Monthly Archives: August 2019

CDs/DVDs August 2019

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Bach: Toccatas BWV 911-916
Mahan Esfahani, harpsichord
HYPERION CDA 68244

There is a real buzz of excitement in this recording which I have certainly felt hearing Mahan Esfahani live but which does not always transfer to disc. Here it certainly does and the tight, dancing rhythms are never allowed to drop. These are not toccatas in the strictest sense of the term but more short suites, or expanded single pieces, often closer to a fantasy that the organ toccatas we are more familiar with. All the more engaging then because of their unfamiliarity and very much worth seeking out.

 

Risonanze: music for viola da gamba
Ibrahim Aziz, viola da gamba
FHR 83

The combination of classical pieces by Bach, Abel and Schenck alongside more recent works by Rebecca Rowe and Carlos Martinez Gil add considerable frisson to the recording and the warmth of Ibrahim Aziz’ playing is never in doubt.

 

Dowland
Michael Butten, classical guitar
FHR 84

Twenty short works by Dowland – each a gem and worthy of careful attention in its own right. The classical guitar brings a different tonal quality compared to the more familiar lute for these pieces and therefore brings a more nuanced perspective and demands a careful listener, which hopefully they will get.

 

A Life in Music: Vintage Tommy Reilly
Tommy Reilly, harmonica
CHANDOS CHAN 20143

This is a delight and brings back many happy memories of post-war radio programmes. However, alongside familiar popular tunes there are some unexpected classical items which demonstrate not only Tommy Reilly’s virtuosity but also the enormous range of his talent. To be able to encompass Jealousy and a Scarlatti sonata is no mean feat.

 

Puccini: Madama Butterfly
Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Omer Meir Wellber
OPUS ARTE OA 1167 D

Before you think oh dear, another Butterfly let me just say this is breath-taking on almost every level. Annilese Miskimmon’s production moves the period to the second world-war with the reality of American sailors returning to the USA with Japanese brides. The use of film clips set this scene clearly and uncomfortably from the start. Added to this the opening act is in Goro’s offices where he is almost literally selling brides to sailors. Joshua Guerrero’s handsome if naïve Pinkerton seems to want to take things more seriously and is happy to go through with the wedding ceremony even if he has no long term intention of keeping his vows. There seems to be enough money to keep Olga Busuioc’s Cio-Cio-San until her son is clearly about 4, and Yamadori is a more that acceptable second husband should she accept the offer. But she doesn’t. The inevitable climax comes and her death is as upsetting as it is unnecessary.

Throughout the score is driven by Omer Meir Wellber with a fierce intensity and lack of sentimentality which is always engaging. The singing is splendid and I particularly liked Michael Sumuel’s world-weary Sharpless.

Very well worth investing in, even if you have more than one Butterfly already.

 

Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique
Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Andrew Davis
CHANDOS CHSA 5239

What makes this worth investigating, in addition to a fine rendition of the familiar Symphonie fantastique, is the addition of the Fantaisie sur la Tempete de Shakespeare, written at about the same time as the symphony and subsequently incorporated into Lalio. It makes for an interesting and instructive combination with obvious links between the two emotionally as well as musically.

 

Schubert: Die Schone Mullerin
Roderick Williams, baritone; Iain Burnside, piano
CHANDOS CHAN 20113

Roderick Williams goes from strength to strength and one wonders if there is anything today that he can’t do. The sensitivity he brings to the text and the sheer joy in his musicality shines throughout. He is superbly supported by Iain Burnsides mellifluous piano accompaniment. An absolute delight!

 

Stanford: overture in the style of a tragedy; Verdun; A Welcome March; Fairy Day; A Song of Agincourt
Ulster orchestra, Howard Shelley
HYPERION CDA 68283

A surprisingly eclectic collection ranging from the charm of Fairy Day – which is as unsentimental as Mendelssohn’s Dream while maintaining a real lightness of touch – the more overtly bombastic A Welcome March for Edward VII’s visit to Ireland. Alongside this sit the Verdun Solemn March and Heroic Epilogue and A Song of Agincourt – a fantasy reworking the familiar medieval song with a romantic take on heroism in its opulent orchestration.

 

Brahms: Symphony No 4
Haydn: Symphony No101
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Otto Klemperer
BR KLASSIK 900717

These recordings from 1956/7 come from a period before I first heard Otto Klemperer live in London and they certainly bring back the wonderful attention to detail as well as the often ponderous approach to tempi. These are not as slow as I had feared they might be but there is still a weight to the Brahms and a slightly pretentious attention to phrasing which is now very much out of fashion. As such it is a useful reminder of how much fashion does actually control our thinking about the way a work should be performed and that, in another fifty years, what now sounds vivid may simply sound superficial.

 

Beethoven: The Creatures of Prometheus – version for piano
Warren Lee, piano
NAXOS 8.573974

Beethoven issued the piano arrangement himself before the orchestral scores so that this is not a reduction from the full score so much as the composer’s own approach to the work in the process of composition. It works extremely well and Warren Lee’s playing is engaging and alive throughout.

 

Wagner: Siegfried Act 3
Lise Lindstrom, Stefan Vinke
Deutsche Radio Philharmonie, Pietari Inkinen
SWR MUSIC SWR 19078CD

This has been released as an abridged version of Act 3 and, for some of us at least, it leaves out much of the best music! In essence this is the final duet from the awakening of Brunnhilde, but includes the Vorspiel to the act and the transition fire music. The orchestral playing is excellent under Pietari Inkinen. Some may find the vibrato in Stefan Vinke’s voice difficult to take but he has no problem or sense of strain with the higher lying passages. Unfortunately Lise Lindstrom suffers from the same problem in terms of a marked vibrato in the voice which I found uncomfortable throughout. A pity – but when there are so many other versions to choose from I am not quite sure what this has to offer.

The John Sheppard Ensemble

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Christ Church, St Leonards-on-sea 6th August 2019

The John Sheppard Ensemble gave a most impressive evening of a capella singing which deserved a larger audience.  Unfortunately, because the St Leonards’ venue was a fill in before their performance in Guildford, the event wasn’t advertised as widely as it should have been. However, those who did attend had an enchanting and splendid evening. We heard choral singing at its best and most harmonious.

The 25 person German choir sang two pieces from German composers and two from English.  The German Brahm’s Funf Gesange and Rheinberger’s Cantus Missae had distinctive emotive flowing tones and movement.  After a brief interval, we heard four of Parry’s Songs of Farewell, delivered enchantingly with the right emphasis on his usual swell and ebb of sound.  Then, Vaughan-Williams Mass in G, which included parts for soloists. These were executed exceedingly well. Overall the choir’s harmony seemed effortless.

Two words came to mind during the whole performance. Firstly, Choreography; the voices danced, flowing and weaving together, each voice complementing the whole with no one being too loud, faltering or out of step.    Secondly, Control; the conductor, Bernhard Schmitt, though his musical direction and conducting appeared light, had a control with the choir which gave them a superiority to be envied and admired.

As an encore we were treated to an extra piece from Rheinberger where the choir surrounded the audience. It was beautiful and enchanting.  Thank you and well done indeed!

Whatever happens after Brexit, please, please, come again. Sorry, that’s an in joke.

Reverend Bernard Crosby

A Fool’s Paradise & The Happy Princess

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Garsington Opera at Wormsley

The Happy Princess by Paul Fincham and Jessica Duchen, loosely based on an Oscar Wilde story, is a mini-masterpiece. In the directorial hands of the very talented Karen Gillingham and the Garsington Opera Youth Company it is a fine hour of opera by any standards, anywhere. I hope very much that this piece is soon published and licensed so that other youth groups elsewhere can have access to it.

Of course the smallest children (from nearby Ibstone CE School)  were show stealers as the city birds, flapping their wings and singing with terrific concentration and clarity, skilfully supported by conductor Jonathon Swinard,  but there is much more to this show than cuteness.

The thrust of the story is that pair of swallows (Owain Boyd-Leslie and Maia Greaves, both very young and very tuneful) undertake three errands for the statue princess (Lara Marie Muller – lots of gravitas and a fine voice). That takes us to some big ensemble scenes: sweatshop workers, a school and a group of refugees. Duchen is a fine story teller.

The singing is, from the very first note, incisive, dynamically well controlled and set against accomplished movement. And it all looks very natural – rather than rehearsed and that makes it all feel very professional and interestingly edgy.

Five stars too, if I were awarding them, for Fincham’s score which uses an eight-piece orchestra. It is highly atmospheric, nicely paced and varied, providing lots of opportunities for small solos along with some string choral numbers including harmony. I loved, for instance, the mysterious minor for the repeated trio between the Princess and the swallows with a rising scale motif – simple but very effective. It’s all unashamedly melodious too.

I suppose Offenbach is melodious too but, sadly, A Fool’s Paradise is definitely not his best work. Garsington Opera Adult Company (directed by Gillingham) had clearly gained a great deal from working on it but this 25 minute staged medley with narrated links never achieves lift off although the professional baritone, Robert Gildon, does his best to cut through the pedestrian woodenness.

It is a mistake to separate the adult and youth companies. In the recent past Garsington has commissioned works (Road Rage 2013 and Silver Birch, 2017 for example) in which the adults and young people work together as a single community and that works much better. It means that everyone can learn from and complement everyone else so that standards spiral upwards.

Susan Elkin

Cilea: L’arlesiana

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Opera Holland Park, July 2019

Education is a progressive realisation of our own ignorance, as Einstein said. The same applies to classical music and especially opera. The more you hear and see the more you discover. Francesco Cilea’s L’arlesiana (1897) was completely new to me but this production won’t be the end of my relationship with it because it is a fine piece.

Federico, (Samuel Sakker) who lives with his mother and younger brother on a Provencal farm, is besotted with an “unsuitable” woman he has met in the nearby city of Arles. It would be more sensible for him to marry and settle down with the very suitable Vivetta (Fflur Wyn) a local girl but of course this is opera and things don’t ultimately go right for any of them. L’arlesiana herself dominates the plot but never appears except, in this production, in a dream sequence.

One of the best things about this work is the quality of the dramatic orchestration: brooding basses to connote anger, oboe melody for calm sublimity, pianissimo upper strings for sadness and despair, for example.  And there’s a magnificent Verdi-esque ending to Act One to accompany Sakker’s high level anguish number as he sees the letters which confirm L’arlesiana’s infidelity. The music is in good hands with City of London Sinfonia under Dane Lam.

Sakker is outstanding in the central role, his rich tenor voice laying bare every emotion. Yvonne Howard finds lots of mezzo warmth and despair in Rosa, Federico’s anxious mother. Keel Watson, who has a very attractive gravelly bass voice, stomps about convincingly as family friend Baldassare and, once she gets going there’s delightful, soaring soprano work from Wyn as the hapless Vivetta.

One of Opera Holland Park’s (many) great strengths is its fine chorus work. It’s a huge, awkwardly shaped playing area but the  massed voices of a large ensemble combine excellent crowd acting with a lovely vocal sound and the off-stage interjections are eerily atmospheric.

Susan Elkin