CD Reviews

Nino Rota: Symphonies 1 & 2

Filarmonica ‘900 del Teatro Regio di Torino
Marzio Conti, conductor

Chandos

It’s a funny thing, but people usually classify the output of composers who write for the cinema into two categories: film music and “serious” music, a distinction that shows scant respect for the former. This despite the fact that numerous composers (Villa-Lobos, Vaughn Williams, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Copland, Walton, Korngold) have been glad to refurbish material they originally composed for the movies and bring it out again, to great applause, in the symphony hall.

In the case of Nino Rota (1911-1979), the disparity in his public reputation is acute. His great success writing scores for the post-war Italian cinema (La Strada, 8 1/2, Amarcord, The Leopard, La Dolce Vita, Rocco and His Brothers) and Hollywood (Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Godfather) led to the perception that he was “only” a film composer. His respectable body of music in other genres, including four symphonies, at least a half-dozen concertos for various instruments, ten operas and five ballets, works for string orchestra and chamber music, went unnoticed.

Until fairly recently, that is. The present offering – the fourth on the Chandos label alone, part of a modest wave of rediscovery – presents a composer who is very easy to like and enjoy. Symphonies 1 & 2, products of his twenties, show Rota as a 20th century romantic, not entirely unaware of modernist trends (and they really proliferated in Rome during the period between wars, so much so that he moved to the quiet of rural Puglia to avoid the intellectual confusion). Both these symphonies reveal his very Italian way of writing vocally inspired material, his mature ability to handle woodwinds and cut them into the orchestration for best effect in naturally interesting and striking ways, and his way with the various layers of string writing. They also reveal, as annotator Michele René Mannucci points out, the influence of someone we might not have thought, a figure he met in Sunday soirées at Arturo Toscanini’s apartment in New York during his sojourn in America in 1930-32. It was the Englishman, Ralph Vaughn Williams.

The Vaughn Williams connection is most evident in the love of landscape painting in music, a trait both composers shared, and in Rota’s scherzo movements, highly rhythmic, rhapsodic, and not at all concerned with sounding a trifle bumptious in their expression of the sheer joy of life. (He once said, famously, “I’d do everything I could to give everyone a moment of happiness.”) Annotator Mannucci sees a marine setting in the opening movement of Symphony No. 1, incredibly tender and rich in melodic motifs – though this is a typically Mediterranean seascape, not as menacing or of such profound compass as Debussy’s La Mer. Nor should we view the mood of the second movement, where woodwinds give way to the darker brass, as foreshadowing the imminent world war in this 1935-39 symphony. Contrast it to the corresponding movement in William Walton’s own First Symphony if you want to hear a real expression of ‘tween-wars anxiety and a harbinger of bad news! Actually, Rota’s Andante provides a point of balance between two happy, life-affirming movements.

Symphony No. 2 (1937-39) is scored for a slightly smaller orchestra than its predecessor. Conductor Marzio Conti seems to really enjoy the spirit of this neo-romantic work with the dancing woodwinds and the bucolic quality of its opening movement, marked Allegro tranquillo, the rhythms of the Tarantella in the scherzo, Allegro molto vivace, and the nocturnal atmosphere imparted by strings and brass in the slow movement, ending in a flute passage that seems to herald the break of day. The finale, like that of Symphony No. 1 (but even more so), is an expression of the joy of living, pulsating beneath its dotted rhythms. Too much joy, in fact, for the times (1939). Rota shelved it, and the work was not premiered until 1975.

Doctor Atomic Symphony

John Adams

Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra

conducted by David Robertson

Nonesuch Records

I’ve been excited about this music for several years, ever since I heard about the opera project on NPR back in maybe 2005.  When reviews starting coming in, well, everyone reading this probably already knows what the reviews said.  Any failings in the libretto were usually balanced by praise for the music.  My experience with the opera itself lasted all of 30 minutes.  I was watching it on PBS, bored out of my skull, and fell asleep before the end of the first act.  My wife stuck it out for half of the second act at which point she gave up, too.

So again, I was excited to hear the music and not be distracted by a story which seemed to be about physics and the dietary intake of military officers.  In general, I like the music of the Doctor Atomic Symphony but it does suffer away from its dramatic context.  The brief opening movement, “The Laboratory” is quite an ear-catcher.  The two and a half minutes are driving, engaging, and my favorite part of the symphony.  The long center movement, “Panic,” languishes a bit too much for my tastes.  The form revolves around recurring brass solos, all very well played, but I never get the feeling that the movement is leading anywhere.  “Panic” kind of sprawls around for fourteen and a half minutes.  Divorced from what drama was in the opera, the music can’t seem to find its own internal trajectory.  At times, it ends up sounding like a soundtrack for a movie I haven’t seen.  Strangely enough, I’ll write about this very thing in my next review.  The final movement, “Trinity” pulls things together nicely.  Fast and driving, much more filled with a sense of urgency than the previous “Panic” movement, “Trinity” has a satisfying dramatic formal arc and a wider range of expressed emotional content.

Perhaps I am judging the work too harshly since I had such high expectations.  I have found Adams’ more recent work to be a bit on the unfocused and sprawling side of the spectrum which is a far cry from the tightly focused and forward moving pieces that I have enjoyed so much.  Perhaps I need to spend more time with the opera but, as a wise man once said, “A bad libretto is like bone disease.”

It should probably come as little surprise that I think Guide to Strange Places is the real sleeper hit on this CD.  From 2001 (the year, not the movie), THIS is the kind of music that I like from Adams.  The energy rolls right along with Adams’ characteristic orchestrational tricks but around 4 minutes in the air gets let out and we go into a “strange place.”  Transitions into foreign areas abound as a formal technique in this piece but I found each transition effective and engaging as well as each of the musical vignettes that they connect.  I’m especially a fan of the low brass and woodwind groan/grunt section around the 13 minute mark.  THIS piece, to my ears, is a Symphony.  The music is varied yet coherent, engaging yet new, and extremely well performed.

James MacMillan: The Confession of Isobel Gowdie
Thomas Adès: Chamber Symphony
Jennifer Higdon: Percussion Concerto

Colin Currie, percussionist
Marin Alsop conducting the London Philharmonic
LPO

Marin Alsop leads the LPO in a program of three of today’s most important new composers, James MacMillan (b.1959), Jennifer Higdon (b.1962) and Thomas Adès (b.1971). MacMillan is heard from first, in a treatment of an historical event that is very close to this composer as a Scot, a Socialist and a Catholic, The Confession of Isobel Gowdie. The work describes, as painfully as is well nigh possible in music, the persecution for witchcraft of the title figure, who in 1662 was induced to “confess” following the most horrible tortures and afterwards strangled and burned at the stake. The music is appropriately brutal, violent and dissonant, utilizing some of the most rasping, rattling, tortured and strangulated sounds that can be produced by percussion, brass and woodwinds, involving a massive chord for full orchestra, repeated thirteen times in the middle of the piece, and then building gradually to a final crescendo on middle C. Running counter to all this calculated anarchy is a theme, first heard on the lower strings and then running throughout the string section, that evokes a plainchant Lux Aeterna from the Requiem Mass. MacMillan’s purpose could not be clearer: it is to remind us to be vigilant against the hysterical outbreaks of intolerance that periodically infect our species. Have we not seen in our own supposedly enlightened time the re-emergence of the ancient benighted belief that one can obtain good results by torturing people?

London native Thomas Adès also writes some ugly-sounding music in his Chamber Symphony, but without MacMillan’s higher purpose. The 12-minute work with allusions to jazz, utilizes a bass clarinet, whose low timbre influences the coloring of the piece. It replaces the usual bassoon in the woodwind quartet, to which Adès adds three brass, five strings, two percussionists, a piano employed percussively, and an accordion. The texture is spare and spikey, with a rather undistinguished motto of a turning semitone running through the entire work. I found the whole thing tremendously uninvolving. If you like the so-called “Ash-Can” school of dramatic art, you will probably like Adès, too. They say every composer has an identifiable “thumb print” running throughout his work; Adès’ should be kept on file at Scotland Yard.

The Percussion Concerto (2005) of American composer Jennifer Higdon provides a change of pace and a satisfying conclusion to the program. Here, Colin Currie has the opportunity to realize a percussionist’s life ambition, in a program placing the artist front and center, showcasing all the sounds the artist’s battery can produce, from the loudest and most aggressive to the softest twinkling tintinnabulation. The array of instruments available to Currie ranges from marimba, vibraphone and crotales (tiny antique cymbals) to bongos, a resonating bowl, and a small Peking opera gong. The large orchestra includes harp, piano, celesta, tympani and three percussionists, with whom the soloist sometimes joins to make a single unit or to play in opposition to the orchestra. Later, a cadenza involving all the percussionists opens a window, similar to the common procedure in a jazz ensemble, allowing for the soloist to do an imaginative improvisation on the drums. The orchestra re-enters, and enlarges on earlier ideas, including the two-bar riff that has largely propelled the work. Things build to a zestful conclusion, followed by well-deserved applause at the end of this live recording, made at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall.

Scottish National Orchestra
Neeme Järvi, conductor

Chandos

Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet has never sounded better than in these 24-bit/96kHz remasterings of the recordings of Suites 1 thru 3, originally made for Chandos by Brian and Ralph Couzens between December 1984 and August 1986. The Scottish National Orchestra was in fine mettle on all these occasions, and Neeme Järvi got the most out of the composer’s music, bringing out the abundant warmth, intimacy and lyrical beauty in these scores and giving the grotesque, mechanistic and violent elements no more than their just due. The present remasterings of these superb performances bring out their finer details in even clearer perspective than did the originals.

As is well known, the management of the Kirov Ballet rejected Prokofiev’s masterpiece when he presented it to them in 1935 after a two years’ labor. The reasons, some of which may have been political, have never been made clear although the sheer effort and expense needed to stage the full three-act ballet may have been a deterrent. At this time, one-act ballets were the rule. Prokofiev was moving into an arena in which his only serious competitor had been dead some forty years, for the ghost of Peter Illich Tchaikovsky loomed large over the scene. The Bolshoi, to whom he next offered the score, added insult to injury, rejecting the composer’s music as “undanceable.” Prokofiev was not in the least discouraged. Endowed with a competitive instinct worthy of any capitalist nation, he soon produced not one, but two stunning suites in 1936, using the symphony hall to stimulate a public demand for his music that prepared its eventual triumph in the ballet theatre. And he came out with a third suite to coincide with its Bolshoi premiere in 1946. The work has been an accepted modern classic ever since.

But let’s not be too blithely accepting. How can we account for the work’s enduring popularity, for the undeniable hold it has on us as listeners? It’s easy enough to point to the sensual beauty of the famous Balcony Scene (Andante amoroso, Suite 1) and the recapitulation of its predominant mood, tinged with sadness and regret, in “Romeo and Juliet before Parting” (Andante – Adagio, Suite 2). This is “love music” at its most overwhelming and all encompassing, so full that we do not realize at first the degree to which the burden of the orchestration is borne solely by the strings. And how lush that sound is, how pregnant with shades of feeling and undertones of tragedy! We hear distant echoes of the music from both these great scenes in the final tragic moments of the ballet, as memories of lost happiness in the death of Romeo, whose dying heartbeats are captured in soft, low pizzicato (Suite 2) and Juliet, her resolution emboldened by the conviction that she will be reunited by death with her beloved (Suite 3).

And here we get to the heart of the matter, the psychological realism that makes the music of most ballets pale in comparison. Was there ever a more insightful portrait of a heroine than “Juliet the Young Girl” (Vivace, Suite 2), the fourteen year old dashing hurriedly back and forth, frightened even as she is compelled by inner drives and desires toward a destiny that she cannot comprehend, poised on the brink of adulthood and a happiness that we know will be tragically short lived?

In” Death of Tybalt” (Preciptiato, Suite 1) the shock waves of grief and alarm that accompany the climax of the scene are the perfect corollary for this particular moment, the turning point in a story that has played like a comedy up to now, but will henceforth hurtle inexorably towards tragedy. Or consider the way in which Prokofiev differentiates between the spontaneous gaiety of the street dances of the common folk in Suites 1 and 2 and the cold formality and cheerlessness of the dances (Minuet, Masks) at the House of the Capulets. Had Romeo comprehended the menacing tone beneath their cool austerity, he he would probably have taken to his heels – and left us without a story!

Symphonies 1, 2, 3 & 9
Jose Serebrier, Royal Scottish National Orchestra

Warner Classics & Jazz

Alexander Glazunov (1865-1936), like Jean Sibelius, was a figure whose creative juices dried up some years before the end of his life. In 1910 he left the piano score of the single movement of his unfinished Ninth Symphony with his friend Maximilian Steinberg when he emigrated from Russia and never returned to it, or any other symphonic score, in the years remaining to him. One may argue that in the case of Sibelius, the loss to the world of music was the greater, but, as Jose Sebrier and the RSNO demonstrate in the present 2-CD slimline, the last installment in their cycle of the Glazunov symphonies, the Russian had something to say, too.

The trouble with Glazunov was perhaps that he was too slick for his own good. All his symphonies are lushly orchestrated, particularly in his string scoring, and he was one of the first composers to consider the saxophone a serious member of the orchestra (witness his choice writing for the instrument in the Andante of Symphony No. 2 in F Minor, a work that was popular in its day, having made a hit at the 1899 Paris Exposition). He was great when it came to contrasting themes and heroic gestures, and he knew how to use the resources of the orchestra.

But, it’s a funny thing: Glazunov’s symphonies don’t make a lasting impression on the listener. Like a holiday filled with excitement and colorful incidents that you can’t recall very distinctly afterwards, I found that a short time after auditioning any of the four symphonies on this disc, I was unable to recall any of the details.

A major problem with Glazunov is a failure to develop his themes. This was a weakness of The Mighty Five and the school of Russian composers who followed in their wake. They consciously rejected the principles of the classical symphony in favor of increased color and nationalistic concerns, and Glazunov followed suite. He was a great melodies and was quite adept at thematic transformation, but that is not the same as developing themes. And the strange thing about themes is, if you don’t develop them, you lose them.

An example of Glazunov at his best is the Andante of Symphony No. 3, with its Tristan-esque chromaticism and the intriguing way the composer re-starts the movement after what has apparently been a consoling ending, working his way instead to a somewhat darker conclusion. But, rather than follow up on the possibilities this slow movement has opened, Glazunov opts instead for an unrelated tour-de-force of thematic transformations in his finale.

Serebrier, taking his cue from indications of flexibility in Glazunov’s own performance scores that are not in the printed editions, has striven for a vibrant interpretation of these forgotten symphonies, rather than taking this music metronomically as too many others have done. As a result, these recordings present the candid listener with a fair, objective impression of the composer’s intentions.

 

Kirill Petrenko, Berlin Comic Opera Orchestra

CPO

Josef Suk (1874-1935) is a remarkable example of something that doesn’t happen very often in life: a workmanlike minor composer who turns around and writes major symphonic masterpieces in the middle of his life. Greatness does not usually emerge suddenly in middle age. Without unduly stressing the autobiographical element with more than it can bear, there occurred a noticeable deepening of Suk’s musical vision after the deaths in 1904-1905 of his father-in-law and mentor, Antonin Dvořák and his beloved wife Otilke. Beginning with his Asrael (Angel of Death) Symphony of 1906, Suk, hitherto a composer content to write music of folksy, nationalistic inspiration in the manner of Dvořák, devoted himself to works of greater depth and artistic maturity. The high point of his career was The Ripening (1912-1917).

The “Ripening” of the title (perhaps the German translation Lebensreife would be more precise) is not a paean to nature. Rather, it refers to the maturity in a human life, a time for reflection and reconciling oneself to the past. Without pushing the analogy to Richard Strauss too far, we might look on The Ripening as Suk’s Ein Heldenleben, but conceived on a decidedly more intimate, personal, and less grandiose level. It is in six movements, identified by Suk’s editor Karel Å rom as Recognition, Youth, Love, Fate, Resolve, and Self-Moderation (maybe “Resignation” would be a better word). They are played without a break, and the music flows with amazing naturalness from one movement to the next, unified by the carry over and transformation of themes. The heightened theme of the scherzo in “Resolve,” for instance, bears a relationship to that of the slow movement, “Love.” Six trumpets brilliantly underscore the energetic outburst at the end of the fugue at the end. The sixth movement, described by Suk as a “birthday present” to himself, features the return of the solo violin playing a sublimely beautiful melody, backed by a trio of violins, that we first heard in “Youth.” The theme makes its way down to the double basses, and then, a masterful stroke, we hear a distant wordless chorus of women’s voices, concluding the work on a note of shimmering transcendence. Is this “modernity” suffused with romantic feeling, as has been claimed, or romantic music with a modernist tendency? Do we really care? I was too busy being delighted.

Kirill Petrenko, at the helm of the Berlin Comic Opera Orchestra, draws upon his experience as an operatic conductor to bring Suk’s luminous score to life and stress the continuity of a work that keeps our rapt attention throughout its 38-minute length. He is keenly attuned to Suk’s intricate rhythm notations, down to the tiniest 32nd interval, and the wonderfully natural flow of the narrative. The BCO Orchestra, belying its name a major organization of 112 pieces, has a glowing sound, particularly from the string section, that gives The Ripening its unique character.

Oh yes, there’s a companion piece! Suk’s overture, Tale of a Winter’s Evening, Op. 9. Suk based it on Shakespeare’s “bitter comedy” A winter’s Tale, in which a happy ending transpires instead of a tragic one only after the passage of some years. Avoiding the trap of strictly programme music, he wrote evocatively, in a way that captures the elements in the story of insane jealousy, revenge, flight, innocence, and ultimate happiness. Suk’s love of contrasted themes and thematic metamorphoses is present here, along with his unerring skill in instrumentation. With the greatest delicacy he uses oboe and English horn to conjure up the bucolic landscape of Bohemia (Yes, Shakespeare used Suk’s native country, complete with an imagined “seacoast,” for the denouement of his play), He then magically reintroduces a theme in the flute, heard inconspicuously much earlier amid storm and stress and symbolizing the heroine’s innocence, to bring the overture to a quiet, satisfying close.

Red Silk Dance (1999)
Tibetan Swing (2002)
The Phoenix (2004)
H’un (Lacerations) In Memoriam: 1966-1976 (1988)
Shana Blake Hill, soprano; Bright Sheng, piano
Seattle Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gerard Schwarz

Naxos

The scintillating performance by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra under Gerard Schwarz, a longtime champion of contemporary music, of four works by Bright Sheng (b. Shanghai, 1955) show clearly why this composer is a great favorite among present-day musicians. He has a penchant for treating traditional instruments of the orchestra in non-traditional ways that today’s generation of young musicians find stimulating and challenging. And his rhythmic vocabulary will keep everyone (the audience included) on their toes.

Red Silk Dance is a good introduction to Sheng’s heady exploration of inter-cultural connections. We envision a caravan slowly wending along the Silk Road that was the ancient link between East and West. A percussion duet between piano and timpani recalls the sound of male Tibetan dancers stamping their feet. Sheng has the performers use hard wooden mallets for the drums, contrasted to accented parallel octaves in the piano, played by Sheng himself as a percussive instrument. A slow interlude has the pianist playing a central Asian flute-inspired melody against a backdrop of muted strings. The only melodious music in the piece, it is interrupted by a miasma of blaring brass. The piano responds with angular leaps and more percussive sounds, culminating in sweeping glissandi.

The title Tibetan Swing refers not to swingtime rhythm, much less an evocation of a pretty girl in a swing, but to the dances of Tibetan women in flowing costumes with long sleeves that brush the ground and swing into the air, accentuating the dance with their swirling patterns of motion. Sheng, a percussionist himself, gives a major role to the sounds of congas, bongos and a bass drum struck with the hand alone. The power of the music increases as more families of the full orchestra become engaged. The composer calls for flutter-tonguing in the brass to add excitement. At the climax, sensational glissandi in the trombones evoke the awesome tones of Tibetan temple horns. The string reintroduce the basic dance motif, and the music swells to a sweeping close.

The Phoenix, for soprano and orchestra, recounts the legend of the fabulous bird that rises from its own ashes. Sheng uses the version in the Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, which he had first encountered in Chinese translation as a child. The work was commissioned by the Seattle Symphony to celebrate its hundredth anniversary in 2004, the year that also marked the 200th birthday of the beloved Danish writer. Sheng chose his story well.

Taking his cue from the suggestion given by Andersen himself, he sees the legend of the Phoenix as a metaphor for the ever-renewing power of music itself to lift up and inspire people in all places and all times. The emotionally charged vocal part is one of the most challenging in the soprano’s repertoire, with its great leaps and chromatic writing. Shana Blake Hill handles her part with composure and assurance, qualities that are especially important given the large sweep and luminous phrasing required by such key words as “bloomed,” “resplendent,” “arise,” “perfume,” and “soar.” Several places in the text provide for instrumental interludes. A reference to the bright eyes of a Hindu girl invites a sitar-like melody accompanied by a string drone. Likewise, Arabia, birthplace of the Phoenix, is conjured up by an octatonic scale and flowing melismas in the woodwinds.

Like Shostakovich, Bright Sheng has been influenced by the tragic events of his time. For the Russian, it was the Stalinist era, in particular the purge trials and the siege of Leningrad, that brought forth stirring musical responses. For Sheng, it was the “Cultural Revolution” in China, a time of upheavals that became seared in the consciousness of the Chinese. “I was one of the millions who were the witnesses, victims, and survivors,” writes Sheng. The title H’un (Lacerations) is a Chinese word with many meanings (wounds, scars, marks, vestiges), all of which are relevant here. Consciously rejecting melodies that he considered “too beautiful” for the context, Sheng based much of his music on the small, dissonant interval of a half-step. The music is often angry, malevolent, expressing both rage and (in a striking passage in which the upper and lower strings play fortissimo at the extreme limits of their range, but muted) the stifling of dissent like a strangled cry.

All but unnoticed amid the dissonance, a brief scrap of melody in the clarinet, amounting to a full step, offers a ray of hope for solace and redemption through music. Composed in 1988 (shortly after Bright Sheng became an American citizen), H’un looks both backward and forward.

Vasily Petrenko, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra

Naxos

Recordings of Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony tend to fall into two categories: the bad ones strike the listener as being a full quarter of an hour too long, the good ones as being only 5 to 10 minutes too long. Vasily Petrenko’s account with the Royal Liverpool PO is of the latter persuasion. Actually, the longeurs in this work proceed naturally from Shostakovich’s thematic material and the procedures through which he develops it. (You see, composers can’t just hit us with a smart melody right off the bat and then run with it. They feel guilty if they do.) Seriously, the Eleventh Symphony, dealing more thematically than program-wise with the events that touched off the 1905 Revolution in Russia, needs some space to develop its ideas and build its climaxes. Petrenko, one of the finest young conductors to come of Russia in recent years, gives it just the right amount of breathing room.

The touchstone is the opening movement, “The Palace Square.” The music incorporates several Russian folk songs, “The Convict,” “Listen,” and “O Tsar, Our Little Father.” The first two are combined and heard in the flutes above ominous triplets in the timpani, the latter in unison low woodwinds. All these are set against a low, glacial, almost static theme that is heard at the beginning and end of the movement and then again, very forcefully, in the second. It connotes more than simply the wintry weather; it is the cold insensitivity of autocrats everywhere (in this instance, Tsar Nicholas ll) to the needs of their people. It moves at glacial speed, too. Most of this opening movement is taken at a level that seldom rises above pianissimo and is given to a buildup of tensions that it is not the composer’s purpose to resolve just yet. If the conductor has kept his listener’s attention up to this point (and Petrenko has been quite careful to do just that), then he has passed the Eleventh’s most formidable challenge.

The succeeding movements are all taken attaca, without breaks, a procedure that stresses the overall trajectory of context-event-aftermath-conclusion. The second movement, “The Ninth of January,” vividly dramatizes the incident in which the Tsar’s guards ruthlessly murdered several hundred peaceful demonstrators in the square before the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg (an event we have seen portrayed in cinema a number of times, including David Lean’s 1962 classic Doctor Zhivago). It opens with subdued but restless activity in the strings, a sure sign that something is about to happen. The climax builds in intensity through several stages with a fugato in between and then we hear the pounding of the side drum as a prelude to the actual slaughter. At the height of the frenzy, the glacial theme from the first movement is blared forth in unison by the whole orchestra. The meaning could not be clearer. The rest of the movement is devoted to the fateful aftermath. First we hear an eerie, spectral recounting of the glacial theme, then the gradual building of anger, understated at first but inexorable, that culminated in the 1905 Revolution.

In Movement 3, “Eternal Memory,” Petrenko does a superior job marshaling the large forces that Shostakovich requires for this symphony, including triple woodwind, four horns, three each of trumpets and trombones, tuba, a full percussion battery, celesta and strings. These forces are used sparingly, but to maximum effect. The melody of the revolutionary song “We fell as martyrs” is used here in a striking context, first heard in the violas and then transferred to the other strings. The mood ranges from funereal to strongly assertive and defiant. The intensity subsides, the viola melody is heard as a distant recessional, and then Movement 4, “The Tocsin,” begins. The reference is to the alarm bell in the coda that summons us to be eternally vigilant against oppression and the soul-corroding influence of tyranny. The rapid build-up incorporates themes from the earlier movements, leading to an aggressive transformation of that glacial theme that we know all-too well by now. The movement adds other themes, eventually reaching its climax with a melody in the English horn (cor d’anglais) that places everything we have heard up until now in a fine perspective. Then the coda.

Throughout the performance, Vasily Petrenko has expertly guided the orchestra through a work characterized by slow, quiet build-ups to moments of anarchic frenzy. The dynamic range of this work is enormous. It has the emotional vocabulary of film music (an activity in which Shostakovich was also distinguished) and a uniquely Russian character that was probably what the composer meant when he described it as his most “Mussorgskyan” symphony. (Significantly, he had recently completed his magnificently re-orchestrated performance version of the older composer’s opera Boris Godunov when he began work on the Eleventh Symphony). At a running time of 57:37, Petrenko’s comparatively tauter performance comes in almost eleven minutes shorter than my treasured Delos recording by James DePreist and the Helsinki PO (68:17). And he keeps our rapt attention to the end. What more could we ask?

Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra & Chorus, Antoni Wit

Naxos

Antoni Wit, artistic director of the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, continues his splendid survey of the major works of Poland’s Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) with the much-neglected ballet-pantomime Harnasie. This tale of a brigand chief who storms his way into a rustic wedding and abducts the bride gave the composer the opportunity to employ rhythms and harmonies based on the folk music of the Gorals, the natives of the Tatra Mountains. With its angular melodies and irregular accents, plus its characteristic vigor, this was just the sort of tonic Szymanowski needed to bring the nationalistic agenda of the Young Poland movement to fruition in music. His personal artistic journey, beginning at the turn of the century and wandering through Chopin, Wagner, Scriabin, Debussy and Ravel, with excursions into the Sufi mystics Hafiz and Rumi, had reached its climax. Harnasie became a part of the Polish ballet repertoire after successful stagings in in 1937-1938. Sadly it was too late for the composer, who died of Tuberculosis at Lausanne in March 1937.

Harnasie represents Szymanowski’s apex. He throws some unusual instruments, including blocks, snare drum, whip and xylophone into an orchestral mix already characterized by his unique feeling for rich, complex harmony. The rhapsodic nature of his music is much in evidence in the tableau “The Harnas and the Girl.” Which brings to mind: just what does the title signify? At first blush, we might have taken it for the name of the girl. Actually, a Harnas is a brigand chief, and the Harnasie are his followers. Why not just translate the title? And while we’re at it, why not eliminate the brief vocals for tenor and even the stirring march of the of brigands, sung by the Warsaw Philharmonic Chorus in Tableau 3. The vocal solos add little or nothing, and the chorus could easily be re-scored for the orchestra. My rationale is this: Harnasie needs to be heard more often in our symphony halls in order to secure its place in Szymanowski’s opus. But its opportunities are limited by the vocal requirements and the fact that they are sung in a language not widely spoken outside of Poland.

The other works on this Naxos release are the pantomime Mandragora and the incidental music for the play Prince Potemkin. The former, designed for inclusion in Act 3 of Molière’s play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, is surprisingly witty and imaginative for a composer in whom I had not previously noticed a sense of humor. As a sparkling neo-classical work, it begs comparison with Richard Strauss’ Bourgeois Gentilhomme Suite and Stravinsky’s Pulcinella. Antoni Wit and the WPO really seem to enjoy this scintillatingly scored music that engages all the resources of the orchestra and includes darker sounding music for a change of pace, possibly referring to the ancient association of the Mandrake root (Mandragora) with black magic.

The Prince Potemkin music did not engage me at first, possibly because I was expecting choice satirical writing. (Evidently, this is not the Potemkin who pulled the wool over Czarina Catherine’s eyes with his pre-fabricated model villages, giving rise to the expression “Potemkinize.”) This music, wholly serious in character, impressed me upon further auditions by Szymanowski’s characteristically luminous writing for the strings, a plangent oboe solo, and an eloquent choral section that is very much an essential part of this score.

 

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Peter Breiner

Naxos

Peter Breiner, music director of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, has done us a service in arranging and recording a series of suites from the operas of Czech composer LeoÅ¡ Janáček (1854-1928), with the object of making some of the composer’s most vibrant music accessible to a wider public outside the opera house. To judge from what I hear in these suites from Jenůfa and The Excursions of Mr. Brouček, Breiner has succeeded admirably as both arranger and conductor. (Even as we speak, a second volume of Janáček suites, consisting of Kátya Kabanová and The Makropoulos Affair, has been released by Naxos.)

Janáček has been called “the first minimalist composer,” but the analogy is misleading. Much of the effectiveness of his writing is due to his assimilation of the natural pitch, rhythm, and inflections of the Czech language. From this study, he derived what he called “speech tunes.” These he applied as as short, repeated motifs to build his unique dramatic style. The repetition of these motifs has a powerful cumulative effect. It is, however, quite different from the way repetition is often used by our present-day Minimalists, which to my mind can be quite boring compared with the result Janáček achieved.

In terms of his orchestrations, on the other hand, you’d have to consider Janáček a “Maximalist,” if there is such a word (if not, coin it at once!) His scores are continuously busy, involving every family of the orchestra. Symphonic players must really love Janáček. No matter what your instrument, he doesn’t keep you sawing away in the background on some boring accompaniment for long; sooner or later, you will have your moment in the sun. In particular, his distinctive writing for the brass is highly imaginative and is often used for expressive purposes. In Jenůfa, a dark, troubled tale of passion and jealousy in which, among other things, the heroine’s love child is drowned in a mill race by her envious stepmother, the sounds of the brass are often blurred as in a miasma, psychologically reflecting the internal turmoil of the characters. The mill itself is characterized by the ceaseless tapping of the xylophone, to be replaced later by the smoother, undulating sound of the harp, when the sinister crisis has been resolved and Jenůfa has at last found happiness.

The Excursions of Mr. Brouček is an opera in a different mood, based on a fictional Czech hero who rivals Baron Münchhausen as a shameless liar. As befits a drunken hero who lives in a wine vat and is at one point sentenced to die in a beer barrel, the music associated with Brouček is highly colored. In the opening movement of the suite, our hero’s name, MatÄ›j Brouček, is blared out for us by the horns and trumpets. When one of his imaginary “excursions” takes him to the moon, we hear mystic strings and harp glissandi. In the last excursion, when Brouček finds himself in 15 th century Prague, the savior of his country against the onslaughts of the Austrian Emperor, the scoring becomes more robust as Janáček invokes the same Hussite chorale that Smetana had previously used in Ma Vlast (My Homeland), and for much the same nationalistic purpose.