SCHUMANN
5 Pieces in Folk
Style, op. 102. Adagio and Allegro,
op. 70. Fantasiestück, op. 73. Cello
Concerto
Sol Gabetta
(vc); Giovanni Antonini, cond; Bertrand Chamayou (fp); Kammerorchester Basel SONY 88985352272 (58:16)
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New classical music releases reviewed in detail by Gavin Dixon
Thursday, 18 April 2019
Sol Gabetta Schumann
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All is not what it seems with this new Schumann album
from Sol Gabetta. From the cover, which shows Gabetta pretending to play on a
set of disembodied cello ribs, the label, and Gabetta’s own stellar reputation,
it would be fair to expect a vehicle for her star prowess. But this is a
different kind of project, as is demonstrated by the liner, not an airy and
self-serving interview with Gabetta, but a detailed discussion of Schumann’s
cello music by Ruth Seiberts: The cellist doesn’t even get a bio.
Even more surprisingly, these are period-instrument
performances, or at least period-instrument accompaniments: Pianist Bertrand
Chamayou plays a J. B. Streicher fortepiano, made in Vienna in 1847, and the
Kammerorchester Basel—who, it seems, swing both ways—on this occasion play on
gut strings and with period brass. But someone forgot to tell Gabetta herself,
whose penetrating tone in the chamber works suggests metal strings and who
(thankfully) eschews the sweeping portamento that we increasingly associate
with 19th-century performance practice.
These are assertive performances from Gabetta, and
they take some getting used to. The Five
Pieces in Folk Style are a good place to start, because Gabetta is able to
bring rhythmic focus, with her narrow tone and brusque articulation. The other
cello and piano works, the Adagio and
Allegro and Fantasiestück, require
more lyrical playing, and Gabetta shows she can mellow her tone, but this is
still a very up-front cello sound. Chamayou is a lively and alert accompanist,
and the engineers find a good balance between the two instruments. The
fortepiano sounds boxy in the mid-register but has an appealing depth in the
lower range—so the period instrument is a mixed blessing here.
The period instruments in the Basel orchestra make
less of an impression in the concerto, although their playing, too, is suitably
light and agile. Gabetta is on excellent form here, expanding her tonal palette
to match the orchestra, while still retaining that focus of tone and line. The
concerto is clearly the main selling point for this disc, though its period
credentials are of only marginal interest—and when you add in the boxy
fortepiano, the result is an elegant but curious album, with Gabetta’s
distinctive playing only partially alleviating its underlying concept problem.
Friday, 12 April 2019
Catoire and Friedman Piano Quintets Forsberg
CATOIRE Piano Quintet in g, op. 28. FRIEDMAN
Piano Quintet in c
Bengt Forsberg (pn); Nils-Erik Sparf (vn); Ulf
Forsberg (vn); Ellen Nisbeth (va); Andreas Brantelid (vc)
BIS 2314 (SACD: 62:08)
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This disc presents two attractive
but largely forgettable piano quintets of the late Romantic era. Neither
composer is particularly famous—at least as a composer; Ignaz Friedman had a
more compelling claim to fame—but their piano quintets seem to be considered
their finest works. So this recording offers an intriguing taster of their
respective soundworlds. And, despite hailing from different countries, Catoire
from Russia, Friedman from Poland, their styles are remarkably similar, making
for a logical and complementary pairing.
Georgy Catoire (1861–1926) was as
Russian composer (of French descent, hence the name) working in the same milieu
as Taneyev, Glière and the young Rachmaninoff. But Catoire was largely
self-taught, and isolated himself from cosmopolitan musical life, at least
until 1915, when he was appointed Professor of Composition at the Moscow
Conservatoire. As with many composers working in Moscow in the years
immediately before the Revolution, Catoire sounds a lot like Rachmaninoff, but
without the memorable tunes. So in the Piano Quintet, we hear deeply sighing
melodies in the strings, with just a touch of folk flavor, supported by
rippling waves of arpeggiated accompaniment in the piano. Catoire’s development
techniques are more distinctive than his melodies, and the opening of the first
movement bears a striking resemblance to the Tchaikovsky Piano Trio. But he
soon goes his own way, with densely contrapuntal and harmonically complex
elaboration, reminiscent of Taneyev but less focused and directed. The results
feel structurally loose, as if the form of each movement is an afterthought, an
impression supported by the casual and relaxed ending to each of the three
movements.
If Catoire begins with
Rachmaninoff, Friedman begins with Brahms, his quintet opening with a
three-note motif taken from the Scherzo of Brahms’s Third Piano Quartet, with
which it shares the key of C Minor. Catoire’s rambling movements seem
positively concise compared to Friedman’s—whose quintet, also in three
movements, is almost half as long again. Friedman is more dour than Catoire,
more serious and intense. The Larghetto second movement offers some relief,
with delicate and varied melodic textures from the string quartet supported by
more modest textures in the piano. The last movement is titled Epilogue, but it
is just as knotty and involved as the first. Given Friedman’s itinerant career
as a concert pianist, it is little surprise that the stylistic profile of his
music is complex and variegated. The Piano Quintet dates from 1918 (three years
after Catoire’s), soon after Friedman’s studies in Leipzig with Hugo Riemann
and Berlin with Busoni. Certainly, the approach to development and counterpoint
feels Germanic, even if the rhapsodic form suggests a distance from those traditions.
Of the two, the Catoire comes across as the more accomplished work: Neither is
a lost masterpiece, but both are distinctive enough to be worth hearing.
These recordings were made at the
Allhelgonakyrkan, a church in Stockholm that also hosts a chamber music
festival, led by Bengt Forsberg, the pianist here. He seems to be the
motivating force behind the project, although the most famous name amongst the
players is cellist Andreas Brantelid. All of the players are up to the demands
of this music, although the extended climax of the Friedman first movement
taxes the violin intonation in the upper register. The recording quality is up
to BIS’s usually high standards. Both works, and the Friedman in particular,
pose challenges of balance, and the engineers seem to have recessed the piano
to prevent its huge textures from the dominating the ensemble. The strings, by
contrast, are very close, and we hear the players breathing in silences, and
some extraneous bow noise, though none of it a distraction to this adventurous
and frequently beguiling program.
This review appears in Fanfare
magazine issue 42:6.
Thursday, 11 April 2019
Pfitzner Lieder Colin Blazer
PFITZNER Lieder, op. 2, op. 6, op. 7, op. 11, op. 21,
op. 24, op. 26, WoO 9, WoO 6, WoO 5, WoO 12 Colin Blazer (ten); Klaus Simon
(pn) NAXOS 8.572603
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We don’t usually think of Pfitzner as a Lieder composer, but
he was prolific in the form, writing 115 songs, spanning his career. This disc
is Volume 2 in a new complete cycle from Naxos, which should eventually run to
five volumes in total. Colin Blazer sings the Lieder for tenor voice, covering
the period 1888–1916, so early-to-mid career, and Naxos are wise to present
most of the program in chronological order, as we hear a clear evolution from a
generic Brahmsian approach early on to a more distinctive sound around the time
of Palestrina, an opera that several of these songs anticipate.
Pfitzner’s texts are mostly from German poets of the late
Romantic era who have otherwise fallen into obscurity—August Schnezler, Robert
Reinick, James Grun—although Eichendorff, Heine, and Goethe also make
appearances. And, in contrast to the colorful tone painting and evocative scene
setting of his operas, the approach here is more text-focused, especially in
the early songs, generously melodic but always placing the texts above the
musical invention. But more sophisticated harmonic progressions and
accompanying effects begin to creep in in the first years of the 20th century,
with the Eichendorff setting “Die Nachtigallen” (1907) a particularly
distinctive and piquant number.
Tenor Colin Blazer is more associated with the Baroque
repertoire than the late Romantic, but he has a fine voice that suits this
music. His tone is light but impressively agile. Pfitzner occasionally makes
Wagnerian demands, especially with loud and high phrase endings, and Blazer
sometimes struggles, although he is able to add a carefully controlled vibrato
to stabilize these passages. His German diction is good, with satisfyingly
rolled “r”s, although “ch” sounds could be softer. Pianist Klaus Simon doesn’t overplay the generally
conservative accompaniments, and balances between singer and accompanist are
good. The piano itself could do with
more tonal focus, especially in the mid-range, and the reverberant but boxy
acoustic of the Steinhalle in Emmendingen does it no favors.
This release, and indeed this entire cycle, is up against a
five-volume set of the complete Pfitzner Lieder released on CPO in the late
1990s. The tenor for those recordings was Christopher Prégardien, who has a
fuller and lower voice than Blazer, though he is more strident and commanding
in those high-lying phrase endings. When that cycle was complete, CPO boxed
them up as the five-CD set 999-789-2. That is still in print, and available at
mid-price, so the chances are that Naxos will eventually come up with a
comparable and similarly priced offering. CPO look to maintain the lead here,
but given the differences in approach between the recordings of the tenor
songs, it might well end up that both are worth having.
This review appears in Fanfare Magazine issue 42:6.
Wednesday, 10 April 2019
Brahms Piano Quartets Primrose Quartet
BRAHMS Piano Quartets Nos. 1–3
Primrose Piano Quartet
MERIDIAN 84650/1–2 (2 CDs: 123:47)
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Period instrument recordings
are often accused, or at least suspected, of academic rather than musical
motivations. But the two need not be mutually exclusive, as this studiously
academic but also vibrantly musical collection demonstrates. The three Brahms
piano quartets are here presented in period performances—the first ever it
seems for Nos. 2 and 3—using three different pianos of the era, and recorded in
a venue familiar to Brahms himself, the Ehrbar Saal in Vienna. The recording
grew out of a symposium at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire on period
performance practice. The Conservatoire also sponsored the release, and so, as
expected, the documentation is impeccable, with detailed discussion on the
works, the performance philosophy, and the pianos, by John Thwaites, who is the
Quartet’s pianist, and Gerd Hecher.
The three pianos are an 1870
Streicher (Quartet No. 1), an 1853 Blüthner (No. 2), and an 1878 Ehrbar (No.
3). Of the three, only the Ehrbar is cross-strung, and it sounds the most
modern. The Blüthner is the most wooly sounding, while the Streicher has a nimble
action and clear tone that makes it the most attractive and distinctive, at
least to my ear. But soft, round sounds are the order of the day, and the gut
strings of the other three players—Susanne Stanzeleit, violin; Dorothea Vogel,
viola; Andrew Fuller, cello—give an ensemble sound that is fully sympathetic to
each piano in turn. The gut strings are particularly apparent in Brahms’s
regular use of percussive pizzicato patterns, here given a warm bronzed
quality, but without reducing the rhythmic drive.
The liner note discusses, as a potential source for
performance practice, a recording of the Third Quartet made in 1927 by the
Spencer Dyke Quartet for the National Geographic Society. It comes up early on
in a discussion about editions: The Simrock leaves the sustain pedal down
indefinitely after the opening piano octaves, while Hans Gál’s later Breitkopf
and Härtel edition releases the pedal at bars 2 and 4, apparently in line with performance
practice in Vienna at that time, 1926–7. In fact, this new recording follows Gál,
where the Spencer Dyke goes along with Simrock. The moral seems to be, as John
Thwaites writes, “… to generalise too much about the Performance Practice of
Brahms’s day is to miss one of the most essential characteristics of that time –
its plurality and variety.”
Another contentious issue is
portamento, in which the Spencer Dyke Quartet are apparently indulgent. The
First Piano Quartet appeared on a period performance recording in 2016, from
the Australian ensemble Ironwood (ABC 481 4686). They take portamento to
extremes, and the results are uncomfortably queezy, whatever the historical veracity.
The Primrose Quartet apply portamento too, but it’s more reserved, as Thwaites
writes, “... an unashamedly modern players’ perspective on the refined
portamenti of Arnold Rosé, concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic from 1881
(and rumoured to be an earlier owner of Susanne Stanzeleit’s Guadagnini
violin).” Piano arpeggiation—a subject of much discussion in 19th-century
period practice—is rare on the NGS recording, as it is here. More
interestingly, the parts occasionally move out of alignment in that early
recording, a practice that the Primrose Quartet aims to follow. So we often
hear a piano chord slightly before the sustained bloom of the string trio, but
the effect is made more palatable by the generally mellow attack from each of
the pianos.
The Ehrbar Saal gives a warm
resonance to the sound, and perhaps more body to the pianos than they might
otherwise achieve. In line with its scholarly credentials, the recording is
made in what is described as “Natural Sound.” It isn’t clear exactly what that
means—some sort of binaural approach perhaps?—but the result is a marked separation
of the string trio in the stereo array, with the cello dominating the right
speaker. The pianos are well recorded though, without any of the mechanics
impinging on the sound.
This review appears in Fanfare Magazine issue 42:6.
This review appears in Fanfare Magazine issue 42:6.
