DownWithTyranny!

Sunday, January 29, 2012

Sunday Classics: With the full symphony orchestra you can create a heckuva storm (aka: Musical storms, part 2)

There are funny storms too! Alexander Prior conducts the deliciously raging thunderstorm in Act II of Rossini's Barber of Seville at the Chuvash National Opera in the Volga River port of Cheboksary, capital of Russia's Chuvash Republic, November 2009. We've got some better performances coming up in the click-through.

As music lovers know, the hint of a distant storm from a few timpani rolls can be as evocative as the crepuscular waves portrayed by Constable. The ability of music both directly to mimic the sounds of the weather and indirectly to imply its subtler moods perhaps gives this medium more scope for dramatic expression than the visual arts and literature, which unavoidably are limited to more literal interpretations.
-- Karen L. Aplin and Paul D. Williams,
in "Meteorological phenomena in Western classical
orchestral music," in the November issue of Weather

by Ken

Just for the record, the authors of the above-cited monograph hail from the Dept. of Physics, University of Oxford (Aplin), and the Dept. of Meteorology, University of Reading (Williams). If that gives you a gnawing bad feeling, trust it. When I discovered the piece, I thought at first it was a happy coincidence that such a piece had been published just as I was setting out to write about musical storms. Then I started reading the piece. And I was reminded why I rigorously avoided taking any academic classes that impinged on my love of music. If you were thinking there was bound to be some fun in such a piece, so was I. We were all wrong.

Anyway, we began listening to our storms imagined in music a couple of weeks ago, leading off with probably the most celebrated from the concert repertory, the sequence from Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony that includes his famous thunderstorm, and surely the most spectacular storm in the operatic repertory, the cataclysm that opens Verdi's Otello -- and nearly rings down the curtain on the opera when Otello's ship is nearly dragged under as it approaches the Cypriot shore. For good measure we threw in a less threatening operatic storm, the beautiful "Royal Hunt and Storm" sequence from Berlioz's epic opera The Trojans.

In Friday's preview we took a step back in time to hear what Vivaldi could do stormwise with just the modest baroque orchestras -- incorporating storm movements in three of the Four Seasons. Today we track what some composers have done with the increasingly resource-rich resources of the modern symphony orchestra.

One perhaps obvious observation is still worth observing: that there's not much point in doing a musical storm if you don't also provide a sort of musical "baseline" -- life as it was being carried on before the storm and as it continues afterward. Beethoven, for example, gave us his countryside peasants dancing merrily before the interruption of the weather event, and then the the merry-making that follows it. The storm itself is brief, but illustrates thrillingly the cleansing, purifying, and exhilarating effect a storm can have. Just to refresh our memory, why don't we listen again to the Klemperer recording with the slow "Peasants' Dance" that producer Walter Legge very likely never did get used to.

BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 6 in F, Op. 68 (Pastoral):
iii. Merry gathering of the peasants: Allegro
iv. Thunderstorm: Allegro
v. Shepherd's song; Happy and grateful feelings after the storm: Allegretto

Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. EMI, recorded October 1957

I thought of including the "Scene in the fields" from Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, which we listened to in June 2010), itself a clear hommage to Beethoven's thunderstorm. But the distant thunder near the end seems kind of incidental for our purposes. In that 2010 post you can hear a quite lovely performance of the movement by Paul Paray and the Detroit Symphony.

Okay, you talked me into it; here's the Paray "Scene in the fields" again. Just as a reminder: The composer's program for the movement concludes: "The sun retires . . . distant noise of thunder . . . solitude . . . silence . . ."

BERLIOZ: Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14:
iii. Scène aux champs (Scene in the fields)

Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Paul Paray, cond. Mercury, recorded Nov. 28, 1959

LET'S MOVE ON TO A REAL STORM, THE CLIMAX
OF FERDE GROFÉ'S GRAND CANYON SUITE

Again, we've heard the Grand Canyon Suite in its entirely, in a July 2010 Fourth of July post. At this point in the piece we've witnessed an awesome musical "Sunrise" and the spooky "Painted Desert," ridden our burros "On the Trail," and watched the "Sunset." You never know when you may be caught in a cloudburst.

GROFÉ: Grand Canyon Suite:
v. Cloudburst

Eastman-Rochester Orchestra, Howard Hanson, cond. Mercury, recorded May 1958

Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Lorin Maazel, cond. CBS/Sony, recorded Sept. 30, 1991

RECORDING NOTE: I know there's a resistance among many modern listeners to "old" recordings like these. It still seems to me that the recording art has gone mostly backward, not forward, since, say, the late '60s. If anyone has heard an orchestral recording made in the last 20 years remotely comparable in sonic beauty or believability to the 1958 and 1959 Mercury recordings we've just heard, I'd sure like to know what it is.

COMING UP: STORMS BY RICHARD STRAUSS,
GRIEG, BRITTEN, AND ROSSINI -- CLICK HERE

(And, oh yes, we've also got a storm-pretender from the Waltz King, Johann Strauss II.)

SUNDAY CLASSICS' MUSICAL STORMS

Preview: Tonight's musical selections should give you a good idea of Sunday's subject (January 13)
The thunderstorm movement from Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony and Otello's "Esultate" from Verdi's Otello
Stormy weather, part 1 (January 15)
Verdi's Otello, Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, and Berlioz's Les Troyens, plus Lena Horne singing "Stormy Weather"
Preview: Given the resources at his disposal, Vivaldi's musical storms may be the most remarkable of all (January 27)
The three storm movements from Vivaldi's Four Seasons
With the full symphony orchestra you can create a heckuva storm (aka: Musical storms, part 2) (January 29)
Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony (again), Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, Grofé's Grand Canyon Suite, Johann Strauss II's Amid Thunder and Lightning polka, Richard Strauss's Alpine Symphony, Grieg's Peer Gynt incidental music, Britten's Peter Grimes, and Rossini's Barber of Seville
Preview: En route to more of our musical storms, we encounter perhaps the most eerily wonderful music I know (February 3)
The Preludes to Acts I and II of Wagner's Siegfried
Storms that set three great operatic scenes in motion (aka: Musical storms, part 3) (February 5)
The openings of Wagner's Die Walküre Act I and Siegfried Act III and of Act III of Puccini's La Bohème
Preview: En route to our final operatic storms, we hear two famous tenor tunes sung by a very famous tenor (February 24)
"La donna è mobile," the Quartet, and the Storm Scene from Act III of Rigoletto
Musical storms, part 4: We come to our raging storms from Janáček's Kátya Kabanová and Verdi's Rigoletto (February 26)
The storms from Act III of both operas, with a close-up look at how Verdi created the Rigoletto one -- plus the whole of Act III

Labels: Beethoven, Britten, Grieg, Johann Strauss II, Richard Strauss, Rossini, Sunday Classics

Saturday, January 29, 2011

[1/29/12] With the full symphony orchestra you can create a heckuva storm (continued)

BEFORE WE CONTINUE, LET'S DISPOSE OF ONE
FAMOUS MUSICAL STORM THAT REALLY ISN'T

J. STRAUSS II: Unter Donner und Blitzen (Amid Thunder and Lightning), Op. 324

This breathless little polka is understandably one of the Waltz King's best-loved works, but despite all that supposed thunder, the thing has never sounded very thundery or lightningy to me. Carlos Kleiber (sort of) conducts the Bavarian State Orchestra in Tokyo, May 1986.

WE HEARD VIVALDI CONJURE STORMS WITH A MERE
BAROQUE ENSEMBLE. HERE'S . . . RICHARD STRAUSS

If there's a wizard among orchestral wizards, surely it's Richard Strauss. I imagine his basic position to have been: If it can be done with an orchestra, I can do it. Sometimes he seems to have taken on just this sort of thing as a personal challenge. A "day in the life" at home? Can do -- the Symphonia domestica. An arduous mountain ascent and descent? Sure thing -- An Alpine Symphony.

Because the Alpine Symphony in particular is so expertly written, it's grand fun for the performers to perform, perhaps more fun (it has sometimes seemed to me) than for listeners. Still, when the performers are skilled enough and engaged enough, the results can be surprisingly persuasive. Curiously, Georg Solti and Herbert von Karajan recorded the piece about a year apart, and I think the results --very different, I think you'll note -- occupy special places in these conductors' mammoth discographies. I had no idea when I grudgingly bought the Karajan that I would listen to it as often as I have.

In our Alpine adventure there is, not surprisingly, a fair amount of weather detail. Here, for example, is a wisp of a fragment that occurs late in the piece, after the climber has reached the summit. I should warn that since Strauss's symphonic "program" is continuous, fragments ripped out of context really sound it.

R. STRAUSS: An Alpine Symphony, Op. 64: Mists rise; The sun gradually dims

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Sir Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded 1979

Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. DG, recorded December 1980

A coupe of minutes later we're set up for one of the great musical storms. We can trust that Strauss was familiar with all those earlier efforts, and was surely confident that he could have his own say.

R. STRAUSS: An Alpine Symphony, Op. 64: Calm before the storm; Thunderstorm, Descent; Sunset

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Sir Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded 1979

Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. DG, recorded December 1980

Now we're going to hear the complete sequence, including the little in-between "Elegy" we haven't heard yet. Again, bear in mind that the Alpine Symphony is musically continuous. While the concertgoer would presumably be provided with a list of the section identifiers, there would be no artificial separations like our unwieldy track changes. Since the Telarc Alpine Symphnony indexes rather than tracks these points, in our format it comes out musically continuous, which for us effectively "takes the training wheels off" and lets us hear this sequence as the composer expected the whole Alpine Symphony to be heard.

(I might also note quickly that in our four recordings of this orchestral display piece we're hearing four of the world's preeminent Strauss orchestras. I've noted before when we've dipped into it that the extensive series of Strauss orchestral works by Rudolf Kempe and the Staatskapelle Dresden seems to me on all counts one of the most impressive projects in the history of orchestral recording -- though the CDs don't seem to me to have done it justice.)

R. STRAUSS: An Alpine Symphony, Op. 64: Mists rise; The sun gradually dims; Elegy; Calm before the storm; Thunderstorm, Descent; Sunset

Staatskapelle Dresden, Rudolf Kempe, cond. EMI, recorded December 1972

Vienna Philharmonic, André Previn, cond. Telarc, recorded Nov. 22-24, 1989

COMPOSERS FOR THE STAGE MAY HAVE TO DO STORMS FOR
DRAMATIC PURPOSE -- LIKE MR. GRIEG AND MR. BRITTEN

We already heard in the earlier post two prime theatrical specimens: the violent opening scene of Verdi's Otello and the very different storm in Berlioz's Trojans which serves as the occasion for the, er, coming together of Dido and Aeneas.

Here's a storm we've heard before, in February 2010 as part of the Peer Gynt Suite No. 2. It had been composed with the large quantity of incidental music the composer provided for Ibsen's play, where it served as the prelude to Act V. (Which reminds me that one of these days we still have to do a post on Grieg's incidental music in theatrical context.)

GRIEG: Peer Gynt (incidental music): Prelude to Act V: Peer's Homeward Journey (Stormy Evening at Sea)

NARRATOR: Peer Gynt, by now a vigorous old man with hair gray as ice. Stormy crossing and homecoming.

Friedhelm Eberle, narrator; Gewandhaus Orchestra (Leipzig), Kurt Masur, cond. Philips, recorded March 1988

Berlin Philharmonic, Jeffrey Tate, cond. EMI, recorded March 1990

Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Neeme Järvi, cond. DG, recorded June 1987

Straddling the line between "concert" and "stage" storm is the violent interlude Britten composed to bridge the two scenes of Act I of Peter Grimes, which has an important theatrical function but has taken on an active concert life as part of the understandably popular suite of Four Sea Interludes (with or without the Passacaglia) from Peter Grimes. (In the suite of interludes it's placed last, for fairly obvious reasons, I think.)

We've heard the 1973 Bernstein "Storm" Interlude before, in a November 2009 Britten post along with the other three interludes. I failed to point out then that Lenny had a history with Peter Grimes. In 1946, at age 28, he conducted the American premiere of the opera, at the Tanglewood Festival. The Sea Interludes were also on the program for his final concert, in August 1990 -- at Tanglewood. I thought we might hear that notably broader performance too. We lead off with a violently impassioned performance by an unexpected Brittenite, Carlo Maria Giulini (who was later asked by the composer to conduct his War Requiem).

BRITTEN: Peter Grimes, Op. 33: Act I: Storm Interlude: Presto con fuoco -- Molto animato -- Largamente -- Tempo I

Philharmonia Orchestra, Carlo Maria Giulini, cond. EMI, recorded c1963

New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded Mar. 8, 1973

Boston Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG, recorded live at the Tanglewood Festival, Aug. 19, 1990

To really appreciate how Britten musicalizes this storm and how it's woven into the action of the opera, we need to back up a bit into Act I, Scene 1, as the approach of the storm is registered, and then listen a bit into Act II, as the storm batters "the Borough" -- on England's Suffolk coast -- at hurricane force. (We performed a similar exercise with the first interlude, "Dawn," which joins the Prologue and Act I, in our November 2009 Britten post.) We're only venturing about a minute into Scene 2, but that's long enough to appreciate how Britten handles the storm. As pretty much the whole of the Borough finds its way into the Boar inn, even though Auntie is trying to close for the night, each time the door opens the storm churns again in the orchestra until the storm refugees manage to get the door closed again.

BRITTEN: Peter Grimes, Op. 33, Act I Scene 1, The storm is here; Storm Interlude; Scene 2 beginning

ACT I, Scene 1 has taken place in the street in the Borough in front of the Moot Hall (where, in the Prologue, a coroner's inquest into the death of the fisherman Peter Grimes's young apprentice took place), the Boar inn (run by "Auntie"), and the shop of the apothecary Ned Keene, opposite breakwaters that run to the sea. Locals wandered in and out of the scene amid growing indications of an approaching storm. At this point the retired merchant captain Balstrode has been encouraging Grimes, still held responsible for the death of the boy despite being spared indictment at the inquest, to leave the Borough. Peter, imagining marrying the kindly schoolteacher Ellen Orford, resolves instead to stay.

CAPTAIN BALSTRODE: The storm, the storm is here, o come away!
PETER GRIMES: The storm is here, and I, and I shall stay!
[BALSTRODE leaves PETER and goes into the Boar. PETER alone -- gazing intently into the sea and approaching storm.]
What harbour shelters peace,
away from tidal waves, away from storms?
What harbour can embrace terrors and tragedies?
With her there'll be no quarrels,
with her the mood will stay
a harbour evermore,
where night is turned to day.
[CURTAIN]

Storm Interlude

Scene 2
Inside the Boar, the same night. AUNTIE is admitting MRS. SEDLEY. The gale is now at hurricane force and they push the door shut with difficulty.

AUNTIE: Past time to close!
MRS. SEDLEY: He -- he -- he said half past ten.
AUNTIE: Who?
MRS. SEDLEY: Mister Keene.
AUNTIE: Him and his women!
MRS. SEDLEY: You referring to me?
AUNTIE: Not at all, not at all!
What do you want?
MRS. SEDLEY: Room from the storm.
AUNTIE: That is the sort of weak politeness
makes a publican lose her clients.
Keep in the corner out of sight.
[BALSTRODE and some of the fishermen enter. They struggle with the door.]
CAPTAIN BALSTRODE: [Whistles] That's a bitch of a gale all right.
AUNTIE: Sh-h-h!
CAPTAIN BALSTRODE: Sorry, I didn't see you, Missis.
You'll give the regulars a surprise.
AUNTIE: She's meeting Ned.
CAPTAIN BALSTRODE: Which Ned?
AUNTIE: The quack! He's looking after her heart attack.
CAPTAIN BALSTRODE: Bring us a pint.
AUNTIE: It's closing time.
CAPTAIN BALSTRODE: You fearful old female, why should you mind?
AUNTIE: Th-e-e-e-e storm!
[BOB BOLES and some other fishermen and women enter. The wind howls through the door.]
BOB BOLES: Did you hear the tide has broken over the North Road?
[The window shutters blow open.]
CAPTAIN BALSTRODE: Get those shutters!

Donald Gramm (bs-b), Captain Balstrode; Jon Vickers (t), Peter Grimes; Lili Chookasian (c), Auntie; Jean Kraft (ms), Mrs. Sedley; Paul Franke (t), Bob Boles; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, John Pritchard, cond. Live performance, Dec. 10, 1977

Anthony Michaels-Moore (b), Captain Balstrode; Glenn Winslade (t), Peter Grimes; Jill Grove (c), Auntie; Catherine Wyn-Rogers (ms), Mrs. Sedley; Christopher Gillett (t), Bob Boles; London Symphony Orchestra, Sir Colin Davis, cond. LSO Live, recorded live in concert at the Barbican (London), January 2004

LET'S WIND IT UP FOR TODAY BY GIVING A PROPER
HEARING TO ROSSINI'S RIB-TICKLING TEMPEST

I'm not sure this storm serves any dramatic purpose -- I mean as a storm. As an interlude, it definitely allows the action time to percolate and set up the opera's grand climax. But as a storm specifically, well, it can provide the stage director with the opportunity to create some (usually hokey) visual effects.

I made two new files for this post, and the Naples and Bucharest ones, and then discovered that I'd already made one of the New York performance, which I don't think we actually heard -- I think that was for another post that's still to come. I really like the hammed-up Leinsdorf performance (I don't think Rossini necessarily meant this storm to be subtle), but I acknowledge that Varviso has as much fun with his straighter approach. Finally, there's a special breath-of-life quality to the Romanian Barber recording from which we hear the storm.

ROSSINI: The Barber of Seville:
Act II, The Storm

Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. RCA/BMG, recorded 1958

Orchestra Rossini of Naples, Silvio Varviso, cond. Decca, recorded c1964

Orchestra of the Romanian Opera, Bucharest, Mihai Brediceanu, cond. Electrecord/Vox, recorded 1960-61

STILL TO COME: MORE OPERATIC STORMS WOVEN INTO THE
ACTION -- LIKE ANOTHER BY VERDI AND ONE BY JANÁČEK

Maybe next week. Or maybe the week after -- it's hard to say with scientific precision.

RETURN TO THE BEGINNING OF THE POST

Labels: Beethoven, Britten, Grieg, Johann Strauss II, Richard Strauss, Rossini, Sunday Classics

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Sunday Classics: Mastering the fine art of Edvard Grieg

Arthur Rubinstein (1887-1982),
at about the time of our recording

by Ken

As I explained last night, we've circled back to spend some more time with Grieg's wonderful little Lyric Pieces. On our first visit I picked out a few pieces I'm particularly fond of, and we heard those along with one complete "book," the six pieces of Op. 54 (Book V of the ten), which happens also -- by sheerest coincidence, of course -- to be the set Grieg participated in orchestrating almost all of. (We also heard all five orchestral versions, including the four that form into the orchestral Lyric Suite, which we also heard.)

For performances of the original piano versions, I depended primarily on the beautiful complete recording made by the English pianist Peter Katin for Unicorn-Kanchana in the final days of 1989. However, I threw in two performances by the great Arthur Rubinstein, which I happened to have because they had been plunked onto a CD in the "RCA Victor Basic 100" series, in between Rubinstein's 1961 recording of the Grieg A minor Concerto with Alfred Wallenstein and his 1967 recording of the Schumann Concerto with Carlo Maria Giulini.

I guessed that those Lyric Pieces, "Shepherd Boy" and the ever-popular "Trolls' March" (also known as the "March of the Dwarves") were from Rubinstein's 1953 all-Grieg LP, which constitutes the whole of the pianist's solo Grieg discography. To give you a glimmer of how these posts play into and out of my musical preoccupations, I was so taken with those two Rubinstein Lyric Pieces that I became really curious about the rest of that Grieg LP. It turns out that all of it was dumped onto a CD, along with Rubinstein's first recording of the Grieg Piano Concerto -- from 1942, with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra -- as Vol. 13 of BMG's grand Rubinstein Collection, and reasonably priced copies aren't hard to find. So naturally I ordered it.

When it arrived, I was delighted to discover that the notes for this volume are by my friend Harris Goldsmith. I still haven't seen by any means all the volumes of the Rubinstein Collection, but even in the limited space allotted for liner notes, the gap between Harris's notes and even the best of the other writers engaged for the project is enormous. (As to the worst of them . . . no, let's not go there.)

Here, for example, is what Harris has to say about that 1942 recording of the Piano Concerto: "A comparison . . . with the subsequent versions reveals an attractive dramatic freshness and vitality that over the years eased into ever-increasing lyricism and expansiveness." Of course if he'd been given the space, Harris could have provided a detailed comparison of the Rubinstein Grieg Concerto recordings that would have left us filled with new insight into Rubinstein as an artist and the expressive possibilities built into the piece, but for one sentence that's pretty darned good, and I wish I'd had it to offer when we heard three of Rubinstein's four audio recordings (the 1942, 1949, and 1961) and saw the finale of the 1975 video recording.

Since the BMG transfer really does sound better than the one I used (from an Ormandy anthology), with more believably musical textures, why don't we listen to the performance again?

GRIEG: Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16

i. Allegro molto moderato

[By the way, don't ask me what exactly Grieg means by that tempo marking. The "molto" would normally be taken as an exhortation to really jack up the "allegro," so about the last thing you'd expect here is a moderating "moderato." The idea appears to be a not-all-that-molto allegro.]

ii. Adagio

followed without pause by:

iii. Allegro moderato molto e marcato; Quasi presto; Andante maestoso

[Here, you'll note, we've got "moderato" and "molto" reversed, which is even less clear to me.]

Arthur Rubinstein, piano; Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, cond. RCA/BMG, recorded 1942

At this point feel free to go back and listen to the other Rubinstein Grieg Concerto recordings (here's the link again), in particular the beautiful 1961 one that he declared himself so pleased with.

RETURNING TO THE LYRIC PIECES

By the time Rubinstein made his second recording of the Grieg Concerto, with Antal Dorati in 1949, as Harris suggests, the evolution in this piece from "dramatic freshness and vitality" to "ever-increasing lyricism and expansiveness" was already in progress. The 1953 solo Grieg LP, however, harks back to the earlier style. As Harris notes, the Lyric Pieces and the rest are "rendered with a sophistication and lack of artifice (which are quintessential Rubinstein) and with a sec clarity (atypical of the well-loved artist's more copiously pedaled work at actual concerts)."

"Sec" rather than "dry," you'll note, because "dry" has connotations of aridity, where "sec" may suggest something more like bracingly crisp. Listen, for example, to Rubinstein play the rippling runs in "Papillon," as compared with all our other pianists.

What we're going to do now is pretty straightforward: go through the 11 Lyric Pieces Rubinstein recorded, in the order they appear on the CD, which I'm assuming is carried over from the LP (which I don't have) and therefore represents a sequence that if not planned by was at least approved by the artist, played first by Rubinstein, then by Peter Katin (whose performances, as I've said, hold up amazingly well -- you don't get blinding insight, but you do get beautiful sound, animated rhythm, and an unfailingly sound sense of proportion), and then in some cases by one or more "guest artists." To maintain the sequence, I've folded in the two pieces we already heard in the Katin and Rubinstein performances.

I should add that Rubinstein has the advantage of playing on "home field"; these are the pieces he chose, and he undoubtedly chose them for good reasons. I should also say that I'm not a fanatical Lyric Pieces collector, and I'm in no position to offer these as the best or most interesting performances. These are performances I either had or had access to, which illustrate basic performance issues in this music.

"At the Cradle," Book IX (Op. 68), No. 5

Arthur Rubinstein, piano. RCA/BMG, recorded 1953