Recent Releases No. 70 (CD Reviews)

by Karl Nehring

Haydn: 48 Piano Sonatas. Daniel-Ben Pienaar, piano. AVIE AV257

In yet another project undertaken in the dark days of the COVID-19 pandemic, South African pianist Daniel-Ban Pienaar has produced this imposing box set containing eight compact discs on which he has recorded as the cover declares “the 39 authenticated multi-movement solo keyboard works from 1765 onwards and nine earlier works presumed to be Haydn’s, or probably his, by the vast majority of scholars.” These works include: Four early Sonatas (listed in Haydn’s Entwurf-Katalog of 1765); Six Sonatas (1765-1772); Six Sonatas dedicated to Prince Nicolas Esterházy (c. 1773, published in 1774); Six Sonatas (1774-?76); Six Sonata dedicated to Katharina and Marianna Auenbrugger (published in 1880); Three Sonatas (published in London in 1783); Three Sonatas for Princess Maria Esterházy (published in 1784); Two Sonatas (1789-90); Three English Sonatas (1794-95); plus Variations in F minor (1793) and nine early Sonatas widely presumed to be by Haydn. Pienaar’s liner notes go into great detail about the difficulty of making a “definitive cycle” of Haydn’s works for piano owing to questions of authenticity. He also offers some remarks concerning how to approach performing these works today.

 I was surprised to discover in the liner note credits that for this release Pienaar had done his own recording and editing. Above the list of credits here is a photo of his piano with the following caption: “The Angela Burgess Recital Hall at the Royal Academy of Music, London. The recording took place in a series of overnight sessions in late 2020, with no engineer or producer present. A single pair of suspended omni-directional microphones was used.” Pienaar is on the faculty at the Royal Academy of Music, which gave him easy access to this recording venue and the associated equipment; still, it is unusual for an artist to record without the assistance of an engineer or producer.  

There is a helpfully informative article by Pienaar in the November 14, 2023, issue of the International Piano Newsletter in which the pianist discusses this recording in considerable detail; I recommend it highly. As with the liner notes, he discusses the difficulties involved in putting together the set of sonatas to record and his approach to performing them. But as something of a hopeless old boomer audiophile, I could not help but be particularly fascinated by Pienaar’s account of the recording process: 

 

“I started recording at the end of the summer, at the Royal Academy of Music in London. The Academy’s Angela Burgess Recital Hall is fitted with a single pair of omnidirectional mics that are pretty good – so I just positioned the piano in the best way I could and played and played, without an engineer or producer. I got permission to access the building overnight, and I tended to work on Saturday nights. I would record about one CD’s worth of music on each of these nights, spending altogether eight nights between September and December. It then took me about five weeks to choose takes and edit everything (I always edit my own work). It was especially important for me that everything should remain ‘fresh’ and that I should capture a feeling of making music for myself, allowing myself to be surprised by Haydn’s music, and exploring in the way I do every day at the piano – thus working in an intimate hall, on my own, and using the simplest means of recording… Every album of mine has been a kind of experiment in avoiding the glossiness that seems almost de rigueur nowadays when it comes to recorded sound. The question to ask is: what are we trying to achieve with recorded sound? Are we just evoking a space? As a listener I don’t really want to be transported to an empty concert hall. And it is important to engage the imagination of the listener – does the recorded sound allow that to happen? It feels to me that the mind is better at filling in some ‘gaps’ in audio information than subtracting it in the case of unrealistic, excessive amounts of resolution and detail.”

 

The sound quality is quite satisfying. The first noticeable quality is that there seems to be just the right amount of distance between the microphones/our ears and the piano. This is not one of those piano recordings where we hear every little click of the keys or creak of the piano bench. On the other hand, it is also not one of those recordings with an abundance of ambient background room or hall sound. At the same time, the sound is full-bodied and dynamic, sounding very much like a piano. 

 

Later in this same article, Pienaar goes on to comment about the music, using a term that I found surprising: “The combination of elements in Haydn’s music strikes me, perhaps more than anything, as rather mysterious. There is something one can’t quite put one’s finger on which makes it beautiful in a special way – very different from the totally disarming sensuality and emotion of Mozart.” It’s the word “mysterious” that caught me off-guard, for it is not the word that I would think of to describe this music, which sounds to my ears as something of a mixture of Bach and Mozart, but leaning more to the latter than the former. But I am not a pianist, nor a musician. I have no adequate words to describe Haydn’s keyboard music, other than to say I find it spirited and enjoyable. Pienaar is certainly WAY more qualified than I to describe this music; upon reflection, I find his use of the term “mysterious” stimulating and delightful.

 

Those same terms – “stimulating” and “delightful” – are also apt descriptions of this boxed set as a whole. There is much delight to be discovered in the piano music of Haydn, and this set offers the music lover a way to sit back and dig in. Whether one might want to methodically work their way through the whole set from start to finish or instead randomly listen to a few selections here and there while perusing the CD booklet for background information, this release offers those opportunities in a package of excellent quality. 

 

The Complete Beethoven Piano Concertos. (CD1) Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Major, Op. 15; No. 2 in B-flat Major, Op. 19; (CD2) No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37; No. 4 in G Major, Op. 58; (CD3) No. 5 in E-flat Major, Op. 58; Overture to The Creatures of Prometheus, Op. 43. Garrick Ohlsson, piano; Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra; Sir Donald Runnicles, conductor. Reference Recordings FR-751SACD

 

I must preface this review by shamefacedly admitting that it is inexcusably late in seeing the light of day. Poor Garrick Ohlsson, Sir Donald Runnicles, and the entire Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra (or, more precisely, this particular copy of their Beethoven concertos recording) somehow managed to disappear in my listening room for a period of many months, cleverly evading my determined search. Happily enough, though, I finally came upon it – pretty much by accident, of course – and am finally able to pass along the recommendation that I should by all rights have passed along many months ago. In the CD booklet, pianist Garrick Ohlsson (b. 1948) remarks that over the course of his long career he has performed each of the Beethoven concertos more than 100 times and that he was excited to have the opportunity to collaborate with Sir Donald Runnicles to record these works over the span of a week of concert performances in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The CD booklet includes an essay by producer Vic Muenzer in which he goes into a fair amount of detail about the recording process in some detail.

 

The end result is set of Beethoven concertos that is warm and comfortable both in sound and performance. This is not the lean and swift sort of Beethoven playing that we have come to hear more often owing to the many “historically informed performance” and/or “original instruments” Beethoven recordings in the marketplace. Ohlsson’s playing on his Steinway sounds rich and expressive, and the sound quality is on the warm and full side. It just all sounds, well, comfortable – and quite enjoyable for all that. My favorite sets of Beethoven piano concertos have been Fleisher/Szell/Cleveland and Bronfman/Zinman/Tonhalle Zurich. This new release from Reference Recordings supplants neither of those, but it is still worthy of consideration by those looking for an entertaining and rewarding set of the Beethoven piano concertos. It's a first-class set both musically and sonically.

Recent Releases, No. 28

By Karl W. Nehring

Jóhannsson: Drone Mass. One Is True; Two Is Apocryphal; Triptych in Mass; To Fold & Remain Dormant; Diving Objects; The Low Drone of Circulating Blood, Diminishes with Time; Moral Vacuums; Take the Night Air; The Mountain View, The Majesty of the Snow-clad Peaks, From a Place of Contemplation And Reflection. Paul Hiller, conductor; American Contemporary Music Ensemble (Clarice Jensen, artistic director and cello; Ben Russell, violin; Laura Lutzke, violin; Caleb Burhans, viola); Theatre of Voices (Else Torp, Kate Macoboy, Signe Asmussen, Iris Oja, Paul Bentley-Angell, Jakob Skjoldborg, Jakob Bloch Jespersen, Steffen Bruun). Deutsche Grammophon 483 7418.

Here we have another recording of music from the late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannson (1987-2018), whose compositions have been reviewed several times before in Classical Candor. Jóhannson was a composer with a rich imagination who was fascinated with sounds, so you never quite knew what he might come up with next. As the liner notes characterize it, “Drone Mass is an electroacoustic oratorio. It can also be seen as an exercise in apophenia – the tendency of the human brain to draw connections between apparently unrelated things, to find patterns and meanings where none was intended. As the composer himself admitted, he was inspired by the musical concept of the drone, but he was also keenly aware of the drones that patrol our skies. ‘I have no specific thoughts about how these ideas relate to each other,’ he wrote, ‘but for me they have some kind of poetic resonance, which is usually enough for me.’ Despite its title Drone Mass is neither a setting of the Mass nor a piece that simply drones. In fact, much of it is full of movement.” Jóhannsson based his text on the so-called “Coptic Gospel of the Egyptians,” part of the Nag Hammadi library discovered in 1945, including a hymn described as consisting of “a seemingly meaningless series of vowels.” The work’s premier performance took place in 2015 at the Egyptian Temple of Dendur space in  New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Augmenting the ACME players were the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, with the composer himself controlling the waves of electronic sound. The album reviewed here was recorded during May 2019 at the Garnisonskirken in Copenhagen. It was produced by Francesco Donadello, another friend and regular associate of Jóhannsson’s. ACME were joined by the Danish vocal group Theatre of Voices and their Artistic Director Paul Hillier. They too have a very close connection with Drone Mass, having performed it twice in the US, and in Krákow, with Jóhannsson and ACME. Most recently, ACME and Theatre of Voices gave a further performance in Athens, just four months after the composer’s death. Theatre of Voices also appear on other recordings of Jóhannsson’s work, including Orphée, Englabörn & Variations, Arrival, and Last and First Men.

Although the idea of electronics, a seemingly meaningless series of vowels, and even the very idea of a “drone mass” itself might sound forbidding and off-putting, the music itself is not so. Rather, it is music that is engaging and immersive, drawing the listener in with its interweaving of the mysterious and the familiar, the acoustic and the electronic, the ancient and the contemporary, the ephemeral and the eternal. At the opening, the sounds are those of the voices, captured in the large space of the church in which they were recorded, gradually joined by the string instruments. As the piece unfolds, electronic sounds become more prominent, adding texture and power as they make their dramatic entrance in To Fold & Remain Dormant and add a feeling of otherworldliness to The Low Drone. I would imagine that by now the more conservative among our readers have decided that they will take a pass on this one, the more adventurous are willing to give it a listen, and those in the middle are not quite sure just what to think. To this last group, I strongly encourage you to give Drone Mass an audition, at least if you have an interest in imaginative vocal music. (And hey, give it a try on a good set of headphones, preferably wired.)

Haydn 2032: No. 10 – Les Heures du Jour. Haydn: Symphony No. 6 in D Major “Le Matin”; No. 7 in C Major “Le Midi”; No. 8 “Le Soir”; Mozart: Serenade No. 6 in D Major, K.239 “Serenata Notturna”. Giovanni Antonini, Il Giardino Armonico. Alpha Classics ALPHA 686.

Lest any followers of Classical Candor get the idea that all I ever listen to or recommend is contemporary music such as that recommended above and below, allow me to present some evidence to the contrary. When it comes to honest-to-goodness true-blue through-and-through classical music, I must say in all candor that you really can’t beat good old Papa Haydn, and hey, Mozart’s not too shabby, either. This release is from a series that looks forward to the three hundredth anniversary of Haydn’s birth in 2032, a series with the ambitious goal of recording all 107 of the composer’s symphonies. Although as you can see from the heading that the three symphonies presented here are in numerical order, you can also see that this release is No. 10 in the series (and no, I have not auditioned any of the previous releases, although I plan to look into them). So what gives? How can recording number 10 of 107 symphonies comprise Symphonies Nos.6-8? And how did Mozart sneak in there? The answers can be found in the liner notes: “Seeing the music of Haydn as ’a kaleidoscope of human emotions’, Giovanni Antonini has decided to tackle the symphonies not in chronological order , but in thematically based programmes (‘La passione’, Il filosofo’, ‘Il distratto’, etc.). Moreover, the Italian conductor believes it is important to establish links between these works and pieces written by other composers contemporary with Haydn or is in some way connected with him.” The theme of this release is “the hours of the day,” as we have the three Haydn symphonies representing morning, noon, and evening, followed by the nocturnal serenade penned by Mozart. This is music that is colorful, sprightly, and at once both elegant and charming. The size and the sound of this Italian period-instrument chamber orchestra seem perfectly suited to this music, making for an utterly delightful release.

Thomas Larcher: Symphony No. 2.”Kenotaph.” Die Nacht der Verlorenen. Andre Schuen, baritone; Hannu Linto, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Ondine  ODE 1393-2.

Thomas Larcher (b. 1963) is an Austrian composer and pianist. Interestingly enough,  his name sounded vaguely familiar to me, so I did a little digging. Aha! I discovered that he had made some recordings on the ECM label as far back as 1999, when he released an album of piano music by Schubert and Schoenberg. Here, of course, he appears in his role as composer, this new Ondine release featuring two of his orchestral compositions. The first is his Symphony No. 2, “Kenotaph” (2015-2016). The liner notes explain that “a cenotaph, from the Greek, is a term used for a monument which is in the shape of a tomb but which is empty, serving as a memorial for deceased persons buried elsewhere. Cenotaphs have traditionally been erected to honour those who have died in combat and remained on the battlefield, but with Larcher’s work the subtitle was motivated by the painful awareness of the thousands of refugees who have drowned in the Mediterranean. The work can also be understood as a more general meditation on human tragedy and an exploration of profound existential issues.” The work is reminiscent in some ways of Mahler, but not in a nostalgic way. Larcher cuts his own path, making his own individual statement while revealing his roots in the Viennese tradition. The two outer movements are the most intense and “modern sounding,” while the two inner movements, marked II. Adagio and III. Scherzo, Molto Allegro, respectively, are comparatively more straightforward sounding but entertainingly imaginative in the style of Mahler, but yet with a more modern sonority. This is music that is utterly fascinating, music that will make you want to listen again and again. Some listeners might be put off by the brashness of the opening measures, but I would urge them to be patient and give the symphony a chance. Let the two inner movements work their magic; once they do, the outer movements may begin to have more meaning. The song cycle Die Nacht der Verlorenen (“The Night of the Lost”) from 2008 takes as its text poems by the Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973). The music is generally on the slow side, but expressive and colorful. Schuen’s voice is quite gripping; if you read the text, you will understand why, as the poems are quite dark. As we have come to expect from Ondine, the sound quality is excellent, with plenty of impact. As an added bonus, the liner notes are helpful, offering useful insights into the music. This may not quite be a release for everyone, but if you are a fan of the music of Mahler, then Larcher is someone you really might want to check out.

Elgar-Bridge: Cello Concertos. Elgar: Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85; Bridge: Oration (Concerto elegiaco). Gabriel Schwabe, cello; Christopher Ward, ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. Naxos 8.574320.

I suspect that there are many classical music lovers who have more than one recording of the Elgar Cello Concerto in their collection. I suppose, then, I should just cut right to the chase and say that the folks at Naxos have released another one they might want to consider adding. First of all, Schwabe does a fine job. His account is swift and virtuosic, but he never seems to take things over the top. Likewise the orchestral accompaniment provided by Ward and his Vienna forces, who provide a nimble, clean, committed sound. All in all, this is a refreshingly straightforward performance. There are times when I might want to hear the heart-on-sleeve emotion of du Pré, but that is not the only way to play the Elgar. Another reason to pick up this release is the coupling, which is an unusual one, Frank Bridge’s Oration (Concerto elegiaco) from 1930. According to the liner notes, “the subtitle Concerto elegiaco was the score’s original title, but, according to Florence Hooton, the composer changed that to Oration in order to emphasize his conception of the work as a funeral address and an outcry against the futility of war, with the solo cello as orator.” Schwabe is able to make his cello play that role perfectly, making it sing out passionately with deeply felt emotion. Oration is a musically moving piece that deserves to be heard; kudos to Naxos for including it here. Off the top of my head I can think of three outstanding Elgar Cello Concerto recordings that are paired with performances of pieces/performances that deserve to be heard: The Jacqueline du Pre/Sir John Barbirolli Elgar paired with Janet Baker’s performance of Elgar’s Sea Pictures; the Inbal Segev/Marin Alsop Elgar paired with Segev’s performance of Anna Clyne’s Dance; and this one. I’m sure there are others, but I can personally attest to these three. Enjoy!

KWN