INSPIRING CZECH SYMPHONIC MUSIC

This is a classic performance. In fact, I don't think it has many serious contenders in the catalogue. The main characters are excellent. Gabriela Benackova as Marenka gives a splendidly warm characterization and the slightly sharp sounds when she is singing at the top end of the spectrum is no more than a quibble; none at all about Peter Dvorsky as Jenik or Miroslav Kopp as Vasek.

In fact, there are no serious objections to anything on this set. Kosler gives an eminently energetic and vigorous performance (the famous orchestral sections, for instance, are marvelous), and the rest of the cast doesn't really have one weak link.

Sound quality is perhaps not faultless (it is a little clangy in a way which might lead you to believe that the recording is a little older than it actually is), but nothing to complain seriously about. Strongly recommended. --G.D. Buy it now

SMETANA : THE BARTERED BRIDE

As soon as conductor Adam Fischer engages the warp engines and shifts the well known overture into hyperdrive, we know we're in for an exciting performance of Bedrich Smetana's masterpiece, The Bartered Bride. As soon as the wonderful Lucia Popp begins lamenting her impending arranged marriage to the son of the rich landowner Micha from the neighboring village, we know that this will also be a lyrical and emotionally satisfying performance. And as soon as we see the traditional stage sets and costumes, we know that we are witnessing a performance conceived and designed before today's European penchant for updating opera to some strange locale with minimal sets and costumes. This staging of The Bartered Bride is traditional and revels in it.

Filmed live at the Wiener Staatsoper in 1982, the appearance of the townsfolk, wearing their traditional Bohemian costumes, exhuberantly singing and dancing, serves to quickly draw us into the early 1870s and this engaging comedy of love nearly thwarted but ultimately triumphant. Smetana was a confirmed Wagnerian who bridled under the usual criticism of that breed: Wagnerians are great at your typical end-of-the-world conflagration, but they are about as funny as a slow tour of a sausage factory. Smetana set out to prove that he could do funny. The first few years following its 1871 premiere, now in its familiar three act version, were largely unsuccessful. The opera failed to find its audience. All that changed when the libretto was translated into German by Max Kalbeck. It became the basis for the subsequent wildly successful performances at the Theater an der Wien in 1893. It is that German translation that is used here for Otto Schenk's 1982 production.

The late Czech singer Lucia Popp stars as Marenka (Marie). A favorite ever since I first heard her in Klemperer's brilliant 1964 recording of Mozart's The Magic Flute, her ability to fully inhabit a role is in evidence here. Her singing is as lyrically lovely as ever. Siegfried Jerusalem is her beloved Hans. Heinz Zednik is Wenzel, the boy she is forced to marry. Karl Ridderbusch is Kezal, the disreputable town matchmaker. These three Wagnerian singers are a reminder of the roots of this opera and they are splendid. The entire cast is excellent. Superior casting coupled with traditional costumes and lovely set design, yields a positive result: we are pulled, unresisting, into the world of this opera, and we are saddened to leave it when it ends. That's the signature of an exemplary performance. The Orchester der Wiener Staatsoper play beautifully for conductor Adam Fischer. Total time of this DVD is 155 minutes. Sound is in PCM stereo and DTS 5.1, both sounding clear and full. The picture has been digitally remastered and is clear with no artifacts given its age. There are the usual DGG languages, menus and previews.

This is a splendid performance of a great comic opera. It will brighten your day. Strongly recommended. - Mike Birma Buy it now

OVERTURE TO "THE BARTERED BRIDE"

Bedrich Smetana (1824-1884)

The great wave of revolutionary nationalism which swept. Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came to the Czech people as an immensely fertilizing and liberating force. Among its many artistic fruits were Smetana’s patriotic tone poems (the most popular being ‘The Moldau’) and his nine operas, including “The Bartered Bride”

Smetana is often considered the father of Czech musical nationalism. He was only twenty-four when the liberal-patriotic revolutions of 1848-1849 swept Europe like a prairie fire, stirring Czech patriots to an unsuccessful revolution of their own, and launching Smetana on his career as a nationalist composer. From 1863 to 1866 he worked on his second opera. The Bartered Bride, a simple comedy of Czech life in a style strongly influenced by Czech folk music. To Czech listeners, “The Bartered bride” is much more than an opera. It has become almost a symbol of Czech people themselves. Happily “The Bartered Bride” captivates even non-Czech listeners with its melodic invention, its orchestral brilliance and its temperamental brio.

The music of the Overture is taken largely from the lively finale of Act II, when the townspeople witness the signing of a contract in which the hero deliberately gives the (false) impression that he is selling his claim to his own fiancée. The Overture opens with a brilliant flourish for full orchestra, a followed by a lively scherzo like figure spun out very delicately by the second violins alone. Presently they are joined by the first violins and finally by the lower strings, building up to a climax of excitement on the crest of which a syncopated dance figure, another chief theme of the Overture is heard. There is considerable development of both the dance theme and the scherzo-like figure. The whole is punctuated and concluded by reappearances of the Overture’s opening flourish.

Franz Liszt : Les Préludes (Symphonic Poem No.3)

Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

Franz Liszt was the son of a disappointed musician who served as land steward to the noble Esterházy family of Hungary. After he showed prodigious talent as a pianist at the age of nine, a group of Hungarian counts subscribed a six-years’ annuity to the boy’s family for him to study in Vienna. Liszt started giving successful piano recitals at the age of 12, became a salon idol as a young man, and later won recognition throughout Europe as the first of the great piano virtuosos. After the age of 40, however, he stopped playing publicly except on rare special occasions, and concentrated on conducting and composing. As a composer, Liszt is best known for his two piano concertos, some nineteen Hungarian Rhapsodies for piano, of which six exist in orchestral versions as well, and a dozen symphonic poems ( the third of which will be performed tonight).

Les Préludes (Symphonic Poem No.3) is the best known and most popular of Liszt’s symphonic poems. It is a colorful, dramatic work expressing Romantic musical ideas, but with an unexplicit “program” that permits the listener great freedom in interpreting the meaning. Originally written in 1848 as a prelude to a choral work. The Four Elements, it was revised several times in succeeding years, until it reached its final form in 1854 as an independent orchestral work.

Although Liszt used some of the thematic material of The Four Elements, he related the final version to the poem Les Préludes from Lamartine’s Méditations Poétiques (Poetic Meditations): …what is our life but a series of preludes to that unknown song whose first solemn note is sounded only by death? “Liszt depicts man’s struggle for existence through various interconnected episodes: first, love (“The enchanted Daybreak”), then the harshness of the real world (“Storms Whose Killing Breath Dispel Lovely Illusion”), a pastoral interlude (“A Pleasant Rest Amidst Nature’s Moods”), a call to battle (“The Trumpets’ Loud Clangor… The Post of Danger…”) and finally, self-recognition. Shop here

Tchaikovsky - THE SLEEPING BEAUTY- BOLSHOI BALLET

This Sleeping Beauty was filmed at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow in 1989 and is a re-release of the Japan-produced "Bolshoi at the Bolshoi" series previously available on VHS. The films were shot without an audience, but are presented with overdubbed applause.

The Bolshoi dances Tchaikovsky's second and grandest ballet in the traditional staging completed in 1973 by then director Yuri Grigorovich, after Marius Petipa and with sets by Simon Virsaladze. At the time Grigorovich's staging was much closer to the original Petipa than the Kirov's own production (available on DVD with Kolpakova/Berezhnoi or Lezhnina/Ruzimatov). This production is still performed by the Bolshoi today.

The DVD features some of the foremost principal dancers of the day: Nina Semizorova as Princess Aurora, Nina Speranskaya as the Lilac Fairy, and Alexei Fadeyechev - easily one of the finest male dancers of the Moscow School from the 1980-90's and a danseur noble if ever there was one - as Prince D?sir?. Yuri Vetrov appears as Carabosse, while Maria Bylova and Alexander Vetrov dance the Blue Bird pas de deux. The Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra is conducted by Alexander Kopylov.

As with all titles in this series, this disc is obviously a video transfer, leaving some of the movements blurred. The sound is offered in simple stereo.

The DVD release doesn't include any bonus material, but comes with a handsome three-language 20-page booklet, introducing and situating the work and the artists. An effort like this needs to saluted, however it will take a bit more accuracy than the Arthaus Musik writers are able to provide at this stage. For example, Kirov dancer, choreographer and artistic director Konstantin Sergeyev is not a son of Nikolai Sergeyev, as the booklet claims. Konstantin Sergeyev staged The Sleeping Beauty for the Kirov Ballet in 1952, but it is of course Nikolai, not Konstantin, who staged it for London's Sadler's Wells Theatre in 1939 and 1946. Yet, to see the outstanding dancers of the Bolshoi, ballet enthusiasts needn't hesitate. See more

TCHAIKOVSKY: THE SLEEPING BEAUTY SUITE

Peter IIyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky did not take up music seriously until he was 22 after studying law and entering the government civil service. But in 1863 he gave up his boring job as a clerk I the Czar’s Ministry of Justice to enter the newly founded St. Petersburg Conservatory. He later moved to Moscow where he became a music critic and teacher and continued to compose. A brief, unsuccessful marriage when he was 34 led to a nervous collapse. At about this time, he met Madame Nadejda von Meck who became Tchaikovsky’s patroness even though they had never met and probably never did meet. For unclear reasons, she abruptly withdrew her support. By this time, Tchaikovsky was already a world-famous composer. In 1893, he died suddenly after drinking unboiled water in cholera-infested St. Petersburg. Controversy has long raged over whether or not he did it deliberately, but most scholars now believe it was accidental.

Apart from his orchestral works. Tchaikovsky was also a skilled ballet music composer. He used his experience to turning ballet music, which was up until that time nothing more than a sequence of pretty but unconnected tunes, into an organized work like a symphony or opera, outlining the story’s emotional development as well as accompanying the dancer’s steps. He wrote three of the finest ballet-scores in the repertoire: The Nutcracker, Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty.

Ravel: Boléro; Rapsodie espagnole; Debussy: Images

Charles Munch was the opposite of the "intellectual" school of French conductors, as typified today by Pierre Boulez. He was a completely spontaneous artist, which is what made him the great Berlioz conductor of our time, and literally anything could happen when he got up onto the podium. It follows then, that his Ravel is not going to be the sort of hyper-precise, calculated sort of interpretation that many fans of the composer expect, but it will be exciting as hell. These three pieces are shrewdly chosen; they are the composer's most extrovert works, and Munch pulls out all of the stops in his performances of them. A classic recording, and a great memento of a unique artist. --David Hurwitz Listen to samples