Record Review - Byrd, Pierrot Lunaire and Proust, Le Concert Retrouvé

Oh, let's blog on regardless. There is no time like the present.

You might remember a time when it was thought impossible to like both, say, Donna Summer and Led Zeppelin, pop music was so sectarian. I liked them both well enough and had their records at the time but there again, I'm contrary. Either that or open-minded. I remember how remarkable it seemed at Cohesian Tentacle, Gloucester's 'rock' night club, that they played Boogie Nights by Heatwave in among their staple fare of ZZ Top. Presumably because it had the word 'boogie' in it.

Never mind 'classical' music. Three such recent arrivals on disc present just as much of a mixture which can't be compared, only contrasted.

 

Schoenberg, Pierrot Lunaire, Patricia Kopatchinskaja (Alpha)

This is, of course, madness and, I'm glad to find, no less mad than it was 40-odd years ago when I purposefully sought out the mad and avant-garde before finding much longer-lasting joy to be had in the Brandenburg Concertos.

Patricia Kopatchinskaja is well-established enough as a violin player of enormous spirit and gusto that it she can do what she likes and making her own record of Pierrot Lunaire is what she wants to do, in the vocal part.

It's not singing and it's not spoken word, either. It's 'sprechgesang', which I'm glad to see Wikipedia at least define as 'expressionist' because that's what I'd have said. As Schoenberg explained, 

the note is initially indicated, but then immediately moved away from, either falling or rising 

and it would appear to be up to the vocalist where it goes.

Alpha records do some marvellous things and the sumptuous book that this comes in is another of them. It contains much useful history of how this came about, from the Commedia del'Arte, through French C19th poetry, which always seemed some way ahead of Tennyson and Browning, to the commission that Schoenberg said he would have done anyway.

It is music to concentrate on. The poetry is great, performed in German and so you do need the translation to make it worthwhile if your German isn't fluent. Otherwise it might be disconcerting for its own sake.

The disc is filled out with a slightly odd mixture of Strauss and Fritz Kreisler with more Schoenberg and Webern but by then one is less inclined to find anything strange. It's something one had to have although it's not likely to be played very often. It doesn't last too long and so it's ending comes in time for it not to be regarded as a merciful release. 

Perhaps it is the collapse of Romanticism we are hearing. The horror, the torment, the hideous beauty of the individual imploding. Except that, against all expectations, it ends in some sort of resolution.

 

Byrd, Byrd 1588, Alamire, Fretwork, David Skinner (Inventa)

Sanity, decorum and, if anything on two discs of 78 minutes each, plenty enough of it, make this about as opposite to the Pierrot as anything could be. It is great value, it is endlessly forgiving, restrained and welcoming but if Pierrot demands to be listened to or else there's no point, it's tempting to let this float by. That isn't out of the question but it would be a mistake to miss some of its more charming episodes.

Some of the poems set by Byrd are psalms, which one needs to be in the proper penitential mood for or else one would rather not be expected to take seriously their oddball devotions; there are poems by Ariosto, Walter Raleigh; the preposterous claimant to the works of Shakespeare (which isn't his fault), the 17th Earl of Oxford and Philip Sidney but the two laments on the death of Sidney, the glamorous soldier-poet who was revered even more than Boris Johnson is today, that end each disc are the highlights. Slow-moving, slow, moving and, if not quite as eternally wonderful as Josquin's lament for Ockeghem, deserving of being mentioned in the same sentence.

Grace Davidson's soprano is pin-sharp, it seemed to me, when it might have floated more. I've never been convinced that William Byrd was quite as good as Thomas Tallis. This won't be the most exciting record you've ever heard but it is all one expects of it and cleanses as pure water does.

 

Proust: Le Concert Retrouvé, T. Langlois de Swarte, T. de Williencourt (Harmonia Mundi)

But this, that only arrived this morning, is likely to stay on the playlist much longer.

One might have thought that with the Isserlis Proust disc that  arrived not long ago, one might not need more that is similar but it's mostly on the back of how good that disc was that this got in.

Some of the tunes are more familiar, with de Swarte on the Stradivarius and Williencourt on a piano given as much billing in another fine accompanying booklet.

Proust's intimate friend, Reynaldo Hahn need not have done anything else beyond his mock-baroque A Cloris, most perfectly set out by Philippe Jaroussky in the counter-tenor, but here done in an arrangement for pno and vln, and almost as good.

Robert Schumann and Chopin lead into Faure's Violin Sonata no. 1, which is a wide-ranging 23 minutes-plus that belie any assumptions one might still have that he, Ravel and Debussy mostly wrote for Classic FM's soprofic 10pm show. There's plenty more to be had from that and tomorrow I'll be having more of it.

The 3'27 of Francois Courperin would certainly have fooled me on piano rather than harpsichord but after more Faure and before the Hahn finale, there is some Wagner on piano.

I'm not against Wagner because of his anti-semitism. I'm also against Korngold, who was Jewish, and Bruckner for his immense dullness. I'm generally against Wagner because he's 'heavy metal' but some noisy rock bands still made some good tunes and so did Richard Wagner. The transcription by Liszt of Isoldens Liebstod, brings out the best of it, it's possible that less can be more and that we can once in a while forgive ourselves for the release we think we find in such surging emotions.

This must be the pick of the recent releases. I'm looking forward to hearing it more than once tomorrow.