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GRAMOPHONE AWARDS SHORTLIST 2018 Blue Heron and conductor Scott Metcalfe impress with Vol 5 in their ‘Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks’ series (see previous page) I T M A N W K A T H Y : P H O T O G R A P H Y The singers use a variety of techniques to engage and communicate, from beautiful clear phrasing to crisp, expressive consonants, which at times allows them to tread a deliciously thin line between soft singing and electrifying stage whispers. Every performance on this disc is illuminating, considered and committed. Take for instance the madrigal by Giovanni da Firenze (fl1340‑50): Angnel son biancho from the Panciatichi Codex, a moralising tale told from the point of view of a sacrificial lamb. The bright, shimmering sopranos Yukie Sato and Perrine Devillers sing in delicate unison as the voice of this lamb, relishing the onomatopoeic bleating in the text until the actual sacrifice is mentioned, leaving just one soprano to finish the madrigal with poignant stillness. More than once, this album has confronted me with old favourites performed in new ways. Solage’s (fl late 14th century) harmonically slithery, menacing ballade Le basile I had much admired in the rich, smooth vocalised performance by Gothic Voices on their then groundbreaking album ‘The Study of Love’ (Hyperion, 6/93), but here, Vivien Simon’s gloriously clear tenor voice is absolutely bewitching. Edward Breen (12/17) ‘Stravaganza d’Amore!’ ‘The Birth of Opera at the Medici Court, 1589‑1608’ Including music by Allegri, Brunelli, Buonamente, Caccini, Cavalieri, Fantini, Gagliano, Malvezzi, Marenzio, Orologio, Peri and Striggio Pygmalion / Raphaël Pichon Harmonia Mundi F b HMM90 2286/7 (103’ • DDD) Hardback book includes texts and translations This two-record set takes as its starting point the various strains of dramatic music that fed into early Florentine opera, above all the legendary and spectacular intermedi put together for the 1589 Medici wedding. Unprecedented in scale and unified by the theme of the power of music, this music is historically important precisely because it is constructed out of the elements from which early opera evolved, within a decade, in the same city. Ten excerpts are presented here, together with substantial sections from Giulio Caccini’s Il rapimento di Cefalo, Marco da Gagliano’s La Dafne and both Caccini’s and Jacopo Peri’s settings of L’Euridice, together with a selection of other works from the period in a variety of styles and forms by a constellation of composers. By grouping them into six imaginary intermedi defined by themes (‘La favola d’Apollo’, ‘Le lagrime d’Orfeo’ and so on), Raphaël Pichon has ingeniously encouraged structured listening across composers and genres of a kind that rarely occurs on record; the results are fascinating and, at times, revelatory. This is not to say that all these pieces are masterpieces. Some, such as Malvezzi’s Sinfonia, were written simply to disguise the creaking of the stage machinery as the sets were changed. As with so much stage music designed to project a message across the footlights, many of them originally formed just one element in a complex experience designed to evoke a sense of ‘wonder’, induced by costumes, lighting, scenic effects and the music itself, which was intended to stupefy the listeners through the virtuosity of the performers and the unparalleled size of the forces required. Pichon and Pygmalion rise to this challenge magnificently. Speeds are finely judged, the sense of vocal and instrumental ensemble is well balanced and there is some impressive solo singing, including Luciana Mancini’s carefully wrought rendition of ‘Lassa, che di spavento’ from Caccini’s L’Euridice. Elsewhere there is some spectacular improvised instrumental ornamentation (just occasionally a little exaggerated), while the whole is expertly underpinned by a rich array of continuo instruments. The fruits of an ambitious and carefully researched project, these records come encased in a beautifully presented illustrated hardback book, with three essays and the texts of the vocal works translated into English, French, and German. Iain Fenlon 22 GRAMOPHONE SHORTLIST 2018 Click on album covers to buy from gramophone.co.uk
page 23
Instrumental GRAMOPHONE AWARDS SHORTLIST 2018 Beethoven Piano Sonatas – No 14, ‘Moonlight’, Op 27 No 2; No 29, ‘Hammerklavier’, Op 106 Murray Perahia pf DG F 479 8353 (56’ • DDD) SThe first thing we should do in approaching this musically remarkable and, in terms of its exploration of the composer’s tempest-tossed inner life, extraordinarily fascinating addition to the Beethoven discography is banish all thoughts of moonlight. A further assumption it might be useful to set aside, as we attend to what Murray Perahia calls ‘two of the most radically groundbreaking of the composer’s 32 piano sonatas’, is that the Hammerklavier is the more difficult of the two pieces. I’m not thinking here of the finger-wrenching challenge of actually delivering the Hammerklavier, something the unbridled fury of the finale of the earlier sonata interestingly presages. Rather, I’m thinking of the imaginative and technical challenges that the emotionally complex Sonata quasi una fantasia in the then alien key of C sharp minor presents to the player: first in seeking out its essence, then in distilling that essence on whatever keyboard circumstance or time provides. (As Charles Rosen observed, the sonata’s finale shredded the pianos of 1801 as surely as its opening movement troubles more modern ones.) One of the many problems presented by the meditative opening movement is that there is no ready-made solution to the question of the speed at which the music should move, other than that which the accomplished interpreter discovers for himself, be it Ignaz Friedman in one of the earliest of all recordings (Columbia, 2/27) or Murray Perahia today. Thus Solomon, in a famous HMV recording (10/54), takes nearly nine minutes over the movement, whereas Perahia, in his luminously voiced yet at the same time emotionally riven performance, takes a little over five. And make no mistake, this is desolate music. ‘A pale light glimmers above the whispered pianissimo triplets, from whose dark depths the grief-laden melody ascends’, wrote Wilhelm Kempff, whose 1956 mono recording (DG, 10/57) is not dissimilar to Perahia’s, for all that Kempff occasionally allows, for expressive effect, a barely perceptible pause in those whispered triplets. We re-encounter this mastery of musical discourse, albeit at greater length and on a higher plane, in Perahia’s free-flowing yet lofty account of the great soliloquy that stands at the heart of the Hammerklavier. Kempff was one of the few pianists of his generation who avoided ponderousness in the Moonlight’s middle movement. Perahia, too, catches well the dance’s melancholy grace and epigrammatic charm; and though his account of the Trio is properly robust, the almost hallucinatory quality Beethoven brings to the drone bass in the Trio’s concluding bars is not lost on Perahia. Thus, when the dance returns, it too appears to have taken on something of the mood of barely suppressed pain that is the sonata’s abiding characteristic. It’s been said that the work’s undeniably angry finale tries too hard, is too repetitive. There’s no sense of that in Perahia’s reading, which has exactly the right degree of implacability, for all that he’s happy to play Beethoven’s game of false dawns with a gracious approach to the recapitulation and a decorous descent from the coda’s emblazoning high trill to the pit below. The ferocity with which the two last chords are delivered suggests, however, that the composer’s travails are not yet over. A late chapter in this same story arrived with the composition of the Hammerklavier in 1818, by which time Beethoven had become, in JWN Sullivan’s words, ‘the great solitary’, ‘a man of infinite courage, infinite suffering’. Much ink has been spilled on how rapidly the first movement should travel. ‘Uncommonly quick and fiery’ was Czerny’s judgement, an approach that echoes the spirit, if not the letter, of Beethoven’s hairraising metronome mark. Artur Schnabel attempted that in his legendary HMV recording (11/36) made in exile in London in 1935, by which time the once ‘flawless’ playing (Claudio Arrau’s testimony) was no longer entirely flawless. For all his own tribulations in recent years, Perahia’s playing pretty well is. His approach to the first movement is never reckless yet it’s essentially ‘quick and fiery’, the fearless ambassador to a still untamed spirit. Perahia is artist enough to know that great art is never, of itself, ugly. It may be Beethoven’s instinct to push every component of the dauntingly complex contrapuntal finale to its logical conclusion (and beyond) but Perahia, though honouring the intent, declines to turn the music into a rout. In matters of musical diction, lucidity matters. Not long before the sonata’s end, Beethoven introduces a three-part fugato, a lyric inspiration of rare beauty, limpid in D. In the context of this carefully gauged programme, we might be tempted to recall the similarly precarious beauties of the C sharp minor Sonata’s opening movement – except that, for some inexplicable reason, the producers have placed the sonata after the Hammerklavier. That lapse notwithstanding, this is a disc, naturally and vividly recorded, of rare distinction and pedigree. Richard Osborne (3/18) Brahms Piano Pieces – Op 76 Nos 1‑4; Op 117; Op 118 Arcadi Volodos pf Sony Classical F 88875 13019-2 (54’ • DDD) This is one of those discs where a word count is a strange thing. For it needs only four: Go Buy This Disc. Or 4000, trying to capture why it is and how it is that Volodos creates the magic he does. It’s four long years since his quietly astounding Mompou recital (8/13), which put the composer on the map for many and walked off with pretty much every award going. Brahms might seem a very different proposition but Volodos inhabits every note, every phrase with just as much conviction. My only plaint is that there could have been more – we get only the first four out of the Eight Piano Pieces, Op 76, though Opp 117 and 118 are complete. But that is a minor niggle; all these pieces have featured in his recitals and his familiarity with their every phrase is abundantly obvious. And whatever he does, you can’t imagine the music going any gramophone.co.uk Click on album covers to buy from GRAMOPHONE SHORTLIST 2018 23

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GRAMOPHONE AWARDS SHORTLIST 2018

Blue Heron and conductor Scott Metcalfe impress with Vol 5 in their ‘Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks’ series (see previous page)

I T M A N

W

K A T H Y

:

P H O T O G R A P H Y

The singers use a variety of techniques to engage and communicate, from beautiful clear phrasing to crisp, expressive consonants, which at times allows them to tread a deliciously thin line between soft singing and electrifying stage whispers. Every performance on this disc is illuminating, considered and committed. Take for instance the madrigal by Giovanni da Firenze (fl1340‑50): Angnel son biancho from the Panciatichi Codex, a moralising tale told from the point of view of a sacrificial lamb. The bright, shimmering sopranos Yukie Sato and Perrine Devillers sing in delicate unison as the voice of this lamb, relishing the onomatopoeic bleating in the text until the actual sacrifice is mentioned, leaving just one soprano to finish the madrigal with poignant stillness. More than once, this album has confronted me with old favourites performed in new ways. Solage’s (fl late 14th century) harmonically slithery, menacing ballade Le basile I had much admired in the rich, smooth vocalised performance by Gothic Voices on their then groundbreaking album ‘The Study of Love’ (Hyperion, 6/93), but here, Vivien Simon’s gloriously clear tenor voice is absolutely bewitching. Edward Breen (12/17)

‘Stravaganza d’Amore!’ ‘The Birth of Opera at the Medici Court, 1589‑1608’ Including music by Allegri, Brunelli,

Buonamente, Caccini, Cavalieri, Fantini, Gagliano, Malvezzi, Marenzio, Orologio, Peri and Striggio Pygmalion / Raphaël Pichon Harmonia Mundi F b HMM90 2286/7 (103’ • DDD) Hardback book includes texts and translations

This two-record set takes as its starting point the various strains of dramatic music that fed into early Florentine opera, above all the legendary and spectacular intermedi put together for the 1589 Medici wedding. Unprecedented in scale and unified by the theme of the power of music, this music is historically important precisely because it is constructed out of the elements from which early opera evolved, within a decade, in the same city. Ten excerpts are presented here, together with substantial sections from Giulio Caccini’s Il rapimento di Cefalo, Marco da Gagliano’s La Dafne and both Caccini’s and Jacopo Peri’s settings of L’Euridice, together with a selection of other works from the period in a variety of styles and forms by a constellation of composers. By grouping them into six imaginary intermedi defined by themes (‘La favola d’Apollo’, ‘Le lagrime d’Orfeo’ and so on), Raphaël Pichon has ingeniously encouraged structured listening across composers and genres of a kind that rarely occurs on record; the results are fascinating and, at times, revelatory.

This is not to say that all these pieces are masterpieces. Some, such as Malvezzi’s Sinfonia, were written simply to disguise the creaking of the stage machinery as the sets were changed. As with so much stage music designed to project a message across the footlights, many of them originally formed just one element in a complex experience designed to evoke a sense of ‘wonder’, induced by costumes, lighting, scenic effects and the music itself, which was intended to stupefy the listeners through the virtuosity of the performers and the unparalleled size of the forces required. Pichon and Pygmalion rise to this challenge magnificently. Speeds are finely judged, the sense of vocal and instrumental ensemble is well balanced and there is some impressive solo singing, including Luciana Mancini’s carefully wrought rendition of ‘Lassa, che di spavento’ from Caccini’s L’Euridice. Elsewhere there is some spectacular improvised instrumental ornamentation (just occasionally a little exaggerated), while the whole is expertly underpinned by a rich array of continuo instruments. The fruits of an ambitious and carefully researched project, these records come encased in a beautifully presented illustrated hardback book, with three essays and the texts of the vocal works translated into English, French, and German. Iain Fenlon

22 GRAMOPHONE SHORTLIST 2018

Click on album covers to buy from gramophone.co.uk

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