How did people get
to know the latest music before recording
was possible? Reductions of the score
for piano solo or duet offered one method,
most familiar nowadays in Liszt’s many
operatic transcriptions. Musical boxes
provided another, very limited opportunity.
Arrangements for wind
ensemble – Harmoniemusik in German
– provided another. In the late eighteenth-century
such outdoor groups came indoors, following
the string ensembles which are thought
to have formed the basis of Haydn’s
earliest string quartets. In Act II
scene v of Don Giovanni, the
very opera which is arranged here for
Harmonie, such a wind band is
heard performing extracts from popular
operas of the day, including Mozart’s
own Figaro. Johann Strauss II
was still doing much the same thing
a century later: his Erinnerungen
an Covent Garden embeds a number
of English music-hall tunes, notably
Champagne Charlie.
To what extent such
arrangements are valuable today, with
multiple recordings of Mozart operas
available, is debatable. In a sense,
it’s as dated as the 78 version of Là
ci darem, sung in German by Richard
Tauber as Reich mir die Hand, mein
Leben, borrowed from a friend’s
father, on which I first encountered
the Don. It’s probably best to regard
this work as an eighteenth-century wind
serenade which just happens to contain
a number of well-known tunes.
Mozart himself wrote
a number of Divertimenti and Serenades
for such ensembles, the most famous
of which is the Gran Partita,
alias Serenade No.10 for 13 Wind
Instruments. A good selection of these,
including the Gran Partita, is
available on Decca 455 794 2, three
bargain-price CDs offering delectable
performances from the London Wind Soloists
under Jack Brymer in generally well-remastered
1960s recordings. An even more complete
7-CD super-bargain set on Brilliant
Classics 99716 received an enthusiastic
review from fellow Musicweb reviewer
Kirk
McElhearn. This now appears to have
reappeared as a 10-CD sdet on 99733
with a 3-CD selection on 92869. A selection
of Mozart’s Wind Serenades on Naxos
8.555943 was made Bargain of the
Month by my colleague Tony
Haywood. Mozart is also known to
have composed Harmonie arrangements
of Die Entführung aus dem Serail
and other of his own operas, but none
of these have survived.
Josef Triebensee directed
a Harmonie ensemble for Prince
Alois of Liechtenstein and other princes
before becoming director of the Estates
Theatre in Prague. In 1803-4 he published
a collection of arrangements of operas
and original music, followed by a second
collection of arrangements of operas
and other works in 1808-13. An arrangement
of Gluck’s Iphigenie en Tauride,
coupled with Beethoven’s Wind Octet
and Hummel’s Octet-Partita, is available
on a Hyperion Helios CD entitled The
Classical Harmonie: The Albion Ensemble
on bargain-price CDH55037. Otherwise,
today his arrangement of Mozart’s Don
Giovanni is practically his sole
claim to fame.
What we have on this
new CD amounts to a set of highlights
from the opera in wind-ensemble form,
offering pretty well what you might
expect on a single CD of ‘regular’ extracts
from the opera. It joins three other
recordings currently available: the
recently-released Europa Symphony Wind
Ensemble on Arte Nova 74321 39118 2;
the Athena Wind Ensemble on Chandos
Collect CHAN6597, both at bargain price,
and a shorter selection, coupled with
music by Salieri on Tudor C779, performed
by the Zurich Wind Octet. A selection
of Mozart’s own Wind Serenades on bargain-price
Hyperion Helios CDH55092 includes Triebensee’s
arrangement of the Don Giovanni Overture
only.
Triebensee did not
simply transcribe the music literally;
his transcriptions are much more flexible
than that, so it is not possible to
make A-B comparisons with vocal performances
of any of the numbers. In particular
it is difficult to convey the drama
of the original opera, especially the
cataclysmic ending of Don Giovanni.
The booklet indicates
that the last three items on the recording,
Ah signor ... per carità,
Don Giovanni, a cenar teco (the
statue’s address to Giovanni) and Questo
è il fin di chi fa mal, are
‘arr. by A.N.Tarkmann’. The notes do
not offer any further explanation as
to who this might be but I take it to
be Andreas Tarkmann, credited rather
portentously by the Rheingau Echo
in 1996 with improving Triebensee’s
arrangement of Don Giovanni in
order to bring out the full potential
of wind-ensemble music: "Mit diesen
Änderungen gelang den Bläsern
eine enorm vielschichtige Umsetzung
der kompositorischen Substanz des Mozartschen
Originals." (These changes enabled
the wind-players to realise an enormously
multi-layered transposition of the compositional
substance of Mozart’s original.)
Whether this means
that Triebensee balked at arranging
this very dramatic music for Harmonie
or that Tarkmann has improved on his
arrangement is not indicated in Peter
Stadler’s otherwise valuable notes.
Presumably Triebensee omitted these
last dramatic moments, or his arrangement
of them has been lost, since the Athena
Ensemble version on Chandos ends with
Già la mensa è preparata
- misprinted as ... le mensa ...
on the Chandos website - thereby lacking
the equivalent of the last 4½ minutes
of this MDG version. Gluck had not shirked
the difficult task of depicting the
Don’s bad end in balletic form – Mozart
borrowed more than a little from the
dramatic ending of this work. Can and
should the same be done in wind-band
transcription? The Tarkmann ending is
effective enough but I have to say that
Don Giovanni, a cenar teco did
not make the hairs on the back of my
neck stand up in the same way that a
live singer can do. This final track
(20), like the finale of Act I on track
11, is subdivided, which is not much
use when most (all?) modern CD decks
have abandoned this feature.
Opera Senza is, as
its name implies, a wind ensemble dedicated
to the performance of opera without
the voices, ranging from Mozart via
Beethoven to Smetana. I believe that
this is their first appearance on record
– I certainly have not encountered them
before – and it is an auspicious début:
their performances do the music full
justice. The addition of a double-bass
to the usual wind-octet line-up, "to
provide 16’ sound" as the notes
in the booklet explain, tends to make
this recording sound rather more bass-heavy
than usual but not unduly so. Since
the ensemble consists of members of
the WDR Symphony Orchestra of Cologne,
whose recording of Shostakovich’s Tenth
Symphony under Semyon Bychkov I have
just nominated Recording of the Month
(Avie hybrid SACD AV2137) I presume
that they use modern, not period instruments.
The smoothness of the sound adds to
that presumption, though the days when
period-performance meant rough and often
out-of-tune ensemble are long gone.
In fact, there they are on the back
cover of the booklet with their modern-looking
instruments.
If I say that their
playing reminds me of Jack Brymer’s
London Wind Soloists, whose recordings
first introduced me to the delights
of Mozart’s wind music over forty years
ago, that is high praise. Their rendition
of Là ci darem la mano
is fully equal to my fifty-year-old
memory of the Tauber 78 rpm recording.
If the final impression
is that Triebensee’s arrangement prettifies
and trivialises Mozart’s opera, turning
the ironic humour into bonhomie,
that is hardly their fault. Like Dr
Johnson, in his sexist comment on lady
preachers, whom he compared to dogs
walking on two legs, it’s well done
but one wonders if it should be done
at all. The now-obligatory Watteau painting
on the cover - uncredited in the booklet
- also prettifies the whole thing. It
would be unfair, however, to deny at
least a thumbs-up for the quality of
the playing and recording.
The recording perfectly
complements the smoothness of the playing.
Long ago Peter Gammond’s series Music
on Record convinced me that chamber
music provided much greater opportunities
than larger-scale works for stereo recording.
On this CD the sound engineers have
created a perfect illusion of nine players,
each instrument - or, at any rate, pairs
of instruments - inhabiting its own
space but well integrated within the
ensemble. As I have indicated, the double
bass adds to the fullness of the sound
without making it bottom-heavy or boomy.
Some compatible SACDs sound less well
in stereo than conventional CDs, but
the stereo layer here sounds excellent
in its own right. I note that MDG have
developed their own 2+2+2 multichannel
sound, graphically depicted in the booklet
and available on this CD in addition
to the normal 5.1 surround sound. How
far the two are compatible I am not
qualified to say.
The disc is encased
in a ‘Super Jewel Box’, rather more
heavily armoured than the usual SACD
case, but that did not prevent its being
slightly cracked in the post. The warning
on the back cover ‘No picture/only music’
seems as unnecessary as labelling a
packet of nuts ‘may contain nuts’.
Brian Wilson
Opera Senza (Maarten Dekkers, Tomoharu
Yoshida (oboes); Thorsten Johanns, Paul-Joachim
Blöcher (clarinets); Kathleen Putnam,
Hubert Stähle (horns); Henrik Rabien,
Hubert Betz (bassoons); Jörg Schade,
(double-bass) 
MUSIKPRODUKTION DABRINGHAUS UND GRIMM
MDG 903 1464-6 Hybrid SACD
[58:22]
