New York In Sound

Frank Braley plays Gershwin
Frank Braley, piano
Harmonia Mundi HMC 901833, 2005

Like with the music of Scott Joplin, I never feel Gershwin comes off better than on a solo piano. And this recording persuades us from the first, jagged notes of Jasbo Brown's Blues from Porgy and Bess. The young French pianist Frank Braley was unknown to me when I stumbled upon this recording, yet another reminder that fabulously talented people are everywhere. He apparently studied at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris, where so many of the luminaries of the Paris organ school I love came from, and has a handful of recordings out now on the Harmonia Mundi label. Gershwin had a love of French music (and Ravel was apparently impressed with Gershwin) so there is a French connection that makes this pianist an appropriate choice.

This CD features familiar works--Rhapsody in Blue in Gershwin's solo piano version, The Man I love, Fascinatin' Rhythm, Liza--along with some other works with which I was unfamiliar, like the opening track. There's something just inescapably New York, 1920 about these sounds that's absolutely intoxicating, so many snapshot movie images and black and white photos of Times Square at night and Manhattan in the rain that come unbidden as this CD plays; it gets a special place on the shelf for when I need a pick-me-up.

Enthusiastically recommended!

Fly-By-Wire Bach

Wendy Carlos:
Switched-on Boxed Set
--Switched-On Bach
--The Well-Tempered Synthesizer
--Switched-On Bach II
--Switched-On Brandenburgs

East Side Digital ESD 81422

Wendy Carlos's original Switched-On Bach (1968) was one of my first classical music enthusiasms. My parents had an 8-track player in our family room (shaped like an old-fashioned diver's helmet, except made of white plastic), and this was one of the releases that was send by default when they joined one of those get-a-thousand-releases-for-a-penny schemes. At first I just found it sonically interesting, a bunch of bleeps and bloops that were clearly rather painstakingly assembled. But over time the whole business came to seem a good deal more serious in intent. In addition to introducing people to the Moog Synthesizer, it brought Bach into a bunch more living rooms, which can't be a bad thing. Carlos never desired, I think, to lean more toward erudition than entertainment, but neither was it just some crackpot marketing scheme. On the strength of this release, I found myself increasingly interested in her subsequent releases.

A few years ago, a Minneapolis company, East Side Digital, released the original Bach- and Baroque-related releases in a lovely boxed set. In addition to re-mastered recordings, the box includes superb documentation and a bunch of extras--photos, interviews, sound files, web site access. I snatched it up immediately. (They have also re-released Carlos's other recordings.)



I think these recordings deserve to be better known today, no matter that the first Bach album was a million-seller in its day. Quite apart from dealing with really peerless repertoire, they chronicle a seminal moment in the history of electronic music, the arrival of sound synthesis as something worthy of serious consideration by the mainstream music-listening public. For lovers of pure sound and sound manipulation, these recordings are documents from the frontier of a new age.

Robert Moog developed his analog synthesizer a couple decades after the arrival on the scene of the Ondes-Martenot and the Theramin. Each of these instruments represents an attempt to bridge the new capabilities with established protocols (though the Theramin looked and sounded--still does--like something imported from another solar system; it is played by manipulation of electric fields around the instrument, accomplished by the musician moving the hands in a kind of combination of hand puppetry and thespian seizure practice. The resulting sound is pure Jetsons, or maybe Twilight Zone). The famous Hammond electric organ dates from the same pre-Moog period, and represented yet another attempt to bring electricity into the musical world, all of them together looking rather like Galapagos finches rushing to fill every little existential void.

Though Moog was originally a Theramin player and builder, his idea with the synthesizer was to control the envelope of a sound in every particular, thus enabling a player to create virtually any simple waveform. Controls were included for choice of basic wave form via an oscillator--square, sawtooth, sine or noise--and for manipulation of four basic parameters: attack, decay, sustain and release. To these controls were added various filters and the like, all routed and connected by patch cords like a WWII telephone operator. Pictures of Carlos's studios over the years are fabulously chaotic, and the idea of sophisticated music coming from this contraption seems unlikely. A little time spent with the Moog made clear to everyone that most sounds are much more complex than what could be produced via the simple waveform controls, but even for a first step it was a huge one.



This sound production technology was in its infancy here and was quickly evolving--something immediately evident with each new release by Carlos, where the sound became smoother and more controlled and the timbres more and more complex. But the means of recording these sounds was also in its infancy and experiencing rapid, symbiotic change. In the beginning, far from having digital recording and Pro Tools, there was not even stereo. The very concept of high fidelity sound--HiFi--was itself fairly new. While Robert Moog was busy trying to define and then extend the new keyboard instrument's capabilities, Wendy Carlos was working with him and also trying to figure out how to make complex music on what was simultaneously a futuristic and crude device. Carlos had to develop techniques for getting monodic lines from individual monaural recordings bounced together so as to sound like they were performed simultaneously, and so on and so on until one had orchestral-sounding music. The fact that the sounds were actually electric signals put directly onto tape makes everything very immediate--there is no intervening acoustical or capturing issues like one has with a live recording. There's nothing on the recording except what the artist specifically places there.

But even that was very limited. The early synthesizers had no touch sensitivity (though Moog came up with a rudimentary one quite quickly), and could play only one note at a time. People typically don't understand this: you could not play chords on the Moog synthesizer--everything had to be recorded one note at a time (so a simple triad took three passes with the tape recorder.) Thus, the number of passes required to put each track on these CDs in the can is deceptively high--a really tremendous amount of very painstaking work. From step one they were up against the limitations of all the machinery, and the first Switched-On Bach album (well, the later ones too) was a snapshot of the cutting edge of a quickly-expanding musical horizon.

My wife finds these sounds highly irritating, and indeed they are quite raw, especially on the first Switched-On Bach album. The controllable parameters were relatively few, and so the resulting sounds were very basic (like Carlos herself says: "salty, sweet, sour"). For all the newness on display, there is not a lot of subtlety. Intonation and timing represented real challenges, and one can sense just what mountain needed to be climbed to bring us the finished product. But there is an electricity (sorry) to these recordings, a sense of restrictions tumbling down and a thrilling cosmos opening in front of one. To know what the sound really is, and how it came to be, makes these recordings like peering into a forgotten black and white photograph.

But what really saves these recordings and seals their merit for posterity is the fundamental musicality of Wendy Carlos. Even while getting her hands dirty with all the technical gobbledygook (which stuff I happen to love), she never forgets the ultimate goal: to make music. The music of Bach, ever versatile and adaptable (which is proven beyond doubt here), is given a respectful and knowing treatment at the hands of this new technology. Well, mostly. The instrument is limited in its capacity for playing tender, expressive lines--you wouldn't use it to replace, say, a solo violin--but in payment for that sacrifice it offers great clarity, unlimited frequency range, and the ability to produce sounds never heard before. I don't know that I prefer any of these performances over my favorite recordings of the instruments Bach had in mind, but I've still listened to these synthesizer recordings an awful lot. And they hold up really well.

My Kinda Town

Mahler: Symphony No. 3
Chicago Symphony Orchestra / Bernard Haitink
Michelle DeYoung, Mezzo-Soprano; Women of the CSO Chorus; Chicago Children's Choir
CSO-Resound CSOR 901 701

***

I have too many recordings of Mahler's third. It's the first Mahler symphony I learned, and while I've come to love others as well, the Third has an embracing vastness that resonates with me. Because it's my favorite of his symphonies, it's the one I use to employ to evaluate an orchestra or a conductor with which I'm less familiar. And then after a few recordings, this thinking took on a life of its own and I soon found myself with a dozen different versions.

Certainly, nobody who listens to this kind of music could be unfamiliar with either the Chicago Symphony Orchestra or with its current Principal Conductor, Bernard Haitink. This has to rank as one of the great orchestra / conductor pairings. The Haitink cycles I have of Mahler and Vaughan Williams symphonies are all vast, expansive interpretations, and the renowned virtuosity of the Chicago Symphony makes for a good chemistry. (Ironically, I found this recording in a shop in Amsterdam, home of what some have argued is the world's greatest orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw, with which Bernard Haitink made his name over a 30 year period. It seemed a bit odd to come across a recording there of their native son conducting an American orchestra.)

My very first exposure to Mahler was in 1982 by way of the CSO, this time conducted by the great James Levine. By chance, I think, that recording has proven hard to top (by chance, I say, because I don't think my affection is merely a first-exposure thing). The CSO is well up to the mercurial nature of the music, and the Mezzo-Soprano part in that recording is handled in inimitable fashion by Marilyn Horne. I later got a disc of the CSO under Georg Solti's baton, but the orchestra never sounded better than on that Levine recording.

This present CD is compiled from live performances in November of last year and is released on the orchestra's own label. Michelle DeYoung is enlisted for the Mezzo-Soprano part, which she handles deftly, and the orchestra has a mercurial virtuosity like a doped-up racehorse. The CSO's brass section, particularly, is legendary for its unbridled power (some say only approached by the Berlin Philharmonic in the von Karajan era), and at the big climaxes the sound here is almost overwhelming.

The sixth movement of this symphony is something, to my mind, almost unparalleled in music. It's practically a continuous 30-minute single melody, leading from hushed beginnings to an ecstatic and exhaustive sonic ejaculation half an hour later, like an engrossing story told beginning-to-end. A recording in 1998 of Esa-Pekka Salonen and the L.A. Philharmonic gets this final movement exactly, unsurpassably right (with thrilling sound to match--a perfect recording), but Haitink is not far behind here. A few times the orchestra seems not quite in lockstep, but they make up for that in sheer power.

In all, an excellent collection to one's collection or a great introduction to the repertoire for the unfamiliar.

Dancing With Death

Alison Krauss
A Hundred Miles or More: A Collection
Rounder Records CDROUN0555 / 0 11661 0555 2 0

***
Alison Krauss has recorded with a lot of people over the years, but she's usually connected with her band, Union Station. Union Station have produced a bunch of consistently high-quality records over the last decade, and my introduction came by way of a double-disc release from 2002 of the group playing live in Louisville, of all places. Turns out, I think I was here in town on the day in question, but I was only dimly aware of her at the time. Like many people, I became more aware of her from her work on the soundtrack of the Coen Brothers' O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000), and I sought her out after that introduction. The Live in Louisville CD is the one I picked.

Well, that performance is really something. I had not listened much to bluegrass (and some of my friends laughed in disbelief when I mentioned it), but here was an example of the best music transcending genre. They were just so utterly adept at their instruments, and the music was so carefully crafted and flawlessly performed, that I was mesmerized. Each of the band members is at or near the top of the virtuoso list for their particular instrument, and Alison's voice hits a particular sweet spot for me. She and Dan Tyminski (the singing voice in O Brother for George Clooney) harmonize like different lobes of the same brain. The recording, though live, is wonderfully clear and quiet. That disc remains the single most listened to recording on my iTunes (though there are several others nipping at its heels).

Afterward I got all her other recordings, and there's hardly a low spot in the lot. (Ron Block's compositions are almost literally dunked in the blood o' Jesus, making me reach for the 'next' button, but his banjo and guitar playing elsewhere are, well, inspired.) While they play some straightforward banjo-driven bluegrass, much of their music straddles several genres without quite committing: soft rock, quiet ballads, bluegrass, soft country, folk music. They're not blazing any new trails, but they're also not quite playing any of these exactly.

This latest release, A Hundred Miles or More: A Collection, is Alison Krauss without Union Station, though several band members play on some of the songs. There are several duets here, and songs from movie soundtracks and other odds and ends. In spite of the individual recordings having come from different times and places, they have a unity of style one expects from the artist, many having a hymn-like quality.

In her concert banter, Alison has referred to the "sad, pathetic" nature of most of the things they play, and this CD takes that to new extremes. Most everything is downcast, and several things morbidly so. One tune in particular, Jacob's Dream, tells the story of two young boys in 1863 who get separated from their parents and get lost in the woods... where they perish! (You thought there was relief coming, no?) The chorus of the song has the children crying out to their parents for help while they expire in the woods. (Jesus, lady!) Likewise, her duet with Brad Paisley, Whiskey Lullaby, tells of a double-suicide of two lovers who couldn't make things work. Things lighten in tiny steps from these two, but only a little. Simple Love, and the lullaby Baby Mine, let the sun shine a little, but it's more comfort than exuberance. And there is one bona fide bluegrass track, "Sawing on the Strings," which is indistinguishable in its details from a Union Station tune.

I happen to love the dark and tormented in music--it's why I like so much religious music--so what might be off-putting for some is a positive boon for me. And everything is so spectacularly performed and captured that it's hard not to listen enraptured. Jerry Douglas features on a couple tracks, and the sound of his dobro is every nostalgic thing condensed into an electric thread of melancholy that suits this music brilliantly.

There are two duets with John Waite which don't quite work to my ear--the hit I Ain't Missing You, while thematically a good Alison Krauss tune, just doesn't use the attributes of her voice to good effect. But that's two tracks out of 16, which is a pretty good ratio.

Praise Gadd

Here is a post from March of last year, which I'll transfer over here from the other blog for continuity's sake. (I've been listening to him again--and marveling again--on a live performance of Sheryl Crow and Eric Clapton, and I feel like writing about him. Reliving old writing will have to do.)
____________________



I've mentioned before that my musical background and early focus was on being a drummer. It was my main activity through high school and into college, and I intended for a decade to do it for my life's work. I did, in point of fact, play with a couple small combos for my daily bread over a couple of summers while I was in college, though shortly afterward I moved on to other things. Still, it is the instrument which (along with the pipe organ and the piano) I know the best, and my attention moves first to the drummer in any musical situation before I move onto other, higher brain things.

Lately I've been watching a DVD of Eric Clapton playing in Los Angeles in 2001. I'm not particularly a Clapton fan, though I'll allow that he is always in the company of first-rate musicians. Certainly, I admire his modesty and the absence of affectation in his playing and manner. For this concert, the guitar god is backed up with an all-star supporting cast: Dave Sancious, Nathan East, Andy Fairweather Low (love that name; I wonder if it's real?), the ebullient Billy Preston, and the real star of the show for me, Mr. Steve Gadd.



If one has paid any kind of attention over the past 30 years to drumming-related things, the name Steve Gadd has been seen in all the nicer places. Wikipedia says he is probably the most recorded drummer in history, but that only means he is successful, not necessarily that he's more than a journeyman.

But he is. He's really extraordinary, and in a self-effacing way that I so admire. He is adept over a greater range of styles than any single person has a right to be, and he seems to make short work of even the most challenging material. People of... a certain age will know his work with Paul Simon (the fabulous latin drum break in "Late in the Evening" and the memorable beat in "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" to name a couple) and Steely Dan (the fantastic drum work on "Aja" and "Gaucho") along with Clapton and Rickie Lee Jones and many others.

As a drummer I cannot but be mesmerized by his playing, and I'm convinced I would be wearing out the DVD whether or not I knew of him in advance. And it's not simply his unquestionable technical mastery, however gratifying that is to one who toils at the same instrument. He looks for all the world on this DVD like the guy who shows up to unclog your toilet. Tattooed and gray-haired and paunchy, his 56 years look not to have been easy ones. There is not the slightest effort made to Disney-fy what he does: he does not smile, he rarely swoons to the others' playing, the effort of some things makes him grimace menacingly. He is dressed like he's headed to the driveway to change the oil in his car.

But that stuff's all bullshit. He is not an entertainer. He is an artist. A true musician. One who just happens to play an instrument to which, the Muppets remind us, a practitioner traditionally may need to be chained. The old joke has a guy describing his band as "three musicians and a drummer." But Steve Gadd reminds me that the most gifted musical minds are not confined to the limits of their instrument; on the contrary, the best musicians expand on each other to produce something larger than the sum of the parts. Synergy, man.

I've never seen a musician in any genre who is less concerned to draw attention to himself than Steve Gadd, in spite of his playing an instrument which is intrinsically ostentatious. In life as in music, this seems an admirable quality. He is here playing material which avails itself of about 30% of his technical prowess, yet he never gives less than 100% of himself to the task. Avert your eyes and listen to the sound and he is perfectly, miraculously, unfailingly correct and appropriate. And something more. His chosen instrument, by tradition, plays a supporting role. And though he is certainly the equal at his instrument of anyone on the stage at theirs, yet he both keeps without complaint to his supporting role and manages to rise above it and do something lasting and inspired. In this he reminds me of the always-unsung piano accompanist: there is often astounding musicianship there in a supporting role to the featured soloist. (Frank Sinatra's longtime accompanist, Bill Miller, comes to mind here.)

Three cheers for The Man!

Morph the Blog

Donald Fagen
Morph the Cat
Reprise / Wea

***

My musical tastes (as I've written elsewhere, I know) lean toward the contemplative and deliberate. I've always responded more strongly to music as an act of premeditated intellectual toil than as an act of spontaneous emotional outburst. I can appreciate the immediate expression of a jazz solo, but a larger part of me would prefer to see those same ideas mulled over and expanded or refined. I mean no value judgment in this; it's just a personal preference--composed classical music gives me more to sink my teeth into than music which is not so worked-over. (And I think this preference is also why I'd usually rather listen to a recording than attend a live performance. That plus the fact that sound at a live popular music show almost always sucks.)

Nothing is absolute, though, and I respond to many different things. The French organ school I so love places great importance on improvisation, though it is improvisation within a tight framework. And maybe there's another element: I love music which has to overcome restrictions in structure or framework. Bach is the predominant example, with his fugues and canons being an ultimate example of flowering under the duress of regulation.

Still, I think almost any musician strives for perfection, however defined. We all want to be as clear and as true and as accurate as possible toward our goals and preferences and tastes. Lately--for a couple decades really, but again lately--I've been listening to a lot of Steely Dan. The occasional solo notwithstanding, this is a group renowned for their obsessive attention to detail, and their use of the recording studio to achieve note-perfection. The stories of what it takes to make Donald Fagen and Walter Becker happy in the studio are legendary. Not that they're tyrannical about it, but they are just very, very particular about the exact sound they're looking for, and they're willing to keep trying until they get it. They are in pop music perhaps an ultimate expression of a certain vein of perfection, and they have several Grammies as a result.

This present album (though I lump them all together under "Steely Dan" in my iTunes) is actually not a Steely Dan album at all, but a solo release from Donald Fagen, his third. SD's other charter member, Walter Becker, released his own solo album a decade ago, but it got little attention and really his presence in music history books will be attached to Steely Dan. Fagen's three solo efforts, on the other hand, have left their mark on his little corner of the musical universe.

His latest one is called Morph the Cat, and is about a year old (hey, if most of the stuff I listen to is three hundred years old, I'm allowed to be a year late in my Donald Fagen review). Sonically, his releases are pretty much indistinguishable from a Steely Dan record, which is fine by me. They're both harmonically-funky, they're recorded to within an inch of their lives, and Donald Fagen is the only lead voice you hear in either place. He uses Steely Dan's usual roster of studio musicians. Both have a hip, New York feel. One distinction is that each of Donald Fagen's three albums follows a kind of storyline profile, some unifying theme or thread which ties the individual songs together. Though his voice is a little changed over these 30-plus years (but not much), he has written in a pretty consistent style throughout his career, and live shows can draw from all his material without sounding dated.

Apart from this legendary attention to detail, which makes repeated listenings very satisfying, Fagen has a fabulous, jazzy harmonic palette, something unusual and ambitious for pop music. His long-line melodies typically follow a really sophisticated harmonic progression, and the musicians are often allowed to wander around a bit in the lush landscape, with extended vamps at the end of a song. Backup singing parts and horn charts are a consistent delight, with the horn parts particularly being very skillfully and idiomatically written by Fagen (though he is not a horn player himself). His ease with all this makes even fairly adventurous harmonic progressions (The Night Belongs to Mona, The Great Pagoda of Funn on this album; The Nighfly on his first solo album of the same title) sound deceptively easy; but a little scrutiny finds us in abnormal territory for a (more or less) mainstream pop artist.

To my ear, the craftsmanship of this record is awesome. Drummer Keith Carlock, bassist Freddie Washington and pianist Ted Baker make for a flawless rhythm section, with crisp, understated grooves (Brite Nightgown, H-Gang) that almost defy belief. (I played Brite Nightgown for my landlord in Kentucky, an accomplished drummer and rock and roll afficianado for five decades, and at Keith Carlock's introduction his shoulders slumped in resignation. "Oh fuck me!" he said, incredulous.) And there are little quirks about each song which make for a distinctive personality: a fantastic harmonica solo by Howard Levy on What I Do, brilliant muted trumpet work by Marvin Stamm on The Great Pagoda of Funn, great guitar work everywhere by Jon Herington, Wayne Krantz and Hugh McCracken. Everybody seems to occupy an immaculate little space specifically carved out for him, making for a sonic landscape which seems clean and straightforward at first, but yields almost bottomless layers and details upon closer scrutiny. This plus the lush harmonic details make the record worth its weight in gold.

It's not some substitute for Bach, but this CD offers something to similarly dig into, something thoughtfully produced by someone with talents well beyond most of us. Like in all of nature, human capacities exist in a wide range, and somebody, some very few, will occupy that thin part of the bell curve. I don't get to live there myself; but I'm grateful that someone invites me out for the occasional visit.

Bach On Ye Olde Hurdy-Gurdy

Bach: Alio Modo
Fretwork
Harmonia Mundi 907395

1. Pièce d'Orgue in G major BWV 572
2. Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein BWV 641
3. Prelude & Fugue XVI in G minor BWV 885
4. Passacaglia in C minor BWV 582
5. Kyrie, Gott Vater in Ewigkeit
6. Christe, aller Welt Trost
7. Kyrie, Gott heiliger Geist BWV 671
8. Dies sind die heiligen zehen Gebot BWV 678
9. Dies sind die heiligen BWV 679
10. Prelude & Fugue XXII in A minor BWV 867
11. Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir BWV 686
12. Fugue in E-flat major, "St Anne" BWV 522.2
13. Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit BWV 668
14. Prelude & Fugue XI in F major BWV 880
15. Wir gläuben all an einen Gott BWV 680
16. Fugue IV in D minor BWV 849
17. Ricercar BWV 1079
18. Canon triplex BWV 1076

***

OK, not really a Hurdy-Gurdy. (But that's what I imagine a critic might say, like Thomas Beecham's quip about the harpsichord sounding like "two skeletons copulating on a tin roof.")

This 2005 CD is one of my very favorites from the last five years. Take a veteran and decorated period instrument ensemble, and match them up with select pieces from Bach's vast catalog of fabulous organ compositions, and the results are pure magic.

Fretwork are a London-based viol ensemble, a group of six regular members who specialize in baroque and pre-baroque repertoire. They've made numerous ensemble recordings and backed up soloists on several different music labels. I first encountered them with a recording a few years back of Bach's Art of Fugue and another of music of John Dowland. But this disc hits a home run for me repertoire-wise, with several pieces that are pointed favorites of mine: the c minor Passacaglia, the G Major Piece d'Orgue, and the organ chorale Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit (supposedly written on Bach's deathbed and devastating in its restrained, heartbreaking beauty).

These pieces would sound good on, say, a modern string sextet (hell, Bach sounds great on anything), but the viols are an especially auspicious setting. The viola da gamba family was very familiar to Bach, so it's not an inappropriate sound for baroque music. And the sound seems tailor-made for ensemble work, being rather nasal and quieter than its violin-family counterpart and with a particularly good ensemble blend. Standard period practice seems to dictate that vibrato is used sparingly, if at all; so the resulting sound is clear and very pure, and the emotional content of the music is restrained and cerebral. It's a similar sound to the pipe organ, at least to certain individual stops, but on a more intimate and individually-expressive scale. Even though an organist can allot a piece's parts among a pedal and a couple of keyboards, assigning each part to its own individual string instrument brings even greater clarity to the part-writing, laying Bach's ingenious counterpoint completely before one. The only thing better for comprehending Bach's architectural mind is the score itself.

While I've always believed there is a deep emotional content to Bach's music--and indeed some scores are manifestly emotional--it often seems to me that this emotional content is buried beneath an ecrypting technical layer, that some work is involved for the listener to get to it. This is why one often hears from the unfamiliar or uninitiated that Bach's music is "cold" or "mechanical;" they haven't done the work to get to the juicy marrow beneath. This recording brings us as close as possible to Bach's conception, and to that marrow. Whereas the organ often has a lot of church-related baggage to overcome with the non-organ-loving public, this disc presents some sublime music in a way that doesn't require this dissociative step from the listeners. The person who doesn't respond to this disc, I think, is just not going to like this repertoire, period.

I do have one little niggle: at times in these pieces, the ensemble seems to swell and diminish with no discernible (to me) rationale, almost as though some producer told them they needed to avoid monotony. It's a small thing, but if I can't grasp what contribution it's making to a musical idea, then the exercise is more distracting than anything. But it's but a tiny blotch (if indeed it is that) on an otherwise magical release.

Rachmaninov Preludes: Eldar Nebolsin

Rachmaninov: Preludes for Piano (complete)
Eldar Nebolsin, piano
Naxos 8.570327

This is Naxos's second release of Rachmaninov preludes, the first coming some years ago as part of a full survey of Rachmaninov's piano works by the splendid Turkish pianist, Idil Biret. This recent issue features young Uzbek pianist Eldar Nebolsin, a First Prize winner at the Sviatoslav Richter International Piano Composition in 2005.

In spite of rather pointedly looking backward in his compositional outlook, Rachmaninov's piano works--the concertos especially, but the Etudes-tableaux and Preludes as well--have become entrenched near the top of the standard repertoire, music which is engaging and feeling while being quite accessible to the listening public. These pieces range from darkly ebullient to quintessential Russian despondency. He is criticized at times for being overly sentimental, but he sets his tone splendidly and I always find his emotional content convincing. (The Prelude Op. 32, No. 10 in b minor sounds like somebody's tragic whole life's story in five minutes.)

His writing shows his almost savant-like command of the keyboard, with the full resources of the modern concert grand piano confidently brought into play. I find I can lose several hours on YouTube watching pianists trying to come to grips with the technical demands of this music (it doesn't help that Rachmaninov had the hands of a giant). (An aside: Telarc put out a couple releases a decade or so ago where Rachmaninov's own piano rolls were processed by Wayne Stahnke to play on a modern Bosendorfer reproducing piano. And the results are damn-near the very resurrection of Rachmaninov's corpse. In addition to being known as one of the greatest technical pianists who ever lived, these recordings give us a definitive interpretation.)

Mr. Nebolsin has the full measure of this music, well able to cope with the technical difficulties without drawing attention to his mastery thereof. Naxos has given him first rate natural sound, making for a recording of these pieces which will stand next to Ashkenazy's, one I will listen to repeatedly. I look forward to (presumably) upcoming further releases from this pianist.

Widor at Woolsey Hall

Charles-Marie Widor: Organ Symphonies
Charles Krigbaum, organ (1928, Ernest M. Skinner, Woolsey Hall, Yale University)
AFKA Records, SK-523, SK-524

• Symphony No. 5 in f minor
• Symphony Gothique in C Major
• Symphony 6 in g minor
• Symphony Romane in D Major

Here we have two of the four available volumes of a cycle of Widor organ symphonies recorded by Charles Krigbaum in the mid 80s in Yale University's Woolsey Hall. Krigbaum was University Organist for years and head of the Organ Department at Yale (a position now held by Thomas Murray), and is apparently now retired--there is virtually no information to be found about him on the web.

I first came across Krigbaum on a really splendid two-disc release on OHS called An Evening at Woolsey Hall, recorded on Woolsey's fantastic Skinner organ. The Widor Symphony on that release (well, the whole release actually) convinced me that I should give these other recordings a listen. It sounds as though Krigbaum originally recorded the whole Widor symphony cycle, but the AFKA releases currently encompass only Nos. 1-6, 9 and 10. There must be another disc with 7 and 8 on it, but it's not currently in the OHS catalog (and there seems to be no such entity as AFKA records).

Widor was organist at St. Sulpice in Paris from 1870-1934, and is mostly remembered today for these ten organ symphonies. Like many of the great French organ composers, these pieces were written for the sounds of Cavaillé-Coll's instruments, particularly his greatest and most famous instrument at St. Sulpice. Though perhaps without Vierne's spark of genius, Widor's symphonies are atmospheric and adept at making the organ speak into a cavernous space. Widor played an essential part in this great musical flowering which occurred in Paris from Cesar Franck onward. As professor of both organ and composition at the Paris Conservatoire, Widor was teacher to many who followed in his footsteps and became luminaries in their own right: Charles Tournemire, Marcel Dupré, Louis Vierne, Maurice Duruflé, Edgar Varése, Darius Milhaud, among many others. To my ear, these ten symphonies, written over almost 30 years, do not show any particular musical progression, though the last two (the "Gothique" and "Romane") are thought to be more introspective and to have an element of plainchant in their thematic material. Rather, they are beautiful and skillfully wrought, and they place some demands on the organist, and they show off an instrument's tonal palette.

Krigbaum understands these works, and he has the right instrument for the job. His tempos are rather stately, which is an aesthetic choice that resonates with me. The Toccata of Widor's Fifth Symphony is one of the most recognized organ works in the entire repertoire--right alongside Bach's BWV 565 d minor Toccata and Fugue--and it's a great means of demonstrating an instrument's (and performer's) mettle. Likewise the Finale to the Sixth: one can imagine Widor at the console, surrounded by admirers (whom he selectively and regally allowed up to the organ loft to witness his performance), thundering out these splendid sounds into the gigantic stone interior of St. Sulpice.

This organ is, to my ear, a real national treasure. The acoustic, while not quite St. Sulpice in scope, is really well suited to organ music, and the organ boasts an almost surreal tonal and dynamic range. The individual voices of this organ are often really compelling, and the tutti rather takes one's breath away. Skinner's pedal flues in particular sound like each one requires its own blower, so full and round is their sound. The big pedal reeds seem necessary only for the fullest textures, and everything at once threatens to boil the bone marrow of anyone within earshot. Martin Jean (another current Yale faculty member) has a cycle of Vierne Symphonies out on this instrument, and the more I hear of the organ the more impressed I am with it. I'll review that disc shortly.

Three Recordings of Maurice Duruflé's Organ Works

Maurice Durufle / Vincent Warnier: L'Oeuvre d'orgue
Vincent Warnier, organ (1863 / 1873, Cavaillé-Coll, St. Etienne-du-mont, Paris)
Intrada INTRA027



Duruflé: L'Oeuvre integrale pour orgue
Stefan Schmidt, organ (2001, Karl Gockel, St. Peter's, Dusseldorf)
Aeolus AE-10211



Durufle: Organ Music (complete)
Henry Fairs, organ (1884, Cavaillé-Coll at the Notre-Dame d'Auteuil, Paris)
Naxos 8.557924

• Scherzo, Op. 2
• Prelude, Adagio et Choral varié sur le theme du "Veni Creator," Op. 4
• Suite pour orgue, Op. 5
• Prelude et fugue sur le nom d'Alain, Op. 7
• Fugue sur le carillon des heures de la Cathedral de Soissons, Op. 12
• Prelude sur l'introit de l'Epiphanie, Op. 13
• Chant Donne--Hommage a Jean Gallon (Fairs, Schmidt)
• Meditation, Op. posth. (Fairs)

***

Duruflé has been on my short list of favorite composers now for nearly 20 years. I remember getting a couple cassette tapes from a friend in the mid-80s and realized that here finally was the tonal world of Debussy and Ravel translated to my favorite instrument (albeit with a gregorian chant underpinning which the other two lacked). I didn't realize at that time that these two cassettes constituted the entirety of Duruflé's published music: one tape for choral works (the Op. 9 Requiem, the Op. 10 Motets, and the Op. 11 Messe Cum Jubilo) and another for organ works. Duruflé's own explanation for his scant output is that his years of teaching composition so heightened his critical faculties that he simply wasn't happy with anything he wrote. The couple of unpublished works which have come forth since his death in 1986 leave one pining for an unexpected discovery of other unknown things, the proverbial lost trunk of sketches. I guess we should be thankful that we have as much as we do. Given the extremely limited scope of his work, then, I feel no compunction about acquiring every recording of his complete organ works I can get my hands on.

It's been a good couple of weeks on this front. After meeting him during our visit to Paris this summer, I was able to find Vincent Warnier's survey on iTunes (I saw several copies of the CD in Paris, but didn't know who the artist was at the time; the physical CD is hard to find back stateside). Warnier shares the titular post at Duruflé's own church in Paris, St. Etienne-du-mont, with organist Thierry Escaich (who has his own Duruflé survey out), and this particular CD was recorded on Duruflé's own instrument at St. Etienne-du-mont. This organ was worked on, as were all of Paris's greatest instruments, by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll; in this case, in 1863 and again in 1873. As one would expect, the organ has been gone thru by several other builders in the 130 years since. How much Cavaillé-Coll remains is unknown to me. But it makes all the right noises, and has that slightly jagged sound--almost as though it's not quite in tune--an aggressive upperwork that makes me think I hear Cavaillé-Coll's work.

Warnier acquits himself well technically, and the performances are solid throughout, though not always the most communicative examples of this repertoire I've encountered. His Op. 13 Prelude sur l'introit de l'Epiphanie in particular passes in rather perfunctory fashion, but the Op. 12 Fugue sur le carillon des heures de la Cathedral de Soissons (with which the Prelude is sometimes paired) comes off better. I like his Op. 7 Prelude and Fugue sur le nom d'Alain, especially the stately pacing of the great fugue. The sound of the iTunes AAC files leaves one wishing for the original CD, or at least an Apple Lossless version, as the compression squashes the sound just a bit. Still, it's a good recording and has the imprimatur of having come from Duruflé's successor.

Stefan Schmidt is the Cantor of the Church of St. Peter in Dusseldorf, where his recording was made. The instrument is a newer offering from a builder with whom I am unfamiliar, one Karl Gockel from near Heidelberg. It's always an interesting proposition to me to hear this very French music played on instruments not specifically tailored to it. Whereas Bach plays well on anything from organ to pan pipes to steel drum, the music of Duruflé is indelibly linked to this very Parisian, Cavaillé-Coll sound. The organ is brilliantly recorded, the live reverberation of the room blending the aggressive tutti into a swirling kaleidoscope of full-range sound. The organ, though not especially large, has a snarling, assertive sound at full throttle which is a bit reminiscent of Cavaillé-Coll's own sound. Schmidt understands his instrument and acoustic, and the playing is paced to make best use of both. Recommended.

My favorite of these three, though is the Naxos release by Englishman Henry Fairs. Fairs is University Organist at the University of Birmingham and an organ tutor at the Birmingham Conservatoire, and another specialist in this repertoire. He has found a little-known (to me, anyway) Cavaillé-Coll in Paris to speak his piece. I don't rate the sound of the instrument or the recording quite as high as the Sefan Schmidt CD, but it's very good just the same, and the performances are spot-on. The instrument is quite small, and so the tutti in the gnashing chromatic climax of the Prelude of the Op. 5 Suite lacks the teeth one likes to see here. But the individual solo stops are lovely, and Fairs makes the most of what he has available. He also includes the delightful Hommage a Jean Gallon and the even rarer Meditation, both published posthumously. (This latter piece is an arrangement of the Agnus Dei from the Op. 11 Cum Jubilo mass, and I've only elsewhere seen it on a BIS release by Hans Fagius.) Fair's Hommage a Jean Gallon is especially haunting, a simple two minute piece that sets deep hooks; I must have listened to it 25 times since getting this recording. It's simply but unapologetically registered, and puts the small Cavaillé-Coll in the most delicious light.

(An aside: you gotta love Naxos. This is their second full survey of the organ music of Duruflé, the first coming over a decade ago at the hands of Eric Lebrun at yet another lesser-known Cavaillé-Coll in Paris. What began as a budget label has become classical music's greatest powerhouse, issuing consistently excellent performances and recordings of both well known and lesser known repertoire while the big labels are floundering. Where I originally looked to them to introduce me inexpensively to new repertoire, I now tend to favor them for consistent quality. That you get to save 25 or 50% is icing on the cake.)

These are all three worthy additions to the catalog, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend any of the three. My favorite single CD of this music remains Todd Wilson's 1986 recording on the Delos label, a recording of a medium-sized Schudi organ in Dallas. The organ is exactly right for the repertoire, the sonic quality of the recording is unbeatable, and the performances are simply perfect. The recording is currently unavailable new, but can be found on Amazon.

Bach on the Lute: Paul O'Dette

BACH (J.S.). Lute Works, vol.I
Paul O'Dette
Harmonia Mundi
HMU907438

• Lute Suite in g minor, BWV 995 (transcribed from BWV 1011, Cello suite No. 5 in c minor)
• Violin Sonata No. 1 in g minor, BWV 1001
• Violin Partita No. 3 in E Major, BWV 1006a

***
Noted lutenist Paul O'Dette has served as Professor of Lute and Director of Early Music at the Eastman School of Music in New York since 1976, and his discography encompasses a couple dozen recordings, including the complete works of John Dowland on five CDs.

This welcome CD features O'Dette playing music originally written by Bach for different instruments. Several of these Bach pieces, especially from the violin works, will be familiar to listeners from other versions: the Prelude to the third violin partita, for example, is more popularly know as the Sinfonia to Cantata BWV 29, and the fugue of the BWV 1001 Violin Sonata was famously recycled by Bach for the organ Prelude and Fugue (d minor, BWV 539).

This seems the right direction to transcribe the music of a long-dead composer: from (comparatively) simple to more complex. The limited polyphonic capabilities of the violin and cello for which these works were originally conceived make the pieces work very well on the more polyphonic lute, since the harmonic and contrapuntal structures were conceived for a more restrictive palette; nothing is lost in the translation. Transcribing Bach's organ works for lute (or, even moreso, for solo violin) would require leaving out so much that a wholly different piece would result.

As it is, these works come off really splendidly in the bargain, though they are a bit different than their originals. The sound of the lute, brilliantly recorded by Harmonia Mundi, is intimate and nuanced, and O'Dette lingers over details in the counterpoints and harmonic statements with a tastefully thoughtful rubato, and the effect is of having an eloquent spokesman for these pieces sitting before you in your living room. Again we find that there is no instrument on which Bach does not sound good, a testament to his versatility.

Though these transcriptions are not as genre-daring, I put this CD alongside the splendid disc of Bach organ works transcribed for viols released last year by Fretwork.

Highly recommended.

Cesar Franck at Oberlin, Haskell Thomson

Franck: Haskell Thomson
Pro Organo CD 7152
The Kay Africa Memorial Organ (C.B. Fisk Opus 116)
Finney Chapel, Oberlin College

• Troisieme Choral en la mineur
  (1890)
• Prelude, Fugue et Variation, Op. 18
• Grande Piece Symphonique, Op. 17
• Trois Pieces (1878)
• --Fantaisie
• --Cantabile
• --Piece Heroique

***
A while back I wrote a post about a recording of J. Melvin Butler playing a new organ at Oberlin College, an instrument built by one of America's most iconic pipe organ builders, the firm of C. B. Fisk of Gloucester, MA. (The late Charles Fisk is an interesting character. After studying nuclear physics at Harvard, he opened his organ shop in 1961 and produced an impressive list of very innovative and progressive instruments until his death in 1983; the firm has continued to follow his principles.)

Apart from being a large instrument designed and built for an academic concert hall, this Oberlin instrument--their Opus 116--has the further distinction of having been built, as an experiment, according to the tonal principles of France's greatest organ builder, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (1811-1899). Cavaillé-Coll is responsible for nearly all of the famous instruments in Paris's great churches (Notre Dame, St. Sulpice, St. Clotilde, la Madeleine, St. Trinité), and many others, and he played an integral part in the flowering of this great compositional school from Cesar Franck onward to the present day. While the Fisk organ at Oberlin is not a copy of any particular Cavaillé-Coll instrument per se, it utilizes his ideas of what sounds ought to be represented in an instrument of this size--its stoplist--and it makes use of Cavaillé-Coll's technical specifications--wind pressures and pipe scalings. The idea, as I understand it, was to build a new instrument for a large American space that is a reasonable stab at what Cavaillé-Coll might have built. It's a fascinating idea, an experiment played out in a very elaborate and expensive arena.

That particular CD had a further twist. In addition to the works of Charles Tournemire played on this new instrument, a second disc was included where the recording engineers ran the digital data from the original recording thru a computer process which gave the organ an artificial acoustic. In effect, the computer was used to put the Oberlin organ into the acoustics of Chartres Cathedral (the acoustic at Finney Chapel is quite dry, and not at all like any acoustic where the existing Cavaillé-Coll instruments are found). The very idea of this, and the details of how they accomplished it, were incredibly captivating to me--and still are (and are covered a bit more in that earlier post).

All this by the way of preface. I recently got a disc of Haskell Thomson playing Cesar Franck on this Oberlin Fisk organ (though without any acoustic processing). Thomson is Professor of Organ at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and a specialist in this repertoire. And it gives me another organist recording another composer on this instrument, captured by another recording engineer and released on another label--these all help to gain a fuller picture of exactly what the instrument is like. (And I ordered yet another disc of this instrument--with yet another performer--but it's on backorder. I will review that disc when I get it.)

Professor Thomson is very effective in this repertoire. There is an inherent gravity in this music, and I feel it is much easier to play too quickly than too slowly. Thomson hits down the center of the fairway, leaning just slightly toward slow and stately. This seems quite correct to me, and he is convincing. For the huge esteem in which the composer is held, Cesar Franck's whole output for the organ fits on two CDs; and so Professor Thomson gives us about half of the oeuvre, a good cross-section of Franck's work.

I have many recordings of this repertoire, and my primary interest in the recording is the instrument itself. This new recording brings some confirmation to my suspicions from the first recording. Well, it does and it doesn't. I have quite a number of recordings of the organs of Cavaillé-Coll, and my familiarity with them and my love of their sound was my primary motivation for going to Paris a decade ago: to see and hear these instruments first-hand. And I have to say that, to my ears, neither recording of this Fisk "copy" of Cavaillé-Coll's work sounds particularly like the C-Cs I have heard. Not even with the signal processing, however fabulous and effective that part of the exercise was.

Don't misunderstand me: this is a magnificent musical instrument in its own right. It sounds fantastic in this French repertoire, though the room is maybe a bit unfortunate. But I just don't think in some kind of blind test I would have any confusion about which was the Fisk and which was the Cavaillé-Coll. Professor Thomson registers the organ in a way that makes the C-C illusion more convincing than it was the first time around, which then begs the question of what HIS recording would sound like if acoustically processed. But still, I think I would not be fooled. That raises many questions about what details big and small are really responsible for Cavaillé-Coll's signature sound: the stoplist? The building itself? The materials used in the pipes? Or is it a matter of the very subtle voicing of the individual stops?

(C.B. Fisk's Opus 116 at Oberlin College)

One of my first and lasting impressions with the work of Cavaillé-Coll was his unexpected method of bringing power to the sound of his instruments. He voiced his big reed stops to be quite obnoxious in their tone. Played by themselves, they sound just this side of noise. But as a foundation for a large body of stops being played simultaneously, the brashness imparts a huge majesty and harmonic richness that is quite unexpected. Likewise the high frequency upperwork. Organs sound so rich because they don't have to rely, as most instruments do, on the natural occurrence of harmonics; pipes can simply be built to SPEAK the notes you might otherwise hope would show up as harmonics. And again, Cavaillé-Coll was not shy about this. Some of his mutations and mixtures are loud to the point of being shrill.

The idea of achieving something of transporting beauty by way of harsh or ugly elements is ingenious (like the painter Chaim Soutine, whose crude globs of paint nonetheless form, if one steps back a bit, a moving image). Without the ensemble beneath them, these ranks are quite painful to listen to; but mixed in with a mass of more conventional organ sound, they take your breath away with a richness which is like a whole sonic universe opening before you.

Neither of these rather counter-intuitive elements--harsh reeds and shrill upperwork--seem to be present in the Oberlin Fisk. It's almost as though someone decided they could smooth off the rough edges, and left the essential character in shavings on the floor in the process. But the acoustic may be playing a role in this. Because the absence of reverberation is so striking in this recording compared to any CD featuring a Cavaillé-Coll instrument, it's an open question to me what role the huge cathedral acoustics play in the overall sound of these organs. While the Fisk company has made use of Cavaillé-Coll's pipe scales and other technical information (wind pressures, windchest designs, key action), it seems that some other element must be involved, some final step which Cavaillé-Coll took which put his indelible stamp on his work.

In timbre and performance, this Haskell Thomson survey of Franck's music makes a great addition to an enthusiast's music collection, and it's a good choice for introducing the repertoire to the unfamiliar.

Launch

I'm not sure of the wisdom of my starting another blog, when I really only post to my other blog irregularly. But it's an axiom of good blogging that one should stick to a limited range of topics, lest people never know whether they'll give a hoot about what they'll find when they stop by. Given that my classical music posts almost always meet with a chirping-cricket response, maybe it would be best to have a separate place to put them, a place where people can at least count on musical subject matter.

My thought is to review on this blog the CDs and music-related videos I acquire, and I'll try to bring other people onboard--people who actually have some knowledge of classical music. Not that we need to restrict ourselves to classical music by any means; but since that's what I'm most interested in, that's what I'm most likely to review here. Any other reviewers are free to cover their enthusiasms, with the understanding that the world probably doesn't need another popular music fan forum.

Feel free to leave comments and / or suggestions.