Jóhann Jóhannsson: Piano Works (CD Review)

by Karl Nehring 

Jóhannsson: Bad; Odo et Amo/Krókódíll; Englabörn; Jöi & Karen; Flugeldar II; Já, Hemmi Minn; Ruslpóstur; The Sun’s Gone Dim and the Sky’s Turned Black; Melodia (III); Theme from “Varmints”; Dressing Up; Linda & Walter; Indian Wedding; He Says It’s the Future; Eleven Thousand Six Hundred and Sixty-nine Died of Natural Causes; Flight from the City; Innocence; Will’s Story I; Time to Say Goodbye; Payphone; A Game of Croquet; A Model of the Universe; The Theory of Everything; Beauty; A Sparrow Alighted Upon Our Shoulder; By the Roes, and by the Hinds of the Field; Good Morning, Midnight; The Drowned World; The Radiant City; Be Over. Alice Sara Ott, piano. Deutsche Grammophon 486 7513

The late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson (1969-2018) was perhaps best known for his film scores, such as those for the movies Sicario and Arrival. His compositions often combined elements of classical, electronic, and ambient music to create soundscapes that are contemplative and inward-focused – serious, but somehow neither morose nor depressing. We have reviewed several previous releases that have included his compositions, including his Drone Mass(Deutsche Grammophon 483 7418) in 2022 (that review can be found here) and A Prayer to the Dynamo (Deutsche Grammophon 486 4870 (that review can be found here). Although Jóhannsson’s soundtracks and other compositions often featured imaginative scoring to produce their intended effects, what we have here with this new release from the German pianist Alice Sara Ott (b. 1988) is a whole new way of experiencing Jóhannsson’s music. “What’s so incredible about Jóhann Jóhannsson’s music,” she writes, is how his compositions, originally written for larger ensembles and different instruments translate so beautifully to the piano. Within this more focused and intimate sound world, the music reveals hidden nuances and enhances clarity that are so intrinsic to his music.”

When a single CD contains 30 tracks, the average length of those tracks cannot be very long, and most of the tracks here come in at under two minutes. They are brief vignettes, sound sketches that capture the essence of a mood, feeling, hope, fear, or other mental state. Jóhannsson was primarily a composer of music for film; Ott has taken brief themes from some of his scores and transcribed them for piano, capturing their essence and revealing their direct emotional and aesthetic appeal. There is a sense of innocent yearning that runs throughout this music, a yearning for something lost – something that cannot quite ever be fully restored, but which nonetheless offers a glimmer of how things could be. 

 

The music connects directly not to outward emotion, but to the roots of emotion, aided by the directness of the sound of the piano on which Ott chose to record her transcriptions of Jóhannsson’s music. “We decided to record most of the pieces on an old upright piano that Bergur [Bergur Þórisson, producer/engineer] has in his studio,” Ott explains in the CD booklet. “I was absolutely in love with it. It was one of the most beautiful upright pianos I’ve ever played on. The felted sound creates this sense of nostalgia, like memories of something that’s gone. The microphones were very close to the piano, so the sound feels incredibly present and intimate, almost as if you’re looking directly into his inner world.” 

 

Not only the sound, but also the music feels present and immediate, as though offering a look not only into Jóhannsson’s inner world, but into the inner world of the listener. Enthusiastically recommended.

Holst: The Planets; Bax: Tintagel (Streaming Review)

by Ryan Ross

Antonio Pappano, conductor; London Symphony Orchestra. LSO Live 0904

The London Symphony Orchestra's commitment to British repertoire continues apace, with these two 2024 live Barbican performances led by chief conductor Antonio Pappano. They pair an established favorite (Holst's The Planets) with a work that deserves equal love (Bax's Tintagel). My provisional opinion of Pappano is that he is a fine if somewhat inconsistent conductor, so I was curious how he'd handle this duo. I’d say he comes just under my benchmark. Here's a good and not a great Planets, followed by a mediocre rather than good Tintagel.

 

The best things about this Planets are superb recorded sound and what it does for Pappano’s handling of the numinous passages. Delicate timbres in Mercury, Saturn, and Neptune, for instance, sparkle with radiant mystery. Here is an object lesson in what’s possible when technology, orchestral skill, and conductor sensitivity work together effectively. If there were nothing more to The Planets, this would rate among its top recordings. Unfortunately for Pappano, there is. The extravert sides of this masterpiece are both more iconic and exactly where he comes up short. The marches in Jupiter and Uranus feel sluggish, with the Thaxted tune missing that last bit of earnestness. Mars is bright enough, but its aggression is blunted by a slowish main pace and positively languid middle portions. Especially regrettable is a dimmed lyrical brass when the outer sections turn to major-mode affirmation. This should sound much more battle-lusty. “Mars the Bringer of Peace Talks” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

 

Before I go any further, I’ll confess to being a committed Baxian. This composer definitely got the short end of the historiographical stick. The same modernist snobbery that bit Vaughan Williams’s reception hard following his death doomed the once-prominent Arnold Bax to a marginality from which he’s never re-emerged. To the extent his name has been kept alive it’s thanks significantly to Tintagel, of which there are now well more than a dozen recordings. There should be even more. With perhaps 2-3 of Bax’s other tone poems, it’s some of the most compelling music to come out of Britain. If a revival of his oeuvre is still possible, it will build on these treasures.

 

Which is why I’m sad to report that Pappano’s Tintagel is a squandered opportunity. If you expect him to apply his best, RVW 4-style vigor you’ll be disappointed. This is a lethargic Tintagel that captures the seascape portion of Bax’s program remarks, but perhaps only on a cloudy day. It misses what he says of Arthur and Tristan, of knights and legends. Pappano and the LSO sink beneath the music’s luxurious harmonies like a leaky barge off the Cornish coast. They don’t seem comfortable with the composer’s thick textures. Compare this with David Lloyd-Jones’s definitive interpretation from over two decades ago (Naxos 8.557145), where there is a much stronger grasp of the idiom. Lloyd-Jones knew how to navigate those big blocks of sound, and to keep his orchestra from getting bogged down. His approach is bold and virile, while Pappano succumbs to flabbiness. In a world hungry for fantasy, Tintagel has the potential to capture audience imagination. Pappano’s LSO may sparkle in Holst’s cosmic mysteries, but when it comes to Bax’s immersive world of myth, the magic simply doesn’t take hold.

 

The nice thing about our streaming age is that I can resist recommendations on the basis of whole albums. About 4-5 tracks of this recording are well worth buying and putting into playlists. I wouldn’t mind if I never heard the others again. As someone who still loves the hard product, with its booklets and cover art, I’ll at least take the win of having piecemeal options here.

Mahler: Symphony No. 7 (CD Review)

by Ryan Ross 

Mahler: Symphony No. 7 in E Minor. National Symphony Orchestra; Gianandrea Noseda, conductor. National Symphony Orchestra NSO0022

The conventional wisdom is that Mahler 7 is an enigmatic work. But as I have said elsewhere, it is not terribly enigmatic if you do a little homework and apply some imagination. In his program notes to the present release, Thomas May provides a bit of the former, pointing out Alma Mahler’s and Henry-Louis de la Grange’s testimony that the first four movements show the composer preoccupied with positive tropes from favorite German literature: “visions of Eichendorff’s poetry, rippling fountains, German Romanticism.” So far so good. But then May seems as hung up by the “affirmative” finale as La Grange and Theodor W. Adorno were before him. Why does this boisterous span abruptly end the symphony? Well, maybe it’s not really affirmative. If we remember that Mahler had been conducting Tristan und Isolde with great success in the years surrounding this symphony’s composition and recall what goes on in the second act of Wagner’s opera, it’s not far-fetched to see the diurnal finale as tragic in its own way. The enchanting realm of night vanishes. A forbidden tryst comes to an end. Magic gives way to bustling mundanity. 

 

Gianandrea Noseda has the bustling mundanity part of the Seventh down pat. Maybe too pat. Little in this performance suggests familiarity with Eichendorff, Novalis, or their world. Here’s the issue in a nutshell: the fast parts are too frenetically empty, and the slow parts aren’t atmospheric enough. The bolder, march-like sections in the first movement need a more bracing sound, with articulation that is sculpted instead of clangy. There is a deficit of conception here and in the Schattenhaft (“shadowy”) third movement. I was not reminded of shadows so much as a drying machine cycle. Similar misgivings manifested throughout. 

 

More disappointing still are the two Nachtmusik (“night music”) movements. Noseda almost entirely misses the importance of several elements in them. The ethereal horn calls of the first often appear with the cowbell. Mahler had a special affinity for the cowbell, associating its sounds with the last things heard as one leaves civilization to venture beyond. The timbres need a certain sensitivity here. Instead, they’re slightly plunky. Ditto the distant trumpet calls at Rehearsal 95. Think of the posthorn in Eichendorff’s Sehnsucht, or the background hunting horns in Act II of Tristan. True, the closing measures of the movement come closer to this ideal, but many other opportunities were missed. The second Nachtmusik simply needs more warmth and elegance. Clocking in at 12:08, it just zooms by, making the gentle ostinato figures seem more like a sewing machine than the evocation of evening fountains and breezes. Again, the articulations are too choppy and somewhat dry. 

 

The finale comes off better for two reasons. First, if the orchestral players are skilled (which they certainly are here), it is the hardest part to mess up interpretively. Second and relatedly, it blunts the negative impact of Noseda’s slightly spasmodic approach to quicker passages. In other words, things are supposed to sound a bit bombastic; this covers for him to a large extent. That all said, the articulation here still feels a bit less than polished; even a hectic farewell needs more differentiation than Noseda can give it. The best way to illustrate this is by calling attention to a secondary melody’s later entry at Rehearsal 269. This is a kind of rapid march parody that Noseda and his group nail. But too often the rest of the symphony (never mind the movement) sounds too much like this particular juncture! We need greater range than he can supply. If the finale’s daylight is tragic precisely because it dissolves the nocturnal world, then a conductor must make that nocturnal world palpable. Noseda doesn’t.

 

The Mahler symphonies have become a runaway bandwagon. Listening to one lackluster recording after another, I keep thinking how a command of the little things in this music adds up to big things, and how few conductors actually wield this command. If the Seventh is not as enigmatic as many let on, it nonetheless requires a robust toolkit to bring off convincingly in all its facets. I don’t need a third hand to count the recordings that truly accomplish this. Two of these remain towering benchmarks: Abbado with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (DG 445 513-2), and Leonard Bernstein with the New York Philharmonic (DG 419-211-2). Several more are fine indeed, but the group remains rarefied. Certainly Noseda and the NSO haven’t entered it.