"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis
Monday, December 26, 2016
For Christmas Day (observed), by popular demand the gala Sunday Classics " 'Nutcracker' (the Whole Deal)" returns!
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The March from the Opening Tableau of The Nutcracker (in the Nutcracker Suite, the first of the "Characteristic Dances" that follow the "Miniature Overture") is performed by the Maryinsky Theater Ballet, with the orchestra conducted by Valery Gergiev.
by Ken
Herewith a change of plan since last night's "Hopeful holiday musical greeting from G. F. Handel -- and another from L. van Beethoven" (necessitated, as already foreseen, by the arduousness of reformatting-for-reuse, as originally intended, the 2011 post containing the whole of Part I of Messiah): Instead we have a (heavily updated) encore presentation of "Nutcracker (the Whole Deal)," not seen/heard since all the way back in 2014. By way of background, I explained in the preview to the 2013 revival of the Nutcracker extravaganza:
As far back as the mind recalls, Sunday Classics has celebrated the holiday musically at least in part with music from Tchaikovsky's ballets, and two years ago I went whole hog and offered a complete Nutcracker, basically double-covered throughout, and assembled from, well, a whole bunch of recordings. I brought it back last year, and now darned if it isn't here again.
In those previous renderings we had the luxury of a preview post, in which I eased into the main event by resorting to the little Nutcracker Suite that Tchaikovsky himself assembled, little imagining that it would become one of his most-performed works. And this still seems to me an excellent way to, er, get our musical toes wet. So we're going to hear once again two really splendid -- and interestingly different -- performances of the suite, which happen also to be, in their original formats, audio spectaculars, though again of quite different sorts. More about this after we've heard a bit of them. And what better bit to start with than the very first one, the "Miniature Overture" that sets the piece in motion?
TCHAIKOVSKY: Nutcracker Suite, Op. 71a:
i. Miniature Overture
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, William Steinberg, cond. Command, recorded c1963
Montreal Symphony Orchestra, Charles Dutoit, cond. Decca, recorded c1985
Later we'll hear how we get from there to Point B:
However, Point B leads directly into Point C:
London Symphony Orchestra, Charles Mackerras, cond. Philips-Mercury, recorded July 1961
by Ken
Last week I reported my discovery of a hidden treasure trove (free!) of overtures, F. Reeder's Internet Archive compendium of "Overtures - Recorded 1926-1847)" -- 33 mp3 transfers of 29 overtures conducted by 18 conductors, most of them legendary (e.g., Barbirolli, Beecham, Furtwängler, Mengelberg, Mitropoulos, Reiner, Rodzinski, Toscanini, Walter, Weingartner). That helped nudge me into an overtury mood. I recalled that a happy heap of my listening over the years has been to recorded collections of overtures and related short orchestral pieces.
As I mentioned, this mood inspired me to finally order CD issues of material that had once been part of my "go to" listening material. As a result, we're not going to do much with the Reeder treasure trove this week, but we'll come back to it. Also, I should mention that in a February 2011 post I already flashed back to one of those treasured overture discs, the Capitol Paperback Classics reissue of Erich Leinsdorf's wonderful c1958 catchily titled Opera Overtures LP with the Philharmonia, augmented on CD with some fine overture performances by Felix Slatkin and Miklós Rózsa.
Another of those LPs sprang back to life with the arrival of those ordered CDs: a Mercury Living Presence CD reincarnation of sorts of Charles Mackerras's Philips LP Kaleidoscope. What we heard in last night's preview was the music that more than anything made me fall in love with the original Kaleidoscope. The CD isn't the original Kaleidoscope, exactly. On it material from two LPs is smooshed together (from the Kaleidoscope LP everything is here except two additional Brahms Hungarian Dances, a minimal loss), all recorded at the same time by the legendary Mercury "Living Presence" team of Wilma Cozart Fine, recording director; Harold Lawrence, musical supervisor; and C. Robert Fine, chief engineer and technical supervisor. The domestic Philips LP was in effect a "Living Presence" LP, which explains why it sounded so good. Unfortunately as with the general run of domestic Philips pressings, it could be, well, problematic -- my copy came badly warped.
But that didn't stop me from listening to it a few zillion times, especially the piece we began hearing last night. What we heard was the hushed, haunting opening -- "Point A" in the A-to-B-to-C sequence above. Now here's the whole thing, starting with the Mackerras recording. Then we have that wise old German hand Robert Heger (from a complete Merry Wives recording) and vintage Herbert von Karajan, plus a dip into the F. Reeder overture grab bag, turning up a conductor now hardly known, Nikolai Sokoloff (1886-1965), who does a pretty nice job while squeezing the thing onto one 78 side.
NICOLAI: The Merry Wives of Windsor: Overture
London Symphony Orchestra, Charles Mackerras, cond. Philips-Mercury, recorded July 1961
Bavarian State Orchestra, Robert Heger, cond. EMI, recorded 1964
Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. EMI, recorded c1959
[trimmed (and rushed) to fit on one 78 side] Cleveland Orchestra, Nikolai Sokoloff, cond. Brunswick, recorded May 1927 (digital transfer by F. Reeder)
Ghost of Sunday Classics preview: Attention, please!
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Can you imagine a more ravishing musical attention-getter?
London Symphony Orchestra, Charles Mackerras, cond. Philips-Mercury, recorded July 1961
by Ken
What we hear above is really and truly a preview; we're not going to hear any more of this piece until tomorrow's Ghost of Sunday Classics post. Many of you will recognize it (we've actually heard it before), but for now I just want to focus on this ravishing opening.
This is a talent, I think, the ability to grab a listener's attention musically. Not in a mechanical, conk-over-the-head way, which I suppose can be done by formula, but in a genuinely imagination-engaging way. The talent can certainly be cultivated, shaped, refined, but I think either you've got stuff in you head that can do the trick or you don't. We've listened, for example, to the way Puccini opened nearly all of his mature operas -- that, I think, is simply astounding, and a measure of unique genius.
One reason I'm so bowled over by the way our composer above seizes hold of our imaginations is precisely because there isn't any conking over the head. Just listen to what he does with that out-of-nothing hush, then gradually gathers momentum. Gorgeous!
This makes me think of the musical solutions Puccini's great predecessor Verdi found for the first of his two supreme masterpieces, Otello. We've heard all of these before (if anyone would like links, please just let me know in the comments; it's so tedious gathering them when there's no earthly purpose), but let's listen first to the similarly quiet orchestral introductions to Acts II, III, and IV.
Sunday Classics preview: Puccini makes a scene, (1) "Gianni Schicchi"
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In this 2007 Royal Academy Opera (London) production, the Donati relatives read poor defunct Buoso's just-found and much-dreaded new will.
by Ken
In January 2009 we spent some time with Gianni Schicchi, and I made the point that its best-known aria, one of all of opera's best-known, Lauretta's "O mio babbino caro," is all but universally known in a form that makes a travesty of it. I tried to explain it back then; this week I'm going to try to make it possible for you to hear what I mean.
Let's start by refreshing our memory of how this comic one-act treasure, the crowing glory of Puccini's trilogy of one-acts, Il Trittico, opens. We're in Florence in the year 1299. In the home of the just-deceased Buoso Donati, his assembled relatives, in addition to mourning their dearly departed, make one another aware of a rumor that he made a new will before he died, leaving his prized possessions to the monks.
PUCCINI: Gianni Schicchi: opening
soloists; Orchestra of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Lamberto Gardelli, cond. Decca, recorded July 1962
Now let's listen to some famous sopranos sing the much-loved aria. Note how differently these performances deal with the problem ripping the aria out of the opera, where it's made to happen by an outburst from the wily Gianni Schicchi, who has been summoned to help with the will problem (which turns out to be as dire as the rumor reported) by the Donati nephew Rinuccio, a dashing young fellow who happens to be madly in love with Schicchi's daughter Lauretta.
After being treated by Rinuccio's fearsomely snobbish aunt Zita like something gross that's stuck to her shoe, Schicchi roared that to help those people he would do: "Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!," and from those thrice-thundered "Niente"s, the orchestra has undergone a harmonic meltdown in the span of a single bar to set the stage for Lauretta's life-or-death plea to her dear little daddy.
So what do you do when you yank the aria, which has no other introduction, out of context? Well, our first performance, from an LP of Puccini arias originally released in 1970, is that you don't do anything. You just have the singer start singing.
PUCCINI: Gianni Schicchi: "O mio babbino caro"
O my dear little daddy, I like him. He's lovely, lovely. I want to go to the Porta Rossa to buy a wedding ring! Yes, yes, I want to go there! And if I were to love him in vain, I would go to the Ponte Vecchio, but to throw myself in the Arno! I'm pining and I'm tormented! O God, I'd like to die! Daddy, have pity, have pity! Daddy, have pity, have pity!
Montserrat Caballé, soprano; London Symphony Orchestra, Charles Mackerras, cond. EMI, recorded c1969
Anna Netrebko and Claudio Abbado adopt a common solution, although in a decidedly peculiar fashion. They retain the orchestral accompaniment to Schicchi's thrice-uttered "Niente"s, but Abbado has the orchestra sound this in such muted fashion as to make it incomprehensible to the point of being perhaps counterproductive.
Anna Netrebko, soprano; Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Claudio Abbado, cond. DG, recorded Feb.-March 2004
Next we have a version that seems to say, if we can't introduce the aria honestly anyway, why not make the lie we tell a whopper? A sloppy-sentimental opening has been grafted on, so that not only is any trace of what actually sets poor Lauretta into song is cunningly removed, it's made to sound as if she's just sorta sad. I'd like to think that the genius who came up with this brilliant idea suffered a suitably untimely and excruciating demise.
However, we do have to give Renée Fleming credit for trying to imagine herself, in her singing, as a lovesick young woman. (By the way, in case you were wondering, we know exactly how old Lauretta is: 21. Her adored Rinuccio 24, and her dear daddy 50. We know because Puccini and librettist Giovacchino Forzano helpfully provided ages for all of the characters, except for Buoso's country-bum brother-in-law Betto, who's described in the cast list as "poor and badly dressed, age indefinable.")
Renée Fleming, soprano; London Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Charles Mackerras, cond. Decca, recorded July 1999
[Note: This may be as close as we get to a farewell tribute to Sir Charles Mackerras, who died of cancer on July 14 at 84, and despite his illness was scheduled to conduct two Proms concerts later this month and Mozart's Idomeneo next month at the Edinburgh Festival. He was for me an extremely problematic musician, and perhaps we'll talk about that one of these days. For the record, in my highly idiosyncratic and utterly un-British style, I identify him in 1969 as just plain "Charles" and in 1999 as "Sir Charles," because he wasn't knighted till 1979. There's a Telarc recording of Gilbert and Sullivan's Yeomen of the Guard and Trial by Jury wherein the album booklet identifies him, in full caps but minus the first few letters of his given name, as "LES MACKERRAS." To me his career makes much better sense if we think of him as "Les." The two "O mio babbino caro" accompaniments, for example, done 30 years apart, while certainly professionally competent, are so unmemorable -- apart from that abominable fake introduction in the Fleming one -- that you barely notice them even when they're happening. However, don't they seem a lot more creditable from a guy named Les?]
