A hopeful holiday musical greeting from G. F. Handel -- and another from L. van Beethoven

HANDEL: Messiah: No. 2, Accompagnato, "Comfort ye"

Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned.

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness: Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

-- Isaiah 40:1-3

by Ken

Last night ( For Christmas Eve, we hark unto the openings of Berlioz's Childhood of Christ and Handel's Messiah") I took a stab at explaining how it came that, given this year's unusual three-day Christmas "arc," I had the idea of resurrecting a three-day musical post from Christmas 2011, and how it wasn't actually possible, as I'd first hoped, to simply paste the old posts into new blogfiles, but that that provided an opportunity to do various sorts of updating and expanding for the 2016 version.

One of the problems, with which I had to bore you but have to, just a little, is an infuriating technical incompatibility between our posts of bygone times and current ones, and in fact for the intended second and third parts of the sequence the problem has proved insurmountable -- tonight's continuation of last night's post had to be entirely typed from scratch, and I don't think tomorrow's planned resurrection of my composite performance of the whole of Part I of Messiah is going to be impossible for tomorrow's "third day" of Christmas ("Christmas observed").

As promised last night, when we listened to the opening tenor solos of Handel's Messiah and Berlioz's L'Enfance du Christ, including hearing both sung by the fondly remembered Swedish tenor Nicolai Gedda, we're returning to the Messiah vocal opening (following the orchestral Overture, that is). Tonight, as I laid out the agenda in 2011, "I'm going to be resurrecting my account of how I first came to hear a tenor singing it singing directly and personally to me." And in addition:

As it happens, there's another musical excerpt, by coincidence or otherwise also written for tenor, which under the right circumstances can give me this same sensation of its composer reaching out -- through the agency of this singer -- and offering hopefulness. So I thought we would start out once again by hearing the two excerpts sung by the same tenor.

From the choral finale of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony:

Happily, happily, as his suns fly
across the heavens' splendid expanse,
run, brothers, your course,
joyfully, like a hero toward victory.

OUR HARD-WORKING TENOR WELL-WISHER TONIGHT IS --

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Sunday Classics snapshots: Jon Vickers in consolatory, even happy mode

"Froh, froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegen"

Gladly, like the heavenly bodies
which he set on their courses,
through the splendor of the firmament;
thus, brothers, you should run your race,
like a hero going to conquest.

Jon Vickers, tenor; London Symphony Chorus and Orchestra, Pierre Monteux, cond. Westminster-MCA-DG, recorded June 1962

Jon Vickers, tenor; Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, Cleveland Orchestra, Lorin Maazel, cond. CBS/Sony, recorded Oct. 13-15, 1978

-- from the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony

by Ken

Last week I put together, from audio clips we'd already heard over the years, a quick tribute to the late Jon Vickers, and still feel guilty about not including at least English texts for the selections, on the shabby ground that digging them out would have involved too much time and effort. (Well, oo-hoo!) Nobody complained, which is even more discouraging. One of these days I will go back and fix that post.

I led that post off with the above excerpt from the epochal finale of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony, precisely to hear Vickers in a "froh" frame of musical mind, since his greatest musical assumptions, despite moments of triumph, were on the desolate side. Again, we have two versions, one early-ish, the other much later. I thought you might like to hear the complete performances of the finale from which the excerpts are drawn (which we have in fact heard before, so you'll find them at the end.)


NOW FOR SOMETHING PRETTY DIFFERENT

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Sunday Classics diary: I love this theme, especially when it's played like this

by Ken

I love this theme. It's majestic, maybe even monumental, irresistibly forward-moving, even swaggering, and at the same time tender and uplifting -- if I could put it into words, I guess I wouldn't need the music.

Now, the theme can be played kinda fast:



And it can be played kinda slow:



And it can be played the way we just heard it:




THIS LAST PERFORMANCE IS THE ONE
THAT GOT MY ATTENTION THIS WEEK

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Re. release of the "Senate Torture Report," what might Beethoven's Don Florestan and Donna Leonore have to say?

"We need reliable intelligence," Young Johnny McCranky said today on the Senate floor. And, he insisted, "Torture produces more misleading information than actionable intelligence."

by Ken

Earlier this evening Howie wrote about the will-they-or-won't-they-release-it situation of the "executive summary" of what I'm just going to call the Senate Torture Report. And he already had me thinking about it yesterday when he passed along the above clip of Young Johnny McCranky on the Senate floor.

As it happened, I took a half sick day this morning, and listened on the radio on to ongoing yammering about the Torture Report release issue, and while most of the commenters -- including local callers-in to WNYC -- were lining up in the expectable ranks for or against, I was made aware that Young Johnny has broken ranks loudly with his normal compadres, the national-security nutjobs for whom any matter slapped with a "national security" label becomes a hot-button issue, whether real national security is really involved or not. I don't have to name names, right? You know the mentality: To invoke "national security" is to end all discussion.

But, as we've known, Young Johnny doesn't toe the "national-security nutjob" line when it comes to torture. And we know that his thinking about the subject comes from a different source than does the "thinking" of, say, "Big Dick" Cheney, who has no reality outside his diseased imagination. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, but, having mostly written Young Johnny off as a person of any intellectual or principled responsibility, I'm refreshed to hear him standing by his principles.

And it matters. Because normally when it comes to matters slapped with that "national security" label, it's hard to find turf to his right. Not so here.

In the clip, after acknowledging that, yes, release of the Torture Report summary might lead to violence in some places, but noting that "sadly, violence needs little incentive in some quarters of the world today," and after pointing out that for the world there aren't going to be a lot of surprises in the account of the "degrading treatment" inflicted by American interrogators on terror suspects (black sites, secret prisons, waterboarding -- the standard kaboodle), and arguing that while the report might provide "an excuse" to harm Americans, people who would do so "hardly need an excuse for that," the senator gets to the heart of the mattter:

What might come as a surprise, not just to our enemies but to many Americans, is how little these practices did to aid our efforts to bring 9/11 culprits to justice, and to find and prevent terrorist attacks today and tomorrow. That could be a real surprise, since it contradicts the many assurances provided by intelligence officials, on the record and in private, that enhanced interrogation techniques were indispensable in the war against terrorism. And I suspect the objection of those same officials to the release of this report is really focused on that disclosure: torture's ineffectiveness. Because we gave up much in the expectation that torture would make us safer. Too much.

CHALK IT UP AS A COINCIDENCE . . .

. . . but this afternoon at work I had a set of proofs that really had to get read, especially after my morning's absence. So naturally I was thinking about a blogpost instead. In the hope that it might possibly help me block out outside thoughts, I decided to put on a CD. For various reasons I don't do this much these days, and so I don't have that much on hand in the office. One thing I do have is the 85-disc-or-so Toscanini Complete RCA Collection, and occasionally I'll pull out a disc at random, which is what I did today. It turned out to be a compendium of shorter Beethoven pieces that begins with a Leonore Overture No. 3 from June 1, 1945, and so this is what I found myself listening to with Young Johnny McCranky still talking about torture in my head.

Talk about being "on point" for tyranny, authoritarianism, torture, and the suppression of any awkward information on those subjects! Leonore No. 3 was Beethoven's third attempt at an overture for his only opera, which happens to deal with these very subjects, and after musically recollecting the happier-days memories of the secretly imprisoned and tortured Spanish truth-teller-to-power Don Florestan, the overture evokes the trumpet calls that in the opera will herald the arrival at the prison of the royal minister Don Fernando. Unfortunately for Florestan, his nemesis, the governor of the prison, Don Pizarro, has had just enough advance warning of the Minister's visit to take the necessary step to eliminate any risk of his exposure: planning the elimination of Florestan. In Pizarro's hastily improvised plan, this should cover his ass, and he and the minister can enjoy a lovely session of mutual congratulations.

So here I was trying to read my proofs, and we came to the first lyrical subject of the overture, and I was struck by how beautifully shaped this Toscanini performance is. Beautiful shaping, you have to understand, is something we don't usually think of in connection with Toscanini, at least the later Toscanini who is most familiar from his most-circulated recordings, which are more often thought of as impressing with their sense of drivenness. And here is old Maestro Arturo (he was 78 at the time of this recording), without sacrificing any sense of forward movement, giving beautiful shape to the music to which the tortured and starved Florestan, dying in his secret dungeon, will recall:


Julius Patzak (t), Florestan; Vienna Philharmonic, Wilhelm Furtwängler, cond. Live performance from the Salzburg Festival, Aug. 3, 1948

Plácido Domingo (t), Florestan; Staatskapelle Berlin, Daniel Barenboim, cond. Teldec, recorded 1999

Jon Vickers (t), Florestan; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. Live performance, Feb. 13, 1960

Here is the section of Leonore No. 3 in question, as played by a conductor of almost the opposite reputation from Toscanini, the ever-so-spaciously inclined Hans Kanppertsbusch (from a complete recording of Fidelio with the Bavarian State Orchestra made in December 1961):



And here's the Toscanini performance sandwiched between two performances of Leonore No. 3 we've heard before:

BEETHOVEN: Leonore Overture No. 3, Op. 72a


Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Bruno Walter, cond. Live performance, Feb. 22, 1941

NBC Symphony Orchestra, Arturo Toscanini, cond. RCA-BMG, recorded in Studio 8-H, New York City, June 1, 1945

Philharmonia Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. Capitol-EMI, recorded c1958


WHAT A MAN DOES FOR HIS PRINCIPLES,
AND WHAT'S DONE TO HIM AS A RESULT

I wrote at some length about the uncompromisingly principled Don Florestan and his equally uncompromising wife in a May 2012 post called "Beethoven's superhero couple: The Florestans have for sure done their duty," with particular reference to the monologue he sings as we first meet him in his dungeon, gaunt and skirting death, at the opening of Act II. We really don't know what Florestan's "crimes" were against the governor of this state prison, Don Pizarro, but it's obvious that Pizarro regards him as a mortal threat. He seems to understand all too well: the thing we need to keep in mind here: that Florestan doesn't compromise his principles, rergardless of the consequences. And the same is true of Leonore.

I realize that the torture dynamics here don't align exactly with those investigated in the Torture Report. Here the tyrant isn't trying to extract information from his torture victim; he's just trying to ensure his permanent silence. Still, what wouldn't the like of "Big Dick" Cheney give for the ability to similarly silence their enemies at home?

Here I'm thinking not of the high dramatics of the dungeon scene, and how the Minister's arrival by sheer luck comes just in the nick of time to prevent Pizarro from exacting his final revenge on Florestan. I'm thinking of the following scene, in which the prisoners have been released and the Minister -- a close personal friend of Florestan and Leonore -- arrives and sings in platitudes so plangent that it's hard to believe a political prisoner has just barely escaped execution.

Although the Minister has only a few more lines to sing than we hear here, the role is so important, the writing so beautiful and noble, that even in the opera house it is usually assigned to something close to a front-line baritone or bass -- and on records it has been cast with genuine front-line talent, as we also hear here. (You'll note that in the orchestral introduction Toscanini definitely lives up to his reputation for, er, getting on with it.)

BEETHOVEN: Fidelio: Act II, Scene 2, Arrival of the Minister

Outside the prison. A crowd of people and liberated prisoners are gathered before the gates.

PEOPLE and PRISONERS [variously]: Hail! Hail!
Hail to the day, hail to the hour,
long yearned for, though unimaginable,
when justice and clemency together
appear before the gates of our tomb!
Hail! Hail!
Hail to the day, etc.
Hail! Hail!
[DON PIZARRO and the Minister, DON FERNANDO, enter, escorted by soldiers.]
DON FERNANDO: Our noblest king's wish and suggestion
lead me to you, you poor souls, here,
so that I may lift the veil of wickedness
which has wrapped you all in heavy gloom.
No, no longer kneel slavishly --
harsh tyranny is far from my mind.
A brother is seeking his brothers,
and if he can help, he gladly will.
PEOPLE and PRISONERS: Hail to the day, hail to the hour!
Hail! Hail!
DON FERNANDO: A brother is seeking his brothers,
and if he can help, he gladly will.
ROCCO [rushing through the guards, with LEONORE and FLORESTAN]: Well then, help these poor people!
DON PIZARRO: What do I see? Ha!
ROCCO: Does it move you?
DON PIZARRO: Away! Away!
DON FERNANDO [to ROCCO]: Then speak!
ROCCO: Let all mercy, all mercy
unite this couple!
Don Florestan --
DON FERNANDO: The man believed dead?
That noble man who struggled for truth?
ROCCO: And suffered numberless torments.
DON FERNANDO: My friend, my friend,
the man believed dead?
In fetters, in fetters,
pale he stands before me?
LEONORE and ROCCO: Yes, Florestan!
Florestan, you see him here.
ROCCO: And Leonore!
DON FERNANDO: Leonore!
ROCCO : Let me present this jewel among women.
She came here --
DON PIZARRO: Let me say two words!
DON FERNANDO: Not a word! She came --
ROCCO: -- to my gate there,
and entered my service as a boy
and did me such good, loyal service
that I chose her for my son-in-law.
MARZELLINE [who with JAQUINO has joined the crowd]: Oh, woe is me! Woe is me! What do I hear?
ROCCO: That monster in this very hour
wished to bring about Florestan's death.
DON PIZARRO [pointing to ROCCO]: Bring it about, with him!
ROCCO : In league with us.
Only your coming called him off! Etc.
PEOPLE and PRISONERS: Let the villain be punished,
who oppressed the innocent!
Justice holds the sword
of vengence poised for judgment!
Let the villain be punished!

José van Dam (bs-b), Don Fernando; Karl Ridderbusch (bs), Rocco; Zoltán Kélémen (bs-b), Don Pizarro; Helga Dernesch (s), Leonore; Helen Donath (s), Marzelline; Chorus of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. EMI, recorded 1970

Nicola Moscona (bs), Don Fernando; Sidor Belarsky (bs), Rocco; Herbert Janssen (b), Don Pizarro; Rose Bampton (s), Leonore; Eleanor Steber (s), Marzelline; NBC Symphony Chorus and Orchestra, Arturo Toscanini, cond. RCA-BMG, broadcast performance, Dec. 17, 1944

Franz Crass (bs), Don Fernando; Gottlob Frick (bs), Rocco; Walter Berry (b), Don Pizarro; Christa Ludwig (ms), Leonore; Ingeborg Hallstein (s), Marzelline; Philharmonia Chorus and Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. EMI, recorded 1962

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Sunday Classics, special Resurrection Edition: Chopin's ballades and Beethoven's Op. 111 Sonata revisited

[Click to enlarge]

Agustin Anievas, piano. EMI, recorded in London, June 1975

Sviatoslav Richter, piano. Praga, recorded live in Prague, Feb. 21, 1960 (mono)

by Ken

Sometimes when I go back to an old "Sunday Classics" post I take heart in the realization that if there's nothing else to be said for it, there's the music. It happened again this week with a May 2012 post I happened to be looking at, "A vision for the future in Beethoven's last piano sonata," for a reason I'll explain in a moment.

After a tease of Beethoven's immensely compact and cryptic yet approachable Op. 111 Piano Sonata, we heard the second of Chopin's four miraculously dramatic ballades, much as we just did above. (In fact, as regards the performances, exactly as we just did above. The score page is new, though. And in the original post I did include this compact note about the two performances: "first a lovely performance by Agustin Anievas, then a more searching performance by Sviatoslav Richter (from the same Prague broadcast from which we recently heard the First Ballade).")


NOW LET ME EXPLAIN ABOUT THAT 2012 POST

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Sunday Classics: Today we hear the whole of Beethoven's grand, stirring "Archduke" Trio

The Atos Trio plays the beautiful third-movement Andante cantabile of Beethoven's Archduke Trio in Berlin's Joseph-Joachim-Saal, December 2011.

by Ken

As I mentioned in last night's preview, a piece dear to my heart popped into my head yesterday, and it was extremely welcome, because I think of it as, for want of a better way of putting it, a "good new" piece. I love it end to end, but I especially love that magisterial opening given to the piano. Once upon a time, way back when, I picked up a used copy of the piano part of the complete Beethoven piano trios for $5, and was shocked to discover when I hacked out the opening bars, that hacked-up as my rendering was, it gave me the tingle I'd come to expect, or hope for, when hearing the piece, and maybe then some, because now the sound coming out of the piano was directly connected to my fingers.

Ironically, the recording that gives me perhaps the best version of that frisson is the performance in the EMI Beethoven trio cycle by Daniel Barenboim, Pinchas Zukerman, and Jacqueline du Pré, which, alas, I have only on open-reel tape. That's the performance I thought I had on CD which turned out to be instead the later Ashkenazy-Perlman-Harrell EMI cycle, from which we heard the opening of the piece last night (along with the celebrated 1941 recording by the "Million Dollar Trio" of Arthur Rubinstein, Jascha Heifetz, and Emanuel Feuermann).


I HAD THE IDEA THAT THIS MIGHT BE A GOOD TIME
FOR US TO LISTEN TO BEETHOVEN'S ARCHDUKE TRIO

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Sunday Classics preview: Here's the key -- or is it?

Piano Trio: 
i. Allegro moderato -- opening

Arthur Rubinstein, piano; Jascha Heifetz, violin; Emanuel Feuermann, cello. RCA-BMG, recorded in Holllywood, Sept. 12-13, 1941

Vladimir Ashkenazy, piano; Itzhak Perlman, violin; Lynn Harrell, cello. EMI, recorded in New York, c1979

UPDATE: If you looked at this post before 10pm ET/7pm PT, you saw only the Ashkenazy-Perlman-Harrell clip, and in fact originally the whole first movement. When I went back to edit it to include just the opening, I was disheartened by how namby-pamby the performance is. (I actually thought the EMI CDs contained a different one, and then I figured how far wrong could we go with this one? I learned.) Most of my CD versions are on a hard-to-get-at shelf, so as an add-on I chose a much grander performance that happened also to be more readily at hand.

by Ken

This piece suddenly popped into my head this afternoon, and I couldn't have been happier that it did. So we're going to hear it tomorrow. Meanwhile it set me to thinking about other works in the same key, with the realization (I'm sure not for the first time, but then, who remembers?) that it's hard to find others of the same character.


SOME OTHER WORKS IN THE SAME KEY

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Sunday Classics preview: A Leon Fleisher postscript

Leon Fleisher plays a piece we've heard a lot (most recently endorsed by mezzo Susan Graham!),"Clair de lune" ("Moonlight") from Debussy's Suite bergamasque, from this July 1956 Epic Debussy-Ravel LP.

by Ken

No, no, Fleisher hasn't died -- at least not that I know. What I mean in the post title is a "postscript" to last week's post, in which we did a sort of hare-and-tortoise journey, "Adding Schubert's mighty Wanderer to our roster of musical fantasies," with the then-35-year-old Leon Fleisher as our "hare" and the ripely matured 78-year-old Arthur Rubinstein as our "tortoise."

I mentioned last week that Sony Classical has just put out a Complete Album Collection with little CD reproductions of all of Fleisher's LPs as well as CDs for Sony and its predecessor labels, Columbia Masterworks and Epic. And I mentioned that I was watching the mailbox for my copy.

It arrived Tuesday, by which time I had finished tinkering with Sunday's post. (If you haven't looked at it since last Sunday, you might want to take another peek.) In playing with the set, I was startled to realize that the 1963 record we were drawing on, a coupling of the Wanderer Fantasy with Schubert's A major Sonata, D. 664 was the last "normal" record Fleisher made at the eight-year mark of his association with Columbia and Epic. It wasn't planned that way, of course. But the loss of his use of his right hand put an end to that part of his career.

I was reminded too that Fleisher had begun his association with Columbia with an earlier Schubert LP, containing perhaps the grandest of the three immensely scaled breakthrough piano sonatas that turned out to be the composer's last, coupled with eight of the 12 tiny German dances of D. 790. (Until now the Ländler we've heard have mostly been the souped-up ones from Mahler's First and Ninth Symphonies -- see the December 2012 preview post "Do I hear a Ländler?")

SCHUBERT: Ländler (12), D. 790:
No. 1 in D [1:11]
No. 3 in D [0:34]
No. 4 in D [0:33]
No. 5 in B minor [1:07]
No. 6 in G-sharp minor [0:42]
No. 7 in A-flat [0:59]
No. 8 in A-flat minor [1:15]
No. 11 in A-flat [0:53]

Leon Fleisher, piano. Columbia-Sony, recorded July 27-39, 1954, and May 4, 1955


IN THIS WEEK'S SUNDAY CLASSICS POST

We're going to  hear some fairly random excerpts from the Fleisher box, including (I'm thinking) the whole of the Suite bergamasque.

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For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

Preview: It's Fantasy Week at Sunday Classics!

Homero Francesch is the piano soloist in this performance of Beethoven's Choral Fantasy with Leonard Bernstein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic and Vienna Jeunesse Choir.

by Ken

We have a great musical fantasy coming up Sunday -- Max Bruch's Scottish Fantasy for violin and orchestra, so I thought tonight we would review the two wonderful fantasies we've already heard.


THERE WAS, FOR ONE, LISZT'S HUNGARIAN FANTASIA

We first heard it in the August 2010 post "The piano-and-orchestra Liszt -- the orator meets the poet."

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Sunday Classics: Our Beethoven Seventh performances are connected the most obvious way -- they're by the same conductor

Otto Klemperer

BEETHOVEN: The Creatures of Prometheus (ballet), Op. 43: Overture

Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. EMI, recorded Nov. 25, 1957
New Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. EMI, recorded June 17-18, 1969

by Ken

In Friday night's preview we heard two extremely lovely performances of the haunting and powerful slow movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, and I invited readers to identify the connection between them.

As our friend me noted in a comment, performance A is older and quicker than performance B. I'm not sure that the Internet-transmitted mp3 sound does full justice to B, and the sound really does matter, because the wealth of sonic color and texture our conductor is coaxing from his players becomes part of the expressive structure of the performance. It is, as it happens, a performance that's some 45 years old but that I don't think I've ever heard, for reasons I'll explain in a moment.

Let's listen again to performances A and B, with a performance X thrown in between them.

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Sunday Classics preview: What's the connection between these performances of the uplifting Allegretto from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony?

by Ken

Nothing fancy tonight. It's even music we've heard before: the always-uplifting Allegretto of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. We're just going to listen to two recordings, which actually have a connection, which we'll talk about in this week's Sunday Classics post. Clearly one of the performances is broader than the other, but I'm not going to say any more for now except that one of these Beethoven Seventh recordings achieved a certain infamy and a place in certain commentators' recorded Hall of Shame.

BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 7 in A, Op. 92:
ii. Allegretto
[A]

[B]

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Sunday Classics: What comes after Mozart's and Beethoven's minor-key symphonic opening movements?

What comes after the monumental, mysterious opening movement of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony, which we heard last week? At the link, Christian Thielemann conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in what seems to me a grindingly prosaic rendering of the thunderingly dramatic scherzo.

by Ken

I realize I should have been saying more about this amazing music we've been hearing, dipping into the two symphonies apiece for which Mozart and Beethoven composed opening movements in the minor mode. But really, when it comes to an incandescent movement like the opening one of Mozart's great later G minor symphony, No. 40, could I really have said anything more helpful than, say, "Wouldja listen to that?" And ditto when it comes to the opening movements of Beethoven's Fifth and Ninth Symphonies. I mean, we're talking here about two of the monuments of human civilization, and I thought talking should take distant second place to listening.

What we began pursuing in this week's preview is the question I raised last week: Where do you go from there?

My point was, if we accept that writing a minor-mode symphonic first movement is an uncommon and nervy thing to do, and is likely to happen only if a composer has been seized by some gripping musical material that requires it, where does he want to take his audience next?

Consider, for example, the most modest of the four Mozart and Beethoven symphonies we began last week: Mozart's earlier G minor symphony, No. 25. Let's add the second movement to the performances we heard last week of the first.

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Sunday Classics preview: Moving on with those Mozart and Beethoven minor-key symphonic opening movements

Tonight we hear both Leonard Bernstein's 1961 and 1977 recordings of the second movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

by Ken

Last week we heard all of the minor-key symphony opening movements that Mozart and Beethoven wrote -- two apiece. I suggested that one obvious question is: Where do you go from there?

We're going to explore that a little on Sunday. (Last week I said I thought it would be in two weeks -- wrong!) And we're going to start by hearing what comes next in two of those symphonies: emphatically, spaciously major-key slow movements.

MOZART: Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550:
ii. Andante

Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, William Steinberg, cond. Capitol-EMI, recorded 1958

Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded 1955

BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67:
ii. Andante con moto

New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded Sept. 25, 1961

Vienna Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG, recorded live, September 1977

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Sunday Classics: Perusing Van Cliburn's legacy (and yes, we'll even get to "the Tchaikovsky")

RACHMANINOFF: Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30:
i. Allegro ma non tanto

Van Cliburn, piano; Symphony of the Air, Kiril Kondrashin, cond. RCA-Sony, recorded live in Carnegie Hall, May 19, 1958

by Ken

The Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto, as I've said, I love beyond qualification -- and we heard Van Cliburn play the first movement, with Fritz Reiner conducting, in the April 2010 post "In perfect balance -- Rachmaninoff's 2nd Piano Concerto, where everything comes together just right." As to the more ambitiously scaled Rachmaninoff Third Concerto, one of the supreme virtuoso challenges, well, I've just never come under its spell, though rehearing the first movement played live by the Cliburn-Kondrashin team (just a couple of days after the pianist's triumphant return from Moscow as winner of the first International Tchaikovsky Competition), I'm as close to being persuaded as I've ever been.

As I mentioned in Friday night's preview of this week's Cliburn remembrance, I got the copy of the Complete Van Cliburn Album Collection I mentioned having ordered in the brief post noting the pianist's passing.


YOU'D HAVE THOUGHT VAN HAD IT ALL, WHAT WITH --

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Sunday Classics: This "Russian theme" used by Beethoven should be familiar

The Alban Berg Quartet (Günther Pichler and Gerhard Schulz, violins; Thomas Kakuska, viola; Valentin Erben, cello) plays one of Beethoven's most beautiful creations, the Molto adagio from Op. 59, No. 2, in June 1989.

SUNDAY AFTERNOON NOTE: At the moment the audio clips haven't always been loading right. If that's the case, I can only ask you to try again later. Sorry! (Sigh.)
UPDATE: Archive.org seems to have had some sort of system crash -- ohboy!
SUNDAY EVENING UPDATE: All seems to be OK now!

by Ken

Here's Beethoven's version of what he noted as a "Thème russe":


The theme should sound familiar. Just last week we heard this version:



[IF THE ARCHIVE.ORG SERVER IS STILL DOWN,
TO ACTUALLY HEAR THE BEETHOVEN VERSION --

It's at 2:17 of this video clip.



And the Mussorgsky version is at 1:49 of the video clip atop last week's post.]


OR TO HEAR THEM IN LESS EXCERPTED FORM . . .

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Van Cliburn (1934-2013)

SCHUMANN (arr. Liszt): "Widmung" ("Dedication")

Van Cliburn plays the Liszt arrangement of Schumann's exhilarating song "Widmung" ("Dedication"), c1970.

by Ken

I want to put off doing a proper memorial to pianist Van Cliburn until I get the copy of RCA's newly released Van Cliburn: The Complete Album Collection which I ordered as soon as I saw that it exists, not realizing at the time that he had in fact just died.

The easy way to go would have been with the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto, the piece that became so identified with him when he rocketed to fame in 1958 (at age 23) with his grand-prize win at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. Instead I thought we'd lead with a solo piece we heard played by Arthur Rubinstein in the November 2011 Sunday Classics post "And then came 'Widmung' " -- and then the following week played by the great American Romantic Earl Wild.

I think we hear here the basic Cliburn virtues: the beautiful, clean, effortlessly full sound and the wholesome extrovert temperament.

Compare:

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Sunday Classics chronicles: Remembering Eugen Jochum (3) -- Overtures Plus, part 1

Act III of Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz

Huntsmen's Chorus
What pleasure on earth can compare with the hunter's?
Whose cup of life sparkles so richly?
To lie in the verdure while the horns sound,
To follow the stag through thicket and pond,
Is joy for a prince, is a real man's desire,
Is strengthens your limbs and spices your food.
When woods and rocks resound all about us,
A full goblet sings a freer and happier song!
Yo ho! Tralala!

Diana is present to brighten the night;
Her darkness cools us like any refreshment in the day.
To fell the bloody wolf, and the boar
who greedily roots through the green crops,
Is joy for a prince, is real man's desire,
It strengthens your limbs and spices your food.
When woods and rocks resound all about us,
A full goblet sings a freer and happier song!
Yo, ho! Tralala!

Bavarian Radio Chorus and Symphony Orchestra, Eugen Jochum, cond. DG, recorded December 1959

by Ken

Do I need an excuse for bringing back the "Huntsmen's Chorus" from Act III of Der Freischütz? I love it. It's another of this musical bits I can listen to over and over and over. (This isn't theoretical. I've done it a bunch of times, usually along with the preceding Entr'acte, which works the same material in purely orchestral form.)

Looking back, I rather admire the audacity with which I first slipped these goodies into Part 5 of the "Remembering Margaret Price" series, on the pretext that we were hearing Dame Margaret sing Agathe's grand Act II aria "Leise, leise" as well as the following trio and Agathe's Act III cavatina. We also heard the performance of the Freischütz Overture we're about to rehear, along with a bunch of other performances of it. It is, of course, a glorious piece, from its brooding and fraught beginnings to its giddily triumphant conclusion, anticipating the joyful concluding section of Agathe's "Leise, leise."

WEBER: Der Freischütz:
Overture

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Eugen Jochum, cond. DG, recorded December 1959

For those just coming in at the point, we're continuing a mostly archival (from the Sunday Classics archives, that is) remembrance of that wonderful conductor Eugen Jochum (1902-1987). Last week we focused on his concert work, specifically on two very different composers for whom he had a remarkable affinity, Haydn and Bruckner. This week we're moving on to his operatic work.

THE FREISCHÜTZ OVERTURE STRADDLES THE DIVIDE

It's probably heard more often in the concert hall than in the opera house. I don't know that Jochum would have conducted it any differently as a concert piece, but I do think it makes a difference atmosphere-wise that he was thinking of it here in its context as a curtain-raiser for the opera. The performance seems to me to work fine either way.

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Sunday Classics: In which Beethoven's violin sonatas turn out to be OK after all

David Oistrakh and Sviatoslav Richter play Beethoven's First Violin Sonata, in 1970.

by Ken

As I mentioned in Friday night's preview, I came away from a recent three-recital series presenting the complete Beethoven violin sonatas, well, impressed but unenchanted. The violinist and pianist seemed earnest and competent, and from their performances as well as their spoken comments there didn't seem any doubt about their appreciation for the music. And yet I came away thinking my longtime fondness for this music had maybe been outgrown.

Now the Beethoven violin sonatas aren't necessarily the most diverse portion of the composer's output. For one thing, they were written mostly in a fairly compact time frame. The first eight date from the period 1797-1802 -- the three sonatas of Op. 12 in 1797-98, the single sonatas of Opp. 23 and 24 in 1800-01, and the three sonatas of Op. 30 in 1802 (an important year for Beethoven; as we know from the famous Heiligenstadt Testament, he was in such despair that he came close to committing suicide). The great sonata we know as the Kreutzer, written on a much grander scale, followed soon after, leaving only by the fascinating and lovely G major Sonata, Op. 96, to come -- from 1812, making it the closest thing there is to a "late" Bethoven violin sonata.

But contrast came almost automatically for Beethoven. As we've discussed in such cases as the "fraternal twin" Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, expressing himself in one mode of musical discourse seemed to build up a need to express himself in a very different one.

I guess I was left thinking that the generally lighter emotional weight of the violin sonatas led to a lesser degree of individuality. Until something curious happened.

SO I PUT ON THIS CD . . .

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Sunday Classics preview: This 40-second piano-and-violin excerpt is one of my favorite musical moments

by Ken

This roughly 40-second piano-and-violin excerpt is for me a cherished musical moment, so we've heard it four times -- in performances that are pretty different but all pretty fine, I think. (We're actually going to hear another performance I'm not so crazy about.)

I thought I'd hold off a moment identifying, not just the performers, but the music. I'd like to think that listeners who don't recognize the music may be just a little surprised to learn who wrote it.

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Sunday Classics: Among our team of operatic avengers, which does Saint-Saëns's Dalila resemble most?

Shirley Verrett sings Dalila's Act II aria "Amour! Viens aider ma faiblesse" with Julius Rudel conducting in San Francisco, 1981. If the staging at the opening makes you wonder whether the stage director ever listened to the music (forget reading the libretto), we're on the same page.

Samson, seeking my presence again,
this evening is to come to this place.
Here is the hour of vengeance,
which must satisfy our gods.

Love! come aid my weakness!
Pour the poison in his breast!
Make it happen that, conquered by my artfulness,
Samson is in fetters tomorrow!
In vain would he wish to be able
to chase me out of his soul, to banish me.
Could he extinguish the flame
that memory feeds?
He is mine! my slave!
My brothers fear his wrath;
I, along among all, I defy him
and hold him at my knees!

Love! come aid my weakness!
Pour the poison in his breast!
Make it happen that, conquered by my artfulness,
Samson is in fetters tomorrow!
Against strength is useless,
and he, the strong among the strong,
he, who broke his people's chains,
will succumb to my efforts.

by Ken

Okay, here's where we are. Last week, in both the preview ("In which we hear a lady weighted by a heap of hurt") and the main post ("Meet Saint-Saëns's Dalila"), we heard the seductive side of Dalila -- and also the side, whatever you want to call it (I called it deep hurt) displayed in the great solo she sings when she's finally alone at the start of Act II. Then in Friday night's preview we heard her in "vengeance" mode, swearing along with the High Priest of Dagon, to bring Samson down -- and I also introduced several other operatic vengeance-seekers: Mozart's Queen of the Night, Beethoven's prison governor Don Pizarro, and the heroine of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.

I certainly didn't mean to suggest any equivalence among our team of avengers. I wanted to lay the groundwork, because the text of Samson et Dalila doesn't give us much factual background to work with, for the best case I can make that Dalila's closest kin here is Isolde.

First we're going to hear from an actual monster, Don Pizarro in Fidelio, who has been forced into the decision to put an end to the suffering he has been inflicting on his old nemesis, Don Florestan, in a secret dungeon (where, you'll recall, we heard him languishing last month. Then, in the click-through, we'll hear from the Queen of the Night and Isolde, and finally we'll come back to Dalila.

(Note that I've juggled the lineup of recordings somewhat from the samples we heard in Friday night's preview. I wrote a bunch of long-winded explanations and exegeses, and then threw them out. We can talk about some of those issues some other time. Maybe. And note too that inclusion of a recording here doesn't necessarily constitute endorsement. There are some I'm not crazy about but have included for particular reasons.)

BEETHOVEN: Fidelio, Op. 72: Act I, Don Pizarro, "Ha! Welch ein Augenblick" ("Ha! What a moment!")

Ha! What a moment!
My vengeance I will cool;
your fate is calling you!
In its heart dwell,
oh live, good luck!
Already I was nearly in the dust,
by the loud scorn robbed,
there to be stretched.
Now it is up to me,
to commit the murder myself.
In his last hour,
the steel in his wound,
to cry in his ear:
Triumph! Victory is mine!

-- translation by Katharina Fink

Zoltán Kélémen (b), Don Pizarro; Chorus of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. EMI, recorded 1970

Ekkehard Wlaschiha (b), Don Pizarro; Dresden State Opera Chorus, Staatskapelle Dresden, Bernard Haitink, cond. Philips, recorded November 1989

Walter Berry (bs-b), Don Pizarro; Vienna State Opera Chorus and Orchestra, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Live performance, June 9 or 14, 1970

Hans Hotter (b), Chorus and Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Otto Klemperer, cond. Testament, recorded live, Feb. 24, 1961


TO HEAR FROM THE REST OF OUR
TEAM OF AVENGERS, CLICK HERE

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