Reviewer's Log -
Robert Hugill - February 2006
Somewhere out there,
there’s an interesting programme to
be made on the subject of Mary Queen
of Scots. I’ve always known about the
Schumann songs but now comes this disc
of cantatas by Carissimi which includes
his Lament for Mary Queen of Scots.
-review.
Of course, Carissimi had a sort of religio-political
stance on the matter as his employers
were the Jesuits. I wonder what other
items there are out there, on the subject
of the unhappy Queen.
Piano recitals don’t
come my way very often and I must confess
that I have a preference for discs which
are thematically organised; I suppose
I was spoiled by being introduced to
Ronald Stevenson’s lucid lecture recitals
whilst I lived in Scotland in the 1980s.
So I need to concentrate especially
hard when listening to David Stanhope’s
new mixed recital of virtuoso piano
music. review
It’s occasions like this which send
me scurrying to the music library to
borrow discs for comparison; no matter
how large my CD library threatens to
grow, there are always gaps.
Just starting a recording
of Handel’s Arianna in Creta,
an opera of his I’d not come across
before; I might be able to name 30 or
so of his operas from memory, but I’ve
certainly not heard them all. Rather
interestingly this disc has a Greek
ancestry; it’s great the way performance
of this style of music has expanded
away from just a small group of specialist
performers. Though of course, issues
of style then come into play. The singers
on the disc all have a background in
what you might term regular opera, so
their approach to Handel is different
to some of the English specialist recordings,
the result can be vibrant but then the
stick-in-the mud part of me kicks into
play.
Every so often you
get a disc which makes you feel sorry
for the performers, where someone has
made decisions on the presentation of
the disc which are either at odds with
the real content or seriously undermine
the carefully wrought programme. You
wonder whether something of this has
happened to the new Clemens non Papa
disc. It has its origins in a fascinating
festival in Louvain celebrating the
16th century publisher Pierre
Phalese (Petrus Phalesius); Clemens
was one of Phalese’s big names. The
recital surveys an interesting cross
section of Phalese’s music but has been
produced with the name Clemens non
papa – priest and bon vivant. I
can’t decide whether this is clever
marketing or simply someone picking
up on one aspect of the disc and wilfully
misunderstanding the rest. But you just
know that a title referring to a 16th
century publisher from Louvain would
definitely not be seen as sexy. As it
is, people might be up for a disappointment
as much of the music, though of good
quality, is not by Clemens.
March 2006
Another new disc of
Handel’s Fire-Water Music. I
decided to listen to a few other comparative
versions and whilst browsing in the
library picked up Trevor Pinnock’s version
of the original, wind-ensemble Firework
Music. Not strictly relevant
to Kevin Mallon’s new disc - which uses
the traditional string version - but
thrilling nonetheless. I love the idea
of 24 oboe players all in one place;
there can’t have been an authentic oboe
player left in London. Such extravagances
of scoring always appeal to me, I once
sang in a BBC performance of Berlioz’s
Symphonie funèbre et triomphale
with a completely ridiculous number
of clarinet players on the stage, but
the result was thrilling. Isn’t it about
time that someone re-created one of
the Handel centenary (1785) performances
of Messiah; these used
huge forces but kept the relative balance
so there was a big choir, with a big
orchestra with lots of oboes and bassoons
– sounds terrific fun and with a period
practice performance the sound-world
should be very interesting. review
Siegfried Wagner’s
Sonnenflamen makes one
admire the energy of companies like
Halle Opera House who mount productions
of lesser-known operas by lesser-known
composers, and record companies like
CPO who endeavour to ensure that such
performances do not go unrecorded. It
seems to me that Siegfried Wagner’s
operas have been available on CD in
a way that is unimaginable for a lesser-known
British composer. I just wish that he’d
managed to get himself a decent librettist.
review
A happier example of
documentation by CD, on this side of
the channel, is the CD issued by Lammas
to mark the end Daniel Soper’s reign
in charge of the choir of Corpus Christi
College, Cambridge. It never ceases
to amaze me how choirs made up of choral
scholars produce such fine results when
the singers have to balance the demands
of singing in chapel with the everyday
demands of academe. I just hope that
they have time to have fun as well.
review
Weigl’s Die Schweizer
Familie was another case of
mistaken identity. I naively assumed
that I was up for an opera based on
the Swiss Family Robinson, or something
like. Not at all, this work turns out
to have been one of the most popular
singspiels in the early 19th
century. Attractively melodic it is,
but with a plot based on a land-owner
recreating Switzerland on his estates
to help his home-sick servants, this
opera/operetta would seem to be doomed
to remain only on CD. Except of course,
as with Siegfried Wagner, German-speaking
countries seem to be far more concerned
about their operatic history, so you
never know. review
Voyages round Carl
Off seem to be cropping up in my life
at the moment. Robert Blank and the
Carl Orff choir’s disc is the second
such to have crossed my path. Having
sung Carmina Burana under one
of Orff’s pupils and also sung in a
rare London outing of Catulli Carmina,
I find this composer endlessly fascinating.
Not least in his refusal to simply produce
further works in the Carmina Burana
mode. The way he stuck steadfastly
to his own groove, even though it was
less melodically pleasing, has always
struck me as being rather similar to
the way Holst refused to follow up on
the extreme popularity of The Planets.
review
Singing groups based
around the adult male members of a Cathedral
choir are a very English phenomenon,
or so it seems to me. They can vary
from a local group who are simply useful
in extending the cultural activities
in their region to better known groups
whose links to the parent choir disappear
as the singers get older. The Clerks
of Christchurch still retain links with
their alma mater and for their most
recent disc they have even gone as far
as to perform a world premiere, a group
of songs by Robert Pantcheff. And very
good they are too. Unfortunately less
imagination went into the fillers. But
you can’t have everything.
review
April 2006
Do I review lots of
discs from Australia or is it just that
I notice them? The most recent, a complete
performance of Monteverdi’s Orfeo
includes talented soprano Sarah Macliver
who has featured on two recital discs
that I’ve come across. The accompanying
orchestra is the Orchestra of the Antipodes
who similarly have featured on a number
of discs. The recording, which is based
on live performances features Mark Tucker
who rather impressed me in the title
role when he performed it on the South
Bank with Philip Pickett and his New
London Consort. It’s tricky doing a
recording of Orfeo which
balances authenticity with the constraints
of performance. This is particularly
true when you’re recording a staged
performance; staging Monteverdi almost
always means compromise in some way.
As a critic all you can do is try to
appreciate the musicality of what’s
on offer and try not to whine too much
when what you hear does not correspond
to that ideal Monteverdi performance
that you only ever hear in your inner
ear. review
Lydia Vierlinger is
a talented German contralto who obviously
has a knack with Handel, I just wish
that she had had better advice over
what language to sing in. Or am I being
too mean? Are the British too susceptible
to badly sung English in performances,
should we be more forgiving; after all
the Germans put up with us singing in
their language. I recall an English-based
German friend in the 1980s saying that
he could not live with Reginald Goodall’s
Tristan because he desperately
wanted a native German speaker as Isolde
and could not live with Linda Esther
Gray’s German. So perhaps I’m not alone.
review
I have a sneaking regard
for English viols consort music. Over
and above its musical considerations,
I’ve always loved the idea of the non-commercial
aspects. This was music written for
private performance, not for an audience.
The idea is of people coming together
simply to play in a professional but
clubbable way. Perhaps this might explain
why the genre seemed to persist after
the Civil War when it could reasonably
have been expected to die out. When
I listen to the music on CD I always
succumb to the warm, dark viol sound.
review
I dread typing up historic
recital discs like the latest Tito Schipa
from Naxos. Not because of the standard
of musicianship - which is excellent
- but because singers of the period
included so many contemporary items;
songs by composers whose sole claim
to fame is that their work was recorded
by Tito Schipa or Caruso etc. It makes
a nightmare of the job of finding their
basic biographical information, almost
as bad as trying to track down the composers
on a disc of Russian Orthodox Music
recording in the 1970s by a Bulgarian
choir.review
Some groups impress
by the clarity and freshness that they
bring to the music. This is particularly
true of choral repertoire where you
can sometimes get a little jaundiced
regarding the extremely sophisticated
choral sound from our mature professional
groups. The Rodolfus Choir are one such
group who, in the Tallis disc, brought
a lovely gust of youth and passion to
these jaundiced ears.review
I am sorry to say that
these ears remained firmly jaundiced
when it came to the narrator on Dan
Welcher’s tone poem Haleakala,
recorded by the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra.
The tone poem is designed to function
either with or without a spoken role
and I just longed for the narrator to
disappear, even though it was Richard
Chamberlain. This prejudice was in danger
of carrying over into the remainder
of the disc; always a problem with these
things.review
May 2005
Judith Weir’s music
is always a tonic to tired ears. She
has a wonderful way of boiling things
down to their essence. Written descriptions
of her chamber operas can sound alarmingly
like the plot of an opera by Strauss
and Hofmansthal or even a Monty Python
sketch. But in real life they are bracing
and gripping. I just wish that the original
recordings were available; it is such
a shame when recordings of such iconic
performances disappear out of the catalogue.
I’ve just finished
a brace of Messiah reissues.
One is Trevor Pinnock’s brilliant revitalisation
of the traditional work. The other is
billed as by Handel/Mozart but omits
some of Mozart’s changes, leaving me
to worry about tradition and schlamperei
even though it is conducted by Charles
Mackerras. The really odd thing is that
both were recorded the same year. Pinnock’s
bass soloist was John Tomlinson and
1988 was the year he made his debut
as Wotan. There can be few contemporary
examples of a singer retaining such
a wide range of material in their career,
something that pre-war singers like
Walter Widdop would have found quite
natural. He continued singing Handel
(notably Messiah) whilst having
a career singing Wagnerian tenor roles.
Could we expect that from any of our
current Siegmunds?
Robert Hugill
