VIVALDI The Four Seasons

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Concerto for 2 violins RV522
Concerto for 2 violins RV511
Nigel Kennedy (violin)
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

EMI 7243 5 57647 20
TPT: 1:01:45

   reviewed by Neville Cohn 

Yet another recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons? Is not the catalogue overburdened with versions of this well-worn work? Is there a good reason for yet another recording coming on to the market? These are some of the questions that even the most die-hard Vivaldi enthusiasts might be asking themselves. Is there anything about this umpteenth version that makes the effort and cost to produce it worthwhile?

Yes! Very much so.

Why? One has only to listen to the opening measures of the work to realise that there IS a special factor at play (no pun intended) here. This account put me in mind of a recital by Ivo Pogorelich that I attended a good many years ago. It was a program of standard keyboard master works – a French Suite by Bach, a sonata by Beethoven and a bracket of Chopin pieces.

Just before that recital began, I asked myself the same questions I’ve just posed about Kennedy’s recording. Was this going to be yet another routinely professional, polished effort – or would it be something to write home about. It was – and for much the same reason that makes Nigel Kennedy’s Four Seasons so compellingly listenable.

After Pogorelich’s recital, I resorted to a botanical analogy, as I do here. Consider a flower, say, a rosebud. It is instantly recognisable as such. .Now, imagine an intensely bright shaft of light shining upwards from the base of the bud. Instantly, we will see the contours of unopened petals within the bud and the traceries of its venous system as well as the stamen at its heart, ALL invisible to the naked eye until the light was projected through the bud.

Now, the bud has not in any way altered. It is still the same bud. But, because of the very bright shaft of light projected through it, our understanding – and appreciation – of the bud has broadened and deepened.

As with Pogorelich, so with Kennedy. Without resorting to gimmickry or playing to the gallery, the performance, like the light through the bud, gives us a more intimate understanding of the music, it draws us into the heart of the music, giving us a greater appreciation of its worth. And that is far harder to do than one might imagine. It calls for absolute control of the instrument, a profound understanding of style – and an ability to reveal (as does the shaft of light) – the inner essence of the music. Kennedy achieves this to superb effect. It is this that elevates his reading of the Four Seasons to a very high category of excellence. In this recording, as if drawing inspiration from their soloist and director, the strings of the BPO play with a vitality and style that do them – and their great soloist – proud. In the two concertos for two violins, Kennedy is joined by an on-form Daniel Stabrawa.

The sound engineers have done a superb job with wraparound corporate tone that makes one feel as if we are listening from a seat within the orchestra. It gives a marvellous immediacy to the presentation. In the finale of the concerto RV522, the rich, grainy tone, rhythmic bite and concentrated energy that inform even the meanest phrase, makes for electrifying listening. Highly recommended.

© November 2003


Symphony No 2 (Resurrection) (Gustav Mahler)

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Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra/ Vienna Singverein
Latonia Moore (soprano)
Nadja Michael (mezzo soprano)
Gilbert Kaplan (conductor)

DG 474 380-2
TPT: 1:25:48

 

 reviewed by Neville Cohn

Gilbert Kaplan is most definitely not your run-of-the-mill orchestral conductor. It would be an understatement to say that his repertoire is restricted. In fact, it is so compact that it puts Kaplan in a unique category, a functioning orchestral conductor with little more than just one musical arrow in his quiver. True. it’s a huge arrow, nothing less than Mahler’s massive Symphony No 2, known as The Resurrection.

For the record, it should be noted that some years ago, Kaplan made a one-off recording of another work, also by Mahler – the Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony for the Pickwick label. And on one other occasion, as the curtain-raiser to yet another performance of Mahler’s Second, Kaplan was required to conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic in The Star Spangled Banner (the national anthem of the USA). These two diversions aside, it is Mahler’s Second that has been, and continues to be, Kaplan’s unremitting preoccupation.

What are Kaplan’s credentials? At which conservatoriums of music did he study to prepare for this challenge? And with which masters? And how many years were devoted to bringing Kaplan to his unique level of symphonic understanding?

The answers – which came in a late-night telephone conversation with Gilbert Kaplan speaking from his New York home – are astounding.

Like many American children, little Gilbert had piano lessons between the ages of 7 and 10 years. And then nothing – nothing at all – for thirty years during which Kaplan pursued a publishing career that netted him a fortune before he embarked on the musical pilgrimage that has made him famous.

His achievement is staggering, the musical equivalent of, say, spending three years of childhood reading nursery rhymes and then, 30 years later, walking on stage to give a world-class characterisation of Shakespeare’s King Lear or Richard III.

In 1965, when Kaplan was 25 years old and working as a stockbroker, he heard Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony for the first time; Leopold Stokowski conducted.

It was an epiphanic experience that was to alter the course of his life – but not for another 17 years.

In the interim, Kaplan went into publishing , and when he eventually sold his Institutional Investor magazine (which had a circulation of 140,000 in 140 countries and received 45 awards for distinguished journalism), it made Kaplan an immensely wealthy man. It gave him the freedom to focus on what has become his life’s work to which he brings an almost visionary intensity.

When, in 1982, Kaplan turned his attention to Mahler’s symphony, “I worked 4 to 5 hours a day, sometimes longer, seven days a week for seven months with a young conductor – Charles Bornstein”.

Kaplan says the beginning was very hard indeed for him – and after working through the first 14 pages of the score, he wondered whether he had taken on an insuperable challenge. He considered throwing in the towel – until he realised, as he explained over the phone, that every journey starts with a single step and that each page studied was a page nearer his goal.

Heartened by these reflections, Kaplan persevered . Then he hired the American Symphony Orchestra so that he could conduct Mahler’s Second at Carnegie Hall. The ASO agreed to this on condition that no critics were invited to the performance. But in the audience there was a reviewer who wrote the concert up for New York’s Village Voice – and the rest is unique music history.

Kaplan’s 1987 recording of the work with the London Symphony Orchestra sold 175,000 copies, the biggest numbers ever for a Mahler CD.

Kaplan conducts this vast opus from memory, using, as his musical Bible, Mahler’s original manuscript with its teeming alterations. This DG CD is the premiere recording of the new official score.

Whatever one may think of Kaplan’s modest repertoire list , he is impressively prepared in music terms to make a recording of Mahler’s Second, a daunting hurdle for anyone, even the most seasoned of orchestral directors. It’s hardly a pushover. In fact, its vast and treacherous musical landscape has been the graveyard of more than a few conducting reputations. And Kaplan? How does he fare?

After listening to his direction of the work not once but several times, I would have to say that he comes across as a master guide, taking us over Mahler’s vast music la ndscape, along the way pointing out every copse and cranny in so persuasive a way that territory that we had previously thought we were familiar with is, through the medium of Kaplan’s guidance, magically transformed so that we get a new, utterly engrossing appreciation of this colossal symphony.

There is an irrefutable logic to his direction of the work, a frankly thrilling response to its myriad subtleties of tempo, timbre and tone. And his ability to inform even the meanest succession of notes with deep meaning while not for a moment losing sight of the epic overall design of the whole gives to it a sense of completeness that makes this recording the standard by which all other recorded performances of the work must now be measured.

That this has been brought about by a musician with almost negligible initial training makes it a near-miraculous achievement.

The Vienna Philharmonic is, of course, more than a world-beating orchestra. It is famous for its uneasy relationship with Mahler and the resentment it exhibited towards the man they had themselves elected as their conductor. Here, the VPO is, to say the least, on its very best behaviour, as are vocal soloists Latonia Moore and Nadja Michael and the Wiener Singverein.

It would have been a formidable prospect for any conductor, even the most experienced and professional, to direct the Resurrection Symphony in the august, history-steeped environment of the Vienna Musiekverein. But after listening to Kaplan’s recording made in this symphonic holy of holies and Mahler’s erstwhile stamping ground, it has to be said that he is more than up to its daunting chal lenges.

Kaplan has already directed the Second with more than 50 orchestras around the world including Melbourne in 1994 and in Beijing, China the following year, the first time it had ever been performed there.

In 2004, he will preside over three performances of the Second in Washington and, later in the year, going on to conduct the Moscow State Symphony Orchestra.

In passing: for all his phenomenal achievements, Gilbert Kaplan is a profoundly humble man. He considers himself an amateur in the original sense of loving the work he does and doing it purely for
the pleasure he derives from it. He declines fees for his conducting. And if he is paid, he donates the fee back to the orchestra. He will, though, accept travel and accommodation costs.

This recording of the Second, runs for 85 minutes. Each one of them is magical.

© November 2003


Daniel Muller-Schott (cello) Australian Chamber Orchestra

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Cello Concertos Nos 1 & 2 (Haydn);

Romances 1& 2 (Beethoven)

Orfeo C 080 031 A
TPT: 0:56:26

Reviewed by Neville Cohn

 

There’s more transcribed music for cello on an Orfeo CD featuring the youthful Daniel Muller-Schott in version for cello and orchestra of Beethoven’s two Romances, originally written for violin and orchestra.

In ensemble with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Muller-Schott elects to play the Romances at a significantly quicker pace than is usually encountered in performance on the violin – but there is in no sense, a suggestion of rush here; it is entirely persuasive, the progeny of a meaningful marriage of profound musical insight and blissfully pleasing tonal colourings.

In Haydn’s two concertos for cello, Muller-Schott scales Olympus. In the opening measures of the first concerto, the soloist draws his bow across the strings to generate hackle-raising waves of grainy tone; it is like a call to arms. And in the slow movement, soloist and orchestra set an unusually restrained pace but succeed in maintaining a flowing sense of onward momentum, one of music’s hardest calls to which soloist and ACO respond in the most musicianly way. And in the finale, the soloist powers to the closing bars like some sublime cellistic athlete.

The second concerto yields fine listening dividends, too, with the slow movement a sedately lulling intermezzo which gives way to a finale that alternates between a swaying motif and cheery, impish utterances.

So far as these performances are concerned, and not least the mostly impeccable accompaniments from the Australian Chamber Orchestra, this is a compilation to which, to paraphrase Messrs G.B.Shaw, Lerner and Loewe, I could have listened all night.

© November 2003


Peter Wispelwey (cello) Carlo Giacometti (piano)

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Sonata in A (Franck)
Adagio and Allegro, opus 70 (Schumann)
Sonata in D, opus 78 (Brahms)
Channel Classics CCS 18698
TPT: 1:02:07

Reviewed by Neville Cohn

Peter Wispelwey is one of the most adventurous of cellists. His recitals extend to just about all of the standard repertoire for the instrument – but he has made something of a specialty of playing transcriptions of music written for other media. His discography, for instance, includes a CD of Chopin waltzes for cello and piano – and, on another compact disc, transcriptions for cello and piano of Schubert’s three Sonatinas for violin and piano in a version for cello and piano.
One of his most recent CD releases is largely devoted to sonatas originally conceived for violin and piano but here presented in transcriptions for cello and piano. By any standards, this is a remarkable effort, not least for the contribution of Italian master pianist Paolo Giacometti.
For those for whom Cesar Franck’s Sonata for violin and piano means much (as it does to many), there might be, I dare say, some scepticism about its workability in a version for cello instead of the violin. Listen for yourselves. Franck’s wondrous creation loses little in transcription; it sounds as convincing in this version as the original. Certainly, Wispelwey and Giacometti play with such understanding of the genre, drawing always on a deep well of expressiveness, that one is drawn ineluctably into Franck’s idiosyncratic sound and mood world. It is not one whit less meaningful in its altered state.
From the opening moments during which the gently rocking cello line caresses the ear, Wispelwey and Giacometti give us some of the most sheerly beautiful playing you’re ever likely to encounter – and, in the grandest of passions, the duo sweeps through the Allegro. There’s more magic in the recitative cello line that introduces the third movement; it’s presented in the most expansive and leisurely way, the notes clothed in luxurious tone. And in the finale, the knotty problems of balance between cello and piano are resolved in a most satisfactory way so that each instrument is heard to best advantage, no mean feat of musicianship. And the turbulence that informs so much of the outer movements is conveyed as if to the manner born by Wispelwey and Giacometti.
Schumann’s Adagio and Allegro, opus 70, originally conceived for horn and piano, loses nothing at all in transcription which says as much for the universality of Schumann’s ideas as the skill of the two musicians. It is a splendid achievement with phrasing as natural as breathing – and the allegro section throbbing with ardour. Bravo!
There’s more splendour in Brahms’ Sonata, opus 78. In much of the first movement, Wispelwey and Giacometti caress the phrase lines of the music like leisurely lovers. Wispelwey’s cello tone is splendidly rich in the double stopping of the closing measure.


MOZART Coronation Concerto K537

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Concerto for two pianos K365* 

Rondos for piano and orchestra K382 & 386

Carl Seeman and Andor Foldes* (pianos)
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
Fritz Lehmann (conductor)DG MONO 474 611-2
TPT: 1:17:56

 reviewed by Neville Cohn

 

Some of the most enterprising and fascinating compilations on Australia-generated compact discs can be found on the MOVE label. The intriguingly titled ensemble, Woof!, offers what is claimed as the first ever complete recording of Percy Grainger’s Tuneful Percussion. Played on authentic instruments, which include the composer’s own bells and marimba, this compilation – 16 tracks on MD 3222 – includes a number of works never placed on record before.Stereo buffs, who avoid listening to anything that isn’t preserved by state-of-the-art recording equipment, will probably not deign to expose their ears to this 1953 recording – and mono at that. It’s their loss.Carl Seeman and Andor Foldes are not nearly as well known now as they were in their heyday. Foldes is particularly remembered for his trailblazing work in bringing the piano music of Bartok to a wide international audience in the 1950s – and Seeman was a pianist of distinction in the standard classical repertoire.In this all-Mozart compilation, the two feature as soloists in the Concerto for two pianos, K365; it’s music – and music making – of near-untrammelled delight. True, recorded sound borders on the tinny at times, and elsewhere the instruments remind one more of fortepianos than modern concert grands.

But the clarity and fluency of the playing make this a performance to cherish. Listen to the precision with which the two synchronise their trills and even the most rapid passagework. At the same time, there is nothing in the least mechanical or rigid about the playing. On the contrary, it has a winning freshness and vitality, a sense of spontaneity. And at its most chromatic, the performances border on the euphoric but invariably within the line and contour of the 18th century. Certainly, the inherent joyousness of much of the writing is splendidly evoked.

I very much admired, too, the quality of string playing in the introduction to the Coronation Concerto. With its rhythmic bite and graceful strength, it comes across as Mozartean playing par excellence. And Seeman’s performance is a joy to listen to, giving, as it does, point and meaning to what in lesser hands could so easily sound like vacuous note spinning.

Recorded sound tends to dryness but there are many compensations, not least the integrity of Seeman’s playing with its trademark clarity. There is no hint here of the sort of sentimentality favoured by some and which can so easily bring an unwanted cloying, honeyed quality to the music.

Fritz Lehmann takes the BPO through exemplary accompaniments to the concertos – and the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra in Seeman’s account of the Rondos, K 382 and K 386. These charming pieces seldom figure on concert programs but they are certainly worth listening to, especially, as here, when given such stylish treatment.

© November 2003