Submitted October 2000

This is volume two in Pearl ’s British film music series and it suffers from many of the same production problems as volume one. These are the original monaural recordings taken from the films in question, some of which go back to the early 1930s (the very earliest is Arthur Bliss’ music to the sci-fi classic Things to Come). Modern listeners might not be able to get past these scratchy and, in some instances, corrupted, recordings. However, the music itself is quite good. Bliss’ aforementioned Things to Come and Arnold Bax’s music to Malta G.C. are filled with rousing themes and nostalgic interludes that make the movies themselves the classics they are. They almost beg for modern, updated performances. The other selections of merit on this release are Vaughan Williams’ scores for Coastal Command and 49 th Parallel. In Coastal Command you can hear tidbits that hark back to Vaughan Williams’ Third Symphony and hint at the dark Fourth Symphony to come.49 th Parallel is only represented by the “Epilogue” to the film, but it’s a real heartbreaker. Its melancholy is surprisingly restrained for Vaughan Williams and has within its brief four minutes the seeds of his Sixth Symphony. It should be better known than it is. In fact, all of this music should be better known than it is, but in far better recordings. But since this series is the only one like it on the market, that alone could be enough to recommend it.

These four pieces for cello and piano by Adrian Williams run the gamut of musical modes of the last one hundred years (with the exception of serialism) to resist any sort of easy categorization. They seem temperamentally to be Romantic and folk-song based. But whatever song-like character they do have is more often than not undercut by the tempestuousness of the piano. Raphael Wallfisch, as usual, turns in wonderful performances on the cello, as in the four understated songs of Quatre Cantilenes, but this isn’t enough to save the rest of the disc. Part of the problem is that the works themselves are schizoid—they don’t know what they want to be or which direction they want to go in. Images of a Mind, for example, suffers from passages of brashness on the piano that seem far too harsh when paired up against the natural melodiousness of the cello. One gets the impression that the composer is very angry about something and doesn’t quite know how to say it (as in Spring Requiem) or is simply not a very good pianist, as in Images of a Mind. This piece really calls for one whose touch is exacting and light. Whatever the case, it’s clear that Williams can compose interesting passages of melodic and harmonic interaction between the two instruments, but he hasn’t yet found a voice—or the right pianist—to help him do it.

Juhani Nuorvala (born in Finland in 1961) is of a generation of young composers still in search of a voice. They know all the tricks of postmodernism as well as the different turns of popular music, including American jazz. Elements of jazz improvisation permeate Three Impromptus for clarinet and kantele, but without jazz’s rhythmic cadences to hold it together. (The kantele is a Finnish harp-like instrument.) Only in the second movement is there any kind of melody, but it’s soon dropped for long, somnambulistic exchanges between the clarinet and the kantele. The work’s atonal character is rather unpleasant and might be due to the odd pairing of the two instruments. Their individual sound characteristics just don’t mesh well. The two String Quartets are the major works here and provide only occasional moments of interest. In the String Quartet No. 2, the composer makes several nods to rock and jazz, but the result sounds strangely like something the Kronos Quartet would knock off at a pops concert—and played about as erratically. The title work here, “What’s a Nice Chord Like You Doing in a Piece Like This”, is for three accordions (all three roles are here performed by Mikko Luoma). It’s more of a curiosity than anything else and its brevity is its greatest virtue. Frankly, these works appear to be Master’s level compositions. As such, only the mildly curious would have any interest in this disc.

This is a re-release of pieces that originally appeared on Chandos 9221, which accounts for the brilliant performances of these standard Benjamin Britten works. Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra is based a theme from Henry Purcell, whose music Britten greatly admired, and makes for an interesting, if pared-down, concerto for orchestra designed to teach young people the way of the orchestra, particularly the virtues of parsimony. Much of Britten’s music was written for the theatre where orchestras are necessarily small. This shows up clearly in his Suite of English Folk Tunes ‘A Time There Was’ which employs the fewest instruments as possible. Unlike the melancholy of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ folksong collections, Britten’s Suite has elements more bitter and sorrowful than one might expect from such a collection. Britten’s Johnson Over Jordan Suite is derived from incidental music to J.B. Priestley’s 1939 play. It’s filled with dramatic flourishes and themes both inspiring and patriotic (perhaps reflecting the nearness of the approaching war in Europe ). It should be better known than it is. The showstopper here is Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes. And though the orchestral forces are very lean, nothing is lost in this music whose impact is staggering. It helps that both orchestra (the Bournemouth Symphony) and conductor (Richard Hickox) are among the best in Great Britain . More particularly, this performance of the Four Sea Interludes is easily one of the best on disc. Hickox captures the loneliness of the man, Peter Grimes, and the beauty and the cruelty of the sea upon which Grimes makes a living. The physical sound of this release tends to lean toward airiness which is a result of the limited orchestral forces in the first three works. But the robust and powerful Four Sea Interludes will absolutely knock your socks off.

Ashot Zograbian (b. 1945) is an Armenian composer who is one of the more advanced practitioners of modern-day serialism, at least the kind produced by the Webern-Boulez school. He also makes use of micro-polyphonic techniques such as those found in Ligeti’s music. String Quartet No. 1 ‘Narcisse’ (1984) is a tour-de-force of serial techniques, bright with glissandi and textured dynamics. The style is freely heterophonic, with long extended lines that take the place of rhythmic structures. It’s intense but never boring or shrill (credit the excellent studio ambience here). Ritual (1993) is for three flutes, with one being a large flute in G and another an alto flute. This piece most resembles Boulez’s writing for wind instruments but has none of Boulez’s unpredictability or his fussiness. Each flute is given coherent but contradictory lines with no regulating rhythmic structure. It’s rather a sound tapestry, pure color. Parable (1992) is for thirteen instruments and makes use here of opposing timbres in the winds with a curiously moderate tonality taken up in the strings, giving the work, in places, a soft meditative character. In Serenade (1982), which follows, the strings provide cohesiveness to an otherwise clashing grouping of instruments taking up the traditional harmonic lines. Here, the influence of Ligeti makes itself felt. Some lines are clearly pointillistic with stretched micro-intervals and this conjures modalities found in Dutilleux and Lutoslawski. Finally, Boomerang Games – Book I (1973) is for nine instruments with the piano taking the foremost role of advancing the thematic ideas of the work. But it should be noted that Zograbian is his own person here. By the time the listener finishes with this music, Boulez, Webern, Stockhausen, et. al. are nowhere in sight. Zograbian’s ideas are fresh and seem like a booster shot to the fading field of pure serialism. The Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble are easily peers to the Ensemble Moderne or Boulez’s own Ensemble InterContemporain. For those interested in advanced post-modernism, this disc is a necessity.

British composer Arnold Bax (1883-1953) was a die-hard romantic whose elegant moodiness set him in stark contrast to his greatest peer, Ralph Vaughan Williams. Whatever his mood, though, Bax never lost sight of the importance of melody in whatever he wrote, particularly in his chamber music. The works on this disc are chamber pieces centering on the harp. Tonally, the harp helps flesh out the character of this music, especially where strings are involved. Actually, the harp in Quintet for Harp and Strings (1919) helps give the work a symphonic feel and has motifs that will show up in several symphonies (the Fourth and Fifth, particularly). The Elegiac Trio (1917) is for harp, flute and viola and is reminiscent of Debussy, but Debussy never used the viola is such a dark manner as in the Trio. It’s an interesting work because of the distinct nature of the three instruments and how Bax juggles them. The Fantasy Sonata for Harp and Viola (1927) gives the harp a more assertive role, but it also allows the viola greater expressive leeway than in the Elegiac Trio. (It could have just as easily been written for harp and violin.) In the Sonata for Flute and Harp (1928) the give-and-take between the two instruments is generally equal, but here the miking on the harp is more muted than it needs to be; the miking on the flute is spot-on. The performances of the mobius ensemble (yes, lower case) here are generally good, with Lorna McGee (flute) and Alison Nicholls (harp) being the standouts. But like so many recordings of chamber music, the overall sound is slightly vaporous. Bax’s music has a built-in “depth” that a fuller sound requires. Bax aficionados, though, should find much here to admire.

Peter Heise (1830-1879) was born in Denmark and was intended by his family to become a lawyer, but after graduating with high marks, he chose music as a career instead. Romanticism was just flowering in Scandinavia and Heise became part of a musical generation that collected (and sometimes reformulated) folk songs of the region. Heise has hundreds of these songs to his credit. The two works on this release, Tornerose (a version of Sleeping Beauty written in 1873) and Bergliot (a Danish historical romance written in 1866) are built from these indigenous folk songs. Musically, however, Heise was profoundly influenced by the great German composers of his era, both living and dead. So in places the music can sound like German beer-hall songs (as in the opening of Tornerose ‘ I borgen hist hun hviler’) or German lieder (just about anything sung by the character ‘the hermit’ in Tornerose). Neither of the two works are operas or theatre pieces, however. They are more like cantatas with roles for soloists. Of the soloists here, the standouts are Stephen Milling (bass) and Helle Charlotte Pederson (soprano). One could wish, however, for a less matronly mezzo-soprano than Marianne Rorholm. Still, the music is lovingly performed, the sound rich with considerable sonic depth, typical of many dacapo releases. Recommended for 19 th century romanticists.

This disc presents two fairly conservative choral works by Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998). Elements of Schnittke’s famous polystylism are, for the most part, missing here, with both the Concerto for Choir (1990) and the Requiem (1975) framed in a recognizably tonal style. This may have something to do with the religious (or liturgical) nature of both works. Only in Requiem does Schnittke’s distinct character appear, with pointillistic passages among the female voices. Requiem has its origin as a Rex aeternam taken from his incidental music to Schiller’s play Don Carlos. With an eerie organ in the background (wrong notes and all), the mood is thoroughly spectral—and not without hints of Schnittke’s sly sense of humor. Schnittke’s Concerto for Choir is for a mixed a cappella choir based on the Book of Lamentations, a 10 th century Slavic mystical text. It’s dominated by strong vocal harmonics and actual melodies. Those used to Schnittke as the unpredictable master of hairpin turns and outbursts of brash atonality won’t find any of that here. The performances are quite good, particularly the female voices which have to tackle the upper registers with strength and clarity. The physical sound could be a shade cleaner than it is, however. Even though the text for both works is provided in the accompanying booklet, in places, particularly in the Choir Concerto, it’s a bit hard to follow. Still, these two works definitely belong in anyone’s Schnittke collection.

These are three appallingly bad performances of three admittedly difficult piano concertos by Bela Bartok. There is enough blame for this to go around to just about everyone involved in this project. Most can go to the Sinfonia of Leeds whose brass section seems to be made up of high school performers. The notes are often flat and when they aren’t, they clash with every other instrument nearby. The soloist Sir Ernest Hall is competent enough, but he is clearly more comfortable with adagio passages and mild-tempered cadenzas that allow him some breathing room where the orchestra doesn’t get in the way. Still, the difficult passages seem to confound everybody, including the conductor, David Creed. This can be seen in the opening sections of Piano Concerto No. 1 where Creed can’t mesh the piano’s entry with the rest of the orchestra, which is playing at an entirely different tempo. Part of this has to do with Bartok’s own lack of specificity regarding the tempos in the opening of Piano Concerto No. 1, but since other performers have gotten it right, it seems reasonable to expect Hall, Creed, et. al., to get it right as well. Other problems, mostly of miking, plague Concertos No. 2 and 3. Some of the sound ambience suggests a recording venue other than a recital hall or studio. (A high school gym with wooden floors?) In any event, this disc is really to be avoided.

Alexander Glazunov (1866-1936) lived long enough to see modernism take root throughout Europe , including Russia where his greatest student, Dmitri Shostakovich, was already making a name for himself. But it never affected Glazunov’s own music. He remained a 19 th century Russian Romantic until the day he died. This collection takes bits and pieces from various Naxos releases in their Glazunov series and structures them in such a way as to provide a good hour’s worth of listening. Glazunov’s showstoppers are here, mostly in three tasty excerpts from The Seasons (including the brilliant “Autumn”) as well as the allegro from the Violin Concerto (the soloist is Ilya Kaler, the orchestra the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, all of whom are excellent). Also here are three selections from Glazunov’s underrated Raymonda, a Scheherazade-like ballet full of memorable melodies. The disc opens, however, with an excerpt from Finnish Sketches (“Solemn Procession”) that should be better known than it is. Excerpts are also here from two symphonies, the Second and the Fourth. Naxos has yet to record Glazunov’s greatest symphony, the Fifth, so it’s not represented. All of the performances are topnotch and the recorded sound lush and rich. This is music that seems almost impossible to get wrong. If you’re new to Glazunov, start here.

This release of three 20 th century works for solo guitar should come as good news for those of us tired of solo guitar albums that center around Villa-Lobos and Rodrigo. Soloist Dale Kavanagh (who has recorded works by both Rodrigo and Villa-Lobos), has made it a point to take on non-traditional guitar works in both her recordings and her concerts. Gathered here are Variations After an Anatolian Folk Song by Carlo Domeniconi (b. 1947), Folia de Espana by Manuel-Maria Ponce (1882-1948) and Nocturnal by Benjamin Britten. If these composers have one thing in common (at least regarding their writing for guitar), it’s that they employ various Baroque techniques. This allows for a much cleaner (and clearer) enunciation of musical ideas. This also has the effect of stripping away any Romantic dolorousness, especially the kind found in both Villa-Lobos and Rodrigo. None of these works requires any extreme prolixity, but it’s clear that Ms. Kavanagh handle very difficult passages. The middle sections of Manuel-Maria Ponce’s Variations highlight this. In fact, throughout these works Ms. Kavanagh reveals at least two performances strengths. The first is her light touch. She never attacks this music; she’s never showy or dramatic. Second, she has remarkable control over her left hand technique which only occasionally allows for finger “slides” were the strings squeak. It’s almost as if she doesn’t want to attract attention to the performer: only the music matters. For guitar enthusiasts, particularly those who have had all the Rodrigo and Villa-Lobos they can stand, this disc will come as thorough delight.

Once again, Chandos scores big with this release of two obscure works of Camille Saint-Saens (1835-1921). Both recordings have the hallmarks of Chandos engineering: a rich, yet fully articulate studio sound (for Suite algerienne) and a warm, carefully balanced live (or performance) recording of La Princesse Jaune. In the latter there is virtually no ambient audience sound, no coughs, no applause. But all the verve of a live performance is there. Both works come out of Saint-Saens’ love of postcards and their evocative images of faraway places. Suite algerienne (1879) is based on the composer’s love of Algeria (he would eventually die there) and is a picture postcard tour of the region that was once a French colony. Included here is also a lighthearted rendition of the famous “Marche Militaire Francaise” which is commonly excerpted or performed on its own. La Princesse jaune (or The Yellow Princess) was first performed in 1872 and arose out of an opera commission. Saint-Saens chose to do a small operetta instead. It’s for two solo voices and a off-stage choir and centers around a man ,who, tired of his wife, has a drug-related hallucination, imagining a better life with a Japanese woman. His wife sings to him while he’s in the dream-state and becomes the Japanese lover. When he awakes, he realizes his love for his wife was never stronger. It’s a rather pleasant divertissement, more melodious than dramatic, and it’s a very strange topic for an operetta. These are, admittedly, minor works, but they are very well performed and allow the listener to get a glimpse of one of the last great French Romantic composers at work before Impressionism puts them all out of business. Highly recommended.

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