Brandenburg Boult

I was moved last month when I visited Köthen in the province of Sachsen-Anhalt. I visited the Schloss where Bach spent a number of years composing mainly instrumental music – including the six Brandenburg concertos. Standing where Bach had stood some 295 years ago was a humbling experience.

I grew up with the Brandenburgs, and made their acquaintance again in a monster box of orchestral music conducted by Adrian Boult, no less, in the early 1970s. These Brandenburgs join those by Klemperer and the Busch Chamber Orchestra on the “old fashioned Bach” shelf. But, to tell the truth, Bach responds to almost any treatment as long as the musical texture is transparent, the rhythmic integrity is preserved, nothing is too fast or too slow, and the players have a somewhat extrovert dexterity when called for. Boult's Brandenburgs impress; only in the third concerto (strings only) did I long for a smaller band of players. Elsewhere, the LPO forms a tutti band, and the LPO principals have a field day playing their instruments (during that period, the LPO had some excellent principals on the main desks). Boult, as ever, conducts impeccably; he was never a man for airs, graces and attention-seeking. I saw him twice in person: once when he was rehearsing an orchestra (in the Schubert Great C major symphony) at a hall in Birmingham, and once at the Midland Hotel in Birmingham where he was having breakfast alone at a table next to mine. On both occasions, he had the same smiling, unruffled expression on his face. No eccentricities with Sir Adrian and, to my surprise, he suits Johann Sebastian Bach perfectly.

Three Violin Recitals

Over the last week of so, various friends have sent me a number of CDs, including violinists, of course. Over the last few days I listened to Rachel Barton Pine, Konstanty Andrzej Kulka, and Ingolf Turban.

Kulka – recorded around 1980 – plays a phenomenal Devil's Trill, Ysaÿe's Ballade sonata, two pieces by Wieniawski, and Paganini's Nel cor più. All the pieces are superbly played, but I take exception to the Paganini since Kulka seems fit to add an entirely spurious and unnecessary piano part; the piano plunks away, adding nothing to the music, but spoiling the violin line. At one time this sort of thing was all the rage; Mendelssohn provided a piano accompaniment to Bach's solo violin works, Schumann to the cello suites … and to the Paganini caprices. Kreisler used to play solo Bach with a piano, and Heifetz the Paganini caprices with a piano. But it is highly undesirable, not on the dubious grounds of “authenticity”, but because Bach and Paganini were perfectly capable of writing for solo violins and cellos.

Ingolf Turban is not someone whose playing I have met often before. On a CD called “solo” he plays 13 works for solo violin, including Nel cor più, thankfully without a piano. He dispatches all 13 works efficiently and with aplomb but, to my ear, without love and without affection. A typical case is Ricci's arrangement of a Spanish Ballad, which in Turban's hands becomes an exercise in ricochet bowing, at great speed.

Barton Pine also includes the Spanish Ballad (albeit in a different arrangement). Her CD is called “Capricho Latino”. Her playing seems to have improved in the twenty years since I found her Sarasate recital disappointing. The Spanish Ballad (known also to we oldies as the theme tune from the film Jules et Jim) is played with expertise, but also with affection for its haunting melody. My main gripe with Barton Pine's disc is that, of the 14 tracks, too few are of really attractive music; she concentrates mainly on music written post-19th century, and this really was not a good time for violin vignettes (apart from those of Fritz Kreisler). So Tarrega, Ysaÿe, Quiroga come off well, but much of the rest is musically sub-standard (do we really need 10 minutes of Ferdinand the Bull, with narration?) My “go on to the next track” button was quite busy. It does, of course, make a change from the endless repetitions of Schön Rosmarin and Banjo & Fiddle; but could she not have found some better pieces to include?

Three discs providing a mixed bag, then. But Kulka's Devil's Trill stays in the mind; the piece is a violinists' old warhorse, written to show off the violin and violin technique, and tongue out to those earnest critics who want it played in an “authentic” manner, without Kreisler's marvellous cadenza, to boot.

Otto Klemperer

Yesterday evening, I really took to the conducting of Otto Klemperer. There are many other celebrated conductors: Furtwängler, Toscanini, Kleiber, Karajan, Bernstein, et al. However, listening to Klemperer conducting the Philharmonia in Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, I marvelled at the clarity of the orchestral parts, at the exemplary internal balance of the orchestra, at the prominence of the woodwinds, the antiphonal left and right first and second violins, the lack of eyebrow-raising tempo or dynamic distorions – all trademarks of Klemperer's approach to conducting. I have never marvelled so constantly at Berlioz's avant-garde orchestration.

This spurred me on to listen to Klemperer's recording of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, one of the few Mahler works I actually enjoy, despite the high-stress opening song. Klemperer's soloists are Christa Ludwig and Fritz Wunderlich, and the performance is an evergreen classic. Most admirable and an excellent 64 minutes of great music making despite the recording having been made over the period 1964 and 1966 due to the Walter Legge upheavals at the time.

Arabella Steinbacher plays Prokofiev

Probably no violinist makes a more beautiful sound than Arabella Steinbacher. On a new CD of Prokofiev works (the two violin concertos, plus the solo violin sonata) this can sound at times somewhat incongruous; this Prokofiev has expensive aftershave and neatly trimmed nails. One suspects that if and when played by Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Prokofiev would have mud on his boots and roots in Russian peasantry.

No matter; Steinbacher is technically highly proficient, the Russian National Orchestra under the admirable Vasily Petrenko is tunefully authentic, and Pentatone produces a well-engineered and well-balanced Super Audio sound. Steinbacher's 1716 Stradivari violin has us all bewitched for 64 minutes. An excellent new addition to the annals of these much-recorded works. I like Arabella, who is not just a pretty face.

Patricia Kopatchinskaja in Bartok

Despite some 55 years of constant effort, I have never really taken to the music of Béla Bartok. For me, there is a coldness, impersonality and aloofness at the heart of almost all his music. Yesterday I ventured once again into Bartok's music, this time with Patricia Kopatchinskaja playing the violin concerto. I don't know this concerto too well (though I have eight other recordings of the work – it's reasonably popular with violinists). Kopatchinskaja's performance seems to me absolutely ideal (she was the reason I bought this CD); Bartok's music should not always sound sweet and beautiful, and the sound of Kopatchinskaja here is worlds away from how I imagine Nicola Benedetti, Joshua Bell, Sarah Chang, et al would sound in this concerto. On occasions Kopatchinskaja tears into the music with real, throaty gusto. Bravo!

Also on the current 2-pack CDs is the violin concerto of György Ligeti that I have never heard before. It sounds worth a second hearing, at least; a good idea to have the violin cadenza right at the end of the work. As for Seven by Peter Eötvös that Kopatchinskaja also plays for around 20 long minutes; it is what I think of as “sound effects music” with predictable clunks and clicks and squeals and plonks. Once was enough.

Moldova (Kopatchinskaja's native land), Romania and Hungary have produced whole armies of world-class violinists over the years. Not too many world-class composers, however and that's a pity since this is very much Patricia Kopatchinskaja's native violin language that she expounds so well. Anyway, she is a formidable violinist outside the routine mould of concert violinists and I enjoy her playing immensely.

Otto Klemperer

For a total outlay of £2.27 per CD, I obtained a thunderous duo package of 20 CDs of Otto Klemperer conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra in the 1950s and 1960s. The ten Beethoven CDs give me shelf-space as I remove the old, bulky CDs; the package that contains all the symphonies, often in several versions, also contains Klemperer's performance with the strings of the orchestra of the Große Fuga, a performance I have loved for decades – I bought the LP when it first came out in 1957.

The other 10 CDs see Klemperer in Romantic repertoire – three Schubert symphonies, all the Schumann symphonies, lots of Mendelssohn, the last three Tchaikovsky symphonies, the symphonies by Berlioz and César Franck. A good box to dip into from time to time. Yesterday I listened to Klemperer and the Philharmonia in 1966 with César Franck's Symphony in D minor. I enjoyed it immensely. The sound was good. The playing of the Philharmonia was still good. Klemperer's skills in architecture, balance and maintenance of pulse were well to the fore. This evening I may well dip into Klemperer and the band in 1963 in Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. For music lovers, there never were such times.

Handel's Lotario

The neglect of Handel's opera Lotario is quite baffling. First performed in December 1729, it flopped and was not performed again until the 1950s … when it again flopped. The resuscitation I listened to today was from 2004, with Alan Curtis and his Complesso Barocco featuring a first-class list of today's singers, including Sara Mingardo, Simone Kermes, Sonia Prina and Vito Priante. I even liked the tenor (Steve Davislim) and appreciated the absence of male altos (Curtis uses female contraltos, in deference to my prejudices).

The music is first-class. Curtis apologises that, to accommodate the work on two CDs, some recitatives and some da capos had to be cut in order to bring the work in at 2 ½ hours rather than three. He need not have apologised to me: I have no objection to having the essence of Lotario, rather than every single note, and I am not in the slightest concerned with following the nuances of “the plot” (which is pretty ridiculous, as usual, and all in Italian, anyway). Nice just to sit back and bask in fine music and fine singing for two and a half hours.

Isakadze, and Faust

Off hand, I can only think of two Georgian violinists -- though there must be scores of excellent ones: Lisa Batiashvili, and Liana Isakadze. I've always had a very high opinion of Batiashvili, and have been a faithful fan of Liana Isakadze, having met her playing via her recording of Otar Taktakishvili's second violin concerto (a work I greatly like, but which remains obstinately completely unknown to practically everyone else). On a CD kindly supplied by Ronald, she plays the Beethoven violin concerto (recorded round about 1980), plus two concertos by Vivaldi (with the Georgian Chamber Orchestra) and the usual Polonaise by Ferdinand Laub. There is a freshness about Isakadze's playing that I find most attractive. In the Vivaldi concertos, there is none of that nonsense about no vibrato, and the long-held notes in the slow movements in particular sound so much better; long held notes on a violin with no vibrato can grate on the nerves, which is presumably why so many "authentic" fanatics indulge in ugly bulges. She plays the Beethoven reasonably "straight" and I like the performance. The Beethoven violin concerto is usually OK unless tempi are extreme (either much too slow, or much too fast) and unless some ridiculous cadenzas are imported for the sake of novelty. Isakadze sticks to the Kreisler cadenzas, and her tempi are perfectly acceptable. Well over an hour of attractive and spirited violin playing.

Isabelle Faust stands in a long line of celebrated Austro-German violinists that includes Carl Flesch, Georg Kulenkampff, Erich Röhn, Adolf Busch, Gerhard Taschner, Wolfgang Schneiderhan, Frank Peter Zimmermann, Thomas Zehetmair, Arabella Steinbacher, Julia Fischer .. and many others. On 19th October 2012 she gave a recital of unaccompanied Bach at a place identified by the BBC as simply “St. Luke's Church”, wherever that may be. She played the first and third sonatas, and the third partita. I enjoyed all three very much indeed. Her playing is in the German classical tradition. She is not an artist who seeks to show off her technique or lovely sound. In addition, she is technically on top of everything. This is Bach one sits back and enjoys.

Furtwängler's Pastoral

Re-united with an old friend this Friday: Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in 1952 in Beethoven's 6th Symphony, the recording with which I grew up on LP in the 1950s, despite all the forewarning and head shaking of the critics of that period. The recording has been re-transferred and cleaned up by the admirable Pristine Audio, and the sound now is perfectly listenable-to without having to make many allowances.

What comes over in this performance is love: the Vienna Philharmonic obviously loved the work, as did the conductor. The opening allegro ma non troppo is quite definitely non troppo in this leisurely performance and, as critics remarked at the time, it is not much different in tempo from the following andante molto mosso. Who cares? It's a lovely performance in which life is breathed into Beethoven's music; one feels he would have been much taken with this rendition of his Pastoral. A happy day in the Viennese countryside with the Vienna Philharmonic.

The task of the conductor and orchestra, of course, is to breathe life into notes on paper, and to attempt to re-create what was in the composer's head when he wrote it. (It goes without saying that what the composer heard in his head at the time might well not have been the following performance that he awaited with resignation or trepidation: “What do I care about your wretched fiddles when the spirit comes over me?” Beethoven is alleged to have remarked).

Anyway, after 60+ years, this classic recording from another age and another world lives on. In Furtwängler's hands, it lasts for 45 glorious minutes; conductors such as Chailly or Norrington probably dispatch it in half the time and then speed on to the next work on the list.

Tatiana Nikolayeva

Picasso had his cubist periods and his blue periods. I seem to have a Russian period at the moment. Current source of delight is Tatiana Nikolayeva playing the 24 Shostakovich preludes & fugues Op 87, a Russian recording from 1987 available very cheaply from Regis Records. I bought the Nikolayeva set partly on the recommendation of a friend (Martin White) and partly because I so enjoyed the recent set by Alexander Melnikov and wanted a second option.

The quality and variety of music in the 48 sections of the 24 preludes and fugues is amazing. This is music to listen to regularly; like Bach's music, it satisfies both cerebrally and emotionally. The sound world oscillates between the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. I keep listening to five or so of the pieces at a time. As to Nikolayeva versus Melnikov: I have no idea who is “best”. I just know I like both of them very much.

How refreshing to listen to the two Russian piano-babes, Maria Yudina and Tatiana Nikolayeva. Pretty obvious neither was selected for their sex appeal or luscious curves. The two are famous and still listened to because they were marvellous pianists and musicians. How many of today's violin or piano babes (or their male equivalents) will still be famous and listened to in fifty years time? The insatiable desire of the “music industry” to commercialise, commoditise and earn large amounts of money short-term is highly detrimental to musicians. Yudina, Nikolayeva, Casals, Elman, Heifetz, Beecham and their like would never get further than the doorman at modern international recording companies.

Richter, Bashmet, Kagan, Shostakovich

Regis Records is a small British company that specialises in remastering and reissuing older recordings at extremely reasonable prices. From my experience, the remastering is also done with skill and taste. Latest acquisition is a splendid CD of Shostakovich's late violin & piano sonata, with his very late viola & piano sonata. Pianist in both cases is the incomparable Sviatoslav Richter. Violinist is Oleg Kagan (1985 public performance in Moscow) and, in the viola sonata,Yuri Bashmet (same place, 1982). These are truly classic performances of two great works. Neither Kagan nor Basmet have featured among my favourite performers but here, in the 1980s in front of a Russian audience and with Richter the exemplary partner, they both triumph.

For Melodiya recordings at public concerts in the 1980s, the recordings are excellent (I noticed only one disturbing cough). The remastering (by Paul Arden-Taylor) is very good indeed. The price – I paid £5.50 for my copy – is remarkable. “You get what you pay for” is not always true. Two superb performances of two superb works for the price of four litres of diesel fuel is the bargain of the century. The disc goes into my “never be without” rack.

Daniil Trifonov

Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto is an old warhorse. It's also a very good piano concerto when played well, with an opening that is dramatic, and as memorable as the opening of Beethoven's G major piano concerto. I listened to it yesterday evening played by Daniil Trifonov (born 1991) accompanied by Valery Gergiev, with the Mariinsky Orchestra recorded in the Mariinsky Concert Hall in St. Petersburg. In one word: stupendous. Trifonov has power when needed, and poetic musing when needed. He does not try to “wow” us with his playing. He brings out all aspects of Tchaikovsky's work, the lyrical as well as the grandiose. This is some 21 year old!

The Russians seem to be well over-quota when it comes to producing world-class pianists and violinists. Trifonov makes me question, once again, whether it is necessarily true that artists give better performances when they mature, as maintained by conventional wisdom. Young artists can come to a work with fresh eyes; they also have reputations to build and establish. Older artists can fray a bit after playing the same work 200 times in public, and often no longer have a need to establish a reputation, but just to appear on stage and to play a work without making a mess of it.

This remarkable performance (of a remarkable work) also reinforces my feeling that nationalism does have a role in musical performance. In the current traversal of Tchaikovsky, the combination of a Russian soloist, a Russian conductor, a Russian orchestra playing Russian music in a Russian concert hall seems to me to give the music an extra 10% of authenticity. Everyone involved here plays with fervour and with feeling. Three stars.

For the rest of the CD, Trifonov gives us solo piano pieces – mainly of very welcome Liszt arrangements of Schubert songs. But I am so entranced with the Tchaikovsky that I haven't yet managed to listen beyond it.

Ignatz Waghalter (who?)

An hour's violin music by Ignatz Waghalter (1881-1949) does not suggest that here we have a newly discovered great master. The word that constantly comes to mind listening to the (agreeable) pieces on this Naxos CD is: generic. The music is generic German in the line of Brahms, Schumann and Bruch. The playing of the soloist, Irmina Trynkos, is generic modern efficient violin playing. The Royal Philharmonic orchestra sounds like a generic modern London orchestra. The finales of the violin concerto and the sonata for violin & piano underline how difficult it is to come up with really meaningful finales. On the whole, I prefer the violin & piano sonata to the orchestral concerto, which does sound a bit inflated and post-Joachim.

An odd liner note from one Michael Haas of the “International Committee of Suppressed Music at the Jewish Music Institute, London University”. He spends much of his text fulminating against the fact that Wagner didn't care much for Jews – though what that has to do with Ignatz Waghalter, or the price of fish, it is difficult to fathom. We are even informed that Anton Webern was not Jewish – in case anyone was interested. Apparently Mr Haas is a bit of an obsessive.

All praise to Naxos for providing – yet again – a cheap opportunity to explore unknown repertoire from the past. Maybe Waghalter would have benefited from a more subtle violinist such as Janine Jansen or Alina Ibragimova (not to mention Jascha Heifetz). Anyway, it all makes a change from endless Bruch, Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky.

Patricia Petibon

I seem to have a crush on nightingales; the latest soprano to hit my letterbox is Patricia Petibon whose new CD – bizarrely called Nouveau Monde – joins those by Sandrine Piau, Diana Damrau and Simone Kermes. Petibon has a lovely voice, she is technically agile and has an infectious personality, though perhaps she does overdo some of the whoops and shouts in the South American folk music on the disc. However, for all I know, that's how they do things in Peru.

The disc almost qualifies as “crossover” music with its mixture of baroque era folk and classical. The South American pieces are catchy, with traditional songs side-by-side with José de Nebra and Henry Le Bailly. As usual, I find the French baroque pieces by Jean-Philippe Rameau and Marc-Antoine Charpentier of lesser interest; I think French music only found its stride starting with Berlioz well into the 19th century. Petibon sings a very moving “Dido's Lament” from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas – surely one of the very greatest laments ever written. She also does a moving “Greensleeves” and a well-sung Fairest Isle (Purcell).

The conductor, Andrea Marcon, does go a bit overboard with drums, castanets, guitars and South American harp, possibly on the ground that since so much of the music is sung in Spanish, all sorts of percussion can be wheeled up and let loose. However, listening to Nouveau Monde and Patricia Petibon is an excellent way to spend an interesting and enjoyable hour or so.

Maria Callas in Norma

7th December 1955. Antonino Votto is in the pit at La Scala. On the bill: Bellini's opera Norma. With Mario Del Monaco (Pollione), Giulietta Simionato (Adalgisa). Fortunately someone, somewhere was making some kind of recording of the evening. The Italian audience was noisy and ecstatic.

There are few real golden classics of recorded music. The Busch Quartet in Beethoven and Schubert; Edwin Fischer in Bach's 48; Casals in the Bach suites for solo cello … and a good handful of others including Maria Callas in Tosca and … Maria Callas as Norma.

I have had the December 1955 Norma for some years (Hunt CD). I am eternally grateful to Andrew Rose (Pristine Audio) for having taken the fragile and imperfect recording in hand and having produced something to which one can listen without wincing too often. Bellini's music is sublime. Del Monaco has been bettered, as has Simionato. But Norma is about Norma, and on 7th December 1955 Norma was Maria Callas. Here, she is simply without any equal whatsoever. This is one of those recording where you forget the sound quality, you do not judge the other singers; you simply concentrate on Norma. And you throw out any other versions you may have (including two other Callas versions).

So many real golden classics of the recorded era date from the 1930s, 40s and 50s. This was the age before the itinerant musical stars took to the air to sing or play on one continent on Monday and another on Tuesday. Germans performed Wagner and Bruckner in a way that does not compare with today. Italians sang Puccini and Verdi … and Bellini, in performances such as you no longer find when the principal tenor flies in from New York and Norma flies in from Moscow. But listen to Callas as heard on 7th December 1955 in Milan and you understand fully and completely why she was so revered and why, to this day, she still has no equal whatsoever.

Rachmaninov and Pletnev

Good food day today, with two excellent plaice for lunch and, for dinner, a plate of smoked salmon followed by (slightly too many) langoustines, perfectly cooked by me. To complete the gastronomy, I felt like a rich, orchestral diet and gravitated towards one of my favourite orchestral works: Rachmaninov's second symphony. I have many versions of this work but always end up with: Mikhail Pletnev conducting the Russian National Orchestral. It sounds: so Russian, in this recording and I have always loved it, and the music. This is music in which one can wallow.

Maria Yudina

My recent purchases of CDs have been heavily slanted towards pianists, and sopranos. Violinists have taken the back seat, for the moment. I already have a very extensive collection of violin recordings, and, alas, the immensely talented new generation is steered almost exclusively towards the same old 9-10 concertos and 9-10 violin and piano sonatas. Even the very highly esteemed – by me --Alina Ibragimova is about to appear with … the Mendelssohn violin concerto of which I already have 74 recordings, the earliest being Fritz Kreisler in 1926. To make things worse, Ibragimova couples the concerto with Mendelssohn's juvenile concerto that Yehudi Menuhin exhumed. Alina won't get my money this time round.

So I've spent my time with sopranos, and currently with the Russian pianist Maria Yudina playing Bach, Liszt, Beethoven and Brahms (Melodiya recordings from the 1950s). 3 ½ hours of Yudina is intensely pleasurable. What comes over (apart from complete technical mastery) is the passionate convinction with which she plays. No feminine delicacy with Yudina; at times she sounds a bit like a Russian T34 tank. She was an eccentric artist (and person) but played as she thought the music should be played; not to make an impression, not just as she was taught. Her sincerity and convinction are completely credible.

Simone Kermes: Drama

I find to my surprise – and delight – that I now have no less that six recital CDs featuring Simone Kermes. The latest, Dramma, is unalloyed delight. Kermes is in her speciality repertoire – opera from the first half of the eighteenth century. She has a lovely voice, she is technically secure in even the most virtuoso arias (such as Giuseppe de Majo's Per trionfar pugnando with which the CD opens). She can also sing softly and beautifully (Porpora's Alto Giove). The band, La Magnifica Comunità, fully lives up to its name. The recording and balance are exactly right. All twelve tracks feature music that is either excellent, or superb. Even the liner notes, by Kermes herself, are highly interesting. All in all, one of those (somewhat) rare discs that is a 100% winner. I think Handel's Lascia ch'io pianga is taken too slowly, as usual. But I had to cavil at something.