Sunday 27 May 2012

Making Love in 3/4 Time

Don't worry, this blog isn't going X-rated!  I used the term "making love" in the old 19th-century sense where it covered everything from writing love letters to whispering sweet nothings in your beloved's ear.  And I doubt if 3/4 time would have been considered appropriate for love music anywhere except Vienna, where people dance through life to the beguiling rhythm of the Viennese waltz.

As did Johannes Brahms.  By now, some of you may know where I'm headed, but it's surprising and indeed distressing to see just how many music lovers aren't acquainted with the musically seductive beauties of the master's Liebeslieder-Walzer ("Love Song Waltes").  The waltzes of the first set were written shortly after Brahms moved to Vienna, a kind of musical tribute of affection for the city which he adopted as his own and made his home for the rest of his life.  The music has a special kind of springtime freshness, young love with a spring in its step.  The second set, triggered by the success of the first, came some years later and are a little darker and more introspective, but still very lovely.

Poetry by Friedrich Daumer may not be all the rage in literary circles, but study the texts of these songs carefully and you will soon see that Brahms, as ever, set the words with an acute ear for the meaning and innate emotional temperature of Daumer's verses.

While the waltzes are often performed by small choruses, and have been recorded that way, the ideal is to hear them as Brahms wrote them: for a quartet of voices and a piano played 4-hands.  And the recording I'm listening to now ideally fulfills those conditions.  It's old, but I've never heard another that captured the innate qualities of this beautiful music any better.  The soloists are from the front rank of EMI's best-known oratorio singers of the late 1950s.  Canadian baritone Donald Bell is still young and in fine form, before his voice was swamped by the tremolo.  For the rest, Elsie Morison as soprano has a girlish quality that suits this music of young love, Marjorie Thomas is a dependable alto with a smooth vocal quality, and Richard Lewis uses his lightest, most persuasive tones to shape every phrase of his music.

In the Liebeslieder-Walzer, the duo pianists are every bit as important as the singers -- no mere accompaniment, this.  And this recording has the services of the wonderful duo of Vitya Vronsky and Victor Babin, who did so much after the Second World War to revive interest in piano playing for 4 hands at one piano.  Indeed, the LP cover featured their names and photograph rather than those of the singers, and rightly so, for it is their wonderfully varied and sensitive playing that anchors the entire performance, as it must.

The net result is that the obstinately memorable melodies linger long after hearing in your mind -- and in your heart.  After all, this is love music!

Monday 21 May 2012

Rare and Majestic Masterpiece

Okay, I'm nailing my colours to the mast right at the beginning of this post.  This concerto is a masterwork on the same plane as the great piano concerti of Beethoven, Brahms, and Mozart.  There --  I said it.  Disagree with me if you like, but that's what I think and how I feel.

Sorry?

Oh, which concerto? 

(Ooops!  My bad....)

The Op. 38 Piano Concerto by Ferrucio Busoni.  Now, here's a rarity indeed.  It's so fiendishly difficult that only a handful of pianists have it in their repertoire.  It's also so challenging for the orchestra that few have time to rehearse it.  Thus, any live performance is an event!  The Concerto is in 5 movements, lasts for 70 minutes (or more), is played nonstop, and includes not only a sizable orchestra but also an offstage male chorus in the finale!  So here we are, back at the third piece for piano, orchestra and chorus which I promised a few days ago.

One reason the Busoni Concerto bears comparison with the great masters named above is the careful thought which the composer put into its organization and structure.  The first, third, and fifth movements are solid, solemn, and powerful -- reflecting the Germanic side of the musical world which Busoni inhabited.  The second and fourth have been appropriately described as "sinister, glittering, Italianate scherzos."  Many themes from the first movement are recalled in the fifth, and also hinted at in the third.  This gives the Concerto a strong organic unity.

Where the Busoni work really resembles the two great concerti of Brahms is in the fact that, like Brahms, Busoni has woven the piano part in many areas fully into the orchestral texture.  The result is the polar opposite of the showy "virtuoso" works so popular in the nineteenth century, where the orchestra has to restrain itself so the soloist has ample time and room to show off.  Busoni's Concerto is certainly a challenge for any virtuoso, but the pianist's technical prowess is nearly always subdued to the needs of the music, rather than the other way around.  As Busoni's biographer, Edward J. Dent, remarked: "It is nearly always the orchestra which seems to be possessed of the composer's most prophetic inspiration. Busoni sits at the pianoforte, listens, comments, decorates, and dreams."  In this scheme, the quiet singing of the offstage male chorus in the final movement is simply another element in the total sound picture, rather than the kind of gigantic spiritual triumph found at the end of choral symphonies by Beethoven, Mahler, and others.

John Ogdon gave the Busoni Concerto its first recording in the 1960s for EMI.  If you can get this pioneering account, you should, for it breathes all the wonder of fresh discovery.  Among more recent recordings, the one to go for is the 1999 Hyperion CD with Canadian pianist Marc-André Hamelin and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by Mark Elder.  The rich digital sound allows Busoni's densest textures to come through clearly, and Hamelin clearly is fully in command of the most demonically complex passagework.  There's also a video performance of the Concerto by Hamelin with the Lahti Symphony Orchestra under Osmo Vanska which can be found on YouTube.

Saturday 19 May 2012

Music for Piano, Orchestra,... and CHORUS???

Now, there's an odd combination for you.  There may be others floating around out there, but I only know of three works which feature this particular grouping of performers.

One is well known, by name at least.  Yet how many people have actually heard Beethoven's Choral Fantasy?  Give it a listen, and you can't miss the family resemblance between the choral finale and the famous finale of the 9th Choral Symphony.  Yet how do you describe it?  Musically, the choral movement of this work is like the child, and the Ode to Joy of the Ninth is the adult which that child eventually grew to become.  Thus, the Ninth is obviously more mature, more involving, and much more sophisticated.  None of that makes the Choral Fantasy any less endearing.

More mature by far is the lengthy solo piano cadenza which opens the piece, and the series of variations for piano and orchestra which parallel the structure of the choral variations in the Ninth.  My personal favourite recording is a Toronto Symphony outing under Andrew Davis with the formidable Anton Kuerti at the keyboard and the full, rich sound of the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir in the final minutes.

A much more recent work came from my old friend Vaughan Williams.  His Fantasia on the Old 104th Psalm Tune was composed for the famous Three Choirs Festival in England, and again includes a substantial piano part.  But the choir in this work sings right along with the pianist and orchestra throughout the piece.  The piano writing is dense and heavy -- I'm the first one to admit that Vaughan Williams didn't always do his best work for the keyboard, although he was the consummate composer of music for strings.  Despite that, or perhaps because of it, this is a majestic, powerful piece.  Where the Beethoven is like a joyful dance, the Vaughan Williams more befits a solemn occasion such as a coronation or perhaps the enthronement of a bishop, although it was not written for any such event.  The slower tempo of this music, with its frequent pauses, is perfectly suited for the cathedral acoustic in which it was first performed.

The third piece will form the substance of my next post.

Monday 14 May 2012

Not-so-Famous Last Words

Okay, that title's stretching a point a bit.  The 9th Symphony wasn't really the last word from Vaughan Williams, as he kept working on several other projects including a symphony and a new full-length opera!  But it was the last major work he completed before his death in 1958.  That brings it very close indeed to modern times, but the composer -- as always -- followed his own chosen path in a more conservative idiom.  Yet it would be foolish indeed to label the piece as "old-fashioned" or "reactionary" (many have revealed their foolishness by doing so publicly).

That's because Vaughan Williams spent the concluding years of his life experimenting with new and unusual sounds and structures.  In his 7th Symphony (Sinfonia antartica) he found intriguing sound equivalents for ice, snow, wind, and the implacability of nature.  In his 8th Symphony he made use (in his own words) of "all the hitting instruments which can command definite notes" and "all the 'phones and 'spiels known to the composer."  The effect was nothing if not provocative and scintillating.

The unique sound world of the 9th Symphony owes something to the use of a group of three saxophones, which often play in block chords of the sort that the composer frequently used when writing for strings.  These saxophones (and a flugelhorn) give the music a sound that is paradoxically both dark and luminous, and much of the rest of the orchestration supports that sound -- violas are also much more prominent in this symphony than usual.  This dark radiance arises from the composer's inspiration for the work, which has been shown to definitely be based in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles and the area around Salisbury Plain which figures in that novel.

By this time Vaughan Williams had left the tradition of the sonata form movement far behind him, yet this work is most definitely a symphony and nothing else.  The music uses long-breathed melodic lines which support the symphonic structures.  The first movement starts out with a long rising theme which the composer said was prompted by something in the organ part of Bach's St. Matthew Passion.  It is immediately followed by the block chording of the saxophones, for the first of a number of times in the work.  The movement rises to a couple of louder moments but ends in a long, musing epilogue for solo violin in RVW's characteristic ruminating manner.

The second opens with a poetic flugelhorn solo, followed by a barbaric rhythmic drumming figure which alternates with the flugelhorn, and eventually rises to dominate the movement.

The third movement is a bizarre scherzo which suggests soldiers marching across the countryside, with side drums to the fore, and dissonant fanfare figures from the brasses. 

The lengthy and loosely-structured finale begins with a long wandering melodic figure that gradually rises to a chordal cadence that has been heard before and will appear several more times.  There comes a clear break in the musical flow, and then a viola melody continues along new lines.  The music ends in a place which the composer often used to great effect, alternating major and minor chords in close keys.  The last word of this remarkable work consists of three great swelling waves of sound that rise up and then sink down as the saxophone chords sound in between them.  The third and biggest wave dwindles into silence, decorated by harp arpeggios.

I first discovered this remarkable and moving piece on LP through Sir Adrian Boult's EMI recording, and that is still a favourite in its CD reissue.  Bernard Haitink's more recent EMI CD confirms the truly symphonic stature of the piece in modern digital sound and is well worth hearing too.  Both versions appear on CD coupled with the 8th Symphony, a natural and sensible pairing.

Friday 11 May 2012

Rare and Beautiful from RVW

The English composer Ralph (pronounced "Rafe" by the way) Vaughan Williams is very well known to church choir singers in the Anglican/Episcopal/Church of England tradition.  That's due to his work as editor of The English Hymnal and the Oxford Book of Carols, and in particular to the many traditional tunes which he harmonized for both books.  Aside from the church connection, his work has been sadly undervalued in North America, although his music is enduringly popular in his homeland.  I'm glad to do anything I can to redress the balance. 

RVW (handy short form!) was a far more diverse and skilled composer than the foregoing paragraph might suggest.  His 9 symphonies are a significant landmark in the history of the form.  He composed a significant body of songs, both with piano and with orchestra.  His body of major choral works with orchestra is very large, and in quality ranks with the best of the last 2 centuries.  He wrote several operas and several ballets, as well as some chamber music.  I've mentioned him a few times already in this blog, but now I want to focus right in on some of the rarer pieces he wrote -- works which are every bit as acomplished as the better-known pieces.

I'm listening to a reissue CD in EMI's "British Composers" series, a series which draws heavily on the music of RVW.  Out of four works on the disc, only one is at all well-known.  The others have been extremely rare birds, both on record and in live performance.

To deal with the well-known one first: Flos Campi is a "suite" for small orchestra, wordless choir, and solo viola.  In fact, the wind players in the work are all soloists too, but the viola player is the featured voice.  And a voice it certainly is.  The six movements are prefaced with quotations from The Song of Solomon, but no words are sung.  However, the viola part is so "vocal" in character that any use of a sung text would be superfluous.  The music is rapturous, lyrical, passionate -- in short, a musical love song parallel to the written love song of the Bible.  Oriental, too, with more than a slight whiff of the Middle East floating through -- especially in the brazen march of the fourth movement.

Now, let's see what other treasures nestle around it.  The disc opens with what I think was one of the most beautiful lyrical outpourings of RVW's entire career (and there were many of them!).  When the composer set to work on the intensely musical poetry of Matthew Arnold, the result was An Oxford Elegy -- setting words from two Arnold poems, The Scholar-Gypsy and Thyrsis.  Rather than try to devise musical equivalents for all of Arnold's soaring phrases, Vaughan Williams opted to use a speaking voice -- sometimes over the music, sometimes in the silence between sections -- as well as a choir singing certain selected passages.  This feature has acted as a handicap to some, but I've always felt that the solution could be no other.  As for the music, it has a certain autumnal quality that goes well with the tone of regret suffusing the poetry.  Yet it remains intensely, visually enchanting from start to finish. 

The second piece is a short choral hymn for Whitsuntide (Pentecost) -- recorded at the same time as Flos Campi and An Oxford Elegy (1968) but for some reason never released.  It's a simple but effective piece indeed, with the choir's rapturous "Alleluias" punctuating the tenor soloist's phrases.

The final work (also the largest) is Sancta Civitas, described by RVW as an "oratorio".  It is that, in the sense that it sets some of the most dramatic scenes in the Bible, from the book of Revelation.  However, any resemblance to the traditional oratorio form stops dead right there.  The music flows through a series of contrasting sections for 35 minutes without any pause.  The narration of the text (the whole book is a narration, of course) is shared between a baritone soloist and no less than three choirs: a large mixed choir, a small semi-chorus, and a distant treble chorus.  Each choral body has its own distinctive selection of orchestral sounds supporting it.  The treble group, placed apart from the main body, has to come in distantly yet clearly.

Right there, I suppose, is the reason Sancta Civitas has been so rarely performed and recorded.  Even if the numbers of performers aren't as great, that plan ranks for sheer complexity right alongside Mahler's 8th Symphony and Britten's War Requiem!  Yet, as always when RVW set words to music, every sound is absolutely right in its context. 

The whole piece is full of marvellous writing -- the 5/4 time, used so differently from Holst, in the battle scene when heaven opens, the beating drums and wailing cries as the angel standing in the sun summons the birds to feast on the flesh of the dead, the dirge for the fallen glories of Babylon -- each one is clearly drawn with vivid musical detail.  The emotional heart of the work is the long, rapturous description of the vision of the new heaven and the new earth -- heightened by RVW's favourite device of a solo violin musing in quasi-recitative over muted strings.  Then comes the spectacular hymn of praise to the Almighty, the final key tenor solo, "Behold, I come quickly," and the quiet fading away of the music.

All of the recordings on this CD I'm listening to were conducted by the dean of English choral conductors, Sir David Willcocks -- already in 1968 at the height of his powers.  Vocal soloists, speaker (John Westbrook a key part of An Oxford Elegy's success), choirs, orchestras are all in top form, and the sound on the CD release couldn't be bettered.  Alternate recordings are available of Flos Campi (several) and of Sancta Civitas (one that I know of, conducted by Richard Hickox) and may be easier to find, but this particular collection is a prize if you can find it.

Monday 7 May 2012

The Birthday Boy!

This post is in honour of the birthday of Johannes Brahms, who would have been 179 years old today if he had just hung around a bit longer!

I grew up on a steady diet of Brahms, who was one of my Dad's favourite composers.  No surprise, he's always been a favourite of mine too.  But even a great composer like Brahms has some little-known surprises lurking in the background, and I want to share one of my favourites with you now.

Like a number of composers of the 18th and 19th centuries, Brahms found himself arranging old folk songs for contemporary performance.  In many cases this amounted to arranging an accompaniment for piano, since genuine folk singing is often either unaccompanied, or else accompanied by whatever instruments are available at hand.

Brahms' 49 settings of German folksongs certainly are no great masterworks.  But they are, for me, utterly charming and delightful.  Much of this is owed to the great interpreters of the only set of these songs that I have ever heard, a 2-disc LP box (later available on CD) for EMI in the 1960s.  The songs were sung by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and accompanied by Gerald Moore. 

The joy of folksongs always lies in the tunes, and these melodies are infectious!  Many songs make you want to sing along, which is precisely the point with folk music!

Half the fun of this set is the potential for duets, because some of the songs are very clearly dialogues between male and female characters.  Others are just as clearly sung by a man or a woman.  The songs are arranged in an order that gives great variety, and every single number sparkles with life in all its fullness.

It's been said that only a great performer can pull off something like this with the necessary simplicity, and I totally agree.  These three "great ones" have created something to cherish and love out of work so slight that Brahms didn't even credit it with an opus number.  If you can find this recording -- somewhere on the internet, in an odd corner of a record shop, buried in your closets somewhere -- pull it out and join in the fun.