Category Archives: CD

Convict Harpsichordist

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convict1Elizabeth Anderson (harpsichord)

MOVE CD 3242

 

reviewed by Neville Cohn

Harpsichord playing at a very high level, meticulously researched notes with fascinating illustrations and CD-ROM images combine to unusually satisfying effect here.

Who was John Grant and how does he fit into the colonial history of New South Wales? What did he do that, centuries later, makes him a figure of fascination? The story, very briefly, is this: Grant had taken a fancy to one Anna Ward who lived in London. But her mother and one John Townsend, who was her mother’s lawyer (and Anna’s guardian) were dead set against the match and told Grant in no uncertain terms.

This infuriated the touchy Grant who challenged Townsend to a duel. Townsend, instead of trying to calm the agitated Grant, inflamed the situation by walking away from it – and grant then impulsively shot Townsend in the buttock (whether right or left is not revealed in the liner notes). For this rash act, Grant was sentenced to death. But only hours before the sentence was to be carried out, King George III commuted the sentence to transportation for life to the then-infant colony of New South Wales.

And when Grant set sail for the antipodes in 1804, he took along his harpsichord, this being the first ever such instrument brought to the antipodes.

As soon as he landed, Grant began his quest for a pardon, lobbying anyone whom he thought might advance his case. But his abrasive manner did him little good initially as he got up the noses of various NSW bigwigs, often gate-crashing governmental garden parties and button-holing anyone he thought could advance his case.

The versatile Grant also put in stints as lay preacher on Norfolk Island and as lay clergyman at Coal River near Newcastle. He even asked Governor Bligh (of Bounty mutiny fame) to help get him pardoned. Perhaps, just to get him out their hair, Grant was eventually pardoned and sailed home in 1811 to be re-united with his mother who had herself applied more than a little pressure to the newly-appointed Governor Macquarie when he took tea with her at the old lady’s Sloan Street home in London where she doubtless bent the governor-designate’s ear as she spoke of her yearning to be re-united with her son.

How all the aforegoing relates to the music on this compact disc is this: while it cannot be said with certainty what sort of music Grant played on his well-travelled harpsichord, all the works on this compilation were freely available in London at the time Grant was bundled off to NSW. Elizabeth Anderson, who, some time ago, made an impressive recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, is here in magnificent form. Certainly, her magisterial readings embody a quality of nobility that is only very rarely encountered on CD – and all the more satisfying for that.

I especially admired Scarlatti’s Sonata in F minor, K386, with Anderson’s artistry drawing the listener ineluctably into the composer’s idiosyncratic sound and mood world. And Handel’s Suite No 5 is given a frankly magnificent reading; the disc is worth having if only to listen to playing of such impeccable style.

The sound engineers, doubtless inspired by Anderson’s Olympian readings, have done her proud; recorded sound is uniformly excellent.

Adding to the pleasure of this exceptional product are fascinatingly illustrated liner notes, a 19-minute CD-ROM video about John Grant’s extraordinary story as well as a specially commissioned work for harpsichord by Ron Nagorcka – This Beauteous Wicked Place in which harpsichord sound is overlaid with Australian bush sounds including bird song – and there are the sounds of clapping sticks and didgeridoo as well.

Adding yet another dimension to this idea, Elizabeth Anderson together with an actor reading extracts of Grant’s letters and official documents of the time, have, in the context of the City of London Festival, presented the story and music in quasi-theatrical terms in a foyer of London’s Old Bailey where Grant had been sentenced many years before.It has also been performed in this way in Melbourne.

*In years of reviewing compact discs, many of the highest quality, I have never encountered so satisfying a product as this MOVE CD. For quality of content, fullness of liner notes with accompanying illustrations as well as a fascinating CD-ROM visual component. This is a product that ought to be recognised as the model it is; it deserves the very highest praise.

© Neville Cohn 2004

 


Aaron Copland Music for Piano

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Raymond Clarke (piano)
Passacaglia; Piano Variations; Piano Sonata; Piano Fantasy

The Divine Art 25016
TTP: 1:16:52

reviewed by Neville Cohn

 

 

 

The other evening, I conducted a snap mini-poll among some friends. What, I asked, were the two works that sprang first to mind on hearing the name Aaron Copland? All of the eight polled named Appalachian Spring as a first choice, and, as second, three chose Fanfare for the Common Man, two named Rodeo and the remaining three opted for El Salon Mexico. But when I asked how many of Copland’s works for solo piano they could name, none of the eight – each an enthusiastic and experienced follower of music – could come up with an answer.

Passacaglia, with its stark and sombre octaves in the left hand, conjures up images of implacable, giant-like strides across a landscape. Here, Clarke, at a superb Steinway piano, hurls massive chunks of sound through the speakers; it’s presented with immense authority, taking all Copland’s contrapuntal ingenuity in his stride.

Copland’s Piano Variations is music that ranges from the tender and lyrical to measures that bristle with brusqueness, music that startles with, for want of better words, its sneering, in-your-face quality. Other variations irresistibly call up images of torment, of a barely contained hysteria. And there are, too, moments which would be an entirely appropriate soundtrack for a movie scene depicting vindictiveness and spite.

Somewhere, Copland has written that for his Variations to succeed in performance, the whole should seem to be greater than the sum of its constituent parts. On the evidence of this recording, Raymond Clarke succeeds in this – and succeeds well. Certainly, this is a performance to which I’ve returned again and again, with each hearing providing fresh insights into a work that ought to be far more frequently heard.

Copland’s Fantasy runs for just over half an hour. Much of it is couched in improvisatory-like terms, music that takes the listener across constantly changing, sometimes startling musical territory. In less authoritative hands, this could well sound meandering, formless and tedious.

Clarke, happily, has a rare gift, an ability to give point and meaning to even the most abstruse and esoteric of writing, and succeeds in conveying a sense of logic, no mean feat in so complex a work. The score is dotted with directions to the pianist: “hurried and tense”, “gradual return to poetic, drifting”, to which Clarke responds with an answering depth of expressiveness. It’s a major achievement.

Clarke, in fact, turns the work into musical gold with magnificent washes of sound, moments of heart-easing tenderness with, elsewhere, tone that has an altogether pleasing needle-sharp, diamond-bright quality. I especially admired Clarke’s exponential skill some twenty minutes into the work where we hear what sounds for all the world like some frenzied carillon and muscularly emphasized note clusters.

This ability to bring cogency and clarity to what in other hands could sound impenetrable, is impressive. This is musical problem-solving at a high level.

Neil Butterworth once described Copland’s Piano Sonata as ‘abstract music of ascetic introversion’. And who, hearing the work, would gainsay him? Although not without its strident moments and lively, syncopated rhythms, it is the musing quietness of much of the writing that lingers longest in the memory. The central vivace is a delight with its puckish, nimble outbursts that are the quintessence of impudence.

Hopefully, Clarke’s accounts of Copland’s works will
gain them the audience they deserve. Certainly, they’ve languished too long in the shadows of Copland’s more frequently heard works.

© 2004 Neville Cohn


Souvenirs

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Diane Doherty (oboe)
Sinfonia Australis
Mark Summerbell (conductor)

ABC Classics 980 046-3
TPT: 1:11:44

reviewed by Neville Cohn

 

 

This collection of miniatures for the oboe provides almost untrammelled listening pleasure. A joy from start to finish, this is a recital that many a lesser oboist would give eye-teeth to emulate. Because Doherty is blessed with extraordinary control of an instrument that is notoriously temperamental, she is freed from the physical constraints lesser musicians might labour under so that she can give full attention to interpretative aspects of the performance.souvenir

The pieces here recorded are beautifully presented, rather like a chaplet of gems, each stone finely facetted and mounted. Listen to Piazzolla’s Oblivion coming across, nostalgia-laced, in a way that haunts the mind. Another delight is the Andante from J.C.Bach’s Sinfonia Concertante in E flat. As it unfolds – and this would apply to just about the entire compilation – it generates such a ‘come-hither’ quality that it leaves one with the impression that, had Doherty walked down some highway while demonstrating her wizardry on the oboe, it would surely have attracted anyone hearing it to follow her, Pied Piper-fashion.

Ross Edwards’ Love Duet from his Oboe Concerto is another delight, with Doherty adapting chameleon-like to music that oscillates between the sensuous and the achingly poignant. There are beautifully synchronised cor anglais figurations
from Alexandre Oguey, who is clearly a musician to be reckoned with. He is also Diane Doherty’s husband! In performance, a line note explains that instead of the soloist standing in front of the orchestra, as is customarily the case, Doherty here moves to a position alongside her husband which gives a charming romantic dimension to the duet. He teams up with Doherty again in another Oz-generated jewel: Ross Edwards’ Love Duet from his Oboe Concerto. This exquisite, instantly accessible miniature makes for compelling listening with its washes of harp tone and quasi mid-eastern harmonies that call the sound tracks of some of Cecil B. de Mille’s biblical movie epics to mind, all complementing Doherty’s sinuous and sensuous oboe line.

And in Carl Vine’s Love Me Sweet, Doherty’s playing is an object lesson in what lyrical oboe playing is all about. Another delight is the ubiquitous Maria from Bernstein’s West Side Story, not least for an impeccable, light-textured accompaniment against which Doherty traces a faultless oboe line.A Bach adagio in C minor is less convincing, its pace too brisk for so gentle an utterance.

© 2004 Neville Cohn

 

 

 


The Singles

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Shura Cherkassky, Fritz Lehmann, Rita Streich, Andres Segovia, Koeckert Quartet, Irmgard Seefried, David & Igor Oistrakh, Eugen Jochum, Ferenc Fricsay, Vegh Quartet, Nicanor Zabaleta, Leopold Simoneau, Helmut Zacharias, Andor Foldes, Kim Borg

 

DG 474 576-2
TPT: 2:36:45

reviewed by Neville Cohn

 

 

For any record collector over sixty years of age, the 1950s are sure to be remembered as the decade which saw, for the first time, 45 rpm discs which were know as EPs – extended play records. The 7-inch discs seldom ran for more than ten or twelve minutes but for those on limited budgets, in particular, it was a cheaper way to get a record collection started than by purchasing the significantly more expensive LPs.

In this milieu, Deutsche Grammophon was the big player, turning out quality recordings by some of the most prominent musicians of the day. Most of these little records, if they exist at all nowadays, are gathering dust in some lounge room corner or in cardboard boxes in backyard store rooms.

Resurrecting some of the best and placing them on CD will rekindle memories of the fifties for many and are certain to attract younger listeners who weren’t even born when 45rpms took the music world by storm.

Much of the material here recorded is of the encore variety, musical bon bons that this or that musician or ensemble might have offered at the end of a concert in response to prolonged applause.

Listen to Shura Cherkassky, then (1955) at the height of his powers, in Morton Gould’s Boogie Woogie Etude, given high-octane boogie treatment – or the Koeckert Quartet offering Hugo Wolf’s Italian Serenade. The latter is one of DG’s less well-recorded offerings. The playing is beyond criticism in the conventional sense but the microphones sound far too close and the sound is unhappily dry and grainy. But there are compensations aplenty, not least from Finnish bass Kim Borg who is in magnificent in two settings – one by Beethoven, the other by Mussorgsky – of Goethe’s famous Song of the Flea. For once, the usually impeccable DG sound engineers got it wrong in that Erik Werba’s piano accompaniment is far too faint in the Mussorgsky setting, barely audible at times. But the sound balance in Beethoven’s setting is perfect.

Celebrated Spanish harpist Nicanor Zabaleta is frankly wonderful in Salzedo’s Chanson dans la nuit, not least for finest filigree ripples of sound. Father and son team David and Igor Oistrakh provide rather meatier fare in a trio sonata in F by Tartini. Also more musically substantial is the Vegh Quartet’s account of what had originally been thought a work of Haydn – Quartet in F “Serenade” – but is now believed to be by Roman Hoffstetter. Whoever wrote it is a secondary consideration; the music is a delight and the playing borders on the sublime. It’s a high point of the compilation; so, too, is the artistry of Andor Foldes, the now-almost-forgotten Hungarian pianist who does wonders with Stravinsky’s galumphing Circus Polka (written as accompaniment to dancing by an elephant troupe from the Barnum and Bailey Circus). And his account of Albeniz’s Tango in D makes this most hackneyed of piano pieces sound newly minted.

The liner note booklet includes colour reproductions of the original sleeve covers.

This is a fascinating compilation which, hopefully, will be followed by more in similar vein.

Copyright Neville Cohn 2004

 

 

 

 

 

 


Where are you, my Brothers? (Songs of the War Years)

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Dmitri Hvorostovsky (baritone)
Moscow Chamber Orchestra
Spiritual Revival Choir of Russia
Constantine Orbelian (conductor)

 

DELOS DE 3315
TPT: 57:29

 

reviewed by Neville Cohn

 

 

 

Patriotic songs, as a genre, don’t have an in-built guarantee of musical quality. That applies across the board. One has only to think of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, arguably the composer’s most embarrassing effort with its formulaic flourishes and tub-thumping cliches, or Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory once described by Hendrik Willem van Loon as “the worst trash ever signed by a supreme genius”.

While the passion attached to patriotic songs is, more often than not, quite genuine, this, in itself, is no guarantee of musical worth. There are innumerable songs of this sort that are embarrassingly bad – and the many marching songs sung by German troops during World War II come with brutally horrific associations that place them on the outermost rim of the outer anyway. The Horst Wessel Lied, for instance, sung to a melody of a music hall song popular with German troops in World War I, is forever tainted by its subsequent adoption by the Nazis.

On the other hand, many of the songs that sprang up around Russia during what the then-Soviet Union termed the Great Patriotic War are strikingly different to many German war-time songs. Many of the Russian genre are the antithesis of the swashbuckling, macho, bully-boy variety of song favoured by the SS. In fact, most are informed by a tenderness and yearning that stem from a profound sadness, even grief, at the violation of mother country.

I especially admired track 4 from which the collection derives its title; its closing measure are the quintessence of tenderness. And track 5 – On a Nameless Hill – is a recollection of cameraderie when under attack from Messerschmitt planes.

Choir and orchestra, under Constantine Orbelian, consistently come up trumps in support of their dazzling vocal soloist.

What makes this compilation particularly attractive is the extraordinary voice of Dmitri Hvorostovsky. It is the sort of vocal instrument critics dream about but seldom if ever encounter in reality. The quality of sound is so ravishingly beautiful that it would make compelling listening even if used to give a recital of the prevailing stock exchange prices or Rossini’s famous ‘laundry list’.

Hvorostovsky’s voice is one that places the critic in the agreeable predicament of having to grope for adjectives to describe its wondrous qualities; the sound equivalent of molten chocolate or the feel and appearance of plush velvet are similes that come to mind. And when employed in songs that have a built-in melancholy and poignancy, the effect is almost overwhelming. I cannot imagine anyone failing to be moved by these exquisitely wrought performances. If you’re familiar with Hvorostovsky’s artistry, no further recommendation is necessary. And if you are coming to this astonishing voice for the first time, you’re in for a unique treat.

Copyright 2004 Neville Cohn