RAVEL: PIANO CONCERTO IN G MAJOR

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

Maurice Ravel is another French composer, of Basque descent on his mother’s side, whose family moved to Paris when he was three months old. He entered the Conservatoire in 1889 to study the piano with Beriot and composition with Gabriel Faure. From his earliest works, composed in the late teens, his maturity of style and use of unorthodox harmonies were regarded with suspicion by the academics of the day, and he was repeatedly denied the highest award in the prix de Rome. The last occasion was in 1905, when his elimination at the preliminary stage caused such an uproar that the director of the Conservatoire was forced to resign. He is today best known for the inescapable Bolero, a piece for orchestra without music, as he himself described.

The Piano Concerto in G major, on which the composer worked for two years, was completed in time for the Festival Ravel at the Salle Pleyel, Paris, and first played there January 14, 1932, with publication the same year. The composer conducted the premiere, with Marguerite Long as soloist, to whom the concerto is dedicated. There are three movements: Allegraments,  Adagio assai and Presto. Ravel himself called this concerto the complete expression of his own development as a composer, and stated that he had put the best of himself into the music.

Ravel once called his G major Concerto a concerto in the strict sense, written in the spirit of Mozart and Saint-Saens. He added, less paradoxically, “I believe that a concerto can be gay and brilliant, and that there is no necessity for it to aim at profundity or big dramatic effects. It has been said that the concertos of some great classical composers were written not for but against the piano, and I think that this criticism is quite justified.”

I Allegramente. The gossamer lightness of the opening, with its sparky little tune for piccolo solo against shimmering bitonality arpeggios for the piano, soft string tremolos, pizzicatos, and a scarcely audible roll of the side drum, is an effect to remember. Hardly has the piccolo introduced the melody when it is taken up by a glittering trumpet solo, and it returns again to cap the climax of the brilliant first movement.

II Adagio assai. The slow movement begins with a long nocturne-like solo for unaccompanied piano. The ease with which the melody seems to flow may be misleading, for Ravel has told us that he constructed it very laboriously, two bars at a time, taking the slow movement to Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet as a model.

III. Presto. The finale is a dazzling piece of virtuosity for the soloist with light-textured, witty orchestral accompaniment. The many fragments of American jazz idiom of the finale. In any case, the entire conclusion flies at such supersonic speed that it seems to finish before it has started.

Overture, The Roman Carnival, Opus 9

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)

 

Son of a provincial French doctor with a practice near Grenoble, Berlioz was destined for the medical profession. However, after his first year in Paris, he gave up medicine and became a music student instead, learning to play the flute, the flageolet and the guitar. In 1823 he entered the Paris Conservatoire, and a year later saw Charles Kemble and his company in a production of Hamlet at the Odeon, where he fell violently in love with an Irish actress, Harriest Smithson, who played Ophella.  From this point on, his life, as related in his own Memoirs, is that of an archetypal Romantic hero. Beset by financial difficulties he was obliged to write reviews and articles to augment his income, a task he loathed but did supremely well. The power and originality of his music and the brilliance of his orchestration were not appreciated by his contemporaries, and even today his genius is more widely recognized outside France than it is within.

Berlioz’s Overture, “The Roman Carnival,” was composed as an afterthought to serve as an introduction to the second act of his opera, Benvenuto Cellini. It was completed in Paris in 1843 and was performed for the first time under the direction of the composer at a concert in the Salle Herz, Paris, on February 3, 1844.

The Overture is based on a reminiscence of Benvenuto Cellini’s first act aria O Teresa, vous que j’aime” (‘O Teresa, whom I adore”) and an anticipation of the lively saltarello which caused Berlioz and the dancers such agonies during the rehearsals of the opera in September 1938. Francois Antoine Habeneck, the conductor, was hostile to Berlioz, in part, perhaps, because Berioz could not restrain his indignation at Habeneck’s sluggishness. The opera was a resounding fiasco. Only the Overture, as Berlioz assures us: “received exaggerated applause, but the rest was

Elgar: Enigma Variations

Sir John Eliot Gardiner makes a very persuasive case for placing Elgar as a composer in classic Central European Romantic mode in these excellent performances of Elgar's orchestral and chamber works, ending with a brilliant performance of Elgar's Enigma Variations. Gardiner's interpretations are certainly radical reinterpretations of Elgar's music; here he emphasizes how these scores pay homage to contemporaries - and artistic mentors - such as Brahms and Dvorak, among others, in his choice of tempi and the lush, warm performances he obtains from the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. I doubt I have heard the Enigma Variations sound so much like a work composed by Brahms before. The sound quality is quite superb, filled with the ample warmth one might expect from recordings made in the Vienna Philharmonic's concert hall. Without question this is yet another successful Deutsche Grammophon collaboration between Gardiner and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.--John Kwok  Listen to samples

Elgar: Cello Concerto; "Enigma" VariationsG

This is a stunning performance of the Elgar Concerto for Cello by the gifted Jacqueline duPre with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by her husband, Daniel Barenboim. Ms. duPre was already being compared to Casals when she was only in her mid-twenties because of her mastery of the sonorous instrument--known to be one of the most difficult to play. Her career was cut short by multiple sclerosis, diagnosed when she was barely 29, but her recordings, like the one superbly remastered here, live on. In the haunting melody of the Elgar concerto's Adagio, one is reminded of the beauty and sadness of duPre's short career. For cello buffs, this album is definetely 4-star, and the Enigma Variations are a nice bonus.--Ginues ressurected Listen to samples

Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 85

Edward Elgar (1857-1934)

Adagio – Moderato

Allegro molto

Adagio

Allegro ma non troppo

The renaissance of English music in the twentieth-century began at its turn with the revelation of Elgar’s ‘Enigma’ Variations, a work soon taken up by the greatest conductors of the time and of all nationalities. In the two following decades, Elgar composed oratorios, symphonies and concertos but only at the end of this period, in the last of his large scale works, this Cello Concerto, did he create another which also earned its place, if more gradually, as a well-loved item in the permanent international repertoire. It was, effectively, Elgar’s swansong. Composed in 1919, it was first played by Felix Salmond at the Queen’s Hall, London, with Elgar conducting, on October 26 of the year.

Although cast in four main sections, in contrast to the three movement of the earlier Violin Concerto, the Cello Concerto is a leaner and more concise score. Here, Elgar, self-taught but wise in orchestral experience, successfully projects the solo cello line in clear relief against an orchestral background of unusual refinement and stripped of all inessentials.

The Concerto begins with a brief recitative-like introduction by the solo cello, leading into the first subject of the first movement proper, a Moderato in nine-eight time. Announced by the violas, it moves like a winding path in autumnal moods. It passes to the solo cello and then to an orchestral tutti before this opening section is rounded off by its return to the solo instrument. Clarinet and bassoons then introduce a second them, which, counterpointed by the solo cello, the violins continue. This then, in Tovey’s well-chosen word, blossoms into the major mode, before reverting to the minor and leading to a recapitulation of the opening section of the movement.

Cello recitative, anticipations of the succeeding scherzo, and a brief cadenza lead into the common-time Allegro molto, a kind of nimble moto perpetuo in E minor, with a contrasted second idea beginning in the remoteness of E Flat major. The music soon reverts to E minor and the initial idea, with the second theme reappearing in G major before the swiftly scurrying coda.

The slow movement unfolds like a prayer, led by the solo cello. I B flat major and three-eight time, it comes to rest on the dominant (F major). This leads into B flat minor for a false start to the finale, an introduction soon swerving into E minor for  another noble recitative and brief cadenza. They lead to the resolute announcement of the main subject of the final Allegro, ma non troppo (E minor, two-four time) by the solo cello to an off-beat accompaniment. An orchestral tutti leads to a more wayward second idea. Resourceful development, in which the initial them recurs rondo-like and engenders a powerful climax, is followed by a chromatic episode, (Poco piu lento, common-time) of deep poignancy. It subsides into a recall of the second phrase of the slow movement, and a final glance at the opening recitative of the Concerto. After which, the main subject supplies a brisk and brusque coda.

With hindsight, it is possible to read into the stately sorrow of the Cello Concerto, and particularly its penultimate episode, Elgar’s farewell to a former world, the more prosperous and leisurely Edwardian era he knew before the first world war. With the death of Lady Elgar in 1920, Elgar lost his creative mainspring, so that the Cello Concerto was indeed a valediction: certainly, he wrote little of real consequence after it.

Programme Note c Felix Aprahamian, 1983

Rossini: Overtures

This CD is quite amazing for several reasons. For starters, you get two CDs for the price of one. Therefore, for the price of one CD, you get 14 Rossini overtures (I must admit that I have not even heard of some of the overtures included). All of the works included are well recorded, so there is very, very little of the hiss or blip that plague other CDs. The best aspect of the CD, however, does not lie in its technical values. Instead, it is the performances themselves that caught my attention. The interpretations taken by Chailly and the New Philharmonic Orchestra are certainly fresh, though not necessarily ones that I would feel safe taking had I been the conductor. The tempi and dynamics of several famous passages (some from the popular Barber of Seville) are not what I am used to, though I was pleasantly surprised to learn that such interpretations are possible without sounding bad. This CD is definitely a good buy. Even if you disagree with some of the interpretations, you still get two CDs for the cost of one. And, for those who are tired of hearing the same performances over and over, these two CDs offer something new that may very well recaptivate your heart.--kv581 Listen to samples

Rossini: Complete Overtures

One French wit in the early part of the nineteenth century observed that he had more fun at a Rossini opera than in the bedroom, and Rossini's irresistable melodies, infectious gaiety, and wild zany sense of humor, all coupled with the dizzy acceleration of the famous Rossini crescendo makes this music as captivating and exciting today as it was two centuries ago when ladies intoxicated by the emotional power of the music fainted in the aisles. Rossini also wrote more serious music, his Otello was a great favorite of a man who knew his operas, Verdi, and the set also includes examples of this less known side of the composer of the Barber of Seville.

Neville Marriner recorded a great number of Rossini overtures back in the second half of the seventies, between 1974 and 1980, and this 3 CD set rounds up the lot and presents them in one box set. No attempt has been made to issue them in the order of composition - indeed the first CD begins with the last - the famous William Tell Overture. The rarer and earlier works, generally of far less interest, are closeted away on the third CD, while the first CD garners many of the best, and the second CD at least has several genuine masterpieces among the lesser pieces.

Rossini was a master of the orchestra, and certainly there is far more than enough to justify two CDs, if not three. However, Philips is not charging an arm and a leg for the box set, so perhaps it's best to view the lesser ones as an addendum.

The performances are brisk, with excellent rythmic impetus, and played with the pure clean tones favored by the Academy. Marriner doesn't surpass the greatest versions in the major works, such as the legendary Toscanini, or in stereo, Szell, but Marriner and his orchestra are alert and highly finished. Overall these grade out at between A to B+ performances; surely a box set anyone could enjoy over time. The set might also make a nice addition to a single CD set of the Rossini overtures. Again you have a chance with this set to hear a truly great master working up a form to ever more and more astonishing displays of pure pandemonium.

The sound has been improved from the LPs, which, while pretty enough, lacked a little oomph. These improvements make for a greater swagger and power, not always quite reached on the LPs. The sound stage and sonic effects fall a little short of the best recent recordings - the snare drum in La gazza ladra simply doesn't richocet off the walls as it can in live performances or contemporary SACD CDs. However, the musicianship remains very high, and if you originally owned and liked the first LP issues, these on CD will not be a disappointment.

A nine page essay in English by Philip Gosset discusses the overtures in fair historical detail - also in French and German translation.

A very good set, then, with the understanding that most people might be happy with a single CD of Rossini's overtures, such as Rossini: Overtures or in an expensive but stunning SACD reissue of the Cleveland Orchestra under Szell Rossini, Auber, Berlioz: Overtures [SACD]. For the adventuresome, this set should provide a wealth of interest and much pleasure.

Playing one of the CDs again I am even more impressed by the level of achievement. This is a terrific CD set!--Doug Haydn Listen to samples

ROSSINI - OVERTURE: THE BARBER OF SEVILLE

Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868)

Within two decades, from 1810 to 1829, Rossini wrote thirty-eight opera, and then no more in the remaining years of his life. About ten of his operatic overtures survive in the concert-room, among them that attached to The Barber of Seville. Rossini wrote the opera early in 1816, taking a bare four weeks, maybe even less, in the joyous task, for the first performance was on February 20, in Rome. Initially, the opera was a failure, but neither it nor its famous Beaumarchais plot bears any relation to the Overture to the opera, said to have been composed on Spanish popular themes, is lost. The present Overture came to The Barber by way of Rossini’s Aureliano in Palmira (first performed in Milan, May 22, 1813) and Elisabetta, Regina d’Inghilterra (first performed in Naples, October 4, 1815)

An Andante maestoso (E Major, common-time) with dramatic contrasts, leads to a pulsing Allegro vivace (E minor, alla breve) with a jaunty middle section and a more suave closing section which rises to a climax before a recapitulation of the opening part of the Allegro and a return to the tonic major in time for a sparkling coda.. 

Programme Note C Felix Aprahamian, 1983 

Schubert: Rosamunde; Die Zauberharfe Overture; Ständchen

"Rosamunde" is one of Schubert's most gratifying works: it's filled with lovely melodies, and this classic mono recording from 1952/53 is quite simply the one to have. Late in 1823 Schubert, who had just completed his song cycle "Die Schone Mullerin," was asked to supply incidental music to Helmina von Chezy's play "Rosamunde." Chezy was once described as "a stout, elderly lady with all the qualities of a real blue-stocking, careless and slovenly in her appearance, not blessed with any earthly goods, but with a great deal of self-sufficiency." Apparently the play (now lost) was really terrible: it closed after only two performances. Schubert had to write this music in great haste to meet the premiere's deadline - reportedly he completed it in only 5 days! There was no time to write a separate overture, so instead Schubert borrowed one from his opera "Alfonso and Estrelle." Later the 1820 overture to his opera "The Magic Harp" was substituted, and that is the one we know today as the "Rosamunde" overture.

My suggestion: start your listening with the Magic Harp overture on track 12 (DG has mis-numbered the CD tracks here, inadvertently assigning track 11 twice: the jacket indicates Magic Harp as being on track 11, but it's really on track 12). It's one of Schubert's finest works and has those charmingly obsessive rhythmic patterns that would flower at their fullest in his 9th Symphony (and virtually all the symphonies of Bruckner as well). The Alphonse and Estrella overture on track 1 is much less interesting, and Lehmann's performance of it is a tad hard-boiled.

The rest of the performances are simply wonderful: excellent choral work and some lustrous playing by Furtwangler's Berlin Philharmonic. The contralto singing of Diana Eustrati in the charming Romance is beautiful, and the wind playing throughout is some of the finest on records: note especially the Shephard's Melody (track 8) for unaccompanied winds and the Act II ballet music (track 11) - clearly a foretaste of Dvorak.

The last track (identified as 12 but really 13) features the exquisite serenade "Zogernd leise," for female choir and piano (accompanied here by the excellent Lieder pianist Michael Raucheisen, who also recorded a great Winterreise with Hotter). This genial late work (1827) is in some ways the highlight of the entire set.

My only quibbles: no texts for the vocal parts, the aforementioned track mis-numberings, and recorded sound which, while perfectly acceptable, is a shade dry when compared with the fuller, warmer sound of the original 2-disc LP set. I was also a little saddened to discover that Schubert's setting of Psalm No. 23 "Gott mein Zuversicht" for piano and woman's chorus, which was on the original LP issue, has been left out here.

The short-lived Fritz Lehmann (1904-1956) was one of Germany's finest conductors: he died suddenly during the intermission of a performance of Bach's Saint Matthew Passion at Munich. DG has already released two of his greatest recordings on CD: a magnificent Brahms Requiem and my very favorite readings of Handel's Water Music and Royal Fireworks. Lehmann's old-fashioned but wonderful reading ("live" 1949) of the St. Matthew Passion is available on a Music and Arts CD set: it has Helmut Krebs as an expert Evangelist and, as Jesus, the 24 year old Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Lehmann's superbly incisive accompaniment in Stefan Askenase's Chopin Piano Concerto #2 can be heard in that pianist's wonderful 7-disc Chopin CD set on DG.

Hopefully DG will re-issue more of Lehmann's best recordings: the two Mendelssohn Piano Concertos with Helmut Roloff (superior, I think, to Perahia's and Serkin's), the Dvorak Serenade for Strings (second only to Talich's), Mozart's Serenade #10 (even better than Furtwangler's), his very romantic Schubert "Unfinished" and Mozart 40th, and Brahms' Tragic Overture and Schicksalslied.

Warmly recommended. --By Jeffrey Lipscomb

Overture “Rosamunde”

Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

When Schubert was pired, music took shape in his mind faster than his pen could move across paper. And in his incidental music to the Romantic drama Rosamunde, Princess of Cypress he was often in spired. He began composing on November 30, 1823, and finished on December 18, 1823, two days before the premiere. Not much time was left to rehearse either the music or the production’s two ballets, and no time at all to compose an overture. In fact Schubert never did compose an overture to Rosamunde. Instead he used an overture already composed for an earlier work.

                One of Schubert’s close friends, the famous Romantic painter Moritz von Schwind, describing the Rosamunde premiere to a mutual friend, wrote that the Overture was taken from Schubert’s opera, Alfonso and Estrella. But Schubert’s opera, Alfonso and Estrella. But Schwind’s comments on the music do not fit the Overture to Alfonso and Estrella. On the other hand, they do fit Schubert’s Overture to an earlier “magic play” (Zauberstück) called The Magic Harp (Die Zauberharte). Add to this the fact that the Zauberharte Overture was published (in a four-hand piano version) shortly before Schubert’s death as the Overture to Rosamunde, and the conclusion seems almost inescapable. It is the Zauberharte Overture that is customarity performed today under the title of Overture to Rosamunde.

                The drama Rosamunde, Princess of Cypress survived for exactly two performances. Even though Schubert’s music had been singled out by the Viennese press for high praise, it fell into obscurity along with the play and was not brought to light again in its entirely until 1867, when Sir Arthur Sullivan made a joint expedition to Vienna for the purpose of unearthing Schubert’s still-neglected manuscripts. The two men were successful beyond their wildest dreams, and in the booty they brought back to London were parts of Schubert’s Rosamunde music, which was performed, in London, for the first time since the Viennese production of the drama.

                The orchestra for the Rosamunde (Zauberharte) Overture calls for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, and the standard choir or strings.

                                                                                 Edward Downes