MusicWeb Reviewer’s Log: September-November
2008
Reviewer: Patrick C Waller
In September I was
quite surprised to hear on the radio that Vernon Handley had
died at the age of 77 because I hadn’t realised he was ill or
quite that old. Not that 77 is “old” for a conductor of course!
Needless to say MusicWeb published an obituary
very promptly and I was soon thinking what an important conductor
he was for anyone interested in British music. I never saw him
live but, as far as I can tell from trawling my database, I
have more works in my collection directed by him (about 150)
than by any other conductor. I suspected that a similar situation
might apply to reviews on MusicWeb and spent a few hours finding
all the reviews and producing a page of links
to them so that his legacy can easily be appreciated. I was
also prompted to revisit one his finest achievements – Bantock’s
Omar
Khayyám during a long car journey and to finally get
around to hearing his Bax symphonies by buying
the marvellous Chandos
set. This seems to be going for around £25 at the moment
and is a real bargain. When it first appeared, I was collecting
the Lloyd-Jones recordings on Naxos and reluctant to duplicate.
Good though those are, Handley’s series is surely the most definitive
yet and unlikely to be surpassed. The final disc has an extended
interview with Handley about the works and I found that fascinating.
I kept expecting a musical example to appear – there are none
– and next time I shall listen to the relevant part of the interview
before hearing the music.
The symphonies of
Bruckner continue to be frequent visitors to my
CD player and one major gap in my recorded listening to this
composer has been the readings of Wilhelm Furtwängler of Nos.
4-9. These are all live recordings from the 1940s and 1950s
but a recent reissue on Music
and Arts received a very positive review in terms of the
sound remastering, so I took the plunge noting that the same
recordings are available on Andromeda for less than half the
price. The sound is impressive and Furtwängler’s approach is
fervent – this is Bruckner played at white heat. He was free
with tempi and idiosyncratic about editions; unfortunately the
first movement of the Sixth has disappeared into the ether but
none of these factors should put one off because there is something
indefinable here that is quite magical. Quite different and
all much more “objective” are three recordings of the Eighth
Symphony which I have also heard recently. Klemperer
was surprisingly fleet in his Cologne recording of 1957, as
was van Beinum in Amsterdam in 1955, a recording which has recently
appeared in the Naxos Classical Archives – historical material
that is only available by download from Classicsonline
and costs a mere £1-99 per “disc”. Both these Bruckner 8 recordings
take a mere 72 minutes (about 80 is “par”) but that’s not a
problem to me – they are tremendous readings in very reasonable
sound for the period. From the same period Schuricht’s Stuttgart
recording is more measured but seems less consistently coherent
and is certainly less well played.
I downloaded the
Schuricht as part of a no obligation free trial on e-music.
Twenty-five free tracks were available and I also obtained Gergiev’s
Mahler 7, Rostropovich’s Shostakovich
11, James Ehnes’s Elgar Violin
Concerto and three of Paul Lewis’s Beethoven
sonatas (24, 28 and 29), all of which proved very worthwhile
listening. I decided not to continue to a subscription for various
reasons, including poor navigation facilities around the site,
variable unstated bit rates and no attempt being made to address
the problem of joins across tracks. Ultimately, my choices from
this site were always going to be biased by length of track
and continuity (as illustrated above). For example, I was potentially
interested in Bernarda Fink’s recent Schubert
disc (HMC901991) but this has 25 tracks and would therefore
cost as much as all the above put together. There is a new download
site which seems to lack the downsides of e-music mentioned
above – Passionato
– but I haven’t yet sampled from it. Incidentally, I was pleased
to see the advent of Brian Wilson’s useful “Download round-ups”
in October
and November.
Another recording
I have recently downloaded is Anne-Sophie Mutter’s recording
of Gubaidulina’s
Violin Concerto (from Classics and
Jazz). I preferred this to the CD because I wasn’t really
interested in acquiring the Bach couplings. I have also been
listening to Sir Adrian Boult’s 1940s Elgar recordings, the
First
Symphony through a download from the Classical shop (in
excellent sound from Pristine Classical) and the Second
Symphony via a recent Beulah release. Both are magnificent
performances but the sound on the Beulah disc is rather disappointing,
although the coupled wonderful reading of and better sounding
In the South offset that a little.
One of the best
sounding discs I have heard recently is a Linn release called
Trumpet
Masque, a series of baroque miniatures for Trumpet and
Piano. Here the playing of Jonathan Freeman-Attwood is stunning.
Also sounding particularly good is Trevor Pinnock’s remake of
Bach’s Brandenburg
Concertos from Avie.
There seem to be
quite a few anniversaries this year but for most Brits the Vaughan
Williams 50th will probably be the most important. I
caught a screening of a BBC documentary called The
Passions of Vaughan Williams which was excellent, and
also the television broadcast of the Prom concert devoted entirely
to his work which was conducted by Sir Andrew Davis. The TV
programme included the Tallis Fantasia, Serenade to
Music and Ninth symphony but scandalously Job was
not aired in favour of some celebrity punditry. This reduces
the concerts to the level of a football match and should be
dropped forthwith. I also watched the last
night on TV but enjoyed it rather less than Jim Pritchard
seemed to in the hall. The previous combination of serious music
followed by razzamatazz seemed to work well but this new wall-to-wall
glitz is much less to my liking and Sir Roger Norrington hardly
seemed the man for that anyway.
The other big anniversaries
are the 80th birthday of Finnish composer Einojuhani
Rautavaara which I have been celebrating by listening
to his symphonies, and the 100th birthday of Olivier
Messiaen. There is a good choice of bargain boxes of
Messiaen’s music around which would make good Christmas presents,
including the complete works on DG (4801333 – 32 CDs for a mere
£63 from MDT) which is now on my wish list. An excellent review
of the various sets is available in the November issue of International
Record Review. For the moment, I made do with Kent Nagano’s
riveting Turangalîla Symphony recorded live with the
Berlin Philharmonic and downloadable for £3 on the Warner
website – this is still a full price CD so there is quite
a big incentive to download it.
The credit crunch
is not all bad news, at least for consumers of recorded music
since there are a lot of bargains around. Even Hyperion have
had a sale on their website and I picked up some very desirable
discs at about half-price, notably John McCabe’s
Fourth symphony and Flute Concerto, and Grechaninov’s
two Piano Trios and Cello Sonata (CDA62795). I also added a
further instalment of their Simpson
quartet cycle (including Nos. 14 and 15) to my collection. As
soon as I finish, no doubt they’ll issue it all in a bargain
box – this is what happened with the symphonies. Talking of
boxes, EMI have been issuing some interesting looking historical
ones in a series called Icon. So far I have sampled the Solomon
recordings which are wonderful indeed - seven discs costing
around £17.
One work that I
have been trying to obtain a recording of for a long-time is
Liszt’s Violin Sonata (or Duo as it is often known).
I have fond memories of the Campoli version of this from LP
days but there doesn’t seem to have been any recording available
of the work for some years until one popped up on the unfamiliar
(to me) Marquis label (774718310422). This dates from the 1970s
and is played by Endré Granat. The liner claims that the original
Orion Master recordings were audiophile standard but here they
don’t sound anything like it, although whether or not it is
just a poor transfer I can’t tell. So I wouldn’t recommend this
disc and the field remains open for a new recording or perhaps
even a re-issue of the Campoli?
It is also good
to discover completely unfamiliar composers. I had not heard
of Paul
Juon until I read Gary Higginson’s review of the
recent CPO release of the Piano Quartets but I enjoyed discovering
the music as much as he obviously did.
As usual, I have
listened quite a bit to the Naxos
Music Library and there are a couple of recently added recordings
which are so good that I must mention them – a gripping performance
of Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony by the
RLPO under Petrenko (8.570568) and both Chopin Piano Concertos
played with great grace by Sa Chen on Pentatone (PTC5186341).
As a result of being able to hear any Naxos disc through streaming,
I hadn’t bought one of their CDs for quite a while but don’t
tell Klaus Heymann! Eventually I decided that there are a few
that I simply must have in my collection and these were Malipiero’s
Third and Fourth symphonies, the final instalment of Maxwell
Davies’s Naxos quartet series (Nos. 9 & 10 on 8.557400),
the sparkling chamber music of Paul
Moravec, Zemlinsky’s
early music for the cello, and volume 2 of the ongoing Alfred
Hill quartet series (8.572097).
To finish, I will
mention a few items on MusicWeb that certainly should not be
missed - starting, most obviously, with Len’s weekly How
did I miss that? Also, Dan Morgan’s mega-review of the music
of Kalevi Aho
has certainly whetted my appetite to explore his oeuvre in the
coming months. My colleague David Barker has been away travelling
for the past few weeks and asked me to prepare and post his
weekly page of Quotations. This
is gradually building up into a most interesting list.
Patrick C
Waller
