REVIEWER'S LOG by
ROBERT HUGILL
November 2006 - January 2007
What do we expect baroque music to
sound like and what compromises are
we prepared to countenance to enable
us to hear the music sung by famous
voices? Rolando Villazon's achievement
on Emmanuelle Haim's new recording of
Monteverdi's Il Combattimento di
Tancredi e Clorinda on Virgin is
astounding. He's trained to sing 19th
and 20th century Italian
opera and has never sung early music
before. He has mastered the vocal style
and ornamentation. He sounds wonderful,
but do we want Monteverdi to sound like
this, with vocal beauty the prime concern
rather than words.
I associate the testo part with those
wonderful spat-out repeated notes; Villazon
just doesn't spit.
This concern cropped up again on the
Naxos recording of Cavalli's Gli
amori d'Apollo e di Dafne directed
by Alberto Zedda, the Rossini scholar.
Using a modern orchestra and many singers
who work in opera the result sounds
like a 19th century transcription.
But I must balance my annoyance with
the knowledge that Zedda's orchestra
is a Spanish youth orchestra and the
exercise is a training one. There is
the possibility that this less austere
version of Cavalli will win followers
over, but will it? Is this sort of sub-Raymond
Leppard type production what we want
to be hearing nowadays?
Elsewhere the transcriptions get even
more distant from the original. Parabolically
Bach presents Bach transcriptions
on an orchestra of saxophones. (review
) Now I rather like the idea of a saxophone
orchestra and am very responsive to
experimenting with Sax's instrumental
inventions. But here the results don't
convince. The art of transcription requires
you to make an imaginative leap to re-create
the original in the new sound-world;
think Stokowski or Grainger. On this
disc the transcriptions don't make that
leap. And the playing has an embarrassing
hint of the awful clarinet choir that
I used to hear when doing a night school
class, many years ago.
A transcription of another sort, this
time Brahms's Requiem review
with his own piano duet accompaniment.
I'm afraid that again I was not convinced.
As a performer, I'd be fascinated to
sing in this version of the piece. As
a listener it did not work for me. I
did wonder whether the performers had
been radical enough and that they ought
to have replaced the choir with a vocal
ensemble, to make a real chamber music
piece. As it is, this version too easily
comes over as the piano rehearsal before
the main orchestral rehearsals start.
Nigel North's 2nd volume
of Dowland's lute music requires no
compromise and is no transcription,
it's the real thing. Its amazing quite
how many volumes of Dowland's lute music
have fallen out of the catalogue. So
North's volumes are doubly welcome.
In The Gramophone the reviewer
described North as a veteran, given
that he's only a year older than me
that is surely worrying. Surely when
coming into his 50s a player can still
be regarded as being in his prime. Judging
by this disc, North surely is. I was
tempted to turn in a three word review
(Wonderful! Buy It!) but thought perhaps
that Rob and Len might want a little
more.
It's worrying quite how many pieces
seem to drop out of the catalogue. I
was recently looking for some of Andrew
Parrott's Bach recordings - I'm a bit
of a one-voice-to-a-part fiend in this
music - and was amazed quite how vague
the presence of these recordings in
the catalogue was. But then, so often
when you look something up on The
Gramophone web-site, so many of
the important versions of the recordings
are labelled as deleted. Which makes
it all the more puzzling when Deutsche
Harmonia Mundi choose to re-issue a
rather indifferent 1974 recording of
Palestrina's Missa Tu Es Petrus by the Tolz Boys Choir - surely the choir
has made better recordings than this!
review
And now for something completely different.
I was entranced by Oystein Baadsvik's
disc of music for Tuba and Piano. review
It's not a combination that I would
have really thought of investigating
on my own, and the rather wacky cover-picture
put me off. But to listen to Baadsvik
in such a well chosen programme - Hindemth,
Gordon Jacob, Bernstein, Astor Piazzolla,
Anthony Plog and Niklas Sivelov - was
a joy. It's one of the delights of reviewing,
when such unaccustomed pleasures appear
on ones desk, more than making up for
the disappointments.
Another, slight disappointment was
the latest in a long line of recordings
of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater.
review
I would have much rather heard Fabio
Biondi and Europa Galante in something
rather less over-recorded. Not that
their performance was less than wonderful,
but again this was a recording where
I wondered about the dynamics of its
creation. How much it had to do with
star names - David Daniels and Dorothea
Roschman - and how much to do with whether
this group really wanted to record these
pieces.
Whereas La Serenissima's recording
of Vivaldi cantatas, review,
with soprano Mhairi Lawson had all the
feel of a programme which was put together
with some thought, because Adrian Chandler
wanted to do it. There is so much music
from this period, so it can be daunting
for performers to investigate the sources.
It's far easier to stick to the tried
and trusted pieces, but so wonderfully
vivid when performers do go off and
produce imaginatively.
The other area where we allow for duplication
is, of course, the recording of live
events. A whole batch of discs have
recently surfaced, detailing the annual
Handel performances at Maulbronn Monastery
in Germany. The advantage these have
is that they give us opportunities to
hear singers in roles that they have
not recorded: Emma Kirkby as Jephtha's
daughter Iphis. The disadvantage is
that the performances don't necessarily
transcend the limits of live performance
and inevitably, Handel oratorios are
shortened in performance. It all depends
how much you value hearing a live performance
I suppose. (Links: Jephtha,
Saul,
Belshazzar)
Interesting light was shed on the background
to these pieces when I read Roz Southey's
book on Music-Making in the North-East
of England in the 18th century.
So very little information from this
period is easily available to casual
readers, it is quite often easy to ignore
the very different background that music-making
had then. Southey's book helps cure
us of the tendency to back-project our
own world onto Handel's, it stops us
thinking that 18th century musical audiences
were just like ourselves. review
Vivica Genaux dazzled in her Handel
and Hasse recital. But though her performances
of the Hasse arias could not be faulted,
it was the Handel that, for me, shone
out as brilliant music. Hasse seemed
to be wedded to displaying virtuosity
for its own sake; no wonder singers
liked him. His popularity in the 18th
century made me realise that in some
things, audiences have not changed.
The flashing and easily pleasing often
wins out over the things which make
the listening work a little harder.
review
Another name new to me, Romanus Weichlein,
a disc of whose masses came my way.
I found them charming and passed it
on to my church choir, they sound eminently
suitable for regular use. review
Robert Hugill
