his style completely every few years. His harshest critics compared him unfavourably to contemporaries such as Schoenberg and Messiaen – composers who basically evolved a single style that suited them and stuck with it.

Today, Stravinsky’s radical shifts of direction seem prophetic as well as opportunistic. In part, yes, he was responding pragmatically to changing conditions, especially in the 1920s. The huge orchestras he used for the great pre1914 ballets, for instance, simply weren’t economically viable after the carnage of the First World War. Hence his decision to use just a handful of instruments for The Soldier’s Tale.

But it wasn’t just about practicality.

Stravinsky saw more clearly than any other composer that the 20th century would be one of perpetual and often traumatic change, and he had the temperament and genius to ride those changes like a surfer riding a huge wave, rather than being swept away into irrelevance.

In the past year the musical world has been through traumatic change and there’s doubtless more to come. I just hope there are young musicians out there who take inspiration from the giant who died 50 years ago and conjure compelling masterpieces from the wreckage.

Richard Morrison is chief music critic and a columnist of The Times BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Evelyn Glennie

GreatestHits Dame Evelyn Glennie enjoys an international status matched by no other percussionist. As she releases a new disc of concertos written specially for her, she takes Claire Jackson on a guided tour of the instruments that have helped her to build her unique career PHOTOGRAPHY: RICHARD CANNON

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n industrial park on the outskirts of Cambridge is an unexpected base for the world’s leading solo percussionist. However, when your instrument collection comprises some 2,000 items, practicalities prevail. Over three decades, Evelyn Glennie has amassed a diverse range of percussive paraphernalia, from triangles to tamtams, tambourines to timpani. She’s also commissioned an entire body of repertoire: over 200 pieces, concertos included.

The scores and correspondence associated with these works are also held at Glennie HQ, where a small team is busy cataloguing the archive. Yet the first item that greets visitors is not a piece of percussion at all; it’s a shiny MV Agusta F4 motorbike – Glennie has held a motorcycle licence since 2001. It’s a reminder that this is a not a museum, but a working office, a usable storage space and a testament to a fast-moving, ceiling-smashing career.

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Evelyn Glennie Give it some stick: (left) a 19-year-old Evelyn Glennie with a marimba on the BBC series A Will To Win, 1984; (right) playing the snare drum, the instrument that sparked her passion; (far right) working her magic on the marimba in 2006

‘EVER SINCE MY FIRST pair of drumsticks I knew I’d be a collector,’ says Glennie as we enter an Aladdin’s Cave of glockenspiels, handbells and wood blocks.

‘This piece was made for the Tan Dun Water Percussion Concerto,’ she explains, selecting a dark purple two-piece from a rack of neatly hung stage outfits. It is the outfit she wore for the 2004 BBC Proms performance of the experimental work that requires the soloist to ‘play’ basins filled with water. ‘In the past, the soloists were men and they wore the usual suit and it didn’t mater when they got splashed.

This colour was chosen so that it didn’t go see-through when I got wet.

‘I haven’t kept everything, but it’s nice to see that the cataloguing is already proving useful. I had a student visit recently from Spain, where she is writing a thesis on the marimba. She was looking for some information on the John Metcalf concerto that was composed for me in 1991. There have been so many first performances that it’s helpful to have the detail noted down!’

As well as the concert programmes, photos and cuttings, there are also ‘workin-progress’ versions of scores that Glennie has worked on with the composers, often denoting interesting amendments. ‘I’ve kept the manuscripts as these often change,’ she explains. ‘For example, the original title for the John Corigliano concerto was Triple Play but the published version is Conjurer. The reason is that after the premiere, the composer said that the way my hands were working looked like a conjurer – so he renamed the concerto.’

Most archives of this nature tend to be put together once the artist is no longer around to endure the intense personal scrutiny. Sometimes, as in the case of Pavarotti, the process begins once it becomes known that the musician will 28

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pass on imminently. Pavarotti’s widow has spoken candidly about how the couple began to archive the tenor’s belongings, from the Hermès scarves to the celebrity communiqué, and the collection now forms part of the Luciano Pavarotti Museum. While macabre, the subject of archiving is important – many items of cultural interest have gone astray in innocent spring cleans. Nonetheless, it is mildly disconcerting to see a notable soloist’s historical innards laid out in this way, particularly when the figure in question is a youthful 55 year-old with – pandemic notwithstanding – a busy concert schedule. ‘I’m happy to be part of the process,’ Glennie reassures me. ‘I’m

‘My local music shop sold only pianos and organs – they had one drum!’ doing this to make sure the information is available when I’ve gone, but it’s a living collection that I will continue to add to.’

Though the entirety of the collection is fascinating, it is the instruments themselves, each with its own story to tell, that really command our conversation…

The snare drum We wander past an enormous tamtam and xylophone to the very back of the room.

Glennie pauses in front of a long row of snare drums and selects a modest-looking specimen. ‘This was my very first drum,’ she says. ‘My parents bought it for me when I was 13. I grew up on a farm just outside Aberdeen and the local music shop only sold pianos and organs. They had one drum – and this was it!’ She turns it over in her hands. ‘To be completely honest, I remember feeling quietly disappointed when I first saw it, having dreamed of those shiny, colourful snare drums.’ A peacock-blue drum winks down from the shelf above us. ‘That said, in a short time this instrument became an extension of my limbs and I played it every day. I still

feel fondness for it.’ She places it back alongside its fancier neighbours.

Glennie was born in 1965 and spent her childhood in rural Scotland. ‘My first teacher, Ron Forbes, was an army musician and he taught us to be sound creators first, then musicians, then instrumentalists.’ Forbes supported Glennie as she began to lose her hearing, helping the young percussionist to experiment with new ways of learning and thinking about sound. ‘We didn’t have much at school – two hand-tuned timpani and a little xylophone, as well as auxiliary instruments like bass drum, cymbals and triangle – but already I was hooked.’

The marimba It’s difficult to imagine when ensconced in such a varied (and valuable) instrument collection, but during the early stages of Glennie’s career access to percussion was not easy. We step away from the shelving units and move towards the free-standing

Italian style: percussionist Simone Rubino

Beating a path

GETTY, ALAMY, MARCO BORGGREVE

Five other leading percussionists

instruments. Glennie carefully peels away a cover to reveal a wooden mallet instrument. ‘This looks like a xylophone but is actually a marimba,’ she explains.

‘This and another marimba were bought on my behalf by the Musicians Benevolent Fund, along with the Beethoven Fund for Deaf Children. They were old BBC instruments that were no longer in use. I was about 15 or 16 and I treasured them as though my life depended on it. They are quite rickety but haven’t changed much since I took them on. I used them a lot in my early days.’

This marimba is smaller than today’s instruments. ‘Nowadays marimbas are five octaves, at least,’ she confirms. ‘This one is four octaves. In the library at the Royal Academy of Music there were two marimba concertos: one by Paul Creston, which fitted on a four-octave marimba and I played it to death! The other was by Robert Kurka, which needed extras, so I had to bring sections of it up an octave.’

The marimba has remained a favourite instrument of Glennie’s ever since. It seems incredible to think of a time before marimba concertos, but pre-Glennie, they were a rarity (more on that presently). The percussionist’s latest recording for Naxos is a compilation of concertos for mallet instruments, in which the marimba is a prominent fixture, alongside glockenspiel, vibraphone and xylophone. Performing alongside the City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong under Jean Thorel, Glennie once again proves that these instruments deserve their place in the concerto repertoire. Alexis Alrich’s Marimba Concerto and Ned Rorem’s Mallet Concerto receive their first recording (something else to add to the database), sandwiching Jenkin’s La Folia, an ode to the much-loved melody.

The timpani Today’s aspiring percussionists can hear the likes of Colin Currie, O Duo and

Colin Currie Another Scot, Currie was the first percussionist to reach the finals of BBC Young Musician of the Year (1994), was a BBC New Generation Artist from 2003-05 and is the founder of his own Colin Currie Group. Elliott Carter, Jennifer Higdon and Thea Musgrave have all written works for him.

Adrian Spillett In 1998, while a student at the Royal Northern College of Music, Adrian Spillett became the first percussionist to win BBC Young Musician of the Year. The following year he formed the ensemble 4-MALITY with which he has toured extensively. He has performed with several major UK orchestras.

Pei-Ching Wu A founder-member of the Ju Percussion Group, Wu has innovated marimba playing techniques involving up to six mallets. In 1999 she appeared with the Hungarian Amadinda Percussion Group in the Budapest Spring Festival and performed with pianist Martha Argerich in Taipei in 2001.

Simone Rubino The Italian (pictured) made a spectacular impression when he won the ARD-Musikwettbewerb in 2014, performing Avner Dorman’s Frozen in Time. He has recorded several albums, including 2019’s Water & Spirit for Sony.

O Duo Formed in 2001 by Owen Gunnell and Oliver Cox while studying at the Royal College of Music, O Duo have toured to glowing press reviews and have recorded two albums for Champs Hill.

Since 2018, Cox’s place in the duo has been filled by Toby Kearney.

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Evelyn Glennie

The best of Evelyn Glennie Five essential albums to explore James MacMillan Veni, Veni, Emmanuel etc.

Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Jukka-Pekka Saraste RCA G010001846447Z Though not Glennie’s debut album, it was this premiere recording of James MacMillan’s riotous and exuberant showpiece, Veni, Veni, Emmanuel, that truly launched her international career.

Martland Street Songs; plus works

by Klatzow, David Horne etc.

The King’s Singers RCA G010000245012M Steve Martland, something of a brutalist maverick among British composers, showed a more urbane side to his creativity in this remarkable collaboration with Glennie and The King’s Singers.

Erkki-Sven Tüür Symphony No. 4, ‘Magma’ Estonian National Symphony Orchestra/ Paavo Järvi Erato 385 7852 One of Glennie’s most charismatic outings, with what BBC Music Magazine’s reviewer described as ‘an intoxicating physical score’, its awe-inspiring climaxes caught in demonstration sound.

John Corigliano Conjurer Albany Symphony Orchestra/David Alan Miller Naxos 8.559757 Another remarkable showpiece for Glennie, and also for the family of percussion instruments, of which each branch – wood, metal and skin – is showcased individually.

Ecstatic Drumbeat: Works for Percussion and Chinese Orchestra With Tzu-You Lin, Tsung-Hsin Hsieh et al BIS BIS-SACD 1599 Glennie has frequently collaborated with percussionists from non-Western musical traditions; here is one of her more recent and most seductively recorded results.

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Twincussion. If they can’t get to one of Glennie’s concerts, they can listen to her 40-odd recordings. But when Glennie was starting out, there was no such thing as a solo percussionist – not least a female solo percussionist. Definitely not a female profoundly deaf solo percussionist.

Both the Royal College of Music and the Academy expressed reservations about admitting a deaf musician. At the final hour, the Academy changed its mind and Glennie moved to London.

‘Everything was geared towards percussionists becoming orchestral musicians,’ she recalls. ‘We didn’t play anything exotic. We played timpani!’

Lessons on more complex orchestral percussion parts such as those by Penderecki and Lutos awski ignited her interest in how percussive timbres could be organised. She also gained the support of visiting tutor James Blades, a legend among percussion players. ‘James had worked closely with Britten and Stravinsky and given advice on percussion parts. He was in his eighties by the time I studied with him and it was an enormous boost to have someone of his calibre believe in me. He had a vision of what my future could look like and told me that I could be a soloist.’

Glennie eventually bought some instruments from Blades – the tamtam we passed earlier had belonged to him.

She shows me the timpani bearing the inscription ‘James Blades’. ‘He also told me to always put my name on my instruments,’ she smiles.

Having the support of a well-respected elder gave Glennie the confidence boost she needed to take the next – somewhat controversial – step. ‘First-year pupils had the opportunity to put their name forward to perform a concerto. Naturally I thought I’d do the Creston, as that was all that was open to me, so I applied – and I got a note back saying that it wouldn’t be fair for the orchestra to learn a concerto that they’d never play again. I decided that the way to get around this was to commission a piece by a student composer, so I asked Kenneth Dempster, who was there at the same time as me. I applied – and the principal David Lumsden called me to his office.’

Rather than berate the first-year, Lumsden echoed Blades’s encouragement and even attended Glennie’s performance.

‘For a three-hour practice session, I had to hire a van and a rehearsal room’ It sparked her lifelong commitment to commissioning new music. ‘I realised that I needed repertoire, so I got the British Composers Yearbook and sent letters to all of those I thought might be interested.

Naturally, I got replies saying, “Yes, I am interested – what’s the fee?”. I hadn’t even thought of that!’ Since those early days, Glennie has co-created a body of work for solo percussionists. ‘My aim has always been that orchestras have at least one percussion focus per season – high-quality music that they believe in, like they would a violin concerto.’

The gamelan A major breakthrough was the concerto James MacMillan wrote for Glennie to premiere at the BBC Proms in 1992. Veni, Veni, Emmanuel propelled her on to the world stage – and there was no longer any doubt that percussion could be a solo discipline. However, it wasn’t only artistic reasons that had prevented percussionists from having solo careers. ‘After the premiere of Veni, Veni, Emmanuel in 1992

Mallet moments: Evelyn Glennie, plus conga; (left) playing the timpani in 1994; (opposite) James Blades was an early inspiration

– the first percussion concerto premiere of the Proms, following on from the first percussion concerto performance in 1989 – I vividly remember sitting down after that performance in the dressing room and saying to myself that things couldn’t go on the way they were,’ she says. ‘I was living in a one-bedroom flat in London.

All my instruments were in a storage space in Wembley. To practise, I had to hire a rehearsal room and a van – it took all day for a three-hour session. Most practice was done alone with the score, in my head.

When I was about 26, I decided to move out of London and came here [Cambridge].’

It was another bold move and one that paid off – the premieres continued.

In 1997, Glennie was back at the Proms for another percussion concerto first performance, this time by Jonathan Harvey. Dotted around the room are pieces of an even bigger instrument. ‘There are 27 parts to this gamelan,’ she explains. ‘It was made in Indonesia, inspired by the works for gamelan and Western percussion written for me by Neil Sorrell. I asked for it to be tuned in both Indonesian and Western scales because I wanted to play it alongside the marimba and vibraphone.

The instrument maker kept asking me whether I was sure! I used pieces of this gamelan for the Harvey concerto.’

BRIDGEMAN

The aluphone Alongside the ‘serious’ percussion instruments lie a dozen wooden frogs with sticks in their mouths. These can be drawn across the protruding spines to create a ‘ribbit’ noise, or struck as wooden blocks. ‘It’s not about how expensive or inexpensive something is, it’s about using your imagination,’ says Glennie.

‘I’m forever going into antique shops or toy stores and seeing things that might be

useful for a particular sound.’ And if you can’t find a specific timbre? Commission your own instrument! At the front of the collection sits a row of connecting silver bells. ‘This is one of my most recent instruments; it was used at the Olympics opening ceremony in 2012.’ She plays a few notes and an eerie, tingling sound fills the room. ‘We wanted a new instrument to represent the new athletes.’ The aluphone was the centrepiece of Caliban’s Dream, which she played as well as leading a 965-strong ensemble of drummers.

The armonica Additions to the collection arrive on a regular basis. ‘Can you guess what this is?’ she asks, gesturing to what looks like a large wooden box. ‘A clavichord?’ I venture. Glennie opens the lid to reveal a series of glasses. ‘It’s an armonica. It had been used as a coffee table for many years – it came from a farm in Scotland.

What’s so special is that all the glasses are

glazed and pre-tuned; you just put water in there.’ She indicates the surrounding cups. This is one of just a few known examples of such an instrument; it’s safe to say that the armonica’s days as a coffee table are over.

As well as the instruments and costumes there is a cabinet of prizes, but Glennie modestly waves these aside when asked for details. Among her many accolades are 15 honorary doctorates and an OBE, a damehood and appointment to the Order of the Companions of Honour in 2017. A cartoon in the downstairs loo best sums up her impressive CV. It depicts Queen Elizabeth II poring over a newspaper cutting announcing the musician’s latest award. ‘OMG…,’ shrieks Her Majesty; ‘I’m gonna meet Evelyn Glennie’.

Evelyn Glennie’s new album of concertos by Alexis Alrichs, Karl Jenkins and Ned Rorem (Naxos) and her recording of Christian Lindberg’s ‘Liverpool Lullabies’ and ‘Waves of Wollongong’ (BIS Records) are out now BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Emmanuelle Haïm

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As conductors, we have to be as strong as we can to fight for the existence of music

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THE BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE INTERVIEW

Emmanuelle Haïm

‘between the raindrops’ – of lockdowns and restrictions. Last October, she convened a residency at the opera house in Lille, Le Concert d’Astrée’s second home, based on performances of a shortened version of André Campra’s opera Idoménée.

Unlike the more familiar Italian versions PHOTOGRAPHY: MIKE OWEN of the story, including Mozart’s composed 70 years later, Campra’s opera ends as every thought the world was collapsing, French tragedy does: properly tragically. that music was going to disappear,’ ‘Of course we kill Idamante. Because we are says Emmanuelle Haïm. She’s barbarians compared to the Italians,’ Haïm at home in Paris, the hub of her life as jokes. ‘They want the lieto fine, the happy founder of the early music ensemble ending, but we want it bloody.’

Le Concert d’Astrée and as a conductor But putting on any operatic performance whose international career takes her to – even a reduced version with a socially the Philharmonics of Berlin, Vienna distanced orchestra, choir and soloists – to and New York. And to Korea, where she a one third-sized audience in the theatre should be conducting Haydn’s The Seasons was a challenge. ‘We had the orchestra on instead of talking to me over Zoom. As the stage and I had everyone behind me, with crisis hit in March 2020 and caused the the singers performing at the front’, along tide of cancellations in her diary, she felt with provisions for the ‘dangerous people’ very down. ‘I felt the absence of music so of the winds with their pesky aerosol strongly and it was hard to keep hoping. production. The overwhelming reaction But now I am fighting and am more able to from the audience proved it was worth the imagine that something will happen again.’ effort. As Haïm says, for all the desperation Haïm’s life in recent months has proved of the times, she feels more strongly than what’s possible even ‘entre les gouttes’ – ever the necessity of the arts: ‘Yes, we As her ensemble Le Concert d’Astrée celebrates 21 years, the French conductor tells Tom Service of her undimmed passion for bringing Baroque music to a much wider audience

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GETTY, STEPHANE C

Leading light: (right) Häim in 2018 conducting the New York Phil; (far right) with soprano Natalie Dessay and countertenor Lawrence Zazzo in 2011 after Handel’s Giulio Cesare at Paris’s Opéra Garnier

need food, yes, we need our homes and everything else to survive, but we need more: we need music, we need books, we need to meet other people. And especially as conductors, we absolutely have to be as strong as we can to fight for the existence of music. Not only for us – for everyone else.’

They were lucky in Lille, because their performances fell exactly in the weeks of relative freedom between the ‘raindrops’ of France’s lockdowns. But these performances prove a bigger point about Haïm’s work with Le Concert d’Astrée.

She and her musicians have made their 20 years of working together not only a success story of international touring and garlanded recordings, from Handel to Monteverdi to Purcell, as well as the French Baroque traditions she has been steeped in ever since her work in the 1990s as a harpsichordist for William Christie’s ensemble Les Arts Florissants; she and Le Concert d’Astrée have also made longterms relationships with the communities of Lille, using their repertoire as a catalyst for creative connection and social cohesion.

But working with music that’s three or four centuries old, a repertoire that’s foreign to non-specialist musicians, let alone the communities of today’s Lille, might seem like a difficult place to start.

That’s not how Haïm sees it. ‘Our repertoire must not be considered elitist,’ she says. ‘It has to be alive and thought of not as a piece of museum art, looked at from far away and treated super respectfully; no, you have to try it, you have to embody it. For me, there is always a way to bring people in. I always try to choose music that talks to me. I have to imagine that, if it moves me, it does that to others as well.’

You can see the success of previous projects online, as choirs of schoolchildren and amateur singers make the music of the French Baroque their own. But ‘building bridges’, as Haïm puts it, is one thing before the pandemic, when Le Concert d’Astrée’s musicians could take their work to prisons, maternity wards and schools in the economically deprived areas of the city where their work is embedded. In the era of social distancing, much of that work has had to be postponed or moved online.

And yet she and her musicians have found a way to keep ‘embodying’ their repertoire, recording Baroque choruses part by part, 34

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for all the schools in the north of France to learn from and perform themselves.

The Lille projects show how Haïm’s advocacy for the repertoire she loves is the opposite of an ivory tower search for ideals of historical verisimilitude. Instead, as every performance or recording of hers proves, it’s the intensity of the musical and emotional embodiment that matters to

‘Our repertoire has to be alive, and not thought of as a piece of museum art’ her, whether she’s revealing the expressive directness of Campra’s sacred music or the ferocious drama of Handel’s cantatas.

That’s the same blazing inspiration that drives her work with modern instrument orchestras around the world. Given the myopic narrowness of so many orchestras’ repertoire when it comes to music composed pre-1750 – for whom playing Handel or Bach, let alone Rameau or Lully, is now virtually terra incognita – surely she’s in a position in which she’s teaching these players how the music goes, whether they’re the Berlin Philharmonic or the LA Phil? ‘There may be times when I introduce music to them, when I know it better than them: French Baroque music is not known by a lot of musicians; they don’t have the opportunity to play it. I’m asked mainly to do my repertoire with these orchestras, but I think you have to come to these great orchestras with humility. Because they know a lot of things better than me, too.’

She admits compromises working with modern instrument orchestras who have less experience in improvising the Baroque ornamentation that her players in Le Concert d’Astrée have so thrillingly at their fingertips, and says that ‘it’s really difficult to play notes inégales’ – those swinging, unequal, infectious rhythms of 17th- and 18th-century music – ‘with a heavy [modern] bow; it’s like asking a dancer who’s used to working on pointes to dance in a completely different way.’ Yet she compares the orchestral cultures of Vienna or Berlin to the unique ensembles of earlier centuries. ‘We have descriptions of the orchestra in Mannheim, how their crescendos were like the wind; or at Versailles, they talked about a “forest of lutes”’ – all those necks of the lutes swaying to the movement of their players – ‘and we haven’t really a clue what all of this really sounded like. And today, each orchestra has its own personality, the unique way they communicate with each other.’

For Haïm, the continuum of music history isn’t an intellectual divertissement, but a visceral reality. ‘When you play

Emmanuelle Haïm

Outstanding: Haïm and Le Concert d’Astrée

Le Concert d’Astrée 21 years of Baroque success

the overture to Rameau’s Naïs, which is so powerful’ – it has an eruptive timpani explosion in the middle section – ‘there’s a link between the timpani player of the time, and the player today, whatever their experience, via the language of the composer.’ And she remembers a performance with the Berlin Philharmonic in music from another Rameau opera, Dardanus. ‘In the “Calme des sens”, when Dardanus falls asleep, the quality of their playing in the pianissimo echoes of the music, the way they were tasting it’ – one of Haïm’s multi-sensory descriptions – ‘was incredibly moving; they hadn’t played the piece for a very long time, but they were enjoying it so much.’

Haïm returns to another of her essential musical passions next year – all being well for Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas in Geneva in April. It’s the first time she will conduct a staged production of a piece she recorded in 2004 after just three performances. ‘We should have had some concerts in London, but I was too intimidated. I thought, non, they will just think, who is this French girl coming to do Dido?’ That was London’s loss,

then as now. In Geneva, she’s working with the composer and viola da gamba player Atsushi Sakai, making interpolations in Purcell’s score, with sonic visions of dream and nightmare that will dissolve and reconfigure the music. She is ecstatic about Purcell: ‘I love him so deeply: such a genius, so young; his harmonies are so unbelievable, so unexpected.’

It’s that fierce passion for the music she loves the most that burns through Haïm’s performances, stripping the centuries away between Purcell, Campra or Monteverdi and our time to an invisible membrane: their world becomes ours in the epochdissolving power of her music-making.

And it’s that intensity and commitment that sustains her through the pandemic, as musical culture in France, and everywhere else, deals with what she says is the ‘tsunami of consequences we are going to have even more now. We have to go through it with energy and optimism, to drive us on to be able to do more.’

A DVD of Rameau’s Les Boréades, featuring Haïm conducting Le Concert d’Astrée and Opéra de Dijon, is out in March on Warner

2021 marks Le Concert d’Astrée’s 21st birthday, but how much it will be able to celebrate depends, of course, on the pace of the coronavirus vaccine roll-out. When it does, however, the ensemble will have plenty to raise a glass to.

When Emmanuelle Haïm founded her group in 2000, she may have had little expectation that just three years later, it would be named as Best Ensemble of the Year in France’s prestigious Victoires de la Musique Classique awards. But the ensemble was in the best hands, as Haïm previously performed as a continuo player in William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants and learnt the conducting trade with Simon Rattle.

Comprised of singers and instrumentalists who specialise in the music of the 17th and 18th centuries, Le Concert d’Astrée spends much of its time performing opera from the period, both at its two home bases in France and on tour. It has also made a number of recordings, either on its own or sometimes helping to showcase major talents such as soprano Natalie Dessay or countertenor Philippe Jaroussky. And those recordings regularly hit the jackpot.

2007’s recording on Erato of Handel’s Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, for instance, won the BBC Music Magazine Opera Award, while Handel: Italian cantatas with singers Sabine Devieilhe and Léa Desandre (also Erato) was shortlisted for the Vocal Award last year. Elsewhere, five-star reviews have become the norm.

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His Majesty’s pleasure The Palace of Versailles’s opera house wasn’t completed until 1770, by which time revolution was afoot. Paul Riley charts its chequered history

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rguably no monarch was more enthusiastic in taking centre-stage than Louis XIV of France. And quite literally centre-stage. As a seasoned dancer in the Court ballets, he danced some 80 roles – most famously of all that of the rising sun in Le Ballet Royal de la Nuit. It was a role that the 15-year old aspired to live up to throughout his reign, and it supplied his soubriquet: The Sun King. But although the theatre-loving Louis included plans for a great opera house 36

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‘‘

Lully’s opera was chosen to give Marie Antoinette a crash course in French operatic manners

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in his ambitions for expanding the palace at Versailles, he didn’t live to see the fulfilment of his musical dreams. And so it would fall to his successor to witness the grand curtain-up. There was an incentive to get it built, too. The theatre had to be ready for the nuptials of the Dauphin and Archduchess Marie Antoinette of Austria in 1770. Which it was, just. And so, along with Beethoven, it had a 250th birthday to celebrate last year, a celebration that, for pandemic reasons, has been carried forward into 2021.

MENG PHU, ALAMY, GETTY

Opera at Versailles

It’s not that Versailles was without its performance spaces, but they lacked room for the sort of stage machinery necessary for the grand spectacles of opera and ballet. Lavish entertainments were housed in specially constructed pop-ups, spaces designed to be dismantled after use. And they were not necessarily modest affairs either. The gilded papier-mâché structure created for the premiere of Molière’s George Dandin comfortably seated in excess of 1,000 spectators. For something more permanent, Louis XV turned to his favourite architect, Ange-Jacques Gabriel, who designed Paris’s Place de la Concorde. Gabriel sent an assistant to see what Italy had to offer before settling on a semi-elliptical layout providing maximum visibility and acoustic clarity.

Building work began in 1766 – the roof went on three years later while the sumptuous interior was finished just a month before the royal wedding. Apollo, the sun god and god of music and dance, loomed large in sculptor Augustin Pajou’s decorative scheme, with reliefs depicting

Royal roles: (clockwise from main) the Ensemble Marguerite Louise performs Charpentier; Louis XIV in Le Ballet Royal de la Nuit; Racine’s play Athalie at the Opéra Royal de Versailles, 1770; Marie Antoinette

operatic characters to animate the blues, golds and marbled wood of the walls. Topping it all was a giant ceiling painting by Durameau depicting Apollo fashioning the crowns with which to honour the ‘illustrious men of the arts’.

First to christen the new theatre and greet the newly-weds was Lully’s Persée, a lavish production featuring 95 singers, 80 dancers, 15 soloists, an instrumental band of 80 musicians, five lavish sets and over 500 costumes. Coincidentally, it had been written in 1682, the year in which Louis XIV had made Versailles his official residence. It’s thought Lully’s opera was chosen to give Marie Antoinette a crash course in French operatic manners – after all, her inclinations favoured Italian and German music and Voltaire warned that ‘she must not be made to yawn’. A forlorn hope. One contemporary noted that ‘Madame la Dauphine did not seem to take pleasure in it’. And the splendidly named Baron Grimm deemed the piece ‘magnificently boring’.

Included in the festivities, too, were Rameau’s Castor et Pollux; dramas by Racine and Voltaire; and a specially composed ballet which got equally short shrift from the hard-toplease Baron: ‘miserable, absurd, tedious and completely ridiculous’. Possibly he was more enthusiastic about the music chosen for the wedding of the Comte d’Artois three years later.

Tastes were changing. Lully and Rameau seemed increasingly old hat compared to Gossec, Grétry and Marie Antoinette’s erstwhile harpsichord teacher, Gluck. Indeed Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide given in May 1782, and Armide, two years later, would be the last two major productions to be staged before the revolution.

In part this was because the Opéra Royal had never been intended as a repertory house with a changing procession of regular performances.

It was a theatre for courtly high days and holidays. And it had been designed to multitask as a banqueting-hall-cum-ballroom.

Neither designation came cheap. For staged BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Gild hall: the lavish interior of Versailles’s Opéra Royal; (below) Laurent Brunner

performances, endlessly replenished candles illuminated the auditorium and foyer while, concealed behind the set flaps, 3,000 oil lamps bathed the scenery in light. The musicians had to be brought in from Paris, the star singers often demanding ‘sweeteners’; and despite some cunning machinery to raise the orchestra floor, a vast army of costly carpenters was required to repurpose the space for feasting and dancing.

Ironically, a banquet and operatic air conspired to seal the theatre’s pre-revolutionary fate when, on 1 October 1789, the royal bodyguards threw a dinner for the Flanders Regiment – newly detailed to Versailles to reinforce the palace’s security. Presciently dubious about ‘looking in’ on the proceedings, the King, Queen and Dauphin were nevertheless present when cries of ‘vive le roi’ accompanied an impromptu rendition of ‘O Richard, mon roi, l’universe t’abandonne’ from Grétry’s Richard Cœur-de-lion. When word got out, the aria became the rallying cry of the monarchists. The royal family, meanwhile, was hauled back to Paris, and the protracted march to the guillotine had begun.

But what of Versailles and its now mothballed opera house? In 1793 the revolutionary government decreed that all the royal property

‘‘

Concealed between the set flaps, 3,000 oil lamps bathed the scenery in light

’’

in the palace be auctioned, and over the course of a year anything from furniture to kitchen utensils was parcelled up into 17,000 lots. The abandoned buildings became store houses. And hidden in a secret cache below the orchestra, the musicians’ chairs and music stands remained forgotten, to be rediscovered during later renovations.

Now began the most chequered part of the theatre’s story. Not until the restoration of the monarchy did things begin to look up. As part of his plans to reimagine Versailles as a museum, a gift to the French people dedicated to ‘all the glories of France’, Louis-Philippe had the opera house redecorated and updated. Moreover, a special opening gala suggested that the theatre might be back in business. That was not to reckon on the running costs, however, which had not gone away. A couple of glittering state banquets including one for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert followed perhaps the only notable musical event of the period.

In 1844 Berlioz had presided over a concert for which he’d mustered over 1,000 performers and an audience eight times that number. Now he was prevailed upon to conduct a benefit at the Opéra Royal. On 29 October 1848 (with BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Opera at Versailles Fit for a king: Grétry’s Richard Cœurde-lion at Versailles’s Royal Opera; (below) Christophe Rousset

Party guest: Jordi Savall

A royal celebration 2021’s anniversary events There were two causes for celebration at Versailles last year, both colliding in a gala evening on 16 May. It was 250 years to the day since the Royal Opera first flung open its doors, and 350 years since Louis XIV granted a patent to the Académie Royal de Musique, a company that soon expanded to include the Royal Academy of Dance. The pandemic had other ideas, however.

Salvaged from last year’s cancelled programme is Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, with its comedy-ballet to a score

by Lully. Christophe Coin will conduct it in June while Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo is performed in July by Jordi Savall and Le Concert des Nations. Rarities

by Campra, Sacrati and Desmarest are spliced with Handel’s Orlando and Cavalli’s Egisto. But the Baroque doesn’t have the stage to itself. In May, Case Scaglione conducts the Orchestre national d’Île-deFrance in Mahlers Ninth, and in June, Wagner’s Die Walküre leapfrogs over Das Rheingold (relocated to 2022). Sébastien Rouland spearheads the forces of the Saarland National Theatre. en.chateauversaillesspectacles.fr 40

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revolution in the air once more), he assembled 400 musicians for a programme of Beethoven, Gluck, Rossini and Weber. Not forgetting himself, there was the ‘Grand fête’ from Roméo et Juliette, the Marche Hongroise and, for his own orchestration of Weber’s Invitation to the Dance, he enlisted 18 harpists. ‘The takings,’ he wrote, ‘were huge, and we had had to turn away 500 people.’

Turning away crowds eager to catch a performance was not, however, going to be an issue for the next 100 years and more as things turned predominantly political. First came the Franco-Prussian War during which the German army, laying siege to Paris, occupied the palace. With a nuanced sense of pageant, the Prussian King William I had himself crowned Kaiser in the great Hall of Mirrors.

And when the Germans left in 1871, the theatre became home to the French Assembly, making Versailles technically the French capital for the duration until the Assembly and Paris were reunited in 1879.

Not until after World War II did major refurbishment restore the theatre to its original 1770 glory – reinstating the ceiling painting and original colour scheme. Ongoing restoration continued into the 21st century with painstaking work on the backstage areas.

It’s a theatre that has long fired the imagination of harpsichordist and director of Les Talens Lyriques, Christophe Rousset. He brought his

grandmother to Versailles at the age of ten to see Puccini’s Tosca.

‘Even as a child I was fascinated by the aesthetic,’ he recalls. ‘It woke my imagination to wonder what had gone on in the palace in the past. When you conduct there you really touch the spirit of the place, and it touches you. And when I perform Lully or Rameau, I’m not relying on a purely musical experience. Everything in Versailles makes the music clearer. It’s about the whole ambience including the gardens. Just as you might notice a detail, a window, or perhaps a chimney, so it is with the music. You feel the size is just right for such refined music.’

Over the past decade the house has powered into action, notching up more productions than in all the previous 240 years combined. Driving the Opéra Royal’s new-found head of steam is director of Château de Versailles Spectacle, Laurent Brunner. ‘An historic theatre must be respected,’ he insists, ‘and performing music from the time of its construction seems to me essential. Versailles Opera is the only theatre whose programme largely consists of music composed between the birth of opera and the French Revolution. Where other companies start with Mozart, I do the opposite, putting together programmes that end with him. Versailles itself is a museum, but its Opéra is a place of living spectacle.’ Sometime plaything of kings, emperors and state, L’Opéra Royal is a theatre whose egalitarian time has surely come.

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Gold bars: (left and above) Stravinsky’s signed photo to Bernstein’s assistant Jack Gottlieb; (right) Ballets Russes programmes; (below) a cigarette card of Enrico Caruso; (opposite) a first edition of Haydn’s Creation from 1800; a Gershwin-signed score of Porgy and Bess

A memorabilia occasion Interest in classical music antiques and collectibles has soared in recent years, discovers Jeremy Pound, as he contemplates joining in the fun

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t’s that moment on BBC’s Antiques Roadshow that we all wait for. After the expert has inspected and appraised the ornate vase, Victorian brooch or Chinese gong in front of them, at last comes the revelation of – expectant pause – how much it’s worth. Cue a delighted grin on the face of the owner or, as often as not, the fixed smile that hides a sense of deep disappointment. Whatever the verdict, it all makes for a good Sunday evening’s viewing.

Thanks partly, though not entirely, to the likes of Antiques Roadshow and its TV bedfellows such as Bargain Hunt, Antiques Road Trip and Cash in the Attic, our enthusiasm for antiques and collectibles has soared in recent years. And, explains Duncan McCoshan, a cataloguer at rare books specialists Peter Harrington, music 42

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memorabilia is no exception. ‘There’s definitely been a growth in interest in all aspects of music,’ he says. ‘This reflects a trend across the industry.

With regards to books in particular, it has been driven by the likes of Harry Potter first editions, which always make news.’

Music’s Potter-style headline grabbers tend to be the original handwritten manuscripts that occasionally surface in someone’s loft or in a forgotten pile of papers in a dusty library.

They, of course, are worth huge amounts. The more day-to-day world of classical musical memorabilia and collectibles revolves around items valued from as little as £50 upwards. Nor does beginning one’s own collection necessarily involve spending a day at an auction house, nose buried in a catalogue. There are specialist dealers

WWW.PETERHARRINGTON.CO.UK

Musical collectibles

who offer them for purchase either in person or online – if you have the funds, you can indeed click ‘Add to basket’ for, say, a photo signed by a legendary soprano or a rare first edition score.

Smaller collectibles at the lower end of the price range include cigarette cards such as those issued by WD & HO Wills in the 1910s – for a smartly mounted card of, for instance, Enrico Caruso or Liszt, you can expect to pay around £75 at a specialist dealer. A quick hunt around the web may well show the same cards at lower prices, though it’s important to bear in mind the condition they’re in. ‘Cigarette cards are a nice way to get into collecting,’ says McCoshan.

‘Wills produced a whole series of cards featuring conductors, composers and performers – you get the likes of Pergolesi and Handel alongside, say, Balfe, who has become rather forgotten about.

Rarity plays a part in their price, as with baseball cards. Caruso may be fairly common, but if you have Adelina Patti, who’s a lot rarer, that will have a big impact on the value of your collection.’

Rarity alone doesn’t make an item valuable, says McCoshan: ‘You can, after all, have a rare first edition that nobody wants to buy, and you’re never going to sell Cabinet Making in Wiltshire as readily as Harry Potter.’ There are, it seems, no cast-iron rules as to what makes a collectible worth a hefty sum, though age and condition do

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If you really want to push the boat out, there’s D UVW HGLWLRQ of Haydn’s The Creation for £12,500

’’

have an impact, as does a famous signature. And some items simply come in and out of fashion.

Provenance, though, does play an important part, says McCoshan: ‘This refers to the chain of association and ownership that an item has gone through. We currently have, for example, a photograph of Stravinsky that is inscribed “To Jack Gottlieb, my best greetings, Sincerely, I. Stravinsky, Hollywood Feb. 1960”. This gives it a great musical association, as Gottlieb was Leonard Bernstein’s assistant. If it just said “To Dan, from Igor” it would be of much less interest.’

That signed Stravinsky photo will set you back £1,850. For a collection of eight lavishly illustrated Ballets Russes souvenir programmes or a copy of Porgy and Bess signed by George and Ira Gershwin, author DuBose Heyward and director Rouben Mamoulian you’ll need to fish deeper down the back of the sofa – these cost £7,500 and £8,500 respectively. Or to really push the boat out, try a first edition score of Haydn’s The Creation, published by the composer himself in 1800, for £12,500. ‘You don’t bump into something like this every day,’ says McCoshan.

‘What’s particularly nice about this copy is that it includes the list of the score’s subscribers. That makes it even more special.’

But let’s not appear too shallow here. The joy of collecting music memorabilia is not just about monetary worth – they are often exquisitely crafted, have unique intellectual value or simply have an important personal connection. In fact, as someone who has been in the business for 40 years, McCoshan says that he can still get ‘just as excited by something that’s worth 50 quid as I can about something costing several thousand’.

The interest of the BBC Music Magazine editorial team has been duly piqued. Come the end of lockdown, plans are afoot to put that interest to practical use. Watch this space.

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A grand adventure For three years, Sophy Roberts crossed Russia in search of its pianos, each with a connection to its country’s tragic history and cultural soul PHOTOGRAPHY: MICHAEL TUREK

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n 2015, I spent a few happy weeks staying with friends in Mongolia’s Orkhon Valley near Karakorum, the site of the historic capital of Genghis Khan’s colossal former empire, not far from the border with Siberia.

My friends – a German filmmaker, Christopher Giercke, his Mongolian wife, Enke, and their three children – live in the valley during the warmer months in a tented camp on the fenceless steppe. The landscape is empty, but by no means barren. In the velvet folds of the grasslands, you become totally present. You can hear every sound: the yaks grazing, the river 44

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running, the crackle of thousands of insects in the dry summer grass.

My family and I were not the only guests that year. Our friends also had a musician staying, a Mongolian pianist called Odgerel Sampilnorov.

She had worked as a music teacher to Giercke’s children and others in the local community.

Recognising her talent, Giercke had helped Sampilnorov secure nine years of study at a conservatory in Perugia in Italy. She was now one of Mongolia’s foremost pianists, whose talent I witnessed in the evenings when she would settle herself before the battered Yamaha baby

Siberian pianos Land and Cs: (clockwise from far left) Tobolsk’s domes above the citadel walls; president of the Siberian Piano Tuners Association, Vladimir Biryukov; the ger in Mongolia where pianist Odgerel Sampilmorov, pictured below, played; (bottom, far left) the author on the Trans-Siberian Railway

grand in the felted ger, and play. It was magical to watch this intimate gathering – including a local shaman, champion archer and herder children – fall silent as they listened to Busoni’s transcription of Bach’s Chaconne floating up with the woodsmoke through an opening in the roof. But Giercke wasn’t satisfied: the instrument’s sound wasn’t what it should have been. During a recital one evening, he leaned over and whispered his frustration in my ear: ‘We must find her one of the lost pianos of Siberia!’

It was those words – and the poetic space they opened up – which unleashed a three-year book project in Russia. I became obsessed by the story of how pianos had ended up in Siberia, in a place less known for its music than its dark reputation as the world’s largest prison without a roof.

From 1801 to 1917, more than a million subjects were banished to Siberia under the Tsarist exile system; from 1929 to 1953, an estimated 2,749,163 forced labourers died in the Soviet Gulag. But that horrifying past, shadowing every day I spent in Russia, was only part of Siberia’s history. Through my search for a piano, I also uncovered a profound connection between the instrument and this Russian hinterland,

“

I began to appreciate the role the piano held among the early wave of Russians headed east

’’

beginning when ‘pianomania’ took hold of St Petersburg and Moscow in the 19th century.

A story started to form as I traced European Russia’s fascination with the instrument. It seemed to me wonderful and absurd: the idea of dragging such an unwieldy instrument (and one so symbolic of the European bourgeoisie) into the snowy taiga where the indigenous people only traditionally carry what they can fit on the back of a sledge. In hunting down an instrument for my friend, I began to realise I’d be able to tell the history of the object in a place that held me in its thrall as I ventured from the Ural Mountains all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

It was a daunting task, not least because of the scale (I went by Anton Chekhov’s description: his ‘Siberia’ of 1892 comprised a vast region covering an 11th of the world’s land surface, stretching from the Urals city of Ekaterinburg to ‘Goodness Knows Where’). The climate proved formidable, with my travels in winter sometimes taking me into temperatures tipping to 20 degrees below. In summer, I suffered an extreme allergic reaction to the mosquitoes unleashed in the thaw. But every time I might have worried that I was embarking on an act of madness, a story would emerge – a tale of solace, hidden under a piano’s lid. It was all so movingly human: the loves lost, the passions remembered, the Gulag prisoner who practised on a keyboard her fellow prisoners had carved into the side of her wooden bunk.

I stumbled upon letters, custom inventories and fascinating archives kept by piano tuners.

I found stories in the individual serial numbers inscribed into an instrument – was the Steinway concert grand, serial number 45731, a survivor of the Siege of Leningrad? Was the pre-Revolution Mühlbach the instrument belonging to the French concert pianist who ended up in a Gulag?

– as well as newspaper clippings, including a 19th-century advertisement for an upcoming visit of a piano tuner travelling all the way from Kiev. It was fascinating to me, that there was enough demand for him to bother braving the bumpy Great Siberian Trakt. His destination?

A Siberian town of tea merchants on the border with Mongolia, over 3,000 miles from his home.

The more time I spent with my feet on the ground, the more I appreciated the role the piano held among the early wave of Russians headed east – all because of the Europeanising influence of Catherine the Great, who began a craze by ordering a piano anglais from Zumpe in London in 1774 (it survived the Second World War in the basement of Russia’s largest opera BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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house, in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk). When Catherine’s daughter-in-law Maria Feodorovna then hired instrument makers from Germanspeaking lands to kickstart a Russian pianomaking industry, the new workshops couldn’t make pianos fast enough. Tax subsidies helped generate demand. Meanwhile the rockstar virtuosos – Franz Liszt, Sigismond Thalberg, Adolf Henselt (the man with ‘the velvet paws’) – were making such a fashion of the instrument that one mid-century commentator remarked that if there were 100 apartments in a St Petersburg building, 93 would have a piano.

And the journeys they took! In 1818, the Governor of Kamchatka’s wife, Lyudmila Rikord, took delivery of a piano gifted by a Russian admiral, Vasily Golovnin, who transported the piano over eight months on a Russian man-o’-war from St Petersburg, through the Baltic and North Sea, south to Cape Horn in South America, then across the Pacific to Kamchatka. I learned about the 1825 Decembrist Uprising, and Maria Volkonsky, wife of one of the exiled dissidents, who dragged her clavichord to Siberia on a sleigh when she joined her husband in exile. There is a moving 1832 drawing by a fellow exiled Decembrist; it depicts Maria playing the piano in a narrow prison cell, with her husband looking on.

It wasn’t all a grand romance, however. I also had to face the darkness. Kolyma was one of the most feared Gulag zones in the Soviet Union.

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Joining her husband in exile, Maria Volkonsky dragged her clavichord to Siberia on a sleigh

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In 1944 when the US vice-president Henry Wallace visited Magadan, a Soviet convict town in Kolyma, he was taken to the Magadan State Music and Drama Theatre (constructed by prisoners) to watch a play performed by forced labourers. This was a common occurrence in the Soviet Gulag. Troupes were assembled by camp commanders, influenced by a strict ethos of spreading ‘appropriate’ Soviet culture. For some, the creativity was a release; for others, like survivor, Yelena Vladimirova, it was a ‘travesty of freedom’ performed by ‘people half-alive’.

I visited Magadan after finding a picture of a grand piano. In the faded black and white image, taken in the 1940s, the instrument sits centrestage in the empty theatre. I learned about the famous Soviet tenor Vadim Kozin, who had performed in the venue while a prisoner. Before his incarceration in 1944, Kozin had toured the Soviet Union, his fame so great that mounted police kept fans at bay. He was arrested on several charges, including sodomy. Alexander Solzehnitsyn, author of one of the most unflinching records of the Gulag system, wrote about Kozin’s performance in Magadan; how he sang to rapturous applause, only to be denounced as a pederast. Kozin tried to hang himself after his first performance in Kolyma, but was taken down out of the noose. He remained in Kolyma after his release, living in a flat in Magadan, where I found his old Red October upright.

This accumulated history made me realise

Siberian pianos Siberian sounds: (clockwise from far left) a horse-drawn sleigh; Novosibirsk Opera House; a Russian Stürzwage grand belonging to Anna Khidirov; Sophy Roberts visits Novoseleginsk’s Decembrists museum; Maria Volkonsky

the value of the pianos that survive to this day – instruments that represent the deep wellspring of humanity that can keep hope alive in the darkest of circumstances. It is a history of elegance, fortitude and culture, of which modern Siberians are proud. Because wherever I ventured, from the Arctic to the shores of Lake Baikal, from modern oil and gas cities to the Pacific islands of the Kurils, I also discovered an enduring truth in the words of Thomas Preston, British consul to Western Siberia during the Russian Revolution of 1917. He described music as ‘a passport… particularly in Russia’. A hundred years after these words were written, my simple question, ‘have you a piano?’, functioned as a way to enter private homes and strike up conversation with strangers. With a shared passion, we could transcend our assumptions formed of political, cultural and socio-economic differences. I could enter people’s inner lives.

Whether or not I was successful in finding a piano for my friend in Mongolia is something perhaps best discovered in my book. What I will say is this: the journey changed me. It shifted my preconceptions and reminded me of the dangers of my ethnocentricity. The more I fell for Siberia – its spectacular landscapes, its nuanced history, the Russian soul – the more I began to question myself as a traveller and journalist. Who was I to think Siberia was the back of beyond?

As I write this piece from my English home, I’m transported back into one of the highlights

of my travels: the Altai Mountains. It is a staggeringly beautiful region near Siberia’s border with Mongolia, with high-altitude plateaus and rich Scythian and Denisovan archaeology. In some ways, the Altai is the Alaska of Russia – a place where people go to live off-grid. It was where I met a former Aeroflot navigator, Leonid Kaloshin, who had retired to the village of Ust-Koksa, inspired by an art exhibition he’d visited in Moscow depicting the Altai as an earthly paradise. Kaloshin was an enthusiastic bibliophile who had gathered tens of thousands of books to create a community library. He also had a keen interest in music, inspired by a young boy in a nearby village, who Kaloshin had found trying to play a table painted with a keyboard. ‘When I saw how strongly he wanted to hear music, I went to Moscow and bought him an instrument,’ said Kaloshin. ‘Nothing special; it was one of four pianos an old man was selling off cheaply from his garage.’ When I visited, Kaloshin had distributed 41 pianos to families around the Altai and – despite lacking the money to stock up on firewood – was building a concert hall at the back of his house. He asked me if I would keep my eye out for a piano for him. ‘But this place is so remote,’ I replied, feeling the tables turn: Leonid was asking me to find him a piano, rather than the other way around. ‘The world is very remote,’ he said, his grey eyes alight; ‘we are at the centre.’ l ‘The Lost Pianos of Siberia’ is published in paperback by Black Swan on 28 January l ‘Siberia’, a collection of photographs

by Michael Turek, is published by Damiani

Hunted: a Red October upright

Remote keys Russia’s piano makers After the Russian royal family heard him ‘duel’ with Mozart in 1782, Clementi began exporting his English brand of pianos to Russia, advising his colleague John Field to ‘make hay while the sun shines’. By 1810, six Western entrepreneurs had set up piano workshops in Russia, including a St Petersburg factory founded by the Bavarianborn Jacob Becker. The ‘Steinway of Russia’ was so well regarded that Becker pianos travelled to the Paris World Fair of 1878.

As the century progressed, only a few foreign-made Broadwoods and Blüthners made it through Russia’s protective trade barriers. This helped the likes of Becker dominate the domestic market. The factory thrived until the 1917 Revolution when Becker’s factory became state property, and renamed as Red October with a shift towards inexpensive instruments made in their thousands.

After perestroika, the old art of piano-making fell away. By 2000, the industry had almost died completely. The Red October factory closed in 2004. In the same month I started work on my book, it was reported that the last of Russia’s piano factories had closed.

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Lewisohn Stadium Star and stripes: Leonard Bernstein rehearsing the Lewisohn Symphony Orchestra, c1941

Stadium of stars New York’s Lewisohn Stadium was one of America’s most important and popular classical music venues – until its demolition in 1973. Brian Wise tells its story

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f Carnegie Hall represents the great rescue saga of American concert hall architecture, then Lewisohn Stadium, which once towered over Upper Manhattan like an ancient Greek amphitheatre, is its tale of forgotten loss. There it is, with its neo-classical colonnade and twinkling lights, in the climactic scene of the 1945 film Rhapsody in Blue, as pianist Oscar Levant performs the title piece with conductor Paul Whiteman and orchestra.

When the Gershwin biopic opened, the stadium was 30 years old and a fixture in New York’s musical life. Viewers could momentarily forget

hear names like violinist Fritz Kreisler, soprano Leontyne Price and clarinettist Benny Goodman for as little as 25 cents. It endured a pandemic, a world war, depression and suburban flight, while promoting a proud civic spirit.

‘It certainly was a very impressive-looking place,’ says Stanley Drucker, who joined the New York Philharmonic’s clarinet section in 1948 and played his first concerts that summer at Lewisohn Stadium. ‘In those days we played six concerts per week, with six rehearsals. Every programme was different. One got to really play repertoire and learn it fast. Among the

Lewisohn Stadium gave people from all walks of life the chance to hear great names for 25 cents its discomforts – the stony seats, the spotty amplification – as Gershwin’s swooning theme pulled you into the stadium’s grandeur.

Skip ahead to 1973 and Lewisohn Stadium was given a very different Hollywood treatment.

Sydney Lumet’s neo-noir crime drama Serpico featured the now-derelict structure as the backdrop for a meeting between two cops, played

by Tony Roberts and Al Pacino. It was razed that year. Unlike the battle over Carnegie Hall, there were no celebrities or rich benefactors rallying to save it. The surrounding neighbourhood had grown seedy and the stadium’s facade ‘blistered by neglect and scarred by graffiti,’ according to a New York Times eulogy. A car park and college building would take its place.

For nearly half a century, Lewisohn Stadium gave people from all walks of life the chance to

conductors were included the likes of Pierre Monteux, Fritz Reiner and Zubin Mehta.’

Druckner, now 91 and retired from the orchestra, remembers his Philharmonic solo debut at Lewisohn in 1957, in Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. ‘It was a beautiful summer night and exciting for a young player,’ says Drucker, who became its principal clarinettist three years later. With no air conditioning in concert halls, Lewisohn’s hillside perch above central Harlem offered an airy city retreat, reachable by subway.

Named after its main benefactor, the Germanborn industrialist Adolph Lewisohn, Lewisohn Stadium opened in 1915 as an athletic field for the City College of New York. Its Doric columns and stately pediments were a signature of architect Arnold W Brunner, who designed monumental buildings including New York’s BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Folk heroes: Paul Robeson in 1940 with the CBS Symphony Orchestra under Mark Warnow

Gilded age: New York’s ‘Old Met’ on Broadway

Vanished venues

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Lost halls of the US Whether victims of changing fashions, neglect or progress, many US concert and opera venues have been lost over time.

1849’s Astor Place Riot did for New York’s Astor Opera House which, among other productions, staged the US premiere of Donizetti’s Anna Bolena.

San Francisco’s Cort Theatre played host to the San Francisco Symphony in the years after World War One. After several names changes, Capitol Follies, as it was latterly called, was demolished in 1941. A car park stands in its place.

Before moving to Lincoln Center, the New York Met was located on Broadway in a splendid opera house that opened in 1883. While the gilded auditorium was spectacular, the backstage areas left a lot of be desired. It was eventually pulled down in 1967.

Finally to Detroit, and to the 1956 brutalist Ford Auditorium. Clad in marble and granite, the hall itself was sparse, with minimal distractions and good sightlines. But the acoustics weren’t great, and it was demolished in 2011. The organ is now in St Aloysius, Washington Boulevard.

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Mount Sinai Hospital and the US Courthouse in Cleveland. Before it was complete, college officials determined that it would serve as a summertime concert venue.

The concert series began in 1918 under the direction of Minnie Guggenheimer, who for 40 years served as its chairperson and guiding spirit. ‘She was famous for her malaprops and her big hats,’ Drucker recalls. A chain-smoking New Yorker, she entertained audiences with her wise-cracking intermission speeches. (Once, as three temperamental opera singers waited in the wings, she told the crowd, ‘If I get enough money, I’ll be able to give you better artists in the future.’)

Under Guggenheimer’s direction, the New York Philharmonic arrived in 1922, debuting with an all-Wagner programme, and remained a summer fixture until 1964 (billed in later years as the Stadium Symphony Orchestra).

‘Stadium audiences were treated to, arguably, an even more eclectic diet than were winter concertgoers,’ writes the musicologist Jonathan Stern in his 2019 history Music for the (American) People: The Concerts at Lewisohn Stadium. There were forays into jazz-symphonic crossover and some efforts towards racial and ethnic diversity.

The roaring twenties were a particularly freewheeling era, bringing Philharmonic performances of Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite, Honegger’s Pacific 231, John Alden Carpenter’s Skyscrapers, Charles T Griffes’s The PleasureDome of Kubla-Khan and Stravinsky’s The Rite of

Spring. The latter drew boos, whistles and some raucous applause when conductor Willem van Hoogstraten introduced it in July 1926. Mahler symphonies were presented to audiences of 6,000 to 7,000 listeners, decades before they became concert-hall fixtures. Even after the market crash of 1929, a vibrancy remained, as in one all-Gershwin concert of 16 August 1932.

With the composer in attendance, the Philharmonic introduced Gershwin’s Cuban Overture, a product of his recent trip to Havana and initially known as Rumba. The New York Herald estimated the turnout at 17,000, with an additional 4,000 turned away, making it the largest Lewisohn crowd to date. Despite reviews, the concert established him as kind of a house composer, and from 1936-64, an all-Gershwin concert was presented every season (though he himself died of a brain tumour in 1937).

During the Great Depression, Lewisohn Stadium was known as one of the best deals in town, and opera was added to the mix. The 1934 season, for instance, included concert performances of Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila, Wagner’s Lohengrin, Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov, Verdi’s Aida and Gounod’s Faust. The next summer, Fritz Reiner led two-hour reductions of all four operas in Wagner’s Ring cycle plus Tristan und Isolde. A critic for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1936 echoed public response, deeming the opera performances ‘usually hit-and-miss affairs’, but conceded that ‘the orchestra of

Lewisohn Stadium Stadium rocked: Andre Kostelanetz conducts at Lewisohn in 1939 in front of one of the largest audiences ever to attend a stadium concert; (below) benefactor Adolph Lewisohn and a concert programme from 1956

course is better than one hears in the winter season at the Metropolitan, and the casts are frequently as good.’

No such hedging was necessary when Marian Anderson made her Lewisohn debut on 26 August 1925. The contralto from Philadelphia had triumphed over 300 other singers in the annual talent contest held at Aeolian Hall and co-sponsored by Lewisohn Stadium. At the winner’s concert, accompanied by the New York Philharmonic, Anderson sang an aria from Donizetti’s La favorita and several spirituals.

She returned to the stadium six more times, from 1940-56, but had to wait decades before a wider breakthrough in New York. Indeed, she was somewhat past her prime when she debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in 1955, becoming the first African American to sing a lead role with the company. There were other firsts for black performers at Lewisohn, the most most striking of which was a 1940 programme featuring William Grant Still’s cantata And They Lynched Him on a Tree alongside music by Dvo ák, Roy Harris and Jerome Kern (with the great bassbaritone Paul Robeson).

But by the end of World War II, the series was bleeding money, a condition blamed on television, recordings, the exodus of residents to the suburbs and a perceived decline in the surrounding neighbourhood. The ever-present deficit had reached over $100,000 in 1948; the eight-week series was cut to five by the mid1950s. Some critics piled on, grumbling about the rain-offs and din of airplanes and sirens.

Yet the final two decades continued to showcase up-and-coming conductors and soloists. A near-annual series of Jazz at Lewisohn Stadium concerts featured headliners like Louis Armstrong, Anita O’Day, Lionel Hampton, Dizzy Gillespie and Stan Getz. Dance companies joined the Philharmonic, including the New York City Ballet, Fokine Russian Ballet and

‘‘

Mahler symphonies were presented to audiences of 6,000 to 7,000 listeners

’’

Spain’s José Greco Dance Company. And there were themed evenings devoted to Vienna, Italy, France and ‘folk songs from around the world’.

Especially notable were the show-must-goon moments. Some 3,500 listeners endured heavy rain on 27 July 1949 to hear 21-year-old pianist Leon Fleisher give his only stadium performance, in both Franck’s Symphonic Variations and Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto.

When a violent thunderstorm destroyed the Stadium’s acoustical shell in 1942, the next evening, Reiner, violinist Jascha Heifetz and the Philharmonic played an all-Brahms programme under a makeshift tent; at intermission, New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia promised a new shell for the following season.

Change came in 1964 when the New York Philharmonic musicians signed their first 52-week contract, tying them to the recently opened Philharmonic Hall (now David Geffen Hall). Mayor Robert F Wagner announced that the Met would be taking over and the city would provide $200,000 to support the performances and pay for renovations. The Met embraced the venture, offering 28 performances, partly as a means of fulfilling contractual obligations with its orchestra. Opening night, on 21 June 1965, drew a crowd of 20,000 listeners and a bit of natural drama. Amid distant lightning and thunder, soprano soloist Renata Tebaldi emerged ‘bouffant, Primavera-like, in green chiffon’, according to The New York Times, and performed selections by Verdi, Rossini and Puccini.

Those two summers brought names like Beverly Sills, Regina Resnik, George Shirley and Richard Tucker, but starry casts and hopes were short-lived. City College had already announced plans to pull the stadium down in 1967. Though demolition was delayed until 1973, it prematurely cut short the Met’s plans. Guggenheimer died in 1966, two years after stepping down.

Would Lewisohn Stadium have survived if New York’s architectural preservation movement had arrived sooner? Impossible to say. ‘It was seen as progress,’ Drucker says of the demolition, adding that the Philharmonic was soon playing for larger audiences in Central Park.

‘The outdoor venues will always exist because people love to go to places that are unique,’ he adds. Indeed, this season, the Philharmonic have evoked the egalitarian spirit of Lewisohn as its musicians have travelled the five boroughs giving pop-up concerts from a lorry, dubbed the Bandwagon. These programmes may lack the stadium’s monumental aura, but they offer a similarly open-armed approach to newcomers.

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Education

Back to school Andrew Stewart discovers how, during the pandemic, Britain’s ensembles have been placing themselves at the heart of education

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Top advice: Wynton Marsalis (top) and Nicola Benedetti give a masterclass at Saffron Hall

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uild back better, the UK government’s alliterative mantra, is unlikely to reassure music teachers whose work has been axed during COVID. Music has been removed from the curriculum in one in ten primary and secondary schools and is no longer an extracurricular activity in around two-thirds of Britain’s secondaries. Yet for all its destructive harm, the pandemic has inspired fresh initiatives as ensembles across the land are finding new ways to become more embedded in schools and communities.

The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE), for instance, set a new precedent when it moved into Acland Burghley School in Camden, north London, two miles from its former base at Kings Place. The period-instrument band’s residency, launched in September, gives the OAE a permanent home and the chance for its musicians to become part of Acland Burghley life; in return, the school receives rental income and an invaluable educational resource.

Last term, OAE timpanist Adrian Bending animated an ambitious project with the school’s GCSE dance group. ‘The kids watched YouTube clips from Rameau operas and voted to make a new dance to “Les sauvages” from Les Indes galantes,’ he recalls. ‘The orchestra recorded the piece and the students devised their own choreography. They don’t care that the music’s 300 years old; they just think it’s really cool.’

Last summer Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council approved the CBSO and Shireland Collegiate Academy’s bid to open a free school in West Bromwich. The plan is set to deliver a 750-place secondary school specialising in

Early learning: members of the OAE at Acland Burghley School

music – a world first according to its begetters and a boon to the local area. The Hallé, meanwhile, is discussing its own free school plans with councillors in Greater Manchester.

Under lockdown, the Hallé consolidated its partnerships with music education hubs, reached out to the education teams at the BBC Philharmonic and Manchester Camerata, and connected with hundreds of schools at home and overseas through beefed-up work online.

Steve Pickett, the Hallé’s education director, explains that many things would never have happened without the pandemic – such as Goddess Gaia, a cantata to words by the poet and children’s writer Tony Mitton, music by Steve Pickett and film animations by Peter Naish.

‘Everything was done in-house,’ he says. ‘We’ve worked with Tony before and Pete’s our head of print and design at the Hallé, as well as being a brilliant animator.’ Goddess Gaia gained the backing of Eco-Schools, a global sustainable

MARC GASCOIGNE, HALLÉ CONCERTS SOCIETY, ROGER KING

Primary needs: Hallé violinist Chris Emerson with a pupil

schools programme that involves 59,000 schools in 68 countries, and has sold online to schools far beyond the Hallé’s customary education patch.

Among smaller ensembles, the Carducci String Quartet’s members became collective head of strings at Cheltenham’s Dean Close School a decade ago. Their work at the co-educational private school went online in March and now mixes virtual and in-person sessions tailored to a community of children aged three to 18. The Carduccis became embedded at Dean Close thanks to its then head of music, the late Helen Porter. Michelle Fleming, the quartet’s second violin, pays tribute to Porter’s vision to integrate music into every child’s education.

‘Like Helen, we believe that if you get kids interested in making music, even if they drift away, they’ll eventually come back to it in later life,’ she says. The musical initiation process begins early at Dean Close, where the school’s pre-prep children perform informal concerts twice a term. ‘They come in all states of

‘‘

It’s sad to hear that schools have dropped music since COVID, when music can be so uplifting in dark times

’’

preparedness, but we rarely have a wobble from them. That’s got to help build their confidence.

And it’s about getting kids to enjoy playing.

Whether we’re working at Dean Close or with the state sector, we want kids to feel that making music is for them. It’s sad to hear that schools have dropped music since COVID, when music can be so uplifting in dark times.’

To provide uplift through music is Saffron Hall’s brief. The 740-seat performance space stands in the grounds of Saffron Walden County High School, an Essex comprehensive with a reputation for excellence. Saffron Hall’s chief executive Angela Dixon notes that COVID forced many concerts to be cancelled or postponed; others were presented to physically distanced audiences seated at cabaret-style tables. ‘Of course the pandemic has been a disaster,’ she says. ‘But it’s been a blessing in some ways. It’s blown apart things that were never discussed, like the 7.30pm concert start, the format of concerts and what an audience will or won’t accept.’

Saffron Hall’s activities ranged from hosting international orchestras and star performers to creating multi-disciplinary events for its school’s pupils and working with community organisations. When COVID struck, the venue was well placed to offer concert slots vacated by its resident orchestras, including the LPO and Britten Sinfonia, to such local groups and promoters as the Saffron Walden Choral Society and Cambridge Summer Music Festival. Angela Dixon is determined to build on connections made or enhanced during the pandemic.

‘We’re there to support the community not only in terms of education but also by helping amateur organisations. All our learning activity and concerts are part of one big department and budget. It’s still a new model but could become common. My post-pandemic dream is to see a network of Saffron Halls in all the concert “cold spots” across the UK, bringing schools and young people together with professional and amateur musicians as part of their wider communities.’

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Klosters & Andermatt Switzerland Michael White heads up into the Swiss Alps to experience a brace of new, ambitious arrivals to Europe’s summer music festival scene

Alpine attractions: Andermatt from above; (opposite) pianists Benjamin Grosvenor and Gabriela Montero performing at last year’s festival

W

e all know what Swiss skiing villages do in winter.

But in the summer, when there’s no snow, they’re confronted by an existential problem – which their marketing departments solve by telling you that Alpine valleys are still lovely when they’re green rather than white, and perfect places for a music festival. Hence Verbier and Gstaad, which have become big, established players on the European summer music circuit. And hence two newer projects that now run in Andermatt and Klosters, which are both a couple of 60

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hours by car from Zurich Airport: Klosters to the east and Andermatt the south.

They’re also reachable by train; and though you have to change in far-flung stations, with what look like perilously close connecting times, Swiss railways tend to work with helpful punctuality.

So, as the journey to these places is at least as good as the stay, you can sit back and enjoy the scenery – which is beyond stunning on the Klosters route as you skirt shimmering blue lakes and rolling pastureland, and zig-zag up into the mountains. You won’t need a book.

The trick with Klosters is to get off at the right stop, which is not the first you arrive at: you need Klosters Platz, not Klosters Dorf. There is extraordinary wealth here, and a quick tour of the small, exquisite shops – which all seem to be jewellers or estate agents – stand testimony to it. But the wealth of Klosters is discreet. The heady days when Hollywood celebrities decamped here and Gene Kelly danced (so legend has it) on the tables of the Hotel Chesa Grischuna have been replaced by a more guarded culture of financiers who fly by private helicopter to their shuttered

MUSICAL DESTINATIONS Tempting sight: Turner’s Little Devil’s Bridge over the Russ

VALENTIN LUTHIGER, GETTY, ALAMY

A cultural scene wooden chalets on the lower slopes. But this is still where Prince Charles sweeps in for off-camera, off-piste fun (the local cable car up to the Gotschnagrat is called the ‘Prince of Wales’). And printed programmes for the Klosters Festival come with his photograph and personal endorsement. He’s a keen supporter. As are ordinary Klosters townsfolk, who are passionate about the whole thing: there’s a waiting list for volunteers.

The Festival grew out of ad hoc music projects that regularised into a more solid programme in 2017, with David Whelton, former boss of the Philharmonia Orchestra, as artistic director. Larger concerts run in a new, multi-purpose hall attached to a riverside sports complex. But smaller ones turn up in more engaging venues like the town’s 18th-century Reform Church, or an artist’s studio where I have memories of hearing a recital as I looked through a window onto the mountains and watched paragliders floating past to the accompaniment of some ethereal Mozart: an experience you don’t get at Wigmore Hall.

Concerts aside, things to do in Klosters include hanging out at the Hotel Vereina, which is the social hub of the town and somewhere to enjoy expensive drinks with expensive (though in fairness, often fascinating) people; trekking out to the Alpenrosli restaurant, whose terrace commands breath-taking views; or taking the little red train to Davos, the neighbouring town.

If arriving into Klosters station can be underwhelming, Andermatt station feels like the middle of nowhere, on a great empty site currently fringed by building works. But that’s because it serves a town in

Devilishly attractive

The Klosters Festival programmes come with Prince Charles’s personal endorsement transition: fashionable in the 19th century, reduced to the functionality of an army garrison in the 20th, and only recently revived as a ‘destination’ – thanks largely to the efforts of an Egyptian property developer who is building hotels and apartment blocks like there’s no tomorrow, doubling the town’s size in the process.

Attached to one of his hotels, the Radisson, is a concert hall that opened in 2019. And it’s there that a group of enterprising young Brits have established a festival season – big with ambition in that it opened with the Berlin Philharmonic and Daniel Barenboim. Smaller events happen in Andermatt’s uber-luxury hotel, the Chedi. And the Chedi takes you to the heart of the old town – which is more

High times: the Hotel Chesa Grischuna in Klosters

If it seems perverse to go looking for high culture in these places largely dedicated to high-altitude sport and the outdoors, the truth is that culture has been beating a path to their door for centuries.

The dramatic remoteness of Andermatt attracted Goethe, who commended it to Schiller, who then wrote William Tell (without having been to Switzerland himself). And it also attracted the British artist JWM Turner, who in the first decade of the 19th century painted the so-called Devil’s Bridge that was once the sole means of access to the town, crossing a precipitous gorge.

pleasing than the station area, with little bridges that criss-cross a sparkling river, wooden chalets with cascading windowbox displays and other classic Swissery.

That said, the joy of Andermatt is walking out of it – straight onto open meadows that turn into rugged mountain paths with panoramic views. It’s hiking country to perfection. High up. Bracing.

Fresh air with a vengeance.

The uncertainties of COVID mean that neither of these Swiss resorts can guarantee what they’ll offer musically in 2021. But Klosters managed to run its festival at the height of the pandemic last summer and is confident it can do so again, from 31 July to 8 August. And Andermatt has plans for a festival in September, details to be announced. All I can say is, check their websites and be hopeful.

Further info: visit klosters-music.ch and andermattmusic.com BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Composer of the month Composer of the Week is broadcast on Radio 3 at 12pm, Monday to Friday. Programmes in December are: 1-5 February Schubert 8-12 February Vaughan Williams 15-19 February Mozart 22-26 February Gipps

Giuseppe Verdi The Italian composer was a great patriot, says Alexandra Wilson, but to what extent were his operas shaped by the politics of his era?

ILLUSTRATION: MATT HERRING

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Verdi’s style Challenging conventions Verdi became frustrated with the two-part aria/duet form around which Italian operatic scenes were routinely structured, with a slow first section, linking passage and fast, showy ‘cabaletta’. He increasingly tweaked the formula, structuring scenes in a more fluid way to respond to the ebb and flow of emotions.

Orchestration Verdi’s earlier works are sometimes disparaged for their ‘guitar-like’ accompaniment. In his mature operas, the orchestral writing is more sophisticated, expressive and to the fore. This paralleled Wagner’s innovations, though Verdi denied a direct influence and worried about younger composers abandoning the primacy of the voice.

Characterisation Many Verdi operas revolve around a doomed love affair between a young soprano and tenor but Verdi subverted the norm as the drama required. In Macbeth the central couple are dysfunctional and romance is absent. Here, as in Rigoletto (as played by Plácido Domingo, below), Simon Boccanegra and Falstaff, the title role becomes a baritone.

Religion Verdi was not devout and sometimes addressed anti-clerical themes, yet his Requiem is a pillar of the choral repertory.

Verdi’s response to the Requiem text offers little comfort: he omits the consoling In Paradisum and emphasises the terror of the last judgement in his setting of the Dies Irae.

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I

n paintings and in photographs, from youth to old age, Giuseppe Verdi cuts a rather severe figure – his brow creased, his mouth turned resolutely down beneath that bushy beard, his mood solemn and inscrutable. Only in some of the photographs taken late in life do we glimpse a twinkle in the eyes, as if the man had finally started to let down his guard. One wonders what he thought about the life he had lived, across almost a century of drastic social change and dramatic political events, of personal sorrows and astonishing professional achievements. The journey from son of a rural innkeeper to country squire – a rags-

his native Emilia-Romagna and the city of Milan, where he studied, went on honeymoon and finally secured the premiere of his first opera, Oberto, at La Scala (1839). The latter resulted in a contract for three further operas at the theatre and being taken onto the books of Ricordi, Italy’s leading music publishing house. After the triumph of his third opera, Nabucco (1842), the work with which Verdi said ‘it is fair to say my career began’, impresarios from all over the peninsula came knocking, and he stepped onto an operatic conveyor belt, usually writing at least an opera a year up to the end of the 1850s. Although working at such

Verdi moved gradually away from the rigid conventions of Italian Romantic opera to-riches narrative that he was not averse to embellishing – had been a long one.

Verdi was born before the Battle of Waterloo; he died during the Boer War. He lived through revolutions and the much-longed-for unification of his country. He could be a harsh taskmaster with librettists and singers, ill-humoured at times, yet was capable of acts of great charity, founding a hospital near Parma and a retirement home for musicians in Milan. He witnessed the death of both his children in infancy, followed soon after by that of his first wife. He was ostracised by his local community for living out of wedlock for years with the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi. The act of creativity often gave him headaches, stomach aches and sore throats.

The early years of Verdi’s career saw him to-ing and fro-ing between

a pace lent a formulaic quality to some of his early works, he moved gradually away from the rigid musical conventions of Italian Romantic opera, developing a keen interest in literature from Schiller to Shakespeare and a determination to put drama on an equal plane with music.

By the 1860s, he had become the most famous and powerful Italian opera composer of his era. With acclaim, money and clout came the luxury of being able to take his time over character psychology, to give each opera its own distinctive musical ‘tinta’, as he put it. The gaps between his works became longer, the subjects and the musical style more varied. Verdi wrote operas on a larger canvas (the five-act, French-style Grand Opera Don Carlos) and that required lavish scenic spectacle (Aida). Ever the perfectionist, he returned to operas written earlier in his career –

COMPOSER OF THE MONTH

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GETTY

Sliding scales: Nadine Sierra as Gilda in Rigoletto at the Chorégies d’Orange, France, 2017

Simon Boccanegra, Macbeth – revising and modernising them for new contexts.

Verdi’s final two Shakespearean operas, Otello and Falstaff, written in a glorious Indian summer and often regarded as the preserve of Verdi connoisseurs, took him to new realms of musical and dramatic sophistication. The correspondence with the librettist Arrigo Boito surrounding Otello shows the extent to which Verdi was by now involved in crafting the drama as well as the music. Subtleties of characterisation were now paramount, Verdi specifying, for example, exactly how he envisaged the role of Iago to be acted, with ‘an absent-minded manner, nonchalant, indifferent to everything, disbelieving, witty, speaking well and ill lightly, with an air of having his thoughts on matters quite different from those he is speaking about’. Working with Boito prompted Verdi to develop a new, more flexible and responsive musical language, better suited to the subtleties of the text.

Verdi’s career reminds us of the many ways in which opera has been political. He was, himself, one of the most politically active of composers. He was an ardent supporter of the Risorgimento, the movement for the Unification of Italy, which was finally achieved in 1861.

Encouraged by Conte Camillo di Cavour, a leading figure in that movement and later the united Italy’s first prime minister, he stood for political office, being elected as a representative in the 64

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Verdi appeals to the modern age as a man who stuck to his artistic principles first Italian Parliament. His name was used as a political slogan and his works were appropriated for political ends.

However, the musicologist Roger Parker has cast doubt upon the oft-repeated claim that Verdi was proclaimed by the Italian people as the Bard of the Risorgimento through spontaneous performances of his choruses, demonstrating that some of his early biographers falsified reviews in order to mythologise him.

During his early career, Verdi often set patriotic subjects, such as La battaglia di Legnano about Barbarossa’s defeat at the hands of the Lombard League.

Nabucco, more famously, with its story of the chosen people yearning for their homeland, chimed with the mood of the Risorgimento movement. Even Macbeth, a work that tapped first and foremost into the contemporary Romantic vogue for misty northern landscapes and the supernatural, featured a chorus of exiled Scots. Later he would move away from nationalistic

topics toward subjects that focused upon the plight of strong but flawed individuals.

Here, too, he often struck a political note of sorts, championing the underdog.

Despite the creative freedoms he came to enjoy as Italy’s leading opera composer, Verdi often faced difficulties bringing his works to the stage in the form in which he wanted them. Opera houses were regarded as founts of potential sedition and disorder in Italy, particularly after the revolutions of 1848, and operas could be censored on political, moral or religious grounds.

State censorship was heavy-handed: libretti were scrutinised for inflammatory subjects or language. There was no single set of rules for the peninsula, but as a rule of thumb, they tended to be strictest in Rome and Naples. Regional bans on topics like conspiracy, assassination, disrespect towards rulers, suicide or illicit love affairs made life difficult for an opera composer.

Verdi and his librettists frequently found themselves hauled up in front of the authorities and asked to account for themselves whenever rumour had it that an opera was about to appear on a subject that was deemed in some way provocative. I Lombardi alla prima crociata offended both the church and the police authorities, but Verdi remained resolute, stating ‘It shall be given as it is or not given at all’.

For Stiffelio, meanwhile, Verdi and his librettist were forced, reluctantly, to accept changes – the subject matter, about a Protestant church minister with an adulterous wife, with quotations from the New Testament, was simply too inflammatory.

COMPOSER OF THE MONTH Moor to it: (left) a 1962 Royal Opera House production of Otello with Mario Del Monaco as the eponymous hero and Raina Kabaivanska as Desdemona; (below) Verdi’s librettist Arrigo Boito

Once an opera set off on its journey around Italy and was out of Verdi’s control, bowdlerised performances were the norm.

Macbeth was deemed unacceptable in Rome, for the supernatural element; in Naples and Palermo, for the killing of kings; and in Austrian-controlled Milan, for the chorus of exiled Scots. Removing the offending elements resulted in nonsensical plotlines. Numerous cities staged Rigoletto – an opera based on a play that had already been banned for ‘repulsive immorality’ – under alternative titles, turning the feckless Duke’s arias into hymns to fidelity, or giving the opera an implausible happy ending in which the heroine survived.

Nowadays, we do not worry that anyone might take inspiration from Rigoletto and try to assassinate royalty, and the only time Verdi’s operas create moral panic is when a director tries a ‘provocative’ reworking.

Yet they still have political resonances of a different sort. Today, the two Verdi works that speak most closely to contemporary sensibilities and cultural politics are La traviata and Rigoletto, whose popularity has overtaken that of Il trovatore, the Verdi opera sine qua non for the Victorians and in the first half of the 20th century. La traviata appeals for its psychological realism and insight into the plight of wronged women. Rigoletto’s themes of disability, corrupt power and sexual exploitation seem ever more topical. Aida has become a textbook case for considerations of cultural imperialism, while Otello prompts debates about race and casting.

Verdi appeals to the modern age, then, as a man who stuck to his artistic principles, as a champion of the vulnerable, the excluded or the dispossessed, and for the perennial popularity of his music. Such was the volume of his output that there is always more Verdi to discover: it is worth a delve into the lesser-known repertory, including that extensive ‘back catalogue’ of early works. Much of the snobbery that used to surround his oeuvre has now dissipated. We no longer subscribe to the view that Verdi’s works are too tuneful to be good, summed up wittily by his biographer Francis Toye in 1930: ‘There was no merit to be gained by professing admiration for a composer whose music could be enjoyed by anybody gifted with any musical receptivity whatever’.

VERDI Life&Times

1813 LIFE: Verdi is born in Le Roncole near Parma, the first child of Carlo, an innkeeper, and Luigia, a spinner.

He takes organ lessons as a child.

TIMES: Under the Duke of Wellington, a British, Spanish and Portuguese army defeats Joseph Bonaparte’s French forces at Vitoria, Spain, leading to victory in the Peninsular War.

1839 LIFE:His first opera, Oberto, proves a success at its premiere at La Scala in Milan and leads to a commission for two further operas from the theatre’s impresario Bartolomeo Merelli.

TIMES: A four-and-a-half mile stretch of railway between Naples and Portici is inaugurated by King Ferdinand II, making it the first line to open in the Italian peninsula.

1859 LIFE: Verdi marries soprano Giuseppina Strepponi, with whom he has been in a long-term relationship.

Her many acclaimed roles include Abigaille in the premiere of Nabucco in 1842.

TIMES: Excavation begins on the Suez Canal, dug to connect the Red and Mediterranean seas. With over a million people involved in its construction, the canal will be completed in 1869.

1874 LIFE: Verdi conducts the first performance of his Requiem Mass at the church of San Marco in Milan. It is written in memory Alessandro Manzoni, a poet and novelist whom he admired.

TIMES: Italian prime minister Marco Minghetti holds a snap general election to try to increase his majority. Of the country’s population of 28 million, 572,000 men are eligible to vote.

1853 LIFE:The premiere of La traviata at Venice’s Teatro La Fenice is met with boos. Some are aimed at soprano Fanny Salvini-Donatelli, reckoned to be too old to play the role of Violetta.

TIMES: The ‘Belfiore martyrs’, a group of Italian independence fighters, are hanged near Mantua as the Austrian government increases repressive measures against the Risorgimento movement.

1901 LIFE: A week after suffering a stroke, Verdi dies in Milan on 27 January, aged 87. An estimated crowd of 300,000 people attends the transfer of his body to the crypt of the Casa di Riposo.

TIMES: The Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi announces that a radio signal sent from Poldhu in Cornwall has been received in Newfoundland, Canada, the first transatlantic transmission.

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Building a library

Frauenliebe und -leben Robert Schumann Natasha Loges explores the finest recordings of a 19th-century song cycle that vividly traces the ups and downs of love’s tortured course The work ‘Since first seeing him, I think I am blind, Wherever I look, Him only I see’. These besotted words open Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben, regarded as one of his great song cycles alongside Dichterliebe and the Eichendorff-Liederkreis. This cycle emerged in 1840, Robert’s ‘Liederjahr’ (‘Year of song’), during which songs flowed from him at a miraculous rate.

The 30 year-old’s inspiration was both emotional and practical. Robert was frantically in love with the supremely gifted pianist Clara Wieck, but needed

The composer As a young man, Robert Schumann seemed set for a career as a virtuoso pianist, encouraged by his teacher Friedrich Wieck. However, an injury to his right hand – possibly caused by a home-made fingerstrengthening device – put an end to that and so he concentrated on composing. Schumann’s early works were written exclusively for the piano but in 1840, the year in which he married Wieck’s gifted daughter Clara, he devoted himself to song.

The next year saw him embark on the first two of his four symphonies, with further orchestral, chamber and choral works following soon after.

Building a Library is broadcast on Radio 3 at 9.30am each Saturday as part of Record Review. A highlights podcast is available at bbc.co.uk/radio3

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announces the death of her husband.

The shock is absorbed in a lengthy piano postlude which recalls the opening song, poignantly re-evoking the bliss of new love.

The songs were written two months before the Schumanns’ wedding, with many others, such as the Drei Gesänge Op. 31 and the Fünf Lieder Op. 40 (see p69). By now, Robert was an expert in constructing cyclical works; his decision to recall earlier music in the extended solo piano postlude, for instance, had been tested in his cycle Dichterliebe; such

A piano postlude recalls the opening song, poignantly re-evoking the bliss of new love to persuade his would-be father-in-law, Friedrich Wieck, that he could financially support his intended bride. Famously, Wieck opposed the marriage so ferociously that he took Schumann to court; he lost the case, and the couple married a day before Clara’s 21st birthday. Always sensitive to poetry, Robert’s creativity flowed into piano-accompanied song.

The cycle’s story is straightforward: over first three songs, a girl falls in love; she gets engaged in the fourth, ‘Du Ring an meinem Finger’ (‘You ring on my finger’); ‘Helft mir, ihr Schwestern’ (‘Help me, my sisters’) describes her wedding morning; ‘Süsser Freund, du blickest’ (‘Sweet friend, you look [at me in wonder]’) makes a discreet allusion to their first sexual encounter; and her new baby is celebrated in ‘An meinem Herzen, an meiner Brust’ (‘On my heart, at my breast’). The closing song abruptly

a gesture bound the songs into a beautiful whole. After composition, he set them aside, tidying them up for the publisher only in 1843.

Appealing lyric songs like these were destined for the vast amateur market for printed music and pianos. Schumann selected lyrics by the aristocrat Adelbert von Chamisso, a famous naturalist whose French family had emigrated to Berlin before the Revolution. Chamisso’s fascinating life included a global circumnavigation in 1815-18, and among his extensive writings was a treatise on the Hawaiian language. Alongside his day job as head of the Berlin Botanic Garden, he was a minor poet; Schumann was the only significant composer to set his words.

Chamisso wrote no fewer than five cycles of poems on middle-class women’s lives. These had no autobiographical

BUILDING A LIBRARY

GETTY

Songs of love: Clara Schumann; (left) Clara’s father, Friedrich Wieck; (below left) baritone Julius Stockhausen

significance; he was long married, with four children, and had reconciled with his wife after he had an affair. His poetry reflected a fascination with domestic family life in 1830s German-speaking lands after the Napoleonic wars. It was aimed at middle-class, leisured women at a time when girls remained their fathers’ legal property until marriage (hence Clara’s battle to marry Robert); thereafter, ownership passed to the husbands.

Clara Wieck was certainly no leisured, middle-class woman. Unsurprisingly, their personal accounts reveal that Robert and Clara fought bitterly the day the cycle was completed. Three years earlier, she had expressed her fears about the effect of marriage on her thriving career; Robert’s response was ‘The first year of our marriage you shall forget the artist, you shall live only for yourself and your house and your husband’.

During their 16-year marriage, Clara fell pregnant eight times, and recalled one miscarriage as a relief. Her friend the singer Pauline Viardot-Garcia advised her to ‘watch her health’ (a discreet reference to birth control). It may not be a coincidence

Strong sentiments: mezzo-soprano Elı-na Garanča

that the widowed Clara Schumann’s own performances of the cycle, with different singers, usually ended with the fifth song – the morning of the wedding day.

At the cycle’s premiere in 1862, Clara Schumann was at the piano, accompanying her friend, the baritone Julius Stockhausen. The song recital was in its infancy and the concert stage was regarded as a largely gender-neutral space, something which baritones Matthias Goerne and Roderick Williams, among

others, have recently explored. In 1865, the publisher Heinze released a luxury edition of the songs, with a photograph of Schumann, boosting their popularity.

But disquiet soon emerged; by the 1880s, critics started expressing disapproval of the seventh song, in which the young mother suckles her baby, declaring that that such words had no place on the public stage. In the 1940s, the great soprano Lotte Lehmann felt that the texts were ‘old-fashioned’, although she continued to admire the songs. In 1999, the pianist and song expert Graham Johnson warned that unless the performers are ‘artists of the first rank’, the work can reach ‘cloying levels of sentimentality’. And in late 2020, mezzo El na Garan a declared that she feels ‘very defensive when people say that they find the texts ridiculous’; to her, they are ‘glorious’. And so, the work continues to provoke everything from despair to delight with each new performance.

Turn the page to discover our recommended recordings of Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Three other great recordings Felicity Lott (soprano) and Angelika Kirchschlager (mezzo-soprano) Recordings which are less precious about the cycle, and with more awareness of how Schumann expected his music to be performed, will appeal to a nonpurist. No one surpasses Graham Johnson, whose consummate gift as pianist and programmer builds depth, space and reflection into the work. Here, he interleaves wordless performances of the songs into a long journey exploring the life and loves of a more three-dimensional woman than Chamisso’s cardboard cut-out.

Kirchschlager and Lott sing with artistry, passion and playfulness.

(Hyperion CDA67563) ‘Believable’: Connolly and Asti bring out the songs’ colours

A beautiful, measured recording

Sarah Connolly (mezzo-soprano) Eugene Asti (piano) Chandos CHAN10492

Recordings have emerged steadily since mezzo-soprano Julia Culp and Otto Bake’s historic 1909 account, the most recent being fellow mezzo El na Garan a’s with Malcolm Martineau in November 2020.

Rich, lower voices such as the magnificent Elisabeth Grümmer (with Aribert Reimann in 1963) or Helen Watts (with Geoffrey Parsons from 1966) bring maturity and complexity to the character. The 59-year-old Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, in 1974, offers a persuasively manic performance; Marian Anderson 68

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The best recordin g

is downright heart-breaking in 1946. But Sarah Connolly and Eugene Asti, who have a lengthy artistic partnership, create a believable, thoughtful and sympathetic character in their 2008 account.

Connolly presents no naïve young girl, but a tender-hearted life companion whose voice lingers lovingly on the curves of the

Connolly presents no naïve young girl, but a tenderhearted life companion melody, softens on each corner, fills each vowel and savours each consonant. Her delivery of the opening words ‘Seit ich ihn gesehen’ (‘Since I saw him’) conveys wonder at the protagonist’s own transformation; but the second song, ‘Er, der Herrlichste von Allen’ (‘He, the most wonderful of all’) is a clear-sighted paean, rather than a giddy fan-tune. The wedding-morning song, ‘Helft mir, ihr Schwestern’ evokes

Edith Mathis (soprano) Known for her superb Mozart singing, Mathis’s technically superb soprano sound is a delight, virtuosically modulated throughout yet never cold. Her shaping of the vocal lines is exquisite. The extrovert songs, such as Nos 2 and 5, are especially pleasing, bright with energy without losing grace. Christoph Eschenbach generally keeps the piano quite restrained while Mathis sings, but beautifully matches her sweet,

true sisterhood rather than an excitable hen party. Motherhood and then bereavement bring out still more layers of colour.

Asti matches her with a vast colouristic range, filling in the gaps in the poetry with his crisp staccato, twinkling arpeggios, deep octaves, silken legato and acute responsiveness to the character’s emotions.

His postlude is a miracle of dignified restraint, sparing with pedal, each stark chord a distillation of loss bravely borne.

Above all, it is the choices of tempo which distinguish this recording. One structural weakness of the cycle is the over-hasty succession of life events:

BUILDING A LIBRARY

Aspects of love: Miah Persson sings Clara Schumann; (below) composer Johanna Kinkel

extrovert sound. The overall effect is polished and aristocratic, but still effective. (DG 479 8337) Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (mezzo) Hunt Lieberson’s gloriously sincere performance coupled with Julius Drake’s responsive, vivid playing makes for a first-class account, without the borderline matronly tones of, say, Brigitte Fassbaender or Elena Gerhardt, wonderful though they are.

Hunt Lieberson responds to every word, but binds the whole with her creamy legato sound, ranging from fullblooded utterance to a near whisper.

Drake tenderly brings out oftenoverlooked inner voices in the piano, acting as the protagonist’s companion and consolation throughout. A devastatingly moving performance.

(Wigmore Hall Live WHLIVE0024)

And one to avoid…

GETTY, ALAMY, REKA CHOY

Christa Ludwig is blessed with one of the most beautiful voices for this repertoire, yet here she sounds strangely robotic in the slow songs (‘Du Ring an meinem Finger’ sounds uninterested), and rather aggressive in the fast ones.

Though polished, in comparison with her sublime performances of Mahler and Brahms this 1976 performance with Gerald Moore lacks heart.

besottedness to bereavement in a brisk 23 minutes. Many accounts pit the slow songs against the fast ones, an effect which recalls Robert Schumann’s own life and personality, split unstably between the imagined characters of the melancholy Eusebius and exuberant Florestan.

This may be the stuff of romance, but not of marriage, motherhood and widowhood. Connolly’s and Asti’s measured approach allows us to evolve alongside the protagonist. It might be a stretch, but it is Clara Schumann, with her maturity, endurance, pathos and loyalty, that they seem to honour.

Continue the journey…

We suggest works to explore after Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben

R

obert Schumann 1836 Frauenliebe, which spent much of July also sets Chamisso’s texts.

1840 immersed in Though less familiar today, the work of Adelbert von the prolific German was Chamisso – as well as greatly admired in his own Frauenliebe und -leben, his time, not least by Wagner.

Fünf Lieder, Op. 40 also set (Brigitte Fassbaender (mezzo), Chamisso’s words. In this Cord Garben (piano) Deutsche instance, though, four of the Grammophon 423 6802). five songs are Chamisso’s The besottedness of translations of poems by the first two songs of Hans Christian Andersen.

Frauenliebe und -leben With each song runs right through depicting a single In Schumann’s Andersen Beethoven’s seminal character, a theme of settings, the darker side of song cycle, An love runs through the die ferne Geliebte passion is never far away (‘To the distant cycle but, Andersen being Andersen, the beloved’). Here, darker, painful side of passion is never amid the blossoms of spring, a lovelorn far away. (Christian Gerhaher (baritone), young man imagines how he will win Gerold Huber (piano) RCA 88697168172). over the object of his desire through Clara Schumann could be fairly selfsong. (Werner Güra (tenor), Christoph Berner deprecatory when comparing her songs (fortepiano), Harmonia Mundi MC902217). to her husband’s, but this reflects Finally, for another Chamisso setting, social convention more than the quality try the lively ‘Der Müllerin Nachbar’ of her work. Her exquisite Op. 13 (‘The mill-girl’s neighbour’), the sixth collection of six songs (1840-44) sets and last song in the Op. 10 cycle by poems by Heine, Geibel and Rückert Johanna Kinkel. Born in the same year that reflect on love in its various forms, as Robert Schumann, Kinkel enjoyed from the utter devotion of ‘Ich hab’ in acclaim as both a composer and deinem Auge’ to the sorry love-hate author. Her career in Germany came relationship described in ‘Sie liebten to a shuddering halt, however, when sich beide’. (Miah Persson (soprano), her involvement in the 1848 uprisings Joseph Breinl (piano) BIS BISSACD1834). forced her to leave for London.

For a close contemporary of (Ingrid Schmithuesen (soprano), Thomas Frauenliebe und -leben, try Carl Loewe’s Palm (fortepiano) CPO 777 1402).

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Reviews 110 CDs, Books & DVDs rated by expert critics Welcome As I cast my eye over what follows in the reviews section this month, I notice a distinctly British and American roster of composers. From the US we have works by the likes of Caroline Shaw, David Gompper, Jennifer Higdon and Joseph C Phillips, while keeping the British end up are Hubert Parry, York Bowen, John Tavener and William Walton, among others.

We’ve not one but two albums of Beethoven symphonies transcribed for piano – including a turn from the legendary Martha Argerich, who supplies two of the four hands for a keyboard Pastoral. And speaking of legends, this issue includes a Historical round-up where you’ll find recordings

by Nadia Boulanger, Wilhelm Backhaus, Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Toscanini.

Michael Beek Reviews editor

This month’s critics John Allison, Nicholas Anderson, Terry Blain, Kate Bolton-Porciatti, Geoff Brown, Michael Church, Christopher Cook, Christopher Dingle, Misha Donat, Jessica Duchen, George Hall, Malcolm Hayes, Julian Haylock, Claire Jackson, Daniel Jaffé, Stephen Johnson, Berta Joncus, Erik Levi, Natasha Loges, Andrew McGregor, David Nice, Roger Nichols, Bayan Northcott, Steph Power, Anthony Pryer, Paul Riley, Jan Smaczny, Michael Tanner, Roger Thomas, Sarah Urwin Jones, Kate Wakeling, Barry Witherden

KEY TO STAR RATINGS

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BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

RECORDING OF THE MONTH

Spiritual revelations and sonic pleasures Natasha Loges is transported by this truly sublime programme of choral works from Paul Hillier and Ars Nova Copenhagen

... and ...

Arvo Pärt: Drei Hirtenkinder; Kleine Litanei; Virgencita; Habitare fratres in unum; Alleluia tropus; And I heard a voice...; Caroline Shaw: and the swallow; Julia Wolfe: Guard my tongue; Anon: Laude di Cortona (arr. Paul Hillier) Ars Nova Copenhagen/ Paul Hillier Naxos 8.574281 62:48 mins

This beautifully conceived recording opens with two works by Caroline Shaw and Julia Wolfe, interleaved with groups of sacred works by Arvo Pärt as well as six Laude from Cortona in Tuscany. The Laude, drawn from a 13th-century manuscript which was only

discovered in the 19th century, are imaginatively arranged by Paul Hillier.

Sung with a huge expressive range, from rustic energy to rapt contemplation, the medieval works forge connections with the 21st-century compositions through shared keys, motives, textures and words. But there is plenty of variety, from the slow and contemplative to the lilting and dancelike. This is outstanding programming.

From the first tentative notes of and the swallow, Caroline Shaw transports us into a spacious, threedimensional world. Her setting of the words ‘How beloved is your dwelling place’ opens with warm, consonant harmonies, but then unfolds into the highest reaches of the choir’s range, like the swallow whose nest is so beautifully hymned.

The energy is ramped up with the first ‘Laudario’, an ebullient song of praise for the Virgin Mary. The rustic, cheeky approach contrasts delightfully with Shaw’s austere soundworld. Such versatility enlivens the whole recording.

Recording of the Month Reviews An interview with Paul Hillier

E CHOIC

JEPPE BJØRN, DITTE CAPION

From the mists of time: Ars Nova builds bridges between the centuries

Wolfe’s Guard my tongue is a painterly work, long strips of sound unfurled and punctuated by splashes of text.

These, in turn, accumulate into new layers, building up a densely populated canvas.

Its solo-ensemble alternation is recalled in the following ‘Laudario’, celebrating the birth of Christ, and in the following Laudes. Similarly, the unisonharmony structure of the Laudes is recalled in Arvo Pärt’s Virgencita.

Thematic connections are to be teased out everywhere. For example, Pärt’s transparent, harmonious Kleine Litanei was written for the reopening of St Virgil’s Chapel in Vienna, an underground medieval shrine dating from the same century as the Laudes. The Virgencita,

similarly, recalls the Laude in praise of Mary. The subject of Wolfe’s Guard my tongue is re-invoked in Pärt’s ‘From the mouths of babes’.

Above all, this is consummate choral singing,

Paul Hillier’s singers create moments of exquisite tenderness and stillness luminous, multi-coloured and virtuosic, each word lovingly and clearly enunciated, each line beautifully shaped, in a performance of deep, rapt spirituality. Collectively, Hillier’s singers create moments of exquisite tenderness and stillness, while solos are individual and characterful.

The sweet-sour, major-minor world of Pärt’s Kleine Litanei sends shivers down the spine.

The sublime, close harmonies of Habitare fratres in unum are weightless and timeless. To close, Pärt’s And I heard a voice intones, consolingly, that after their labours, the dead will finally rest.

I would have liked liner notes that tell us more about these fascinating works, but this is a minor gripe. The acoustic of the Garnisonskirken, Copenhagen is sympathetic and warm, the recording quality outstanding, creating a remarkably layered, spatial listening experience.

This recording offers spiritual revelation and sonic pleasure from start to finish.

PERFORMANCE RECORDING

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What’s the story behind the album’s title?

Titles are sometimes a nuisance; two of the pieces on the album begin with the word ‘and’, so I thought it could at least get things started. It’s a pretty thin reason, I know, but in lieu of anything better I decided that’s what I’d call it. I suppose the idea of adding a bit of intrigue was in the back of my mind a little, too. Also, I like minimal things and you can’t get much more minimalist than that!

The programme spans the centuries. What was your starting point?

We had Arvo Pärt’s commission, And I heard a voice, and that gave me the idea to do a record of some more of his music, but not a whole record – I’ve done several before. We had also just performed the Caroline Shaw piece for the first time, and we’d been doing Julia Wolfe’s wonderful piece for two or three years on and off. I wanted something different, and yet not too different, to put between them all; so I decided to go for the Laude di Cortona, which I’ve been doing for some time with various different groups.

Did you work with Arvo Pärt?

He was commissioned by the University of Salamanca; they wanted a piece from him for us to perform – we had been booked to come and do a concert. He came to one of the rehearsals in Copenhagen, and that was invaluable. He also travelled to Salamanca to be present when we performed it. So he was involved, but he wasn’t at the recording. I’ve worked with Arvo quite a lot over the years and it’s always been a very positive experience.

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Orchestral JON

ORCHESTRAL CHOICE

Seattle’s blockbuster pairing triumphs David Nice gets a kick out of Thomas Dausgaard’s Strauss and Scriabin epics between C and B major seems to find its next step in Scriabin’s postTristan-esque opening chord. And Scriabin • R Strauss if the constant yearning of the later R Strauss: Also sprach Zarathustra; work is weakened by adherence to Scriabin: Symphony No. 4 sonata form and the limitations of a ‘The Poem of Ecstasy’ few thematic shapes – Zarathustra Seattle Symphony/ is more constantly shape-shifting – Thomas Dausgaard there are enough correspondences Seattle Symphony SSM 1025 52:23 mins for fascination. I hadn’t noticed the It might be nostalgia for the big downward pizzicatos in Strauss’s late-Romantic orchestra, so long Grave Song, echoed in the Scriabin. missing in live And the trumpet action, that makes work in both is The trumpet work me indulgent to superlatively in both pieces is the interpretations good. One small superlatively good of these cosmic reservation – that blockbusters. Both the Seattle strings need this wide soundscape and the can’t go for impassioned muscle in art that conceals art for the details the same way as those of Vienna, in a clear, broad picture. We still get Berlin or Amsterdam – is offset the timbres of woodwind and harps by all the swoops and chirrups of adding their splashes of colour; the Dance-Song, the best I know from shrieking piccolo to silky bass (concertmaster Noah Geller, I lines, as quiet as the grave in Strauss’s presume, is the soloist here). I’d first fugue, the dynamic range thought of Dausgaard as a febrile is impressive. kind of conductor, but he knows Any conventional idea that there when to go slow and spacious here, needs to be a long gap between Also when to drive to thrilling climaxes. sprach Zarathustra and The Poem of His booklet notes are excellent, too.

Ecstasy was banished by the actuality PERFORMANCE HHHHH – Strauss’s unresolved conflict RECORDING HHHHH

Beethoven Symphony No. 7; Piano Concerto No. 4 Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra/ Lahav Shani (piano)

THOMAS GRØNDAHL

Warner Classics 9029517768 73:14 mins

Like his mentor Daniel Barenboim, Lahav Shani is both an outstanding pianist and conductor – he has been chief conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic since 2016 and recently became music director of the Israel Philharmonic. In the piano concerto, with violins arrayed left and right, and cellos and double basses (whose presence

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is unusually ‘felt’) in the middle, Shani emphasises the music’s lyrical impulse and exultant quality rather than eliciting a heroic overview.

Although he relishes the implicit contrast in the brief Andante con moto central movement between muscular strings and acquiescent piano, he avoids the pitfall of attempting to impose a similar emotional narrative on the outer movements. Everything unfolds naturally – the finale possesses a reassuringly smiling quality reminiscent of classic Philharmonia accounts from Emil Gilels/Leopold Ludwig and Hans Richter-Haaser/ Istvan Kertész (both EMI/Warner).

Likewise the Seventh Symphony (complete with first movement

A conductor in control: Thomas Dausgaard has a firm hand

You can access thousands of reviews from our extensive archive on the BBC Music Magazine website at www.classical-music.com

exposition repeat): in a work that can easily become an adrenalinepumping exercise in musical exhilaration, Shani retains the joy without over-forcing the music’s physical impact. Indeed, the Scherzo is all fleet-footed dancing, without a hob-nailed boot within earshot.

Even the finale retains its genial composure, without any sense of being driven – there’s certainly no lack of excitement, yet Shani avoids the manic quality that has become almost part-and-parcel of the Seventh’s rhetorical tradition.

He also gauges well the fine line between HIP (historically informed performance) and indulging modern instrumental proclivities.

The Rotterdam Philharmonic

possesses an appealing inner glow and warmth that radiates a strong sense of collegiate endeavour.

Julian Haylock PERFORMANCE HHHH RECORDING HHHH

Elisabetta Brusa Symphony No. 2; Simply Largo Ulster Orchestra/Daniele Rustioni Naxos 8.574263 52:52 mins

The Italian composer Elisabetta Brusa is that modern rarity, a convincing 21st-century symphonist with a powerful stylistic voice and some urgent substance to communicate.

Orchestral Reviews The classical structure she adopts in her Symphony No. 2 is handled with rigour, offering strong foundations upon which she builds a crunchy harmonic language with more than a few nods towards bitonality and polytonality. A former pupil of Peter Maxwell Davies and Hans Keller, among others, Brusa has a strong pedigree and an individual approach that pays ample dividends in these world-premiere recordings.

The symphony, Brusa says in her booklet note, took ten years (200010) to write due to the ‘vicissitudes’ of fate. Although it is an abstract work, it seems easy to imagine that the five harsh, hammeredout chords which open the first movement, and batter down the more lyrical music later, form a fate motif of sorts. The work follows a traditional four-movement format with slow movement placed second, and the orchestration is rewardingly colourful. Some of the instrumental writing is really challenging, the proliferation of high, loud brass in particular, and the Ulster Orchestra carries some of these elements off with conviction. Unfortunately the strings do not always match up with confidence or intensity of tone, while the balance of both orchestra and sound quality could perhaps be stronger. The short Simply Largo for string orchestra, however, gives its players a chance to shine brighter: here the richness of Brusa’s language and the expressive lament the music crystallises speak compellingly to the listener. Jessica Duchen PERFORMANCE HHH RECORDING HHH

Myaskovsky • Prokofiev Prokofiev: Symphony No. 5; Myaskovsky: Symphony No. 21 Oslo Philharmonic/Vasily Petrenko Lawo LWC 1207 62:31 mins

Admirable it may be of Vasily Petrenko to continue his winning streak in an ever-growing discography by pairing symphonies

by Prokofiev and his lifelong friend Myaskovsky, ten years his senior, but there can be no doubt what really matters here – a powerful and revelatory take on a masterpiece, Prokofiev’s Fifth. Its schizoid nature – epic and parody in alarming alternation – is highlighted by first and third movements stretched almost to breaking point, but

Perfect Prokofiev: Vasily Petrenko is on a symphonic roll

with dynamic and textural detail keeping expressiveness and pathos afloat, the sonic extremes superbly handled in another engineering triumph by Lawo. The grotesquerie and the menace have never been better done; that remarkable passage for three snapping trumpets which leads back to a new terror in the return of the scherzo proper is hair-raising at a sustained tempo, the rapid acceleration to whirlwind speed all the more powerful. And the monstrous machine that finally devours the finale’s galop is all the more shocking here.

Myaskovsky’s chief virtue in his 21st Symphony of 1940 is a return to the brevity young Prokofiev had recommended when both students embarked on the art of the symphony back in 1908. The halflights in which the work begins and ends seem genuine reflections of the composer’s depressive temperament; in between, a brio which belongs to an interwar work by a minor British composer comes up against the kind of romantic idea which could have been written in the late 19th century.

An interesting bonus, then, but the Prokofiev is the bold and novel thing here. David Nice PERFORMANCE HHHHH RECORDING HHHH

Schubert Symphonies Nos 2 & 3; Alfonso und Estrella – Overture ‘Rosamund’; Des Teufels Lustschloss – Overture Chamber Orchestra Basel/ Heinz Holliger

Heinz Holliger’s energetic approach to Schubert pays off in this recording of these two symphonies. The bright Symphony No. 3 fizzes, clipped and contained most starkly in the surprisingly decorous third movement Menuetto, a collected canter rather than the hair-raising, flat-out gallop that one might be used to elsewhere.

The Presto vivace is as expertly delineated, but far more fleet and glittering, a champagne finish.

Overtures from Schubert’s ‘failed’ opera career provide the sandwich filling. Holliger goes some way to redressing this historical oversight, particularly in the overture to Schubert’s teenage opera Das Teufels Lustschloss, with its thrilling sense of drama as imaginary furies rage through the strings. And yet he also

manages to suggest, as Schubert intends, that all this conjuring might just be a grand illusion.

In the rather more sombre overture to Alfonso und Estrella, Schubert’s exploratory manipulations of tonality and structure, as if constantly working on the element of surprise, is underscored by Holliger’s attentive approach, here as in the composer’s Second Symphony. Holliger makes a thrilling case for the Symphony’s lengthy first movement, played by the Kammerorchester Basel with infectious drive. The Andante’s delicate main theme is followed by an insistent Menuetto, although it’s perhaps all too much drive at this point, and in the end it is the dazzling Third Symphony and Das Teufels Lustschloss which linger.

Sarah Urwin Jones PERFORMANCE HHHH RECORDING HHHH

Thomas Wilson Symphonies Nos 2 & 5 Royal Scottish National Orchestra/ Rory Macdonald Linn Records CKD643 54:24 mins

Fifty-four minutes might seem rather short shrift for an album, but the Scottish composer Thomas Wilson, dubbed at his death in 2001 ‘a national treasure’, makes every second count. The two symphonies here, completing Linn’s recorded survey (missing only the suppressed No. 1), may have stylistic differences, but both are notably taut affairs, propelled by motivic cells more harmonic than melodic, nervously explored from every angle. The language in neither is

BACKGROUND TO…

Elisabetta Brusa (b1954) Born in Milan, Brusa began composing aged five. She studied at the city’s Conservatory under Bruno Bettinelli and Azio Corghi, graduating in 1980. She then subsequently taught composition at various Italian conservatories, finally returning to teach at the Milan Conservatory. From 1976-85, she made several visits to the UK, where she was mentored first

by Peter Maxwell Davies at Dartington, then by Hans Keller in London. She became naturalised British in 2018. A series of recordings devoted to her orchestral works is being released by Naxos to critical acclaim.

Sony Classical 19075814422 76:10 mins

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Orchestral Reviews particularly advanced, but nor are they works for sleepy heads. Both receive committed performances from Rory Macdonald’s orchestral forces, captured in a rather hard, unfriendly acoustic that might vaguely suit Wilson’s seriousness of purpose but doesn’t do full justice to his diverse, often lustrous instrumental colours.

The Second Symphony of 1965 is particularly tense, chewing over rhythms and intervallic relations in a manner both muscular and surly, with sustained notes dominating parts of its striking, shadow-strewn central adagio. Overall, the work’s pleasures closely resemble those obtained from a strenuous afterwork run round the park.

Leaping over 30 years, we reach Wilson’s Fifth of 1998, comparatively mellow and reflective, and his last completed work. Here you can put your feet up a bit, thanks to greater lyricism and structural fluidity, plus cells of longer length. It’s as enjoyable as it is impressive; and Wilson’s orchestral palette continues to intrigue, right from the opening mix of ominous growling timpani and a sad, wriggling cor anglais. Geoff Brown PERFORMANCE HHHH RECORDING HHH

Music with humanity: Charles Mackerras was much loved

From the archives Andrew McGregor reflects on Charles Mackerras’s approach to late Mozart as recorded by Linn Records This set, Sir Charles Mackerras conducts Mozart (Linn Records CKD651; 5CDs), is all the proof we need that Mackerras and Mozart are two names that belong together. I was at the first recording sessions in Glasgow City Halls in 2007, and Mackerras told me his interpretation of Mozart’s late symphonies had altered considerably since he’d last recorded them. He loved working with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and wanted to record late Mozart with them one last time: modern instruments (except for the timpani and the natural horns and trumpets), but with Mackerras’s historically informed approach to articulation and phrasing, with just a little vibrato on the longer notes to warm the string sound. Meticulous preparation too; Mackerras brought his own scores and markedup orchestral parts, so everyone could see his thinking, starting on the same page. We’re rewarded with delightfully alert playing and transparent textures, all the detail joyfully revealed in these excellent recordings – one of which won ‘Recording of the Year’ at the 2009 BBC Music Magazine Awards.

The Jupiter Symphony is radiant, the finale of the Linz is majestic, the Haffner is full of colour and character and the gentle grace of the SCO strings enhances the G minor Symphony No. 40. Mackerras makes it seem so natural, so supple; you’ll ask yourself why Mozart can’t always be like this, even as you realise it’s far from simple, that it takes a lifetime of love and knowledge and research. The sessions were democratic, not authoritarian; lots of discussion, listening and laughter, qualities that shine through in the wit and humanity of these recordings.

The Requiem was originally released in 2003, using Robert Levin’s edition of the Süssmayr completion, aiming to get closer to what Mozart might have written, and soprano Susan Gritton is outstanding. Charles Mackerras died in July 2010, shortly after conducting Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte at Glyndebourne, his love and respect for Mozart accompanying him to the end.

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Elgar: Organ Sonata in G (arr. Hans Kunstovny); Jacob: A Symphony for Strings; Parry: An English Suite Southwest German Chamber Orchestra/Douglas Bostock CPO 555 382-2 71:05 mins

GETTY

Andrew McGregor is the presenter of Radio 3’s Record Review, broadcast each Saturday morning from 9am until 11.45am

British Music for Strings

Just a few months into English conductor Douglas Bostock’s first season as artistic director of the Southwest German Chamber Orchestra, COVID-19 shut concerts down. This new album had already been recorded, however, and is the first in a projected series of British string music.

The puckish skirls and jaunty rhythms in the ‘Prelude’ to Parry’s An English Suite show the 14 players keenly attuned to its courtly, neo-baroque idiom. The ‘Saraband’ is grave without overemphasis, the ‘Caprice’ cutting and skittish, and the dancing ‘Frolic’ caps out an infectiously entertaining interpretation.

Gordon Jacob’s A Symphony for Strings is a darker piece. Written in

1943, it has no explicit programme, but its solemn opening Andante and the stoical Allegro that follows suggest its wartime background.

The central Andante implants a haunting threnody for solo violin in the string writing, and the movement as a whole is shaped

by Bostock and his players with satisfying nuance and cogency.

Jacob’s Symphony makes a canny companion piece to a work he himself orchestrated, Elgar’s Organ Sonata. The version heard here, though, is one for strings only by Hans Kunstovny, former principal bass with the Southwest German Chamber Orchestra. On paper it doesn’t look a promising idea, but Kunstovny makes a highly convincing case for his transcription, and Bostock elicits a bracingly articulate performance. I listened to the organ original for comparison and, perhaps heretically, enjoyed the string arrangement more. Elgarians will, I suspect, love it. Terry Blain PERFORMANCE HHHH RECORDING HHHHH

The English Connection Bantock: Pagan Symphony; Maxwell Davies: Five Klee Pictures; Parry: Symphonic Variations Argovia Philharmonic/ Douglas Bostock Coviello COV92017 58:17 mins

This curious programme demonstrates both that there is no single defining 20th-century ‘English’ style, and the versatility of this Swiss orchestra. If not the slickest of ensembles, the Argovia Philharmonic is never less than characterful and engaging here under its former principal conductor Douglas Bostock.

Perhaps surprisingly, Parry’s Symphonic Variations (1897) proves the most strikingly innovative of the three works. Its abrupt juxtaposition of different styles – one moment Tchaikovsky high tragedy, the next careless classical grace – suggests Mahler and even, in its use of jump cut, anticipates Stravinsky; one variation, little more than woodwind tremolo with some pizzicato underpinning, foretells Petrushka.

In contrast, the biggest surprise offered by the Bantock is that this lush and delectable work, though composed in the mid-1920s and titled Pagan Symphony, so totally

Orchestral Reviews bypasses Stravinsky’s influence.

Rather – inspired principally by Richard Strauss (particularly Ein Heldenleben) with hints of Borodin and, in its closing pages, a clear debt to Sibelius’s Third Symphony – it sounds as if written at least 15 years earlier, yet will surely please those who enjoy John Williams’s exuberant film scores.

Ironically, Maxwell Davies’s Five Klee Pictures sounds rather more dated. A worthy attempt to write modern music for school children in the 1950s, the material – though pithily evocative and performed with spirit by Bostock and his musicians – does not repay much relistening, its brassy dissonances too readily suggesting the bargain basement horrors of a 1960s Amicus film. Daniel Jaffé PERFORMANCE HHHH RECORDING HHHH

Works by Satie and Scheidt (arr. for baroque ensemble) Lautten Compagney/ Wolfgang Katschner DHM G0100044377293 (digital only) 65:38 mins

These are strangely effective bedfellows.

Berlin-based ensemble Lautten Compagney is fond of quirkily creative combinations and its latest album, Time Zones, creates a musical dialogue between two thoroughly idiosyncratic figures: Erik Satie (1866-1925) and Samuel Scheidt (1587-1654) are separated by the

Harbingers of hope during mankind’s darkest hour Sasha Cooke, Daniel Hope, Sean Mori, Kay Stern, Dawn Harms, Patricia Heller, Emil Miland

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Time Zones

distance between Paris and Halle, by three centuries and clearly by aesthetic. Nonetheless, there is a certain kinship in the way both composers stood resolutely apart from their peers, finding inspiration in the past for their music. Most of the Satie pieces were originally written for piano and are arranged here with whimsical flair by Bo Wiget for Lautten Compagney’s evershifting forces. The intertwining lines of Scheidt’s contrapuntal gems require comparable creative decisions since the instrumentation is never specified in his scores.

There is a broad nod to era, the chirpy recorders, cornett and trombones of the cheerful Canzon ad imitationem Bergamasca clearly Baroque in outlook, while Satie’s Pièces froides have the whiff of a Parisian café band. However, juxtaposition soon becomes exchange, Satie’s Avant dernières pensées sounding like a dreamy recollection of the vivacious movements from Scheidt’s Ludi musici I. There are delectably inventive stylistic flirtations, such as saxophone and marimba figuring prominently, and convincingly, in the ninth of Scheidt’s Siebzig Symphonien. Satie’s Sarabande No. 3 is utterly enchanting heard on two archlutes and chitarrone, and only the hardest of hearts could resist the amiable reimagining of his Les oiseaux for delicate plucked strings accompanying low recorder. Overall, a charmingly diverting set of new perspectives on both composers.

Christopher Dingle PERFORMANCE HHHH RECORDING HHHH

Violins of Hope, recorded live at Kohl Mansion, presents instruments that were owned by Jewish musicians before and during the Holocaust, representing strength and optimism for the future during mankind’s darkest hour. On this album, the instruments are used to perform two string quartet masterpieces by Schubert and Mendelssohn, alongside a new composition

by Jake Heggie setting texts by Gene Scheer, inspired by the violins’ histories.

RECENT HIGHLIGHT

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National treasures: Douglas Bostock conducts two discs of British works

Bach Harpsichord Concertos II Francesco Corti and il pomo d’oro www.pentatonemusic.com BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE And in all good record shops

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Concerto Copland • R Strauss

CONCERTO CHOICE

A momentous recording of two Martin concertos Frank Peter Zimmermann and the Bambergs give a truly satisfying performance, says Jan Smaczny

Dazzling virtuoso: Zimmermann plays with sparkle

Bartók • Martin

Bamberg Symphony clearly relish Martin ’s highly coloured orchestral palette.

The Second Concerto composed in the United States, where Martin had fled in 1943, is full Frank Peter Zimmermann (violin); of anticipation of his later maturity. Reflecting Bamberg Symphony Orchestra/Jakub Hr a BIS BIS-2457 (CD/SACD) 74:40 mins the tonal beauty of Mischa Elman’s playing for whom it was written, there is a wealth of lyrical For nearly 30 years Martin ’s First Violin Concerto, melody underpinned by strong symphonic fibre. completed in 1933, was thought to have been lost.

Zimmermann and Hr a deliver Composed for the American violinist Samuel Dushkin, who The orchestra clearly another superb performance – the sprung rhythms of the first turned out to be very demanding relishes Martin ’s movement and robust ebullience of where the solo part was concerned, highly coloured palette the finale are brilliantly captured the work disappeared during in one of the most satisfying Martin ’s lifetime and had to wait recorded performances available. nearly 15 years after his death for its premiere in 1973.

The Bartók Solo Violin Sonata is a great bonus and The work itself might be described as transitional; beautifully played, but these landmark performances in the outer movements Martin favours the busy, sometimes jazz-inflected neo-classicism he cultivated of the Martin concertos are the headline items and both are unquestionably outstanding. in the late 1920s. The slow movement, however, is PERFORMANCE HHHHH full of generous, almost pastoral lyricism looking RECORDING HHHHH forward to his music of the 1940s. Zimmermann has fully absorbed the slightly eclectic style of the work You can access thousands of reviews from our and produces a performance of conviction, not to extensive archive on the BBC Music Magazine mention dazzling virtuosity. Hr a accompanies with website at www.classical-music.com understanding and flexibility, while the players of the

HARALD HOFFMANN

Martinů: Violin Concertos Nos 1 & 2; Bartók: Sonata for Solo Violin

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R Strauss: Duet Concertino*; Capriccio – Prelude**; Copland: Clarinet Concerto; Appalachian Spring – Suite (1944 version) Ernst Ottensamer (clarinet), *Stepan Turnovsky (bassoon); **Academy of London; Northern Sinfonia/ Richard Stamp Signum Classics SIGCD 654 75:14 mins

Late Richard Strauss and middle-period Copland is an odd coupling. Even the recordings are disparate, the Copland tracks dating from 2014, the Strauss from 199091. True, all the music here is from the 1940s, with the concertos – both composed between 1946-48 – being played by the late Ernst Ottensamer, the Vienna Philharmonic’s sometime principal clarinet.

Strauss’s Duet-Concertino goes very nicely, the initially disputatious soloists gambolling amicably through its extended rococo finale.

Unfortunately, several details of Strauss’s elaborate interactions for solo string group and string orchestra and harp are lost in the overgeneralised recording – as they are in the vibrantly performed string sextet movement that serves as a Prelude to his last opera, Capriccio.

Appalachian Spring in its original chamber scoring gets the most convincing reading: Richard Stamp secures real zip in the faster music, and there is some lovely tender playing from the Royal Northern Sinfonia principals in the more poised passages. The Clarinet Concerto is acceptable, but its finale lacks the friskiness and bounce of the best readings. Bayan Northcott PERFORMANCE HHH RECORDING HHH

David Gompper Cello Concerto; Double Bass Concerto; Moonburst Timothy Gill (cello), Volkan Orhon (double bass); Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Emmanuel Siffert Naxos 8.559855 60:19 mins

David Gompper (see Background To…, p75) is a composerpianist rooted in traditional forms and practical music-making.

This third album of orchestral

Concerto Reviews works with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Emmanuel Siffert forms a kind of diptych with last year’s second: here we get Moonburst (2018, companion to the earlier Sunburst) alongside recent concertos for cello and double bass.

Gompper’s bold orchestral canvases are in an approachable transatlantic modernist style which explores binary opposites of line, timbre, tempo and so on. Each work utilises matrices derived from mathematics’ Farey sequence: a way of ordering fractions that has underpinned his structures and imagery for some time, which results here in music of expressive contrasts.

In the concertos, soloist is pitted against orchestra ‘in an attempt to world-build’ that yields highly listenable results, thanks also to the virtuoso commitment of Timothy Gill (cello) and Volkan Orhon (double bass). The Cello Concerto is conventional fare, exploring divergent material in two movements, volatile then reflective. But its sibling proves more intriguing as Gompper rises to the challenge of the double bass’s relative quietness: imagining three stages of a solar eclipse, corresponding sections highlight different kinds of sonic shadow.

Moonburst builds layers of nightsuggestive material – including hidden homages to nocturnal works by Schoenberg and Debussy – into an eventual climax which is satisfyingly expansive. There are some lovely translucent textures here which could strike gold with a more subtly blended recorded sound. Steph Power PERFORMANCE HHH RECORDING HHH

Ragna Schirmer ventured a set on Berlin Classics, divvying them up between fortepiano, pianoforte and, throwing caution to the wind, Hammond organ buttressed by a jazz combo. Matthias Kirschnereit restricts himself to a Steinway grand, but there’s nothing ‘restricted’ about his free-spirited approach.

In the liner notes he argues that the modern piano offers the chance ‘to display in a different light a number of artistic ideas slumbering in these scores.’ There’s certainly little room for slumber given Kirschnereit’s interventions, which can prove distinctly hit-and-miss.

Handel’s keyboard playing was commended by a contemporary for his ‘uncommon brilliance and command of fingers,’ two qualities Kirschnereit possesses in spades; but stylish exuberance co-exists with a welter of stylistic anachronisms that can passingly push the music closer to CPE Bach, Mozart and even, at times, Beethoven. His embellishments often strive too hard; introspection can turn self-regarding. One moment his invention delights, the next it interposes itself between listener and music. A similar stylistic inconsistency afflicts the undeniably tight-knit Deutsche Kammerakademie Neuss.

Previously released as three separate discs and now boxed together for the first time, Kirschnereit’s is ‘Handel with care’; but the equally playful insights and greater linguistic coherence of organist Richard Egarr on Harmonia Mundi offers a more persuasive vision. Paul Riley PERFORMANCE HHH RECORDING HHHH

Handel

Michael Stewart • Tavener

Organ Concertos (arr. for piano and orchestra)

Tavener: Palintropos; Michael Stewart: Beyond Space and Time

Matthias Kirschnereit (piano), Deutsche Kammerakademie Neuss/ Lavard Skou Larsen

Aruhi (piano); New London Orchestra/Ronald Corp

CPO 555 413-2 (CD/SACD) 198:06 mins (3 discs)

This is unusual Tavener. Dating from 1978, Palintropos belongs to the transitional period in Tavener’s life where he moved from being a restless western-European progressive to focusing exclusively on the spiritual.

The timelessness of Tavener’s mature works is already present,

Pianists – Sviatoslav Richter, Murray Perahia and Keith Jarrett among them – have long observed open season on Handel’s harpsichord suites. Few, however, have thought of appropriating the organ concertos – although

A Flock Ascending AFACD 001 46:01 mins

but it is combined and overlaid with busy modernist gestures. A voluble and demanding solo piano chitters busily, yet this is hardly a concerto.

To complicate matters further, as Tavener himself observed, it is an unusually impressionistic work in his output. Similar to a palindrome, the title refers to a structure turning back on itself. In this case, it specifically charts the changing light on the sea from dawn to dusk viewed from high up on the island of Patmos. Unsurprisingly, the spirit of Messiaen is rarely far away, especially in the slow moving brass figures. Nonetheless, Palintropos is far from derivative, with numerous ear-catching aspects, such as the quixotic duets between piano and celeste, or the dynamically static central climax.

That this curious mix hangs together as a convincing entity is a tribute to Tavener’s compositional skills, aided here in this remarkably assured first recorded performance from Japanese pianist Aruhi and the New London Orchestra under Ronald Corp. It is partnered by Michael Stewart’s Beyond Time and Space (in Memoriam John Tavener) in which piano is again to the fore.

Nonetheless, Stewart’s swooshing, phasing keyboards and electronics often dominate the texture in a triptych that aspires to the eternal, though ultimately less memorably than the Tavener. Christopher Dingle PERFORMANCE HHHH RECORDING HHHH

Vivaldi The Four Seasons Alexandra Conunova(violin); ad hoc ensemble of 12 string players; Paolo Corsi (harpsichord) Aparté AP 242 37:09 mins

Nicolas Bartholomée’s Aparté label has built up an impressive track record over the last ten years, not least for its outstanding 2018 release of Prokofiev’s violin and piano sonatas with Alexandra Conunova and Michail Lifits. The acclaimed Moldavian violinist returns here with a particularly personal response to the trials of 2020.

Overwhelmed with messages of appreciation during lockdown for an earlier recording of The Four Seasons on YouTube, Conunova promptly gathered a group of friends to record the piece anew as a ‘symbol of survival’. The result is this imaginative account of Vivaldi’s masterpiece which bursts with vitality.

Conunova can conjure a sublimely gorgeous tone, but is also adventurous in her use of timbre without ever seeming affected.

Spring especially shimmers with surprises, while Conunova brings a wonderfully dangerous edge to the opening movement of Winter.

Toying with her tuning to create an otherworldly feel, Conunova here veers between fragility and vigour in the blink of an eye to powerful effect.

Ensemble is admirably tight and there is a wonderful sense of conviviality from the band throughout. As Conunova writes in the liner notes, the recording was conceived as a ‘celebration’ amid testing times, and this sense of exuberance and energy rings across the disc’s every track. Kate Wakeling PERFORMANCE HHHH RECORDING HHHH

BACKGROUND TO…

David Gompper (b1954) An award-winning composer, conductor and pianist, David Gompper has enjoyed a global career that has seen him make music in the UK, Russia, Nigeria and across the United States.

Born in South Carolina, he studied at the Royal College of Music and found an early affinity with chamber music and song. His 2009 Violin Concerto saw a turning point in his focus and the concerto form has continued to occupy and inspire him ever since.

Gompper continues to play the piano, accompanying the likes of cellist Tim Gill, double bassist Volkan Orhon and baritone Stephen Swanson.

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Opera Boismortier

Berta Joncus

OPERA CHOICE

This Dutch master creates a very powerful Portrait Willem Jeths’s examination of the meaning of art is a truly scintillating listen, says Christopher Cook Life of the party: Verity Wingate’s Luisa is a work of art

Willem Jeths

Jeths’s story about the meaning and purpose of art is a powerful and accomplished piece of music Verity Wingate, Martin Mkhize, Frederik Bergman, theatre. His own post-modernist style helps, with Paride Cataldo, Dominic Kraemer, Lucas van Lierop, fragments of Ravel’s La Valse, hints of Tristan and Cameron Shahbazi; Dutch National Opera; Amsterdam Salome, and even Tchaikovsky’s letter scene drifting Sinfonietta/Geoffrey Paterson through a comfortably tonal score. There are wellChallenge CC 72849 88:24 mins crafted arias for the principals, most notably a Puccinian outpouring for D’Annunzio in Scene II An invitation to an opera that promises a party is and Luisa’s lament in Scene IV not to be sneezed at! As Willem introduced with more than a Jeths discovers in his third music Paride Cataldo’s hint of Tosca. drama, Ritratto (Portrait), parties posturing D’Annunzio It’s invidious to single out are an elegant way of introducing all but steals the show individuals from the young assorted characters, and a cast, many of them members of perfect excuse for bad behaviour. the Dutch National Opera Studio, but Verity Wingate (Think no further than Flora’s Party in La traviata, or more recently Thomas Adès The Exterminating Angel.) is compelling as Luisa, and Paride Cataldo’s posturing D’Annunzio all but steals the show. Laurels, too, for Jeths and his librettist Frank Siera’s hostess is the Geoffrey Patterson who conducts the Amsterdam fabulously rich Marchese Luisa Casati, who with the Sinfonietta with complete conviction. help of the early 20th-century avant-garde, including PERFORMANCE HHHHH D’Annunzio, Diaghilev, Marinetti and Man Ray, RECORDING HHHHH intends to make herself a work of art. Unfortunately the Great War marches through her salon, although You can access thousands of reviews from our Casati partly lives out her ambition by embellishing extensive archive on the BBC Music Magazine her portrait with her own eyes and breasts as it’s being website at www.classical-music.com painted by Romaine Brooks.

RUTH WALZ, HUGO BERNARD

Ritratto

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Les voyages de l’Amour Katherine Watson, Katia Velletaz, Chantal Santon Jeffery, Judith van Wanroij, Thomas Dolié, Éléonore Pancrazi; Purcell Choir; Orfeo Orchestra/György Vashegyi Glossa GCD 924009 157:37 mins (2 discs)

The French composer Joseph Bodin de Boismortier (1689-1755) is remembered today mostly for his instrumental music, especially his flute sonatas; but there are a handful of stage works, all written for the Paris Opéra, of which Les voyages de l’Amour was the first, garnering some 18 performances following its premiere in 1736. For some reason the second act failed to please, and was quickly replaced by the composer and his librettist: on this recording both versions are included.

Cupid’s Travels is described as a ballet, but while there are numerous highly inventive dance movements it’s otherwise sung throughout, often to ornately decorated vocal lines. The plot is admittedly slight, and mildly repetitive. Cupid is determined to discover a lover who is faithful to him, and to that purpose voyages in disguise to a village (where he meets Daphné), a city (where he dallies with Lucile, or in the second version Dircé) and to a court (where he encounters Julie). The women at city and court disappoint him, however, so he returns to the village and to rustic Daphné, who represents true love.

Boismortier’s score is often delectable and both stylishly and entrancingly performed here by the rich and characterful Hungarian period-instrument orchestra and the healthy-sounding choir, with international principals among whom Katherine Watson’s Zéphire and Judith van Wanroij’s Daphné in particular stand out: Chantal Santon Jeffery’s Cupid is less even, her tone generally sweet and tender, though not always smack on the note. Conductor György Vashegyi maintains lively tempos. The sound possesses a wide range and a striking sense of perspective.

George Hall PERFORMANCE HHHH RECORDING HHHHH

Opera Reviews Nicholas Lens L.I.T.A.N.I.E.S

Breezy in Boismortier: Katherine Watson stands out as Zéphire

Clara-Lane Lens, Denzil Delaere, Claron McFadden; The Fourteen Storks Ensemble DG 483 9745 60:42 mins

Nick Cave describes lockdown as both apocalyptic and boring.

Unfortunately, the same could be said for L.I.T.A.N.I.E.S, the vocal work composed by Nicholas Lens to text written by the Australian singer. The 12 litanies are intended to echo a liturgical style, with recurring phrases reflected in the repeated musical motifs.

Whereas Lens and Cave’s previous project, Shell Shock, followed the general shape of a chamber opera, L.I.T.A.N.I.E.S lacks a clear narrative – there’s no sense of how this music might translate to stage.

Cave has not written a libretto, but rather a dozen disparate reflections on life, death, love and suffering – wrapped up under a guise of spirituality that verges on polite parody (‘Love comes to pass / Nothing ever lasts / Never lasts for long / For like an even- / An evensong’). The composer’s daughter Clara-Lane Lens’s uncluttered, breathy vocals lend an unsettling, dramatic quality to ‘Litany of the Sleeping Dream’, and the catchy ‘Litany of the Forsaken’ recalls pop vocals of The xx. There are several meandering instrumental sections, such as at the start of ‘Litany of The Unnamed’, as well as some enjoyable orchestration – the saxophones and strings in ‘Litany of the First Encounter’ provide colourful interest. Claire Jackson PERFORMANCE HH RECORDING HHH

Meyerbeer Romilda e Costanza Patrick Kabongo, Javier Povedano, Chiara Brunello, César Cortés, Giulio Mastrototaro, Luiza Fatyol; Górecki Chamber Choir; Passionart Orchestra/Luciano Acocella Naxos 8.660495-97 173:50 mins

This two-act semi-serious melodrama, first performed in Padua in 1817, was the 26-yearold Meyerbeer’s first attempt at composing in Italian in a fiercely

Soprano Rebecca L Hargrove and narrator Kenneth Browning embody all these as mother and son, deftly aided by Phillips’s own 28-piece Numinous ensemble in giving voice to a collective cry for justice that echoes through the years. Skilfully blending art and vernacular styles, the composer’s ‘mixed music’ idiom lends sociopolitical thrust to a post-minimalism that suffuses the work with added poignancy in light of the historic neglect of Julius Eastman, his minimalist precursor.

Steph Power PERFORMANCE HHHH RECORDING HHHH

Puccini Il Tabarro Melody Moore, Lester Lynch, Brian Jagde, Roxana Constantinescu, Joanne Marie D’Mello, Yongkeun Kim, Martin-Jan Nijhof; MDR Leipzig Radio Choir; Dresden Philharmonic/Marek Janowski

competitive market dominated by Rossini. Like Beethoven’s Fidelio from a few years earlier, it’s a rescue opera with a love triangle between the hero Teobaldo and his new and old loves, Romilda (disguised as Adelio) and Costanza.

The recording was made over three days at the Rossini in Wildbad Festival. The Passionart Orchestra under Luciano Acocella is brisk and well-paced, if a little unpolished; the dense orchestral writing needs more depth and clarity of sound for the individual instrumental colours to glow. The Górecki Chamber Choir is often overpowered by the orchestra.

The international cast offers some old-fashioned, slightly overblown singing. Soprano Luiza Fatyol is an assured, if weighty, Costanza; her dramatic scene in Act II is effective, but Meyerbeer’s rapid-fire, Rossini-inspired passagework needs more agility. Chiara Brunello’s Romilda is a proper contralto who bravely tackles this difficult role but is occasionally unsteady.

Tenor Patrick Kabongo, singing Teobaldo, is blessed with a rich, bel canto sound. Giulio Mastrototaro sings Pierotto, the stock peasant with a suitably rustic tone. In the numerous ensembles, individual weaknesses are masked by the strength of the whole.

There is plenty to enjoy: drama, passion, plot and a satisfying ending.

But a wider expressive range, with more vocal agility and choralorchestral polish, would serve

Meyerbeer’s fertile imagination better. Some listeners will prefer a full libretto and translation, rather than the scene synopses provided.

Natasha Loges PERFORMANCE HHH RECORDING HHH

Joseph C Phillips Jr The Grey Land Rebecca L Hargrove (soprano), Kenneth Browning (narrator); Numinous New Amsterdam NWAM 147 62:27 mins

Joseph C Phillips Jr has blogged that ‘this particular moment … does not afford me, an American Black male, the privilege of being silent about the systemic issues our country has never had the willingness to fully tackle.’ Through 13 vivid episodes, The Grey Land confronts the lived reality of systemic racism and police brutality for generations of Black Americans.

Conceived in 2011 and given focus by the 2014 Ferguson protests, the opera’s completion in 2020 feels timely indeed in the wake of George Floyd’s killing and the renewed urgency of Black Lives Matter. Placing mothers powerfully at the core of multimedia testimony, Phillips conveys the sorrow, agony, rage and sheer exhaustion of the struggle while at the same time radiating a shared strength, beauty and determination.

Pentatone PTC 5186 773 (CD/SACD) 49:42 mins

The first panel of Puccini’s Trittico (or Triptych, New York, 1918), Il tabarro (The Cloak) sits near to the heart of the verismo aesthetic and perhaps represents his darkest operatic statement. With its subtle harmonic and colouristic palettes deployed in an almost Impressionistic manner, the score also offers evidence of his mature style’s complete mastery: on and offstage effects are plentiful and imaginative, themselves providing a kind of sonic realism with their siren, bugle and car horns.

In this studio recording, the three central roles go well together, though without being strikingly individual. Lester Lynch is firm and authoritative as the bargeowner Michele, his clipped delivery and heavy presence marking out the character’s despondent soul.

Given a nervous, insecure reading

by Melody Moore, Michele’s wife Giorgetta no longer loves him and has moved on to young stevedore Luigi, whose bitterness at his downtrodden condition finds forceful expression in Brian Jagde’s taut interpretation; in their best moments both Moore and Jagde find the expansiveness to allow Puccini’s phrases to lift into the air.

Smaller roles are all vital and impressively characterised, notably BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Opera Reviews Roxana Constantinescu’s vivid ragpicker la Frugola – a game old bird – as well as in the ironic emotional counterpoint of the two young lovers (Joanne Marie D’Mello and Yongkeun Kim). The Leipzig choir and Dresden orchestra make strong contributions, yet while the ebb and flow in tension of a score full of musical and emotional ambiguity are carefully conveyed by conductor Marek Janowski, the result ultimately feels somewhat contained. George Hall PERFORMANCE HHH RECORDING HHHH

from Otello (as Desdemona), La donna del lago (as Elena) and Le Siège de Corinthe (as Pamyra). In an excerpt from Armida, the young Spanish tenor Xabier Anduaga takes on the secondary role of Carlo; he’s also a worthwhile presence in the Otello duet and one of two from Ricciardo.

With plenty of forward drive under Corrado Rovaris, the periodinstrument orchestra is neat, accurate and light-textured. Nicely regulated sound. George Hall PERFORMANCE HHHH RECORDING HHHH

Rossini

Rossini

Amici e Rivali: Duets and ensembles from Il barbiere di Siviglia, Ricciardo e Zoraide, La donna del lago, Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra, Otello, Le Siège de Corinthe and Armida

Matilde di Shabran

Lawrence Brownlee, Michael Spyres (tenor); with Tara Erraught (mezzosoprano), Xabier Anduaga (tenor); I Virtuosi Italiani/Corrado Rovaris Erato 9029526947 79:02 mins

An unusual disc, focusing on tenor-tenor duets – something that Rossini, given the plethora of this voice-type he had available to him during his Neapolitan period (1815-22) – was able to indulge in.

His Armida, for instance, involves no fewer than six tenors – though admittedly some of them occupy minor roles.

Lawrence Brownlee takes the higher parts. Airy and buoyant in his top register, he can negotiate all the notes with ease. Michael Spyres is equally stylish, though there are a couple of moments when he’s less than ideally fluent.

They are both at their best in the Agorante/Ricciardo duet from Ricciardo e Zoraide, where they prove equally adept in matching the piece’s exacting requirements, and in an excerpt from Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra in which Spyres’s stirring Leicester is confronted

by Lawrence Brownlee’s false friend Norfolk.

Right at the beginning they tackle the Almaviva/Figaro duet from The Barber of Seville, with Spyres assuming the baritone title role; though there are precedents, this is not what the composer intended.

Rich-toned mezzo Tara Erraught makes vital contributions to extracts

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Ricardo Seguel, Julian Henao Gonzalez, Giulio Mastrototaro, Michele Angelini, Emmanuel Franco, Victoria Yarovaya, Sara Blanch, Lamia Beuque, Zong Shi; Górecki Chamber Choir; Passionart Orchestra/Jose-Miguel Pérez-Sierra Naxos 8.660492-94 185:26 mins (3 discs)

After the premiere of Matilde di Shabran in 1821, one critic declared Jacopo Ferretti’s libretto to be ‘utterly mad’, a work that ‘both delights and angers’. We, too, are puzzled by a work that describes itself as a Melodramma giocoso or opera semiseria playing fast and loose with the opera rules. Is it a satire on opera seria, is it a comic melodrama, or is it a new kind of musical comedy?

This splendid recording of the original Rome version of Matilde reveals a hybrid work that looks forward to Il viaggio a Reims and Le comte Ory. Recorded at the 2019 Rossini Wildbad Festival in Germany with a handful of nips and cuts to the first version, it relishes the almost comic tale of the melodramatic medieval tyrant Corradino conquered by love, or rather Matilde, with a score packed with some of Rossini’s most accomplished music.

Michele Angelini is magnificent as the villain, everything that you hope for in a Rossini tenor – fleet of voice in his runs and trills and with gravity-defying head notes.

Sara Blanch’s Matilde matches him note for note. Their Act I duet ‘Ch’io fugga ha già timore…’ is a thrilling lesson in Rossini singing.

There’s good work from the rest of the cast, notably the contralto

Victoria Yarovaya as Edoardo, who Corradino has unjustly imprisoned and turns tragedy into comedy.

Equally pleasing is the Passionart Orchestra conducted by José Miguel Pérez-Sierra. All scrupulously Rossinian including the celebrated horn solo at the beginning of Act II. Christopher Cook PERFORMANCE HHHH RECORDING HHHH

Italian Opera Arias Arias by Bellini, Donizetti, Puccini and Verdi Linda Richardson (soprano); Sinfonia of London/John Wilson Chandos CHAN 20155 70:13 mins

It’s a brave soprano who starts a recital with a pair of the most demanding of Verdi’s numbers: ‘Pace, Pace ...’ from La forza del destino and then Violetta’s Act I aria ‘Ah, fors’è lui’ and ‘Sempre libera’. Linda Richardson screws her courage to the sticking point and tackles both with a proper sense of style: the superhuman breath control of the ‘Pace’ and the effortless move from lyric to coloratura in La traviata, though it’s a shame she had no Alfredo outside the window here, just a sugary solo violin. Thankfully there are no extraneous vocal fireworks as Violetta asserts her independence.

Richardson’s Puccini is unshowy, too, with a touching farewell to Rodolfo from Mimì and a defiant Tosca at the end of ‘Visse d’arte’.

She evidently hears these women in their music. Yet sometimes she becomes ‘detached’ from her Italian and when the voice opens up there is a temptation to push too hard.

The end of ‘Un bel dì, vedremo’ is uncomfortable, and not helped by John Wilson revving up the Sinfonia of London and throwing aural caution to the winds.

If Richardson doesn’t quite have the measure of Bellini’s ‘Casta Diva’ – how many sopranos do? – her ‘Piangete voi?…Al dolce guidami’ from Anna Bolena is as good as this dependable artist gets, discreetly decorated at the start of the aria as she wraps her voice around one of Donizetti’s most seductive melodies.

The soft singing at the end has real class, and for once Wilson keeps the brakes on. Christopher Cook PERFORMANCE HHH RECORDING HHHH

Queen of Baroque Arias by Steffani, Vinvi, Handel, Broschi, Vivaldi, Graun, Albinoni, Caldara, et al Cecilia Bartoli (mezzo-soprano), Philippe Jaroussky (countertenor), Sol Gabetta (cello); Il Giardino Armonico/Giovanni Antonini Decca 485 1275 75:55 mins

This is a compilation disc surveying the diva’s 20 years of activity in the recording studio on behalf of Baroque composers, with the forgotten highlighted amongst the celebrated: two new tracks each represent a world premiere recording.

The first is an aria sung by Enea in Agostino Steffani’s I trionfi del fato (1695). While everything Bartoli does is always dramatically motivated, her dogged bashing her way through the coloratura has long been a mannerism and is so here.

Similarly, in Erissena’s aria from Leonardo Vinci’s Alessandro nell’Indie (1730), the lower part of the voice sounds rough while there are mannered moments when she bends the tone for comic effect; yet despite these negatives, her consistent sense of character and rhythmic alertness remain plusses.

A famous (and indeed a parodied performance) is ‘Agitata da due venti’ from Vivaldi’s Griselda – certainly flamboyantly virtuosic, and less mannered than some. She makes a determined assault on ‘Son quel nave ch’agitata’ from Riccardo Broschi’s Artaserse, which though arguably over-emphatic remains a tour de force.

Bartoli indeed thinks about everything she sings, and her whispered, beautifully phrased account of ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’ is carefully shaded, with decorations scrupulously delivered. Other, slow melodies, too, are ideally shaped: Handel’s ‘Ombra mai fu’ and Porpora’s ‘Parto, ti lascio, o cara’ (from Germanico in Germania) among them.

Of the duets, Bartoli and June Anderson in the opening of the Pergolesi Stabat Mater don’t blend, though in excerpts from Steffani’s Niobe and I trionfi del fato she and Philippe Jaroussky achieve some flawless duo singing. George Hall PERFORMANCE HHHH RECORDING HHHH

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Choral & Song CHORAL & SONG CHOICE

Bruckner Latin Motets

This musical journey is ravishing and revelatory Kate Bolton-Porciatti delights in this collection of 17th-century works inspired by Italian travels Surround sound: the ensemble creates a lush sonic canvas

An Italian Travel Diary

Charpentier lingered for some years in Rome, and the city’s extravagant polychoral tradition clearly left its mark. He was later inspired to prepare a manuscript of Francesco Beretta’s 16-part Missa Mirabiles elationes Ensemble Correspondances/Sébastian Daucé maris, to which his own, lush 16-part Mass clearly Harmonia Mundi HMM 902640 74:45 mins responds. The Roman composer weaves a shroud of sound, threaded with yearning dissonances, creating a ‘Go to Italy; that is the true source’ – so Charpentier advised following his own journey from Paris to Rome profoundly poignant work. Here, and throughout the disc, Daucé gives expressive shape in the 1660s. This ‘travel diary’ brings together the sort of music Daucé gives expressive to the music’s ebb and flow; tempos beautifully judged, responding he may have encountered en route shape to the music’s are to the texts and their sacred context. and provides a narrative thread ebb and flow The ensemble’s luminous vocal for a selection of ravishing, often sound and instrumental colours add revelatory, works. to the lush sonic canvas.

Highlights include Maurizio Cazzati’s sumptuous In short, this is an inspiring programme which eight-voice motet Salve caput sacrosanctum; Cavalli’s highlights the reasons why Italy had such an 12-part Sonata in D minor, showcasing the ensemble’s overwhelming impact on the impressionable crack instrumentalists, and Merula’s quasi-operatic young Parisian. psalm-setting Credidi propter quod. The disc’s PERFORMANCE HHHHH centrepiece is Cavalli’s Magnificat of 1656 – a vivid, RECORDING HHHHH dramatic, daringly sensual response to the canticle text. Director Sébastien Daucé throws into high relief You can access thousands of reviews from our its textural and expressive contrasts – magnificent and extensive archive on the BBC Music Magazine intimate by turns; ‘Deposuit potentes’, uttered with website at www.classical-music.com hushed reverence, is particularly beautiful.

SEBASTIEN DAUCE

M-A Charpentier: Mass for Four Choirs, etc; plus works by Benevoli, Beretta, Cavalli, Cazzati, Giamberti and Merula

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Latvian Radio Choir/Sigvards Klava Ondine ODE 1362-2 56:38 mins

Anton Bruckner devoted his life and his music ‘to the dear God’, the words he inscribed on the title page of his Ninth Symphony.

But all his work, with insignificant exceptions, is dedicated to God, even though He gave the composer a particularly rough time. Worse, perhaps, than anything else was a hopeless lack of confidence, which led Bruckner to indulge in incessant revisions of his works. It was the symphonies that caused him most anxiety, but his choral works weren’t altogether untouched by it. However, most of the works on this excellent disc were written early, even in his teens, and rather than revising he would write a new piece, often to the same words. It probably helped that they were written to be performed in a liturgical context, and in Bruckner’s favourite churches.

None of these pieces is less than radiant, but most of them are also very short, two or three minutes. The longest piece is the first Mass in D minor, though it lacks the Credo and some other parts. Listening to this disc straight through is not recommended; the pieces begin to merge. That is no fault of the admirable Latvian Radio Choir, nor of their director Sigvards Klava. I prefer them to Cambridge’s King’s College Choir, who sound as if they are trying to be angels, while this Latvian choir resounds from the bottom upwards and does sound much more like an anxious congregation praying.

Michael Tanner PERFORMANCE HHHHH RECORDING HHHH

Machaut The Lion of Nobility: Ballades, Motets, etc The Orlando Consort Hyperion CDA68318 58:57 mins

Renowned in his own lifetime as the pre-eminent poet-composer of his day, Guillaume de Machaut (c1300-77) took special care for the preservation of his

Choral & Song Reviews output, having his collected works copied into a series of lavish presentation manuscripts – the vocal contents of which the Orlando Consort have been steadily recording for Hyperion since 2012.

However, their approach is rather different from the refined blend of such pioneering groups as Gothic Voices; exploiting, instead, the contrasts in timbre and character between the four voices and varying in manner from rough to smooth depending upon the texts and genres of different pieces.

The most celebrated item in this latest collection is the rondeau for three voices Ma fin est mon commencement in which the principal melody is heard in counterpoint with itself sung backwards while the lowest line reverses itself halfway through.

The most demanding listen is the 18-minute lai En demantant et lamentante, in which four paragraphs of polyphony are each repeated three times with different voices emphasised. The most exciting is the final motet Tant doucement m’ont attrait in which, over a slow bass line, the top parts challenge and dodge one another at the double. Bayan Northcott PERFORMANCE HHHH RECORDING HHHH

that even the first song seems tinged with a premonition of the painful trajectory that will lead to the watery embrace of the brook.

‘Das Wandern’ underlays delight with the almost-menace of some unbiddable imperative. What follows isn’t so much an initially wide-eyed voyage of discovery into love, loss and despair, but a series of flashbacks refracted through the prism of a knowledge hardwon. It’s a valid approach, typical of Bostridge’s always-inquisitive psychological antennae; and how deliciously arch is the greeting at the beginning of ‘Morgengruss’, or crushingly matter-of-fact the ending of ‘Tränenregen’. ‘Eifersucht und Stolz’ snarls with a desperation that isn’t quite ‘earthed’ in ‘Die liebe Farbe’. But in the frisson of live performance a few technical issues obtrude, while expressiveness sometimes trespasses into caricature. And in the previous recording, under Uchida’s deliquescent fingers, the brook babbles more beguilingly than for Giorgini. Paul Riley PERFORMANCE HHH RECORDING HHHH

John Sheppard Media Vita; Iudica me Deus; A solis ortus cardine, etc

Schubert

Choir of New College, Oxford/ Robert Quinney

Die schöne Müllerin

Linn Records CKD 632 71:58 mins

Ian Bostridge (tenor), Saskia Giorgini (piano)

The 16th-century composer John Sheppard belongs to the generation just before the great figures of Tallis and Byrd. Selections from his Latin works have fairly frequently been recorded, and at least two of them (by Stile Antico on Harmonia Mundi, and the Westminster Cathedral Choir on Hyperion) have the same title as this one – taken from one of Sheppard’s most impressive motets.

There the similarity ends. The New College Choir (16 boys and 14 adults) is quite large but its engagingly fulsome sound is kept nicely in focus by the acoustics of the moderately sized church in which it was recorded. Their rich, warm sound comes across best in A solis ortus cardine and in the superb motet Media Vita of the title – the lower voices are in balance and the boys voices gain brightness from the slightly high performance

Pentatone PTC 5186 775 61:17 mins

Tenor Ian Bostridge and Die schöne Müllerin have form. A quarter of a century ago pianist Graham Johnson chose him for the cycle as part of Hyperion’s complete Schubert song odyssey. Less than a decade on followed another recording with Mitsuko Uchida; and now comes this third, recorded live at Wigmore Hall with Salzburg Mozart Competition winner Saskia Giorgini. The inevitable change in timbre over the years is striking; and when Bostridge argues that the cycle is more than a ‘rustic pastoral confection of adolescent lovemongering’, whilst undeniably true, he’s also justifying a voice darker, less readily manoeuvrable and no longer in the first flush of youth.

Innocence yields to experience so

Choral & Song Reviews pitch. Sometimes the pieces sag a little from lack of direction ( Judice me Deus), and the inner voices occasionally require a little more effort to highlight the points of imitation and keep the rhythms precise in the shorter note values (Confitebor Domine). However, in general this is a vivid and convincing presentation of a very talented composer. Anthony Pryer PERFORMANCE HHHH RECORDING HHHH

Luminous lyricism: Dorothee Mields is splendid in Handel

Chandos CHSA 5243 (CD/SACD) 63:36 mins

Sacred Works by Albinoni, JS Bach, Brahms, Fauré, Mascagni, Mozart, Saint-Saëns, Schubert, Stradella, Verdi, etc Marina Rebeka (soprano); Latvian Radio Choir; Sinfonietta Riga/ Modestas Pitr nas

HARALD HOFFMANN

Prima Classic PRIMA 007 75:47 mins

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Fried: Verklärte Nacht*†; Korngold: Songs of Farewell†; Lehár: Fieber†; Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht *Christine Rice (soprano), †Stuart Skelton (tenor); BBC Symphony Orchestra/Edward Gardner

Credo

The Latvian soprano’s collection is mostly made up of religious items, though the aria ‘Ombra mai fu’ from Handel’s Serse doesn’t qualify, nor Dido’s Lament, let alone Remo Giazotto’s post-war Adagio supposedly based on a fragment by Albinoni, sung as a vocalise. Many pieces are performed in uncredited arrangements while several are misattributed.

But Marina Rebeka makes something worthwhile out of pretty well all of them, her voice forwardly if occasionally fiercely recorded – as in the misattributed Stradella ‘Pietà, signore’ (in fact by Louis Niedermeyer: 1802-61).

She offers a rich, spacious sound in Mozart’s ‘Laudate Dominum’ and carefully gradated tone in Verdi’s Ave Maria. Actually composed by Vladimir Vovikov (1925-73), the regularly misattributed Caccini Ave Maria is sensitively voiced, Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel’s ‘Bist du bei mir’ (frequently misattributed to Bach) expressive.

The ‘Pie Jesu’ from Fauré’s Requiem is luminously voiced. She deploys a veiled tone for Durante’s ‘Vergin tutto amor’ – originally a vocalise to which the current text was added more than a century after the composer’s death.

There’s a moving ethereality to the soprano solo from the Brahms Requiem, a performance also notable for a fine contribution (as elsewhere on the disc) from the Latvian Radio Choir.

Verklärte Nacht

Among the rarer pieces is the attractive Saint-Saëns’s Ave Maria (1865). Rebeka enters with conviction into the spirit of its Schubertian namesake, while her delivery of the Mascagni setting (an arrangement of the Intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana) is equally potent.

Musical standards are presentable under conductor Modestas Pitr nas, with the Sinfonietta Riga leaving a good impression. George Hall PERFORMANCE HHH RECORDING HHHH

Handel’s Tea Time Handel: Venus & Adonis; 24 English Songs, HWV 228 – excerpts; Mi palpita i cor, HWV 132b; Purcell: The Fairy Queen – O Let Me Weep Dorothee Mields (soprano); Die Freitagsakademie Bern Sony Classical 19439792732 76:04 mins

Baroque ensemble Die Freitagsakademie and star soprano Dorothee Mields have performed together since 2017, but this is their first recording. The wait has been worth it.

Mields is splendid. Her poise, luminous vocalism and animated dialogue with the band show why she’s an Early Music legend. Her command of the recording’s three languages allows her to relish words

as well as music, whether goofing around – as in ‘Bacchus’ HWV 228 – or lamenting. Her consistently intelligent musicianship is apparent above all when she improvises according to period and location.

The profound reflection she brings to the sacred air ‘Flammende Rose, Zierde der Erden’ is as impressive as the wild peregrinations with which she executes the cantata ‘Mi palpita il cor’. The musicianship of the ensemble’s six players is likewise intense, delicate and alert to rhetoric. Band director Katharina Suske brings to her oboe part a slow-burning lyricism, while the realisations by lutenist Jonathan Rubin make the humblest of progressions richly sonorous.

If I have a complaint, it is with the packaging. The programme is from Mi palpita il cor, an earlier Freitagsakademie concert with Mields, but you’d never know this from the sleeve notes. Why silently rebrand a selection of love-themed songs under such an ill-suited title?

The music isn’t all Handel, with Purcell’s ‘O let me weep’ clocking in as the longest single track, nor is it all English. And scholars have shown that a number of pieces said here to be ‘by Handel’ are almost certainly not. We must close our eyes to the misleading branding, and listen: the performers’ artistry speaks for itself.

Berta Joncus PERFORMANCE HHHHH RECORDING HHHH

The tortured orchestral landscape glowers. A tenor enters, detonating a controlled explosion on the word ‘Licht’. And expressionism yields to a waltzing nod to the world of operetta before touching on Berlioz.

Who would have thought that the composer of The Merry Widow had it in him? But Fieber, Lehár’s ‘tone poem for tenor and large orchestra’, isn’t the only rarity in this skilfully woven tapestry charting a voluptuous cross-section of fin de siècle Viennoiserie. Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht is paired with a nearcontemporaneous setting of the Dehmel poem which inspired it by Oskar Fried, a composer-conductor who, in 1921, was the first to record a Mahler symphony. Scored for mezzo, tenor and orchestra, its lush Romanticism falls alluringly on the ear in this seductively authoritative performance, even if Fried never quite interrogates the poem with the tenacity of Schoenberg’s wordless psychodrama.

To finish (picking up the thematic baton from Lehár), there’s Korngold’s Lieder des Abschieds. Composed in the slipstream of Die tote Stadt, the opera’s spirit is revisited in four death-suffused songs – the first a tender lullaby, vividly scored, setting Christina Rossetti. Across the programme Edward Gardner is preternaturally attentive, nailing the volatile blend of schmaltz and suffering that underpins the Lehár; and cloaking the moonbathing opening of the Fried with a velvety sumptuousness that prefigures the ensuing vocal refulgence – though Stuart Skelton, having elsewhere unleashed full Heldentenor heft, sounds momentarily challenged in the highest register. Adventurously conceived, and with the BBC Symphony Orchestra on top form, this is a stimulating disc from first note to last. Paul Riley PERFORMANCE HHHH RECORDING HHHH

Chamber Bartók

CHAMBER CHOICE

String Quartets Nos 1, 3 & 5

The heart of Schumann’s quartets is revealed at last The Emerson String Quartet’s performance of these three works is a revelation, says Stephen Johnson

Musical conversation: the Emerson Quartet creates a dialogue

R Schumann

figures, but the Emersons have such a natural, vital feel for this that it leaves one wondering why people Emerson String Quartet ever had a problem with it. As for structure, the lines Pentatone PTC 5186 869 76:46 mins are persuasively shaped, and structurally all the quirks and lateral side-steps make perfect sense.

It seems that at last people are really starting to get This is also, hand on heart, the first time that I’ve Schumann’s chamber music. The Piano Quintet has really grasped these three works as a cycle. Listen to always been popular, but the three string quartets he them in one sitting if you can: wrote the same year are marvels it’s wonderfully illuminating too. It’s just that they’re subtler, The musicians have and moving. Far more than his less extrovert, at times more such a natural, vital protégé Brahms, and in a very enigmatic. Here’s playing that feel for this music different way from Beethoven, penetrates this music to a degree Schumann had a truly Classical, that surprised even a fully paidup fan like me. The Emerson are such a fine ensemble, Haydnesque feel for what made the string quartet genre unique. but they’re also four strongly individual personalities.

The recordings serve the performances admirably.

The element of dialogue in Schumann’s quartetRecommended to believers and agnostics alike. writing is forefronted beautifully. At times it’s tender PERFORMANCE HHHHH and intimate, like a conversation by the fireside in HHHHH Schumann’s Leipzig home; at others it’s more troubled RECORDING and inward – as though this time the voices are You can access thousands of reviews from our contending within Schumann’s own head. extensive archive on the BBC Music Magazine A potential problem with this music is the amount website at www.classical-music.com of rhythmic repetition, especially of oddly off-beat

JURGEN FRANK

String Quartets Nos 1-3

Jerusalem Quartet Harmonia Mundi HMM 902240 75:24 mins

Despite stiff competition from his contemporaries, Bartók’s is perhaps the greatest 20th century contribution to the quartet literature and we can never have enough recordings.

So it is welcome news that the outstanding Jerusalem Quartet, who released the even-numbered works on the same label back in 2016, has now with this album completed their cycle.

Dating from the early phase of Bartók’s career, the First Quartet reflects the same unhappy love affair with Stefi Geyer as the Violin Concerto, taking up the ‘Stefi theme’ as well. It opens in a state of lonely desolation, and the feeling of suspense is superbly captured by the Jerusalems, who also find the earthy folksiness to remind us that Bartók’s language is rooted in multi-ethnic Transylvania. Equally impressive in the Fifth, a towering masterpiece based symmetrically around its third movement (‘Alla bulgarese’), they play the finale with whirling virtuosity.

They also meet all the technical innovations of the Third, but this is where my slight reservation creeps in: such highly cultivated playing as the Jerusalems produce perhaps renders the work’s strangeness not quite mesmerising enough.

John Allison PERFORMANCE HHHH RECORDING HHHH

Erkki-Sven Tüür String Quartet No. 2 ‘Lost Prayers’*; Fata Morgana; Synergie†; Lichttürme †Florian Donderer, Harry Traksmann (violin), Marrit Gerretz-Traksmann (piano), Leho Karin, †Tanja Tetzlaff (cello); *Signum Quartett ECM 481 9540 54:40 mins

Erkki-Sven Tüür is best known for his robustly elemental orchestral writing, with nine symphonies and a host of concertos and other large-scale BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Chamber Reviews pieces composed to date. Yet, as this album of chamber works attests, he is equally at home with far smaller forces where his trademark dramatic extremes and expansive gestures take on a powerful immediacy close-up.

Named after Tüür’s String Quartet No. 2, Lost Prayers, this album’s collected works are striking for their consistency and coherence over a span of 15 years.

Each deploys motivic seeds which, as they grow and mutate, generate organic structures that knit the work together as it were from the inside.

Whether in the quartet (2012), the violin-cello duo Synergie (2010) or piano trios Fata Morgana (2002) and Lichttürme (2017), the resulting idiom is ferociously intense: dissonant with dark, tonal-atonal underpinnings, and replete with pauses and explosions that ricochet outwards in molten trails before re-gathering. All are delivered with exemplary drive and luminosity: the Signum Quartett respond vividly to the changing textures of Tüür’s imagined Lost Prayers, while Florian Donderer (violin) and Tanja Tetzlaff (cello) create pools of colour as they stretch and entwine in the aptly titled Synergie.

But it’s in Fata Morgana and especially Lichttürme (Towers of Light) where the harmonic fields are most resonant, the piano in each case affording a rippling sustain that unites the earthly with the ethereal.

Both are beautifully navigated by Harry Traksmann (violin), Leho Karin (cello) and Marrit GerretzTraksmann (piano). Steph Power PERFORMANCE HHHHH RECORDING HHHHH

Walton Piano Quartet; Toccata in A minor; Two Pieces for Violin and Piano; Violin Sonata Matthew Jones (violin), Sarah-Jane Bradley (viola), Tim Lowe (cello), Annabel Thwaite (piano)

IRÈNE ZANDEL

Naxos 8.573892 74:11 mins

Listeners new to William Walton’s music would get a lopsided impression of his achievements from this sturdily performed collection covering all his chamber works featuring the violin and piano. From the bundle of early 20th-century influences romping through the teenage Walton’s Piano

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Vivid textures: the Signum Quartett respond well in Tüür

The Arcadia’s evident enthusiasm for the music is perfectly conveyed here with playing that maximises the emotional range explored in each work, as well as exploiting to the full the music’s tonal and textural varieties and its underlying sense of unease. These contrasts are placed in sharp relief when comparing the relentless Bartókian ferocity they achieve in the rhythmically dynamic Scherzo from the Fifth Quartet with the easygoing geniality that is projected in the opening movement of the Second, or the austere solemnity that characterises the slow sections of the Eighth. Erik Levi PERFORMANCE HHHHH RECORDING HHHHH

The Art of the Mandolin Works by Beethoven, Ben-Haim, David Bruce, Henze, D Scarlatti, Giovanni Sollima and Vivaldi Quartet we reach the gnarled and ferocious Toccata (hard to enjoy, even harder to play), composed by a determined 1920s iconoclast.

Jumping over Walton’s peak years, we pass through the wispy Two Pieces from the 1940s and land on his fussy if ardent Violin Sonata, receiver of mixed reviews following its 1950 London premiere. You could compare it all to the equivalent of a restaurant meal of teasing hors d’oeuvre and a comforting dessert, but lacking the chef’s signature dish.

Even so, it’s fascinating to hear Walton’s complex musical personality gradually form through imitation and experimentation, only to loosen after the Second World War. Violinist Matthew Jones and pianist Annabel Thwaite need all the finger fire at their command for the extravagantly ‘modern’ 1923 Toccata, the one work here with a limited outlet for the lyrically Romantic strand so pleasantly featured in the Piano Quartet.

Walton later labelled that piece the product of a ‘drooling baby’, though he still regarded it fondly.

As for the Violin Sonata, the temperature of his creative imagination may have dropped, but you can’t deny magic moments like the finale’s fifth variation, all filigree beauty and wonderfully conveyed here. A vivid recording adds to the album’s rewards. Geoff Brown PERFORMANCE HHHH RECORDING HHHH

Weinberg String Quartets Nos 2, 5 & 8 Arcadia Quartet Chandos CHAN 20158 68:24 mins

It’s a mark of the increasing levels of recognition accorded to Mieczys aw Weinberg in recent years that we now have the prospect of savouring ongoing recorded cycles of his 17 string quartets from two different ensembles as an alternative to the much-acclaimed pioneering set by the Quatuor Danel released over ten years ago by CPO. First out of the blocks was the Silesian Quartet, who has thus far released three excellent discs on the Accord label.

This Polish group is now joined by the Arcadia Quartet, who make a very auspicious impression for their first Weinberg entrée that brings together three of the composer’s most accessible contributions to the genre, all recorded in a warmsounding acoustic.

In their illuminating booklet notes, the Arcadia Quartet players explain the joys they experienced from playing these works for the first time. They describe Weinberg’s music as sounding ‘like a glow of light surrounded by the darkness of the unknown: we felt instantly captivated by his deeply inspired melodies and perfectly shaped structures.’

Avi Avital, Alon Sariel (mandolin), Sean Shibe (guitar), Anneleen Lenaerts (harp), Ophira Zakal (theorbo), Yizhar Karshon (harpsichord), Patrick Sepec (cello); Venice Baroque Orchestra DG 483 8534 55:17 mins

Avi Avital’s latest release looks back over 300 years of mandolin music, starting with Vivaldi’s enchanting Double Mandolin Concerto (partnered by Alon Sariel), which is brought sparklingly to life, with the Venice Baroque Orchestra providing deftly engaging accompaniment. Staying in the Baroque period, Domenico Scarlatti’s D minor Keyboard Sonata K.89 belongs to a handful of works that modern scholarship suggests may have been conceived originally for the mandolin – after hearing Avital’s engagingly dynamic performance, one is certainly inclined to agree.

Beethoven’s Adagio ma non troppo WoO 43.2 is one of four delightful pieces he composed for the singer/mandolinist Countess Josephine of Clary-Aldringen, a society ‘looker’ who seems to have well and truly caught the composer’s eye.

Moving forward in time to the last century, Hans Werner Henze’s Carillon, Récitatif, Masque is a minimasterpiece of bracingly inventive pasticherie, and although Paul BenHaim’s Sonata a Tre for mandolin,

Chamber Reviews guitar and harpsichord possesses a similar nostalgic stylistic trajectory, it is closer to the neo-Baroque re-imaginings of Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas brasileiras.

Bringing us virtually bang up to date is David Bruce’s Death is a Friend of Mine, a dazzling mélange of dancing inspiration climaxing in a Rodrigo-like finale, and Giovanni Sollima’s solo mandolin Prelude, an effervescent three-and-a-half minuter, featuring an exhilarating tarantella. Julian Haylock PERFORMANCE HHHH RECORDING HHHH

Correspondances Barratt-Due: Duo for Viola and Piano ‘Correspondances’; A Benjamin: Viola Sonata; Hindemith: Viola Sonata, Op.11/4; Enescu: Concertstück; plus works

by Vieutemps and Ysaÿe Eivind Ringstad (viola), David Meier (piano) Rubicon RCD 1050 69:14 mins

The Norwegian violist Eivind Ringstad won the Eurovision Young Musicians competition in 2012, and this is his debut recorded recital. It is anything but a play-safe piece of programming.

Arthur Benjamin’s Sonata for viola and piano is the opener, and both Ringstad and his excellent accompanist David Meier catch vividly its unsettled wartime atmosphere (it dates from 1942), especially in the nervy instability of the Waltz movement. The hyperactive Toccata finale is technically testing, but Ringstad’s attack is never ugly and his intonation seems infallible.

Hindemith’s Viola Sonata (the Op. 11, No. 4 ) also features, and its opening ‘Fantasie’ showcases Ringstad’s ripe, rhapsodic tone and the cleanness of his fingerwork in the outbursts of elaborate filigree. Charm and panache are in Ringstad’s armoury too, in a transcription of Ysaÿe’s Caprice d’après l’Étude en forme de valse de Saint-Saëns (originally for violin and orchestra).

But the most interesting piece on the disc is probably Peder BarrattDue’s Correspondances, premiered

by Ringstad at the 2018 Edinburgh Festival. A sharp-edged work that juxtaposes spiky, staccato rhythms with a keeningly lyrical central

section, it shatters preconceptions of the viola as a somewhat stuffy, conservative instrument, especially in Ringstad’s commandeering performance. Terry Blain PERFORMANCE HHHH RECORDING HHHHH

A Family Affair Dvořák: Bagatelles, Op. 47; Rusalka – Song of the Moon; Korngold: Die tote Stadt – Mariettas Lied; Suite, Op. 23 Raphaelle Moreau, David Moreau (violin), Edgar Moreau (cello), Jérémie Moreau (piano) Erato 9029524112 65:23 mins

This release highlights the capacity of extraordinarily gifted musical families to perform chamber music with a level of instinctive precision that is rarely matched even by longstanding professional groups. We already know from Edgar Moreau’s previous discs what a superbly talented cellist he is in his own right, and these qualities are admirably demonstrated here in highly expressive accounts of the famous ‘Song to the Moon’ from Dvo ák’s Rusalka and Mariettas’s Lied from Korngold’s Die tote Stadt.

But Edgar also shows an ability to tame his strong musical personality and work in perfect accord with other members of his family. In this respect, the performances of the Dvo ák Bagatelles and the technically far more challenging Suite for Piano Left Hand, two violins and cello, which Korngold composed for Paul Wittgenstein in 1930, are immaculately delivered with much fine attention to detail, and the dryish recording admirably communicates the intimacy of the music making.

The downside is that some emotional characteristics in both works remain understated.

Admittedly, the Dvo ák might have benefited from being performed in its more intimate original instrumentation with a harmonium replacing the more blandly scored piano alternative. But setting this issue aside, the technical fluency of the playing can’t really compensate for a lack of charm, elegance and exhilaration in this interpretation.

The Korngold on the other hand is engaging, particularly in the musically austere Präludium und

Fuge and the heartfelt Lied. At the same time, I missed an essential ingredient of Viennese nostalgia in the haunting Waltz, and the ensuing Groteske movement could be far more unhinged to make a really powerful impact. Erik Levi PERFORMANCE HHH RECORDING HHHHH

Mirrors – 21st Century

of cello and violin to the usual voice-and-piano art song is highly evocative. Four novels, a religious text and a painting technique inspire the remaining featured works. Claire Jackson PERFORMANCE HHHH RECORDING HHHH

Mon ami, mon amour

Works by S Belimova, Ciupinski, G Cohen, WD Cooper, Higdon and R Moya

L Boulanger: Two Pieces (arr.

Haimovitz); N Boulanger: Trois pièces; Debussy: Cello Sonata; Poulenc: Cello Sonata; plus works

by Fauré, Milhaud and Ravel

Sarah Shafer (soprano); Lysander Piano Trio

Matt Haimovitz (cello), Mari Kodama (piano)

First Hand Records FHR 111 71:26 mins

Pentatone PTC 5186 816 62:05 mins

The traditional piano trio – violin, cello and piano – has been the go-to pianobased ensemble for great composers throughout history: Mozart, Beethoven and Schumann all focused efforts on arrangements for three players, and Ravel, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Shostakovich also favoured the format. In spite of contemporary chamber music’s inclination for unusual instrumentation, this centuries-old combination has continued to flourish – in part thanks to the work of the Lysander Piano Trio, which has promoted and premiered several major works. The ensemble’s ten-year anniversary project Mirrors comprises six first recordings of 21st-century pieces – including four commissions.

As its title and cover artwork suggests, this album draws on reflections, particularly those found within the arts at large. Shakespeare is the inspiration behind Gilad Cohen’s Around the Cauldron, which evokes the three witches in Macbeth via a grumbling bass (sometimes played on the bridge, imitating an electric guitar) and sighing bent notes. The Bard is also central to Sofia Belimova’s compact Titania and Her Suite, a fleeting, fairy-like tribute to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Lysander Piano Trio takes its name from the play, applying the character’s famous line ‘The course of true love never did run smooth’ to their work as a musicians.)

Sarah Shafer joins the trio for Jennifer Higdon’s Love Sweet, a five-part cycle that uses texts by American poet Amy Lowell (18741925). Shafer’s lyric soprano suits the wistful melodies; the addition

In his excellent liner note, Matt Haimovitz singles out structure and joie de vivre as two salient characteristics of French music, and his playing fully endorses this judgment. His tone (on his beloved cello now happily restored after a serious accident) embraces both the light-hearted and the solemn without ever becoming scratchy or dull, and he is sensitively supported by his accompanist. His two transcriptions are both entirely successful: Ravel’s song ‘Kaddish’, at a slow speed beyond the ability of most singers, is deeply moving, aided by his transposition of the central section down an octave, while that of two violin pieces by Lili Boulanger catches the soulfulness of the first and the playfulness of the second – his invented sul ponticello being a particularly apt touch. It’s very good, too, to have three pieces by her sister Nadia who, after Lili’s early death, wrote only half a dozen songs in 1922, devoting herself from then on to promoting Lili’s works and to her own teaching: the third piece exhibits a jazzy Nadia unknown in later years.

I have only a few quibbles. In the second movement of the Poulenc Sonata, the tempo at fig. 4 is considerably above what is marked, and at fig. 9 in the third movement there is a curious and unwelcome burst of speed. In the central movement of the Debussy Sonata, the structure is built on the games between staccato and legato, not always in place here. But overall this is an impressive and enjoyable disc.

Roger Nichols PERFORMANCE HHHH RECORDING HHHHH

American Piano Trios

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A delightful set of little-known treasures This collection of Bowen vignettes and studies is a winner, says Kate Wakeling to a series of studies, all of which happily transcend the purely technical drill. The two brief Bowen Concert Studies (Op. 9 No. 2 and Fragments from Hans Andersen; Op. 32) are joyous, big-hearted works that demand considerable 12 Studies, Op. 46; virtuosity but are nonetheless rich Concert Studies Nos 1 & 2 Nicolas Namoradze (piano) in melody. Namoradze conjures a Hyperion CDA68303 66:32 mins splendid warmth and depth of sound throughout and is equally at home in Praised by Saint-Saëns as ‘the most the 12 Studies, Op. 46 which follow. remarkable of the young British Not to be confused with Bowen’s composers,’ York Bowen (1884-1961) celebrated 24 Preludes, Op. 102, these has all the same never received quite studies do not adhere to the cycle the attention his music deserves. of keys and each This delightful is labelled with a disc is a treasure Namoradze brings forbidding chest of lessera deft touch to these rather pedagogical title known works charming works (‘for brilliance given beautifully in passagework’, attentive ‘to induce lateral freedom of hand performances from the acclaimed and arm’), but they nonetheless young pianist Nicolas Namoradze. hold together as a coherent work Bowen’s Fragments from Hans and Bowen himself performed the Andersen (1920) are ten musical sequence in concert on occasion. vignettes, each capturing a scene Namoradze once more brings total or character inspired by the master technical assurance alongside of fairytales. Namoradze brings exuberance and an unshowy sense of a deft touch to these charming integrity to these fiendish pieces. An works, teasing out their respective altogether enjoyable disc. tenderness, melancholy and wit PERFORMANCE HHHHH with subtlety and poise. The RECORDING HHHHH remainder of the disc is given over

JS Bach 6 Partitas, BWV 825-830 Asako Ogawa (harpsichord)

NATHAN ELSON

First Hand Records FHR92 150:30 mins (2 discs)

Asako Ogawa is a noted soloist and continuo player, and is also a Baroque coach at the Guildhall; the people she has studied with include Laurence Cummings and Steven Devine – she therefore comes with the best credentials.

Yet by the time I had listened to the first 30 minutes of this recording, I had taken against her. The opening Praeludium was clean and unfussy, and the first Allemande had hints

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of pensive rubato, but her playing seemed to have no heart. The first Sarabande had no plangency, and the operatic sweep of the first Sinfonia was reduced to a stilted froideur; in the Allemande of the second Partita, expressiveness was replaced by the careful plod of a teaching exercise. The prospect of two more hours of that didn’t bode well.

But as the second Partita progressed, she began to loosen up, revealing rhythmic subtlety and a refined control of tone-colour. And with the Ouverture to Partita No. 4 – placed next in the sequence on this double disc, and coming over as a sustained fantasy – I realised that Ogawa’s soundworld was a place

Unshowy performer: Namoradze shows great integrity

You can access thousands of reviews from our extensive archive on the BBC Music Magazine website at www.classical-music.com

where I was very happy to live. From this point on her playing radiated excitement, and a vivid sense of the character of each individual piece. Her liner note speaks of these Partitas as reflecting the ‘laughter and tears’ of Bach’s own life during the period when he wrote them, and that was the impression her recording leaves in the mind.

Particular pleasures include the Gavottes, the Sarabandes in Partitas 3 and 4, the lovely breadth and grandeur of the closing Toccata and the graceful treatment of the final Gigue, which many other pianists turn into a circus act.

Michael Church PERFORMANCE HHHH RECORDING HHHH

Beethoven Symphonies Nos 1 & 2 (trans. Liszt) Hinrich Alpers (piano) Sony Classical G0100044108877 (digital only) 63:05 mins

Before orchestral recordings existed, piano reductions designed for home use were a major industry, and duet publications of Beethoven’s symphonies almost literally two-a-penny. The solo piano versions made by the Beethoven-admiring Liszt were a rather different idea – not keyboard reductions but, as he insisted, fully-

Instrumental Reviews fledged piano scores in their own right, involving as much orchestral detail as could tellingly be fitted in. The masterful results, while not quite demanding a full-on Lisztian keyboard technique, were still beyond what most home-based amateur players would have been able to manage, and were intended more for the concert platform.

Also they really do amount to something more than a connoisseur’s experience for dedicated Lisztians. Today we tend to think of Beethoven’s first two symphonies as relatively small-scale compared to the epic masterworks to come, but contemporary audiences were startled by their previously unimagined firepower and rhythmic energy. The skilfully concentrated layout of these arrangements recaptures those qualities remarkably – as in the closing stages of the Second Symphony’s finale, whose eruptive impact here subverts any sense of over-familiarity with the music itself. Hinrich Alpers has finely mastered the art of presenting Liszt’s transcription idiom on a modern concert grand, so that those densely written left-hand chords sound powerful rather than overturgid (they would have balanced naturally on pianos of the period).

And passages like the trio section of the First Symphony’s Scherzo movement come across with a lovely singing quality, happily connecting with the spirit of Beethoven’s original. Malcolm Hayes PERFORMANCE HHHH RECORDING HHHH

Beethoven Symphony No. 6 (arr. piano four hands)*; Piano Sonata No. 17 ‘Tempest’ Theodosia Ntokou, *Martha Argerich (piano) Warner Classics 9029516403 65:37 mins

Martha Argerich has mentored Greek virtuoso Theodosia Ntokou for over a decade now, and on the evidence of this engaging performance of former Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung editor Selmar Bagge’s piano duet arrangement of the Pastoral Symphony, they have been learning from each other. The key here is Ntokou’s dramatically poised, Classically aware, emotionally supple, refreshingly unhurried reading of

the Tempest Sonata. While most pianists make the outer movements conform to a Sturm und Drang style, Ntokou reminds us that Beethoven was one of music’s supreme thinkers, as she subtly articulates the music’s structural narrative rather than coming over all moody and ‘tempestuous’ at the slightest provocation. As a result, the sublime central Adagio is experienced as a vital part of the music’s organisational fabric, rather than a mere sonic buffer zone between two high-tension soundscapes.

Likewise, the reading of the Pastoral Symphony here is the polar opposite of impulsive or spur-of-themoment. Argerich is as engagingly spontaneous and pianistically responsive as ever, yet here she plays with exquisite refinement, as though distilling her interpretative essence to its essentials. Ntokou counterbalances Argerich’s inspired pianism with captivating flair, textural acuity and fine-graded tonal matching. Julian Haylock PERFORMANCE HHHHH RECORDING HHHH

Chopin Ballades; Nocturnes – selection Lara Melda (piano) Champs Hill CHRCD 153 76:12 mins

There is much to admire here: total technical control, sensitivity to linear balance, a wide range of dynamics and warm tone. If the Nocturnes seem to be more Lara Melda’s natural territory, that’s mainly because the Ballades throw up more searching questions of structure.

Only two points concerned me, but both are crucial. Firstly, rests.

Mozart famously declared, ‘The music in not in the notes, but in the silence in between.’ Of course he was exaggerating, but to a good purpose: just because the sound stops, our ears and brains don’t stop with it. While rests with a pause mark can be treated variously, plain rests do need strict observance as contributing to the overall rhetoric.

While Melda’s rubato is generally subtle and persuasive, the holes in the discourse are considerably less so. Allied with this is the whole question of slowing down at the ends of phrases. To ban this completely (even if Dutilleux demanded it in his own music) would be taking

Martha the mentor: Argerich and Ntokou dazzle in Beethoven

Puritanism to an extreme. More helpfully, pianists should be aware of the law of diminishing returns.

If a majority of phrases end with a ritardando, the impact gradually withers, to the point that the result actually becomes irritating. The motto is ‘Choose your rits stingily and meaningfully!’

It’s a pity that Melda leaves her worst infraction to the final bars of the disc, playing the four chords at the end of the Fourth Ballade at twice their notated speed, ruining the majestic close to one of Chopin’s greatest works. Roger Nichols PERFORMANCE HHHH RECORDING HHHH

Reicha L’Art de varier, Op. 57 Ivan Ili (piano) Chandos CHAN 20194 86:50 mins

Now in its third volume, Ivan Ili ’s exploration of the piano works of Anton Reicha is making those works’ cognate origin with the works of Beethoven yet more abundantly clear. And cognate is exact, in that the two musicians were born in the same year, played side by side in the Bonn court orchestra when they were 15 and remained friends in adulthood. But their careers diverged sharply: while Beethoven rose to fame, Reicha, who worshipped Haydn, settled in Paris, ploughed an austere furrow as a mathematician and musical theoretician and gave celebrated

classes to students including Berlioz, Gounod and César Franck.

‘My study of algebra gave me an analytical outlook,’ he claimed, and that is what gives the Op. 57 variations their tensile strength.

For almost 90 minutes he subjects a simple, songful theme to the most kaleidoscopic imaginable treatment, and – thanks in part to the freshness and clarity of Ili ’s playing – the wonder is that I don’t get bored.

The first variation is a demure little embroidery on the theme, and the second thunders in Beethovenian style. Then, after establishing these polarities, he’s off on a voyage full of drama and incident, sometimes adumbrating Chopin and sometimes Liszt, and often demanding fullblown virtuosity. Harking back to Bach, the penultimate variation is a po-faced fugue, and the finale is a perky little Presto; Reicha’s invention never flags for a moment. It would make an arresting programme for a Wigmore concert. Michael Church PERFORMANCE HHHHH RECORDING HHHH

Schubert Collected Piano Works Ll r Williams (piano) Signum Classics SIGCD 645 574:18 mins (8 discs)

As Ll r Williams points out in his preface to the disc’s booklet, any pianist embarking on a survey of Schubert’s sonatas needs to decide which of the early works BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Instrumental Reviews to include. Schubert made his first sustained attempts with the genre in 1817, when he was just 20. Of the works he composed at that time, Williams includes only the Sonata D575, in the unusual key of B major.

Several of the companion pieces were left incomplete, but still it’s a pity to be without the E flat Sonata D568, which is a later revision of a work originally written in the key of D flat; or the E minor D566, with its beautiful rondo in the major clearly modelled on the rondo from Beethoven’s two-movement sonata in the same key Op. 90.

On the other hand, Williams does include the largest and greatest of Schubert’s unfinished sonatas, D840, composed in the spring of 1825. Only its first two movements stand complete, and most pianists choose to play just those. However, there have been attempts at rounding out the remainder, by Ernst K enek and Paul BaduraSkoda among others. Williams opts for a completion by the American composer William Bolcom; and while it’s good to hear the minuet, which Schubert nearly finished, the finale is much weaker than the rest, and he was surely right to abandon it.

Slightly extraneous to Williams’s cycle is the last of the eight discs, featuring a generous selection of Liszt’s transcriptions of Schubert songs. If something of an acquired taste, there’s no denying their ingenuity. Williams dispatches the dazzling display pieces such as Erlkönig, Auf dem Wasser zu singen, and Die Forelle (The Trout) brilliantly.

Among the sonatas, perhaps he’s most at home in the D major D850, where he conveys the sweep of the unusually quick and energetic opening movement admirably.

He’s very good in that early B major sonata and the late A major D959, too, but there are occasions elsewhere – and particularly in the slow movements, almost all of them marked ‘Andante’ – where he sounds rather ponderous. While there’s no mistaking his innate musicality, pieces like the Andante of the unfinished C major Sonata, or the big A minor D845 and the genial little A major D664 all need to flow more naturally. A mixed bag, then, but at their best these are very impressive performances.

Misha Donat PERFORMANCE HHH RECORDING HHHHH

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All Around Bach

Casta Diva

Mysteries

JS Bach: Solo Concerto, BWV 979; Solo Concerto in F, BWV 971 ‘Italian’; Chorale Preludes – excerpts (arr. Busoni); Phantasy and Fugue in G minor, BWV 542 (arr. Liszt); Franck: Prelude, Fugue et Variation, Op. 18 (arr. saxophone and piano)*; Liszt: Phantasy and Fugue on B-A-C-H

Piano transcriptions by Chopin, Ginzburg, Liszt, Thalberg, P Wittgenstein et al Vanessa Benelli Mossell (piano)

Bacri: Piano Sonatas Nos 2 & 3; Fantaisie, Op. 134; Myaskovsky: Piano Sonatas Nos 2 & 3; Eccentricities, Op. 25

Decca 485 5291 67:49 mins

Sabine Weyer (piano)

The young Liszt’s arrangement of Bellini’s Réminiscences de Norma, an opera transcription intended to showcase the capabilities of the newly created piano, forms the centrepiece of Vanessa Benelli Mosell’s new album. The Italian pianist harnesses the greater technical abilities of today’s Steinway Model D to bring a spiky, slightly acidic reading of the melodic highlights from Bellini’s tragic opera.

With Liszt’s reflections from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, Verdi’s Rigoletto and Rossini’s William Tell Overture, Mosell faces stiff competition, primarily Louis Lortie’s Liszt at the Opera (Chandos) and Leslie Howard’s collection of the same name for Hyperion, but she stands up to the challenge. Her varied programme also includes Chopin’s take on the march from Bellini’s I puritani, a piece written for Hexaméron, a volume of Bellini transcriptions from six of the greatest keyboardists of the day.

This compact – often overlooked – variation shimmers and sparkles, while Ginzburg’s version of Rossini’s Barber of Seville has the required pizzazz. Wittgenstein’s left-hand transcription of the sailor’s chorus from Madam Butterfly provides a thoughtful pause before the closing William Tell canter. Claire Jackson PERFORMANCE HHHH RECORDING HHHH

Ars Produktion ARS 38 313 74:33 mins

*Asya Fateyeva (saxophone), Stepan Simonian (piano) CAvi-music AVI8553988 67:38 mins

Russian-born German pianist Stepan Simonian presents a collection of works based on Bach, journeying from JSB’s own arrangements in the 18th century to adaptations by Busoni, César Franck and Liszt in the late 19th.

From the outset, Simonian reveals his dazzling technique with blazing passagework and spirited rhythms in the fast movements of BWV 979, balanced with wistful and lyrical playing in the slow movements.

Here, and in the Italian Concerto, Simonian exploits the piano’s vast expressive range and the potential of its pedals to enhance dynamic and colouristic effects, offsetting a big, concert-hall sound with moments of hushed intimacy. Despite the resonant recording, contrapuntal lines and ornaments remain lucid.

Two works by Liszt form the core of the programme: the celebrated Fantasia and Fugue on the letters of Bach’s name, and his arrangement of Bach’s own Fantasia and Fugue BWV 542.

Simonian brings beefy, Russianschool virtuosity to the former, building the musical architecture into a towering monument. The Fantasia of the latter work is rather pummelled out, but the Fugue is crisp and beautifully articulated.

Interweaving these warhorses are Busoni’s arrangements of three chorale preludes to which Simonian brings muscular certitude (‘In dir ist Freude’), gravitas (‘Jesus Christus, unser Heiland’) and joie de vivre (‘Nun freut Euch’). An arrangement for piano and soprano saxophone of César Franck’s Prélude, fugue et variation, Op. 18 seems a schmaltzy addition, though it’s gracefully played by Simonian and his saxophonist wife, Asya Fateyeva.

Kate Bolton-Porciatti PERFORMANCE HHHH RECORDING HHHH

In principle, it was a striking idea to pair Russian and Soviet music’s most lugubrious voice, Nikolay Myaskovsky, with a much more recent composer influenced by his oppressive style, Frenchman Nicolas Bacri. In practice, this is way too much to take, though listen to the four sonatas – two by each composer – in isolation and there’s much to admire, at least, for the authenticity of their despair.

Most companionable is Myaskovsky’s pre-First World War Third Sonata: the lyrical theme in it provides a Scriabinesque lightening of the mood, and the introduction of the Dies Irae provides another contrast, if much of the same predominant heavy weather. Bacri’s obsessive qualities come to the fore in the hypnotic oscillations of his Third Sonata. Relief of sorts only comes in the miniature Prichudy (translated here as ‘Eccentricities’) in which Myaskovsky pays homage to the Sarcasms and Visions fugitives of his good friend Prokofiev. There’s some dynamic lightness here, too; the sonatas would benefit from a much wider range, with more extremes of loud and soft. On this evidence Sabine Weyer is a formidable technician, but a mezzofortist kind of musician. David Nice PERFORMANCE HHH RECORDING HHHH

BACKGROUND TO…

Nicolas Bacri (b1961) Born in Paris, Bacri took private lessons with Louis Saguer before entering the Paris Conservatoire in 1979. There he studied under Serge Nigg and Michel Philippot, and graduated with a premiere prix in music composition in 1983. That same year he was awarded a two-year residency at the Académie de France in Rome. From 1987 he was head of Radio France’s chamber music department; he left his position in 1991 to devote himself to composition. He has composed more than 100 works, including orchestral works, operas, cantatas and chamber works.

Historical Nicholas Anderson enjoys releases by some legendary 20th-century performers

Wilhelm Backhaus: The Complete 1940s Recordings brings together Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. Backhaus was still recording for HMV prior to the acrimonious circumstances which led to his move to Decca in 1950.

The disc contains pieces issued in their entirety for the first time. The major work is Mozart’s Coronation Concerto No. 26, K537.

Fluent, unfussy and purposeful, Backhaus illuminates the music of some of his favourite composers.

His playful understanding of the outer movements of Bach’s Italian Concerto and his gentle view of its Andante are perhaps of especial appeal. (APR 5637 HHHH) In 1920 Arturo Toscanini was appointed artistic director of La Scala, Milan. The First Recordings, 1920-1926 mostly features his newly formed Orchestra of La Scala in a programme mainly of short pieces with some excerpts. It is a pity we only have such excerpts in the case of Mozart’s Symphony No. 39 and Beethoven’s Symphonies Nos 1 and 5, since Toscanini’s characteristically vital responses are irresistible. Even in a recorded sound of such venerable age, something of his legendary perfectionism shines through. Among the items are The Hungarian March from The Damnation of Faust by Berlioz, a composer dear to his heart, pieces from Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bizet’s Carmen and the Overture to Donizetti’s Don Pasquale. (Guild GHCD 3504 HHH) The importance of the Boyd Neel Orchestra in promoting Baroque music, especially that of Handel, hardly can be overstated. It features here in two Handel concertos, one of which is with harp soloist Osian Ellis. Both involve Thurston Dart, whose role both as continuo player and director, was paramount in moulding the stylistic authority for which it became celebrated. The

principal work on the disc, however, is Handel’s dramatic cantata Apollo e Dafne. It is directed by Geraint Jones, another luminary of our resurgent interest in Baroque music. The vocal protagonists are baritone Thomas Hemsley – here on splendid form – and soprano Arla Mandikian.

(Cameo Classics CC 9127 HHH) Schubert – The Symphonies sees live recordings from the 1988 Styriarte Festival, Graz, by Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe.

Well known for his deep scepticism and deliberate avoidance of performing tradition, Harnoncourt breathes new life into the music by looking afresh at the sources and encouraging his players to do likewise. The approach has resulted in readings of pulsating energy whose luminous instrumental textures further enhance our enjoyment. To quote his wife, Alice ‘we can hear the works infused with new life, with their fresh colours offering a genuine new listening experience.’ (ICA Classics ICAC 5160 HHHH) Secrets is a compilation of bootleg recordings made between 1978 and 1981 of recitals given by Hungarian pianist Annie Fischer. Fischer disliked studio work, and without these unofficial tapes her wonderful legacy would be considerably smaller. These discs feature music

by Schubert, Schumann and Chopin. With Schubert’s Sonatas in A minor, D845, and A major D959 we are drawn into Fischer’s intimately personal world.

Many endearingly distinctive aspects of her playing further suffuse her interpretation of Schumann’s Fantasiestücke.

Recorded sound is never less than acceptable and, for the most part much more than that. (Hungaroton HCD 32845-46 HHHH)

HISTORICAL CHOICE

Pioneering Boulanger Recordings by the great scholar, teacher and performing musician are finally remastered A vital communicator: Nadia Boulanger conducting in the 1950s

Nadia Boulanger - The American Decca Recordings Works by Brahms, M-A Charpentier, Monteverdi and Rameau; plus French Renaissance Vocal Music Nadia Boulanger (piano/conductor) Eloquence 484 1384 (5 discs)

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February round-up

Eloquence Classics deserve special gratitude for the sympathetically remastered reissue of these early 1950s recordings, most of them appearing on CD for the first time. Early music performance was in its infancy when these discs were recorded in Paris: Charpentier was barely known, and records of Monteverdi and Rameau were few and far between.

Nowadays, we do things differently; but what illuminates these performances, often with dazzling radiancy and always with deep insight, is Boulanger's intuitive feeling for the music itself. Her direction possesses enormous vitality which is communicated to her splendid musicians, outstanding among whom are tenor Hugues Cuenod and bass baritone Doda Conrad. Highlights are Medea’s chilling ‘Noires filles du Styx’, with a stentorian Fanfare from Charpentier’s Médée, a Ballet figuré from Rameau’s Zaïs, and Tambourins from the 1757 revival of Hippolyte et Aricie. Sadly, the misleading documentation of both the Rameau items remains uncorrected from their first release, though happily all the imaginative original cover art has been retained. HHHHH BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Brief notes This month’s selection features thrilling rarities and a conductor’s final bow JS Bach Goldberg Variations Marcin Swiatkiewicz (piano) Rubicon RCD1064

These Goldbergs are full of energy and spontaneity.

Swiatkiewicz’s frequent use of the 16-foot stop lends many of the variations a magnificent Thuringian heft. (OC) HHHH Brahms Horn Trio; Cello Sonata No. 1 etc Alec Frank-Gemmill (horn) BIS BIS-2478

Fascinating to hear new colours in a familiar work, with Brahms’s First Cello Sonata transcribed for French horn. It makes a fine prelude to a terrific performance of the Horn Trio. (JP) HHHH

Gershwin • Harbison • Tower Orchestral Works National Orchestral Institute Philharmonic Naxos 8.559875

Gershwin’s Piano Concerto and Piston’s Fifth Symphony feature in this album of American orchestral works. Vibrant and fun, though the Gershwin could be more virtuosic. (FP) HHHH M Haydn Missa Sancti Nicolai Tolentini etc St Albans Cathedral Girls Choir et al Naxos 8.574163

Largely upbeat, though not without its more reflective moments, Michael Haydn’s mass enjoys a spirited performance here, though a more robust choral sound would have been welcome. (JP) HHH

Bruckner Mass No. 2; Te Deum

Kvandal A Quiet Beauty

Steve Reich Eight Lines, City Life

Lina Johnson (soprano), Arnfinn Tobiassen (organ) LAWO LWC 1203

Holst-Sinfonietta/Klaus Simon

There’s a winning simplicity to Kvandal’s songs for soprano and organ, sung here with graceful ease by Lina Johnson and interspersed with characterful short organ works. (JP) HHH

Classic Reich tackled with grit and a clear understanding of the music, notably in the roughness of the multi-tracked flutes in Vermont Counterpoint. (FP) HHH

Scott Lee Through the Mangrove Tunnels JACK Quartet et al

Naxos 8.559682

P teris Vasks Distant Light; Lonely Angel Daniel Rowland (violin); Stift Festival Orchestra

Panoramic Recordings PAN20

Challenge Classics CC 72830

Lee’s album-length work races through vastly different musical styles.

Inspired by his visit to the swamps in Florida, this is a knotty, discombobulating adventure. (FP) HHHH

Vasks’s desolate, contemplative soundworld seems all too appropriate for current times.

Rowland captures the spirit with aplomb here. (JP) HHHH An Armenian Palette Works by Chebotarian, Mansurian et al Heik Melikyan

Collegium Vocale Gent Phi LPH 034

Rael Jones Mother Echo

Jonathan Leshnoff Symphony No. 3; Piano Concerto etc

Bruckner’s intricate counterpoint and rich orchestrations make for seductive, powerful listening, especially in the Te Deum which bursts with harmonic colour.

Herreweghe and his musicians give invigorating and beautifully balanced accounts. (OC) HHHH

Rael Jones (piano) et al

Kansas City Symphony Reference FR739

(piano) Grand Piano GP845

Silflay Records 195448590630

Unashamedly lyrical music, and that’s fine by me. The Third Symphony packs an emotional punch thanks in part to its First World War inspiration; the soulful Piano Concerto enthrals. (MB) HHHH

Folksong flavours this album of Armenian piano music, whether in Chebotarian’s melancholy Six Preludes, Mirzoyan’s joyful Album for a Granddaughter or even Mansurian’s avant-garde Three Pieces. (OC) HHHH

Chausson • Ravel Piano Quartet; Piano Trio Trio Machiavelli

Kancheli Poetry of Silence

Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra

Ketevan Sepashvili (piano) et al

Naxos 8.574226

Berlin Classics 0301417BC

Gramola 99235

Ravel’s muchloved trio is given a wonderfully sprightly outing here, with an immaculate balance between the three instruments. The less familiar Chausson quartet makes a very welcome companion. (JP) HHHH

Melodic miniatures by the late Georgian composer taken from scores for theatre and film. A rather lovely set, performed with delicate beauty

by Sepashvili and flautist Temo Kharshiladze. (MB) HHHH

Novák’s rich Romanticism rarely gets a look in beyond his familiar Slovak Suite, making this an especially welcome release. The colourfully atmospheric Toman and the Wood Nymph is a particular treat. (JP) HHHH

Written from a very personal place, Rael Jones’s pieces for piano and string quartet are filled with deep emotion and great beauty.

It left me enchanted; I’ll play it again and again. (MB) HHHHH

Novák South Bohemian Suite etc

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Martin Kohlstedt FLUR Fauré Piano Quartets

Martin Kohlstedt (piano)

Fauré Quartett Berlin Classics 0301422BC

Warner Classics 9029518132

Fauré’s piano quartets are among his most inventive and passionate works. Ravishing performances of both by the Fauré Quartett are complemented by gorgeous chamber arrangements of a handful of songs. (OC) HHHH

Kohlstedt turns inward for this collection of meditative numbers to chime with the current mood. There are some inspired moments, but the dampened piano becomes wearing after a while. (OC) HHH

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Prokofiev Visions fugitives (arr. violin and piano) etc Yuri Kalnits (violin), Yulia Chaplina (piano) Toccata Classics TOCC0135

A treasure trove of richly melodic short works, reimagined for piano and violin.

Beautiful, hearty performances and a fulsome recorded sound make this hugely enticing. (MB) HHH

The Art of Agony Works by Grainger, Louise Denson et al Viney-Grinberg Duo Naxos 8.579075

This album includes eight premiere recordings, most commissioned by the duo themselves, using electronics to great effect. The title track blends speech by Grainger with music mimicking his speech patterns. (FP) HHH In Motion Works by Schubert, Hindson et al United Strings of Europe, et al BIS BIS-2529

Virtuosic performances and a compelling programme from the string orchestra plus guests; Matthew Hindson’s Maralinga is a powerful and evocative highlight. (MB) HHH

Mariss Jansons – His Last Concert Works by Brahms and R Strauss

The month in box-sets

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra BR Klassik 900192

There’s something rather moving about the lengthy applause and cheers which follow the Hungarian Dances, an encore to what would end up being Jansons’s final bow. Fine playing throughout. (MB) HHHH

Not counting the Fifth: Villa-Lobos is as good as complete from Naxos

Orchestral Favourites Bizet, Elgar, Holst et al Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Brilliant 96146

This four-disc set is a great resource, taking in Elgar’s Enigma, Sibelius’s Finlandia and Parry’s Jerusalem. Despite occasional dragging tempo, a fun journey through orchestral pops. (FP) HHH Piano Music by Chopin, Liszt et al Paul Ji (piano) Warner 9029515859

An accomplished programme of Chopin, Liszt, Debussy and more, designed to accompany us through the pandemic. Ji’s tone is sometimes a little hard-edged, but this is a charming idea. (OC) HHH Songs of Comfort and Hope Arrangements by Tom Poster, Caroline Shaw et al Yo-Yo Ma (cello), Kathryn Stott (piano) Sony Classical 19439822372

Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott present a lovely selection of comforting songs in arrangements which somehow avoid the music becoming saccharine. Delicately and thoughtfully played. (FP) HHHH Voices in the Wilderness A Cappella Hymns Elizabeth Bates (soprano) et al Bright Shiny Things BSTC-0141

Some of the earliest music to be written in America, this collection of 18th-century hymns was recorded at the site of their conception in Pennsylvania.

The result is rather captivating.

(MB) HHH Reviewers: Michael Beek (MB), Oliver Condy (OC), Freya Parr (FP), Jeremy Pound (JP)

Barbizet, Bruckner and other delights We also take in a set of Villa-Lobos symphonies and an Opera Gala Pianist Pierre Barbizet brought Yet more lavish is Anton Bruckner: great character and integrity to The Symphonies, The Story, The his performances, perhaps most Film (Arthaus Musik 109400). Across notably with the violinist Christian six DVDs (and four Blu-ray discs) Ferras. That pairing looms large you can enjoy performances of all in The Complete Erato & HMV nine symphonies by the Munich Phil Recordings (Erato 9029518762), a 14and Valery Gergiev, as filmed at the disc set which shines a light on the 2017-19 Bruckner Festivals. That Chilean-born musician’s recordings would be worthwhile enough, but made from the 1960s-80s. there’s much more as this Other partners include fellow set includes Reiner E Moritz’s Pierre Barbizet makes pianists Samson François and documentary The Making rare solo appearances Jean Hubeau, while Barbizet of a Giant, a hardback book on two discs of Chabrier called On Becoming a Genius makes rare solo appearances on two discs of Chabrier. and a bonus performance by Original jacket artwork is a welcome addition, organist Martin Haselböck. with at least two CD premieres.

Another sumptuous offering comes with Mystery still surrounds Villa-Lobos’s Opera Gala (Eloquence 484 1398), a 20-disc Symphony No. 5, which has never been found. collection which takes in a staggering 28 So in Villa-Lobos – Complete Symphonies (Naxos operas. This colourful selection box is 8.506039) we have 11 of a potential 12 works, comprised of some of Decca’s great highlights gathered together from recordings released albums, plus artist showcases and one-act from 2012-17. Who better to bring the Brazilian operas, and it’s a real who’s who and what’s composer’s music to vivid life than the São what of opera. Rare Baroque turns from Joan Paulo Symphony Orchestra under one of the Sutherland and Richard Bonynge are featured country’s most lauded conductors, Isaac alongside performances by Marilyn Horne Karabtchevsky? Villa-Lobos’s stylistic evolution and Regina Resnik, with works from the pens is charted in these works, performed with vital of everyone from Adolphe Adam to Richard energy and deep insight.

Wagner via Bizet, Gounod and Strauss.

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Jazz Barry Witherden enjoys high-energy ensembles and stride piano reinvented February round-up

JAZZ CHOICE

Back to basics Rob Barron’s sublime pianism forms the foundation of an exceptional standards album High standards: ‘classic piano trio jazz at its best’

Rob Barron From This Moment On Rob Barron (piano); Jeremy Brown (bass); Josh Morrison (drums)

BENJAMIN AMURE, SEB PETERS

Ubuntu UBU0064)

The repertoire of most young/youngish jazz musicians these days consists almost exclusively of their own original compositions. This is entirely commendable, but I sometimes feel nostalgic for the days when certain well-established tunes and chord-sequences were a kind of lingua franca. This treasury of tunes was quarried by almost everybody and you could readily compare performances of the same piece whilst enjoying spotting the origins of litigation-dodging palimpsests of ‘I Got Rhythm’, ‘Cherokee’ or ‘Indiana’.

Barron joyfully plunders some of the greatest, most enduring tunes in the jazz and popular songbooks, from Oliver Nelson’s ‘Butch and Butch’ to Victor Young’s ‘My Foolish Heart’, modestly throwing in a couple of his own exemplary compositions (‘Fortune Green’ and ‘Evidently’) along the way. He plays with incisiveness, sinewy strength and grace, making imaginative use of the melodies and chords, and is well matched with Brown and Morrison. His CV stretches from here to way over there as a sideman and session musician with big names in the jazz and classical fields as well as appearing on film soundtracks – and this is classic piano trio jazz at its best. HHHHH

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Patrick Cornelius’s Acadia takes its name from an area in Maine, the inspiration for much of this music.

On Way of the Cairns Cornelius celebrates the beauty, mystery and freedom of National Parks and other tracts of wildness in nine varied, highly-engaging compositions by him and (one each) drummer Paul Wiltgen and pianist Kristjan Randalu. Cornelius says he wanted the band, rather than his tenor, to be the lead voice, and this has largely been achieved. The title track could almost be called, after Beethoven, ‘cheerful feelings on arriving in the countryside’.

The album has an airiness and freshness all too desperately needed.

(Whirlwind WR4766) HHHHH Stride piano evolved from ragtime in the 1920s and continued to have some degree of influence on major figures like Duke Ellington, Erroll Garner and Thelonious Monk later in the century. With Future Stride, award-winning composer and pianist Emmet Cohen brings it exuberantly into the 2020s. In fact, the spirit of stride is often only in the background, and the overall tenor is post-bop with excellent solos, notably by trumpeter Marquis Hill, saxophonist Melissa Aldana and Cohen himself whose versatile playing brims with pleasing ideas and dry humour.

(Mack Avenue MAC1181) HHHH Trio Grande is the impressive debut album by the multi-national group of that name, which consists of Will Vinson (saxes and electric piano), Gilad Hekselman (guitar) and drummer Antonio Sánchez.

Without descending into fusion or jazzrock they tap heavy rock and jazz traditions as well as folk music and electronics.

The performances range from lyrical romanticism (the early parts

of ‘Firenze’ and ‘Oberkampf’) via danceable pieces like ‘Elli Yeled Tov’ to ferocious free-for-alls. They do thoughtful, well-crafted melodic development and no-holds-barred melées with equal conviction and effectiveness. (Whirlwind 497663) HHHH Afterglow by Italian pianist Enrico Pieranunzi and Belgian trumpeter Bert Joris is appropriately named: these exquisite duets impart a warm, relaxed and satisfied feeling. Both musicians have played with numerous US and European heavyweights and bring a maturity and depth to this programme of original compositions. Pieranunzi says, ‘Sometimes the moment you don’t play adds to the significance of what you do play’ and the duo’s use of simplicity and space demonstrates this. They can also do busy and intense, as on Joris’s ‘Millie’, Pieranunzi’s ‘Five Plus Five’ or the bop-tinged ‘What’s What’, but the predominant mood is lyrical and subtle. (Challenge Records CR 73460) HHHH On High Heart Ben Wendel addresses concerns similar to those manifested in Maria Schneider’s recent Data Lords. The album reflects tenor saxophonist Wendel’s artistic journey in ‘a society of increasing complexity, oversaturation and social imbalance’. He sometimes fights fire with fire, with bustling, intense passages that create tension as much as excitement, and which never fail to grab the attention. Michael Mayo’s clear, wordless vocals, particularly affecting on lyrical tracks such as ‘Less’ and Traveler’, are used instrumentally throughout.

(Edition EDN1162) HHHH Just room to mention Charles Mingus: Bremen 1964 & 1975 – storming concert performances featuring, amongst others, Eric Dolphy and George Adams.

(Sunnyside SSC1570) HHHH

TAKE FIVE

2 CD

An interview with today’s finest jazz musicians

J. S. B A C H Modern Yazz: ‘a unique creative voice’

6 PA R T I TA S Asako Ogawa h a r p s i c h o r d

A S A K O O G AWA

This month: Yazz Ahmed When the British-Bahraini trumpet player Yazz Ahmed received the Ivors Composer Award for Innovation in November, the Academy praised ‘a unique creative voice that smashes the boundaries between jazz and electronic sound design’. It’s an accurate summary of an artist whose many jazz mentors gave her the grounding to go out and do her own thing.

Ahmed grew up listening to records by Dizzy Gillespie and Stan Tracey bought by her late grandfather, the London bebop trumpeter and record producer Terry Brown. She started playing herself in young jazz groups such as NYJO, and had jazz trumpet lessons with Paul Eshelby and later with Nick Smart, paving the way for a place at the Guildhall School of Music. But the South Londoner didn’t have much confidence as a composer early on:

J.S. BACH 6 Partitas, BWV825–830 Spectacular performances Magnificant sounding high-resolution audio CD, downloads & streaming platforms asakoogawa.com f irsthandrecords.com

‘Working with electronic artists means bringing jazz to different audiences’ ‘It was thanks to the Tomorrow’s Warriors’ collective founders Gary Crosby and Janine Irons. They saw potential in my writing and encouraged me to write for large ensembles.’ Ahmed quickly developed a reputation for taking on big-canvas music.

2019’s Polyhymnia featured 25 players and was hailed for its multi-layered and textural qualities while 2018’s La Saboteuse integrated Arabic modes with jazz improvisation. Both albums have been remixed by DJs. ‘Working with electronic artists means bringing jazz to different audiences while introducing remixes to jazz people. I love that,’ she enthuses.

Ahmed’s next album will be another ‘multikulti’ affair – and her first try at writing songs with lyrics: ‘The project is inspired by the folk music of Bahrain, including the traditional songs of the island’s pearl divers and music performed by women drumming groups at weddings and celebrations. I’m fusing that with jazz elements as well electronic sound design.’

At the same time, as a side-project Ahmed is working on an EP, Electric Dreams, with drummer Rob Youngs, guitarist Samuel Hallqvist and vocal sculptor Jason Singh: ‘We recorded a few live performances last year. It’s totally improvised, involving electronics. It can be quite wild and is a lot of fun!’ Garry Booth BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Books Our critics cast their eyes over this month’s selection of books on classical music Allegri’s Miserere in the Sistine Chapel Graham O’Reilly

Life of a legend: Isaac Stern’s career is examined in full

Boydell Press 392pp (hb) £45

Sometimes quite famous works have a dubious status. ‘Albinoni’s’ Adagio for example was fabricated from fragments by Remo Giazotti c1900, ‘Bach’s’ Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 585) is probably by somebody else and this fascinating and impressive book demonstrates that our familiar modern versions of Allegri’s Miserere (with their high Cs) ‘have been modified out of all recognition’ from the version written down in the 1630s. Indeed when the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I requested a copy he couldn’t believe the ‘wretched appearance’ of the apparently simple music.

O’Reilly employs two types of evidence to establish the performance traditions of the work: he transcribes some earlier manuscript sources, including the crucial 1892 version by the Vatican choirmaster Domenico Mustafà; and he ingeniously gathers what can be gleaned from historical accounts

by Blainville, Burney, Mozart and others who heard it in Rome. The icing on the cake would have been some comparative assessment of modern recordings which attempt some historical reconstructions.

Anthony Pryer HHHH

Keith Jarrett – A Biography Wolfgang Sandner; Trans. Chris Jarrett

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Equinox 230pp (hb) £25

This is an updated translation of the original 2015 German edition and is very welcome on this and several other counts. Jarrett’s declining health has forced him to retire from public performance, so this detailed discussion of the pianist’s recorded legacy, and the appended discography, are particularly welcome; though both are poignant reminders that this will now be the only way to hear his music.

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and the other members of his celebrated piano trio – pianist Eugene Istomin and cellist Leonard Rose. A little more detail on Stern’s special proclivities as a violinist would not have gone amiss, but for the general reader this comes warmly recommended. Julian Haylock HHHH

This Musical Life – Hedwig Stein, Emigrée Pianist Helen Marquard Troubador 328pp (pb) £12.99

That said, this is by no means just a book for record collectors. The author presents an informative and detailed account of Jarrett’s early life, then goes on to integrate all the varied aspects of his career into a coherent whole: his development as an artist, the choices he made and the choices that were forced upon him by circumstance, his interaction with other musicians and the roles they played in the pianist’s music. The writing clunks occasionally, such as when the pianist is described as having ‘drunk from the mysterious goblet of the druid Thelonious [Monk],’ but Sandner’s critical rigour more than makes up for that.

Roger Thomas HHHH

The Lives of Isaac Stern David Schoenbaum WW Norton 256pp (hb) £22

Anyone familiar with Isaac Stern’s concerto recordings from

the late 1950s and ’60s with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy and New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein will know that he was a true force of nature – a born communicator, whose scorching musical intensity was seemingly a hotline to a work’s emotional core.

In the first biography to have been written with full access to Stern’s 140 boxes of personal materials bequeathed to the Library of Congress following his death in 2001, David Schoenberg takes us behind the scenes of a 60-year career that began in the era of 78s and ended when DVD was all the rage. Along the way, Stern became something of a national icon, not only as a renowned soloist and chamber musician, but as the saviour of Carnegie Hall, a generous nurturer of promising talent and cultural ambassador.

It is a colourful story, deftly told by amateur violinist Schoenbaum, who captures nicely the spirit of the era and doesn’t shy away from pointing up the less-than-friendly accord that existed between Stern

Scientist Helen Marquard, seeking a piano teacher in Manchester, chanced upon the larger-than-life figure of Hedwig Stein, who had left Nazi Germany for the safer environment of Britain after Hitler came to power. With her Russian pianist husband, Iso Elinson, Stein had moved in the musical circles of pre-war London, a sphere that would have seemed natural after her home life in Germany, where her father was friends with Max Reger and did much to support him.

In a very personal account, Marquard traces her own exploration of Hedwig’s turbulent past, and evokes the way that world events play out through the daily lives of their unwitting protagonists. Hedwig and Iso’s personalities and their relationship are strongly depicted, though figures as colourful as Henry Wood, Jelly d’Arányi and Clifford Curzon remain passing names.

Some vivid wartime images stand out, too, such as Iso stopping to help firefighters after a recital.

This is an affectionate tribute to a figure who could have gone unremarked by history, yet touched many lives. Jessica Duchen HHH Note: Last month's review of Carmen Abroad listed Richard Langham Smith as author. It was in fact edited by Richard with Clair Rowden.

Audio choice Chris Haslam chooses the best hi-fi equipment for your classical music listening THIS MONTH: BUILD A GREAT VALUE HI FI Singular quality: a great hi-fi in one unit

Twin peaks: Cambridge Audio’s separates are superb

CD PLAYER AND AMPLIFIER

Cambridge Audio AXC35 & AXA35 £279/£299 Paired with the equally excellent value AXA35 (£299) amplifier, the AXC35 CD player offers a big step up from entry-level, boasting sleek looks, excellent build quality and an assured performance that will make the most of your BBC Music Magazine cover CD. It’s a no-frills option, but the high-quality digital to analogue converter (DAC) does a commendable job of managing all the intricacies of a lavish orchestral recording. cambridgeaudio.com

ALL IN ONE BRILLIANCE

BEST BUY

SPEAKERS

Q Acoustics 3020i £249 Regular readers will be familiar with my appreciation of all things Q Acoustic; for my money, you’ll not find better sounding speakers for less. The 3020i has 20mm soft dome tweeters and 12.5cm mid/ bass drivers inside a solid cabinet, with vibrationreducing technology inherited from their £4,000 Concept 500 loudspeakers. The result is a bargain that boasts unrivalled levels of dynamism and detail. qacoustics.co.uk

NEED TO KNOW Which features? Make a checklist of the features you need, such as DAB radio, Bluetooth or headphone output; but be warned, if it’s cheap and bursting with hitech features, sound quality may well be an afterthought. Look for products that do the

Denon DT-1 £259

Admittedly, many audiophiles spend more than £250 on cables alone, but with the DT-1, Denon has proven, and not for the first time, that you can enjoy great sound and a multitude of features without spending thousands.

This traditionally styled all-in-one hi-fi features two 15-watt amplifiers, CD player, FM/AM radio and Bluetooth streaming convenience and both aux and optical inputs for connecting portable music players and TVs. Add in their pair of stereo speakers (12cm woofers and 25mm soft-dome tweeter) and you’ve got a complete audio system in one neat, easy-to-use package. Don’t expect to be blown away by the sound quality, but compared to the majority of similarly priced all-in-one streaming speaker systems, the DT-1 offers a confident and assured performance with plenty of punch. It’s a pity there’s no DAB radio, but you can still stream your favourite stations via Bluetooth and the BBC Sounds app. denon.co.uk

basics well, with the money spent where it counts on quality components such as DACs and robust speaker cabinetry.

Which brands? For the best sound quality, stick to well-established audio brands such as Denon, Marantz and Cambridge Audio who have a track record in great-value products,

plus their reputation to maintain. Bigger brands also drip down features from premium ranges to the cheaper collections.

Extras Remember to factor in costs such as speaker cables, speaker stands and possibly even a phono stage if you’re looking to connect a turntable to your amplifier.

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Reviews Index JS Bach 6 Partitas, BWV 825-830 88 Goldberg Variations 92 Bartók Sonata for Solo Violin 76 String Quartets Nos 1, 3 & 5 85 Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 4 72 Piano Sonata No. 17 ‘Tempest’ 89 Symphonies Nos 1 & 2 (trans) 88 Symphony No. 6 (arr. four hands) 89 Symphony No. 7 72 Boismortier Les voyages de l’Amour 78 Bowen 12 Studies 88 Concert Studies Nos 1 & 2 88 Fragments from Hans Anderson 88 Brahms Horn Trio, etc 92 Bruckner Latin Motets 82 Mass No. 2; Te Deum 92 Elisabetta Brusa Simply Largo 72 Symphony No. 2 72 Chausson Piano Trio 92 Chopin Ballades; Nocturnes 89 Copland Appalachian Spring – Suite 76 Clarinet Concerto 76 Fauré Piano Quartets 92 Gershwin Concerto in F 92 Gompper Cello Concerto 76 Double Bass Concerto 76 Moonburst 76 Handel Apollo e Dafne 91 Concerto grossi 91 Harp Concerto 91 Organ Concertos (arr. piano and orchestra) 77 M Haydn Missa Sancti Nicolai Tolentini 92 Willem Jeths Ritratto 78 Rael Jones Mother Echo 92 Kancheli Chamber Works 92 Martin Kohlstedt FLUR 92 Kvandal Songs 92 Scott Lee Through the Mangrove Tunnels 92 Nicholas Lens L.I.T.A.N.I.E.S 79 Jonathan Leshnoff Piano Concerto 92 Symphony No. 3 92 Machaud Ballades; Motets, etc 82 Martin Violin Concertos Nos 1 & 2 76 Meyerbeer Romilda e Costanza 79 Myaskovsky Symphony No. 21 73 Novák South Bohemian Suite, etc 92 Joseph C Phillips, Jr. The Grey Land 79 Prokofiev Symphony No. 5 73 Visions fugitives, etc 92 Puccini Il Tabarro 79 Ravel Piano Trio 92 Steve Reich City Life; Eight Lines 92 Reicha L’Art de verier 89 Rossini Matilde di Shabran 80 Tenor Duets 80 Schubert Die schöne Müllerin 83 Piano Works 89 Overtures 73 Symphonies 73 & 91 R Schumann String Quartets Nos 1-3 85 Scriabin Symphony No. 4 72 John Sheppard Media Vita, etc 83 Michael Stewart Beyond Space and Time 77 R Strauss Also sprach Zarathustra 72

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Capriccio – Prelude 76 Duet Concertino 76 Tavener Palintropos 77 Erkki-Sven Tüür Fata Morgana 85 Lichttürme 85 String Quartet No. 2 ‘Lost Prayers’ 85 Synergie 85 P teris Vasks Distant Light 92 Lonely Angel 92 Vivaldi The Four Seasons 77 Walton Piano Quartet 86 Toccata in A minor 86 Two Pieces for Violin and Piano 86 Violin Sonata 86 Weinberg String Quartets Nos 2, 5 & 8 86 Thomas Wilson Symphonies Nos 2 & 5 73 COLLECTIONS ... and ... Ars Nova Copenhagen 70 All Around Bach Stepan Simonian, et al 90 The American Decca Recordings Nadia Boulanger, et al 91 An Armenian Palette Heik Melikyan 92 An Italian Travel Diary Ensemble Correspondances 82 The Art of Agony Viney-Grinberg Duo 92 The Art of the Mandolin Avi Avital, et al 86 British Music for Strings Southwest German Chamber Orc. 74 Casta Diva Vanessa Benelli Mossell 90 The Complete 1940s Recordings Wilhelm Backhaus, et al 91 Correspondances Eivind Ringstad, et al 87 Credo Marina Rebeka, et al 84 The English Connection Argovia Philharmonic 74 A Family Affair Edgar Moreau, et al 87 The First Recordings, 1920-26 Arturo Toscanini, et al 91 Handel’s Tea Time Dorothee Mields, et al 84 In Motion United Strings of Europe, et al 92 Italian Opera Arias Linda Richardson, et al 80 Mariss Jansons - His Last Concert Bavarian Radio Symphony Orc. 93 Mirrors Lysander Piano Trio 87 Mon ami, mon amour Matt Haimovitz, Mari Kodama 87 Mysteries Sabine Weyer 90 Orchestral Favourites Royal Philharmonic Orchestra 93 Piano Paul Ji 93 Queen of Baroque Cecilia Bartoli, et al 80 Secrets Annie Fischer 91 Sir Charles Mackerras Conducts Mozart Scottish Chamber Orc. 74 Songs of Comfort and Hope Yo-Yo Ma, Kathryn Stott 93 Time Zones Lautten Compagney 75 Verklärte Nacht Christine Rice, Stuart Skelton, et al 84 Voices in the Wilderness Elizabeth Bates, et al 93

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We explore the true story behind Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, a perennial favourite which is also on the cover CD.

Hollywood legend John Williams discusses his stellar career, and there are recordings by some great cathedral choirs on our festive cover CD.

Tom Poster and Elena Urioste share the story behind their lockdown performances, and we celebrate Albinoni’s 350th on our cover CD.

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TV&Radio

Your complete guide to what’s on Radio 3 this month, plus TV highlights

FEBRUARY’S RADIO 3 LISTINGS Schedules may be subject to alteration. For up-to-date listings see Radio Times

Three to look out for Alan Davey, the controller of BBC Radio 3, picks out three great moments to tune into this February

A Celebration of the BBC Orchestras and Choirs The BBC’s ensembles present a series of live concerts based on the theme of ‘reinvention’. The music of Stravinsky is at the heart of the weekend’s programming, marking 50 years since his death.

12-14 February

Classical Commonwealth Belize-born British composer Errollyn Wallen explores the history of music in the Commonwealth and how it has intersected with British classical traditions. From Scottish folk songs to Mayan chant from her native Caribbean, Wallen examines the far-reaching concept of ‘British music’.

Sunday Feature: 21 February, 6.45pm

Lunchtime Concerts from Cardiff The Consone Quartet has curated a week of lunchtime concerts live from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, focused on the music of Schubert and Schumann. They’ll be joined by Paolo Zanzu on the fortepiano, as well as tenor Gwilym Bowen and cellist Anastasia Kobekina.

Lunchtime Concert: 16-19 February, 1pm

1 MONDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Schubert 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-5pm Afternoon Concert 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert from Combins Hall, Verbier, Switzerland. Glazunov From the Middle Ages: Prelude, Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, Symphony No. 4, Melodie from Souvenir d’un lieu cher. Janine Jansen (violin), Verbier Festival

100

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

Orchestra/Mikhail Pletnev 10-10.45pm Music Matters 10.45-11pm The Essay 11pm-12.30am Night Tracks

2 TUESDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Schubert 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-5pm Afternoon Concert 5-7.30pm In Tune plus Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert from Maida Vale, London.

Vivaldi The Four Seasons, Piazzolla The Four Seasons.

Igor Jusejovich (violin), BBC Symphony Orchestra 10-10.45pm Free Thinking 10.45-11pm The Essay 11pm-12.30am Night Tracks

3 WEDNESDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Schubert 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-3.30pm Afternoon Concert 3.30-4.30pm Choral Evensong 4.30-5pm New Generation Artists 5-7.30pm In Tune plus Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert from the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London. Sibelius The Swan of Tuonela, Schoenberg Song of the Wood-Dove from Gurre-Lieder, Debussy orch. Kloke Suite: Pelléas et Mélisande, Messiaen L’Ascension: Majesty of Christ, Rautavaara Cantus Arcticus.

Ruxandra Donose (mezzo), London Philharmonic Orchestra/ Vladimir Jurowski 10-10.45pm Free Thinking 10.45-11pm The Essay 11pm-12.30am Night Tracks

4 THURSDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Schubert 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-5pm Afternoon Concert 5-7.30pm In Tune plus Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert live from City Halls, Glasgow.

Programme to include works

by Mozart, Mahler and Wagner.

Laura Samuel (violin), BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra 10-10.45pm Free Thinking 10.45-11pm The Essay 11-11.30pm Night Tracks 11.30pm-12.30am Unclassified

5 FRIDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of

the Week Schubert 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-5pm Afternoon Concert 5-7.30pm In Tune plus Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert live from Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff. Stravinsky Suite, Britten Sinfonietta, Britten Temporal Variations, Colin Matthews Spiralling. Jess Gillam (saxophone), BBC National Orchestra of Wales 10-10.45pm The Verb 10.45-11pm The Essay 11pm-1am Late Junction

6 SATURDAY 7-9am Breakfast 9-11.45am Record Review 11.45am-12.30pm Music Matters 12.30-1pm This Classical Life 1-3pm Inside Music 3-4pm Sound of Cinema 4-5pm Music Planet 5-10pm Opera on 3 10pm-12 midnight New Music Show 12 midnight-1am Freeness

7 SUNDAY 7-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon Sunday Morning 12 noon-1pm Private Passions Chibundu Onuzo (novelist) 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert (rpt) 2-3pm The Early Music Show 3-4pm Choral Evensong (rpt) 4-5pm Jazz Record Requests 5-5.30pm The Listening Service 5.30-6.45pm Words and Music 6.45-7.30pm Sunday Feature John Foulds: Life, Death and Resurrection 7.30-9pm Drama on 3 The Blackwood (Jacob Polley) and (After) Fear by (Oliver Emanuel) 9-11pm Record Review Extra 11pm-12am Sunday Series

8 MONDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Vaughan Williams

1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-5pm Afternoon Concert 5-7.30pm In Tune plus Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert from Auditorium, Parco della Musica, Rome, Italy. Bruckner Te Deum, Mahler Das Lied von der Erde. Gerhild Romberger (mezzo-soprano), Clay Hilley (tenor), Orchestra and Chorus of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia/Antonio Pappano 10-10.45pm Music Matters 10.45-11pm The Essay Acting Unrehearsed 11pm-12.30am Night Tracks

9 TUESDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Vaughan Williams 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-5pm Afternoon Concert 5-7.30pm In Tune plus Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert from the Philharmonic Hall,

February TV&Radio 4-5pm Jazz Record Requests 5-5.30pm The Listening Service 5.30-7.30pm Radio 3 in Concert BBC National Orchestra of Wales 7.30-9pm Drama on 3 9-11pm Record Review Extra 11pm-12am Sunday Series

15 MONDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Mozart’s Operas 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-5pm Afternoon Concert 5-7.30pm In Tune plus Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert from LAC, Lugano, Switzerland.

Saint-Saëns Cello Concerto No. 1, Enrico Chapela Magnetar: Concerto for Electric Violin and Orchestra, Franck Symphony in D minor. Johannes Moser (cello), Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana/Alexander Vedernikov 10-10.45pm Music Matters 10.45-11pm The Essay Science Notes 11pm-12.30am Night Tracks

16 TUESDAY

The great curator: Anastasia Kobekina joins the Consone Quartet’s concert series

Liverpool. Mendelssohn Overture, Nocturne and Scherzo from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Schumann Symphony No. 2. Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/ Vasily Petrenko 10-10.45pm Free Thinking 10.45-11pm The Essay Acting Unrehearsed 11pm-12.30am Night Tracks

XENIA ZASETSKAYA

10 WEDNESDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Vaughan Williams 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-3.30pm Afternoon Concert 3.30-4.30pm Choral Evensong 4.30-5pm New Generation Artists 5-7.30pm In Tune plus Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert live from the Lighthouse, Poole. Borodin In the Steppes of Central Asia, Nurymov

Symphony No. 2 (UK premiere), Rimsky-Korsakov Antar.

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Kirill Karabits 10-10.45pm Free Thinking 10.45-11pm The Essay Acting Unrehearsed 11pm-12.30am Night Tracks

11 THURSDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Vaughan Williams 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-5pm Afternoon Concert 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert from the Barbican, London.

Schumann Piano Concerto, Schubert Symphony No. 9 ‘The Great’. Mitsuko Uchida (piano), London Symphony Orchestra/Simon Rattle 10-10.45pm Free Thinking 10.45-11pm The Essay

Acting Unrehearsed 11-11.30pm Night Tracks 11.30pm-12.30am Unclassified

12 FRIDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Vaughan Williams 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-5pm Afternoon Concert 5-7.30pm In Tune plus Mixtape 7.30-9pm TBA CHOICE 9-10.45pm Radio 3 in Concert from the Barbican, London. Paul Weller (singer and lead guitar of The Jam), BBC Symphony Orchestra/Jules Buckley 10.45-11pm The Essay Acting Unrehearsed 11pm-1am Late Junction

13 SATURDAY 7-9am Breakfast 9-11.45am Record Review

11.45am-12.30pm Music Matters 12.30-1pm This Classical Life 1-2pm Inside Music 2-3.30pm Radio 3 in Concert BBC Concert Orchestra 3.30-4pm TBA 4-5pm Music Planet 5-6.30pm Radio 3 in Concert BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra 6.30-7.30pm TBA 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert BBC Philharmonic 10pm-12 midnight New Music Show 12 midnight-1am Freeness

14 SUNDAY 7-9am Breakfast 9-11am Sunday Morning 11am-1.30pm Radio 3 in Concert Ulster Orchestra 1.30-3pm Radio 3 in Concert BBC Singers 2-3pm The Early Music Show 3-4pm Choral Evensong (rpt)

6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Mozart’s Operas CHOICE 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. Schubert Impromptu No. 1, Schumann Kinderszenen Op. 15, Piano Quintet. Paolo Zanzu (fortepiano), Consone Quartet 2-5pm Afternoon Concert 5-7.30pm In Tune plus Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert 10-10.45pm Free Thinking 10.45-11pm The Essay Science Notes 11pm-12.30am Night Tracks

17 WEDNESDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Mozart’s Operas 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. Schubert German Dances, Menuet No. 3, Liebeslauschen, An Schwager Kronos, Auf Dem See, Der Fischer, An Der Mond, Robert Schumann Widmung, Sehnsucht, Mein schöner Stern, Zum Schluß, Clara Schumann Liebst du um Schönheit, Sie liebten sich beiden. Gwilym Bowen (tenor), Paolo Zanzu (fortepiano), Consone Quartet 2-3.30pm Afternoon Concert 3.30-4.30pm Choral Evensong 4.30-5pm New Generation Artists BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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February TV&Radio

6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Mozart’s Operas 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama.

Schubert String Quintet.

Anastasia Kobekina (cello), Consone Quartet 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert 10-10.45pm The Verb 10.45-11pm The Essay Science Notes 11pm-1am Late Junction

20 SATURDAY

PODCAST CHOICE Music to my Ears: Series Two The second series of the Music to my Ears podcast is now available to stream or download on Acast, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

This series, we’re joined by a raft of famous faces from the classical music world and beyond, all of whom share the stories of their musical lives.

Comedian Deborah Frances-White reveals how she used to sneak into the opera when she first arrived in London from Australia and tells us about her experiences of music when she was a Jehovah’s Witness. Composer Errollyn Wallen speaks to us from her lighthouse in the Scottish Highlands, recalling the experience of writing a piece for the BBC Proms in lockdown. Conductor Karina Canellakis, meanwhile, explains how she began life as a violinist and her love of listening to Wagner.

Listen on Acast, Apple Podcasts, other podcast providers or our website, classical-music.com.

5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert 10-10.45pm Free Thinking 10.45-11pm The Essay Science Notes 11pm-12.30am Night Tracks

CHRIS CHRISTODOULOU

18 THURSDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Mozart’s Operas 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert from the Royal Welsh College of

Music and Drama. Haydn String Quartet Op. 50 No. 6 ‘The Frog’, Felix Mendelssohn String Quartet. Consone Quartet 2-5pm Afternoon Concert 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert live from City Halls, Glasgow. Programme to include Stravinsky The Soldier’s Tale.

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Mark Wigglesworth 10-10.45pm Free Thinking 10.45-11pm The Essay

7-9am Breakfast 9-11.45am Record Review 11.45am-12.30pm Music Matters 12.30-1pm This Classical Life 1-3pm Inside Music 3-4pm Sound of Gaming 4-5pm Music Planet 5-6.30pm J to Z 6.30-10pm Opera on 3 10pm-12 midnight New Music Show 12 midnight-1am Freeness

21 SUNDAY 7-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon Sunday Morning 12 noon-1pm Private Passions Tim Harford (economist) 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert (rpt) 2-3pm The Early Music Show 3-4pm Choral Evensong (rpt) 4-5pm Jazz Record Requests 5-5.30pm The Listening Service 5.30-6.45pm Words and Music CHOICE 6.45-7.30pm Sunday Feature Our Classical Commonwealth with Errollyn Wallen 7.30-9pm Drama on 3 French like Faiza 9-11pm Record Review Extra 11pm-12am Sunday Series

22 MONDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Ruth Gipps 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-5pm Afternoon Concert 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert from Blue Hall, de Singel,

23 TUESDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Ruth Gipps 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-5pm Afternoon Concert 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 7.30-9.30pm Radio 3 in Concert from Media City, Salford. Copland Appalachian Spring, Cowell Symphony No. 9, Carter Instances, Ives Symphony No. 3 ‘The Camp Meeting’. BBC Philharmonic/Ludovic Morlot 10-10.45pm Free Thinking 10.45-11pm The Essay Becoming Animal 11pm-12.30am Night Tracks

24 WEDNESDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Ruth Gipps 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-3.30pm Afternoon Concert 3.30-4.30pm Choral Evensong 4.30-5pm New Generation Artists 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert 10-10.45pm Free Thinking 10.45-11pm The Essay Becoming Animal 11pm-12.30am Night Tracks

25 THURSDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Ruth Gipps 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-5pm Afternoon Concert 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert live from City Halls, Glasgow.

Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1. Pablo Ferrández (cello), BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Alpesh Chauhan 10-10.45pm Free Thinking 10.45-11pm The Essay Becoming Animal 11-11.30pm Night Tracks

11.30pm-12.30am Unclassified with Elizabeth Alker

26 FRIDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Ruth Gipps 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-5pm Afternoon Concert 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert live from Media City, Salford.

BBC Philharmonic/John Wilson 10-10.45pm The Verb 10.45-11pm The Essay Becoming Animal 11pm-1am Late Junction

27 SATURDAY 7-9am Breakfast 9-11.45am Record Review 11.45am-12.30pm Music Matters 12.30-1pm This Classical Life 1-3pm Inside Music 3-4pm Sound of Cinema 4-5pm Music Planet 5-10pm Opera on 3 10pm-12 midnight New Music Show 12 midnight-1am Freeness

28 SUNDAY 7-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon Sunday Morning 12 noon-1pm Private Passions Caroline Bird (poet/playwright) 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert (rpt) 2-3pm The Early Music Show 3-4pm Choral Evensong (rpt) 4-5pm Jazz Record Requests 5-5.30pm The Listening Service 5.30-6.45pm Words and Music 6.45-7.30pm Between the Ears Concrete Paris 7.30-9pm Drama on 3 The Fishermen 9-11pm Record Review Extra

QUIZ ANSWERS from 104

19 FRIDAY

Antwerp, Belgium. Beethoven Missa Solemnis. Malin Hartelius (soprano), Sarah Connolly (mezzo-soprano), Steve Davislim (tenor), Hanno Müller-Brachmann (bass), Arnold Schoenberg Chorus, Le Concert Olympique/Jan Caeyers 10-10.45pm Music Matters 10.45-11pm The Essay Becoming Animal 11pm-12.30am Night Tracks

1. JS Bach 2. Allegri’s Miserere 3. Either ‘The Mighty Handful’ or ‘The Five’ 4. Jenny Lind 5. a) The Rhine; b) The Thames; c) The Seine; d) The Volga 6. Mario Lanza 7. Respighi’s Pines of Rome 8. The strings (they are the instruments portraying the various characters in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf ) 9. They both wrote the scores and acted in the films themselves 10. The Tintin books

Science Notes 11-11.30pm Night Tracks 11.30pm-12.30am Unclassified with Elizabeth Alker

A maestro’s musings: American conductor Karina Canellakis

VISIT WWW.CLASSICAL MUSIC.COM FOR THE VERY LATEST FROM THE MUSIC WORLD 102

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

The BBC Music Magazine PRIZE CROSSWORD NO. 356 Crossword set by Paul Henderson

THE QUIZ

The first correct solution of our crossword picked at random will win a copy of The Oxford Companion to Music. A runnerup will win Who Knew? Answers to Questions about Classical Music (see www.oup.co.uk). Send answers to: BBC Music Magazine, Crossword 356/Feb, PO Box 501, Leicester, LE94 0AA to arrive by 18 Feb 2021 (solution in May 2021 issue).

It’s time to put your classical music knowledge to the test…

1. Which composer was appointed as Thomaskantor in the city of Leipzig in 1723?

2. In 1770, the 14-year-old Mozart broke Sistine Chapel rules by copying out the music of which choral work after hearing it there?

3. The St Petersburg-based composers Mily Balakirev, César Cui, Modest Musorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Borodin were collectively known by what name?

4. Which famous opera singer, who lived from 1820-87, was nicknamed the ‘Swedish Nightingale’?

5. With which rivers might you associate the following works: a) Schumann’s Symphony No. 3; b) Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No. 2; c) Puccini’s Il tabarro; d) Janá ek’s Kát’a Kabanova?

6. This year is the centenary of the birth of the hugely popular tenor pictured above. Who is he?

9. What do Paul Hindemith and the 1928 film Ghosts before Breakfast have in common with Ryuichi Sakamoto and the 1983 film Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence?

10. Nicknamed the ‘Milanese Nightingale’ and famous for singing the Jewel Song from Gounod’s Faust, soprano Bianca Castafiore makes regular appearances in which series of books?

See p102 for answers

104

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

1 Queen attending Wagner operas, making a mistake (6) 5 Instruments in the near future collected by singer (8) 9 Instrument of love in abode with Romeo, possibly (4,6) 10 First item in choral period for composer (4) 11 Italian composer, one in old England heading for Italy (8) 12 Still openings for these stupendous major performances? (6) 13 German composer seen around in our parties (10) 15 Piano sitting beside no odd bits of simple wind instrument (4) 16 British composer declines to erase forte (4) 17 Verdi opera: a vital aria I dropped in recomposition?

About time (2,8) 19 Contend with notes linked to a city of the waltz (6) 21 Practice piece? That’s a duty, without hesitation (8) 23 Classy musical work recalled with silence (4) 24 Reason mike failed – this was too loud? (10) 25 Modern information about line in Dvořák symphony (3,5) 26 Extremes in society disdain every location of opera house (6)

DOWN

Your name & address

7. The third movement of which orchestral work of 1924 features a recording of a nightingale?

8. The flute and the oboe argue, the clarinet tries but fails to catch both of them but the horns do catch the oboe. What catches the horns?

ACROSS

DECEMBER SOLUTION No. 353

DECEMBER WINNER Helen Hinder, Southampton Immediate Media Company Limited, publisher of BBC Music Magazine, may contact you with details of our products and services or to undertake research.

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2 French Baroque composer’s dance enthralling British (5) 3 They list it: ‘Piece of Mozart in broadcast series’ (9) 4 Puccini, say, arranged magic couple of openings of opera (7) 5 Penned by BD, version of line now within song (6,2,3,4) 6 Set to change regarding very large music players (7) 7 Starts to observe new conductor, unusually excited, playing at the right moment? (2,3) 8 Various things sink location for dancing etc (9) 14 Harsh about critical comment over run for d’Oyly Carte production (9) 15 British conductor’s power – source of tension in Wagner,say (9) 17 One’s finding out overture of Lehar’s a money-spinner (7) 18 Eternal fool penning arrangement of glee (7) 20 Skill in radio broadcast?

Absolutely not (5) 22 Some allege islanders set up event in Rossini opera (5)

Volume 29 No. 5 BBC Music Magazine (ISSN 0966-7180) (USPS 018-168) is published 13 times a year by Immediate Media Company Bristol Limited under licence from BBC Worldwide, Eagle House, Colston Avenue, Bristol BS1 4ST, UK. © Immediate Media Company Bristol Limited, 2020 Printed by William Gibbons & Sons Ltd, Willenhall, West Midlands, WV13 3XT. Not for resale. All rights reserved. Unauthorised reproduction in whole or part is prohibited without written permission. Every effort has been made to secure permission for copyright material. In the event of any material being used inadvertently, or where it proved impossible to trace the copyright owner, acknowledgement will be made in a future issue. MSS, photographs and artwork are accepted on the basis that BBC Music Magazine and its agents do not accept liability for loss or damage to same.

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Who was the real Mozart?

Author of a new Mozart biography, Jan Swafford strips away the composer’s childish reputation to reveal a savvy, sophisticated figure

On you F R EE C r D

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Clarinet legend: Jack Brymer performs Mozart’s Concerto

Mozart Clarinet Concerto Performed by Jack Brymer; plus the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Malcolm Sargent in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 PLUS! Roger Nichols delves into Ravel’s writings on music; an introduction to Sturm und Drang by Richard Wigmore; a look at Beethoven’s conversation books; Michael White celebrates London’s glorious musical heritage; Stephen Johnson on the best recordings of Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony; and Liadov is our Composer of the Month

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Jan-Dec 2019 – 27,394 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

105

Music that changed me

Jilly Goolden Wine expert Jilly Goolden is a wine critic, broadcaster and journalist. For 18 years she co-presented BBC Two’s Food and Drink series where she attracted acclaim for her unorthodox and expressive descriptions – characterising a Gamay as ‘like trainers on hot tarmac’ – and earning her a place in Radio Times’s top 40 most eccentric TV presenters of all time. As one of the nation’s best-loved wine connoisseurs, she now runs tasting courses (winedays.co.uk) from her home in East Sussex.

ALAMY

W

hen I was growing up I had a lot of music around me – my father used to fill the house with his LPs. We had a recording of SaintSaëns’s Carnival of the Animals with verses

by Ogden Nash and I remember absolutely loving it. And as a teenager I discovered Handel’s Messiah, which I would listen to interspersed with The Beatles – my big love affair with Handel’s music began with the soprano solo that begins Part III of Messiah, ‘I Know My Redeemer Liveth’.

At that time, my understanding was that classical music had to be sad. I thought the pastoral stuff was naff; I felt that you needed to be on the verge of tears for the music to talk to you.

I spent my late-twenties living alone in a little cottage in a remote part of the countryside. It confirmed forever my passion for nature and sparked my lifelong love of rural life. ELGAR’s Chanson de Matin for me is the embodiment of everything bucolic, and I discovered that gorgeous happy piece of music around that time. I suddenly realised that music didn’t necessarily have to be tragic to be emotive. If I ever had a down moment I would listen to this piece and it would highlight the joy of the countryside, whatever else life threw at you.

I went to GERSHWIN’s Porgy and Bess at English National Opera and Glyndebourne. It’s not the greatest opera, 106

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

The choices Elgar Chanson de Matin RPO/Yehudi Menuhin Membran 222833-203

Gershwin Bess, you is my woman now Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald Verve Records 0602517448209

Handel Rinaldo David Daniels, Cecilia Bartoli; AAM/ Christopher Hogwood Decca 467 0872

Verdi Simon Boccanegra Plácido Domingo; Royal Opera House/ Antonio Pappano Warner Classics 917 8259 (DVD)

Saint-Saëns Symphony No. 3 (Organ) Kansas City Symphony/Michael Stern Reference Recordings RR 136

but ‘Bess, you is my woman now’ is marvellous. The Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald version is a permanent fixture on my play list. I love ballads – again, embracing the tragic side of music.

My parents were not keen on opera – I remember them coming back from a performance and saying what a dirge it was. So I’d always had this suspicion that

I wouldn’t like it. In fact, I got straight in with Wagner and did the Ring cycle first: it was a baptism of fire and I worked hard to engage with it all. After that, I discovered the ease of loving Puccini and Verdi. I live near Glyndebourne and go as often as I can to see productions there. Before it was developed and was more of an ‘at home with the Christies’, you could hear the opera from the organ room without buying a ticket. As a 20-something I heard many operas that way. But I first heard HANDEL’s Rinaldo from a paid seat, and fell for ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’ from Act II. It’s up there with ‘Bess, you is my woman now’ for sheer mournfulness.

I got very interested in last year’s Opera Cup at Glyndebourne and attended various stages. I had my money on the American baritone Edward Nelson who went on to win it. I have a thing for the bass-baritone voice, and I think VERDI’s Simon Boccanegra shows it off brilliantly. I expect that Nelson is too young for the role at the moment, but I would love to hear him as the lead in that opera one day.

I also love Rachmaninov, particularly his piano concertos. I loved No. 2, and then I came to know No. 3 from Shine, the 1996 biopic about the life of pianist David Helfgott. I had learned the piano when I was little, and I still play a bit. I also used to sing – although I think my children would probably prefer me not to these days! It’s one of those things I keep intending to revisit again. I must have a strange form of dyslexia because I find reading music very difficult. I’d love to be able to sit down and play instinctively or from a score, but instead it takes me a long time to learn chord by chord, note by note; but then I remember it forever.

For my final piece, I’ve gone for SAINT SAËNS’s Organ Symphony No. 3 – it’s so thundering and powerful in that finale.

It’s incredibly stirring and so far removed from Carnival of the Animals.

Interview by Claire Jackson

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