The Do-Everything Machine

L'orgue à quatre visages: Jean-Christophe Geiser at the Op. 120 Fisk organ (2003) of Lausanne Cathedral, Switzerland
Loft Records, ORG-7210

Vincent Lübeck: Praeludium in d minor
Pierre Du Mage: Suite der 1er ton
Franz Liszt: Evocation a la Chapelle Sixtine
Maurice Duruflé: Suite pour orgue, Op. 5

***

Here's the first of a couple recent recordings of organs from my favorite American shop, CB Fisk of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Their Op. 120 for Lausanne Cathedral in Switzerland is one of the first major pipe organs from America to be installed in a classic European cathedral. And it's a major work from the Fisk firm, both in size and location and in the ambition of its design. (An article about the organ from the NYT can be found here.)

In the liner notes for this CD, Wolfram Adolph writes:

To perform a wide range of repertoire in concerts and in the protestant services in the cathedral, the new organ contains four different musical style options in one great cathedral organ: the French classic style of Francois-Henri Cliquot, north German sounds of the polyphonic Hanseatic aesthetics of the 17th and 18th centuries, typical French symphonic colors after Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (1811-1899) and German romantic stops in the style of Friedrich Ladegast.

So this instrument is effectively four disparate organs in one case, which is a fascinating idea. Fisk was one of the earliest firms in this country to embrace tracker action and non-equal temperaments. They have built a whole host of beautiful and artistic instruments over the years, covering a pretty wide philosophical range, from small organs tuned to quarter-comma meantone, to the snarling behemoth in Dallas's Meyerson Symphony Center. In the last decade they built a fabulous instrument for Oberlin college that sought to copy the construction and tonal design of the great 19th Century French organ builder, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. This organ for Lausanne Cathedral continues in this daring and experimental vein.

Based on this recording, this organ is another triumph for Fisk. The instrument, and Lausanne Cathedral organist Jean-Christophe Geiser, acquit themselves beautifully in all this repertoire, and I'm eager to hear more of the instrument. I love these experiments, where modern instruments are, to varying degrees, built to the standards and practices of other eras--an expensive and painstaking undertaking with a large pipe organ. But I must also confess to a bit of schizophrenia about this particular instrument and particularly its four-in-one mission. Much as I love the idea of it, I'm not convinced that this experiment contributes much to the organ's success. A bit of a digression might help me make my point.

I had similar feelings about Fisk's lovely organ at Oberlin College (their Op. 116). It's a really magnificent musical instrument, though not, near as I can tell, because it purports to be what Cavaillé-Coll might have built. The instrument has a French accent, but I'd never mistake it for a C-C. Some of this, as I said in that review, is surely the acoustic--Finney Chapel is very dry. But a big part of the reason I'm not fooled is (forgive me for repeating myself) the relative smoothness of the Fisk's voicing compared to the big C-Cs in, say, St. Ouen and St. Sulpice. C-C's large instruments have a shocking snarl at tutti, almost a harshness, which comes from their very brash reeds and shrill upperwork. These elements incongruously contribute to the organ's glorious sound. The Oberlin Fisk makes plenty of volume, but with these rough edges smoothed away the organ sounds closer to their own Meyerson instrument in Dallas than the Cavaillé-Colls they purport to copy. It's less a function of the subtle voicing of stops and more of the large-scale characteristics of how C-C made power, I think.

Fisk's goal with the Lausanne instrument of doing justice to four different styles is impossible for me to judge as I might judge a Cavaillé-Coll replica (beyond saying all the pieces here sound lovely). But I just wonder what this experiment amounts to in practice, whether it's really possible to cobble together four proper instruments of these periods and have them play well together without so much massaging that nothing meaningful of the four original styles remains.

This in turn raises questions about what compromises are necessary to "faithfully" play widely-varied styles of organ music on a single instrument, and whether those compromises in the end fail to do full justice to any of the styles. It's exactly because Cavaillé-Coll (or Ernest M. Skinner, for that matter) was pursuing his own tonal ideas--and not trying to honor others'--that his instruments are so distinctive; he was less constrained by having to do justice to other musical styles, since he was deeply immersed in a vibrant, modern movement--one which we now revisit and design organs to mimic.

This Fisk at Lausanne sounds lovely and impressive and all of a piece. But none of the separate styles sound to my ear more than a hint or suggestion. Like the Finney Chapel organ, this is an impressive instrument in its own right, but I don't think it owes its success to its stylistic experiment. Still, success is success, and I give all credit to the Fisk shop for taking a challenge like this on and making a top-shelf run at it.

A Treat From YouTube

Olivier Latry is the titular organist of Notre Dame in Paris, arguably the single most prestigious organ post in the world. In addition to these duties, he also is professor of organ at the Conservatoire du Paris and is in great demand as a concert artist. Still a young man--he was appointed to the Conservatoire post at age 21 and his Notre Dame post at 23--he is living proof that the incredible legacy of Franck and Widor and Vierne and Dupré and Duruflé and Cochereau is alive and well. (In this he is joined by Philippe Lefebvre and Daniel Roth and Sophie-Veronique Cauchefer-Choplin and Vincent Warnier and Thierry Escaich and Jean Guillou and Yves Castagnet and Francois-Henri Houbart and others.)

This video treats us, courtesy of JAV Records, to Mr. Latry improvising at the console in October, 2007. Improvisation is a big part of the tradition of being an organist in France, and in this video we hear the fabulous harmonic language which is such a big part of the legacy of this school (and the related aesthetics of Debussy and Ravel).

I also love how utterly adept he is at manipulating what is a very large and complicated instrument. (I wonder what it must be like to be this good at anything in life.)



(An aside: this is not Cavaillé-Coll's original console, and my understanding is that the new console is computer-controlled and allows any stop on the organ to be played from any keyboard. So though Latry doesn't use but two or three keyboards here, he is likely making use of more of the organ's resources than it appears.)

The Face-Off

The Great Contest: Bach, Scarlatti, and Handel
David Yearsley plays the Op. 85 Fisk organ (1984) at Memorial Church, Stanford University
Loft Records LRCD-1028; 2002

***

This is an intriguing concept: a CD that mimics the dream concert of the 18th Century, a meeting between Domenico Scarlatti, George Frideric Handel and J.S. Bach. All were born in 1685 and died in the 1750s, and the three together represented the state of musical and keyboard arts of the day (by any objective measure, the year 1685 must count as one of music history's most momentous). Scarlatti and Handel did meet, I believe, and held a kind of contest; as I recall, the "decision" was said to go to Handel for the organ and Scarlatti for the keyboard. Very judicious. But neither man ever met Bach in person. This CD gives us a taste of what such a meeting might have sounded like. Or at least it stacks their compositions up side-by-side, even if we can't know how each man's performances might have illuminated his own works.

Scarlatti's sonatas are not often heard on organ, being conceived mostly for the harpsichord (though pianists often play them). They don't suffer at the organ, certainly, though the instrument puts Mr. Scarlatti at a bit of a disadvantage since this is not how we expect to hear his works. And it rather makes inevitable a direct comparison with Handel and Bach, both of whose works are much more commonly heard on the organ. But none of these three composers is painting with the same brush as the others, and hearing Scarlatti on the organ sandwiched by the other two kind of shines the wrong type of light on him.

And in this setting the great Handel sounds rather like a transitional figure toward the Next Big Thing. A bit more expansive, perhaps, than Mr. Scarlatti, and with his toe dipping in the galant. Handel has a wonderful fluidity, a pastoral beauty which is so often heard in his string writing. It's just a different aesthetic than Bach and Scarlatti.

But Bach is the party crasher here. That at any rate is how this little experiment sounds to me: Scarlatti and Handel give us delightful and engaging music, and Bach makes everyone else sound almost like a warmup act. To my ear he just overshadows everybody with his singular and towering musical genius. Part of it is a question of complexity, I guess. Handel's sounds are sparser--less dense, less wrought with detail--and Scarlatti seems at home with the small, finite statement. He is remarkably inventive--over 550 keyboard sonatas!--but it all exists within a very narrow sphere. But in Bach we find something altogether more expansive and beyond easy categorizing. His Duetto No. 1 BWV 802 from the Clavierübung III (an uncharacteristically spare piece for Bach) sounds like it might have come from Scarlatti's pen, but by the time we get a chorale prelude (Allein Gott in der Höh' sei Ehr', BWV 676) one senses the other two would have looked on in stunned awe. His Toccata, Adagio and Fugue (BWV 564) is in its own league entirely. He's like a helicopter landing in the town square in the 1700s.

David Yearsley teaches musicology and performance at Cornell University. He has chosen for this recording the very felicitous 1984 Fisk organ at Stanford University, a vibrant and thrilling-sounding instrument that puts its tones before us almost like a 3-D hologram. His tempi are lively and the performances felicitous and sprightly. (I see, as an aside, that Dr. Yearsley writes a regular column for the online political magazine Counterpunch. The two I happened to stumble upon seemed like thinly-veiled Obama-hatred pieces, though the rest seem to be writing about more general musical matters. In any case, the playing on our present disc is delightful.)

As is so often the case, this Fisk instrument also merits a bit of mention. Here's another instrument from the hallowed Gloucester shops that plays with temperament (this time a bit like Martin Pasi's great Op. 14 instrument from 2003 in the Cathedral of St. Cecilia in Omaha). From the Fisk website:

By means of five additional pipes in every octave, a large lever can switch the Werk, Ruckpositive, Seitenwerk, and Pedal divisions from a Renaissance fifth-comma meantone to a well-tempered tuning like those J. S. Bach knew. The Brustpositive and the Brustpedalia are fixed in meantone and offer two sub-semitones, or split sharps, per octave, D sharp/E flat and G sharp/A flat.

I love these experiments, first for their glorious sound and second for the mechanical daring and sheer, whimsical expense. It says something good about our species that we can prioritize a device like this one. No A/B comparison between temperaments is on offer on this disc, but the instrument is noticeably not equally-tempered.

The sound from Loft is superb.

A Channeling

Mark Knopfler
Get Lucky
Mercury Records
2009

***

At some point enthusiasm crosses the line into something unseemly, into almost a fetish. I feel sheepishly as though I've crossed this line with Mark Knopfler, having put up several gushing reviews of his last few albums. He released a new album a couple months ago, so one can predict what's coming from my end. (Because I don't review much of this kind of music, I've become a bit like the dental hygienist who keeps picking at the same spot over and over until she makes a problem where you didn't think you had one: Mark Knopfler again.)

But something about his approach just resonates with me; he achieves perfection in this particular musical style. Though this genre is not my musical bread and butter, he confirms to me that a high enough degree of competence or genius or inspiration simply overrides the mundanities and generalizations of genre; talent becomes its own reward, its own justification.

On his latest release, Get Lucky, he remains firmly in the same nest he has feathered all along--at least since I've been paying attention, that of acoustic folk-rock with essential instrumentation and a few well-chosen spices. These last four solo albums--The Ragpicker's Dream, Shangri-La, Kill to Get Crimson and Get Lucky--all sound as though they might have been recorded in the same recording session (with the next earlier album, Sailing to Philadelphia not far off this path). The differences between these releases are subtle, both in thematic material and in presentation. But that's quite all right; his is a mature artistry, and he's concerned to do what he does with exquisite attention to detail and not with trying a splash in someone else's pool.

Knopfler is renowned as a guitarist, of course, from his Dire Straits days and onward. He has perfected a distinct clawhammer / fingerpicking style, a whole-instrument approach that enables him to play pretty much anything. On these solo albums, his guitar has a quietly authoritative presence, his artistry not needing too much of the spotlight to make itself known. He alternates between quietly contrapuntal backgrounds and these wonderfully lyrical melodic treatments, both electric and acoustic--it makes one want to take up the instrument, his effortlessness almost convincing you that playing a guitar just couldn't be that hard. He is not a virtuoso as a singer, with a grumbling hang-dog voice that's more mumble than song; but it's the perfect instrument for telling a story, and his pitch and phrasing are delicious.

That storyteller's voice is key to the synergy of his songwriting approach: solidly affecting, singable melodies with a basic rock and roll background, and some usually haunting image / theme tying it all together. While this stylistic approach is fairly steady, the stories themselves cover a lot of ground: A man operating a locomotive, Homage to a mandolin maker, the remembrance of friends gone, the occasional love story. A nostalgia buff after my own heart, he's found a really haunting folk-sounding melody for the song Before Gas and TV, a look back at a simpler time that's just about gone from public consciousness.

Knopfler shows some of his influences here, with several songs paying musical homage to other artists of the singer / songwriter genre. One of my favorites here, So Far From the Clyde, chronicles a ship on its final journey being intentionally run aground for scrapping--a song with more than a passing resemblance to Gordon Lightfoot's The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. How deliciously he sets the tone:

They had a last supper
 the day of the beaching

She's a dead ship sailing
- skeleton crew

The galley is empty, 
the stove pots are cooling

With what's left of a stew
Her time is approaching, t
he captain moves over

The hangman steps in
to do what he's paid for

With the wind and the tide 
she goes proud ahead steaming

And he drives her hard into the shore

The title track, Get Lucky, with its lovely whistle solo, channels Simon & Garfunkel's The Boxer (my favorite song of theirs), in a gentler form, a kind of Boxer Lite.

The album's final track, Piper to the End--yet another haunting and infectious tune--begins with a statement of musical theme on whistle and violin and concertina, a theme that sounds like it's been rattling around the highlands for a couple hundred years. (I'm assuming, though I don't know, that it's not an old melody.) But it has an intriguing twist. I've had pieces of music over the years which lodged themselves in my mind in a certain way, and I later learned that I had the counting or phrasing of a section of the piece wrong--it had gelled in my mind with the wrong orientation. Later, when I see sheet music or hear a live version I realize the error of my ways and what I "know" of the song changes too. And this theme, in Piper to the End, makes its appearance seeming to be one way, when in fact the bar lines are two counts off from what one initially hears. The notes are all the same, of course, but the phrases begin and end at different points than where instinct tells us they do, kind of like an Escher painting that flops between this and that. The song lopes along with occasional odd phrasing details, hinting at something. When the drums come in about halfway through the song, a little nudge is given to emphasize these bar lines, as if they know that people aren't going to count the phrases right without a little help. It's a subtle thing, but it changes the nature of the musical statement just a bit--maybe an analogy is how a spoken phrase can change its meaning depending on what words are emphasized. Well, you can't make a song out of that detail, and maybe it's a trick my mind plays on me that others will not experience (though I expect not). And the unexpected phrases, coupled with this bone-marrow melody, make for a very satisfying experience.

And it's an example of Knopfler's genius: he is not concerned to make a bold statement or to blaze new trails or to pander to the masses. This is another quiet effort, but one which stands up to repeated listenings and continues to yield satisfying little details. And that's right up my alley.

Recommended.

A Thing to Celebrate

Now Let Us Rejoice: Organ Hymns for the Sabbath
John Longhurst, Clay Christiansen and Richard Elliott
The Schoenstein Organ at the LDS Conference Center, Salt Lake City
Intellectual Reserve, Inc.
2006

***

I'm a bit behind the power curve on this release as well.

A couple years ago on a Salt Lake City layover I made a visit to the Mormon Tabernacle to see the famous 1947 Aeolian-Skinner organ there--arguably the single most famous instrument from arguably America's most notorious organ building concern--actually, it's probably the single most famous pipe organ in America.

What I did not know was that at that moment I was a hundred yards or so from the recently-completed (in 2000) Latter Day Saints Conference Center. Wikipedia says (echoing the Mormon website) the new space is the largest theater-type auditorium ever built, seating some 21,000 people. That's over three times the capacity of the Tabernacle, a space larger than many sporting arenas. And the new space has an organ! I learned of space and organ alike while browsing the recent catalog from the Organ Historical Society.

A little further digging--especially a fascinating article by the primary Tabernacle organist John Longhurst about the design deliberations regarding the organ--reveals the difficulty involved in putting a pipe organ in a space that's much more akin to a stadium than to a church or theater. The initial planning asked questions about what kind of instrument to put in the new space, a conventional pipe organ versus an all-electric organ versus an electric / pipe hybrid or perhaps something altogether different. If we think about the electronic organs used in sport stadiums, we get a sense of the difficulty in getting a pipe organ to sound in so large a space, and to sound, well, like a church or auditorium organ. (John Longhurst's article also addresses the impracticality of specifying a concert organ, since 20,000 people are unlikely ever to come specifically to hear the organ. This is all stuff to be considered.)

After deliberating it was decided to follow the formula that had proved so successful in the smaller space, but adapted to the unique new setting: that is, a large "American Classic" style pipe organ designed to blend at appropriate power with the unassisted Tabernacle Choir, with the whole to be amplified to sound adequately throughout the space (this strikes me, actually, as one of the "hybrid" options, since what most people will hear in the space will be very much influenced by whatever public address system is employed). The necessity for amplification made it unnecessary to scale the instrument up to match the building, with the result that the new organ is about the same size as the Tabernacle organ (still a very sizeable instrument). The concern was more about colors and variety than power. The organ's "American Classic" style would be similar to the Tabernacle's famous Aeolian-Skinner, which makes for stylistic continuity with the Tabernacle. But it poses a challenge for whatever firm is chosen for the task (see Most Famous Organ in America comment above).

(The new upstart.)

(The tried-and-true.)

The Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company closed its doors in 1972 after a decade of steady decline, a victim of changing tastes. By this time the public taste had been in the thrall of the "neo-baroque" organ movement for over a decade. As so often happens in matters of public taste, we have in recent years come to recognize and celebrate some of the merits of these earlier ways of thinking about organ design and tone (and indeed there were those whose enthusiasm had never wavered). But in the early '70s the American Classic organ, the aesthetic embodied by Aeolian-Skinner and M.P. Möller and others, was distinctly out of fashion. By 2000 there weren't many firms with experience designing and building this style of organ (even if we'd begun to restore and protect the remaining American Classic organs).

Pipe organs are traditionally custom designed and built for a specific site, and an instrument like this one--a large, expensive, high-profile instrument in a very public space--would be a plum commission for any organ building firm. And so the search was on. The commission was awarded to the Schoenstein Organ Company of San Francisco for a grand instrument in the American Classic style, a modern rendition, one might say, of Aeolian-Skinner's work 60 years ago in the Tabernacle. Schoenstein has been in business since 1877, and they're a firm I've heard of but whose instruments are unfamiliar to me. But their historical aesthetic seems perfect for this application. From their website:

We are builders of organs in the Romantic-Symphonic style employing electric-pneumatic actions. Many have characterized our work as carrying forward into the 21st century the type of approach pioneered by E.M. Skinner.

(One of the organ's most intriguing features is the installation of a 32' Diaphone stop from an old organ in Los Angeles. A diaphone is a kind of reed pipe that uses a valve rather than a reed to vibrate the air column. This makes for a very strong fundamental tone with little harmonic development. Its function over a standard reed is the production of penetrating power--diaphones are used much more for foghorns nowadays than organ stops! Diaphones were never commonplace in organs and they're quite rare today--and in this installation its inclusion is evidently a step made to accommodate the immense hall into which the instrument speaks.)

Armed with all this new information, I was especially interested to dig into this recording. New installations of massive, high-profile instruments like this one or Lynn Dobson's recent instrument for Philadelphia's Kimmel Center or the now-famous Fisk at Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas are rare and special (and I'm now on a mission to find other recordings of Schoenstein instruments).

So the instrument is most interesting. But I wish we'd had a bit more substantial fare here for demonstration purposes. The disc is mostly of contemporary pieces, almost all short bits that seem suitable for some part of an actual church service (I guess they've given us fair warning: Hymns for the Sabbath). While a couple are a mite intriguing--Vaughan Williams' Prelude on the Welsh hymn tune Rhosymedre, Walford Davies' Solemn Melody, two Bach arrangements--most are a kind of mundane celebration of tonality, straightforwardly tuneful and harmonically unadventurous. Not that there isn't a place for this: these selections might be just what will play in the sanctuary (I imagine the congregation en masse might have little patience for, say, César Franck's Priere, to say nothing of Messiaen's Dieu Parmi Nous). But it's hard for me to generate much enthusiasm for a program seemingly chosen for a congregation's attention span. The organ's rich literature contains so very much more than this, and it would seem trivially easy to assemble a recital of substantial pieces to satisfy the mind as well as demonstrate the instrument. Even the two Bach pieces here are "arrangements," a kind of dumbed-down Wal-Mart version of Bach (the idea of someone "improving" on Bach seems like a very good exemplar of real sacrilege).

I'd look forward to more from this instrument, but as alluded to above there may be little opportunity for concertizing on it. Perhaps it will find a recording life (despite the immense space having almost no acoustic, and the magnificent Tabernacle instrument a stone's throw away).

A Glenn Gould Repost

This is a repost from my other (non-music) blog. I'm thinking lately that these music-related posts should be moved over here; so a bit of housekeeping.

***

(A young Gould, with the original chair but before he took to raising the piano on blocks.)

I've been thinking the last few days about the late Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (the Wikipedia summary is excellent). (I also seem to have forgotten that I started this topic a year ago in this post.)

For those not familiar with his story, he is one of history's most gifted and eccentric musicians, someone who burst onto the scene in 1955 with a revelatory recording of J. S. Bach's Goldberg Variations. He was 23 years old at the time. He was immediately hailed as a phenom and the Goldberg recording took off in a fashion then unheard-of for a classical release. An otherwise obscure work suddenly became mainstream, and Glenn Gould became a household name overnight. His manner of playing was, and remains, immediately recognizable: dry and dynamically-constrained (especially his Bach) with a kind of spare, puritan beauty, and with an astounding faculty for counterpoint. His was a very un-luxurious--un-romantic--approach to the piano for the time (not to say unemotional), and he revolutionized how we think of Bach on a modern grand piano.

He is renowned for his almost obscenely wide-ranging and exhaustive musical mind--and we'll come back to this--but also for his eccentricities. Indeed, more people probably came to know of him by his oddities than by his brilliance with what is after all a fairly obscure musical specialty. I feel a bit like a brain-cell-killing People Magazine article talking about his tics and mannerisms and his very odd career path, but in the final analysis they are extraordinary things, unavoidable aspects of one of history's most significant and noteworthy musical personalities. They are part of his story.

One of his oddest traits was his hostility to performing in public. He came to feel there was something competitive and gladiatorial in live musical performance, and so in 1964, at age 31, he renounced playing concerts, and he kept this resolution for the rest of his life. But for the few years where he graced the concert stage, he presented quite a spectacle (which, of course, played some role in how he viewed the music-consuming public).

If his playing were not so transporting, his manner at the piano might suggest some form of mental illness. He could not keep himself from vocalizing audibly and swaying precariously while he played; he often conducted himself and others if either hand were not in use, and he could not keep still when he was not playing; his posture at the piano was most unorthodox: he insisted the piano be raised a few inches on wooden blocks, and he sat on a low, folding wooden chair with the legs chopped off, and he slouched in the chair so that his nose was not far above the keyboard (this chair, which was originally altered by Gould's father, traveled with him everywhere, eventually coming to look like something salvaged from a junk yard--very odd indeed in Carnegie Hall! When it finally fell into splinters, he was bereft and unable to play properly, and he eventually commissioned an almost identical custom-made replacement, which he used until his death); the chair would creak distractingly as he swayed around during the performances, and between the squeaking and the singing his recordings all sound as though a brilliant pianist kept a disturbed friend at his side for the performances; his appearance was almost comical, as he slouched on his child's chair with his legs crossed and pedaled in his stocking feet, often with the wrong foot--his clothing was ill-fitting and often dirty and unkempt, and he played at least one concert with mismatched shoes; he was a legendary hypochondriac, traveling everywhere with a huge cache of pills and wearing a heavy topcoat and hat and scarf and mittens even in the hottest weather.



This list can go on and on, but it takes us ultimately in the wrong direction, I think. What remains to us after his death from a stroke in 1982 (at age 50) is a legacy of really extraordinary recorded performances. The recordings are of piano music, primarily, ranging from the pre-Baroque up to really compelling advocacy of contemporary composers. But he also left quite a bit of writing, and he worked in radio and television as well. One of his passions was for experimental radio quasi-documentaries (which he called "contrapuntal radio"), and he was one of the first people to see the possibilities of the new and emerging technological media.

He was particularly innovative with his own recordings. His rejection of concertizing stemmed in part from his conviction that recording was going to revolutionize how we consume music. It seemed quite reasonable to him that we might assemble our own favorite Mahler symphony by cobbling together individual movements from different recordings according to our preferences. And he was one of the first to record many takes of a work, or a part of a work, and then assemble a "perfect" version from the bits and pieces. This is, of course, commonplace today. The recording studio (or radio studio or television studio) enabled him to experiment almost without limit, and gave him absolute control over what was put forth to the public.

In the end it's his piano work which has set permanent hooks in me. So many of his recordings--of Bach particularly, but of other composers too--set the bar for the repertoire he tackled, and many remain the gold standard decades later. He had a unique aptitude for counterpoint, an ability to seemingly divide his brain into however many discreet sections as he had musical lines to play, giving each top billing. Like the mysteries of relativity, whatever you're looking at seems to be the musical idea getting fullest attention; everyone's the star! I'm sure I've not pinned it down exactly, but he simply does counterpoint better than anyone else.

Whatever his approach, whatever the admixture of composer and performer, his musical output remains absolutely compelling. To watch him playing on video is to witness complete mastery. More than mastery: his command of the piano itself makes this technical part of the process seem the least of his challenges, and I don't know that I've ever heard or seen a single incorrect note from him (I say this not because I think it should be anybody's priority, but because it shows something of how seamlessly he melded with his instrument).

He came from quite unextraordinary circumstances, showing signs of his odd, savant-like personality from a pretty young age. He rarely strayed far from Toronto, especially once he stopped concertizing, and as time went on he more and more lived a hermit's life where he interacted with people mostly over the telephone and tinkered with his technology in his own spaces. But it's hard to find fault with his approach when it yielded the results it did.

So here's a tip of the hat to one of my favorite geniuses.

***

There are a whole host of videos on YouTube with which to make one's introduction, and I'll just finish up with a few of my favorites.

Here's one that shows how he thinks and speaks about Bach. He had a pretty dense and high-flown way of talking and writing, but his understanding of his subject matter is always encyclopedic. (This is not the original video I posted, but that one is gone. Luckily, there are plenty of others.)



And here's one where he plays the first movement of Bach's Sixth Partita:

A Pianist and A Concept

Fiddling around YouTube the other day in search of a video of someone playing Chopin's Op. 60 Barcarolle, I ran across this pianist.



26-year-old (or so) Lola Astanova was born in Tashkent, in the former Soviet Union, and has lived in New York now for several years. In addition to having an apparently fail-safe technique and a coherent and independent musical vision, she seems remarkably composed for someone so young--thoughtful and eloquent and self-possessed. I love that a person so obviously gifted will bubble to the surface and be discovered. (I often wonder how many Buddy Riches spent their lives working as plumbers for lack of a little push early in life in just the right direction...)

But Ms. Astanova--the phenomenon of her--raises another issue: how she is marketing herself. Her YouTube videos lead one to her own YouTube channel, and she also has her own website and a blog. She has released her first album, which is available on iTunes and, for whatever price you'd like to pay, from her website.

This all reflects a very new career path for a classical musician. And, I have to think, one the outcome of which is quite unsure.

I spent some time listening to her videos and reading interviews and related material and so on. And Ms. Astanova is part of the ongoing experiment developing a model which will have a huge impact, when it's settled, on exactly what remains of the once-powerful classical music industry. The availability of so much information via the internet raises questions about niche marketing and fads-versus-quality concepts, all of it having implications quite above my pay grade. But just when I might expect classical music overall to struggle, this all makes me wonder whether the internet might in fact be a boon for classical music. Stay tuned.

A couple other YouTube discoveries of late are organist Chelsea Chen (pity about the unsynchronized video) and pianist Yujia Wang. (I stumbled upon Ms. Wang while looking for a video of Horowitz playing his Carmen Variations. A related video called Carmen from the Practice Room promised what looked like a highschool girl attempting a butchery of Horowitz--how often these things show up. Boy was I wrong.) In the past, I would have learned of these performers only if a major recording label had taken a shine to them and put some big dollars behind promotion of their talents. Time will tell if this newer method will result in viable careers for these young performers.

Introducing Matthais Weckmann

Complete Organ Works of Matthias Weckmann
Hans Davidsson, organ
North German baroque GOArt Organ, Örgryte Nya Kyrka, Gothenburg, Sweden
Loft Recordings, LRCD-1065-1067; 2004

***

It's Hans Davidsson week here at The Tone Bigot, apparently. When placing my order for the much anticipated final installment in Dr. Davidsson's excellent Buxtehude survey, I decided I'd also spring for the last remaining Davidsson issue I didn't have, the complete organ works of Matthias Weckmann.

Weckmann (1616-1674) is a slightly obscure member of the flowering of North Germanic organ music in the 17th and 18th Centuries, part of a group that includes Johann Pachelbel, Georg Böhm, Franz Tunder, Heinrich Scheidemann, Nikolaus Bruhns, Dietrich Buxtehude and others, all culminating in the person of J. S. Bach. This three disc set covers all of Weckmann's organ compositions, and is recorded on the same magnificent Schnitger-inspired organ on which Davidsson recorded his Buxtehude series. The instrument specification conforms to period practices as concerns pitch and tuning, employing quarter-comma meantone temperament; it's very much the right vehicle for this music. (The instrument and temperament are discussed in a bit more detail in this post.)

I'm not familiar with Weckmann's works. It surprised me to find only a single Weckmann track in my entire CD collection, and that from a disc of various composers. But the music is identifiably North Germanic, sounding very much like those among the group listed above with whom I am familiar. A large part of this school involved the varying treatments of chorale tunes, and much of Weckmann's output is of this sort. Several of Weckmann's compositions take the form of a chorale theme-and-variations, not unlike Bach's later chorale partitas. As a basis for composed works, these tunes would have of course been familiar to the congregation, and would have thus provided some context for listeners. Weckmann also composed some free works (that is, works not tied to an ecclesiastical function: Canzons, Toccatas, a Praeludium), and those are included here as well.

This group of innovators produced quite an enduring legacy, a flowering of musical ideas in the hundred and fifty or so years following the death of Sweelinck. But out of the context of this group Buxtehude and especially Bach appear like thunderbolts. If we steep ourselves a bit in the tonality of Weckmann, Bach appears shockingly modern, a powerfully penetrating musical mind who stands apart from his peers--despite utilizing much of their mechanisms and structures--almost as if from a different culture altogether. I certainly don't mean to imply that Weckmann's value as a composer is merely to provide a block on which his successors will stand, but there is a touch of the antique in Weckmann's style that makes his music (for us) as much an exercise in nostalgia as an exploration of living musical theory.




It's a very pleasant experience all the same, and Dr. Davidsson gives lively performances of these works, bringing the same sensibility and phrasing that infuses and inspires his Buxtehude. One has a sense of the importance of the correct temperament in these works; it's hard for me to imagine they would come off so well played on a 1964 Möller in Cleveland. Davidsson also employs the talents of the choir Schola Gothia to sing the actual hymn settings on which Weckmann bases several of his pieces. This is all excellently done, and the recording is marvelous (as we have come to expect from Loft).

The Cycle Is Now Complete

Buxtehude and the Schnitger Organ
Hans Davidsson
Loft Recordings, LRCD 1094-1096

***

Well, it took two years, but Loft Recordings has at last released the third and final volume of Hans Davidsson's complete survey of the organ works of Dietrich Buxtehude.

I was quite unbounded in my enthusiasm for the first two releases (here and here), and this three-disc set completes the series.

This release is again recorded on the magnificent GOArt organ at Göteborg University in Sweden. This instrument, which dates from 2000, was specifically constructed as a recreation of the state of the organ-building art for the late 17th Century, an instrument that would seem familiar and contemporary to Buxtehude himself. In addition to the appropriate acoustic--in terms of room size and material composition--the organ was designed and constructed with the limitations and preferences that existed at the time, including the use of quarter-comma meantone (of which a bit more is mentioned in my first review of this cycle, which happens to be of Volume Two). All of the glories and successes of the earlier releases are once again on display here, and this issue becomes a must-have if you've enjoyed the earlier releases.

The titles of the CDs give a subtle and specific focus to each release. The first release--Buxtehude and the Meantone Organ--emphasizes the revelation that awaits us to hear these compositions on a period-correct tuning scheme. This is no small task, as the employment of quarter-comma meantone requires a dedicated keyboard and pipe layout--indeed it fundamentally alters the entire instrument mechanically. But it's a sacrifice that yields an ample payoff, as this series readily demonstrates.

The second release--The Bach Connection--emphasizes the connection between the elder Buxtehude and the young Bach; the pieces give us a glimpse of what spurred Bach to make his famous trek to Lübeck in 1705/6. Buxtehude was the organ superstar of his day, and one can only imagine what Bach's fertile genius must have experienced in Buxtehude's presence (indeed, Bach was granted a two-week leave for the trek, but in the event was AWOL for four months. He returned to Arnstadt to find himself in very hot water indeed).

Now this third and final release shines light on the organ building genius of the time (and arguably one of the great geniuses of all time in this field), the German Arp Schnitger (1648-1719). Organ building reached a universally-acknowledged zenith under Schnitger (a convergence of music and instrument occurred at this time analogous to what was found in Paris two centuries later under Arisitide Cavaillé-Coll), and many of the principles he applied and perfected are still in use today. This GOArt organ is designed less as a direct copy of any specific Schnitger organ than as a faithful demonstration of the validity of his ideas in all facets.

I'm not quite knowledgeable enough about the pieces to know if the actual compositions were chosen for the theme of each CD release, or whether the CD titles are just intended to focus our attention on a different aspect of this convergence of talents and circumstances. But that magical convergence--of advanced and sophisticated musical language, brilliant composer and visionary organ builder--represented a rare nexus in musical history.

Here are three superb CD releases testifying to the fact.

Dream On

If Dreams Come True
Carolyn Leonhart / Wayne Escoffery
Nagel-Heyer Records
CD 2078
2007

***

I discovered the jazz singer Carolyn Leonhart when she featured as a backup singer on Steely Dan's 2000 return-to-service CD Two Against Nature--actually on the live DVD performance of the music of that CD (which is, by the way, an awesome display of no-bullshit performance of their singular musical vision. But I digress). Ms. Leonhart was one of three singers supporting the intrepid cerebro-pop duo, joined by a host of spectacular musicians including Ms. Leonhart's brother Michael on trumpet and the late saxman Cornelius Bumpus. (I'm at a loss as to how to categorize Steely Dan: they're not rock and roll; they're too cerebral for pop; they're too scripted to be called jazz--though their harmonic palette is much more jazz than pop--and the label "fusion" is already claimed for an approach that doesn't quite fit them either. Like the Coen Brothers, I guess they're their own genre. I appear to be digressing again.)

The present 2006 recording / 2007 release is a joint effort between the breezy soprano and her English-born reedman husband, Wayne Escoffery. Based in New York, the two have had successful solo careers, but this CD seems a happy exploration of the broad overlap of their individual disciplines. Not all the tracks feature both musicians, and on those that do the duties are not always equally shared. But this gives the CD a real collaborative vibe, a sense that they each helped on the others' pet projects and managed to bottle some synergistic lightning along the way.

Carolyn Leonhart's singing reminds me in its liquid smoothness of Paul Desmond's alto playing. The music--a combination of original compositions and works of others--provides a deft showcase for her voice, and she is always poised and urbane (like Steely Dan, I can't help thinking the CD has a very New York vibe).

But for me the real discovery here is her husband. Admittedly, I don't make a steady diet of jazz so I'm not well-versed on who the young talent is in this slightly retro genre. But Mr. Escoffery plays like someone who has covered considerably more miles than his 34 years would suggest. Playing alto and tenor and soprano with equal facility, he seems to have an unlimited vocabulary, alternately soaring and scorching and crooning through the tracks, all with supreme self-assurance. The duo manage some really deft interspecies harmonizing, with Mr. Escoffery sounding quite like a second voice at times. His wife returns the favor, using her voice like a horn, especially on the lovely "Not Without You." Based on this effort, I don't know that I'm convinced her talent extends quite so far as his does. She's a skilled musician with a lovely voice and a good ear; he seems quite a ball hit out of the park altogether. I was not expecting that we were making them like him anymore.

(Unfortunately, iTunes's typical practice does not deliver any liner notes with the purchase. So I've no idea who the other musicians on the recording are. But the crew is excellent.)

A Personal Recommendation

Mahler: Symphony No. 2 "Resurrection"
The Philadelphia Orchestra
Christophe Eschenbach, conductor
Simona Suturova, Soprano; Yvonne Naef, Mezzo-Soprano
Ondine Records, ODE 1134-2D

***

I caught a commercial flight Sunday night into Philadelphia, where I'm spending the week working, and I noticed a sizeable group of mostly young-ish folks (early 30s, I'd say, most of them) walking about me as I exited the airport terminal. There were a lot of them, they were casually but nicely dressed, and there seemed to be a high proportion of Asians among them. And I noticed that they all had laminated plain white numbered tags on their bags and backpacks. Hmmm. As I waited for my ride downtown, I saw a Chinese-American-looking woman standing by a doorway. She was smiling and addressing group members as they walked past her, telling them that their bus was across the drive and down to the left. She clearly recognized the other group members by sight.

I finally walked up and inquired about the large group. "Yeah, there are 130 of us," she said (I believe that was the number). "Who are you?" I asked, "What is your group?" "We're the Philadelphia Orchestra," she said. They were returning from a three week tour. She was quite busy directing, so I did not get a chance to ask where they had been, but I did mention that I was just contemplating their new Mahler Second release. "You should get it," she said. "It's awesome!" That qualifies as a bona fide endorsement in my book, if a biased one.

And so I did. And so it is, awesome.

First played in 1895, the Second Symphony is one of Mahler's most enduring and popular works. Despite its nickname, it is not a religious piece. Mahler does grapple with the larger questions of human existence, using texts from his beloved Des knaben wunderhorn to ask the Big Questions, why are we here and does anything of us live on after death, etc. But these are really contemplations on the unknowable, and have nothing to do with resurrection (unless perhaps he was referring to his career after the grudging reception of his First Symphony). "Pantheism" might be a better moniker. Whatever we call it, it is a haunting and lyrically beautiful piece, one which, like so much of Mahler, seems to take on immense challenges of musical storytelling, and it delivers a correspondingly immense payoff 90 minutes later. I always feel at the end of a Mahler symphony (at least my favorites) as though some great planetary alignment has been performed before me, and I'm left with a sense of exhaustion and peace. There's something in the act of concluding a lengthy piece of music, at least as Mahler does it, that lays a very grand vision before us with eloquence and assurance. The man definitely found the right profession.

I bought the disc on iTunes (as is my wont lately, and I guess forever more), and typically there is no documentation. Also, I'm always reminded that the recommendations one finds at the iTunes Music Store are largely without merit. (I occasionally put in my two cents' worth there, so one can look at all this several ways.) Some dweeb said the recording had "weak brass." That was the whole review, actually, those two words: weak brass. Thanks, chuckles. Of course there is no such deficit, with the brass or anything else. This is top shelf playing from one of the world's great orchestras, and the sound quality is excellent. There was also some discussion about Christophe Eschenbach's brisk tempi, but I find them exactly right. There is not undue lingering, but nothing is glossed over, and conductor & orchestra luxuriate in all the appropriate moments to ensure the message gets across.

Indeed, I'm hard pressed to find much of anything to criticize. If I would register a complaint, it might be with the choice of soloists in the singing roles. Slovak Soprano Simona Suturova (say that several times swiftly) and Swiss Mezzo-soprano Yvonne Naef are enlisted for the final movement's solo parts, joined by the Philadelphia Singers Chorale, and the soloists didn't sit particularly well with me. I must insert my standard caution here that these musicians are very likely expertly chosen and perhaps even inspired--certainly, I could not make better suggestions; indeed, I can't really think of any singing in this period / style that I even like. Stylistically, I'm sure they are in complete synchronicity with what Mahler envisioned when he wrote the piece, and most appropriate to the style of music of this period. But I find myself rankling at the wide, ceaseless, operatic vibrato. We also hear it in the solo violin work, and the affectation is so unstinting that one wonders whether the singers snore with a strong tremulant. Does it ever shut off? Does one EVER sing a steady tone? But if you're not one to cavil about a singer's vibrato generally, I feel confident you won't bat an eye here.

My previous favorite recording of this symphony has been the really splendid late '80s EMI disc of Simon Rattle with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, and I have a soft spot for Antoni Wit's unique vision with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra on Naxos. But this Philadelphia Orchestra recording will now join these at the top of the list. With a previously-recorded Mahler Sixth also in the catalog, one wonders if a full cycle is in the works.

Recommended.

Another Mix of Nationalities

French on the Flentrop
J. Melvin Butler, organ
St. Mark's Cathedral, Seattle, WA; 1965
Loft Records, LRCD-1013

Works by Franck, Tournemire, Messiaen, Clerambault, Daquin, Balbastre and de Grigny.

***

The organ building firm of Flentrop from Zaandam, Holland is one of the organ world's most venerable and important concerns. Founded in 1903 by Hendrik Flentrop, the firm became by mid-century an early specialist in the study and faithful restoration of historic instruments, with a pointed specialty in mechanical action (at a time when few modern builders, at least of large instruments, were employing this mechanism). Holland and Northern Germany had been a hotbed of progressive organ design in the 17th and 18th Centuries, advancement symbiotically reflected in the works of Dieterich Buxtehude and Bach, Georg Böhm and Samuel Scheidt, Johann Pachelbel and many others, and in our own time the Flentrop firm helped lead the way in recognizing the virtues and merits of traditional organ building.

Flentrop popped onto the radar screen in the US after the firm's 1958 installation of an instrument in the Busch-Reisinger Germanic Museum at Harvard University, a commission from Anglo-American organist E. Power Biggs who had caught the period instrument bug during his travels and recordings in Europe.



Widely recorded and featured on radio broadcasts, this instrument was a revelation for organ fans: it was a small instrument and had no orchestral imitation stops, featuring instead traditional indigenous organ sounds. Its design followed the German werkprinzip, a group of principles around which historic organs had been constructed: wind pressures were generally lower than those used in modern times, and pipes were voiced accordingly, often with great care given to how individual ranks blended together. Also, each division of the organ was located in, and its sound focused by, its own discreet case. And of course the instrument featured mechanical action--a physical link between keyboards and the pipe valves; no electricity was involved except to run the blower. And the result was very different from the player's perspective, certainly, but also for the listener: direct and intimate, the sound had a carefully-composed blend and a highly musical intensity that was all its own. It's hard to overstate the role this instrument played in reshaping public tastes in organ sound. Through these early efforts, the organ reestablished its place as an autonomous musical instrument (and not as a one-person "orchestra").

So much for background. The instrument on our current recording hails from the same shop, not quite a decade after the Harvard instrument was built, when the "neo-baroque" revolution was in full swing. The organ in St. Mark's Cathedral in Seattle was installed in 1965, and bears resemblance to the Harvard instrument on several fronts: it is also formed around werkprinzip ideas; it has similarly plain casework; it employs similarly unburnished facade pipes (as opposed to most organs, which have polished tin facades). And while the instrument is larger--as is the acoustic into which it speaks--it is voiced with the same attention and personality as the smaller Harvard instrument displays.

Biggs played the expected classic repertoire on his Flentrop, but he also stressed that the sound fundamental principles used in its design and construction would do justice to any music. And so in addition to recordings of Sweelinck and Gabrieli and lots of Bach, of course, we also got, for example, the organ sonatas of Paul Hindemith. Everything sounded brilliant: clear and lucid, and with a certain very musical intensity.

What I didn't hear from that Flentrop was anything from late-19th & 20th Century France. That organ lacked the appropriate reeds and any kind of swell box, which made for quite a stretch with this repertoire. But I always wondered what, say, a Franck Choral would sound like on that organ; not authentic, surely, but perhaps compelling just the same. The 1965 St. Mark's Flentrop has no such limitations (especially after a careful 1994 rebuild by Paul Fritts). Here we have the resources for anything in the organ repertoire. And it demonstrates, as Biggs predicted, how far a solid foundation can go in making a persuasive case. In addition to having very French-sounding reeds for solo work and in the Pedal, the voicing is clear and bright, and the mechanical action gives a crisp, immediate response.

J. Melvin Butler is a specialist in French repertoire, and gives a fabulous performance. I confess my heart flutters for the Franck and Tournemire and Messiaen here; I'm less able to connect with the French baroque, which is my own limitation. Doubtless the de Grigny and Balbastre and Daquin and Clerambault are as well-treated in Dr. Butler's hands, but I just find it hard to sink my teeth into them.

The recording, as always from Loft, is brilliant and quite silent. St. Mark's is a pretty cavernous space--well-suited to much of this repertoire--and the recording captures the space very well.

The French Up North

Charles Tournemire
12 Préludes-Poèmes for Piano, Op. 58
Lise Boucher, piano
ATMA Classique, ACD22329
(October, 2004)

***

Charles Tournemire (1870-1939) was titular organist at the Basilique Ste. Clotilde in Paris, a post previously held by César Franck. Ste Clotilde is one of the municipal church posts in Paris from which, along with the Paris Conservatoire (now the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, or CNSMDP), came a remarkable school of composers from the middle 1800s. Indeed, César Franck can be considered the Godfather of this school, a movement which produced so many luminaries: Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens, Alexandre Guilmant, Charles-Marie Widor, Louis Vierne, Gabriel Fauré, Joseph Bonnet, Theodore Dubois, Camille Saint-Saens, Maurice Duruflé, Jean Langlais, Jeanne Demessieux, Marcel Dupré, Pierre Cochereau, Philippe Lefebvre, Olivier Messiaen. What a list. And the tradition continues to the present day: Jean Guillou at St. Eustache, Daniel Roth at St. Sulpice, Naji Hakim at Sainte-Trinité, Olivier Latry at Notre Dame and Vincent Warnier holds the organ chair at St. Etienne-du-mont jointly with Thierry Escaich.

Charles Tournemire is an important figure in this movement, both in his role as titular at Ste. Clotilde from 1898 til his death in 1939, and also as an instructor at the Conservatoire. (Many of the great figures of this movement held both church posts and teaching posts at the Conservatoire. Thus did their ideas find both academic and popular audiences, a perfect setup for ideas to take root and foment and evolve.) I first learned of him as one of the teachers of my man Maurice Duruflé, who is said to have learned his harmonic language from Tournemire.

Tournemire is mostly known for his immense organ cycle L'Orgue mystique, a collection of 51 suites of five movements each, based around the church's catalog of gregorian chant tunes. Mystical and sounding highly improvisational, L'Orgue mystique is a massive work intended to supply organ music for an entire year of church services. But l'Orgue mystique is not all Tournemire wrote. In addition to other organ works, he also composed several symphonies and works for solo piano. This present release of Préludes-Poèmes for solo piano slots neatly between Debussy and early Messiaen aesthetically. His harmonies are impressionistic, and the pieces are not strongly tonal. They remind me of Debussy's Preludes, but are less descriptive and have a weaker tonal center. These sound like challenging pieces to play.

The performance is by French-Canadian pianist Lise Boucher, and is excellent. She has a sensitive touch, and also a fiery power as needed. The recording is fine. I recommend this recording to other who, like myself, revere Debussy and Ravel, but find Messiaen's later forays into birdsong a bit hard to follow. Tournemire provides us a bridge between the two.

An American in Berlin

Simone Dinnerstein
The Berlin Concert
Telarc, 80715
2008

Simone Dinnerstein is an American pianist who shot to prominence with a 2007 release of Bach's Goldberg Variations. Born and raised in New York (where she still resides), she studied under Peter Serkin at Julliard. With her first-release home run at age 35, it is not surprising to find a poised and mature artist tackling substantial pieces.

This present release is the follow up to that debut, a live recording from 11/22/07 at the Philharmonie in Berlin. In addition to her undisputed mastery of Bach, we are treated to a late Beethoven sonata, and the 12 Variations on a Bach Chorale by American composer Philip Lasser.

I discovered her on iTunes, and found a couple videos (from Telarc) on YouTube. I have to say that her manner at the keyboard (from video) is a bit off-putting to me, seeming a touch affected and theatrical in contrast to a pretty down-to-earth manner when speaking. But the proof is in the sound, and this recording shows Ms. Dinnerstein in a most flattering light.

Glenn Gould casts a long shadow, and it's difficult for me to listen to anyone's piano Bach and not compare their work with his. Gould was notorious for seeming to give equal treatment to each of Bach's contrapuntal lines, which makes for a challenge even for the listener. But there are a lot of ways to accomplish the task, and the great Bach pianists to follow Gould--András Schiff and Angela Hewitt come to mind--have found their own ways to do the works justice. Dinnerstein more readily invites comparisons to these latter two artists than to Gould. Her playing is pianistic; she does not attempt to imitate a harpsichord. But her technique is clean and confident, and one cannot but look forward to how she might tackle the Well-Tempered Clavier, say.

Philip Lasser's work is new to me, but it has the most auspicious foundation, Bach's haunting harmonisation of the Lutheran hymn Nimm von uns, Herr, du Treuer Gott, BWV 101, (a chorale tune also used by Mendelssohn in his Sixth Organ Sonata). It's clearly a contemporary work, but it stays comfortably tethered to the original tonality in a successful blend of the old and new. Dinnerstein plays it as though she wrote it herself.

The recording is fantastic. There is nary an audience sound, and the piano's image and the minute shadings and harmonic minglings are perfectly captured. Some of my favorite organ recordings are from Telarc, though they have been quiet for a while. It's great to see them back in the saddle so impressively.

The Left Hand Zig-Zags

American Beauty: A Ragtime Boquet
Gary Smart, piano
Albany Records, TROY 1029

***

Gary Smart is the Yessin Professor of Music at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, a broadly-trained musician, a versatile composer and an improviser across a stylistic range from American jazz to classical music to world music. This Albany Records release features Smart playing a number of his own piano rags interspersed with works by the classic ragtime composers of a century ago.

I've always been a wee bit frustrated at the selection of piano ragtime available in the CD era. The wonderful Dick Hyman released an authoritative full set of Scott Joplin's piano works three decades ago on a 5-LP set on RCA (I believe), but so far only a single disc of "favorites" from that effort has made its way to CD. Most every other recording I've come across since either has amateur playing or a disappointing instrument or recording, or the artist insists to some degree on treating Joplin's score as a rough template, a kind of jazz fake book for how the artists thinks the piece ought to sound. I suppose this is not nonsensical, given Joplin's position as one of the bedrocks of jazz, a genre which has a fundamental element of improvisation. Maybe my classical music background has tainted me--people don't "interpret" Chopin in this way--but I just prefer to hear what Joplin wrote rather than what each pianist has to say about what Joplin wrote.



I have no such reservations about this CD. Dr. Smart devotes about half the recording to classic rag composers--Joplin, Joseph Lamb, James Scott, Robert Hampton and Clarence Woods--and the other half to his own compositions. He does the genre great justice, demonstrating a deep sympathy and understanding. Tempi are ambling (everybody seems to want to play rags too fast, and it's a delight to hear someone slow down and find the groove), the rubato restrained, and the performances get us right inside the pieces, in the process capturing (and revisiting) a rich moment in history.

Having said that, most of Smart's own works here sound right out of that classic rag period of a hundred-plus years ago. His Two Flowers Rag takes us right back to the turn of the last century (reminding me of the soundtrack for one of my favorite movies, Robert Altman's Gosford Park) and the Peanut Butter and Laramie Rags are quite traditional. By way of contrast, his Harlequin Rag offers a more modern variation on the theme, departing from the template a bit in both structure and tonality. And the delightfully jaunty Bell Rag also sounds smartly updated (sorry).

The classic works on the album make lovely additions to one's music library. James Scott and Joseph Lamb sit with Joplin at the top of the ragtime family tree, and it takes a devotee to realize these composers' works are not from Joplin's pen. Scott's Grace and Beauty especially sounds absolutely like a Joplin rag (and is in any event a delightful composition). And we get two Joplin rags, including my single favorite of the genre, Solace: a Mexican serenade.

The piano chosen for the recording sounds a touch tired, though not to the recording's detriment. The record is not particularly sharp, but clean enough to make out detail.

Church Without Talking

Bach: Epiphany Mass
Gabrieli Consort & Players
Deutsche Grammophon ARCHIV Produktion, 457 631-2
1998

***

Looking back on the short tenure of this music blog, I find that the previously-reviewed recording by Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort & Players, The Road to Paradise, stands out as my favorite recording of the year (at least so far). The more I listen to it, the more deeply impressed I am: profoundly conceived, flawlessly executed, stunningly captured; this disc is a rare, rare treat.

Well, the ensemble have been together for quite a while--since 1982, to be exact--and I'm the one showing up late to the party. So there's quite a catalog of recordings to explore. I've chosen next the group's 1998 recreation of the musical portions of a Mass at the St. Thomaskirche in Leipzig, where Bach was employed for the last half of his life. The intent here, it appears (there are no notes with the iTunes download), is to show Bach's purpose-made music in as close to the exact context as possible to what people would have experienced at the time. And as such, we find his composed mass included among some of his organ works, a cantata and a number of other pieces by other composers. All these disparate elements would have been skilfully integrated and managed to achieve the appropriate ecclesiastical experience (as it was judged at the time).

I am, I've often said, a stickler for precision and intonation, attributes present to the point of conspicuity in their Road to Paradise CD. Not surprisingly, the current disc proves that Dr. McCreesh and company did not suddenly stumble upon their skills just prior to that most recent recording. This one reminds me of the axiom that our elders were pounding into our heads when we were kids: through discipline comes freedom. By choosing ensemble members carefully and holding everyone to very exacting standards, the work produced blossoms before us as something more than the sum of its parts. This particular setting places our Bach and his work among that of other composers, most notably Johann Pachelbel, which, with the chants and other service-related details, gives us a sense of his modernity and his perfection of craft. It's a glorious and elevating experience.

I'm less disposed to respond to the efforts at replicating the church service per se, doubtless because the ecclesiastical functions and origin of this music are lost on me. So in that sense, this effort as a concept album doesn't hit its mark for me. That element of Bach's music, his piety, has never played a role in my love of his work. I'm taken with his miraculous mind, his singular genius for purely musical logic. There is all the mystery of the human experience right there.

Still, I would not grudge the believer their synergy with Bach's religious message, and McCreesh et al. have given us the best possible chance to find the wonder of this music, however we define it.

More from Phantasm

John Jenkins: Five-Part Consorts
Avie (AV 2120)
2007
Phantasm (plus Mikko Perkola)

***


I had my introduction to Phantasm, Oxford University's consort-in-residence viol group about four months ago with their 1999 disc of 4- and 5-part consorts by William Lawes. That disc made a strong impression on me, and I subsequently sampled their 2004 disc, The Four Temperaments, featuring works of Byrd, Ferrabosco, Parsons and Tallis. So far, the group seem incapable of mundanity. They have been together since 1994, and I'm thrilled to continue working through their existing catalog of recordings.

This disc dates from 2007 and features the music of English composer John Jenkins (1592-1678). The little-known Jenkins was a friend of William Lawes, and appears to have spent his career toggling between official royal music-making and as the private composer to several wealthy English families. On the strength of these pieces he surely deserves to be better-known. These consorts have a wonderful assertive quality, conveying the composer's deep and exhilarating self-confidence.

Once again Phantasm and Laurence Dreyfus, this time assisted by the Finn Mikko Perkola, display the very highest standards of musicianship, bringing these works absolutely to life for us. I note this with every recording, I realize, but I'm always struck: the inherent blend of the gut-stringed viols and Phantasm's flawless articulation and intonation convince me that this ensemble could render almost any period's music to advantage. (Admittedly, there's a big dollop of personal preference at work here, but the recent Emerson String Quartet disc of fugues from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier--really capital idea though it is--only reminds me how much better these works would sound to my ear on gambas rather than violins.)

Whatever the truth of my views, it seems improbable that someone could improve on these settings here. Once again, highest marks.

A Supernova Up Close

Ingrid Fliter plays Chopin
EMI Classics 5099951489953

• Piano Sonata No. 4, Op. 58
  
• Ballade No. 4, Op. 52
  
• Barcarolle Op. 60
• 4 Waltzes
• 3 Mazurkas
• 2 Preludes
• Impromptu in c sharp minor, Op. posth. (later the Op. 66 Fantaisia-Impromptu)
  

***

There is, for the piano as for many other instruments which are formally studied, a standard repertoire which an artist is expected to assimilate in order to be considered a master of their craft. With classical music, most all of this repertoire dates back from 100-300+ years, at least for most popular concert instruments--piano, violin, organ, string ensemble, etc. For pianists, probably first on that list is the Pole Frederic Chopin (1810-1849). Along with Beethoven, Chopin is considered the greatest composer for the piano, first on a list which contains Ravel and Rachmaninov and Liszt and (though he wasn't technically a piano composer) Bach. In part, Chopin probably owes his place on the list to the correspondence of his lifetime to the maturation of the piano mechanically. The early versions of the pianoforte which Bach experienced (and treated as a curiosity) were a world away from a modern piano, and even Beethoven was playing an instrument still very much under development. Chopin, on the other hand, wrote his pieces for a very close approximation to the modern Steinway.

Like Bach, Chopin wrote pieces of wide-ranging technical sophistication, pieces which are manageable for the aspiring pianist, and also great works with passages of diabolical difficulty. But emotionally Chopin is a pure Romantic, a composer with a miraculous gift for melody and urbane expression. Not surprisingly, many pianists have established themselves by way of Chopin's works, people like Vladimir Ashkenazy and Artur Rubenstein and Garrick Ohlsson and Martha Argerich.

Now here's another: the Argentine Ingrid Fliter (b. 1973). A specialist in the works of Chopin, Ms. Fliter studied in Freiburg and Rome and Imola and has won or placed highly in a number of piano competitions.

To my ear, Ms. Fliter plays these pieces to perfection. In that mysterious world where abstract music makes for powerful communication, she seems to have lit upon exactly the right forum for her sensibilities. Her tempi and phrasing are exactly correct, and she has exactly the sense of drama and the commanding technique to make these pieces absolutely compelling. From the frenetic whimsy of the waltzes to the gravity of the b minor Sonata and the absolute drama of the Fourth Ballade (one of my very favorite pieces in any genre), she dances and muscles her way around the keyboard in thrilling fashion, creating a whole sonic landscape which the engineers at EMI Classics have captured perfectly.

As I've said before in other contexts, if these performances don't work for you, then you're simply never going to respond to this music, period. She is that good.

Here's a sample from YouTube:

Two Discs from Minnesota

Slavic Holiday: Legends from Ancient Czechoslovakia and Poland

Fire of the Soul: Choral Virtuosity in 17th-Century Russia & Poland

Both releases are on Rose Records, and are available on iTunes or from the Rose Ensemble's website or from Amazon.com.

***

I've enthused a good deal in these pages about London and its miraculous concentration of choral talent. There must be some critical mass beyond which a thing becomes self-sustaining, with the numbers of ensembles and the audience for them and the schools producing the new talent and the recording companies interested in them all following in symbiotic lockstep. Whatever the reason, there is an amazing concentration of talent in this one place.

But as I was reminded with the Kansas City Chorale / Phoenix Bach Choir recordings on Chandos, proximity can account for only so much. Musical talent is a distinctly human quality, not a geographic one, and there are talented people everywhere (something about which I'm reminded with organists; there are great organists everywhere of whom no one ever heard).

The Rose Ensemble hails from my home town of St. Paul, Minnesota, and specializes in early music from diverse sources. I lived in Minneapolis / St. Paul for 20 years, but I moved from the place about the same time as Artistic Director Jordan Sramek formed the group in 1996. Many of the group are instrumentalists as well as singers, and most seem to have some Minnesota connection, either family or education.

It strikes me that one of the advantages of hailing from a place without deep roots in original music is that one is free to delve into a wider range of styles without confounding anyone's expectations. These two discs feature Slavic composers, spanning from the 11th Century up to a present-day composition commissioned by the Rose Ensemble. The first of these discs, Slavic Holiday, concentrates on very early works from Poland and Czechoslovakia, and the earliest pieces especially are monodic, or feature very essential harmonies. Composition dates range from the 11th to the 17th Centuries. The other disc, Fire of the Soul, concentrates (apart from the contemporary Khvoshchinskiy piece) on the work of three composers: Poles Mikolaj Zielenski (ca.1550- post 1616) and Andrzej Rohaczewski (c. 1600s), and the Russian Vasily Titov (c.1650-ca.1715). Though not quite wearing the misty aura of despair which characterizes so much Russian music, the Titov does have a certain minor mode gravity about it; but the Polish pieces sound more Italian than Russian. I read a review snippet that compared some of this writing to Claudio Monteverdi, and that seems a good stab. I often play a little game with the radio of trying to figure out what I'm listening to before the announcer gives it away, and I would not have guessed Poland with these pieces. The disc finishes with the commissioned work--Rejoice, O Virgin Mary--by Russian Sergey Khvoshchinskiy (b. 1957). This piece is more layered and modern, though you could mistake it for something older if you weren't paying attention. It reminds me a bit of his countryman Gretchaninov, and it sounds identifiably Russian.

Overall, these are much more solid performances than I would have expected--world-class, actually. Pitch is generally excellent, and the male voices especially achieve a wonderful unity. There are one or two moments where the choir's pitch is not absolutely in lock step, but I'm admittedly being awfully fussy to even mention it. These two discs make us a splendid introduction to unknown repertoire (to me, anyway), and I see that the group has quite a number of recordings available. I shall sample some of the others soon.

Phantastick!

Four Temperaments - Byrd, Ferrabosco, Parsons, Tallis
Phantasm (plus Emilia Benjamin and Asako Morikawa)
Avie Records, AV2054 (2004)

Tallis: A Solfing song; In nomine I a4; In nomine II a4;
Byrd: Queen's Goodnight (Prelude and Ground); Pavan a6; Galliard a6
Parsons: A song of Mr Robert Parsons; In nomine III a5; De la court; Ut re mi fa sol la; A Song called Trumpets
Ferrabosco: Pavan a5; In nomine I a5; In nomine II a5; In nomine III a5; Fantasia a4; Sur la Rousée (Fantasia a6)

***

Another fabulous disc from the British gamba quartet, Phantasm, this time joined by Emilia Benjamin and Asako Morikawa. I've been on a bit of a mission to find more of the obscure Robert Parsons, and here are several more of his pieces, in addition to Byrd and Tallis and another fellow of whom I've not heard, Alfonso Ferrabosco (presumably the younger, though he comes from a long line of composers out of Bologna).

There's just something in this presentation--an intimate grouping of expertly-played viols--that brings this music to life. There is a palpable joy in the part writing, in the interplay between voices that bears the indelible stamp of its time and place. But rather than sounding archaic, the group's infectious vitality makes these compositions sound current and thrilling.

The pieces cover an emotional range from rollicking to funereal. The group's phrasing and intonation are spot-on, and the recording is excellent, though close and intimate (in keeping with the settings where this music might originally have been heard, perhaps?). Mr. Parsons shows a bit more playfulness than in the other brief exposures I've heard, and seems to write always with a confident hand.

Highly recommended.