ARTHUR RUBINSTEIN (piano) & ZUBIN MEHTA (conductor)
Israel Philharmonic Orchestra
JULIUS KATCHEN (piano)
DECCA Eloquence 466 724-2
TPT:1:10:17
reviewed by Neville Cohn
It’s a fascinating exercise, after listening to the polonaises recorded by Rubinstein in middle age, to consider the last concerto performance he ever recorded, his first ever for the DECCA label – and the only one. Special permission had to be sought from RCA Victor, to whom Rubinstein had been contracted for many years. RCA permitted the recording to go ahead on learning that all royalties from the DECCA disc would go to a benevolent fund for retired musicians of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra with whom Rubinstein recorded Brahms’ Piano Concerto No 2.
This was Rubinstein’s concerto recording swansong and it says much for physical resilience that he not only steers a safe way through this musical minefield but invests the playing with a nobility – the distillation of a lifetime’s musical thought and endeavour – that makes for compelling listening. The CD booklet points out that one of the trickier passages needed to be re-recorded by the old man and then spliced into the main tape. It is superior musical surgery; no scar is evident. While understandably playing at a more deliberate pace than would have been the case had Rubinstein been fifty or even fifteen years younger, the powers of expression, the ability to summon up his trademark massive tone where required and to caress the ear in quieter moments, is astonishing testimony to Rubinstein’s durability as both man and musician. Zubin Mehta galvanises the IPO which provides a sensationally fine accompaniment for the old magician. There’s a Brahms bonus: the Ballades, opus 10 presented with all the insight we have come to expect of Julius Katchen.
A 2-CD pack on the ABC Classics label is devoted to performances recorded during the 2000 Sydney International Piano Competition, including those of top laureate Marina Kolomiitseva’s astonishingly persuasive account of Liszt’s Grande Etudes de Paganini. They mark her irrefutably as a worthy winner; these excruciatingly taxing pieces hold few fears for the young Russian who invests each of these studies with poetic insights. Her virtuosity is extraordinary, her hands sweeping up and down the keyboard as nonchalantly as if dusting the furniture. This, as well as faultless tremolo (which gives an imperious quality to the playing), makes “Etude No 2” unforgettable, an amalgam of dazzling flourishes and heart-easingly expressive filigree arabesques. In “Etude No 4”, staccato notes evoke images of sparks in stygian darkness. Kolomiitseva is triumphant, too, in Tchaikowsky’s Concerto in B flat minor – and how wonderfully she invigorates this most tired of war horses. Drawing from a deep well of expressiveness, Kolomiitseva, whether expounding the concerto’s lyrical qualities or hurling great bolts of sound, Zeus-like, at the ear, plays as if the work were specially written for her.
Also spilling out of this splendid musical cornucopia is Vera Kameneva’s account of Mozart’s K467 in C, now known to millions as the Elvira Madigan Concerto. A born Mozart player, Kameneva brings an exultant quality to the opening of the work. Often, the presentation pulses with vitality, as meaningful in its way as delicato note-streams, fragile as gossamer. And the finale glows with power. Christopher Hogwood, too, sounds in his element as he directs the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Yet another instance of high calibre keyboard ability is Evgeny Ukhanov who gives a near-perfect assessment of the music in Rachmaninov’s Concerto in D minor.
HAYDN: Sonata in E; RACHMANINOV: Sonata No 2; BRAHMS: Six Pieces, opus 118; TCHAIKOWSKY: Dumka, Nocturne in C sharp minor; BALAKIREV: Islamey
Telarc CD 80524
TPT: 1:18:28
reviewed by Neville Cohn
Lang Lang’s debut recording – of a recital before an audience at Seiji Ozawa Hall, Tanglewood – marks him instantly as a classicist of unusual ability. A musician to his fingertips (no pun intended), his reading of Haydn’s Sonata in E, Hob XVI:31 is a model of its kind, lucid, cogent, exquisitely phrased: I hung on every note. So, too, I dare say, will anyone interested in poised, finely considered accounts of keyboard music of the classical era. A performance worthy of the highest praise, it makes for irresistible listening. At its most persuasive, Lang Lang’ pianism here is reminiscent of Lili Kraus at her best – and this is high praise.
Although only eighteen years old when he made this recording, his account of the Haydn work has a maturity of expression one more usually associates with an arrived master. Certainly, his performance sounds as if he was drawing on decades of musical experience. I very much admired, too, Lang Lang’s reading of Tchaikowsky’s Nocturne in C sharp minor, given a deeply expressive interpretation that allows its inherent simplicity to register meaningfully on the consciousness.
And while this young pianist gives a satisfactory performances of Rachmaninov’s sprawling Sonata in B flat minor (the slow movement was exquisitely introspective), he comes across primarily as a musician most at home in works of the classical era, less so in virtuoso vehicles such as Balakirev’s Islamey which lacks the drive and brilliance that others more suited to the genre such as, say, Horowitz, might bring to their playing. Brahms’ opus 118, six of the master’s miniature gems, is least persuasive; these mainly autumnal musings are entirely satisfactory in notational and tonal terms. But for all the beauty of nuance brought to bear on the music, the sunset, valedictory nature of much of the writing proved elusive, especially in the “Intermezzo in E flat minor”; Solomon’s breathtakingly insightful recording of the early 1950s still reigns supreme. Despite these reservations, there’s every reason, on the evidence of this recording (especially the Haydn sonata) to believe that in time this phenomenal young artist will be able successfully to plumb the expressive depths of opus 118. Hopefully, too, those responsible for such matters will encourage this exceptionally sensitive pianist to place more readings of Haydn – and Mozart – on disc.
For a number of years, civil liberties were suspended in the Argentine which at the time was under the control of a brutal military junta. Unspeakable crimes were committed, often with impunity, and the exact fate of many thousands of Argentinians will never be known.
Chris Edmund, in his latest play – The Butcher’s Dance – has given us a disturbing insight into that terrible era. But there is much else to engage the eye and ear in what is a many-layered offering.
Whether unintended or consciously sought, much of what leads up to a hideous confrontation between secret police and a Buenos Aires family has about it a dream-like quality where some of the dialogue sounds muffled and often rather difficult to make out, an effect exacerbated by an overlay of tango music at low decibel levels. The effect is to lull the observer, again perhaps unintended – but when appalling violence breaks out in Buenos Aires suburbia, the impact, by contrast, is all the greater. It is electrifying.
Edmund includes known figures in his tale. In a New York brothel, presided over by Polly Adler (a splendidly vulgar characterisation by Virginia Gay who gives us as flinty a Madam as one is ever likely to encounter on stage), we meet the acerbic Dorothy Parker well on her way to status as a bitchy alcoholic – and Robert Benchley (Martin Williams), that other habitue of the Algonquin Round Table. As well, we meet tango-meister Astor Piazzolla (Morgan David Jones). It’s the moment of Wall Street’s 1929 collapse with all the economic chaos and human misery that follow in its wake.
For much of the evening, one is conscious of a barely contained undercurrent of menace and violence. This theme of aggressive anger is early established as we watch a butcher hacking at a joint of meat, then a knife fight that breaks out between workers in late-19th century Buenos Aires. The events of 9/11 come frequently to the fore as well.
But the chief focus is on the horror unleashed on the Argentine by General Videla and his henchmen between 1976 and 1983.
We see a Buenos Aires family including a heavily pregnant woman at home as secret police arrive. They commit horrific assaults, primarily sexual, on both women and men. Edmund does not hold back here; unflinchingly, unsparingly, he reveals the shocking violence of the time and its ghastly aftermath.
Reinforcing the impact of these scenes is the knowledge that the events portrayed are not some fanciful essay in Grand Guignol but incidents of a sort that were all too frequent and all too real.
Perhaps inevitably, as we watch the acting out of brutal tyranny, Argentine-style, we think of more recent outrages torture and humiliation of prisoners in Abu Graib, for instance. Are the gross abuses of power in Iraq any less despicable and unacceptable as those which took place in the Argentine?
Are events in Iraq not even worse because a blind eye is turned to it by those cynical professors of humbug who pretend – and may even believe – that they are the white knights of democracy, ostensibly freeing the oppressed to enjoy the delights of USA-style enlightenment?
The Butcher’s Dance is not for the squeamish nor for those who prefer plays to have a chronological working out with a clear beginning and a logical end. Edmund’s offering is the antithesis of this formality; Butcher’s Dance is fragmentary and episodic, the viewer taken on a winding path along which we encounter, inter alia, a number of characters who come onstage alone and take the audience into their confidence.
One, in particular, lingers in the mind. She looks as if she might be an off-duty flight attendant, an American; her smugness, her ignorance and complacency are frightening, her uncritical and absolute belief in the rightness of the ‘American way’ appalling.
The confronting nature of much of The Butcher’s Dance is not for those whose idea of a good night at the theatre is
a couple of hours of lightweight, escapist mummery.
Society needs works such as Edmund’s, theatre that compels us to question what those in power are doing in our names.
In one of the best ever years for serious music in Perth, it was the W.A.Symphony Orchestra which, towards the end of 2005, reached heights never before attained. Two programs conducted by Russian maestro Alexander Lazarev produced sensational interpretations, notably of Shostakovich’s Tenth. Soon after, we heard Charles Dutoit take the WASO through a magnificent reading of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. This was incontrovertible evidence that, provided the right person is on the podium, the WASO is capable of stunning interpretations. Earlier in the year, Vladimir Verbitsky led the orchestra through an at-times electrifying account of Prokofiev’s cantata Alexander Nevsky.
Of a raft of soloists with the WASO, it was Shlomo Mintz above all who scaled the heights in Brahms’ Violin Concerto – and Allan Meyer was near-sublime in Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. Russian master pianist Nicolai Demidenko did wonders in Rachmaninov’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini.
There was some exceptionally rewarding chamber music on offer, notably by the Australian String Quartet, wondrously eloquent in Bartok’s Fourth but their collaboration with cellist Li-Wei in Schubert’s Quintet in C was one of the year’s dullest offerings. The Macquarie Trio reached for the stars in Mendelssohn’s Trio in D minor – and the visiting Kronos Quartet did not need visual features (which were often intrusively annoying) to give evidence of magnificently honed ensemble skills.
Of piano recitals, far and away the most eccentric was by Geoffrey Tozer whose account of a Schubert sonata was bizzarely erratic. Roger Woodward’s all-Chopin recital ranged from the unfortunate to the profoundly musical. And Larry Sitsky, now in his seventies, brought youthful ardour to hitherto neglected virtuoso works of Anton Rubinstein. Scottish pianist Steven Osborne was magnificent in Mozart’s Piano Concerto K414 with the ACO but wasted his time and ours in Britten’s vulgar, cheap and noisy Young Apollo.
There was a deal of new music, with pianist Emily Green-Armytage giving a probing account of Roger Smalley’s Three Studies in Black and White. Darryl Poulsen gave the first performance of Smalley’s Lament with the composer contributing discreetly on percussion at a concert to raise funds for tsunami victims. At the Luna Cinema, Evan Kennea conducted Louis Andriessen’s fascinatingly intricate score for Peter Greenaway’s M is for Man, Music, Mozart – and James Ledger’s Line Drawing, a concerto for recorders and strings, was given a successful premiere at the Art Gallery of W.A. with Genevieve Lacey as soloist. Another remarkable new work – Georges Lentz’s Caeli Enarrant – was presented by the Australian Quartet in ensemble with percussionists positioned at four points of the Concert Hall.
Emeritus Professor David Tunley’s 75th birthday was marked by a mainly-Tunley program at the Octagon. Few Perth-based musicians have served the arts with such distinction both here and abroad. But why are so few of Tunley’s often delightful works on CD? They certainly deserve to be.
A packed Callaway Auditorium heard Stephanie Coleman and Jangoo Chapkhana in a charm-laden piano duet recital of French music.
Whether John Adams’ introverted and melancholic On the Transmigration of Souls for orchestra and chorus will survive on its own merits remains to be seen. For the present, its powerful associations with 9/11, which inspired it, guarantees it a place in orchestral programs.
Among singers, laurels to Kiwi bass Peter Whelan whose account of Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death for PIAF set new standards for vocal excellence. Charlotte Hellekant made a positive impression as Carmen in Bizet’s timeless masterpiece – and Rachelle Durkin, fresh from vocal experience in the USA, sang Donna Anna in Don Giovanni as if the part had been written for her. Andrew Foote repeated his success as Papageno in Mozart’s Magic Flute in Opera in the Park.
Fiona Campbell’s glorious mezzo soprano voice was thrilling in two cantatas by Monteclair as well as Bach’s St Matthew Passion, also memorable for beautifully considered violin obbligati from Paul Wright. The impact of this performance of Bach’s Passion was all the greater as a result of Lindy Hume’s discreet and invariably tasteful theatrical touches.
Richard Tognetti’s skill as an arranger has greatly enriched the repertoire for chamber orchestra – but his transcription for solo cello and strings of Franck’s superb Sonata in A for violin and piano was a major miscalculation. Lacking that adversarial quality that is the essence of the original, it bombed despite the eloquence of cellist extraordinaire Pieter Wispelwey. Another cellist – Noeleen Wright – made an all-too-rare appearance in an all-Beethoven program. Partnered at the fortepiano by Cecilia Sun, Wright’s playing bristled with authority and intensity of emotion. Why is this exceptional musician so rarely heard in recital? Steven Isserlis dazzled in Britten’s Unaccompanied Cello Suite No 3; it was an exercise in perfection.
Andrew Fisenden, a young wizard on drum kit, was frankly thrilling in ensemble with Defying Gravity.
Perth’s music life became the poorer for the passing in April of Marcia Harrison, noted music historian and matriarch of a family that has made an enormous contribution to the city’s music life. Another departure from the scene was flamenco singer Jose Maria Gonzalez.
Copyright 2005 Neville Cohn
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