Paul Dukas’ Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, first heard in 1907, once seemed important. Arturo Toscanini conducted the Met premiere in 1911 with Farrar and later arranged some of its music for a 1947 recording with his NBC Symphony.
The economics of the recording companies dictate much that is not ideal. Wagner’s operas were not composed as they were in order to permit the extraction of bleeding chunks, even on those occasions when strophic song forms do occur.
Among the recent recordings of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, Valery Gergiev’s release on the LSO Live label is an excellent addition to the discography of this work.
While not unknown, the songs of Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871-1942) deserve to be heard more frequently.
Recorded on 5 and 6 May 2008 and 17 and 18 January 2009 at the Lisztzentrum (Raiding, Austria), this recent Bridge release makes available the piano-vocal versions of three song cycles by Gustav Mahler, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Rückert-Lieder, and Kindertotenlieder performed by mezzo-soprano Hermine Haselböck, accompanied by Russell Ryan.
Contraltos rarely achieve the acclaim and renown of sopranos. Assigned few leading roles in opera, they are condemned to playing the villain or the grandmother, or to stealing the castrati’s trousers in en travesti roles.
Following their 2011 Decca recording of Striggio’s Mass in 40 Parts (1566), I Fagiolini continue their quest to unearth lost treasures of the High Renaissance and early Baroque, with this collection of world-premiere recordings, ‘reconstructions’ and ‘reconstitutions’ of music by Giovanni and Andrea Gabrieli, Monteverdi, Palestrina, and their less well-known compatriots Viadana, Barbarino and Soriano.
Eternal Echoes is an album of khazones [Jewish cantorial music] for cantorial soloist, solo violin and a blended instrumental ensemble comprising a small orchestra and the Klezmer Conservatory Band.
Michael Tilson Thomas’s recording of Mahler’s Third Symphony is an outstanding contribution to the composer’s discography.
Oliver Knussen burst into British music with an unprecedented flourish. In 1967, the London Symphony Orchestra premiered Knussen’s First Symphony, with István Kertész scheduled to conduct.
Based on performances given in Summer 2010 at the Lucerne Festival, this recording of Beethoven’s Fidelio is an admirable recording that captures the vitality of the work as conducted by Claudio Abbado.
Stanisław Moniuszko (1819-1872) was one of the most popular composers of his day in Poland, and of the many works he wrote for the stage, two are performed from time to time, Halka (1848) and Strazny dwór [The Haunted Manor] (1865).
The Polish alto Jadwiga Rappé is a familiar voice in various stage and concert works, and the recent release of a selection of songs by Stanisław Moniuszko (1819-1872) is an opportunity to hear her performing artsongs.
Originally released on multiple discs in 1981 this reissue on two CDs is a comprehensive collection of art songs by Italian and French composers from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
An exciting contribution to the discography of this popular opera, the live performance of Richard Strauss’s Salome from the Festspielhaus at Baden-Baden is a compelling DVD.
Released in late 2011, Deutsche Grammophon’s DVD of the new staging of Berg’s Lulu at the Gran Teatro del Liceu, Barcelona is an excellent contribution to the discography of this fascinating opera.
A recent release by the Metropolitan Opera, this two-disc set makes available on DVD the famous performance of Berg’s Lulu that was broadcast on 20 December 1980 as part of the PBS series “Live from the Met.”
The novels of Sinclair Lewis once shot across the American literary skies like comets, alarming and fascinating readers of that era, but their tails didn’t extend far behind them.
Once the province of only the most dedicated opera fanatics, mid-20th century recordings of privately taped live performances have become more widely available.
Flute players in opera orchestra around the world must look forward to the frequent appearances of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, knowing that while the stage spotlight in the mad scene will be on the soprano, the orchestral spotlight will be on their instrument.
In 1851 during his first season as music director in Düsseldorf, Robert Schumann presented a performance of Bach’s St. John Passion, and unsurprisingly adapted the score both to nineteenth-century taste and nineteenth-century practicalities.
There is, of course, a degree of irony in all of this, for it was mid-nineteenth-century musicians and scholars who began the landmark Bach Gesellschaft complete edition of the composer’s music: landmark in its scope and landmark in the pioneering model of scholarly “pure” editing it presented. The objective ideals of science would soon shape the nineteenth-century birth of modern music scholarship, and a rigorous approach to editing, shorn of adulteration, was a characteristic presage. At the same time, however, some nineteenth-century performances of Bach showed no hesitation to re-clothe the score lovingly in modern garb. Thus, Schumann’s score adds instruments—clarinets here, trumpets there—substitutes available instruments for those that were not—a solo viola replaces the solo viola da gamba in “Es ist vollbracht,” for instance—alters voice assignments—some tenor arias are sung by soprano—and makes various deletions in the score. Additionally, Schumann’s performance used fortepiano as the continuo instrument, especially prominent for its role in the large number of recitatives.
As an example of the degree of adaptation, the well-known aria, “Es ist vollbracht” shows Schumann’s respectful but creative hand. The original viola da gamba solo, played to the accompaniment of basso continuo alone is recast as a viola solo over low, brooding string harmonies; the heroic second section of the aria, adds trumpets to the orchestral flourishes to heighten the military sound of things. The Bachian details remain reasonably intact though we may perceive those details differently for the adjustment in color. The de-familiarization is an interesting way of meeting this “old friend” anew . . . interesting, and in selective ways gratifying. The brooding low strings of “Es ist vollbracht,” for instance, is not all that distant from certain Bach sonorities—one thinks of the divided viola parts in the early cantatas, for example--and here in the Passion, this later touch may well haunt my own future listening of Bach’s version of the aria. I doubt the later version will ever unseat the earlier—our historical sensitivities, if nothing else, are much too deeply entrenched for that—but hearing the aria with a touch of Romantic melancholy may serve to alert us anew to the affective depths we may find in Bach’s own language.
The performance is an impressive one. In general, Hermann Max and his forces seem to have started with a baroque sound and brought it chronologically forward a bit rather than have taken a later sound and tried to pull it back. This serves the performance well. The choir is flexible and clear; spry in fast passages and well proportioned in solemn moments. The soloists in the main are well-seasoned early music practitioners and we hear in their approach the refined articulative sense and shapely contours born of this specialty. Bach seems to trump Schumann in the vocal sound. Jan Kobow’s rendition of the evangelist’s role is brilliant—compellingly dramatic and wonderfully fluent, and the ease of his high range is remarkable. Similarly so the exquisite high register of Veronika Winter, beautifully controlled in the aria “Zerfliesse, mein Herze.”
One of the most startling differences in the Schumann version is the fortepiano accompaniment, here played by Christian Rieger. Through frequent arpeggiation and chordal reiteration he promotes a very satisfying forward motion to the line, welcome in any rendition of the work.
Schumann’s devotion to Bach is well-known, and though modern respect for Bach’s historical “otherness” would deem the arrangement a historical trespass, in Schumann’s world the adaptation serves only to further the devotion. According Schumann the integrity of his own historical “otherness,” we find in this arrangement much that will move and interest. And in the performance we find considerable accomplishment, indeed.
Steven Plank