Turbulent Heart – music of Vierne and Chausson

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Steve Davislim (tenor)

The Queensland Orchestra

Guillaume Tourniaire (conductor)

Melba-TURBULENT-800X800

TPT: 76’32”

Melba MR 301123

reviewed by Neville Cohn

Vierne: Les Djinns; Eros; Ballade de desespere; Psyche

Chausson: Poeme de l’amour et de la mer

More often than not, compact discs bearing the Melba label remind me of books published by the Folio Society. The latter, as is well known to innumerable booklovers around the world, sets immense store by the quality of its publications.

As its many members know, Folio books are a joy to look at and a tactile delight. Much time and thought are devoted to choice of type font. Illustrations are often specially commissioned, bindings are invariably first rate. As well, each book comes in a finely made slipcase. In decades of membership, I have never encountered a volume that disappointed.

All this invariably comes to mind when listening to compact discs issued by Melba. As with Folio, every aspect of a Melba label compact disc production receives the most careful attention.

Liner notes, often lengthy and detailed, are invariably of high standard as are illustrations in the liner note booklets which are finely bound. There is, as well, a transparent slipcase.

But, as some might ask, what is the point of all this fine packaging if the recorded contents are less than completely satisfying. Happily, Melba label CDs are everything one could have hoped for. And Turbulent Heart meets the highest expectations. The performances are stylistically impeccable, every note clothed in tone of the most appealing kind. This recording is just about the last word in excellence. I have returned to it again and again.

I would be surprised if this CD fails to win over an enthusiastic constituency. It is a marvellous presentation of music seldom heard. Stylistically impeccable, its presentation is a triumph. I recommend it unreservedly.

The Seamstress (Geraldine Wooller)

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UWA Press

The Seamstress2

227 pages: SC: rrp $24-95

reviewed by Neville Cohn

Photo GW smiling

Geraldine Wooller. Photo is by James Booth.

Miniscule victories, quiet heroism, seismic reverses, a fling at happiness, stoicism in the face of catastrophe, wretchedly few wins in life’s lottery with more than a fair share of disappointment, discouragement and tragedy.  This, in essence, is The Seamstress.

It is Geraldine Wooller’s great gift to articulate, with compassion but without sentimentality, the lives of a family which she observes with an unblinking gaze. Utterly free of sentimentality, The Seamstress is a remarkable achievement which kept  this reader glued to the turning pages. I read it in a single day and into the night.

Wooller’s language is the essence of realism; it has the indelible tinge of truth. But it

is not the sort of novel for those who like the narrative to unfold in a strictly chronological way. This is quite different. The book is made up of a series of vignettes, often painfully and disconcertingly detailed. It’s rather like a chaplet of carefully polished literary gems, each set near-perfectly.

Newspaper reports often carry the words ‘ordinary people’ and, if the characters in this novel were flesh and blood, they, too, would probably be thought of in this way. But I’m not sure if there are any such beings. Have you met an ordinary man or woman? I certainly haven’t – and they definitely don’t inhabit this book.

In The Seamstress, we find vignettes, episodes that reveal with startling, even unnerving, clarity those moments that might for years following – generations, perhaps – scar a family history. Here, they come thick and fast.

I will not reveal any of these moments in this review. It is the author’s privilege to announce these disquieting upheavals which she does with unflinching honesty of purpose. What family is without moments such as these?

Running through the story like a fine thread is a near-faultless recounting of the dismantling of a much loved mother’s mind – and the very real sense of loss, bereavement even – which occurs before there is a physical death. It is like mourning for a mind that has, to all intents and purposes, died – and it is Wooller’s great gift to articulate the grief in coming to grips with a calamity the incidence of which is multiplying with frightening rapidity as medicine finds ever new ways to keep the body alive but lags far behind in preserving the disintegrating brain and a sense of dignity.

Jo observes her mother Willa’s descent into unreality with a restraint that is masterly. In a sense, all the other inter-family upheavals are a side show to the devastating main game. In its lucidity and poignancy, Woollard’s tale calls to mind William Styron’s Darkness Visible in which he describes his real-life battle with depression.

If you read no other book this year, let it be this. It is too satisfying to overlook.

Dame Nellie Melba

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The First Recordings

TPT: 56’16”

476 3556 Melba

ABC Classics 476 3556

reviewed by Neville Cohn

Nellie Melba, for much of her career, was arguably the most famous Australian in the world. The aura of glamour about her sustained public interest to an astonishing degree for years.

A recently released CD features recordings Melba made at the height of her career, a marvellous insight into one of the greatest voices ever to be captured on gramophone records. Almost all the tracks here were made in 1904 at Melba’s luxurious and extravagantly furnished home in London’s Great Cumberland Place, near Marble Arch.

Let’s look at some of the economics of those sessions, drawn from Roger Neill’s fascinating liner notes.

For this series of recordings done over a number of days, Melba was paid one thousand British pounds, a staggering fee that equates now to around 80,000 pounds. Moreover, her contract required that her gramophone recordings would be sold at one guinea each ie 21 shillings or one pound, one shilling, this equating nowadays to about 80 pounds. I cannot readily think of anyone nowadays who would be prepared to pay such a sum for a recording running for perhaps four or so minutes.

It was, and still is, a staggering indication of how much in demand Melba was in singing terms. As well, her contract stipulated that for each record sold, she was to receive a royalty of five shillings which, too, added up to a more than tidy sum. The public was insatiable.

In Sydney, not long after these recordings were made, a concert which consisted of people listening to Melba’s voice on a gramophone positioned on a small table was sold out fourteen times running! And for those interested in such matters, King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra purchased a gramophone and many of the recordings on this CD, some of which they played for their guest at Buckingham palace:Archduke Franz Ferdinand  who would be assassinated by Gavrilo Princip, thus tipping the world into the Great War 1914 – 1918.

How we have come on since 1904. In those days, records were sold in ordinary brown paper packets, sometimes with advertising on them, unlike nowadays when there is almost information overkill in the liner note booklets that come with each CD.

But the real joy of this collection is, of course, the singing which gives one an opportunity to savour one of the world’s truly magical voices. Melba may have been unpleasant as a human being, an unabashed social climber and rough with those she considered her inferiors – but she had a voice the recordings of which will thrill listeners far into the future.

The Piano at the Carnival

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Anthony Goldstone (piano)

Piano at the Carnival

TPT: 76’31”

Divine Art dda25075

reviewed by Neville Cohn

Anthony Goldstone is one of the most resourceful pianists currently before the public. He has done wonders over years resurrecting music which, for one reason or another, has fallen into disuse. Indeed, the only tracks here that could be thought of as main stream repertoire are those devoted to Schumann’s Carnival which, of course, is available in umpteen other versions on CD.

It’s the rarities that are the main fascination of this recording.

Sydney Smith’s Fantaisie brillante on Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera, for instance, is claimed as a first ever on record apart from a piano roll made circa 1919. Some might tut tut at its often superficial writing which it would not be inaccurate to describe as frankly cheap salon material – but its sometimes schmaltzy measures are offered with such gusto and brilliance that its inherent shallowness is forgotten for the duration of the performance. And in a first ever recording of Paul Klengel’s arrangement of Dvorak’s Carnival Overture, Goldstone seems positively to relish coming to grips with its many keyboard challenges. He emerges unscathed from this traversing of a treacherous musical landscape with ebullient, admirably buoyant, playing that marshals avalanches of notes with immense flair.

I liked particularly the skill that Goldstone brings to Chopin’s Souvenir de Paganini (The Carnival of Venice), its much loved theme presented in gorgeous filigree terms with fine tonal light and shade, the composer’s idiosyncratic harmonies contributing to most satisfying listening. But an account of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No 9 (The Carnival of Pesth) tends to ramble in a reading where the soloist might to advantage have surrendered more fully to the Muse.

Khatchaturian’s Masquerade Suite is known to millions in its original incarnation for orchestra. Here, Goldstone gives us the premiere recording of Alexander Dolukhanian’s version of the suite for solo piano. Each of the five movements is finely considered with the concluding Galop a particular delight: the playing is informed by immense brio before a brief moment of reflection, then an all-stops-out conclusion at top speed at high decibel levels.

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More Bizarre or baRock

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Elizabeth Anderson (harpsichord) and friends

MOVE CD 3326

reviewed by Neville Cohn

3326

For those who think of the harpsichord exclusively in terms of its repertoire dating back to the pre-piano era, Elizabeth Anderson’s latest compact disc may well prove startling. Certainly, it is one of the most delightfully entertaining recitals on the instrument I’ve heard in a long time.

Some years ago, film fans watching Margaret Rutherford, the first – and most redoubtable  –  incarnations of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, would have heard its quirky theme music played on a harpsichord which, at that time, was a most unexpected departure from the norm. It brought home the idiosyncratic timbre of the instrument to millions who might never have heard, or even thought about, the harpsichord.

Much of this collection is in this delightfully zany tradition.

Elizabeth Anderson has done much to familiarise listeners with the instrument in unexpected styles, such as Franzpeter Goebels’ Chocolate Boogie, its anarchic measures a clear indication of what is to follow. Anderson seems positively to relish coming to grips with Andrew Koll’s Fuguedelic, after which there is a brief return to what might call stylistic normality with a fine reading of the first of Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues. Then it’s back to the bizarre with Templeton’s Bach Goes to Town.

Bach’s arrangement for harpsichord of Vivaldi’s Concerto in D receives first rate treatment by Anderson in a performance which underscores the music’s many dramatic moments. Earl Scruggs’ Foggy Mountain Breakdown calls up images of a boozy hillbilly celebration.

Those who delight in Chopin’s magisterial Polonaises may well find Couperin’s and Telemann’s versions of the dance rather less athletic and intense than those of the Polish master.

Jill Lowe’s baRock is a fine vehicle for Anderson’s virtuosity, especially rapid repeated notes which are played with huge flair. Certainly, the inherent grandeur of the piece comes across splendidly.

One of the most celebrated of all harpsichordists – George Malcolm – wrote a cheeky, insouciant version of the hornpipe and Anderson gives bracing point and meaning to it. Martin Peerson’s Fall of the Leafe, however, can’t hold a candle to Giles Farnaby’s exquisite miniature of the same name.  Purcell’s Round O will be instantly recognised by many as the theme Benjamin Britten used for his Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra tossed off with enviable ease. Ligeti’s Continuum is a little miracle of flawless fingerwork.

Throughout, Anderson’s artistry is complemented by co-musicians Rosie Westbrook, Tony Floyd, Ariel Valent and Ron Nagorka.