The Tone Bigot

2011-12-06T13:53:00.001-06:00

Bach: Famous Works on Pedal Harpsichord
Luc Beausejour
Analekta AN2 9970

Preludes and Fugues BWV 535, 541, 545
Passacaglia and Fugue BWV 582
Toccata and Fugue BWV 565
Eight chorale preludes BWV 605, 638, 639, 642, 643, 645, 690, 731

***

Though we are told that organists in centuries past used pedal harpsichords and pedal clavichords as practice instruments, it has come down to us as more of a novelty instrument or academic exercise than anything mainstream. E. Power Biggs had a pedal harpsichord made for him by American harpsichord builder John Challis in the mid-'60s and made a couple noteworthy recordings on it. For many--certainly for me--this was an introduction to the instrument, and these albums showed off familiar music (two LPs of Bach organ works and one of Joplin rags) in a totally new light.

But as the instrument does not exist in the wild, releases of pedal harpsichord and clavichord recordings after Biggs have been few and far between. Harold Vogel put out an excellent CD of Bach on the pedal clavichord in 1998, and a really splendid pedal harpsichord CD came out a couple years ago (2004) from Frenchman Yves Rechsteiner. And of course there's been the occasional recording of the even rarer pedal piano, a couple of which are reviewed below.

The piano is of course a very different animal from the harpsichord, and even from the clavichord with which it shares its touch-sensitivity. Both harpsichords and clavichords are more private, personal instruments; the clavichord can hardly be heard on the other side of a living room, and a traditional harpsichord--even a big one--is really only suitable for a salon, certainly not a modern concert hall, at least without amplification. This intimacy is one of the things John Challis attempted to remedy by putting a metal frame in his instruments (harpsichord structural bits traditionally being made entirely of wood). This frame was one of the things that rankled purists about Biggs' recordings of it, as it gave the harpsichord a bigger, more sustaining sound. The French piano manufacturer Pleyel had gone even further in the early days of the harpsichord revival, almost duplicating the structure of a modern grand piano in their large concert instruments as favored by Wanda Landowska.

This all leads to a discussion of authenticity and composers' intent and musical purity on which I haven't the expertise to venture forth. For my part, I find I'm more concerned with the sound than the authenticity, and I enjoy the sound of all these instruments. And in truth there are too few recordings for an enthusiast to be very picky.

So the current recording is a most welcome addition to the collection. Montreal-based organ and harpsichord teacher Luc Beausejour plays an instrument that hews much more to the historically accurate than the experimental, a two manual harpsichord and separate pedal instrument from Canadian builder Yves Beaupré. Bach of course translates beautifully to almost any instrumentation, no matter how far afield from that for which it was published (or believed to be intended). One can hear very satisfying Bach on steel drum or recorder ensemble, and pieces written for strings or voice sound great on organ or piano. So whether one is "supposed" to hear Bach on a pedal harpsichord or not, it sounds really fabulous.

To my ear there's a particular approach for Bach that renders his organ music most effectively, and that involves moderate-slow tempi at a mostly straightforward pulse (that is, not too flexible a rhythmic approach) and minimal ornamentation. It is with this approach that I think the genius of Bach's compositional mind shines out most forcefully, like the heat from a glowing ember. Although playing styles have moved on some, E. Power Biggs achieved this glow often, practically laying the printed score in your lap, and I find that Joan Lippincott and George Ritchie both do very well in selling what Bach wrote. (Organists like Wolfgang Rübsam or Jean Guillou or Ton Koopman have brilliant and splendid things to say--and I love their work--but as with many great virtuosos their message is as much their own as the composer's.)

And by this admittedly personal standard, Luc Beausejour's CD here is a real home run. It's a great sounding instrument, and the performances are absolutely spot-on. To my thinking, if you were not familiar with Bach's music this would be one of the best ways to make an introduction. (As an aside, to my mind the d minor Toccata--probably the most famous single piece of organ music for some reason--is a piece that could be retired without too much protest, and Dr. Beausejour here makes the most persuasive case for keeping the piece around. I even listened to it twice in a row.)

The recording is excellent, capturing the little ambient noises that are an intrinsic part of the instrument's mechanism. High marks.

Lo, He Comes With Shoes Sequined

2011-06-26T16:49:00.006-05:00

Cameron Live!
Cameron Carpenter at the Aeolian-Skinner of St. Mary the Virgin, New York City
Telarc International
2010

Bach: Preludes and Fugues BWV 532, 541, 543, 544, 548; Toccata in F# (transcribed from F) BWV 540; Carpenter: Serenade and Fugue on BACH.

***

My first exposure to organist Cameron Carpenter came by way of a comment left on this site a couple years ago. In response to my mention of young American organist Chelsea Chen, the commenter suggested I learn about Carpenter who "blows Chelsea Chen out of the water."

Chalk it up to my contrarian nature, perhaps, but this rather worked as an anti-endorsement to me. Quite apart from my rejection of music as a competitive (even gladiatorial!) endeavor, Ms. Chen seems to possess a deep musicality and a technical competence that more than qualify her for entry into the ranks of accomplished musicians; one needn't, I feel, occupy some ultimate place to be worthy of attention and consideration.

But after recently making a more comprehensive introduction to Mr. Carpenter, I begin to see why people might enthuse about him (while in no way ceding ground vis-a-vis my appreciation of Ms. Chen). After my recent and delightful discovery of the fascinating Aeolian-Skinner instrument in New York City's Church of St. Mary the Virgin, I was even more thrilled to learn there had been a recent recording of the instrument.

Enter Cameron Carpenter.

Mr. Carpenter's website and the information available on the web (including some reviews of his playing) do indeed paint him as a major artist, a phenom even. A graduate of the Julliard School, Mr. Carpenter studied with Gerre Hancock, John Weaver and Paul Jacobs and is brilliantly talented quite beyond question.

He is also controversial, to a degree inherently and to a degree by design. His musical vision is unique and his enthusiasm and élan are irrepressible, but he's bringing sequined costumes to places where sequins don't get much play. And this is not to everyone's liking: just take a look at the comments about his playing on iTunes. People seem to love him or hate him; there's little in-between.

For this recording--Mr. Carpenter's second with the major label Telarc--he is at the aforementioned Aeolian-Skinner organ at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin just off Times Square. I've said plenty about that instrument here, so let's just concentrate on Mr. Carpenter. His program is Bach--five of the Great Preludes and Fugues, the Toccata in F Major BWV 540 (transcribed here to F#)--and three pieces by Mr. Carpenter himself (one an improvised cadenza to BWV 541).

Mr. Carpenter's playing reminds me very much of the late (and incomparable) Vladimir Horowitz. Any given piece Horowitz performed was likely to be as much Horowitz as the piece's composer, either by some degree of creative license or, more typically, by the simple force of Horowitz's mind, by the singularity of the artist's interpretation (Glenn Gould strikes me in the same way). Carpenter is like this. His Bach is quite a distance from what has come to be accepted as "authentic performance," and yet he is never disrespectful and never less than fully, coherently musical. On the contrary, his musical vision seems almost more than the vessel of an existing composition can contain. Like the Well-Tempered Clavier played on a modern Steinway, Carpenter tailors his interpretations to take advantage of the full resources of a modern pipe organ--I have never seen anyone so lavishly fluent in the dense mechanical controls of a large organ console. (And he's not afraid to play on his instrument his favorite music of any genre or background--much, I'm reminded, like the popular piano recitals of a century ago.)

But it must be said that the organ has more than its share of traditionalists, both in performers and in enthusiasts, and Mr. Carpenter's iconoclastic approach is simply not going to be everyone's cup of tea (though to be very worked up over it seems silly to me). He never seems shocking for its own sake, but neither does he seem willing to tread lightly when his heart tells him something else. He is an irrepressible showman, loving any publicity and revealing a lavish (some might say lurid) presence. It's talent and exuberance that verges on precocity--and at times perhaps spilling over into excess. His transcription of Chopin's "Revolutionary" Etude (from which his Grammy-nominated first Telarc album takes its name) has his feet doing things that I daresay few organists could do, and on this album his transcription of Bach's F Major Toccata up half a step to F# seems a bit show-offy, like he had a wager with friends and was doing the deed extemporaneously.

But I cannot sustain these misgivings; Cameron Carpenter is a lavish, larger-than-life musical presence in a world that will not suffer for the injection of some new blood, frankly. I love that Mr. Carpenter for a few years held down a regular church post despite being "not religious," and that he is a strong advocate of the virtual pipe organ--an all-electronic version of the instrument. Neither of these things is likely to sit at all well with the traditionalist, but the traditional pipe organ, traditionally-played, seems in fairly secure hands at the moment. Music is a big house and there is plenty of room for those whose wide-ranging enthusiasms cannot be contained.

And from his skin-tight, Siegfried-and-Roy costumes and hand-sequined shoes, one might conclude that if we don't make space for Mr. Carpenter he could very easily construct his own space without our invitation. For my part, much as I love the stuffy and traditional in this field, I welcome him with open arms.

Organ Adventures

2011-06-12T17:16:00.010-05:00

I've had amazing luck with organ matters. On my first visit to Paris, I stumbled upon several amazing things, culminating with my being invited to the organ loft at St. Sulpice to observe Sophie-Veronique Cauchefer-Choplin improvising through a service. I was similarly lucky on Susan's and my visit to Paris a decade later.

In New York last year as Susan and I walked back to our hotel we passed the open doors of a church near Times Square (The Church of Saint Mary the Virgin on 46th St. between Sixth and Seventh) and I heard the unmistakable sounds of Duruflé. I dashed across the street to hear the final minute or so of the Op. 4 Veni Creator Variations. I didn't go inside at that time--it was the postlude and everyone was leaving the building--but I thought the instrument sounded very congenial for French repertoire and made a mental note to investigate the building and its organ.

It only took the passage of another year and another reminder. This past week we were back in Manhattan leading our yearly tour, and I was out wandering on a free evening. And I passed the same church again and--lo and behold--this time I heard Mendelssohn coming out the open doors. (It almost seemed like a sign!) This time I went in. It turns out a visiting organist from Washington, D.C., one Julie Vidrick Evans, was practicing for a concert to be played the next day (alas, we would be headed back to WI by then), so I stuck around for a couple hours and listened--two different Mendelssohn movements and Dupré's Op. 7 Prelude and Fugue in B Major. Ms. Evans was very accomplished, and her practicing was not to master the pieces but rather the instrument--she was trying out registrations and setting pistons, trying to make the best use of the instrument's many resources. For a listener wanting to learn about a specific organ, this is maybe better than listening to the recital itself; one can hear different stops in quick succession and see how they interact.

The organ turns out to be something considerably more than just a random instrument on a random street in a random church--I'm a little surprised I hadn't heard of it before now. In the church's dark interior it was hard to get a very clear look at the instrument. And after my eyes adjusted I was surprised at what I saw: an instrument that looked half-finished and then left that way for several decades. I thought at first it might be an early Holtkamp; the pipework was entirely exposed. But the layout of the pipes and their dull metallic composition convinced me the instrument was not intended to look this way. I really had never seen anything like it.

(What I could see as my eyes adjusted.)

More astonishing than what it looked like was what it actually IS: I did some searching on my iPhone as I sat there and my jaw dropped to learn that the instrument came not from Cleveland but from the workshops of Aeolian-Skinner in 1932 as its Opus 891 (extended a decade later to become Op. 891-A). Consulting my biography of Ernest M. Skinner back at home, I learned that Op. 891-A was notorious as the first example of what became known as the "American Classic" style, a style which moved away from the blatant orchestral imitation for which the Skinner firm was known and toward a more historically-informed tonal design. Ernest M. Skinner was still at the helm of the firm which bore his name, but Op. 891-A was a product of the man who was leading what amounted to a hostile takeover of Skinner's firm, the Englishman G. Donald Harrison. Op. 891-A was a modern and innovative organ in its day--innovation of which Ernest M. Skinner rather strongly disapproved--and the instrument marked a decisive turn of the firm away from its founder.

(I love that despite the arguments about arcane details, any well-designed and -executed organ sounds lovely and of a piece in its setting. Skinner's instruments--say, the masterpiece in Woolsey Hall at Yale University--seem noteworthy now not for their ability to imitate a symphony orchestra, but for their tonal innovations and masterful construction and for the coherence of their designer's tonal vision. Harrison's Op. 891-A is not, as it happens, an instrument Skinner wanted his firm to build, but it strikes us as a unified and glorious instrument in its space--and, with more than a little irony, it still sounds very much like the kind of big, orchestral organ that was in vogue 80 years ago when compared to the extremes to which the historical movement went in the ensuing half century).

In fact the instrument sounds fantastic in the middling-reverberation space, and the sounds are very congenial indeed for French repertoire. It's a large instrument (93 stops on four manuals and pedal) and it fills the space very ably--the tutti is almost painful. The space itself is reverberant enough to help the organ blend, yet intimate enough to hear details and to appreciate the instrument's full dynamic range. The stoplist I saw on some church literature did not mention any 32' flue pipes on the organ, but there is a big reed on the pedal which is quite overwhelming; it was fun to hear the practicing recitalist try passages with and without the Bombarde. (The AGO site shows two 32' flues: a Salicional and a Bourdon.)

(The console, typical of Skinners of the day. This console layout is one of the enduring legacies of Ernest M. Skinner.)

Overall the sound seemed a touch lighter than with other Skinners with which I'm familiar. I'm used to an Aeolian-Skinner featuring huge scales and a very wide-open tone, and this instrument struck me as being a bit slighter in its tonal composition. (Not that anyone would call this instrument "slight." I'd be curious to know if there's anything in this or if it was just a quirk of my ear on this day.)

And so a fun discovery: my research shows the instrument to be rather famous, and one of the new breed of virtuoso organists, one Cameron Carpenter, has recorded a live recital on just the instrument. (It's downloading as I type this, and perhaps I'll have two cents' worth about it later.)

Lastly, a word on the instrument's facade. I spoke the following morning to the church's organist, a young Englishman named James Kennerly, and he had a few details about the instrument's history (plus there's a great rundown of the instrument's history on the New York AGO website here, including sketches of what the intended facade was to look like). It seems no one ever intended the instrument to look as it does, but budgets were tight and what money was available was always prioritized into completing the intended specification; when the money was finally found, the instrument's looks had become something of a trademark and it was decided to leave well enough alone.

(A photo from the web with much better lighting than mine.)

With a mechanical-action instrument, the arrangement of pipes follows the mechanics of the windchests, which route wind more or less uniformly to the individual ranks, lined up by keyboard position (though it must be said that facade pipes will often be arranged separately for aesthetic purposes, and even dummy pipes used to achieve a desired look). With an electric or electro-pneumatic action like this A-S, pipes can be put anywhere wind can be routed to them, and so it's interesting to see how an instrument is laid out--which pipes are under expression and which not. This particular organ is most unusual in having all this exposed to the audience. Walter Holtkamp's experiments with completely exposed pipework were rather controversial in their day, though a number of firms have built at least the occasional instrument with this feature. But to my knowledge Aeolian-Skinner was not one of them. And that makes it even more special and rare.

Another great entry for my organ serendipity ledger!

Thunder from Down Under

2011-04-17T21:15:00.001-05:00

Beethoven: Op. 120 Diabelli Variations, etc.
Gerard Willems at the Stuart & Sons piano
ABC Classics 476 4113
2010

***

I find I'm not quite done with piano technical matters.

After my recent brief survey of recordings of unusual pianos, I spent some time surfing the web exploring boutique piano manufacturers. They're not so rare as I expected. On reflection, there is little excuse for my being surprised to find artisans hand-building grand pianos; in my defense (as I've said elsewhere) I'm simply used to pianos as the output of mass-production--big, heavy products of big industrial concerns, the products of steam-driven factories that once dotted our landscape. Teams of engineers and designers worked in concert (sorry) to finalize a specification, which was then translated into industrial processes which in turn produced countless examples of each model, all conforming to the original specification to within specified tolerances. The industrial revolution in a nutshell.

But of course a piano exists as an implement for an artistic endeavor, and at the pointy end of the spectrum musical instruments have always been made with exquisite care and attention to detail. That they once were ONLY made this way doesn't mean that NONE are now made this way. A Steinway D is still made in the old factory, but the instrument is surely gone over individually in excruciating detail to bring each variance to perfect compliance.

But the smaller the builder the less mass-produced the process must seem. David Rubenstein's R-371, a 12-foot concert grand, is hand made in his workshop in California. The materials may be similar to those used in a production-line Steinway D, but everything here must be crafted and fitted by hand. And so it must be for all these boutique builders. Pictures on his website show Luigi Borgato's Italian factory to be a pre-industrial space, more an artisan's workshop than, say, a place where BMWs are built.

Some really exquisite things come from these places. Another discovery I made is the piano builder and researcher Wayne Stuart, proprietor of Stuart & Sons Pianos out of Newcastle, Australia. Formed in 2001, Stuart & Sons have concentrated on careful research and design evolution of the modern grand piano. The firm have produced something North of 50 large instruments. I searched in vain for a showroom on my recent visit to Sydney, but alas the instruments are only officially on display in the firm's Newcastle factory. But the website mentions that Sydney's Powerhouse Museum owns one of the instruments, so I headed over there to have a look at it. (It was part of a museum display of musical instruments, so unfortunately I was neither able to photograph nor to play the magnificent instrument.)

Among other things, Wayne Stuart has concentrated on increasing the instrument's clarity and sustain, and the results are subtle but meaningful. The instrument features an increased range--four notes on the bottom and almost an octave on top--which is not subtle, of course, though there is little existing music (classical anyway) that will allow for use of these notes; but the harmonic development of the instrument's tone is enhanced by the increased scale. And Stuart's work on improved sustain and clarity is quite noticeable. In concentrating minutely on controlling how the piano's individual strings vibrate, Stuart has been able to increase the sonic purity of the notes, with the result that the upper registers speak with an unexpected brilliance and distinctness, not getting lost in a plink of harmonic artifacts; and the lower registers maintain their fundamental focus considerably further down the scale, the individual tones not disappearing in a mass of muddy sound. The result is subtle but noticeable. (The pianist Bill Risby demonstrates these features on the website.)

Because the concern is so small, there are almost no recordings of the instruments available (it seems the company does not sponsor artists as many other manufacturers do, so recordings are only going to be made by otherwise unaffiliated artists who chose the instrument. One of these is the Dutch-born Australian classical pianist Gerard Willems, who has now recorded an entire cycle of Beethoven on the Stuart & Sons piano. I was able to find his most recent release on iTunes, a 2010 recording of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations. It's an excellent recording, giving one a front-row seat for demonstration of this most fascinating instrument in a most demanding repertoire. I'm not previously familiar with the Diabelli Variations (not being especially taken with Beethoven), but the piano's full dymanic and tonal resources are put to vigorous use here. Willems seems a perfect advocate of this repertoire, highly accomplished technically and full of fire; he plays the piece almost like an improvisation.

The website features several other musicians demonstrating the Stuart & Sons instrument, including some Bach, and one hopes for additional recordings--since I'm unlikely to ever spend much time with the real instrument. Maybe if I win the lottery (most unlikely if I refuse to buy a ticket...)

Schumann in the Old Style

2011-02-18T11:20:00.002-06:00

Robert Schumann: Works for the Pedal Piano
Martin Schmeding
ARS 38 011 (2006)

***

In all this piano discussion, I wrote to a friend this past week expressing my surprise that piano tone across a broad spectrum of builders (and across a broad spectrum of instrument prices) was remarkably uniform. His response, very sensibly, is that--apart from the organ--what other established classical instrument enables you to determine its manufacturer by sound alone? (And even in the case of the organ this is very tenuous.) All instruments--violin, flute, oboe, saxophone, xylophone, guitar--have evolved to occupy a particular point in sonic space, and for the most part instrument builders attempt to conform to the sonic standard.

But I maintain that my question is not altogether nonsensical. If, for example, an extraordinary 12' piano sounds indistinguishable from a standard 9' concert grand, what is the impetus to build it? In all instruments we must have an interior sense of the sonic ideal from which contemporary instruments fall short; otherwise, who would bother to be an instrument builder at all?

After falling in love with Schumann's works for pedal piano in Marco Bruson's recording on the remarkable Doppio Borgato, I went in search for other similar things, and ran across this complete survey of Schumann's pedal piano works by Martin Schmeding, Professor of Organ and Church Music at the Freiburg Hochschule for Music. In addition to the Op. 56 Etudes and the Op. 58 Scenes recorded by Bruson, Professor Schmeding also includes the six Op. 60 Fugues on BACH (pieces, again, familiar to most lovers of organ music).

Professor Schmeding is superb here and his survey of these works has the ring of authority. He captures the little fleeting moods of these pieces wonderfully, giving us a sense of what must have seemed amazingly fresh and alive in Schumann's time.

But I again find the instrument itself upstages. Professor Schmeding adds to the sense of authenticity here by playing a Pleyel grand piano from about 1840 (similar to Chopin's final instrument), mated to a Pleyel pedal instrument from c. 1890. So like the Doppio Borgato this Pleyel instrument is two separate entities, a grand piano sitting atop a distinct instrument for the feet.

This Pleyel instrument gives the lie to my contention that piano tone is eternally set, reminding us that the piano is still, in the grand scheme of things, a fairly recent phenomenon (something easy to lose sight of when electronics have overwhelmed the music world in the past three decades). 1840 is not that long ago in the grand scheme of things, but this Pleyel instrument, while still unquestionably a piano, sounds almost as much like a pianoforte of Mozart or Haydn's time as it does a modern Steinway. (And when we look at the Pleyel compared to my own 75-year old Chickering, which DOES sound much like a modern Steinway, we realize that this change occurred in the short 90-plus years between 1840 and 1934.)

As is typical with iTunes, there is but a single cover photo and no supporting text, but even from that photo one can see some obvious differences between the Pleyel and a modern concert grand. The scale is obviously smaller and slighter, with the instrument being roughly 7' in length and not nearly as heavily-built as a modern grand. The Pleyel is straight-strung (with no harmonic-enhancing cross-stringing of the bottom two octaves across the strings of the rest of the instrument). A metal frame is visible in the Pleyel, but it's a considerably slighter affair than that of a modern grand.

The result of these technical things is an instrument with notably less power and sustain than a modern grand piano, especially when played aggressively. Even a modern piano is distinguished by having a strong attack followed by a reduced sustain and a decay that gets shorter and shorter as the notes rise in the upper register. The Pleyel seems to exaggerate each of these characteristics, being more attack and less sustain than we're used to. And none of the notes here sustains like a modern grand. In all, it's just a more intimate, less grand sound than a modern instrument.

It's hard to discern much detail about the pedal instrument from the photos. It does not appear to extend its strings beneath the piano in the manner of the Doppio Borgato, but rather has everything contained in a square box centered beneath the player's bench and the piano keyboard. This leaves little space for strings of any length, and not surprisingly the Pleyel's pedal tones have a fraction of the Borgato's power and sustain. My sense is that this pedal instrument was intended as a practice device for organists rather than as a concert instrument (as the Doppio Borgato obviously is).

Even if my ear has its preference, there doesn't need to be a value judgment in this: it's simply what was done at the time the Pleyel was built, and the instrument's tone is remarkable in its own way. But it's a reminder that the "ideal" of piano tone was as yet not determined, or certainly not yet realized when the Pleyel was built. This is the state of the art of the time, but that boundary was still in motion. The instrument is certainly capable of a singing tone, particularly in quieter passages, but the room for improvement was evident to all and the improvements came.

What's interesting to me is where we might go from here.

As for this recording, I give it top marks. A good clean, quiet recording of a fascinating instrument with brilliant content. A solid home run.

Doppio Good

2011-02-10T19:29:00.003-06:00

Mirco Bruson Plays the Doppio Borgato Pedal Piano
Music of Schumann, Beethoven, Franck and Bach
Luigi Borgato, 2011

***

Here's another recording that springboards us into a discussion about technical matters. As mentioned in the previous post, my exploration of some of the more obscure corners of the piano industry has yielded several great finds. This is perhaps the most exciting.

Luigi Borgato is an Italian piano maker who, in addition to having made some innovations to the standard concert grand piano design, offers a production pedal piano, which he calls the Doppio Borgato (Double Borgato). He didn't invent the pedal piano concept (I've seen pictures of several improvised ones) but the Doppio Borgato is the only commercially-available pedal piano I've ever heard of. Of course it's a natural idea, following on from the pedal harpsichords which were known in Bach's day and which organists used as practice instruments. But it's an idea which also brings challenges. Neither the organ nor the harpsichord require a nuanced touch for any kind of dynamic control, while this expressive mechanism is the piano's whole raison d'etre. To require the feet to do something more delicate than a simple on / off is surely an additional complication for the player.

Wikipedia shows a couple historic versions of the pedal piano, most of which involve linkages from the pedals to their corresponding piano keys above. The other method is to build a separate instrument for the feet and stack the two one atop the other. The Doppio Borgato is of this latter type, with a standard concert grand piano sitting atop a second, dedicated 37-note piano for the feet. The "standard" piano is Borgato's L-282, an exquisite 9' grand of the regular 88 note compass. The single front leg has been moved slightly to accommodate the pedal instrument below, but it appears otherwise to follow the established pattern of concert grand pianos. I thought it ungainly-looking at first, but I'm changing my mind. It's certainly less elegant than the basic concert grand, but there's a mass and seriousness about the two instruments together that look to mean business. They certainly look to mean money: the Doppio Borgato is a whopping €260,750 complete.

Over the years I've wondered about what qualities would seem to be needed to make a pedal piano work, and a big question is whether one would want the feet to produce sound which differs in any particular from the hands, or if the two should be seamless. Of course, if the feet simply activate the corresponding notes of the piano above, the sound would only be distinguished by differences in quality of touch or phrasing. (With an organ the artist is easily able to choose between both options: use the same pipes as the hands or use a different registration). Most pedal harpsichords I've heard give the pedal instrument a bit of extra gravitas, which seems suitable. Maestro Borgato seems to have straddled this line very subtly. The pedal instrument of the Doppio Borgato played gently sounds indistinguishable from the keyboard above; but played with a bit more aggression the pedals acquire a hard, brassy quality that sounds powerful and very effectively underpins the instrument above. It's exactly the right balance, I think, but it doesn't minimize the challenge of getting the "touch" of the feet right; this change in timbre from piano to forte makes a careless movement of the feet more noticeable than it might otherwise be. Further, the pedals seem to have a very small range of motion--not unlike the inch or so that the piano keys move--and I wonder if that limited motion makes it more difficult to gauge the intensity of one's touch when using the feet? (I'd love to learn more about the technical aspects of the instrument; is the action different from the L-282 above? Are the strings and tensions in the pedal instrument the same as the L-282? And if anything differs, how was that difference arrived at?)

I'm surprised at how much music (that is, any at all) has been written for the pedal piano considering it's an instrument that basically does not exist in the wild. And to this repertoire can be added almost anything written for the organ--a huge body of music. The Italian pianist Mirco Bruson is entrusted with introducing the Doppio Borgato to us on this recording, and he has chosen superbly. Schumann wrote several cycles of pieces specifically for the pedal piano (they are always performed on the organ), and Bruson here gives us the Op. 56 Etudes and the Op. 58 Scenes. There is also a piece by Beethoven, Cesar Franck's Prelude, Fugue et Variation, and from Bach three chorale preludes and the famous c minor Passacaglia and Fugue BWV 582. All these show the instrument off most flatteringly. I've always enjoyed the Schumann pieces, particularly the Op. 56 Etudes but they've never sounded so good as they do on this instrument. They're not as densely contrapuntal as, say, Bach's Trio Sonatas, but the canonic interplay of voices here is wonderfully inventive and Schumann's melodies are lovely.

Bruson's performance is letter-perfect. My earlier-stated concerns about the difficulty of judging one's touch with the pedal instrument stem at least partly from my having seen video of the great French organist Jean Guillou playing his own Doppio Borgato where some of Bach's more athletic pedal passages sound a bit uneven. I'm quite aware of Guillou's rare brilliance as an organist, which only reinforces the notion that playing this pedal instrument may not be a walk in the park. Mirco Bruson's recording here does not hint at any such issues, and the disc brilliantly demonstrates this interplay of tones between hands and feet. (As an aside, Jean Guillou made a recording in 2002 on Phillips of the Doppio Borgato which is unavailable in the US. I'm shocked at how absolutely it's unavailable--a Google search comes up with very little and even a search of Decca's own website turns up not a trace. I've managed to track it down on a European site, but the protection against an American getting his hands on the recording is remarkably effective--for what purpose I cannot imagine. I feel I must make it a mission to get my hands on that CD, and will try again next time I'm out of the country.)

(Jean Guillou at the Doppio Borgato)

This disc, and the Doppio Borgato particularly, makes for the most exciting addition to my music collection in a long time. I can hardly conceive of a more fascinating endeavor than to build and perfect an instrument like this one, and I would love to hear the whole of the organ literature recorded on it. Here's hoping for much more.

Highest recommendation.

A Couple Discoveries

2011-02-10T17:55:00.002-06:00

Favorite French Piano Works
David Rubinstein
Musicus (2010)

***

My love of the organ is closely seconded by affection for the piano. I suppose it's because I always had a piano in the house and developed a taste for its sounds early on. I've had an old Chickering 9' concert grand for about 25 years now, carting it laboriously from place to place, always having to choose houses based on what will accommodate it.

As with the organ, I'm very interested in the piano as a machine and in its history and construction. In addition to listening to a lot of piano music, I love visiting new piano showrooms and also the mom-and-pop piano rebuilding shops I've found in each place I've lived. From all of this I have a sense of the piano as a product historically of large industrial concerns--Steinway, Yamaha, Bösendorfer. These are big, expensive products crafted and assembled by armies of workers of many job descriptions and skills. I've always been aware of smaller specialty piano makers, but even firms like Fazioli and Bechstein are, I imagined, pretty large concerns, shipping 3/4 ton, highly finished instruments all over the world.

Clicking through YouTube videos a couple days ago (yet again--how much of my musical life is now being driven by YouTube?), I ran across a video of Messiaen played on the world's largest piano in which Aaron McClasky plays the short Prelude "The Dove" on an instrument by the California piano maker David Rubenstein. I'd never heard of him (Rubenstein or McClasky), but I was immediately intrigued, not simply by the piano's massive size--12'2" and 2,500 lbs!--but by the idea that an individual would undertake to design and build an instrument of this size and caliber in (presumably) a small workshop. This was like a thunderbolt to me; it counters every intuition I have about where pianos come from.

While searching for Mr. Rubenstein's website, I quickly came to realize that there is a cottage industry of small, boutique piano makers. I'll come back to that. But after poking around his website--and buying this recording of his instrument--I decided to send him off a little note of introduction expressing an interest in seeing his operation at some point (his shop is located in El Segundo, just South of LAX; an easy drive from our hub in Ontario, CA). He very graciously wrote me back and extended his hospitality whenever I next make it to town, so this has become high on my to-do list.

His signature piano, the R-371, is not the only instrument he makes. There is also the more nearly normal R-244, which sports an eight foot length and a standard 88 keys. The R-371 has 97 keys, extending the piano's normal compass down to CCC. Both pianos are otherwise made of the same materials and with the same methods. I have no idea how many, if any, of either model Mr. Rubenstein has made or sold.

The piano builder David Rubenstein has paired up with the improbably-named pianist David Rubinstein for a CD of the R-371, an album of French compositions which show off the instrument's dynamic and tonal palette: The Meditation from Thaïs of Massenet, Satie's Three Gymnopedie, Debussy's Children's Corner, three Mouvements perpetuel of Francis Poulenc and the Sonatine and Les Vallée des cloches of Ravel. Just my kind of stuff.

The first thing I notice is that the sonic differences between pianos from different manufacturers (to say nothing of between instruments from a single builder) are very subtle indeed. "Proper" piano tone is well-established and codified. There's a right and wrong way for a piano to sound. Given the massive existing repertoire for the piano--in all genres--I don't know why I was expecting a singular instrument like the R-371 to sound in any way different from every concert grand piano I had heard before, but this expectation went unrealized. Perhaps more time and careful listening is required; if I concentrate I can hear an impressive sustain from the R-371, and the lowest octave is spectacular as one might expect from strings a good three feet longer than the industry standard. But it sounds like a concert grand piano in all the best senses.

As for this recording, pianist David Rubinstein is excellent. He is very much at home in this repertoire, and he demonstrates the bottom 2/3 of the instrument's dynamic range ably--though a full assessment of the R-371's qualities will need some Beethoven or Prokofiev or Reger to judge. The sound on the disc is excellent apart from a couple climactic moments--just a couple individual notes, really, which sound a touch saturated to me (and it may just be a bad iTunes transfer). Regardless, it's nothing to detract from a very enjoyable listening experience and a wonderful introduction to the musical oddity that is the R-371.

This exploration of what is to me new territory yielded a few other delicious finds, including a brilliant instrument from the Australian firm Stuart and Sons, and also a magnificent pedal piano from the Italian builder Luigi Borgato. We'll cover this latter instrument in a separate post.

A Fabulous Discovery

2011-02-05T23:59:00.007-06:00

Salve Regina: Works of Yves Castagnet, Olivier Latry and Francis Poulenc
Maitrise Notre-Dame de Paris
Editions Hortus
HORT-056 (2007)

***

There is no worse-kept secret here than my infatuation with the music of Maurice Duruflé and my broader love for the compositional school surrounding the great churches of Paris and the Paris Conservatoire from the 1850s or so up to the present day--indeed, I daresay I've belabored the point. But it's the very center point of my musical interest, and I've lived immersed in this music for a couple decades now and I seem never to tire of it.

I say the school continues to the present day, but the bulk of its glory is naturally enough shining at us from the past: César Franck, Charles-Marie Widor, Louis Vierne, Marcel Dupré, Maurice Duruflé, etc., etc. Probably the most famous flag-bearer of this school in recent years has been Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992), and many music listeners have heard of Franck and perhaps Duruflé from his Requiem of 1948. But the rest, including the many active participants today, are likely to be unfamiliar to most folks.

Even I am a little surprised that the modern world has not overrun the school (not merely the school in the sense of the Conservatoire de Paris, where many of these composers studied and taught, but in this larger sense of practitioners of a particular musical aesthetic; I'm surprised the aesthetic continues). But continue it does, full steam ahead. On the couple visits I've made to Paris, I've been most fortunate to stumble upon--literally--noteworthy people doing noteworthy things, which had the effect of making me feel like the stream of a vibrant, if arcane, history was rushing onward and I was lucky enough to be able to step briefly into it.

Wading through YouTube videos a few weeks back (it's stunning how much stuff is on YouTube), I ran across an audio-and-still-photo video of a movement from a mass by the Notre Dame choir organist Yves Castagnet, the Sanctus. I'm aware of Mr. Castagnet from a recording or two (plus a performance I attended in Paris in 1998)--he is a former first prize winner for organ performance from the Conservatoire de Paris and is as accomplished as his comrades at Notre Dame, even if he leads a quieter public existence.

What I was not aware of before now was that Mr. Castagnet is a composer. This shouldn't be a surprise, but modern compositions from the present batch of Parisian organists seem fairly rare. Notre Dame's most famous organist, Olivier Latry, is a devoted improviser, as are his co-titulars at Notre Dame, Phillippe Lefebvre and Jean-Pierre Leguay (their compositions, if there are any, are not numerous or widely-played). So too with the organ loft of St. Sulpice. Daniel Roth has a couple compositions, but mostly he and his second, Sophie-Veronique Cauchefer-Choplin, are famous for their improvisational arts. I'm thrilled that on my visits to Paris I've been able to hear improvisations by Vincent Warnier and Jean Guillou and Phillippe Lefebvre and Ms. Cauchefer-Choplin; but the end result of this experience has been to convince me that the movement is now almost entirely about improvisation.

So this discovery of a composed mass by Yves Castagnet was to me a real find. And it was doubly thrilling to find it to be an engaging piece, energetic and confident and absolutely steeped in this aesthetic world. Written in an ABA form, the Sanctus takes the form of a typical French organ toccata with a vocal overlay. It's written in a virtuoso sextuple meter with thunderous bass octaves underpinning the soaring choral lines. I robbed the audio track from the video and promptly wore a hole in my hard drive listening again and again.

But the Messe had other movements which were nowhere to be found. I decided I had to locate the rest of it. The person posting the video said the track came from a CD obtained from the Notre Dame gift shop which contained the entire mass, plus a published work by Olivier Latry--another first for me!--and some Poulenc. I found the website for the cathedral's gift shop, but I was unable to discern which of the available CDs was the one in question--nor could I determine whether they would ship overseas. After a bit more poking, I found the CD label--Hortus--and was able to go to their website for more information. I spent another hour trying to find an online music seller who would have the CD available for MP3 download, but alas there were none; the disc was just a bit too obscure. But Hortus themselves would happily ship the CD (and another I found of Vierne and a mass by Jean-Pierre Leguay) to the US of A, and after a month or so I was in business.

A few observations: First, I don't remember any French vocal group sounding nearly so good as the Maitrise Notre Dame de Paris do on this and two other recent CD acquisitions. I don't know to whom to attribute the improvement, but the pitch and blend and precision, the dynamic control, and the quality of the soloists are all absolutely top shelf here. Second, the massive acoustic of Notre Dame, plus the thundering grand orgue (which sits nearly a city block distant from the singers) combine to make a really magical and singular sonic environment for music. The present disc is recorded close to the choir so that the organ's immense power, while still palpable, is kept at bay just a bit. This enables some of the organ's more aggressive timbres--especially the big pedal reeds--to be used to great effect without drowning out the choir (as I suspect would occur if the choir joined the organist up in the organ loft.

All three pieces on the CD use the Salve Regina chant as basic thematic material. Castagnet's Messe "Salve Regina" is the centerpiece. Written for mixed chorus and two organs, it contains four movements with interspersed plainchant sung by female voices only. For this performance, Olivier Latry mans the grand organ console and composer Castagnet takes his regular place at the choir organ. The work is mostly quiet and contemplative with the Salve Regina chant making regular appearances. The quiet is punctuated with occasional outbursts from the organ, especially the powerful close of the second-movement Gloria and the whole of the now-familiar third movement, the Sanctus. In the Sanctus, the grand organ part is given all the technical fireworks, and the quieter, more intimate choir organ given the very Duruflé-like central section. In fact, the whole work sounds very reminiscent of Duruflé's Op. 9 Requiem or his Op. 10 Quatre motets, a mixture of ancient melodies and modern, yet still tonal, harmonies (indeed, I found a British review of the CD in question which referred to the piece as "post-Duruflé," which gets right to the heart of it, I think). The piece is unmistakeably French, the tonality sounding very much like Ravel and Debussy and, yes, Duruflé.

Latry's Salve Regina for Organ and Voice is based on an improvisation he did, I believe, during an American concert tour. It intersperses the solo singing of chants with organ sketches of varying characters based on the Salve Regina phrases just sung. It is the only composed work of Latry's of which I've heard, and it naturally has very much the character of his improvisations. He is very inventive in his use of timbre at the grand orgue, and the effect is similar to the Castagnet work in its tenor and tonality. All these pieces are essentially tonal, but are unafraid to use spice as needed. The musicians are superb throughout, and the recording first rate. (One wonders what another recording of the work would sound like without this acoustic and that instrument.)

Duruflé himself gave us a very limited number of composed works. One is grateful for the wondrous pieces we have, pieces of absolute perfection and haunting beauty, but one naturally pines for more. I have no idea how many compositions Mr. Castagnet has in him, but on the strength of this work I will be continually on the lookout for anything new coming from his pen.

Highest recommendation for the organ lover.

The Do-Everything Machine

2010-01-25T00:20:00.000-06:00

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

2010-01-23T17:51:00.005-06:00

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

2009-12-25T17:25:00.007-06:00

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

2009-12-15T17:42:00.004-06:00

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

2009-12-12T15:37:00.006-06:00

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

2009-12-11T12:18:00.005-06:00

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

2009-11-26T17:14:00.004-06:00

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

2009-11-24T10:03:00.004-06:00

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

2009-11-19T17:11:00.009-06:00

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

2009-09-11T13:57:00.004-05:00

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

2009-02-18T01:24:00.011-06:00

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

2008-12-17T15:05:00.000-06:00

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

2008-12-14T20:54:00.000-06:00

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

2008-11-25T11:08:00.005-06:00

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

2008-11-23T21:15:00.000-06:00

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

2008-11-05T19:39:00.001-06:00

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

2008-09-18T12:39:00.011-05:00

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

2008-07-20T13:44:00.006-05:00

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

2008-07-01T00:29:00.006-05:00

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!

2008-06-20T01:10:00.006-05:00

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.

Parsonic Boom

2008-06-13T13:52:00.008-05:00

Music of Robert Parsons
Voces Cantabile / Barnaby Smith
Naxos Records, 8.570451

First Great Service
Responds for the Dead (Latin Service)

***

After my recent acquisition of the Gabrieli Consort's Road to Paradise, I searched through my music collection for other works by the little-known Robert Parsons. His five-voice Ave Maria culminates with an 80 second Amen that is the most glorious bit of music from the Renaissance I've ever heard. At least as it's presented to us by McCreesh & Company. And it turns out to be the only piece by Parsons in my whole collection.

So I searched online a bit for more of Robert Parsons, about whom quite little is known. The following is the entirety of Wikipedia's entry on him:

Robert Parsons (c. 1535 - January 1572) was an English composer.

Although little is known about the life of Robert Parsons, it is likely that in his youth he was a choir boy, as until 1561 he was an assistant to Richard Bower, Master of the Children Choristers of the Chapel Royal.

Parsons was appointed Gentleman of the Chapel Royal on 17 October 1563. His work consisted of a number of sacred and secular vocal compositions, including his Ave Maria, as well as some instrumental pieces. He is believed to have died in January 1572 when he fell into the then swollen River Trent and was drowned. He may have been a teacher of, or at least an influence on, William Byrd at Lincoln Cathedral. Byrd succeeded him as Gentleman of the Chapel Royal.

My favorite recording label, Naxos, has the only all-Parsons release I was able to find, a 2007 issue featuring the choir Voces Cantabile, under the baton of Barnaby Smith. Formed in 2003 of ex-choristers from Westminster Abbey, here is yet another young London-based choir taking advantage of the country's wonderfully rich choral heritage.

While I'm thrilled to find more of this composer, these performances don't quite reach the top-shelf level of the Gabrieli Consort (as is perhaps to be expected from such a young ensemble). The choir doesn't blend to the same ethereal degree, and they don't achieve the confident pitch solidity, especially in what seem like a couple less-than-ideal edits where the choir's pitch changes suddenly and noticeably. Pitch is a particularly sticky point for me, and not everyone may object to the same degree.

But for that, though, it's a fine, respectable effort, and it fills a void in the recorded repertoire of another of England's shining Tudor lights.

Two More of Naxos's Buxtehude Cycle

2008-05-31T22:09:00.006-05:00

Buxtehude: Organ Works, Volume 3
Wolfgang Rübsam, organ
John Brombaugh organ, Central Lutheran Church, Eugene OR (1976)
Naxos 8.555991

Buxtehude: Organ Works, Volume 4
Craig Cramer, organ
Paul Fritts organ, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma WA (1999)
Naxos 8.557195

***

Here are two more from Naxos's ongoing cycle of Buxtehude's organ works. I've been acquiring the discs rather in inverse order, starting with Julia Brown's fabulous later releases, Volumes 5-7, recorded on the magnificent Martin Pasi organ at St. Cecelia's Cathedral in Omaha. Now we have the two releases prior to Dr. Brown's involvement, Volumes 3 and 4, recorded by two different organists on yet two different organs. I'm always of two minds about this releasing of a composer's complete works played by several interpreters: on the one hand, it introduces a variable into the survey, which can be distracting to a new or fussy listener; but on the other, it ensures the whole cycle gets completed, and Naxos has been quite inspired in its choices. (Though for my money, I'd be very happy to have the whole cycle by Julia Brown on that Pasi organ!)

Volume 3 is from native German, and former teacher at Northwestern University outside Chicago, Wolfgang Rübsam. Mr Rübsam happens to have acted as producer for the other volumes in this set--as well as quite a number of other organ recordings from Naxos--and many of the performers on these discs have studied with him, including Julia Brown. Based on her glorious performances and a really excellent set of the six organ sonatas of Felix Mendelssohn by another student, one Stephen Tharp, Mr. Rübsam's involvement seems entirely welcome in any capacity. Rübsam himself released a complete Buxtehude cycle in the early '80s on the Bellaphon label, as well as Bach's complete organ output for Naxos (among many other releases).

His playing is characterized by extreme liveliness and virtuosity with a pointedly non-metronomic pulse. This makes for vibrant interpretations, reminding me at times of Glenn Gould, except that Rübsam is more concerned with authenticity than Gould was. Parts of his Bach are among my favorites, though often I feel aware of the artist as well as the composer, which is perhaps not to everyone's taste (in this he is like Gould or Horowitz; there are two geniuses in the room). But he's damn persuasive with his approach, and whatever I think going in he almost always wins me over. To my ear, his quite flexible time seems to work better with Buxtehude than with Bach, and this particular Buxtehude disc really comes alive under his touch.

His instrument of choice is a 1976 John Brombaugh instrument from Central Lutheran Church in Eugene, OR. It has a fairly mild non-equal temperament and makes a very appropriate and pleasing sound. This is really excellent Buxtehude.

Volume 4 comes from Craig Cramer, the Professor of Organ at Notre Dame University. As with Julia Brown, I fancy I hear some of Rübsam's irrepressibility and exuberance in Mr. Cramer's playing (the little devil sitting on the organist's shoulder saying "let yourself go a little!"), though perhaps turned down a notch or two. But if his approach is slightly less adventurous, this is still quite lively playing, and Mr. Cramer is solidly in control. His disc contains mostly chorale treatments, with a couple of Buxtehude's multipartite Preludes / Toccatas mixed in, and it's a wonderful disc.

The instrument is the 1998 Paul Fritts organ at Pacific Lutheran University, the same organ we've heard in George Ritchie's Bach cycle and the Joan Lippincott recording of Bach Preludes and Fugues (reviewed below). Again, it's a first-rate organ for the repertoire, and the recording quality is everything we've come to expect from Naxos.

Though their approaches are not precisely the same, they are both eminently worthy of the repertoire, and Naxos has done as good a job of pairing here as we have a right to expect. With Julia Brown's volumes, this shapes up as a cycle to have.

Two Recordings of Bach

2008-05-27T13:11:00.004-05:00

Weimar Preludes and Fugues
Joan Lippincott, organ
Paul Fritts, University of Notre Dame, IN (2004)
Gothic Records G-49260 (2008)

BWV #s 532, 534, 537, 539, 542, 543, 545

Preludes and Fugues
Joan Lippincott, organ
Paul Fritts, Pacific Lutheran University, WA (1999)
Gothic Records G-49202 (2002)

BWV #s 541, 544, 546, 548, 572, 769

***

Joan Lippincott is the former head of the organ department at Westminster Choir College, where, along with the Curtis Institute, she undertook her own studies. She specializes in Bach, but has recorded a fairly broad repertoire. After a distinguished teaching career, she now makes her living as a concert organist.

These two recordings showcase Preludes and Fugues from two different periods of Bach's life: the youthful exuberance of his Weimar years, and the more polished weight of his Leipzig period. Care has been taken to select instruments appropriate to the resources which Bach had available when writing the pieces, in an effort to bring us as close as possible to the sound and spirit of Bach's creation. Both instruments are from the Tacoma, WA builder Paul Fritts and Company. For the Weimar disc Dr. Lippincott has chosen a well-developed two manual and pedal instrument from 2004, installed at the University of Notre Dame; and the Leipzig disc gets a larger (and much-recorded) three manual and pedal instrument from 1998 installed at Pacific University in Tacoma, WA in 1999. Both are beautiful, impressive instruments that give us the clear and vibrant, pure-organ sound representative of the state of organ building of Bach's day, and both are in sympathetic acoustics--the Notre Dame instrument particularly so.

Dr. Lippincott's interpretations remind me a bit of the late, great E. Power Biggs, in that they seem at their best like a spotlight trained on the score, a rare glimpse into the composer's brain. This is abstract music, written for the glory of its peculiar sound and for the joy of triumphing over the rules of counterpoint, and Dr. Lippincott has an obvious affinity for this repertoire. She finds the inspiration from within the pieces, rather than imposing it from without. On the whole, I think the CD of the Weimar pieces is the more successful of the two. The Notre Dame organ is not large (35 stops on two manuals and pedal) but the divisions are very well developed, and it produces an especially harmonious sound. The acoustic in the recital hall helps, being almost cathedral-like in its scope. Dr. Lippincott's performances here are spot-on, among the best of these pieces I've heard.

The other disc has some of my favorites of Bach's output, some really excellent pieces--BWV 572, 541 and 544 are among my most beloved music in any genre, and the Canonic Variations, BWV 769, come off especially well. The PLU organ (54 stops over three manuals and pedal) is similarly brilliant, another Fritts masterwork. But there are several rough edges among the selections, the occasional missed note and the like, and the disc doesn't hit its mark quite so squarely. The opening piece especially--the Piece d'orgue in G Major BWV 572--has several distracting moments. There is a rather glaringly misplayed pedal passage about halfway through, and a peculiarly absent-minded-sounding release before the final section. And in this piece particularly (though I must be careful not to declare an error something that merely grates on my personal tastes) my old nemesis flexible winding rears its head quite excessively. At times it sounds like a small child jumping rhythmically on the bellows.

(I feel a digression coming on.)

Looking at the CD's notes, I see that the Professor of Music and Organist Emeritus of Pacific Lutheran University (and contributor to the notes) is one David Dahl. It strikes me now that I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Dahl during a cross-country motorcycle trip I took in 1982. I rode into Eugene, OR and went in search of the shops of the organ builder John Brombaugh. Not finding anyone at the shop, I was pointed in the direction of a recent Brombaugh installation in town, and went to the church to look around. There I found an organ lesson in progress, a student working on the Adagio of Bach's Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C Major, BWV 564, taught by none other than (I presume) this same David Dahl. When the lesson ended, Dr. Dahl--whom I'd never met nor heard of--was very kind to talk with me for quite a while about the Brombaugh organ. One of the items we discussed was the organ's prominent flexible wind supply (the degree of flexibility of which, if memory serves, could be adjusted with a switch or drawknob), which Dr. Dahl was quite a proponent of. I remember he asked me to sing a note, and then he shoved back on my shoulder and we noted the quaver in my voice. His point was that music-making is a living thing, and we all react to what is going on around us. Sounds sensible enough, and (honestly grateful though I was for his time and attention) it wasn't until a couple hundred miles down the road that it struck me that we don't push each other around during a choir performance! The analogy just didn't really hold water for me, and it still doesn't; flexible winding, beyond a certain minimal point, just sounds like a wind-supply defect--a result perhaps of technical limitations from antiquity--that has been mistaken for something sonically beneficial.

But I've carped about that quite enough, I think. It hardly stands as much of an impediment to appreciating these performances. I think the glitches I note (if indeed they are glitches) would only attract the attention of the devotee, and they needn't deter anyone sampling these recordings. I see that Dr. Lippincott has most of the rest of Bach's output available on the Gothic label; I look forward to hearing more.

There are many excellent CDs of this repertoire, and these are worthy additions to the catalog. They showcase one of our country's great concert organists and some really great and artistic American organs. With my small reservations noted, I'm happy to add them to my collection.

A 1/20th Full Cup

2008-05-26T13:14:00.005-05:00

Scarlatti: Sonatas
Mikhail Pletnev, piano
Virgin Classics, 7243 5 61961 2 4 (2 CDs)

***

As promised, here we have a double CD set of Russian pianist Mikhail Pletnev playing 31 Scarlatti sonatas, providing us with a nice contrast to the Scott Ross harpsichord versions reviewed below. As I mentioned in that post, the suitability of the piano for all 555 of Scarlatti's sonatas is questioned, at least by some. And I'm certainly not knowledgeable enough to clear the air on these matters. But between the Hungarian Andras Schiff, Horowitz and now Pletnev, I must have 50 or more of the sonatas recorded on modern grand piano, and the pieces seem certainly not worse for wear for this instrument choice.

Which is not to say there is no difference. None of these artists seeks to make their piano sound like something other than what it is. Pletnev is of the first order of pianists, a top shelf technician with a broad repertoire. He uses his instrument's full resources to bring us these pieces, taking advantage of the piano's great dynamic range, clarity and expressive potential to shape lines and emphasize contrapuntal interplay, and indeed to differentiate emotionally between pieces. Some pieces, like K. #s 24, 386, 141 and 113 pass at a perilously fast pace; not gratuitously fast, but a pace which requires deft skill (and the piano's perfected double-escapement action) to pull off. Other pieces are presented more luxuriously, though never self-indulgently. Pletnev has chosen a number of more familiar sonatas (K. #s 27, 380, 96, the hauntingly beautiful K.87--a favorite of Horowitz's) mixed in with the inevitably lesser-known numbers.

It makes for a satisfying recital, and a great summary of Scarlatti on piano. It doesn't substitute for these pieces on their intended instrument, but Scarlatti, like Bach, translates very well to other media. I think a strong argument can be made that the piano is the dominant keyboard instrument of our times (harpsichords having become quite esoteric), and we exclude repertoire from it to our own detriment. Certainly I'd rather have Scarlatti's work become better known via the piano than not to hear him at all.

The recording, from 1995, is fairly close, natural and quiet.

An Embarassment of Riches

2008-05-15T19:18:00.006-05:00

Domenico Scarlatti: The Keyboard Sonatas
Scott Ross, Harpsichord
Warner Classics, 2564-62092-2, 1986

***

In the process of updating some stuff in my iTunes, I threw out the MP3 files of Scott Ross's set of 555 Keyboard Sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti and re-ripped them into AAC format (slightly smaller files, and a bit better sound). This requires going back through and renaming everything, since I virtually never get correct titles off of the CD Database (and certainly not titles formatted to my taste). What really drives me crazy is that SOMEBODY bothered to submit these track titles to the database, and yet they have no consistency from one disc to the next, and are often a semi-intelligible scramble--no composer listed, artist's name listed as composer, instrument listed as piano, genre as rock or pop. And these are the only track name options available in the database (if there are several, they will prompt you to pick which one you want), so someone actually submitted them in this haphazard fashion! Why bother? Virtually anyone will have to reenter all this stuff in what is a fairly tedious and laborious process.

(I really shouldn't complain too much, as I've kind of developed my own formatting over the years, and so much of the typing would have to be done in any case. The words "major" and "minor" are omitted, replaced by upper or lowercase letters; the words "in" and "for" and other superfluities are dropped from titles; unless it's not obvious, the instrument gets deleted. So Piano Sonata No. 5 in c minor, Op. 5 becomes Op.5 Sonata 5c. Or Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings No.1 in F Major, Op. 77, First Movement: Andante becomes Op.77 Harpsichord Concerto 1F / 1--Andante. Takes much less space. But this means that I have a perpetually unfinished editing task facing me, as everything on my iTunes has to get the treatment.)

How easily I get off track. My point was to talk about Scarlatti. He's one of the Big Three born in 1685 (along with Bach and Handel), and is remembered chiefly for his huge output of sonatas for the harpsichord. Though Italian by birth, he became the official composer of the Spanish Queen Maria Barbara, and wrote his huge number of sonatas for the queen's tutelage (she was obviously a pretty accomplished keyboardist). Scarlatti himself seems to have been a spectacular player, even besting the brilliant Handel in a contest at the harpsichord (though Handel was judged the superior at the organ).

The fascinating thing is what Scarlatti accomplished with such a restricted palette. I love the sound of the harpsichord, but it's a limited instrument in its expressive capacities. It has some tiered dynamic control, but it's quite rudimentary compared with, say, a piano (harpsichordists would argue this, I'm sure; but the harpsichord's limited dynamic control is indisputable). The clavichord--said to be Bach's favorite instrument--is a much closer historic analog to our modern piano, but it was unable to produce the volume necessary for anything more than small salon performance. A larger room or concert hall required a more powerful instrument, and the harpsichord was the best the period had to offer. The comparatively thin sound produced by plucking the strings actually makes for great harmonic development, and harpsichords are almost always tuned to a non-equal temperament. So the instrument can produce a rich and very satisfying sound. But it's very much a sound of a particular era in music history, and the music written reflects the limitations of the instrument (nobody tries to play Chopin or Rachmaninov on a harpsichord).

One aspect of Bach's musical genius is his ability to produce really profound things while working within the restrictive contrapuntal forms. It's as though he needed some obstacle to overcome for his expression to take wing. And there's an element of this in Scarlatti's achievement. His Sonatas are virtually all written for the harpsichord, almost all are bipartite, and they fall stylistically within a fairly narrow range. Well, one would think that the limits of this formula would be quickly reached. And yet he managed 555 of them! That's an unbelievable number of a single type of composition. There seems to have been no limit to his ability to find new themes and fresh ways to assemble them. And each one is a gem unto itself.

Thanks to Horowitz and others, these sonatas are heard more and more from pianists. (I remember the CD notes of a perfectly horrid recording of Scarlatti Sonatas by the pianist Alexis Weissenberg wherein he wrote that only 15 or so of the 555 are suited to the piano. I have considerably more than 15 recorded on piano, and they sound great, thanks.) But the harpsichord does have its charm and an undeniable correctness with this repertoire, and the late Scott Ross is a most persuasive proponent of the literature. He uses several different instruments in the course of the cycle, so that one's ear gets a bit of variety. Just the same, one is unlikely to sit down for all 555 of them; this set--on 34 discs--takes a day and a half of continuous play to run its course! So the "variety" angle is a bit moot. (I read that the whole recording enterprise required over 8,000 takes!)

I bought the original release of these CDs on Erato Disques 20-some years ago, but I see they're still available from Warner's catalog as a budget release. If you're a collector, I simply can't imagine anyone topping this effort and I highly recommend the release. I have a number of other very persuasive exponents of this music--Andras Schiff and Trevor Pinnock, both on some older recordings; and I've ordered a more recent Mikhail Pletnev recording that shows great promise--but Mr. Ross holds his own on a case-by-case basis, and offers exhaustive completeness to boot.

The recordings are almost 25 years old now, but they could have been recorded yesterday. The sound is excellent.

So I've hours of work at my computer here to re-input all the information for this release. At least I've got some really engaging music to keep me company.

Livin' the High Life

2008-05-07T09:20:00.002-05:00

Steve Winwood
Nine Lives (2008) (plus Back In the High Life--1986)
Sony Records

***

I remember Steve Winwood from my college days. He was pretty prominent on radio at that time, and with his past group affiliations it seemed like he might already be in the latter part of his career. It wasn't that he didn't sound current, but there was something old style about his singing. He was a rock update on a horns and Hammond rhythm and blues style. I never owned any of his music, but I knew of the guy, at least while he was current. And then there was no more new stuff, and I came to feel that his career was maybe over or he had moved on to executive matters, like producing other artists or some such.

Not so fast, it seems. With Nine Lives, he gives us a fine studio recording, his first in five years. Since I had no other music by him, I decided in picking up his new CD to also snag an album from when he was more prominently in pop culture's radar, and chose 1986's Back In the High Life.

The new album does not stray too far from the blue-eyed soul sound for which he is renowned (though he is an experienced keyboardist in jazz and other genres). His voice is immediately recognizable, sounding like the back-of-the-throat belting of an older black man--kind of like Bill Withers: soulful and rich and from the street. I'm reminded (though not stylistically) of the first time I heard Christina Aguilera, whom I was convinced could not possibly be white: I just didn't think skinny British white guy when I heard Winwood sing.

He seems always to be surrounded by able musicians, though one of the banes of an iTunes purchase is that there are no CD notes accompanying. And finding the roster of musicians online has not proven very easy. (Allmusic.com has a listing of musicians, but it's so unspecific that it's of little use). So I'm kind of in the dark about who helped him on his albums.

Nine Lives sounds more relaxed than his older material, maybe as befits someone older and wiser. Winwood's voice is older, but it's clearly the same musical mind attached, and there's a more acoustic sound to the new album. Back In the High Life, though polished and professional, sounds much more processed. Nine Lives begins with the basic R&B wail I'm Not Drowning, basically just the singer and his guitar, and proceeds from there through a range of moods, from the dreamy Fly to the grittier Dirty City, which prominently features Winwood's former Blind Faith bandmember, Eric Clapton. This is a good, honest record from a journeyman musician whose command of his craft lets him not work so hard at it.

But my real revelation is with that earlier album. There are four or five songs on Back In the High Life that still receive regular airtime, songs with which I've been more or less familiar for years. But to hear them in good fidelity and collected into a group--and to pay close attention to them--makes the album seem a more impressive accomplishment than I realized. From some inspired playing from all corners (by whomever--thanks again, iTunes), to really delicious soul grooves, the album just delivers the goods in a satisfying way. If you weren't a fan of this kind of music, here is the album that will make you into one. As a drummer, I'm especially taken with the really fabulous turns on the title track (with sections played in the style almost of a military march) and the utterly infectious Freedom Overspill. Add in a remarkable turn by vocalist Chaka Kahn in Higher Love, and the unmistakable backing vocals of James Taylor (also on the title track--something I had felt sure of for years, but only confirmed with some web digging after buying the album), and the result is an album which most pop artists dream of: a collection of feeling songs, brilliantly played, which stand the test of time.

Together, these two make an impressive pair of releases. The musical world is better for having Steve Winwood in it.

A Lawes Unto Themselves

2008-05-05T01:55:00.006-05:00

William Lawes: Consorts in Four and Five Parts
Phantasm (plus Sarah Cunningham)
Channel Classics CCS 15698

Works for Five Voices:

Set in a
Set in F
Set in c
Set in C
Set in g

Works for Four Voices:

Fantazy in c (VdGS #108)
Aire [Fantazy] in C (VdGS #111)
Aire in c (VdGS #109)
Aire in C (VdGS #112)
Aire in c (VdGS #110)
Aire in C (VdGS #113)

***

Phantasm are a quartet of viols comprised of Americans Laurence Dreyfus and Wendy Gillespie, the Scot Jonathan Manson and Finn Markku Luolajan-Mikkola. Founded by Laurence Dreyfus in 1994, the group have been the Consort-in-Residence at Oxford University since 2005, and have won numerous awards, including a Grammophon Award for Best Non-Vocal Baroque Performance with their very first CD, 1995's recording of Purcell's Complete Fantasies for Viols (Simax - PSC 1124). They now have 11 recordings to their credit, including works by Byrd, John Jenkins and Orlando Gibbons among others.

This present release dates from 1999, and is one of two discs featuring music of William Lawes (1602-1645). This disc covers Consorts written for both four and five voices (for which the quartet is supplemented by Sarah Cunnningham).

There's a magnetism in the plaintive, organum-like sound of a group of gambas, something that taps into the foundation of musicality itself. After the human voice, these instruments provide about the most basic example of a sustained, blending tone, which then leads to an essential exposure to harmony and the fundamentals of counterpoint and voice leading. I find the gamba family sound much more appealing in general than the violin family, not because of its period-correctness but because it's a purer tone with a more interesting articulation. And it doesn't escape me that many of these pieces would translate very well to the organ (just as Fretwork so beautifully translated Bach's organ works to a gamba ensemble). Some of the sets are lugubrious and solemn, while others are quite rollicking, and would be fun to play (and see played). Belaboring a point I've made on numerous occasions before, here is yet another specialized niche musical concern based in or around London, a place which already sports the aforementioned Fretwork. You gotta love the place.

These pieces are perfectly played. I'm eager now to look into both their companion volume to this one of Lawes' Six-Part Consorts, as well as a couple volumes of John Jenkins. High marks on this one.

More Youthful Splendor

2008-05-01T03:33:00.002-05:00

Heavenly Harmonies
Stile antico
Harmonia Mundi, HMU807463
2008

Music of Thomas Tallis and William Byrd

***

This is the second release by young British vocal group stile antico. Their first, 2007's Music for Compline, heralded the arrival of a spectacular group of young singers specializing in the great choral works from England's Tudor period.

This present effort builds on every success of that first thrilling release, contrasting the simple hymn tune settings of Thomas Tallis with the more elaborate contrapuntal essays of William Byrd. It's an excellent contrast, though I find I'm especially taken with these very direct tunes of Tallis. Like Bach's fantastic harmonization of the Lutheran hymns with which he worked daily, there's a sense here of Tallis reaching out across hundreds of years, bridging time and style and circumstance to make an eternal musical statement. The Byrd is lovely too, of course--and as flawlessly presented--but his manner is a bit more ornate and, like the floridness of Shakespeare's language to our modern ear, takes a bit more acclimation. This is meant as no criticism, and the toggling between the two styles seems most effective.

The group seems a bit more closely recorded on this CD. The room is there, but in a supporting role. The benefit is that of being able to hear the individual voices--the singers sound almost as though they were collected in your music room for a private concert; but this intimacy comes at the cost of a touch of mystery and atmosphere. But in the Tallis especially a chamber sound seems very appropriate.

As with Music for Compline, I cannot but note how beautifully these young men and women blend together, and how mature and searching their interpretations are. In that they work without the guiding vision of a conductor, this sense of unity seems even more impressive.

I look eagerly forward to their next offering.

CSO / Haitink's Continuing Mahler Cycle

2008-04-30T00:45:00.001-05:00

Mahler: Symphony No. 6
Chicago Symphony Orchestra / Bernard Haitink
CSO Resound

***

Here's a CD to remind you that Chicago is home to one of the world's truly great orchestras. And this pairing of Bernard Haitink and the CSO seems inspired, especially in this grand repertoire like Mahler or Bruckner or Vaughan Williams.

I was particularly happy with their earlier release of Mahler's Third, and this present CD will likely bubble to the top as my favorite Sixth. Chicago have long been famous for having one of the best brass sections of any orchestra, and this release shows that feather still firmly in their cap. Certain passages here will part your hair, assuming your audio setup is willing. But every section of the orchestra carries their weight and the result is a marvelous thing.

The recording itself is spectacular. There is a distinct soundstage and the recording is quiet enough to hear the corners of the room.

Thoughts on Electronic Music

2008-04-27T15:15:00.000-05:00

I think this is the first time I've put up the same post on both blogs. But I couldn't figure out where it made more sense to put it. So.

***

(A very simple Moog synthesizer, without any of the mixing or recording apparatus. Carlos's studio from the '70s was much more involved than this.)

I have a project in mind.

As I have written elsewhere, I have a distinct soft spot for the recordings of Wendy Carlos. And also of Isao Tomita, who was active in similar fashion about the same time. Carlos's early "Switched-On" recordings of Bach on the Moog synthesizer, and Tomita's recordings of synthesized Debussy (and others) were one of my entry points into classical music--we might even call them the spoonful of sugar that caused me to linger over something that might otherwise have required too much concentration from my teen-age brain. It doesn't hurt, of course, that they were fiddling with really amazing source material; it's one of the reasons these recordings have stood the test of time.

But another reason is that they document a fascinating period of history. This was the point at which purely electronically-created sounds officially entered the mainstream. I love the idea of this, I love the steps required to make it happen, and I love the sounds themselves.

Mine are not the most versatile of tastes, I know. I listen to a broader range than some, but my music collection still consists of a handful of pockets, a few distinct genres that constitute my core enthusiasms. Within my favorite genre of organ music, I love all manner of sounds and all the mechanical stuff involved in making those sounds. My exploration of organ tone and pipe construction and voicing and the assembly of an ensemble over the years helped me to become more aware of musical tone and of the nature of sound generally. And I've come to be in love with sound itself. So how could I not love the Moog synthesizer and all the electronic permutations that have followed it? It's more versatile than just this, of course, but I think the synthesizer is ideally suited to organ music.

Somewhere along the line, the synthesizer has been co-opted by popular and dance music almost exclusively. There is a field of modern composed electronic music (though I've struggled to find much of a portal into that community), but like much of the rest of modern intellectual music it seems to have raced far ahead of public acceptance or understanding or appreciation. And no one seems to be using the synthesizer as Carlos and Tomita did 30 years ago, as a set of unique sounds and capabilities to be applied to the existing musical canon. I find this odd, since we have not deemed the repertoire itself to be irrelevant; we're still interested in triad-based Western tonal music from the last five hundred years, but nobody seems to be seriously interpreting this music electronically.

So there is the nub of my "project," an idea that has been bouncing around my head for a decade. There is a hole that needs filling.

In the 20 years since I was playing drums in a band in Minneapolis, the world of sound production and recording has undergone really radical, fundamental changes. So fundamental that it has taken me some time to even figure out what questions to ask. What used to be a matter of acoustic (or even early electronic) instruments played real-time and captured on magnetic tape in a dedicated recording studio by a team of professionals is now something an individual can accomplish quite easily in his bedroom on his laptop. All of it--the whole business. (I struggle to get my head around the details and implications of this.)

All this change seems actually to work in my favor, as much of the technology is specifically suited to someone who does not fluently read music (me) or is not highly accomplished on the instrument in question (me again). Working from a score, I should be able to assemble pieces a line at a time--or even a note at a time--and then edit and tweak the details so that I end up at the performance I desire. This is not an approach which celebrates the spark of spontaneous creativity, I know, which is a big part of at least some types of music. But my own tastes have always leaned toward the considered and deliberate. If I were more adept at reading music, I might find my purest appreciation by studying the score. So my carefully-assembled and -tweaked computer music might understandably not appeal to everyone. But I can think of a hundred pieces which might benefit from this perspective.

What remains to figure out is... well, everything (and this is where the rubber of my formulation of questions meets the road of my ignorance of the new paradigm). How to produce the actual sounds? What exact software--and how to decide on one program over another? If I use my computer to do the digital sound synthesis (a sensible step), how do I ensure compatibility between the actual synthesizing software and the sequencing and recording programs? These things can be gotten as a bundle, even having all elements as lobes of a single program; but that convenience / compatibility may force compromises in sound input material; and presumably we'll eventually be dealing with more than just a single source of sound material. And that leads to another question: at what point does one "record" the sounds produced? Is the tweaking to be done in the editing phase? Do I perfect a given line or phrase and put it in the can, assembling a piece from the best takes of the myriad parts? Or is most of the work to be done in the editing after the fact, programming the MIDI instructions so that the piece plays--generates in completed form--at the touch of a button? Does one tweak and tweak the MIDI file and then record the final product when there isn't any more tweaking to do?

I feel a bit like a cave man stumbling upon a Vespa scooter in the woods. There are plenty of people swimming with perfect comfort in these waters presently, people for whom my questions may not be entirely sensible (or who realize that my aspirations are misguided or ill-informed). It's like my in-laws who find the use of a cell phone intimidating and incomprehensible, even though it doesn't differ much from their cordless house phone. Everyone's knowledge and comfort zone has a boundary somewhere.

All this by way of introduction. It will take me a while to figure out the details, but I may put up continuing posts detailing my progress or lack thereof.

Thoughts or suggestions are welcome, natch.

The Plunge to The Depths

2008-04-24T21:10:00.013-05:00

The Road to Paradise
Gabrieli Consort / Paul McCreesh
Deutsche Grammophon, CD 477 6605
Music of Britten · Byrd · William H. Harris · Holst · Howells · Robert Parsons · Richard Rodney Bennett · Sheppard · Tallis · John Tavener

***

I bought this back-to-back with the previously-reviewed Sixteen / Harry Christophers album, and as I listen from one to the other they almost seem at first like companion discs. Rather than concentrating specifically on virginal material, though, the unifying theme for the Gabrieli Consort CD is the trek made by medieval pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela (a subject also addressed in Joby Talbot's 2005 composition Path of Miracles). Conductor McCreesh has chosen pieces--again spanning several centuries--that express musically what religious pilgrims might have experienced during the perilous journey. Sonically, the two albums occupy some common real estate; both are fairly serious and somber and contemplative unaccompanied choral music (there is just a bit of organ on the Gabrieli Consort disc).

But that first impression of similarity does not hold up. There is a noticeable change of sonic setting moving from one disc to the other; that's one part of it. Paul McCreesh has chosen a much larger, more luxurious acoustic than that in which The Sixteen were recorded. But that acoustic plays a supporting role in what, after a couple listenings, comes across as a much more ambitious project. While we do have works of serenity and surpassing beauty such as Robert Parson's Ave Maria and Thomas Tallis's Miserere nostri, we encounter more depth and drama as we progress, in Benjamin Britten's treatment of the traditional A Hymn to The Virgin and John Tavener's Song for Athene and Gustav Holst's Nunc dimittis and others. It's all fairly buttoned-down, but the dynamics presented in this setting introduce us to deep waters.

The Gabrieli Consort was formed by Paul McCreesh in 1982 and, like The Sixteen, concentrate on mostly Baroque and Renaissance repertoire (though they are now venturing forward into the Classical). They were one of the first groups I encountered to concentrate on authentic period performance, and the value of the exercise is nowhere more evident than here. Intonation and blend are superb; no other word does the trick. Using between 8 and 32 singers on these various pieces, I cannot imagine getting more deeply into this music than these women and men have done here.

The Sixteen disc is excellent; but this offering from Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort is profound.

Highest recommendation.

Ghost Stories

2008-04-21T23:20:00.004-05:00

A Mother's Love: Music for Mary
The Sixteen / Harry Christophers
Universal Classics & Jazz, UCJ 476 6295

Grieg: Ave Maris Stella
Cornysh: Ave Maria Mater Dei
Josquin: Gaude Virgo Mater Christi
Bruckner: Tota Pulchra Es, Maria (Antiphon)
Saint-Saens: Ave Maria
Britten: A Hymn To The Virgin
Mendelssohn: Ave Maria
Obrecht: Salve Regina
Rizza: Ave Generosa (World Premiere recording)
Anon: (Mediaeval) Alma Redemptoris Mater
Faure: Ave Maria
Palestrina: Sicut Lilium Inter Spinas
Liszt: Ave Maris Stella
Elgar: Ave Maria
Durufle: Tota Pulchra Es, Maria
Plainsong: Salve Regina
Lassus: Salve Regina

***

Here is yet another of London's fabulous vocal ensembles, The Sixteen. Formed by conductor Harry Christophers in 1977, it draws for its members from the choirs of Oxford and Cambridge. They have concentrated over the years on English polyphony, but have also dabbled in a much wider range of music, from the Italian Renaissance up into the 21st Century.

This present release gathers together the musical thoughts of a range of composers about the maypole of the West's favorite matronly construct of mythology, the Virgin Mary. The emotional hand-wringing of the world's religions have incontrovertibly provided fodder--or at least a focusing mechanism--for musical art; truth be told, I was actually eager to see what variations on the theme of saintly motherhood were managed by some of these represented composers, as I had already in my collection a number of lovely pieces of the same cast. Brahms, Morten Lauridsen, Mendelssohn, Langlais and, especially, Gabriel Fauré were already onboard with some fabulous entries; and here was an opportunity to hear from Brucker, William Cornyshe, Britten, Saint-Saens and Liszt, among others.

The pieces, as one might expect, all have a certain relaxed quality, being all serenely tonal and not too militantly polyphonic. The earliest composers--William Cornyshe or Jacob Obrecht--sound antique to our ears, jagged and meandering. By the time we get to Fauré, Mendelssohn and Bruckner we find ourselves squarely in mainstream 19th Century Classical mode, and Margaret Rizza brings us right up to present day with the premier recording of her Ave Generosa, which sounds at times a bit like the tintinnabulum sounds of Estonian Arvo Part. The CD's organizing theme is not so structured as to guarantee absolute unity of style, but the album holds together as a concept reasonably well.

I have a number of recordings of The Sixteen, and their performances are always stylistically coherent and unimpeachably competent technically. In contrast to some other chamber choirs who specialize on this Renaissance and post-Renaissance material, The Sixteen sound to employ different singing styles depending on the exact period of the material. Early material will typically be sung without much vibrato (excepting the solo voices), whereas Romantic period pieces are often sung with a fuller texture. I cannot fault them for this approach--indeed, far be it from me to second-guess a scholar like Harry Christophers--but my own ear always recoils from the use of vibrato with singing except in very rare and special circumstances. Particularly with solo voices or the high soprano lines, the vibrato here can take on an almost operatic quality that, for me, throws a damp rag on things right quick. So my reservations here carry the caveat of my pointed personal preference; anyone not objecting to this use of vibrato in a choral setting will likely thrill at these performances.

The recording is fairly close and in a medium-dry acoustic.

State-of-the-Art Fisk

2008-04-19T19:01:00.003-05:00

Organ Odyssey
Mary Preston at the Lay Family Concert Organ,
Fisk Op. 100, Meyerson Symphony Center, Dallas
Reference Recordings, RR-113
Music of Karg-Elert, Vierne, Mendelssohn, Widor, Ives, Messiaen, Widor, and John la Montaine.

***

This instrument has cropped up on this blog several times before in my reviews or talk of organ construction. A concert hall organ might be expected to represent a firm's ultimate effort, having talents ranging from the power to pummel all within a large space into a pudding of awe to the versatility necessary for playing a very wide range of repertoire; and this Fisk instrument is something of a torch-carrier for the current state of the art; it's the quintessential modern concert hall organ. It's the instrument to which Lynn Dobson's recent organ for Philadelphia's Kimmel Center will most naturally be compared (I'm still waiting for a solo recording of that new instrument.)

I've reviewed several recordings in this space made on Yale University's magnificent Skinner organ in Woolsey Hall; these recordings inevitably cause me to think of this particular Fisk, both because the two instruments are in pursuit of the very same goal, and because each is perhaps the most prominent organ of this type built in its own day. The Woolsey Skinner seems suffused to me with a kind of inner glow, a unified sonic genius that would ensure that Ernest M. Skinner went into the history books not only as an expert builder of first-quality large symphonic pipe organs, but also as someone who left a distinct sonic stamp on organ building in this country and around the world.

It might fairly be said that Charles Fisk's legacy is further-reaching, one that covers a much broader range of tonal and mechanical philosophy than Skinner's. Fisk built in a pretty broad range of styles, and his firm have branched out even further since Fisk's death in 1983; perhaps no single instrument can fairly stand for all that Mr. Fisk's ambitions encompassed.

So with the caveat that even a magnificent organ like the one in Dallas's Meyerson Symphony Center cannot speak for the totality of the firm, this is still an instrument which has gained a real prominence in the musical world. Built in 1991, the organ boasts over 4,500 pipes spread over four manuals and pedal, and ranks as one of the world's most important and ambitious organs built for this kind of setting.

Part of the reason this Fisk instrument comes to mind as I listen to Yale's Skinner is because this Skinner is so very distinctive--and so different sounding than this state-of-the-art Fisk. However immensely impressed I am by this Fisk, I would certainly not confuse it for the Skinner in Woolsey hall, nor would I be able to identify it as a Fisk instrument in a blind test. I can't say with certainty that I could do this for Woolsey's Skinner either, but I think I'd come much closer. I'm not sure if there's anything like a fair litmus test here, but all these things are pieces of a puzzle that I'm trying to assemble in my mind as to what sonic components comprise an organ's style, and what elements make some of these instruments more distinctive than others.

I think one of the things contributing to my inability to identify this organ blind is that this Fisk is attempting to give the organist maximum flexibility for a wide repertoire. We might even say the firm have done a fantastic job of executing other people's tonal preferences. Thus, there is a French-inspired Résonance division and an English-derived Tuba division, and the rest of the organ built to unify those two worlds. I daresay that Ernest M. Skinner seemed more apt to build an instrument that conformed to his own internal compass about what an organ should be--and he made quite a sales pitch about why his tonal ideas were correct--and that repertoire played on it would thus be "Skinnerized." And it was his genius that his ideas seemed sonically unified and viable. This Fisk, by contrast, seems to try and deftly straddle several lines of stylistic demarcation, all unified by skillful voicing and a kind of central guiding hand.

(Oh yeah, and it looks jaw-dropping amazing!)

Mary Preston is the organist of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and she is the Curator of this magnificent organ. She has now recorded several discs on the instrument, covering Duruflé's big works, a Widor Symphony, a couple compositions by Max Reger, and Reubke's Sonata on the 94th Psalm, among others. Now we have a recent Reference Recordings release featuring German and French works, plus a couple American compositions as well. All these recordings show Mrs. Preston as a highly-skilled virtuoso, and also a musician of pretty broad range. She knows her way around this instrument, and demonstrates its many colors most deftly. It does what a concert hall instrument ought to do: great justice to repertoire of different schools and periods.

The opening, majestic chords of Karg-Elert's March on "Nun danket alle Gott" start the recital, and we travel through, among others, a frothy Op. 55 Piéce de fantaisie of Louis Vierne, one of Mendelssohn's Sonatas, and the compelling stridency of Messiaen's Dieu parmi nous as we go (the Messiaen seems most persuasively presented). Ives's Variations on 'America' are a whimsical bit of youthful writing, easily accessible and based on the most familiar of tunes. She finishes the recital with the second most famous of all organ pieces, the final movement Toccata of Widor's Fifth Symphony, all played in exemplary fashion.

One of the things I particularly love about the instrument is the immediacy with which it speaks into what is still a pretty generous acoustic for a modern concert hall (pains were taken in the hall's construction to make it organ-friendly, including having concrete-lined resonance chambers which can be opened and closed according to preference). The organ's casework helps focus the sound such that every pipe is audible. The Fisk has a more developed (or at least a more prominent) upperwork than the Woolsey organ, and there is an engaging, almost shrill aggressiveness to the instrument's tutti which reminds me of some of the great French organs in Paris (though with quite different-sounding reeds).

Alas, I may wring my hands forever on this topic without quite finding the conclusion I seek. But so long as there are instruments like this one to raise the question, I'll be happy to consign myself to the endless trek.

The recording, as "Reference Recording" suggests, is excellent, which is the more impressive given the instrument's huge dynamic range.

Like Getting Married

2008-04-15T22:28:00.003-05:00

Yes, yes; you're in the right place.

I just decided that "Ultrasonic Scattershot" was intolerably long. (Actually, at the time I simply wanted "Scattershot" or "Musical Scattershot" but both were taken.) I figured nobody would actually be typing in the URL anyway...

But I grew to dislike its clumsiness. And I thought it might be nice to have something without blogspot in the URL. What the hell, it's $10.

So, a new name. Same old product in new clothing. Like getting married!

And given how little of the musical mainstream I seem to cross paths with, a hint of snobbery seemed on point.

So with a clink of champagne glasses and some scattered rice, we're off and running!

Wisdom and Experience

2008-04-11T22:42:00.006-05:00

Mark Knopfler
The Ragpicker's Dream
Mercury Records, 2002

***

Occasionally I'm surprised to go through my music collection and find myself with a bunch more individual performances of a single piece of music than I realized I had. Though I do have something of the collector in me, I only find myself drawn to collect in this way when I care deeply about the repertoire (as an example, I have but two versions of Beethoven's Symphonies--modern orchestra and period performance--because it's just not music I care much for; whereas I find myself with some 40 copies of Duruflé's organ music--virtually every performance I have ever come across). I think this is because, consciously or unconsciously, I'm searching for sublimity, for the ideal performance of works I know well.

As I have listened over the decades, I seem to have developed barely-subconscious mental musical templates, ideal specimens of varying genres that are just out of my reach but which influence my take of almost anything I hear. How I respond to a recording or performance will correlate directly to how closely the artist comes to these mental templates (how much of this is just an assembly of all the preferred details of these varied recordings I've heard and how much is of my own genesis I cannot say). Much more rarely a performer will either present me with an entirely new template or radically retool an existing one. People listen in different ways, I know; and I don't think that my interface with music is better or move valid than someone else's. But I think we're all influenced by everything we're exposed to, either in music or literature or film or art or ideas, and this seems like a rough model of how things work for me.

I've come over the past few months to regard Mark Knopfler as one of my standard-bearers for songwriting and acoustic folk-rock performance. Though I knew of him via a passing familiarity with Dire Straits, it was only when I stumbled upon his 2007 solo release Kill to Get Crimson that I really began paying attention. That deeply satisfying release led me back to his previous, 2004's Shangri-La, which continued in the same vein of evocative and laconic lyrics and very tasty, no-mindless-theatrical-pyrotechnical-bullshit playing by a small group of very competent musicians. I gravitate again and again to these CDs, finding in them a brilliant condensation of the songwriter's art, the essence of a troubador's craft with a light coating of period style. This is simply as good to my mind as this genre of writing gets.

Naturally, until he offers another new record, I'm compelled to go further and further back in his catalog. This time it's his release from 2000, The Ragpicker's Dream. And again we find Mr. Knopfler immersed in his personal vein, though I daresay in tiny increments over the half decade from Ragpicker to Crimson he has become even quieter and more contemplative. But it's the same great musical mind throughout, mature and settled, and the stylistic continuity could have these three albums stand as a trilogy. Speaking of style, though his instrumentation and essential approach are settled, he still covers a pretty broad range. Ragpicker ranges from the deliciously quiet, almost grief-stricken The Place Where We Used to Live, to Quality Shoe, which sounds like it was tapped directly from an airing of A Prairie Home Companion.

Lyrically, he has a wonderful ability to find the perfect few words that evoke a whole scene, to tell a three-dimensional story with just a few key points. And he delivers these lyrics so gently, with a cross between a whisper and a mumble, that the story threatens to go right past unless a little attention is paid. I love this, that attention and repeat listenings yield treat after treat; in lyrics, sure, but also (some might say especially) in his exquisite guitar playing. He simply never overplays--which seems the ultimate expression of confidence--and has a conspicuous talent for making less into much more. Again, all this brings us back to essentials.

There is (I might as well finish my hyperbolic gush) something of the beau ideal in this presentation, a quiet, deeply masculine voice singing songs of penetrating vision and sensitivity. Though he looks like a plumber, there is a distinct sex appeal here; there's something quintessentially male about him. For once I seem to have come across an unequivocal man who does not shame my sex, one that maybe even raises the average for the rest of us a little.

Widor Early Symphonies

2008-03-31T20:29:00.003-05:00

Charles-Marie Widor, Symphonies No. 3 and 4
Charles Krigbaum at the Newberry Memorial Organ, Woolsey Hall, Yale University
AKFA Records, SK-522, 1992

This is another issue in this series. I've little to add to my observations about the previous releases here except to confirm my previous impressions. This organ makes such convincing sounds that whatever it lacks in authenticity for this music it more than makes up for with its own very compelling voice. Overall, this instrument is much less reedy than the big Cavaillé-Colls--Aeolian Skinners in general, I think--though not less powerful. Rather, the power is made a different way, seemingly from just moving a whole lot of air through very large scale fluework rather than from a resort to brash reeds. That makes for a different effect, though I dare say it's no less effective.

This is always my impression of the more successful Skinners, that they exhibit a power and intensity all their own, some X-factor which newer "American Classic"-style concert organs (like the Dobson in Kimmel Center or the Meyerson Fisk) don't quite capture. I wonder what the comparative sound pressure levels between the instruments would be. It could be that I've got my teeth into a little subtlety that doesn't quite hold up to thorough rinsing, but every time I listen to this Woolsey Skinner I think "My god what a huge, huge sound."

The playing is excellent, as is the recording.

200 Years' Worth

2008-03-28T21:50:00.005-05:00

Preludes, Fugues and Variations
Music of Bach, Beethoven, Franck and Rachmaninov
Frederick Moyer, Piano
JRI Records, J101

Bach/David Moyer: "Herr Christ, der ein'ge Gottes-Sohn"
Beethoven: Twelve Variations on a Russian Dance
Franck/Bauer: Prelude, Fugue et Variation in b minor
Rachmaninoff: Three Preludes from Op. 23: No. 2 in B-flat Major, No. 4 in D Major, No. 5 in g minor
Bach/Busoni: Prelude and Fugue in D Major, BWV 532

***

Here's a fun recording from concert pianist Frederick Moyer. He has collected a recital of various pieces which conform to the basic forms of Franck's triptych: preludes, fugues or variations. For the preludes, we get three piano preludes from Rachmaninov's Opus 23 set, a transcription of Bach's organ chorale prelude Herr Christ, der ein'ge Gottes-Sohn, BWV 601, and Busoni's transcription of Bach's Prelude and Fugue in D Major, BWV 532; that piece gives us our fugue, along with Franck's Prelude, fugue et variation in b minor, which latter piece gives us a variation planform; this is followed by Beethoven's substantial Twelve Variations On a Russian Dance, WoO 71.

I confess I have too many recordings of both Ferrucio Busoni's transcriptions of Bach's organ works and of Rachmaninov's preludes as well. But there are relatively few transcriptions of Cesar Franck's organ works for piano, and this is the first I'm aware of that transcribes this particular piece. In any case this collection of pieces in a single recital makes an intriguing grouping, and a welcome addition to my collection.

The CD issues from the small, new-to-me label JRI Recordings, whose catalog exists almost entirely of recordings by this pianist. Regardless, the recording is excellent, quiet and fairly closely-miked. Mr. Moyer plays with a deft touch and a very deliberate manner. I did find a few of his phrasings a bit distracting, especially when the organ transcriptions essentially gave him more notes to play than he had fingers; his idiomatic interruption of melodic line to surmount these difficulties is expertly handled (that is, with the same confident deliberateness of the rest of the performances), but nonetheless seems always to catch me a bit off-guard.

Small potatoes. It's a fine performance of an interesting collection of pieces, well-recorded and played.

Two More in a Series

2008-03-24T23:38:00.011-05:00

Sylvius Leopold Weiss: Complete Lute Works, Volumes 2 and 3
Robert Barto, Lute
Naxos Records, 8.553988, 8.554350

***

Another couple volumes of this great Naxos series of the complete works of Sylvius Weiss, a composer introduced to me on this site by my friend Shrimplate.

I couldn't pretend this review to be of much value to established fans of lute and guitar music, as I have comparatively little such music in my collection. So my impressions are at least as much--no, mostly--to do with my budding awareness of the lute as an instrument as they are about the compositions. It's relatively new territory for me, but a good fit with my preferences. As an instrument which requires its player to think in harmonic as well as melodic terms--like the piano and the organ--the lute interests me as requiring a more complete musical immersion than, say, a flute.

These releases lead me to think about the lute versus the guitar. If one goes back far enough, the two instruments seem to have diverged from a common ancestor, but the guitar has gone on to a modern ubiquity while the lute seems now much more attached to antiquity. That seems a loss to me, since with its greater number of courses (often doubled) and greater pitch range the lute seems a more ambitious instrument than the guitar.

(It bears saying that the guitar seems to have a more flexible phenotype than many other instruments; seven- and eight- and ten- and of course 12-string guitars are not uncommon. I'm reminded of the great series of Delos recordings of Paul Galbraith playing a custom-made 8-string guitar of his own specification--the "Brahms guitar"--which he holds and plays like a cello, even having a post out the bottom which rests on a resonance box.)

The guitar's ongoing prominence in classical and popular music results in it being played in a much wider variety of manners and musical styles than the lute. This longevity has resulted in traditions and vital schools of musical thought surrounding the guitar in far-flung places stretching from the present day back several centuries. The lute by contrast seems to be reliving a couple hundred years of glory from ages now long past. But I personally find the sound of the lute more pleasing to the ear, lighter and richer.

Certainly the lute shares some of the guitar's virtues: it's a salon instrument, intended to impact a small group of people in close proximity; it works well accompanying the human voice or in combination with other instruments; and the artist has a deeply intimate interface with the instrument, controlling much of its tone production in addition to voicing and phrasing. So the sounds produced are much more individual than, say, several people recording Bach on various Steinway Ds--and this is without addressing the variety of the instruments themselves, which I imagine are highly variable.

So much for my philosophical wanderings. Without knowing more about any of this than I do, it seems immediately apparent that Robert Barto is a virtuoso of the first order. There is a strong sense of musical statement, of a coherent musical mind projecting these works for us. Weiss's compositions, as I mentioned in a previous review, have the modern harmonic sensibility of Bach and Scarlatti and Handel, but they are less contrapuntally rigorous than Bach or imitative than Scarlatti, and these compositions at least sound very idiomatic to the lute. Bach's lute music is frequently heard on guitar, and so much of Bach has been transcribed for other instruments (or other genres altogether); I can't help wondering how some of Weiss's pieces would come off on guitar or a keyboard instrument. As it is, some of the movements seem technically very challenging for the lutenist.

Pleasant and impressive as these recordings are, what I have not gleaned at this stage is whether these compositions will come to have stronger individual identities than is presently the case, either the individual movements themselves or the suites. For all the variety in the lute's tonal capabilities, these pieces sound all of a certain stripe, much like Scarlatti's 550 harpsichord sonatas or Tournemire's L'orgue mystique. I suspect this is something that needs a bit of investment of time; I'm simply not familiar enough with any of it to have determined my favorites. But at this point I would have little hope of determining which movements went with which suite if my iTunes were to scramble the tracks. While that was true for me at one time with Bach's Brandenburgs as well, I wonder if I'll ever find myself passionately attached to these pieces rather than liking and admiring the sound generally.

Whatever the case, I am mesmerized by the sound--the courtly, intimate and very civilized sound.

Size Matters

2008-03-18T17:45:00.001-05:00

This is a post from January of last year from my other blog. It seems it might have a more sensible existence over here.

***

I continue my little musical nostalgia tour from the last post. It's been a musical couple of weeks, which is much better than a couple weeks of politics.

Our hotel in PHL is a block from the old Wanamaker department store, now owned & operated by Macy's. This store contains, in what seems the ultimate non-sequitur, the largest operational pipe organ in the world.

As a devoted fan of the pipe organ, I've known of this instrument for many years. It's not really my kind of organ; this is an ultimate example of what we might call the symphonic organ, that is, the organ as a kind of one-man orchestra. This design philosophy, which really took off after Bach's death and found great flowering in the 19th and 20th Centuries at the hands of France's Aristide Cavaille-Coll and America's Ernest M. Skinner, among many others, stands in philosophical contrast to the organs that Bach knew. Bach's organ was a stand-alone instrument with its own repertoire and its own history having nothing to do with the orchestra or any other instruments. Starting in the late 1950s, by which time these symphonic organs were the established norm, there was a push in the organ world to return to the non-imitative roots of the baroque organ, creating a pretty deep rift--almost a civil war--between the neo-baroque and romantic / symphonic camps. To me this whole fight has been a vital and interesting one (in a sitting- on- the- sidelines- while- buttoned- down- Christians- throw- stones- at- each- other kinda way), one with a few dollops of intrigue thrown in; but that's kind of another post.

The organ at Wanamaker's has the additional distinction of being incongruently located in the eight-story central court of an operating retail department store. As if the pipe organ does not seem anachronistic enough on its own (something about which I'm feeling rather bruised and vulnerable lately), the idea of supporting such a beast with retail shoppers of socks and underwear is positively surreal. Proven so, actually, since nobody I saw shopping during the 45 minute concert paid the least attention to the music. But John Wanamaker had money and a love for the organ and a place to put one, and the rest is history.

Yesterday was the first time I ever heard the Wanamaker instrument. I've walked past the building a few times in the last five years, but the last couple times I've been here the store has been closed for its conversion from a Lord & Taylor to a Macy's. Yesterday everything was up and running as usual. There are regular noontime concerts played every day of the week, and there are afternoon concerts three days a week, plus weekend concerts and occasional special events (including after-hours things where they can let the beast out of its cage properly). So I timed my walk around the city to make the noon concert.

The organ speaks into the large, central shopping court from several levels, and the delivery-van-sized console is visible behind a railing on the third level. Walking around to the console, a flat screen monitor televises the organist at work. I can't entirely fault the shoppers for not paying more attention to the music, as there are no accommodations made for concertgoers--no seats and not many good places to stand and watch & listen--and the repertoire, while pleasant and demonstrative of the huge variety of the lower half of the instrument's dynamic range, was not thought-provoking. Which is as it should be; after all, it is a working retail establishment, and they can hardly do without their phones or normal business transactions for two 45-minute periods every day.

After the concert I talked to the organist and one of the two technical people who look after the instrument full-time, and I got a tour of the massive console. Much of the organ--including this awesome control console--was built by a shop on the 12th floor of the store (space now leased out to other tenants), with the pipes themselves coming from the Kimball Organ Company. The instrument was originally installed in the department store in 1911, at which time its 10,000 pipes (already several times the number found in most church organs today) were deemed "inadequate" for the space and enlargements were undertaken. By about 1930 the organ had tripled in size to its present 28,000 pipes. I talk of the organ exercising the quieter half of its dynamic range, but even then the power of the instrument rather takes one by surprise. Considering that, from where I listened to the concert from the third floor I could not have heard a normal cell phone ringer down on the main shopping floor below me, the fact that even a quiet solo stop is clearly audible throughout the eight-story courtyard gives one an idea of what kind of horsepower is behind it. And naturally, the organ has the resources to make conversation in the courtyard quite impossible. Those who have heard a good-quality pipe organ in their local church or auditorium know that organ bass is often felt as much as it is heard, the product of high energy, low frequency sound waves produced by the large pedal pipes. Well, one can imagine what kind of power is required to shake the air--and the occupants--of so large a space as this one.

It's amazing, really, that Macy's would agree to continue funding something which at this point can only be considered an historical and nostalgic oddity. Surely this instrument no longer generates any real revenue, and yet Macy's pay a staff organist and several assistants, as well as two full-time maintenance people. They also contract out some maintenance services when the jobs get too big for the in-house shop to handle. While there is a non-profit foundation called the Friends of the Wanamaker Organ, and the organ has received several substantial endowments and private donations, it is still some burden on Macy's and one cannot help feeling grateful that they have embraced this quirk in the store's past.

It's a little off track, but even as long as I've been a student of this instrument and (some of) its repertoire--nearly 30 years now--I'm still not immune to its magic. I have made treks over the years to a number of individual pipe organs both here and in Europe, instruments which I've come through recordings to love; I've examined and played them in my unskilled way, and gotten a sense of their presence and of the rooms and acoustics where they live; and I've been witness to some awesome demonstrations by people who knew what they were doing at these instruments. And I'm always frankly amazed at the organist's skill.

Yesterday at Wanamaker's I watched the organist at the console during the concert via a little flat screen monitor outside the cordoned-off area where the console sits, and though he appeared to be a thousand years old he still achieved a near-magical feat that virtually none of us could do. The coordination required of an organist--just the aspect of playing coherent musical phrases with one's feet while the hands do their thing simultaneously on two separate keyboards--requires a physical command of one's body that borders on the impossible. (Look sometime at the notation for Bach's Trio Sonatas for organ and you'll have some idea of what this inter-limb / digit coordination entails.)

But there's more. Look at the photos of this console.

In addition to six separate keyboards (basically, one for each division of the organ, each of which will have a distinct function or sonic character) plus a full pedalboard, there is a tablet for activating each of several hundred individual timbres of the organ, controls for coupling divisions together (at various octave intervals), pedals and sliders for controlling the volume of sound allowed to escape from the chambers where the pipes are contained, and a baffling array of buttons and footswitches which can be programmed to singly make large-scale changes of the organ's settings. And a couple dozen other odds and ends to boot. Ignoring the business of simply playing a coherent musical thought in this setting (again, a not inconsiderable task by a long shot), just the management of all these other controls and resources at this console requires a physical dexterity and concentration that I would venture few of us ever have to muster in life. Put the two things together--playing music and managing the machinery--and we have arrived at outright sorcery. This has to rank among the most complicated tasks the human brain and body can tackle. I can think of no better way for a hunched-over old man to inarguably win the pissing contest of masculine achievement than to play something coherent on this instrument. Top THAT, football boy. That the purpose of all this training and skill is to fill an arena-sized room with a kind of bone-marrow-boiling sound makes it all the more interesting. Or, looked at from the opposite angle, that such stirring musical ideas come to fruition by way of such great demands placed on the artist makes the art remarkable.

That Gretchaninov Disc Wasn't a Fluke

2008-03-15T17:03:00.010-05:00

Rheinberger: Sacred Choral Works
Kansas City Chorale / Phoenix Bach Choir; Charles Bruffy
Chandos Records, CHSA 5055
Four Motets Op. 133; Mass Op. 109; Three Sacred Songs Op. 69; Easter Hymn Op. 134

***

(I didn't really think it was, but here's the proof just the same.)

As a lover of organ music I'm a bit surprised that I've failed to latch onto the works of German (or Liechtensteinian) Josef Rheinberger (1839-1901). Falling between Felix Mendelssohn and Max Reger (he was a contemporary of Brahms)--all of whom I enjoy--one would think I'd eat up his output of some 20 Sonatas. But Rheinberger and me are apparently like Mozart and me: people far smarter and more informed than I have given their stamp of approval, but his music just begets no response whatsoever in me. In both these cases, I reserve the right for the long-planted seeds to suddenly bear fruit, but every time I check back there's just dirt (in the case of Mozart, the seeds have had 30 years to germinate and I'm pretty sure they're dead and they'll stay that way).

Well, that's organ music. But after my thrilling discovery of the Kansas City Chorale and Phoenix Bach Choir singing Gretchaninov, I was eager to give this group's next release a quick audition. And Rheinberger it is. Well--a big relief to his corpse, I'm sure--I like his choral music rather more than his organ music. Indeed, I would have pegged it as either Brahms or Mendelssohn if I hadn't read the label; it has Mendelssohn's lyricism. Gently contrapuntal and resolutely tonal and conservative as church music apparently should be, this is music that will surprise no one. But it's well-crafted and quietly engaging and makes for a disc I'm happy to add to my collection.

The ensemble and conductor Bruffy bring the same wondrous sensibilities and careful precision to this disc as to their previous. His tempi and phrasing and the balance of the ensemble are simply beyond reproach; inspired, even. I was tempted to conclude that Rheinberger's writing is not quite as engaging as Gretchaninov's to my ear, but it's growing on me after several hearings. Still, the Russian works seem more ambitious or momentous somehow -- transcendent, almost otherworldly, familiar yet different. Maybe it's just that Gretchaninov hails from a more isolated corner of human culture. There is something predictable about much of the Rheinberger (not to say mundane); it sounds a bit like a solidly competent composer using the standard tools available to him.

But for all that, this is still a virtuosic display of choral singing with moments of real depth and inspiration. Much of it is soaringly beautiful, and here's to hoping it continues to grow on me as it has. But for now it still gives me a warm glow of satisfaction rather than leaving my mouth open in astonishment. Call it fully five stars for execution and four for material. Well, that's still a pretty great accomplishment at that.

And who knows? Maybe this will be the eye-opener for Rheinberger's organ works for me.

One Good Turn Deserves Another

2008-03-15T03:30:00.010-05:00

Widor: Organ Favorites
Robert Delcamp at the Martin Pasi organ of the St. Cecilia Cathedral, Omaha
Naxos Records, 8.570310
Excerpts from Symphonies 1-6 and 9, etc.

***

I've long wondered what role authenticity really plays in musical enjoyment. I found myself very early on drawn to the sound of period instruments in baroque music, but not, I think, because these sounds were supposed to be "correct." No, I just liked the fundamental sounds better; I liked the clarity and intonation and / or lack of affected vibrato in music of my favored period. Even more contrarily, I always wondered whether more contemporary music wouldn't sound better on these older sounds (we do the converse of this all the time, by playing antique music on modern orchestral instruments, harpsichord music on piano, Buxtehude and Pachelbel and Scheidemann on modern organs). I knew that the music of Cesar Franck, say, played on the Flentrop organ at Harvard University--an organ whose sound I so loved and which was so effective in Bach--would go against custom and even the composer's stated desires; and yet I still felt the music would come off really well in that setting. Different, sure; but moving and wonderful and maybe better in some ways--small and focused and intimate.

Well, I never did get to hear Franck on that particular Flentrop (though E. Power Biggs recorded Hindemith to very good effect on it), but I've heard quite a bit of his music on very different instruments than Franck had in mind; and as with Bach's music Franck has a near-universal appeal that transcends period specifics.

This present release is another opportunity to put some of these questions front and center. The instrument, the Op. 14 of 2003 from the shops of Martin Pasi and Associates, resides in the St. Cecilia Cathedral in Omaha, NE, and is familiar to us from two recently-reviewed discs of baroque music performed by George Ritchie and Julia Brown (another issue from which Buxtehude cycle I have since acquired, recorded on the same instrument). We may recall from those reviews that the organ is really two organs in one, sporting a dual temperament. The whole organ of 55 stops on three manuals and pedal is available in well-tempering, and a smaller portion--29 stops on two manuals and pedal--is available in quarter-comma meantone. This is a really valuable tool for exploring the music of Bach and earlier, as those temperaments were a fact of life before the 19th Century, and music sounds different when tempered.

(Drawknobs for well-tempered; sliding levers for meantone.)

But the organs which Cesar Franck played were not tempered, at least not anything like what Buxtehude knew. So the idea of a non-equally-tempered organ being used for more contemporary music--music made familiar to us via equal tempering--seemed to push my old-sounds-with-new-music idea out nearer the uncharted waters. Once again it's our friends at Naxos who deliver the goods for us. The prevalent well-tempering of the organ (all 55 of the organ's stops are available this way) is subtle enough that it might be mistaken for equal temperament if you weren't paying close attention. None of the keys is woefully off color, and the Widor Symphonies spend much of their time in familiar tonalities. But these pieces meander through a much wider range of tonalities than was common in the Baroque, resulting in an occasional piquancy from the tuning and a glow to some of the resolutions that you don't hear with equal tempering. It's a little unexpected, but just as delightful here as with music where it's more commonly found.

And quite apart from the tuning, this instrument is clearly not from Cavaillé-Coll's workshop. It's a nicely powerful instrument with a solid 32' underpinning in a really wonderful, reverberant space, but it doesn't have a characteristic French sound; the reeds especially lack that brassy snarl that so characterizes C-C's organs. Just the same, I think it sounds fantastic in this literature, even if it might have sounded a bit odd to Franck's ears.

More distracting than the temperament to me is the organ's fairly flexible wind, which makes itself known in some of the big, chordy sections of the Symphony Finales. It's not extreme, and I don't mean to protest (though in fact I do think of it as a defect of antiquity that someone resurrected centuries later in an attempt to be "fashionable" and others followed suit), but it's an affectation that one simply isn't used to hearing in instruments after the Baroque. And a couple times I wonder if I didn't hear the instrument struggling to provide enough wind to meet the organist's demands. (In a couple recordings of Biggs' Flentrop, one could hear some parts of the organ flat slightly at the big climaxes, something which organ builder Fritz Noack told me a couple years ago was due to inadequate winding of the instrument's rückpositiv division--which malady he was hired to remedy. Well, this Pasi organ's temperament might be playing a role here: were the meantone stops added to the mix for big climaxes, for example?) Maybe my ears were just playing tricks on me. The effect, if there was one, was very subtle and nothing to prevent a thorough enjoyment of the performances.

Organist Robert Delcamp hails from Sewanee, Tennessee, where he is Professor of Music, University Organist and Choirmaster, and Chair of the Music Department at The University of the South. He has made several recordings for Naxos, mostly involving the music of Marcel Dupré. This marks Dr. Delcamp as a specialist in French repertoire and makes him a natural for Widor's music (Dupré was Widor's assistant at St. Sulpice in Paris for many years before taking over the position when Widor retired), and his performances are really excellent. He takes his time to let the organ speak into the great space, and he lingers over Widor's writing like someone who is trying to tell a story. I've never heard these pieces better, and rarely as good.

The Glories of YouTube

2008-03-05T16:23:00.003-06:00

For those not familiar with Bach's Trio Sonatas for organ, they represent yet another milestone of organ composition from the German master. There are six Sonatas in all, each in three movements, and they involve (as the name implies) three musical lines in each movement: one for each of the hands and one for the feet. Registration is generally static, and the whole show is in the mastery of the dense, highly imitative counterpoint.

The feet are especially tasked here. Bach placed greater demands on the organist's feet than any composer to that point, and nowhere so much as in these pieces. The coordination required to play them at all is very impressive, and to play them well is really miraculous.

The organist, Aarnoud de Groen, is someone new to me, but he plays this movement brilliantly. (One small criticism: I do wish he had chosen a more assertive registration for his left hand, as this line gets lost a bit in this recording. But that bottom manual is for the rückpositiv, the "chair organ" which is speaking out into the church from behind his back. If this recording comes from the camera, we're hearing less of this--and more of the organ's mechanical sounds--than someone out in the church proper.)

A Definitive Statement

2008-02-26T01:25:00.000-06:00

The Op. 31 Pieces en style libre of Louis Vierne
George C. Baker at the Cavaillé-Coll organ of St. Ouen, Rouen.
Solstice Records, SOCD 815/6, recorded 1993

***

I came to know of George Baker about 20 years ago as the producer of my favorite disc of Duruflé's organ works by Todd Wilson on the Delos label.

I noted the oddity at the time of the producer making a personal statement in the CD notes about how HE had hoped to make this very recording in his concert organist days before he abandoned his musical ambitions to concentrate on dermatology--not least because most of us have no idea (and could care less) what the hell a producer does on a classical music CD. So his little personal note seemed out of place. But, after all, he had interviewed Maurice Duruflé personally, and it seems as though Dr. Baker was responsible for the choice of the marvelous Schudi organ for the project. Anyway I remembered the note, and a decade later when I visited the instrument in Dallas I spoke with the church organist about that recording. "Do you ever see George Baker?" I asked. "Oh yes, he's here all the time!" was the reply. A couple years after that I found Dr. Baker acting as organist on a CD release of Vierne Pieces de fantaisie (a companion release to the present one) and shortly thereafter on a Naxos volume of Dupré. So I guess skin maladies were not able to restrain his passions after all.

Our current release was recorded on the magnificent Cavaillé-Coll instrument at St. Ouen in Rouen. I'm less familiar with the full set of Op. 31 Pieces en style libre, and do not find them quite as engaging on the whole as the later Pieces de fantaisie or the fantastic Symphonies (some of the selections from this set, though, have achieved standard-repertoire status). Still, I reserve the right to fall hard for them with repeated listenings. And we can only conclude that Dr. Baker returned to his organ passions none too soon, as his playing as brilliant: authentic, confident, passionate, knowing. If he's as good a dermatologist as he is an organist, then I can see why his choice has been so hard to make and / or keep.

And then there's that Cavaillé-Coll organ. It seems to be a toss-up as to which extant C-C takes the prize as the greatest of the Great Man's instruments, a contest between St. Ouen and St. Sulpice in Paris. Both are national treasures, and however you count the votes this organ is stunning, magnificent. It produces such bold, captivating sounds, and it gathers into a fearsome tutti that takes your breath away. It's immediately apparent to the listener that this organ is something quite beyond the norm. What a rare convergence of acoustic and builder--and, as it happened, composer. Vierne reigned over the organ loft in Notre Dame for 37 years, toiling at yet another of Cavaille-Coll's masterpieces (somewhat altered today, though still fabulous), and it bears repeating that his instruments greatly seeded and fertilized the great flowering of compositions from César Franck up thru Messiaen and Duruflé and on to the present occupants of Paris's organ lofts.

Every recording on this instrument is a treat, and this one is particularly excellent. And to have one of France's greatest organ composers on the menu, served up by a great and sympathetic artist, it just doesn't get better.

Another Buxtehude Cycle

2008-02-24T17:20:00.001-06:00

Buxtehude: Organ Works, Volume 6
Julia Brown, organist
The Martin Pasi organ of St. Cecelia Cathedral, Omaha, NE
Naxos Records (follow link above to see track listing)

***

In looking through Naxos's recent CD releases, I see an ongoing Buxtehude series by organist Julia Brown, at least three volumes of which are recorded on the Martin Pasi organ in Omaha (their Op. 14) which captured my attention in George Ritchie's Bach cycle.

A quick listen on iTunes made for a very happy discovery. Although originally from Brazil, Dr. Brown currently holds the organist's bench at First United Methodist Church in Eugene, Oregon, and she earned her Master's and Doctorate at Northwestern University under the watchful eye of Wolfgang Rübsam. And his influence seems immediately apparent in her playing: she shares his vibrant but flexible sense of time (which always sounds more convincing with Buxtehude than with Bach to my ear), and her registrations and interpretations are confident and outspoken, at times even cocky; her confidence is exhilarating.

The organ is more interesting than I realized. From the Ritchie release, I knew the organ to have a non-equal temperament and mechanical action. But it seems the Pasi firm have gone considerably beyond that. From a bit of digging online, I learned that the instrument actually features two separate, selectable temperaments--making it like two organs in one. From the Pasi website:

The organ is comprised of 55-stops over three manuals and pedal, 29 of which are playable in two temperaments: 1/4-comma meantone and a new well-tempered tuning devised for this instrument by Kristian Wegscheider of Dresden, Germany.

This is the first I'd heard of the idea, but--of course--it seems that the shop of C.B. Fisk tried their hand at the same thing with their Op. 85 at the Memorial Church at Stanford University, Standford, CA. In both cases, extra pipes are included in the selected ranks, and, in the case of the Pasi organ, different stop-activation methods determine which pipes are engaged.

Again, from the Pasi website:

[29 of the organ's stops] ...contain eight extra notes per octave, tipping the scale of the concept from a single organ with extra pipes to the equivalent of two organs which share a third of their pipes. The abundance of extra pipes allows the circulating temperament to accommodate much of the Romantic and modern repertoires, while retaining enough key color to bring Baroque music alive and to lock into tune the mixtures and reeds in the best keys.
All stops in the Oberwerk and selected stops in the Hauptwerk and Pedal divisions are available in both temperaments. The well-tempered and meantone organs share the following notes in every octave: C, D, G and A. The desired temperament may be chosen independently in each division by the choice of stops. Each dual-tempered voice has two sliders and separate stop controls: traditional drawknobs for the well-tempered stops and Italian-style levers for the meantone stops.

I'm interested to know how limited the interaction between the "two organs" must be. Obviously, all 55 stops are available with the milder well-tempering. But presumably things played in meantone temperament are restricted to a much smaller 29 stops. Or can one mix and match? Maybe it depends on the key in which one is playing.

Regardless, the proof, as the saying goes, is in the pudding. The organ sounds wonderfully authentic and entirely of a piece (even if it's really of two pieces!). These performances hold their own with the excellent Hans Davidsson releases on the wonderful GOArt organ in Sweden (and, indeed, with Rübsams own Buxtehude cycle from 20 years ago). Given my enthusiasm for those releases, this is high praise indeed. It goes without saying that Naxos has given us a fantastic sounding disc.

I see that Dr. Brown also has three discs of Scheidemann on a Brombaugh organ in Eugene, OR. I'll sample those shortly.

A Bit of Recent Organ Archeology

2008-02-23T17:24:00.001-06:00

Discoveries: Christopher Marks plays the Crouse Holtkamp
The 1950 Walter Holtkamp organ at Crouse College, Syracuse University
Raven Records OAR-790
Music of Bach, Dupré, Sowerby, Franz Tunder, David N. Johnson (1922-1987), Joseph Ahrens (1904-1999) and Nicolas Scherzinger (b. 1968)

***

With my recent review of Murray Forbes Somerville playing Bach on the Flentrop organ at Harvard University, I touched a bit upon the upheaval in the organ world that began in the early-mid 20th Century, as organists and listeners became aware of the merits of the organ of Bach's day. That Flentrop organ was one of the earliest instruments of modern times--certainly one of the most famous--to wholly embrace this organ reform movement. The principles of the movement included, among others:

Mechanical key and stop action (the only electricity involved was to run the blower, and some of these neo-baroque organs even allowed for a manual winding option); this restricted how the organ could be laid out and how large it could practically be.
The choirs of the organ were discretely organized into physical sections, and the sound of each was focused by its own case.
Relatively low wind pressures were employed.
Pipes were voiced differently, using an open toe and controlling pipe speech at the mouth of the pipe.
Eventually, historic temperaments were regularly incorporated.

All of these things were a departure from how the organs of the time were constructed. A modern Aeolian-Skinner organ used considerably higher wind pressures, and the organ was thoroughly electrified. A modern organ console was basically a mass of electric switches, connected to the organ with an umbilical of electric cords, and could be placed anywhere; the organ pipes could be installed in any configuration--wherever the pipes could be made to fit--with the divisions of the organ mixed up together. In this scenario, casework becomes almost entirely cosmetic. (The one exception here would involve sections of the organ which were under expression--that is, inside a swell chamber where the volume escaping from the chamber could be controlled by a foot-pedal-activated wall of venetian shutters; these sections needed to be geographically contiguous.)

With early 20th Century organs designed to be a one-person orchestra (for playing orchestral transcriptions, say, or accompanying a silent film), many of the sounds were imitative of orchestral timbres, and the stoplists for these organs were very different from what Bach had been familiar with. It was against all this that the organ reform movement sought to rebel. The baroque organ had been a stand-alone instrument, one with its own repertoire and not predominantly imitative of anything except other organs. The rediscovery of these European organs reminded listeners that there was another way, and many found that other way to be more coherent and compelling.

This present CD introduces us to an intermediate stage along this retro-modernization movement. The organ, dating from 1950, comes from the Cleveland shops of Walter Holtkamp, and was a significant instrument in several respects. The Holtkamp Company was one of America's foremost organ builders in 1950, and Walter Holtkamp Sr. was one of the reform movement's leading proponents in this country.

This present instrument is significant both for its reform stoplist (combined with some of the previous organ's romantic pipework) and for Holtkamp's soon-to-be trademark use of totally open pipework. A portion of the organ is under expression, which of course requires some kind of containment casework; but most of the organ sits out in the open, the pipes themselves like a beautiful, sparkling sculpture, without any kind of casework above. The organ is installed in an alcove in the building, which might be expected to act like an oversized case, but subsequent Holtkamp organs were often installed completely in the open. Walter Holtkamp believed this made the sound of the organ more intimate and immediate, and it made for really striking and individual looking instruments. While the Crouse instrument has electric action, Holtkamp's son, Walter Holtkamp Jr., introduced mechanical action to the firm, and subsequent instruments have been a mixture of mechanical and electric action as the customers and circumstances demand.

While the instrument is not particularly baroque up next to the 1958 Flentrop (to say nothing of a present-day Fritts or Brombaugh organ), when viewed next to an Aeolian-Skinner of 1950 it's a pretty radical departure. And sonically it's clearly a step back toward this new way of thinking. And it makes for a compelling and very successful organ, one which does Bach with great unity and vibrancy, but also deftly handles more modern fare (which is always the challenge, isn't it? An instrument tailored for Buxtehude will struggle with Franck or Duruflé; compromises must be found).

Christopher Marks is Assistant Professor of organ at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. From 1999-2006 he taught organ and music theory at Syracuse University, where he became intimately familiar with this Holtkamp organ. As such, he has an affection for the instrument and an excellent sense of how to show it in the best possible light. In addition to Bach and Franz Tunder, Marks plays three pieces from Dupré's Suite Bretonne and the Passacaglia of Leo Sowerby, plus some excellent pieces from Joseph Ahrens and from past and present Syracuse faculty Nicolas Scherzinger and David N. Johnson. It's a wonderful recital of known and unknown, on a versatile and significant instrument.

Sonically, the disc is fine, though the acoustic--so typical in American recital halls--is a bit dry.

Take That, London!

2008-02-23T15:05:00.005-06:00

Gretchaninov: Passion Week
Kansas City Chorale and Phoenix Bach Choir; Charles Bruffy
Caroline Markham, mezzo-soprano; Paul Davidson, tenor; Bryan Taylor, baritone
Chandos Records, CHSA 5044

***

I feel like some crow-eating is in order. Well, almost.

I've spent some ink extolling the virtues of London as a vocal music mecca (indeed, as a classical music mecca in general), what with recent discs of Stile Antico, Tenebrae and Polyphony--plus a recent Tallis Scholars release of Robert Byrd on the way.

But the world of music is always full of surprises, and here is an unexpectedly fabulous release from the combined ensembles of the Phoenix Bach Choir and the Kansas City Chorale doing the lush, lugubrious works of the Russian Alexander Gretchaninov (1864-1956). Apparently I'm still spending some time with my head under a rock somewhere, as this album was nominated for four Grammys including Best Classical Album and Best Choral Performance, and it won the Grammy for Best Engineered Classical Album.

Much in the mode of Rachmaninov, Gretchaninov's choral works are simple, direct and hauntingly beautiful. His harmonic palette is 19th Century, and his innovation is in expression rather than mechanism. Gretchaninov's Vespers resemble Rachmaninov's in exactly the same way as Duruflé's Requiem resembles Fauré's: they have structure and fundamental sensibility in common, but with a brief exposure you'll have no trouble determining which is which. My wife finds it all impossibly heavy, but it's achingly powerful to me. I think there's a strange phenomenon at work; if there were such thing as a soul, I would say this music is designed to crush the soul flat before giving it a miraculous healing. That's how this music sounds to me, almost like (to quote Shakespeare In Love) a sickness and its cure, together. I feel compelled to champion Gretchaninov, like a bout of Stockholm Syndrome. But really, if you like Rachmaninov's Vespers, you'll love this music. And this release is the unexpected equal in style and conviction of the fabulous 1999 Holst Singers release of some of the same repertoire on Hyperion.

I just never thought I'd be saying that about a choral group from Kansas City and Phoenix.

I suppose, to be fair, the London musical elite needn't put their flats up for rent and buy plane tickets for Missouri just yet. But it's an excellent reminder that there are sophisticated musical minds and really talented people all over the place. A quick perusal of the KCC's and PBCs websites show a group of mostly young, highly educated professionals (much like the members of London's Stile Antico, come to think of it). Well, it seems that they have several other recordings out as well, which I'm now eager to explore.

Enthusiastically recommended.

Where I Get Lost On My Way to the Review

2008-02-20T01:29:00.007-06:00

Pas De Dieu - Music Sublime & Spirited
Janette Fishell, organ
C. B. Fisk, St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Greenville NC, 2005
Loft Records, LRCD-1082

Music of Franck, Vierne, Ferko, Litaize, Duruflé

***

The organs of C. B. Fisk are disproportionately represented in my CD collection. Partly this is because, as I noted in an earlier post, I've had a little personal contact with one or two of the firm's organs; but it's also because the firm has been so consistently innovative and adventurous in its choices and projects. Charles Fisk was among the earliest contemporary American organ builders to construct historically-informed neo-baroque instruments--including an instrument for Wellesley College (Op. 72, 1982) that featured quarter-comma meantone tuning, mutant keyboard and all. But far from confining themselves to that niche, the firm have also done many conventional church organs, big American Classic concert organs (e.g. Meyerson Symphony Center, Dallas) and even earnest copies of the work of French great Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (Oberlin College, OH), and everything in between.

This wide range is not an unprecedented situation in the organ world. Several other firms which pop readily to mind--Flentrop of Holland, Marcussen of Denmark and the Austrian firm Rieger, just to name a few--have also dabbled in this cross-genre business. But none to my knowledge have gone so far as Fisk, whose range is nearly all-encompassing. This is kind of a double-edged sword, as it makes the task more difficult to know exactly what the firm stands for; and more than this, it would seem to make actual boundary-stretching innovation (as opposed to just visiting the existing genres) more difficult, as the company is not singularly focused. (I don't know--is it possible to innovate in an historical genre? Is the blending of genres an innovation anymore?) I love all the things Fisk have done, from their most radical neo-baroque experiment to their fabulous concert hall organ in Dallas; maybe that's all that matters.

One unifying thing among all of Fisk's instruments is the use of mechanical key action. (For the uninitiated, this means that each key of each keyboard has a direct, mechanical linkage to the pallet which admits air to the pipes speaking that note.) From his start in the 60s, Charles Fisk's commitment to mechanical action was a pretty radical departure from the norm. I don't know that Fisk have never made an electric action organ, but clearly tracker action is one of their things, and this choice informs everything else about the instrument, from layout to wind pressures to voicing. While an organist's touch does not affect the actual tonal quality of the sound produced, there is still thought by many to be an artistic connection formed between player and instrument by the intimacy of this mechanism.

The advances of the Electric Age--fully electric key action among them--changed organ building profoundly, enabling organs to be built of almost unlimited size and layout. A single rank of pipes could be made to serve several purposes, e.g. as a manual rank at 16' pitch, and, with an extension, as a 32' rank on the pedal; likewise, a rank could serve as both foundation and mutation by simple manipulation of wiring. And indeed we see these things, as well as much-improved console assists for the organist--e.g. crescendo pedals and multi-level combination actions--on the organs of Hook & Hastings and Ernest Skinner and others.

With antique instruments, of course, some kind of mechanical linkage was required--there was no other option. But the march of technology enabled larger and larger instruments, until we get to the behemoths like the Wanamaker Grand Court organ or the instruments at West Point or Atlantic City, which would be impossible without electric key action. Between the two extremes we have intermediate steps; although the big Cavaillé-Colls in France were still necessarily built with mechanical key action, they have pneumatic Barker machines to assist with what is after all a great mechanical load--I guess this is technically "tracker-pneumatic" action. The higher wind pressures of an orchestral organ make opening the pallets more difficult, and coupling the manuals together simply requires more force than a person can deftly provide. (In the interest of historical authenticity, Fisk's Cavaillé-Coll imitation at Oberlin College has a similar servo-assisted mechanical action, even though this must be a more expensive and complicated method of construction on a big instrument.)

We could easily have a discussion about the merits of mechanical-versus-electric action--and I seem to have run off in that direction. For our present purposes I mean only to note that Fisk have stayed with mechanical action throughout their wide range of instrument genres--including those genres where we might not expect to see it--and it's interesting to contemplate what other things fall into place because of this fundamental choice. With an instrument like theirs at the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, mechanical action is a bit unexpected, and so we find a modern synthesis of styles. Likewise the Lynn Dobson concert hall organ at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia (among several others I can think of). Here we have an instrument with both a mechanical action console at the organ's case, and also a remote, electric-action console down on the stage. These things all represent relatively new territory.

The new organ on this release, the shop's Op. 126 from 2005 in St Paul's Episcopal Church in Greenville, NC, continues with Fisk's commitment to mechanical action. And it also builds on their research into Aristide Cavaillé-Coll's work for the firm's organ at Oberlin College. The Greenville organ is unapologetically French, but it's a bit lighter in tone than Oberlin and it benefits from a more sympathetic acoustic than the one at Oberlin. The excellence of this NC acoustic leads me to wonder (again) whether the "French-ness" of the instrument is in any way reliant on the acoustic--and again how big a handicap the acoustic was to the firm's aims at Oberlin.

Whatever the cause, this Greenville organ is particularly successful, offering a rare blend and unity of sound in a spectacularly beautiful package. The Fisk firm have many organs in their oeuvre to be proud of, but this is certainly one where everything came together beautifully.

This release features Janette Fishell, Distinguished Professor of Music at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC, where she heads the Organ Performance and Sacred Music degree programs and is Chair of Keyboard Studies. The CD includes selections by Louis Vierne and Gaston Litaize, the lovely Priére by Cesar Franck (one of my favorite organ works), plus Duruflé's Prelude, Adagio and Choral Variations on Veni Creator. We also find a premier of the Livre d'orgue of longtime Chicago area resident and organist Frank Ferko (b. 1950). It's an excellent repertoire to show off the instrument, and Dr. Fishell's performances are vibrant and spot-on.

In Bach's time, the pipe organ was the most complicated, sophisticated machine with which people had regular contact. Today, the actual inner workings of a Yamaha synthesizer or something from the Kurzweill shop probably trump that claim, to say nothing of all the complex non-musical things that are part of our everyday lives. But a pipe organ is still a daunting undertaking, an endeavor requiring expertise in metals and woodworking, in design and acoustics, and increasingly in electronics as well. It's a field with deep roots back into history, foundations which strongly inform the industry present-day. There is a delight in knowing that no two are exactly the same, and even instruments which are similar on paper can be widely different in the flesh. This makes a new instrument's success contingent on many different threads. And while all organs fascinate me just by virtue of what they are, it's still a special thrill to find one where things make that rare convergence, like the focusing of a light with a magnifying glass.

Based, admittedly, on only one recording (albeit an excellent one), I think Fisk have given us a keeper.

A Body of Work

2008-02-08T14:26:00.001-06:00

J. S. Bach: the Complete Organ Works
George Ritchie on American organs by Brombaugh, Fisk, Fritts, Taylor & Boody, Noack, Pasi, Yokota
(recorded June 1992-September 2003)
Raven Records, OAR-875

***

I probably don't need another complete Bach organ cycle for my collection. More than a quarter of my collection is Bach, and a majority of that is organ music, including at least four complete surveys plus several hundred other Bach organ discs. But apart from a piece here and there on the occasional recital disc, I've not bought any Bach organ stuff since the last of Wolfgang Rübsam's cycle on Naxos a decade ago. So it seemed not a bad idea to see what's going on present-day. Because I've listened so intently to Bach's compositions for so many years, and used them as a springboard onto other things, it's easy to forget how much of the musical bedrock in my mind springs from these works. And if I concentrate just a little, Bach's inventiveness and musical genius retain the capacity to overwhelm. He is just so fecund, so unfailingly and impossibly tasteful--the very loftiest stratum of genius. (It seems silly to even attempt to make a case for Bach, but such is his miraculous talent that I can't keep from evangelizing a bit.)

George Ritchie is Professor of Organ Emeritus at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and his releases for this series over the last decade or so have put him on the map as a specialist in this repertoire. A highly capable technician, he gives an inspired tour of Bach's varied output, from the tenderness of the chorale preludes to the intellectual challenges of the trio sonatas to the confident brio of the great Preludes and Fugues. Interpretively, Dr. Ritchie swings close to the center of the fairway, choosing middling tempi and wholly defensible phrasing and registrations. Any of these performances could be held up as an example of how the piece in question ought to be played, and if you didn't know this music, this would be a really excellent introduction. Come to think of it, Ritchie's playing reminds me a bit of E. Power Biggs's old recordings, but with a touch more period performance nuance. I guess that's a pretty lofty imprimatur.

The box set calls itself Bach's complete works for organ, but the collection is missing quite a few things. Only two of the Chorale Partitas are present, and the chorales from the Neumeister Collection are not here, just off the top of my head (my other complete releases have 17 discs; this one, only 11). I'm not sure if there's a scholarly reason for this, or whether further volumes were intended, but the six individual releases are boxed together for this issue and labeled "complete." Still, there's plenty to celebrate for the 200 or so tracks present.

I'm quite enthusiastic about Dr. Ritchie's choice of instruments for the cycle. There is little need nowadays to make a case for the merits of historically-informed organs, but this would be the set to do it. While Bach's gifts shine through almost any transcription to synthesizer or steel drum band or scat singing, the simple, direct organ sounds like those of the instruments he knew show him in the best possible light, especially compared to Bach on an American Classic organ. And in this set the artist has managed to hit all the high points of historically-inspired organ design (including a couple organs also used by Rübsam in his Naxos set), the builders collectively forming quite a who's who of mechanical-action builders in this country: C. B. Fisk, Paul Fritts, John Brombaugh, Taylor & Boody, Fritz Noack. And there are a couple I'd not heard of as well: Martin Pasi and Associates, and the Japanese-American builder Munetaka Yokota. It turns out that Mr. Yokota, whose organ in this present CD release is at the California State University in Chino, was responsible for building and voicing the pipes for the North German organ at GOArt, the Goteborg Organ Art Center in Sweden--an organ about which I have erupted with effusive praise. So, small world.

They're excellent organs all. I especially like Fritz Noack's 1995 instrument in Christ the King Evangelical Lutheran Church in Houston. The instrument seems to achieve a greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts unity (though the extreme flexibility of the winding is occasionally disrupting; I've heard the arguments in favor of it, but it still sounds like a defect to me). Martin Pasi & Assoc.'s 2003 organ in the Cathedral of St. Cecilia in Omaha is also excellent, and new to me. It's a larger acoustic than one typically finds in this country. And the Op. 18 organ of Paul Fritts at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma (1998) has gotten a lot of attention. This is my first recording of that instrument as well.

Lastly, because of a small personal connection, I'm particularly interested in the organs of Fisk and of John Brombaugh. Mr. Brombaugh and I exchanged a couple letters in the early 80s discussing organ design; so I've had a small personal attachment to his work since that time (there is a lovely and noteworthy 1995 Brombaugh organ in the chapel at Lawrence University, a stone's throw from my house). For the present release, Ritchie plays the Clavierübung III (plus some miscellaneous pieces) on Brombaugh's Anton Heiller Memorial Organ from 1986, located at Southern College of 7th Day Adventists in Collegedale, Tennessee. It has a distinctive, baroque sound, with fairly thin and prominent upperwork and notably flexible wind. It is tuned (as I think all the organs in this set are) to a non-equal temperament, which gives a bit of piquancy to the sound, and a little bloom to the resolutions. Mr. Brombaugh did not build too many instruments before his retirement (as opposed to, say, Aeolian-Skinner), and it's fun to find another large instrument of his recorded.

I've also always followed the output of the C. B. Fisk firm, both because a distant acquaintance of mine works at the shop, and also because the firm have simply done some amazing and innovative things over the years. The Fisk organ on this recording, the four-manual organ at House of Hope Presbyterian Church in St. Paul, MN, is an instrument with which I have a little first-hand acquaintance.

I got an up-close look at the organ in the early 80s, back when it was quite newly-installed and the talk of the organ world. At the time of its installation, it was the largest mechanical action organ built in this country, and--I think--the largest organ the Fisk firm had built to that point. The organ clearly had fashionable neo-Baroque design details--non-equal temperament, mechanical key and stop action, Werkprinzip layout--and yet was tonally not fully on board with the aesthetic, having both German and French elements; an interesting hybrid, as it were. It's a spectacular-looking organ. I attended several church services in order to hear the instrument (no easy matter for me), and I remember attending a recital by the great French organist Marie-Claire Alain on this organ. (During the reception afterward, I asked her what she thought of the instrument. "Very heavy! Very heavy," she said. "Especially when coupled. It needs a Barker lever!") [addendum: I see now on the Fisk website that a "in 1992 a Kowalyshyn Servopneumatic lever was added to make key touch more sensitive when playing with the manuals coupled."] I remembered the acoustic being awfully dry and short, and this recording confirms my memory there. The organ builder Charles Hendrickson told me some years ago that he had wandered around the organ cases after installation and was surprised at how "opened up" all the pipework was; Fisk had gone all out to get volume out of the instrument. The fact that it did not completely overwhelm listeners was a testament to just how dead the room is. It's fun to hear this instrument again on a good recording, and to reacquaint myself with it. It's not the most interesting or successful organ in this set, but it's still a noteworthy and very musical achievement.

In summary, this is a first-rate set either for those looking to supplement their collection, or for those who would like to explore the state-of-the-art in Bach organ interpretation.

The Mother Road

2008-02-07T09:28:00.001-06:00

Bach: Great Chorales of the Clavierübung III
Murray Forbes Somerville at the Harvard Flentrop
Raven Records, OAR-750

Ten Chorale Preludes, BWV 669-671, 676, 678, 680, 682, 684, 686, 688
Prelude and Fugue in E-flat, "St. Anne"

***

This instrument was made famous by the late concert organist E. Power Biggs, who recorded six volumes of Bach on it, plus Hindemith's organ sonatas and some Sweelinck and several others. Since Biggs' death in 1977, the instrument has been regularly played, but recorded much less frequently. The Harvard University Organist Murray Forbes Somerville recorded the Orgelbüchlein on it 20 years or so ago now, and organist John Ayer did a musical tribute to Biggs a few years back. On this present disc, recorded in 2000, Dr. Somerville finishes his tenure at Harvard by recording about half of the Third part of the Clavierübung.

I confess have a exaggerated soft spot for this particular organ, and I'm frankly surprised to learn there is a recording on it which I've somehow missed (I've scoured my CDs a couple times, convinced that this purchase was a duplicate, but so far I can't find it). Years ago I even made a pilgrimage to Boston specifically to see this organ, and I was able to get a private tour of the instrument and was allowed to spend a couple hours on my own poking around and playing it. When I was first discovering the organ--and discovering Bach--in the early 80s, Biggs' recordings were in record stores everywhere. The existence of this particular instrument in Harvard's Germanic Museum was Biggs' doing, with the organist doing the research, commissioning the builder, and even paying for the instrument out of his own pocket (he later donated the organ to the University, I believe). This instrument played a huge role in awakening America's sensibilities to the riches of organ history, and specifically to the real virtues of baroque organ design, principles from which contemporary organ design had diverged sharply.

This awakening to the merits of baroque and pre-baroque organs began a couple decades before this Flentrop was installed at Harvard in 1958, and in fact American builders, responding to this awakening, had begun to take small, tentative steps to incorporate some of the baroque tonal and mechanical principles into their modern instruments. The preceding organ in the Germanic Museum's loft--prior to Biggs' Flentrop--came from the firm of Aeolian-Skinner, and was an experiment with Biggs to try out some of these new theories. The organ was broadcast weekly on radio, and became quite famous in its own right. But this Aeolian-Skinner "baroque" instrument was a travesty compared to what Biggs had played and recorded in Europe, and he wanted much more. The story goes that the tonal directorship of Aeolian-Skinner was coming vacant, and Biggs wanted that position for himself, confident that he could help the firm, and the American organ industry as a whole, take a giant leap back to the future. When the position was denied him, the most famous and influential organist in the world went to a Dutch builder and commissioned the instrument which helped put Skinner, and most of the other builders of "American Classic" organs, out of business entirely.

That's the story, anyway. But the instrument is quite able to tell the salient parts of its own story, the rest of this business falling away and leaving only music. It's a fairly small organ--27 stops and 34 ranks over three manuals and pedal--but it's in a spectacularly live acoustic, and the organ speaks with an astounding clarity. It seems possible to identify the sound of each individual pipe, and yet the ensemble comes together from disparate individual sounds in a most unexpected way. Dirk Flentrop has given the organ a bright, present character which sounds vibrantly musical, moreso than any other organ I've ever heard. I'm accustomed to thinking that it's just my early exposure to the instrument which biases me toward this favoritism, but even after a couple years without listening to these old recordings I find my excitement quickly renewed to hear it again; it's really a magical convergence of circumstances which add up to a confident and compelling musical statement.

Dr. Somerville writes in the CD notes:

The pipes, voiced on low wind pressure and placed on the historic form of slider chests, have a gentle, alive quality of sound, and the open-toe, un-nicked voicing gives an articulate quality. This instrument was among the first examples (and for many years by far the most prominent) of the "Baroque" or historical organ revival; Flentrop subsequently installed many other instruments throughout the United States. Though it now appears to us more a product of its time in its neo-Baroque austerity (with no tremulant, no strings, pronounced chiff, and equal temperament) it remains a beautifully musical organ in an almost ideal acoustic location.

The playing and recording are both first-rate. This one gets put in my special pile.

More Russian Winter

2008-01-25T19:33:00.000-06:00

The Rachmaninov Vespers and All-Night Vigil, Op. 37
Tenebrae
Signum Classics, SIG CD045

***

I love the idea of a music blog as an avenue for discussions with other people about music. Because the web is so large, a substantial market can congeal for almost any niche thing, including perhaps not-quite-mainstream classical music. One of the great fringe benefits of this site for me has been some wonderful input from new friends who have found their way here. A month or so ago I was introduced to the baroque lutenist and composer Sylvius Leopold Weiss, and now I've been pointed toward a great English choral group of whom I'd not previously heard, Tenebrae.

Formed in 2001 by former King's Singer member Nigel Short, Tenebrae seeks to bring an intimate Renaissance sensibility to choral performance, even of more modern works. They are known for performing by candlelight, and they specialize in optimizing their performances for the acoustics in which they sing. As we've noted before, England generally, and London specifically, is practically overrun by top-shelf vocal groups, all fed and nourished by a collection of fantastic school and church choirs, making for a culture which seems to have reached a critical, self-sustaining mass. True to form, Tenebrae's members have come from some very impressive places: the Monteverdi Choir, the choirs of Westminster Abbey and Cathedral and King’s College, Cambridge, I Fagiolini, The Tallis Scholars, The Swingle Singers, The King’s Singers, Covent Garden and English National Opera.

I picked their recording of Rachmaninov's Vespers, both because I'm in a Rachmaninov mood lately and because I recently reviewed The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir's version of the same piece, so a contrast seemed inevitable. (The EPCC in that recording was led by yet another Londoner, the brilliant Paul Hillier.) And boy, it's a tough task to choose among them. Interpretively, the two choirs are coming from a similar sensibility, so that no identifiable slant of vision distinguishes one performance from the other. Tempos are similarly middling, and both choirs are fairly relaxed in their projection, not resorting to extreme dynamics to make their case; fortissimos are reserved for key moments. The Tenebrae recording is in a smaller acoustic, and there is a bit more closeness and intimacy here; I think the reverberation on Hillier's recording serves the piece very well, giving blend and mystery, though this is purely a personal preference (and not a consistent one: I generally like to hear as much detail as possible). I also find just a wee bit more polish in the Estonian solo voices, plus I fancy there is some indefinable Slavic resonance. But the Tenebrae recording is really excellent, and I'm eager to explore their catalog further.

Each new reading of a piece illuminates something not emphasized by others, giving us a fuller and deeper understanding of the score, and the Tenebrae recording is careful and thoughtful and a happy addition to my collection.

Original Bach

2008-01-25T17:56:00.000-06:00

J.S. Bach: Viola da gamba Sonatas, etc.
Aapo Hakkinen, harpsichord and Mikko Perkola, viola da gamba
Naxos records, 8.570210

Three Sonatas for viola da gamba and harpsichord, BWV 1027-1029
Two Trios, BWV 583 and 584
Harpsichord Sonatas, BWV 963 and 967

***

The gambist on this Naxos release from late last year is Finnish baroque specialist and early music teacher Mikko Perkola. He is joined by the young Finnish harpsichordist Aapo Hakkinen, who teaches at the Helsinki Sibelius Academy, and is the Artistic Director of the Helsinki Baroque Orchestra and of the Early Music concert series at the Institut Finlandais in Paris.

These Viola da Gamba Sonatas are most often performed nowadays on 'cello and a modern grand piano, and while I came to be familiar with these pieces on that instrumental combination at the hands of Leonard Rose and Glenn Gould years ago, I find it to be different and more vital music when performed on the instruments Bach knew. For me it's not so much an authenticity thing--though I cast no aspersions on that goal, and at times I place my own premium on this priority; rather, I just find the character and tone of the viola da gamba aligns with something deeply in my musical sensitivities that the 'cello doesn't quite reach, despite it being my favorite voice of the modern string family. The vibrato-free steadiness and slightly nasal tone of the gamba seems to fully expose the artist, and the harpsichord's metallic timbre contrasts with the flatter tone of the viol, giving a richness and edge to the sound the breathes life into the works.

In addition to the more popular three Sonatas, the recording includes a couple less-well-known movements, the Trios BWV 583 and 584, which I know as solo organ pieces, and which are thought to date from around the same time as Bach's famous Trio Sonatas for organ (BWV 525-531). The recording also includes a couple pieces for solo harpsichord which I'm surprised to find are not in my collection--well, one not at all (BWV 967, considered a bit dubious) and the other (BWV 963) is on organ. So some new or substantially freshened repertoire is always a treat. The sonatas are all expertly played, with tempos and phrasing just perfect to my ear.

The recording, as always with Naxos, is excellent.

Sonic Sunshine

2008-01-04T01:25:00.000-06:00

Cloudburst: Choral Music of Eric Whitacre
Polyphony / Stephen Layton
Hyperion Records, CDA67543

***

The English conductor Stephen Layton heads two different choral groups, Polyphony and the Holst Singers, which are among my favorite musical entities. A conspicuous number of these two groups' recordings have ended up on my pile of favorites. I'm wildly fond of Polyphony's collection of Grainger and the Holst Singers' Vaughan Williams compilation, both from a few years ago, and they have a couple really excellent collections of Russian composers as well. Through them I learned of Morten Lauridsen and James MacMillan.

And now they've introduced me to Eric Whitacre. Whitacre (b. 1970) has a Master's degree from Julliard, and specializes in choral writing. This disc gives us a representative sample of his output, with Polyphony's typical flawless execution. Whitacre's harmonies are dense and luxurious, and Layton clearly has a feel for how Whitacre writes. There's something so simple and confident and direct in the settings that I find myself kind of permanantly choked up while I listen.

I recommend, with the added glow of their being a new discovery for me.
____________

A review of groups on YouTube performing Whitacre's "Sleep" (my favorite so far on this album) shows that what Polyphony have pulled off is very impressive indeed. I did not find any Polyphony on YouTube, but this recording gives a good sample of Whitacre's writing (and, for all that, this Indiana choir--either high school or college--does a great job; but Hyperion and Polyphony certainly do them one better). Polyphony can be sampled on iTunes.

A North American Collaboration

2007-12-28T06:08:00.000-06:00

Choral Works of Morten Lauridsen
Elora Festival Singers, Noel Edison
Naxos, 8.559304

***

Here's another delightful recording from our friends at Naxos.

I discovered Morten Lauridsen via a recording by Stephen Layton and Polyphony from 2004 on Hyperion (CDA67449). I was immediately nearly heartbroken by the simple beauty of his Ave Maria; so quietly powerful was this music that I found myself seeking the disc out for mood control. I've been on a mission since then to acquire more of his oeuvre. The 64-year-old Lauridsen is professor of composition at USC, and has written several secular and sacred settings for mixed choir. Polyphony followed that initial release with a second in 2006, also on Hyperion (CDA67580), the two discs covering most of his output.

Lauridsen's writing, especially in the classic sacred settings, is wonderfully simple and direct, employing quite spare and deliberate part-writing and a limited but very engaging harmonic palette. Having made this much acquaintance, I feel I could identify him readily by this harmonic language, which is firmly tonal but gently modern.

Now comes a recent release on Naxos of an excellent cross section of Lauridsen's work, sung by a Canadian group, the Elora Festival Singers. I was thrilled by their recording a few years back of Vaughan Williams's Requiem (Naxos 8.554826), and they have released discs of Arvo Part's Berliner Messe and music of Healy Willan, among others.

But this recording of Lauridsen will stand on its own. The choir has a very warm and blended sound, and Noel Edison gives us very feeling interpretations of these works. I'm especially taken with Les Chansons des Roses, a four-movement work that concludes with an achingly beautiful, piano-supported monody that reminds me of Duruflé and his penchant for plainsong.

Having been introduced to all these works by other groups, I can say that this Naxos release equals or betters any other versions I've heard. Add in Naxos's bargain price, and you have a really attractive package.

Highly recommended.

Weiss, Volume 6

2007-12-27T18:50:00.000-06:00

(sorry for another crappy picture)

Sylvius Leopold Weiss: Lute Sonatas, Vol. 6
Robert Barto, Lute
Naxos 8.555722

A blog friend has pointed me to Sylvius Leopold Weiss (1687-1750). The German Weiss was a direct contemporary of J. S. Bach, and they seem even to have met thru Bach's son Wilhelm Friedemann. The Wikipedia entry says that Weiss is history's most prolific composer for the lute, and also one of the great technical players of the instrument. I have a number of recordings of Paul O'dette and Nigel North playing John Dowland and Bach on the lute, but it shows my myopia that I'd never even heard of Sylvius Weiss before this recent introduction. But one can sample his compositions on iTunes, and after a quick listen I did the download.

Once again, Naxos comes to the rescue, with at least eight volumes now of Weiss's lute sonatas by American lutenist Robert Barto. Not all are available on iTunes, so I just randomly picked Volume Six.

It's really lovely music, exhibiting the modernity of Bach's writing, but with just a touch of the antique (which might be as much instrument as repertoire). The sound is necessarily intimate, chamber music played in a quiet, resonant space. The writing is very charming but seems less technical than Bach's; it has, to my ear, the more relaxed contrapuntal textures of Pachelbel or Telemann. But he's very melodic, and a couple times on this disc I thought we could be listening to the lute versions of lost additional Brandenburg Concertos.

The lute is pretty new territory for me. It has some obvious similarities with the guitar, of course, but it's more complex. Most lutes have more strings than a guitar, and strings are usually doubled, with each doubled unit (or "course") tuned either in unison or in octaves, depending on the individual course and the historical period of the instrument. Frets are of gut tied around the neck, rather than a guitar's imbedded metal frets. The instrument is played essentially like a guitar, it seems, but there are some idiosyncrasies: beyond the greater pitch spread from the more numerous courses, it seems much more the custom with the lute that high notes are played by selecting a higher course rather than by stopping far up on a lower string (perhaps this counts as a versatility of the guitar and explains why fewer strings / courses were needed?). This technical aspect is something new and intriguing to me.

Lutenist Robert Barto is apparently very well known in Lute circles, and this disc seems most expertly played. Naxos has given us, as ever, a first-rate recording.

I'm eager to accumulate the other volumes of the series, and expect I might have more to say about the music with increased exposure.

Never Too Much of a Good Thing

2007-12-21T11:34:00.000-06:00

Mark Knopfler
Shangri-La
Mercury records

***

I've been so taken with Mark Knopfler's latest, Kill to Get Crimson, that I decided to get the album previous to this one, Shangri-La.

Dating from 2004, it's in the same vein as Crimson, with very basic acoustic instrumentation and juicy, well-placed guitar phrasing (which reminds me of Count Basie in its fabulous economy). Knopfler himself mumbles his way endearingly thru the set, sounding like your local auto mechanic with a magnificent spark of talent that you'd likely miss if you didn't look closely.

His guitar playing is kind of everywhere and nowhere at once. Video footage has him often playing unaccompanied or with just a trio, which is always a challenge for an instrumentalist, but especially so for one with a quiet or sparse style. But he steps deftly into the spaces between his sung phrases, and there is a little harmonic movement that moves like a stream beneath the songs as they pass. Obviously, the studio album fattens the sound with additional musicians--Jim Cox's drumming and Chad Cromwell's Hammond B-3 seem especially tasty (of course)--but it's really Knopfler's guitar that holds the place of honor at the exhibition's center.

I'm especially taken with Song for Sonny Liston, both for its relentless, plodding gait (if this groove doesn't make you want to move something is broken) and for its eloquent exposé of a man of whom I'd scarcely heard before. But the whole album is atmospheric and devoid of artifice. In addition to Cox and Cromwell, he's joined by Richard Bennett on guitar, Guy Fletcher on keys, Glenn Worf on bass and Paul Franklin on pedal steel guitar.

Here's a bit of Sonny Liston from YouTube:

Youthful Old School

2007-12-12T01:01:00.000-06:00

Music for Compline
Stile Antico
Choral music of Tallis, Byrd, Sheppard, Aston and White
Harmonia Mundi, HMU907419

***

Stile antico is a group of young British singers specializing in Renaissance and early baroque repertoire. I don't remember how I learned of them, though I suspect I heard a profile of the group on NPR (which is credited for launching this present CD to No. 1 in an instant). But however I heard of them, I made a mental note to look for their CD when I next found my way into a good music store. But with classical music pretty much gone from the big stores I run across in the course of my work week, I eventually caved in and downloaded the CD from iTunes.

And what a debut disc. They have chosen from a rich catalog of English Tudor heavy hitters, with 17 tracks of Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, John Sheppard and Robert White.

One can't help feeling a giddy sense of accomplishment for these dozen young men and women, who have put their heads together and come up with a life-changing plan. Certainly they have excellent role models to follow, with London being the home of numerous choirs and top-shelf vocal ensembles and the schools which produce them: the Hilliard Ensemble, Pro Cantione Antiqua, Polyphony, Oxford Camerata, the Monteverdi Choir and the Tallis Scholars come immediately to mind, and there are amazing school and church choirs everywhere. It says something fabulous about London that a new group can arise in 2007 in the midst of so much existing and established talent.

All the members of stile antico are actively engaged in study, or have recently embarked upon professional careers as singers and instrumentalists, performing in concerts and ensembles and in movie sountracks. There must be a certain critical mass wherein a cultural element like this becomes self-sustaining, as one could not make a living in this way except in a few special places. I would give my eye teeth to belong to such an ensemble (wanting only for talent and youth and expertise and geography; baby steps).

Stile antico sound on this recording as though they've been singing together for years, which is even more impressive in that they work without a conductor. They approach individual pieces as chamber musicians with everyone offering their input, yet manage to produce a highly polished product. They handle the material with professional confidence, and their blend and intonation are beyond reproach. If you don't like this recording, you're not going to like the material no matter who performs it.

The recording is first-rate, though one of the casualties of the iTunes purchase is information about where the disc was recorded (this is not a priority for most people, I know, but it's something I like to know, along with the producer and engineer, and the recording equipment). But the recording itself is where the rubber meets the road, and this one is a rare treat.

Highly recommended.

Another Dobson

2007-12-08T17:41:00.000-06:00

Two Recordings of the 2003 Dobson Organ at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Los Angeles, CA.
Samuel S. Soria, organ
Delos Records

Premier Organ Recording DE 3331

Alec Wyton: Fanfare
Louis Vierne: Naïades for Organ, Op. 55
Julius Reubke: The 94th Psalm - Sonata for Organ
Johann Sebastian Bach: Prelude and Fugue in C, BWV 547
Olivier Messiaen: L'Ascension pour Orgue, II. & III
Herbert Howells: Psalm Preludes, Set II No. I

____________

Organ Voices DE 3343

Theodore Dubois: Toccata in G
Eric De Lamarter: You Raise the Flute to Your Lips (from Four Eclogues)
Peter Hurford: Paean
Maurice Duruflé: Suite, Op. 5
Paul Drayton: Pavane
Eugene Reuchsel: Trés lent et douloureux (from Evocation de Louis Vierne)
Olivier Messiaen: Joie et Clarté des Corps Glorieux
Hugh McAmis: Dreams
Edwin Lemare: Andantino (from Les Corps Glorieux)
César Franck: Chorale No. 2 in B

***

I was trying to figure out what sonic lineage the new Dobson organ in Philadelphia's Kimmel Center claims as its kin. Certainly not (to look at recently-reviewed recordings) North Germanic baroque, and not something derived from Cavaillé-Coll's workshop. The obvious answer is that Dobson is springing into the 21st Century by way of Skinner and G. Donald Harrison and M. P. Moller and the 20th Century American Classic organ. But I don't quite hear that in the Kimmel instrument. It's lovely and powerful, and it has a stylistic and sonic coherence, but it has its own stamp; it's not quite this and not quite that, and yet I can't so far put my finger on a new direction which is distinctly Dobson. I enjoy the exercise, and it may yet come to me. But so far it seems like a branch off the family tree which is too short to gauge its direction.

My questions, in my review of the recent recording of that new Kimmel Center organ, about whether Lynn Dobson was up to so immense a task as building what is billed as "America's largest concert hall organ" were evidently misplaced. It's a confident, assured instrument and a magnificent mechanical and sonic achievement with no asterisks. But with my inherent skepticism toward the do everything organ, I've continued to scratch my head a little about the roots of its sound. Obviously, such an instrument does not appear in a poof of smoke, so in search of a little perspective I set out to see what brought Lynn Dobson to this watershed. As I mentioned in that earlier review, my familiarity with Dobson's work was confined to a small mechanical action instrument installed in a church in Minneapolis shortly after it was installed roughly 25 years ago--a world away from the behemoth in Kimmel Center. So I wasn't surprised to learn that Mr. Dobson had traversed a number of steps leading to the Kimmel organ. One of these steps, a most pertinent one, is an ambitious instrument from 2003 in Los Angeles' Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

There are at least three solo CD releases on this instrument, and I've managed to get my hands on two of them. I had seen these releases in online catalogs over the past year or two, but hadn't been paying attention. Double shame on me, as both these releases are on the Delos label, which specializes in organ recordings and is responsible for several of the most spectacularly-recorded CDs in my collection (including the Todd Wilson complete Duruflé from 1986 that tops them all). These releases bring Delos's usual engineering excellence to the task, and the instrument and space are fantastically captured.

But the organ. A four manual instrument of 76 speaking stops and 105 ranks, it's a substantial organ by any standard (though still a bit smaller than the 97 stop / 124 rank Kimmel Center organ). This organ certainly establishes the firm's credentials for tackling the Philadelphia instrument, though it's worth noting that these are the only two four manual instruments Dobson has built. (He's done many three manual organs, but these two four manual instruments are substantially larger than anything else from his shop.) The church's previous building was damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, and Mr. Dobson was commissioned to build an organ (using some of the old organ's pipes) for the new church built in replacement. It's a lovely building, the kind of huge, blank-slate space which architects must rarely get a crack at. Sonically, it's not quite Notre Dame, but it's a gigantic volume of enclosed space, and very sympathetic to grand organ music. So the pedigree is excellent all around.

Our performer on these releases is the Lady of the Angels cathedral organist Samuel Soria, who gives us a mixture in both programs of firmly established and relatively unfamiliar repertoire. Soria came to Los Angles after a nine year stint in Chicago at the luscious Flentrop at Holy Name Cathedral, and has studied with some very prestigious people, including Wolfgang Rubsam, Jean Guillou and Naji Hakim. He has an excellent musical sense (I would expect nothing less with this roster of teachers), with middling tempos and sympathetic registrations. The lush acoustic is well suited for this kind of music, and Soria has good instincts for this set-up. One small complaint is that he rushes his way through the climax to the third movement of Olivier Messiaen's l'Ascension, a stirring movement which nonetheless I feel requires a player to make a case for. But it's a small niggle. Here is yet another rendition of Duruflé's Op. 5 Suite pour orgue, and Mr. Soria tackles the huge technical challenges, especially of the final movement, expertly. He also gives a thrilling rendition of Franck's Second Choral--a piece for which the instrument seems tailor-made.

After my recent attention to the very period-specific and genre-specific work of GOArt, I'm aware that an instrument which seeks to do everything well must necessarily compromise on everything. Much of mainstream contemporary organ building covers a certain tonal landscape, and it's understood that a copy of a 16th or 17th Century organ will have very limited practical application for anybody but a university. This Los Angeles Dobson gives me a little perspective from which to judge his Kimmel Center organ (of which I'm longing for a solo recording). This Lady of the Angels instrument speaks into a more sympathetic space for organ music than Kimmel Hall, and the organ here speaks clearly and has a huge dynamic range--as we'd expect from an instrument of 105 ranks. Much more than the Kimmel Center organ (to my ear), I hear a connection between this Los Angeles Dobson and the work of Ernest M. Skinner or G. Donald Harrison. This organ sounds American. It's a really big sound, the sound of large air volumes and high wind pressures and clean, forthright projection. All pipe speech characteristics and artifacts have been scrubbed clean, seemingly making for sounds where key elements would not disappear behind some closed swell shutters (which is one of the reasons I've never cared for swell boxes).

Like the Fisk organ in Dallas's Meyerson Symphony Center, this is an organ designed to fill a huge space, and it is naturally a less intimate, less delicately-nuanced sound than what we might get from a small-room instrument. It's not an idiosyncratic sound. There is a full set of fiery en chamade horizontal reeds on this organ, which bring the requisite snap to climaxes, but that leads me to one of my few complaints about the organ: something in the wind supply regulation of these en chamade reeds, or an incongruity between the wind pressures or supply of these reeds versus the rest of the organ makes the reeds a bit distracting, especially in antiphonal effects. They sound great to top off the ensemble for a climax, but as solo voices there is something off-putting in their speech and / or voicing. In parts of the Ruebke Sonata on the 94th Psalm, I momentarily wondered if there were something wrong with my sound system. I see the third recording available on this instrument is with another performer, so maybe Mr. Soria just has a different sense of what works than I do; maybe I'd agree with a different performer's choices here more.

For so large an undertaking, though, these few carps are trivial. I'm quite wowed by Mr. Dobson's work here, and I'll look forward to other recordings on both instruments. I see that Mr. Dobson is currently working on another large, four manual instrument for a church in Dallas. I anticipate that instrument, but for now I'm quite engrossed with this pair of impressive new organs from him.

Buxtehude, Volume One

2007-11-27T02:05:00.000-06:00

Dieterich Buxtehude and the Mean-Tone Organ, Volume 1
Hans Davidsson, organ
The GOArt North German organ, Goteborg University, Goteborg, Sweden
Loft Recordings LRCD 1054

***

My first exposure to Hans Davidsson's projected complete Buxtehude cycle on this fabulous GOArt instrument (Volume 2, here) was a paradigm shift for me, one of those rare moments where something old and familiar is shown in a really new light. Having our eyes and ears thus opened to this new world, here's a further opportunity to wander around and absorb the newness of the old, and to continue our recalibration of Buxtehude's work. As with the other volume, this release mixes shorter, chorale-based works with more freestyle Praeludia and Toccatas.

(The extra notes required by quarter comma meantone are visible in this picture.)

The CD booklet is a bit more complete than that of Volume 2 (though still, rather frustratingly, devoid of a stoplist) and all these GOArt CDs are very generously allotted--this two-disc set runs to just shy of three hours total length spread over 35 tracks. I find myself more drawn to Dr. Davidsson's interpretations than I felt at first listening. My initial impression was that he was a mite stayed or lacking in energy; but given my penchant for things not being rushed, I'm coming to think he's on exactly the right interpretive track.

And again, the real star here is this magnificent organ, which the generous program lets Davidsson explore fully. The individual characters of the stops and different key signatures within quarter comma meantone tuning make for a larger and more diverse tonal world than we experience with the familiar equal temperament. Any given piece might be played in several different keys (and some exist in Buxtehude's hand in more than one), resulting, really, in several different pieces--the sonic character can be that different.

The acoustic is excellent for organ music--reverberant, but not stone-cathedral big--and the sound-capturing of the recording is first-rate. I eagerly look forward to the coming releases in the cycle, and indeed anything recorded on this instrument.

It's a GOArt World

2007-11-27T01:30:00.000-06:00

French Symphonic Masterpieces
Hans Davidsson, organ
The 1998 Verschueren GOArt organ, Goteborg, Sweden
Loft Recordings LRCD 1054

Guilmant: First Sonata (Symphony,) Op. 42
Franck: Priere, Op. 20
Widor: 2 movements from Symphony No. 6, Op. 42
Alain: Intermezzo
Duruflé: Suite, Op. 5

***

It is, apparently. My rapture with the recently-reviewed Volume 2 of Hans Davidsson's Buxtehude cycle recorded on GOArt's recent period recreation of a North German organ has led, naturally enough, to the acquisition of Volume 1 as well. I'll have two cents' about that shortly.

In the process of learning more about GOArt (the Goteborg Organ Art Center), I found that this North German organ was not the end of their surprises. Turns out that they are in the process of building a trio of period-faithful organs from distinct lineages. From these resources students learn hands-on about the mechanisms and sounds which played so large a part in the compositional schools in which we are still immersed today. I just can't overstate my fascination with this process, and with every detail of what has resulted from it.

The North German organ reviewed below is understandably their centerpiece, as the large and elaborate instrument was exhaustively researched and then designed and constructed in the school's own shops--an awesome accomplishment by every standard. But the North German organ was not the first instrument in the project. GOArt began with a similarly exhaustively-researched recreation of an instrument in the style of the French master, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. Readers of these pages will recall that the Massachusetts firm of C. B. Fisk undertook quite a similar project at Oberlin College in Ohio in 2002; I've reviewed three... different... recordings... on this Fisk instrument, and have debated how close the firm came to hitting their mark. That another firm, this time with a university research staff in tow, would undertake the same project seems like lightning striking twice (in a good way). Then to find a recording of that instrument--one with Duruflé's Op. 5 Suite pour orgue particularly--was like a small lottery win for me.

This first GOArt organ was not built in the university's shops, but was entrusted to the Dutch firm Verschueren Orgelbouw BV from Heythuysen. After acknowledging that no existing firm was doing what Cavaillé-Coll used to do, an extensive search was undertaken and Verschueren emerged at the far end of that search. The chosen firm would obviously need to be one which was enthusiastically on board with building someone else's instrument, and with an extensive and diverse advisory board plus a university research team meddling in its operations, and the resulting collaboration bore fruit in 1998. As with the Fisk organ at Oberlin, the GOArt group researched every detail of Cavaillé-Coll's methods for constructing pipes and organ mechanisms, and the GOArt people then went to some pains to duplicate even the exact voicings of the various ranks by doing close A/B comparisons of their new pipes with the existing C-C pipework.

I think the Fisk organ at Oberlin College is a really fabulous and beautiful instrument, the outcome of a wonderful and exciting process; its a magnificent organ in its own right. But I don't really think of Cavaillé-Coll when I hear it. It's clearly French in general character, but it lacks some thing, some fingerprint that's found on all C-C's. I've speculated that the extreme lack of resonance in Finney Chapel put the Fisk people at a bit of a disadvantage, as none of C-C's famous instruments are found in such dead acoustics. I just can't help thinking that the profound intimacy of the acoustic has caused the Fisk people to voice the rough edges off the organ, edges which might have been beneficial--and certainly distinctive--in a larger acoustic. At the very least, the acoustic makes it difficult to assess how close the Fisk firm got to C-C's ideas. (The supplemental disc included with that first release addresses the question on everyone's mind: but what would it sound like in Notre Dame or St. Sulpice? But the inclusion of that disc, whereby the original recording is subjected to a computer alteration to place the organ in the acoustic of Chartres Cathedral, seems an admission of defeat. The oddity of Finney Chapel's sonic setting compared to any place we're used to hearing C-C's work is inescapable).

The space into which GOArt put their Verschueren organ was only a little more resonant than Finney Chapel, but GOArt specifically stipulated a minimum resonance they would accept and then took pains to accommodate that acoustic. This included researching what Cavaillé-Coll had to say about less resonant rooms. Turns out that C-C built quite a number of organs for private residences, which would naturally not have cathedral acoustics at their disposal, and the master had some distinct ideas about how to cope with this. Thus, GOArt's room was constructed specifically to order, including details like having the hardwood floor floating on sand, and having an insulating rubber layer between the inner and outer sections of the walls. The room is 59' X 35' X 35', so not large by cathedral standards. But it seems quite a sympathetic space for organ music, with enough resonance to help the organ blend.

Whatever the contribution of individual elements, all the research has paid off big: with this GOArt instrument, the Cavaillé-Coll illusion is very convincing indeed, quite thrillingly so. Though the instrument is relatively small--only 43 stops on three manuals, compared to 58 stops on the Oberlin Fisk--the stoplist and the voicing are spot-on. I would not be able to tell on sound alone whether this was a C-C or not (something I think I'd have little trouble doing with the Oberlin organ). GOArt's fidelity to C-Cs design is so comprehensive as to include a pneumatic-assist Barker Lever (on an instrument surely not large enough to require one, but the touch will be quite different from either electric or mechanical action) and to use mechanical combination pedals instead of the now-standard electronic pushbuttons. An electronic combination system was included, but only after the designers determined it could be added on without altering the period function or console aesthetic of the standard system in any way. Fanatical indeed. But the proof is in the pudding. I honestly can't think of what seminal thing an organ student would miss out on by playing this GOArt instrument over the actual Cavaillé-Coll. (True, they'd get Paris in the bargain, but only for a lesson or two.) The organ facade is configured in a shallow U shape, with the console in the middle and facing out into the hall, looking like a downsized version of the great organ at St. Sulpice without the statuary (and with simply-ornamented casework in sympathy with the concert hall's architecture).

As with the Buxtehude releases, Professor Hans Davidsson mans the Verschueren console for this release. Like his brilliant countryman Hans Fagius, Dr. Davidson demonstrates that he can play very convincingly in several styles and from very different periods. He brings the same deliberation to these works as to his Buxtehude, but he knows how to sound the organ to excellent effect, and he is well up for the dramatic moments. Cesar Franck's long-line Priere, which sounds almost like a 10 minute continuous melody, seems especially convincing. Likewise, in the denouement of the opening movement of Duruflé's Suite he lingers deliciously at the dissonant chords as the hands and feet move contrariwise, followed by three of the most beautiful minutes in all of music to close out the movement.

This is all a fantastic undertaking. Like the aircraft simulators I must work with in my job, I love that students at Goteborg are able to immerse themselves so effectively and completely in these worlds while never leaving the campus in Sweden. The pedagogical advantages seem palpable to me, though I think it's a really cool exercise even without the overt educational mandate. But even without a love of the process that brought us the instrument, this is a great recording of organ music. The recording itself is quiet and clean, and the performances are excellent. And the organ itself? It rocks.