Once Again, CD and DVD Reviews 

Maybe I should elaborate on, and clarify, my previous comments on the subject of serious (“classical”) music vs. popular music.

Not all classical music is serious, nor is all serious music good. For example, neither Rossini’s William Tell overture nor Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz is serious, but both are classical and both are good. On the other hand, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture is both classical and serious but not very good. Popular music can also be “classical,” in the sense of a “classic,” such as Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust, for example, which is a popular song that is not a whit inferior to a Schubert Lied. I have the greatest respect for truly good popular music. I think Louis Armstrong, Nat “King” Cole, and Hank Williams were stupendous, just as I think that Aerosmith, Eminem, and Britney Spears are garbage. It is unfortunate that the youngest generation’s exposure to popular music is currently dominated by garbage, but that can change. (All it would take is the emergence of a new really gifted group, such as the Beatles in the ’60s, and its rise to mega-success.) Serious music also went through a wrong-headed, sterile phase in the second half of the twentieth century, and now the tide seems to be turning.

DVD from BBC Opus Arte

“Eroica: The day that changed music forever,” a film featuring Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 55, with Ian Hart as Beethoven and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, conductor. OA 0908 D (2004).

This is not Music Appreciation 101. This is a highly original and thoroughly fascinating movie about the first public performance of the Eroica—not much more than a polished rehearsal—at the palace of Prince Lobkowitz in Vienna in 1804. The prince and his wife, Beethoven, his pupil Ferdinand Ries, and a number of distinguished guests come and go during the performance, sometimes chatting, sometimes listening, Beethoven sometimes conducting and sometimes just sitting or temporarily leaving the room—it’s no big deal, merely the greatest piece of music composed up to that time casually happening in the room. The most poignant moment is the arrival of Haydn between the scherzo and the last movement, who muses that music will never be the same again. It’s all very believable. The cast consists of actors, but the musicians are played by the actual members of Gardiner’s orchestra in period costume. An uninterrupted performance of the entire symphony follows the movie. The playing is absolutely wonderful throughout, much better than I am sure it was in 1804, with an authentic period sound and metrics, most refreshing after all the familiar modern performances. The available audio formats are stereo and DTS 5.1, the latter one of the finest examples of surround sound I’ve heard. I unhesitatingly recommend this DVD to all music lovers.

DVD from Opus Arte

Richard Wagner: Parsifal. Christopher Ventris, Parsifal; Waltraud Meier, Kundry; Matti Salminen, Gurnemanz; Thomas Hampson, Amfortas; Tom Fox, Klingsor. Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Festspielchor Baden-Baden, Kent Nagano, conductor. OA 0915 D (3 DVDs, recorded 2004, issued 2005).

This time the Festspielhaus of Baden-Baden equals or surpasses the Festspielhaus of Bayreuth. I cannot imagine a better-sung present-day production of Parsifal, even in the latter holy of holies. Not that Ventris is a Melchior or Meier a Flagstad or Nagano a Toscanini, but I said present-day. And then there is Matti Salminen, pushing 60 and as good as ever, whose name I can’t trump with an older, historical one; indeed, he is as fine a Gurnemanz as I can imagine, now or long ago or in the future. He almost carries the opera single-handed in his huge role as narrator/factotum. Parsifal is a strange beast; parts of it, such as the Prelude and the Good Friday Spell, represent Wagner at his transcendental greatest, while some passages are deadly bores, as if the old man had run out of ideas in his terminal work. Staunch Wagnerians like me are able to sit through the whole thing with rapt attention, but I don’t expect all music lovers to be as hardcore. Kent Nagano’s conducting is highly focused and controlled; sometimes I wished the orchestra were louder, drowning out the singers, but that’s probably just my bad taste. Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s staging is a bit too bare-bones for my taste; some reviewers liked it but I prefer 19th-century mise-en-scène in Wagner. The DTS 5.1 soundtrack is excellent but not quite as juicy and immediate as in the Beethoven DVD above.

CD from Channel Classics

Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 6 in A Minor. Budapest Festival Orchestra, Iván Fischer, conductor. CCS SA 22905 (2005).

At this point, every Mahler symphony has so many world-class recordings that another very good one, such as this CD, can’t make much of a dent. Fischer emphasizes the long lyrical line of Mahler’s phrases, making the main themes extremely coherent and memorable. No recording, however, can do justice to Mahler’s orchestration; you have to hear the music live in a good hall. I say that despite the fact that this is an exceptionally fine recording in a state-of-the-art new concert hall. The latter is perhaps the main reason for this review because I am something of a Hungarian chauvinist and the recently built National Concert Hall in the Palace of the Arts in Budapest is a remarkable achievement for a small country. Among other things, the hall’s reverberation time is tunable from 1 second to 4 seconds, an amazingly wide range. It’s truly a 21st-century music venue with sci-fi-like technology. Even so, the CD sounds merely like a wonderful recording, not like the life-size Mahler Sixth I recently heard in Verizon Hall, played by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eschenbach. In Mahler’s case “the medium is the message”—the live sound of the orchestra is an essential element of the aesthetic content and impact of the music. A recording, no matter how good, is an inadequate substitute, whereas in the case of, say, a Beethoven quartet it’s almost as satisfying as a live performance. Anyway, Fischer’s performance is right up there with the best Mahler Sixths, and both the stereo and multichannel layers of the SACD are flawless. (The multichannel encoding is 5.0.)

CD from Chesky Records

David Chesky: “Area 31.” Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (Tom Chiu, violin); Poem No. 9: The Girl from Guatemala (Wonjung Kim, soprano); Concerto for Flute and Orchestra (Jeffrey Khaner, flute). Area 31 ensemble, Anthony Aibel, conductor. SACD288 (2005).

David Chesky is one of the very few contemporary composers (Jennifer Higdon is another) whose music is comprehensible on first hearing. By comprehensible I mean that a listener who is not a professor of music theory still knows what’s going on. That’s not the same thing as saying that the music is good, but in David Chesky’s case it is. The violin concerto is a highly eclectic, rhythm-driven work, almost a percussion display piece with violin obbligato, rising to a particularly exciting, frenzied climax at the end of the first movement. Jazz and Latin American influences abound—and even Bach, in the third movement, which appears to be a takeoff on Brandenburg No. 3. The violin part is extremely virtuosic and very well played by Tom Chiu, who is actually more of a jazz musician than a classical violinist. The short piece for soprano is a flamenco-flavored setting of a 19th-century Cuban poem, which might as well have been sung in the original Spanish instead of an English translation, since I couldn’t make out the words anyway. The singing is otherwise accomplished and the lightly orchestrated accompaniment quite imaginative. The flute concerto is a lightweight piece in comparison with the violin concerto; it is more impressionistic, with flamenco (lots of handclapping), tango, and bossa nova flavoring. Its main attraction is the absolutely brilliant flute playing of Jeffrey Khaner, principal flutist of the Philadelphia Orchestra. All in all, everything here is immediately enjoyable, hip, well-crafted, beautifully orchestrated modern music. What’s more, the recording by the composer’s own record company is superb, as usual, on both the stereo and multichannel layers. The latter is actually 4.0 (rather than 5.1) encoded, but that suits the music.

CDs from EMI

Olivier Messiaen: Éclairs sur l’Au-delà… Berliner Philharmoniker, Sir Simon Rattle, conductor. 5 57788 2 (2004).

This is the piece some concertgoers walk out on and others stay to worship. I’m somewhere in between. If you expect long, coherent Brahmsian phrases, you’ll be frustrated. If you allow your ears to tune in to the abrupt splashes of gorgeous orchestral color, the bird calls, the shifting rhythms, the sudden pregnant silences, you may end up finding the music beautiful—at least occasionally beautiful. As far as Messiaen’s religious faith and mysticism are concerned, I feel they have more to do with his titles (“Apparition du Christ glorieux,” “Les Sept Anges aux sept trompettes,” “Et Dieu essuira tout larme de leurs yeux…,” etc.) than with the audible content of his music. Even Bach’s great choral works are religious because of the words, not the music; with a secular text the music would be equally plausible. In Éclairs I hear drumbeats, bird calls, string tremolos, etc., not Jesus Christ. I hold with Stravinsky that music doesn’t “express” anything; it isn’t “about” anything but itself. Simon Rattle has stated in an interview that Éclairs, Messiaen’s farewell composition at the end of his long life, is “without a doubt one of the greatest works of the century.” He knows a hell of lot more about music than I do, so I’ll have to accept his dictum but so far I haven’t been deeply moved by this work. The Berlin orchestra plays magnificently, and the stereo recording by Arne Akselberg is very fine, wonderfully detailed, better than what others have done in the Philharmonie. By the way, Éclairs sur l’Au-delà means something like “Glimpses of the Beyond” (nothing to do with chocolate-covered pastry filled with whipped cream).

Franz Schubert: Die schöne Müllerin, D 795. Ian Bostridge, tenor; Mitsuko Uchida, piano. 5 57827 2 (recorded 2003, issued 2005).

Franz Schubert: Winterreise, D 911. Ian Bostridge, tenor; Leif Ove Andsnes, piano. 5 57790 2 (2004).

Few critics would dispute that Schubert was the greatest composer of Lieder (German art songs) of the 19th century. Even fewer would dispute that Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise are his masterpieces in that genre. Some would dispute, but many would not, that Ian Bostridge is one of the greatest Lieder singers of our time. Bostridge sings these two long song cycles (each a full-length CD) perhaps more idiosyncratically than the great German singers of the grand tradition, sometimes emphasizing the words more than the musical line, but he certainly communicates the dramatic essence of each song. Being a tenor, he sings all songs in their original key, not transposed, for maximum authenticity. His German diction is superb, which is more than one can say about most English and American singers. As for the wonderfully imaginative piano accompaniments, Mitsuko Uchida and Leif Ove Andsnes are both great artists and play the piano parts with the utmost sensitivity. The recordings are in two different venues but by the same producer/engineer team; in both instances the voice/piano balance and the acoustic perspective are just right. Dozens and dozens of great interpreters have recorded these works, but these two CDs are definitely competitive.

Richard Wagner: Tristan und Isolde. Placido Domingo, Tristan; Nina Stemme, Isolde; Mihoko Fujimura, Brangäne; René Pape, König Marke; Olaf Bär, Kurwenal. Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; the Royal Opera Chorus, Covent Garden; Antonio Pappano, conductor. 5 58006 2 (3 CDs & 1 DVD, 2005).

There has never been a more influential work in the history of music than Tristan und Isolde. For a hundred years, or more, after its premiere in 1865 composers have imitated its unrelieved chromaticism, a musical idiom that was totally new with Wagner, and even movie music is nothing but bowdlerized Tristan when it tries to be romantic or climactic. Wagner’s switch, in the middle of composing the Ring, to total chromaticism, followed by the reverse switch to the apotheosis of the diatonic scale in Meistersinger, is the most astonishing example of stylistic versatility in classical music. What is also remarkable is that he never went back to the Tristan idiom after resuming work on the Ring. This new recording has been referred to as “Domingo’s Tristan,” as if the 65-year old (just under 64 at the time of recording) superstar’s durability were the main feature. Actually, Domingo never sang the role in any opera house; the recording is a careful editing job made over a period of a month and a half. (It is probably the last million-dollar recording project by any classical label under the current depressed conditions.) Domingo is a wonderful musician, and his unfailingly intelligent, lyrical, expressive singing can still sound beautiful at middle volume. In the ranting and raving passages of Act 3, however, the strain begins to show, and not just a little. He is not a true Heldentenor; at full volume there remain no reserves of strength. That he is still a very plausible Tristan at his age is in itself a phenomenon. The young Swedish soprano Nina Stemme is exactly the opposite case; her voice is absolutely solid and unstrained from top to bottom and she can belt it out at triple fortissimo, but in the Liebestod the lack of a chesty bottom foundation makes her voice less than thrilling (in the Flagstad or Traubel or Nilsson sense). The greatest voice in the cast is actually that of René Pape; when he launches into King Marke’s second-act monologue one has the feeling that we are finally in a bigtime opera house. The orchestral playing by the Covent Garden band is first-rate, no reservations, and Pappano’s conducting is very alert, although the great preludes to Act 1 and Act 3 could both go a little faster. The stereo recording is exceptionally fine, very transparent with excellent structural detail; the DTS 5.1 soundtrack of the DVD is strictly routine, probably an afterthought, with sonically congealed climaxes. The video is the full text of the libretto on the screen. Overall I would grade this effort as a high B+, maybe even an A–. It is not quite on the level of the 1952 mono recording in the EMI catalog, with Furtwängler, Suthaus, and Flagstad.

CD from Harmonia Mundi

Anton Bruckner: Symphony No. 7 in E Major. Orchestre des Champs-Elysées, Philippe Herreweghe, conductor. HMC 901857 (2004).

I don’t pretend to be a highly qualified Brucknerian, but to my ears this is a revelatory performance. Herreweghe is famous for his period-practice Bach, but period-practice Bruckner with 19th-century winds and gut strings is equally illuminating. Instead of the somewhat constipated grandiosity of the standard renditions, what emerges here is a totally transparent, structurally coherent, sometimes lyrical, sometimes heroic, balanced composition, perhaps smaller in scale than one is used to but much more convincing and appealing—Bruckner renascent! Herreweghe’s rather brisk tempi are part of the reason—how some of the usual performances drag!—but the main ingredient is the textural clarity. The climaxes are still as powerful as can be, no problemo. This may not be everybody’s cup of Brucknerian tea but I am sold. The stereo recording is gorgeous, as transparent in structure and texture as the performance itself.

CD from Sony Classical

Antonín Dvorák: Concerto for Cello & Orchestra in B Minor, Op. 104 (“The Secrets of Dvorák’s Cello Concerto”); “Lasst mich allein,” Op. 82, No. 1; Zigeunerlieder, Op. 55. Stephen Foster: “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” & “Wilt Thou Be Gone, Love?” Jan Vogler, cello; New York Philharmonic, David Robertson, conductor; Angelika Kirchschlager, mezzo-soprano; Helmut Deutsch, piano. 82876737162 (2004–2005).

The “editorial” theme of this release seems to be musicologist Michael Beckerman’s theory of a link between Dvorák’s cello concerto and his song “Lasst mich allein,” as well as Stephen Foster’s influence on the concerto, the emotional connection to the life and death of Dvorák’s sister-in-law Josefina Kounicova, and so forth. I don’t particularly care about any of that stuff; what I care about is the jolt I got from this CD when I first played it. This is the best recording of the Dvorák cello concerto I have ever heard! I may be influenced by the irresistibly gorgeous music that each time makes the last performance one has heard seem the best, but I don’t think so. Both Jan Vogler and David Robertson are up-and-coming artists of some prominence, but I wouldn’t have expected them to leave the competition in the dust—which is what they do (in my opinion). Robertson inspires the splendid New York Philharmonic to play this warhorse like a world premiere, setting a fairly brisk pace that sweeps the music relentlessly and unfussily along, and Vogler plays like an angel, with passion, great musicality, and wonderful tone. I think the few critics who have already reviewed this performance, all of them more or less favorably, were much too cautious. I was moved to tears. The stereo recording by a German team in New York’s dreadful Avery Fisher Hall is thoroughly transparent and structurally detailed, as if the acoustical difficulties did not exist. After the concerto, Angelika Kirchschlager’s beautiful singing of the songs (to prove Beckerman’s theories) is mere icing on the cake.

CDs from Water Lily Acoustics

Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp Minor. Saint Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, Yuri Temirkanov, conductor. WLA-WS-76-SACD (recorded 2003, issued 2005).

Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony No. 7 in C Major, Op. 60 (“Leningrad”). Saint Petersburg Academic Symphony Orchestra, Alexander Dmitriev, conductor. WLA-WS-77-SACD (recorded 2003, issued 2005).

Yevgeny Svetlanov: Piano Concerto in C Minor.* Alexander Skryabin: Symphony No. 3 (“The Divine Poem”). *Vladimir Ovchinnikov, piano; Saint Petersburg Academic Symphony Orchestra, Alexander Dmitriev, conductor. WLA-WS-75-SACD (recorded 2003, issued 2005).

Recording engineer Kavichandran Alexander (“Kavi”) is a rock-ribbed purist. I know him, I respect him, and I understand him. He believes in the purity, and therefore the supremacy, of the classic Blumlein microphone array for all recording purposes. Nothing can shake his faith. If a Blumlein recording is great, it’s only natural. If it isn’t, it’s still not Kavi’s fault because the superiority of the Blumlein technique remains indisputable. Contrast this with the philosophy of the great (and recently retired) John Eargle, who always said that a recordist must be free of preconceived technical notions and totally opportunistic, using all kinds of microphones, in small and large numbers, in all kinds of configurations and deployments depending on the venue, as long as the resulting sound is superior. These live DSD recordings in the Great Hall of the Saint Petersburg Philharmonia, which Kavi had been dreaming for long years to make, illustrate the point—Blumlein purism has its pluses and minuses.

To restrict ourselves for the moment to the basic stereo CD layers, the sound is 100% honest—no gimmicks, no highlighting, no compression, no EQ, no processing of any kind. There is a very good sense of the size of the hall (at least through my Linkwitz Lab “Orion” speakers); directional cues are very accurate; front-to-back information is clear; and the dynamic range is huge. The latter is actually a problem; since full-scale 0 dB is reached only occasionally, at the very loudest moments, setting your listening volume to tolerability on those few passages makes most of the music too low in level. Some judicious raising of the dynamic floor and lowering of the ceiling, as practiced in the best big-label recordings, actually results in a more listenable product, unless the compression is excessive. And that’s not even the biggest problem. To quote John Eargle’s The Microphone Book (2nd edition, Focal Press, 2004) on the subject of Blumlein performance, “a wide array of performers may require the microphone pair to be placed too far from the performers for the desired degree of presence.” That’s the main weakness of these otherwise splendid recordings. Everything is a bit too much over there, rather than here. The Svetlanov/Skryabin disc is actually better in this regard than the other two; it was recorded with a modified Blumlein pair (parallel figure-8 configuration) as against the classic Blumlein array (crossed figure-8s) used in the Mahler and Shostakovich.

As for the SACD layers, they are completely artificial in the Mahler and Shostakovich. Only two channels existed on the master; they were converted to 5.0 channels through a mathematical algorithm (the third disc remained 2-channel). I found the resulting sound to be less open and less finely detailed, as well as narrower in lateral spread, than the original stereo versions. Furthermore, the SACD layers had frequent dropouts on my copies—I hope only on mine. I wish these recordings had remained pure stereo releases.

When it comes to the musical performances, I focused almost exclusively on the Mahler, since I find the Shostakovich Seventh to be insufferably banal and tedious, the weakest by far of his 15 symphonies, and the other Russian compositions are new to me. (Toscanini conducted the “Leningrad” symphony during World War II out of political solidarity with the Russian allies, and when his son played for him a recording of it 15 years later, he asked, “Did I play that?” and being told “Yes,” he remarked, “I must have been crazy.”) The Saint Petersburg Philharmonic isn’t your ideal Mahler orchestra; the strings are rather lusterless (I think they use little or no vibrato) and the brasses are far from golden. The opening trumpet solo of the Mahler Fifth is played with very poor tone; I have heard better trumpet playing from a high-school band, although it improves later on. I don’t think the orchestra is as good today as it was under Mravinsky, whose era ended in 1982. (Check out the 1960 Mravinsky recording, made in London for the Deutsche Grammophon label, of the last three Tchaikovsky symphonies—sensational!) Temirkanov conducts the Mahler in a somewhat flabby and boring fashion; it is still a well-shaped performance overall but not really competitive with all the great recordings over the years, from Bruno Walter (1947) to Simon Rattle (2002). The main importance of this disc—of all three discs, for that matter—is the documentation of a recording technique which has almost vanished from the scene but whose virtues should not be forgotten.

---Peter Aczel

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