Recent Releases No. 44 (CD Reviews)

by Karl Nehring

American Stories. Richard Danielpour: Four Angels; James Lee III: Quintet; Ben Shirley: High Sierra Sonata; Valerie Coleman: Shotgun Houses. Anthony McGill, clarinet; Pacifica Quartet (Simin Ganatra, violin; Austin Hartman, violin; Mark Holloway, viola; Brandon Vamos, cello). Cedille CDR 90000 216

Anthony McGill is the principal clarinet for the New York Philharmonic and he plays with a strong, confident tone that is a wonder to behold. He is joined on this release by the multiple Grammy Award-winning Pacifica Quartet to play music by contemporary American composers.  McGill describes it as a project driven by the desire to “expand the capacity for art and music to change the world,” further observing that “as an artist you don’t often get to put together a collection of living composers that you love. I am in awe of every piece on this album and how each piece communicates with the other.” Each of the four composers contributes a liner note essay explaining the motivation behind their composition, with a common theme being the struggle for human dignity. Danielpour’s Four Angels pays tribute to the four young African-American girls killed in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing and civil rights advocates who refused to be intimidated by racial violence. Lee’s Quintet reflects on the Native American experience and contains elements of Native music. Ben Shirley’s High Sierra Sonata, which inspired the album’s cover art, evokes California’s Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains and the region’s annual high-altitude marathon. Coleman’s Shotgun Houses celebrates the life of Muhammad Ali and the West Louisville, Kentucky, neighborhood where she and the legendary boxer grew up. Throughout, McGill’s command of his instrument is nothing short of miraculous, and the Pacifica Quartet plays with both precision and passion. As usual, the Cedille sonics are beyond reproach.

Symphony: Jean-Michel Pilc. Leaving; Discovery; The Encounter; First Dance; Just Get Up; Way to Go; Understanding; Waltz for Xose; Not Falling This Time; I’ll Be Back. Jean-Michel Pilc, piano. Justin Time Records JTR 8632-2

 

Some readers may be familiar with the music of the legendary pianist Keith Jarrett, who throughout his long career has released numerous live concert performance recordings of improvised solo piano music for the ECM label; a review of one of those releases, The Bordeaux Concert, can be read here. Moreover, Jarrett fans – and even those who are not necessarily Jarrett fans but who have an interest in beholding musical genius, not to mention a moving human interest story – should find this extended in-depth interview with Jarrett by the delightful YouTube musical personality and fount of information Rick Beato to be both illuminating and heartwarming. 

But now we have another recording of improvised solo piano music to audition and enjoy. In November, 2021, the French jazz pianist Jean-Michel Pilc (b. 1960), who now resides in Canada, had just finished a recording session in a Portuguese studio for an album by a Spanish saxophonist. He really liked the studio, the acoustics, the Steinway, and the overall vibe, so he asked whether he could take some extra studio time to improvise at the keyboard. The saxophonist gave the go-ahead and the sound engineer agreed to record while Pilc played. Pilc says of the session, “Without any intention other than making music, I started playing. When inspiration sets in, you leave the 'real world' and music leads you through a new universe of its own. That’s what happened, and when I stopped, everyone was so enthusiastic about the result that they generously offered to mix and master it carefully for a future release which they said was inevitable. After listening to it myself, I agreed with their assessment. So here it is, and I hope the listener will go on the same journey I did that day.” That journey is one of discovery, exploring harmonies on the keyboard, going down different melodic trails to see where they might lead, but along the way, never losing sight of the idea of melody. Although the header above reads like a list of songs, the album does not sound like that; rather, ideas shift, tempos change, but in general, the album has an overall flow to it that does not sound entirely like a collection of discrete songs. There are, of course, some abrupt shifts of mood from time to time, as between the nervous tension of Time to Go and the reflective serenity of Understanding. All in all, Pilc has produced a fascinating album of compelling improvisatory music that blurs the boundaries between classical and jazz.

 

 

Vox Audiophile Edition Releases: Mozart and Rachmaninov (CD Reviews)

 by Karl Nehring

Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 17 in G major, K. 453; Piano Concerto No. 27 in B flat major, K. 595. Walter Klien, piano; Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Minnesota Orchestra. Vox VOX-NX-3012CD

 

Rachmaninov: Symphony No. 2, Op. 27; Vocalise, Op. 34, No. 14. Leonard Slatkin, St, Louis Symphony Orchestra. Vox VOX-NX-3013CD

 

Many classical music lovers of a certain age are no doubt familiar with Vox, a budget label that produced some real gems over the years. A quick example: I’ll never forget a day back in the mid-1970s when I was strolling through a Sears department store one afternoon and came across an aisle display that featured the newly-released 4-LP Vox Box of Ravel’s orchestral music featuring Stanislaw Skrowaczewski conducting the Minnesota Orchestra. I was back in college on the G.I. Bill after serving 4½ years in the Army, with a wife, two kids, a pair of Bose 901s, a rapidly expanding passion for classical music, and a tight budget. When I saw that this box was on sale for something like seven bucks – well, that settled it, I just had to have it. It sounded pretty darn good through the 901s (purchased in Germany with my reenlistment bonus) when I got home, and I found the music of Monsieur Ravel to be utterly captivating. Even though Vox was a budget label, the sound quality on some of their releases could be excellent (the main drawback was the often substandard quality of their vinyl pressings), and this Ravel set, which was recorded by Elite Recordings (engineer Marc Aubort and producer Joanna Nickrenz), had beguiling sound. Those performances and recordings still hold up as you can see from reviews of digital releases from the Ravel set, such as a review from our own John Puccio that you can read here, or an article at the PS Audio website that provides some insight into the recording process, which you can find here. 

Appearing on the back cover of these new “Vox Audiophile Edition” releases is a highlighted statement affirming that “The recordings of American orchestras produced for VOX by the legendary Elite Recordings team of Marc Aubort and Joanna Nickrenz are considered by audiophiles to be among the very finest sounding orchestral recordings ever made.”For this new series of reissues from the Vox catalog, the folks at Naxos have begun to pull some of those  tapes out from the vaults and carefully prepare these CDs for release, the end product of their labors being what they describe as “new192 kHz / 24-bit ultra high definition transcriptions of the original Elite Recordings analogue master tapes.”

 

The first two releases in this new series feature works by Mozart and Rachmaninov. The Mozart recording features the Austrian pianist Walter Klien (1928-1991), who during his career was a specialist in the works of Mozart who in fact recorded all of the composer’s works for piano for Vox and its subsidiary Candide label. For this recording, which was originally released in 1978, he was accompanied by the Minnesota Orchestra under the direction of Maestro Skrowaczewski, who defected from Poland in 1960 to become the orchestra’s Music Director in 1960, a post he held for 19 years before stepping down in 1979 to concentrate on composing and guest conducting. This is not Mozart for the “Historically Informed Practice” crowd; instead, it is Mozart playing in the grand style, robust and assertive, with a modern grand piano supported by a large orchestra. It’s fun, it sounds very good indeed, and if you like Mozart, you’ll most likely love this recording.

 

The Rachmaninov release features the American conductor Leonard Slatkin (b.1944) leading the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, for which he served as Music Director from 1979 through 1996 and is now Conductor Laureate. Slatkin and the SLSO recorded all three Rachmaninov symphonies for Vox in the mid-1970s; however, given the wide popularity of the composer’s Symphony No. 2, it makes sense that it would be the first (let’s hope not the last) to be given the “Audiophile Edition” rerelease. Slatkin and the SLSO give a powerful, straightforward reading of the score, and are aided in that regard by the well-balanced engineering. Although the vintage analog recording lacks that last bit of transparency and definition that can be attained by modern digital recording technologies, Elite Recordings knew where best to place their microphones and they did the very best with the technology of their day. Not too long ago I had happened to acquire a Vox Box CD set of Rachmaninov orchestral works recorded by Slatkin and the SLSO back in the ‘70s, a set that included their performance of Vocalise. Comparing the track from the Vox Box to the track from this new transfer. I found that the newer release seemed slightly cleaner in the sound of the massed strings and brass. No, it was not a dramatic difference – in fact, it was quite subtle at best, but that is to be expected. Still, this new edition offers as fine a version of this recording as can be had – and does so at an eminently reasonable price.  

With brief but useful liner notes and careful attention to sound quality, not to mention such excellent and enjoyable musical selections, this new series of “Vox Audiophile Editions” is off to a flying start. It will be interesting to see what other vintage recordings the folks at Naxos might decide to dig out from the Vox back catalog. Seasoned classical music fans well know there are plenty of excellent performances in that catalog from which to choose.

 

 

Nikolai Kapustin: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 5, Op. 72

by Karl Nehring

Also includes: Concerto for 2 Pianos and Percussion, Op. 104; Sinfonietta for Piano Four Hands, Op. 49. Frank Dupree, piano; Dominik Beykirch, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin;  Adrian Brendle, piano; Meinhard “Obi” Jenne, drumset; Franz Bach, percussion. Capriccio C5495

Those who have followed Classical Candor for any length of time will recall that we have occasionally slipped in a review of a jazz album (most recently here), generally with the justification that some forms of jazz can be viewed as a kind of chamber music, and thus not that completely different in kind from then forms of music that we have come to lump together under the term “classical.” There are of course accepted “classical” compositions that have an undeniable connection to jazz, the most notable being Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. But recently the music of the Ukrainian-born, Russian-trained composer and pianist Nikolai Kapustin (1937-2020) has begun to command attention primarily because of its masterly fusion of jazz and classical styles. Kapustin was an accomplished pianist who was classically trained in both performance and composition, but his real musical passion was jazz. As a result, he poured his energy into composing music that is classical in form but has much the same feel as improvised jazz – not an easy feat. 

This new release featuring the young German pianist Frank Dupree (b. 1991), who focused some his musical education on learning jazz percussion, features three highly entertaining works that truly do demonstrate how Kapustin was able to deftly weave his love of jazz into classical patterns. In the exuberant single-movement Piano Concerto No. 5, for example, there are passages where the piano and orchestra engage in call-and-response patterns similar to jazz ensembles; elsewhere, there are times when the percussion section of the orchestra sounds like the trap set of a jazz drummer, while at other times you can hear passages from the orchestra that echo the sound of a string bass in a piano trio. The piece never sounds entirely like a jazz composition, but it is surely a thoroughly jazz-infused yet completely serious concerto for piano and orchestra. Dupree is then joined at the keyboard by another young German pianist, Adrian Brendle (b. 1990), for the final two compositions on the program. For the first of these, the energetic three-movement Concerto for 2 Pianos and Percussion, the pair of pianists are joined by drummer Meinhard “Obi” Jenne (b. 1970) and percussionist Franz Bach (b. 1965), who add some tasty rhythmic and coloristic seasoning. 

The final piece finds both Dupree and Brendle together at the same keyboard in the Sinfonietta for Piano Four Hands, which is in four movements that vary considerably in mood and expression, starting with an opening movement that begins like an overture for a Broadway musical, a second movement one could imagine forming part of the soundtrack of an old black-and-white murder mystery, a third movement hinting of Gershwin with echoes of Rhapsody in Blue, and then it is on to the final movement, which brings more hints of Gershwin, this time with subtle echoes of I Got Rhythm. Bear in mind, though, these are hints and allusions, homages perhaps, tips of the cap. Or, as the liner notes say of Kapustin: “Most of his works are stylistically related to jazz and skillfully combine its elements with the classical music tradition from Bach to Prokofiev and Stravinsky. To paraphrase one of the most prominent representatives of symphonic jazz: one can speak of Kapustin as a ‘Russian in the footsteps of Gershwin’.” 

The liner notes, although relatively brief, are informative about both the music and the musicians; furthermore, the engineering is impeccable. By the way, Capriccio has previously released several other Kapustin CDs, two of them featuring Dupree: one of classical works, the other of music for jazz trio. Judging from the quality of this release, they too are no doubt well worth seeking out by classical and jazz lovers alike.