Franz Schreker’s Neglected Masterpiece

SCHREKER: Die Gezeichneten / Franz Crass, bass (Duke Antoniotto Adorno/Captain of the Guards); Thomas Stewart, bar (Andrea Vitelozzo Tamare); Ernst Wiemann, bass (Podestà Lodovico Nardi); Evelyn Lear, sop (Carlotta Nardi); Helmut Krebs, ten (Alvanio Salvago); Julius Katona, ten (Guidobald Usodimare/A Youth/First Senator/Father); Manfred Schmidt, ten (Menaldo Negroni); Walter Hauck, bar (Michelotto Cibó); Hans Herbert, bar (Gonsalvo Fiechi); Herbert Klomser, bass (Julian Pinelli); Erich Wenk, bass (Paolo Calvi/Second Senator); Maria von Ilosvay, alto (Martuccia); Donald Grobe, ten (Pietro, a cutthroat); North German Radio Chorus & Symphony Orchestra; Winfried Zillig, conductor / Walhall 376

In the era of Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier and the similar rubbish he wrote that followed it, Franz Schreker wrote this astonishingly musical, powerful and symphonically constructed work. Die Gezeichneten, or The Stigmatized, tells the story of a deformed, hunchbacked Genoan nobleman of the Middle Ages, Alviano Salvago, who has no illusions of being with a woman but who, out of the goodness of his heart, donates the island paradise he created called Elysium to the people of Genoa for their use. Unfortunately, the island is already being used by his dissolute friends as a site for orgies, and so they go to Duke Adorno to stop the transfer of ownership. One of them, Count Tamare, has set his sights on Carlotta, daughter of the Podestà. Carlotta rejects him, as she is only interested in Salvago, whose soul she wants to paint. Infuriated by Carlotta’s rejection, Tamare swears to Adorno that he will take her by force. He also reveals the secret of the grotto to Adorno. Not wanting Salvago to become more popular than himself as a result of the gift, Adorno decides to use the existence of the secret grotto as an excuse to veto the transfer. From Wikipedia:

Not wanting Salvago to become more popular than himself as a result of the gift, Adorno decides to use the existence of the secret grotto as an excuse to veto the transfer. While Salvago is sitting for Carlotta, she complains that she can’t paint his soul if he keeps avoiding looking at her. To which he responds that ugly as he is, he still has the feelings of a man in the presence of a beautiful woman… Eventually Carlotta confesses that she loves him, but faints in his arms as both are overcome with emotion.

The citizens of Genoa go to the island for the first time and are awed by what they see. Salvago asks the Podestà for Carlotta’s hand in marriage. She evades him, wanders off alone, and in the grotto finally succumbs to Tamare who’s wearing a mask. The Duke accuses Salvago of masterminding the abductions. Salvago, beside himself with worry for Carlotta, leads everyone to the underground grotto. Carlotta lies senseless on a bed, while Tamare prides himself on his conquering abilities. Salvago stabs him. Carlotta awakens, Salvago rushes to her side, but with her dying breath she calls for Tamare. Salvago, completely deranged, stumbles over Tamare’s body as he makes his way through the stunned crowd.

The music in which Schreker wrapped this sad and somewhat ugly tale of unrestrained lust vs. the pure intentions of Salvago is very much in the late-romantic tonal language of the time, but unlike the later Strauss operas (Die Frau ohne Schatten, Ariane auf Naxos, Intermezzo, The Egyptian Helen, Arabella, Die schweigsame Frau), Schreker’s music is much better constructed. Once past the lush overture, the opera moves in an interesting sound world, using rhythmic motifs not only in the orchestra but also in the vocal lines. Although he never quite abandons conventional tonality, there are touches of Mahler in the score. Like Strauss, the music is continuous within each act and each character gets his or her own particular style to distinguish them. There are passages that one can point to as semi-parlando, but Schreker’s long experience in writing songs serves him well in his sense of construction. Although the music does not “reach for the high notes” the way Puccini and late Strauss often did, it is somewhat difficult to sing, as the musical lines tend towards the strophic and are often quite complex. In short, it’s the kind of opera that only exceptional singing-actors can perform. As one can imagine, the modern productions of this opera (one such is on YouTube) tend to stress the prurient interests in the story, with lots of naked women running around with their junk hanging out.

From what I can tell, and I may be wrong, this seems to have been a non-staged recording made for broadcast by Hamburg radio between May 9 and 11, 1960. I admit to not having heard Winfried Zellig before, but he seems to have been a composer and music theorist as well as a conductor. He studied law before moving into music, which he studied with Hermann Zilcher before becoming a private pupil of Arnold Schoenberg. In 1927 he became the assistant to Erich Kleiber at the Berlin State Opera, and so may have encountered Schreker’s opera at that time. He was also the one who completed Schoenberg’s oratorio Die Jakobsleiter at the request of the composer’s widow. (Would that he had also finished Moses und Aron!) Thus he was uniquely qualified to lead this performance. Sadly, he died only three years later, at the still-youngish age of 58. He leads a supremely taut performance that does not ignore the sometimes exotic orchestration, and his talented cast includes the wonderful light tenor Helmut Krebs, noted for his singing of light roles ancient and modern (he was also a noted David in Die Meistersinger). The American darlings of Germany at the time, soprano Evelyn Lear and her husband, baritone Thomas Stewart, sing Carlotta and Tamare respectively, and the lineup also includes such lesser-known but equally excellent singers as Maria von Ilosvay, a mainstay at Bayreuth during this period and beyond, Walter Hauck, Herbert Klomser, Franz Crass and another American, tenor Donald Grobe.

The second act is the most “parlando” in style, not as lyrical or attractive as the first and particularly the third act, which is the best and most interesting of the three. Thus, it is sad that many modern performances—even the Decca studio recording, conducted in a dull and uninteresting manner by one Lothar Zagrosek, and featuring a strangulated, unsteady tenor (Heinz Kruse) as Salvago—make cuts in the last act and not in the second, where a few minutes’ excision would not harm the musical structure nearly as much.

It’s really a shame that modern productions tend to focus on the sexual aspects of the opera (which, of course, are an essential component of the plot, but not the way Schreker intended), or that the modern “singing actors” who perform it exude plenty of acting but not much in the way of voice. The best cast of any of them is, sadly, an incomplete performance conducted by Kent Nagano, which includes the superb soprano Anne Schwanewilms, tenor Robert Brubaker and baritone Michael Volle for EuroArts in 2005. Thus you almost have to own, or at least hear, this recording in order to fully appreciate the complexity and beauty of the music. The best way I can characterize it is as a somewhat lighter and less grotesque Salome in style. Had this opera been written by Strauss, I’m sure it would be world-famous buy now.

Of all the singers, it is Lear who stands out for her subtlety of interpretation. Her voice was still exceptionally beautiful in those years. She later complained that singing too many performances of Berg’s Lulu ruined her voice, and she was probably right. A lyric soprano, she really only had the extreme high range that Lulu called for as extra notes she could vocalize to, not a range she could sing comfortably in performance after performance. Lear should have made discretion the better part of valor and given the role up, pressure to continue it notwithstanding. Interestingly, her husband’s voice also became drier and a bit hollow in later years (I saw him in the early 1970s, at the Metropolitan Opera, as the villains in Les contes d’Hoffmann), and he had no similar excuse for his vocal deterioration…but he remained a riveting and compelling vocal actor.

Yet for all the recording’s excellences, a caveat: the sound is quite muddy, particularly for the orchestra. I strongly urge that you acquire this recording via downloads if you can or, lacking that, rip the CDs and enhance the treble by 2.2 db. This gives the singers’ voices a bit more brightness, which is not unwelcome (particularly in the case of Lear), but greatly enhances the orchestral sound. In every other respect, this is clearly the performance to own of this unjustly marginalized gem, a sort of German Pelléas und Mélisande with sex and gore thrown in.

—© 2018 Lynn René Bayley

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Roberto Esposito Plays His Own Piano Music

ESPOSITO: Piano Concerto No. 1 in f♯ min., “Fantastico.” Piano Sonata No. 1 in Bb min. / Roberto Esposito, pno; Budapest Scoring Symphonic Orchestra; Eliseo Castrignano, cond / Grand Piano Overtone GP781

Thirty-four-year old composer Roberto Esposito has written these large-form works, a Piano Concerto as a Sonata, in part to pay homage to the great composers of the past and in part to inject some elements of music close to his heart, jazz and “folk music of the Mediterranean.” The latter can already be heard in the opening of the first movement of the concerto, though it quickly shifts to a late-Romantic aesthetic in the oboe passage with strings. Surprisingly, the piano’s entrance shifts gears once again, introducing an alternate theme that is then dovetailed into the orchestra, now playing staccato chords behind him. The ensuing solo portion of the music is indeed jazz-oriented, assuming a swing beat against the otherwise formal backdrop. But Esposito has more surprises in for us, alternating classical and jazz phrasing as the music progresses, and he even gets the orchestra’s basses to play a quasi-syncopated pizzicato figure behind him and the winds. Swirling piano figures are then introduced, against which the orchestra’s rhythms shift to a Latin beat. Esposito falls into line with this, playing a Latin beat with his left hand and arpeggiated figures with his right, and the extempore “break” sounds improvised. But this isn’t half as surprising as the following solo piano cadenza, which is pure jazz, relaxing the tempo halfway through it and introducing a sort of syncopated canon above single bass notes. Although I enjoyed it, these juxtapositions seemed to me not necessarily forced but not fully integrated structurally. Esposito is young, though, and enthusiasm clearly predominates in his approach at this stage in his development.

Roberto Esposito

The second movement, “Adagio ironico,” begins with a lush string figure, following which the piano enters playing a lovely theme based on the opening. In the liner notes, Esposito states that this movement “refers to the big-band tradition of Duke Ellington,” but this really isn’t evident until 4:52 into the movement, when the tempo increases slightly and the pianist-composer swings out with a Swing Era-type melody. Sadly, the Budapest strings aren’t into the spirit in their alternating passages; they try, bless them, but end up sounding like Mantovani playing swing. Oddly, the movement ends in the middle of a phrase.

In the third movement, Esposito pays tribute to the Puglian folk dance pizzica salentina. It’s an odd rhythm even as Latin rhythms go, rapid triplets played against a quick 3, and within its quirky beat Esposito is able to introduce jazz inflections. The orchestra’s winds, strings and percussion take their turn in a slower passage, then Esposito re-enters and the music regains its momentum.

The piano sonata begins with quick flourishes, moving (again) in and out of jazz time, but here, since he is the only player, he is in complete control of the musical progression. Again, themes are juxtaposed, as are tempo changes, moving into piano flourishes that, though interesting, don’t seem to jell at first. But Esposito has more surprises in store for us, swinging out when you least expect it and continually switching gears. It’s really more like a piano fantasia than a sonata. There is much more structure in the second movement, which begins with a somewhat classical-sounding theme before moving into a 1950s pop ballad sort of tune with jazz inflections. Later, he improvises on this theme in an interesting fashion with good swing. It’s the third movement that is the most impressive, both in terms of form and a full integration of jazz elements into that form. Very impressive in the way he keeps dovetailing jazz passages into the ongoing musical structure.

The final piece, Indigo Mirage, appears to be played on a celeste with soft strings and a harp in the background. Esposito describes it as “inspired by an adventure-filled trip to the States and Central America.” It’s a nice piece, sort of a pop ballad.

This CD clearly presents an enthusiastic young musician-composer who has good instincts. I’m hoping that, in time, he will refine his art further and produce some truly substantive works. I’m rooting for him!

—© 2018 Lynn René Bayley

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Duo d’Accord Plays Tansman

TANSMAN: Le Train de nuit. Sonata for 2 Pianos. Fantaisie sur le valses de Johann Strauβ. Le Grand Ville, Ballet in 3 Tableaux / Duo d’Accord: Lucia Huang, Sebastian Euler, pno / SWR Music 19053CD

The Polish composer Alexandre Tansman, often considered French or at least cosmopolitan because he lived much of his life in France, was a talented but sometimes uneven composer. I tried to review a CD of his Concertinos, but chose not to because the music was formulaic and uninteresting to me. This is clearly not the case with this disc of duo-piano music, works so imaginative that they almost defy description. Interestingly, his 1951 piece, The Night Train, has a jazz feel about it, which isn’t surprising from the composer of the earlier Transatlantic Suite and other jazz-inflected works of the late 1920s and early ‘30s. Duo d’Accord can’t quite get the jazz feel, playing the syncopations in a more classical vein, but it’s all there in the music if you just tune your ears to it. At 16 minutes long, it has a great deal of development in it, and Tansman wrote contrasting tempos in the various sections of the piece, including a languorous waltz, to add variety. His jazz-classical train toodles down the tracks at its own pace and quirky rhythms, with plenty of harmonic changes and some nifty chromatic passages in it. There’s a nice bluesy passage beginning at 8:25, suggesting a bit of revelry aboard his “bar car.”

The duo-piano sonata is an entirely different animal. It is in stricter classical form but also atmospheric and moody, with a soft, mysterious opening characterized by walking bass lines. This first movement also seems to drift towards the 12-tone style, seldom settling down in any one specific key. The slow second movement relaxes this, allowing tonality to creep in, while the moto perpetuo third movement keeps the pianos a semitone apart as they scamper up and down the keyboard. In the fourth movement, “Allegro deciso,” Tansman opens the proceedings with crush chords and a slow tempo before moving into a bitonal fugue. This is tremendously interesting music.

The Fantasy on Waltzes of Johann Strauss, which I half-expected to dislike, is in fact another wonderfully imaginative piece, combining and contrasting snippets of various Strauss pieces, including the “Duidu” section from the Act II finale of Die Fledermaus. Though clearly designed for entertainment value, it is nonetheless so well constructed that one cannot help but admire it: a far cry from the bombastic piano transcriptions of others’ music by Franz Liszt. Indeed, the music’s charm seems to bring out the very best in Duo d’Accord as they have obvious fun playing with the different variants.

In the music of the ballet suite La Grande Ville from 1935, the ragtime and jazz influence isn’t even subliminal; it’s right out in the open, and here Duo d’Accord does indeed capture the right spirit and swing of the music. Of course, the ballet had to do with a young couple dancing, so this makes perfect sense. Even in the seductive second movement, “Cité ouvrière,” the jazz inflections are evident, though perhaps less so than in the fast outer movements, particularly the Charleston-based third piece, “Dancing.” I was delighted to discover this piece, having unfortunately missed it while writing my book on the intersection of classical music and jazz.

This is a simply wonderful disc, full of interesting music by a composer who walked the tightrope between popular and classical musical styles with imagination and grace. Bravo to Duo d’Accord!

—© 2018 Lynn René Bayley

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Martinů’s Double Concerti in a New Recording

MARTINŮ: Concerto for 2 Violins & Orchestra. Rhapsody-Concerto for Viola & Orchestra. Concerto for 2 Pianos & Orchestra / Deborah Nemtanu, Sarah Nemtanu, vln; Magali Demesse, vla; Momo Kodama, Mari Kodama, pno; Orchestre Philharmonique de Marsaille; Lawrence Foster, cond / Pentatone Classic 5186658

The imaginative and always inventive Bohuslav Martinů gets a modern makeover in this new release. In the first piece, written in 1950, gone are the Bohemian-Slavic references in many of his scores: none of the slightly asymmetric phrasing one heard in earlier works is present. Here, all is crisp and clean, with a no-reading reading that presses forward with an almost relentless drive. In its own way it’s exciting, however, and both the soloists and orchestra play with flawless technique.

Happily, the Bohemian spirit is present in this performance of the Rhapsody-Concerto for Viola, a solo-instrument work featuring the fine playing of one Magali Demesse. Conductor Lawrence Foster imbues this work with Eastern European warmth, and Demesse responds in kind. She is particularly fine in the expressive latter part of the first movement with her tasteful use of portamento.

The duo-piano concerto, somewhat splashier than normal for Martinů, revels in chromatic movement and frequent key changes within bars. This gets a fine reading from Foster and his soloists, the piano duo of Momo and Mari Kodama. The orchestration is quite unique in its coloring, and in addition has a good amount of jazz syncopation about it, a rare thing for the normally quite classical-oriented Martinů (though he did write a jazz suite earlier). Indeed, much of the chromatic movement here seems to take its cue from contemporary jazz of the time (1943); you can find my detailed analysis of this work in my online book, From Baroque to Bop and Beyond. I’m guessing that jazz-classical aficionados haven’t yet fully discovered or embraced this work simply because it is so much denser and more complex than the mostly-crappy Gershwin Piano Concerto in F, so popular because it’s much more accessible to the general public. Martinů also introduces a quasi-blues swagger into the second movement, even in the orchestral part, which Foster conducts excellently. With somewhat more jazz-oriented soloists, this performance might really have swung. The Kodamas try their best, bless them, but simply don’t have the kind of feeling one would have gotten from a duo of, say, Friedrich Gulda and Chick Corea, who played a duo-concert back in the 1980s.

The last movement, a bit less jazz-inflected than the first two and played in a fast 3, skips along at a lively pace but still fits in with the preceding music. Foster gets a lot of credit for drawing such an elastic reading from his French orchestra. Clearly, this is the most masterful and original piece of the three on this CD. Very highly recommended!

—© 2018 Lynn René Bayley

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Ellington Swings at Coventry Cathedral

ELLINGTON: New World A-Comin’ / Duke Ellington, pno / Come Sunday. Light (Montage). Come Easter. Tell Me It’s the Truth. In the Beginning God. West Indian Pancake. La Plus Belle Africaine / Willie “Cat” Anderson, Cootie Williams, Herbie Jones, Mercer Ellington, tpt; Lawrence Brown, Buster Cooper, tb; Chuck Conners, bs-tb; Russell Procope, a-sax/cl; Johnny Hodges, a-sax; Paul Gonsalves, t-sax; Harry Carney, bar-sax/cl/bs-cl; Ellington, pno; John Lamb, bs; Sam Woodyard, dm; George Webb, Cliff Adams Singers, voc / Storyville 1018448 (live: Coventry, February 21, 1966)

The Duke Ellington Orchestra went through several changes as it moved through the 1960s, from impressive and inventive suites to accompanying singers like Frank Sinatra and Alice Babs, an album with John Coltrane, and playing imaginative arrangements of current pop tunes and, by this point, programming sacred concerts. Ellington was always very religious in his own way and wore his heart on his sleeve. From the time he wrote “Come Sunday” as part of his Black, Brown & Beige suite in 1943, he had evolved, by this point, to expanding on religious Christian themes in full-length concert works. This way-stop at Coventry Cathedral in early 1966 gave him the opportunity to present three of his religious pieces mixed in with a current favorite of his, La Plus Belle Africaine, and other excerpts from Black, Brown & Beige.

The concert here opens with one of Ellington’s most diverse and interesting piano solo pieces, New World A-Comin’, which begins as an out-tempo ballad before moving into swinging sections, but the music keeps shifting and changing both thematically and rhythmically. As usual with Ellington, the music is not technically difficult—he never had the kind of technique that could compete with such solo piano masters as Earl Hines, Fats Waller, Art Tatum, Lennie Tristano, Bud Powell or George Shearing—but it is musically complex, and that in itself is interesting. It sounds as if he were spontaneously composing at the piano. (Interestingly, Charles Mingus’ great piano solo album is not that far removed from the way Ellington plays here.)

Come Sunday, the quasi-spiritual piece from 1943’s Black, Brown & Beige, underwent many transformations by the band in the years since. This version swings more than most, includes a brief paraphrase of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot in the introduction, and features Russell Procope in an extended clarinet solo, the latter portion of which has Cootie Williams growling with a plunger mute in the background. After a bridge played by Ellington, the tempo comes way down and Johnny Hodges plays an exceptional alto solo. An extempore, out-of-tempo trumpet interlude (possibly Herbie Jones) leads into the swinging rendition of Light (Montage), an excellent performance with the band swinging in a relaxed yet uptempo fashion.

Come Easter is another of his jazz-religious ballads. The piece was entirely new for this concert; it is played very well, but there’s not a lot to it other than a pretty theme. Tell Me It’s the Truth, which opens as an alto sax-trombone duet played by long-time Ellington stalwarts Hodges and Lawrence Brown, is an unusual piece as being in either a fast 3 or a moderate 6/8, an odd tempo for the band. The music has a sort of gospel-blues feel to it.

In the Beginning God starts out in swinging fashion, but quickly slows down for a deeply-felt baritone sax solo by the great Harry Carney, who in my view never got the credit he deserved for pioneering his instrument in jazz. (When I saw the Ellington band in person in 1973, I stood at the rail near the bandstand of the Meadowbrook, looking directly at Carney. It was amazing; he was 63 years old at the time, but his face was relatively unlined and he looked like a man in his late 30s.) Procope plays a clarinet solo, followed by a somewhat strained-sounding baritone singer named George Webb. After his first chorus, the band picks up and swings behind him. He has a fairly pleasant tone and good diction, but that strained tonal emission is hard to take. He then has a speaking section in which he lists the things that didn’t exist before the creation of the universe, such as “no TV commercials, no cows, no bulls, no birds, no bees, no people.” He hits a nice high note at the end, though, before Paul Gonsalves (who I also saw in person with the band) swings mightily, with really cool rhythmic, spoken interjections by the Cliff Adams Singers. This was the opening piece of Ellington’s First Sacred Concert the previous year (1965), and all in all it works remarkably well.

A somewhat theatrical trumpet fanfare, followed by a clarinet trill, opens the second half of this piece, followed by a magisterial open trumpet solo by Willie “Cat” Anderson, who then takes it into the stratosphere as only he could. The third section, actually a separate piece played in the Sacred Concert as Books of the Bible, features the chorus intoning the names of the apostles who the “gospels” were named after, along with the titles of other Biblical books. This, as well as Tell Me It’s the Truth, New World A-Comin’ and this updated version of Come Sunday, also comes from the First Sacred Concert. This morphs into the uptempo section of In the Beginning God, bringing this quasi-religious suite to a close. (Ellington made it very clear that his Sacred Concerts were not “jazz masses,” but his jazz impressions of religious themes.)

West Indian Pancake, another swinging 6/8 piece and one I hadn’t heard before, comes next. It’s a fairly simple tune, embellished by Ellington with some nifty trombone section counterpoint. Gonsalves plays another excellent solo. The concert ends with an excellent performance of La Plus Belle Africaine, one of Ellington’s most interesting later pieces, which became a concert staple by 1969. John Lamb plays an exceptionally interesting, almost bitonal, bowed bass solo on this one with a great deal of chromatic movement.

All in all, an excellent concert. Personally, I liked the programming of the pieces of the First Sacred Concert very much here, and of course all the solos are different from the recording of that work for RCA Victor—an album that, surprisingly, sold very poorly at the time.

—© 2018 Lynn René Bayley

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Goodbye, Jack Reilly

Jazz pianist, educator and sometime classical composer Jack Reilly, who died this past Friday at the age of 86, was one of my oldest friends who I never met in person. Back in 1989, I started my own homemade music ‘zine devoted strictly to classical music and jazz, a forerunner of this blog. These were the early days of desktop publishing; I used a program called “Publish It!” which set up a three-column-per-page layout, used a hand-held scanner for pictures that converted good-looking photos into poor, grainy images to insert (in some instances I just did a cut-and-paste from the Schwann Catalog because it looked better), had copies made at the local Kinko’s, staple-bound each issue by hand and then sealed the binding with some sort of liquid elastic. It looked homemade and I never had more than 40 subscribers, but I kept it going for three years before I called it quits.

Jack sent me a copy of his early, home-bound copies of his “Species Blues” books (later professionally published by Hal Leonard) to review, but because I was so busy with the current issue I explained to him that I wanted to hold off on reviewing it until I had a chance to properly digest it. For some reason, he assumed I didn’t understand what he was talking about and so told me NOT to review it because I was too stupid. Well, that just ticked me off. I don’t claim to be competent at bookkeeping or building a ham radio, but if there’s one thing I do know, it’s music, so I delved into the three-book series and wrote a very positive and detailed review and sent it to him. He was awed by my analysis of his work, and from that moment on, we became friends.

But for whatever reason, Jack still decided to play me for a fool. He called me on the phone but said his name was Sean Petrahn, an Italian-Jewish jazz critic, and wanted to write reviews for my magazine. I was delighted to have him, even though I already had Ralph Berton and jazz trumpeter Jack Walrath as reviewers in the jazz field (I never was able to get any known names for classical reviews except for Terry Teachout, who I had met a decade earlier at the Aspen Music Festival). Jack/Sean wrote some very fine reviews for my ‘zine, but he kept playing me. He had his wife, Carol Lian, call me on the phone pretending to be Steve Allen’s secretary and asking me how she could get in touch with Sean because Steve wanted him on his TV show. Once I stopped publishing, he admitted the charade and we became real friends.

He was always supportive of me and I of him. I wrote good reviews of his CDs, which were not plentiful, and just couldn’t understand why this superb jazz musician wasn’t as well known as his early friend and colleague, Bill Evans, whose work his resembled in many ways. When he decided to release his series of spontaneous improvisations on the Aleister Crowley deck of tarot cards, “Tzu-Jan: The Sound of the Tarot,” he asked me to write the liner notes, for which he paid me. It was very welcome money, though not a large stipend. The funny thing was, once past his Sean Petrahn phase, we rarely talked on the phone in the intervening years, but we kept in touch via email almost up to the end.

Reilly’s work was consistently interesting. He didn’t lay into technique nearly as much as other jazz pianists, and perhaps this is what held back his popularity. People love flash in jazz pianists, and this Reilly would not do. His music was meaty and well-developed, one of his best works being the “La-No-Tib Suite,” which is Bitonal spelled backwards. He recorded a jazz version of the suite while his wife Carol, a fine classical pianist who also invented her own improvisations, recorded a classical version of it. He continued to send me his CDs to review, some of which appeared in Fanfare, as well as his Hal Leonard copies of Species Blues, The Harmony of Bill Evans and his last book, The Harmony of Dave Brubeck. Reilly’s musical analyses were detailed to a T and always extremely interesting. The Hal Leonard books also included CDs of him playing examples of various chord positions so that musicians could hear what he was writing about. In both books, while respecting the original works, Reilly included reharmonizations of their music in his own style.

When reviewing The Harmony of Dave Brubeck, I mentioned that during Brubeck’s active career many jazz critics lambasted him for his “pretentious” and “heavy-handed” playing style, which I never agreed with (I was a Brubeck fan from the moment Time Out first appeared in the early 1960s). Indeed, some critics even went so far as to approach alto saxist Paul Desmond and ask him why he didn’t just leave the quartet and go out on his own. Reilly was gracious enough to pass my comments on to Iola Brubeck, who wrote me back and commented that it was just the mindset of the time. I still have her email saved in my archive. He was also responsible for giving me Sheila Jordan’s email address, which led to my published interview of her.

Jack’s wacky sense of humor continued to the very end as well. I still have the hysterically funny meme he sent me of President Donald Trump, showing one of his signed executive orders. Over the real executive order, Jack had photoshopped an image directing all jazz musicians to learn to play bebop heads in all 12 keys…beginning with Charlie Parker’s Donna Lee. I knew he had been a cancer survivor, back in the early 2000s, but seemed to be in fairly good health until his final days.

In short, Jack Reilly was a wonderful musician and a loyal if somewhat quirky friend. He continued to send me links to jazz videos and great audio clips he had found online, and I did the same, once locating a late-1950s TV clip of the late George Russell leading a band which included Tony Scott on clarinet and Bill Evans on piano playing some of his pieces. Jack couldn’t thank me enough for that one. We also agreed that the late Clare Fischer, though recognized for his composing skills, was one of the most underrated jazz pianists of his time, and he gushed about the brilliance of the late Hall Overton as well. Reilly also sent me recordings of some of his classical compositions, which although they were well written I found a bit thick in texture and not altogether appealing, but by that time he had come to respect my musical judgment and so wasn’t really offended. I praised his jazz to the very end.

If you haven’t discovered Jack Reilly, and are a jazz fan, you need to search him out on YouTube and also collect some of his records. He was a superb artist whose work, like Mark Murphy’s, flew under the radar.

—© 2018 Lynn René Bayley

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Walker Delves Into Hindemith & Hartmann

HINDEMITH: Ludus Tonalis. HARTMANN: Piano Sonata, “27 April 1945” / Esther Walker, pno / FHR 54

Pianist Esther Walker here plays two major works by two composers, one internationally famous and the other (Karl Amadeus Hartmann) only well-known to academics and musicians. Yet both works are fascinating and well-written, though Hindemith’s Ludus Tonalis or Tonal Games is clearly the meatier and more densely structured of the two.

A contrast in the abilities and potentials between the precise and highly productive Paul Hindemith and the amorphous, vastly overrated musical “philosophy” of Theodor Adorno: When Hindemith came to America, he carved out a fine career for himself as a Professor of Music at Yale, not only writing a work such as this and in teaching, but also in musicology. He took several years off from his own work as a composer to research the true performance style of the early 17th century (as opposed to today’s false “historically-informed” nonsense) to produce a working arrangement of the seminal operatic work of all time, Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, which he then conducted and presented in the early 1950s. Adorno, hired by Columbia University, was asked to come up with a workable philosophy of music that could be taught. He came up with nothing more than his own nasty polemics against non-German conductors performing German music and his lifelong snotty comments about jazz, Arturo Toscanini and even actors in great plays. In short, Adorno was a non-productive intellectual snob whereas Hindemith was a true intellectual who enjoyed interacting with other musicians and students, and was highly productive.

Ludus Tonalis (which, incidentally, was also the name of a used classical record shop in New York’s Greenwich Village during the 1960s and ‘70s) used the 12 tones of the chromatic scale as the springboard for using each of them as a keynote to bring the others into tonal accord. As explained in the liner notes:

Not the least innovative aspect of Ludus Tonalis is its structural follow-through. The work consists of 25 movements: 12 fugues interspersed with 11 interludes, the sequence framed by a prelude and postlude themselves evincing formal and expressive symmetry. The long-term evolution of this sequence is from the ‘C’ keynote of the first fugue to the ‘F sharp’ of the twelfth, with the interludes modulating not between keys but between the keynotes of those fugues on either side; a long-term process adumbrated in the prelude then consolidated in the postlude.

And Hindemith did not stop with verbal description. Here is an image created by Hindemith to show the sequence of notes from Series 1 in his book The Craft of Musical Composition as used in Ludas Tonalis:

Interestingly—or ironically, in the case of Adorno’s dismissal of jazz musicians—this graph occasionally confuses classical musicians, who think mostly in terms of what is on the page written by the composer, but not by jazz musicians who always think in terms of tonal relationships and chromatic movement.

Hindemith structured his work as a Prelude followed by 23 fugues and interludes, concluding with a Postlude. Despite the complexity of the work, it is relatively easy to follow, particularly if you’ve studied jazz, and not as indigestible to the casual listener as the description above might indicate. Despite his use of some advanced harmony and unusual (for classical music) chord positions, it is one of his more melodic works, and pianist Esther Walker plays it with warmth of tone and lyrical distinction. In her hands, it becomes much more than an exercise; it is living, breathing music, interesting and attractive at the same time. In the brisker fugues, Walker plays with energy and enthusiasm. The “Scherzando” interlude is also played with a deft touch and a nicely bouncing rhythm. The result is a performance of both fascinating construction (the third fugue almost sounds like a modern version of J.S. Bach’s The Art of Fugue) and a strong desire to make the score appealing to the average listener. In this she succeeds brilliantly.

Hartmann’s piano sonata, which occupies a similar sound and texture as the Hindemith piece, was withheld from publication by the composer and so did not have its premier until 1982, some 21 years after his death. Despite its tonal similarity to Hindemith’s work, it is altogether a more somber work, its longer movements allowing for greater development. This somber quality makes sense if one explores the subtitle, “27 April 1945,” a date on which Hartmann witnessed “an endless stream of Dachau prisoners of war trudge past us…unending was the misery…unending was the sorrow.”  Since it lacks the immediate appeal of Ludus Tonalis, marking it as a “musician’s piece” and not one that would gain public endearment or easy acceptance. Walker makes what she can of it, however, imbuing its stern structure with as much warmth and feeling as she can muster. I liked it very much.

This is a great CD that you need to hear if you enjoy modern music.

—© 2018 Lynn René Bayley

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TrioPolis One Plays Modern Composers

DAFNIS: Ockeghem’s Razor. S. HONG: Evlogimenos. BROBERG: Colors and Texture. A. MAY: Abstraction With Reference. DeROSA: Brazilian Prelude. WATERS: You as a Sea Turtle in a Kelp Forest at Dawn. SABEY: Temple Swallows* / TrioPolis: Kimberly Cole Luevano, cl; Anatolia Ionnides, pno; Felix Olschofka, vln; *Nicola Ruzevic, cel / Fleur de Son Classics FDS58038

TrioPolis One is a chamber group comprised of clarinetist Kimberly Cole Luevano, violinist Felix Olschofka and pianist Anatolia Ionnides. On this recording, they are augmented by cellist Nicola Ruzevic who plays on this piece.

With no disrespect towards the composers of these pieces, their written descriptions of their work in the liner notes is, without exception, obfuscation of the worst sort. They talk about such things as “fluid voice-leading reassembled into angular leaps…obscuring but not obliterating the organic framework,” mapping “coloristic, textural and proportional elements of various paintings into sound” and “approximate rectangles (following) irregular, curved trajectories, unevenly breaking the 10 x 10 ‘resolution’ of the outer edges into clusters of smaller, brightly colored rectangles.” I’m sure this kind of academic BS impresses their composition professors, but it doesn’t impress me one bit. I’m interested in music qua music, not convoluted comparisons to shapes, images and “organic frameworks.”

What I particularly liked about Costas Dafnis’ Ockeghem’s Razor, for instance, was its driving rhythm and attractive, largely tonal thematic material despite the introduction of out-of-center harmonies. Dafnis’ music is both fun to listen to and well-developed, with the clarinet playing mostly in staccato figures and the violin playing edgy, rhythmic figures. It is the piano that seems to carry the bulk of the melodic line, with the other two chiming in every now and then when they are not playing in an angular fashion. There is a lyrical second section in which the rhythmic drive relaxes and all three play in a more conventional trio fashion. Olschofska has a very bright violin tone with a fast vibrato, Luevano’s clarinet playing alternates between a rich, fluid sound and a very bright one with almost no vibrato at all, while Ionnides plays with a warm, deep-in-the-keys touch. That’s about as much as you need to know about their musical approach.

Sungji Hong’s Evlogimenos almost sounds like a continuation of Dafnis’ piece, particularly the lyrical section. Here the clarinet and violin alternate thematic material while the piano plays repeated broken chords beneath them. It’s not exactly a minimalist piece because there is melodic and, later, harmonic movement, but it is regular enough in its rhythm to create a hypnotic effect, and it, too, is an attractive, mostly tonal work. It does, however, overstay its welcome by a couple of minutes, since the development is rather static.

In Kirsten Broberg’s seven-part Colors and Textures, some of the movements are almost microscopically brief (:24, :33, :34, :32), and the musical construction of the first movement written in hocket style (each of the three instruments alternating notes in the construction of the theme). This gives the music more of a clockwork sound than a “colors and textures” quality, but it is interesting. There is also considerable humor in the way Broberg writes for the trio. In the third movement, “Fields of Color,” it is the violin that plays a repetitive rocking motion while the clarinet holds long notes in its middle-low register while the piano sprinkles a few notes here and there, while in “Spiraling” the piano plays running figures in the mid-range while the other instruments play long notes that move slowly and subtly up and down. The 33-second “Primary Colors” has the piano slamming a few chords while the others hold notes above it; “Monochrome in Ultraviolet” has the clarinet sustain a low D while the others plays sparsely above it, and in “Curved Lines” all three plays sparse descending scale-figures, followed by ascending ones. This is a wonderful suite that holds together well and clearly does not overdo its effects.

Andrew May’s Abstraction With Reference takes abbreviated theme snippets and pushes them together to create a whole piece. I was a little less able to follow May’s thinking in the opening section, but as the music expands and becomes broader in scope it all falls into place. Indeed, it is the expansiveness of May’s musical canvas, plus the use of rests and “space” in the score, that draws the listener inward.

With Richard DeRosa’s Brazilian Prelude, we reach a piece with a truly defined melody in minor that morphs to major. The whimsically-titled You as a Sea Turtle in a Kelp Forest at Dawn by Joseph Martin Waters features odd, irregular rhythmic figures above which whole and partial themes play against them. The music is largely rhythmic, with flowing piano arpeggios and clarinet and violin flutters on top. A bit of a Latin rhythm comes in around 2:50, after which the music breaks into quarter-note triplets for a few bars. Later on, it becomes somewhat pointillistic with staccato playing from all concerned. A Latin rhythm comes and goes rather quickly as well.

The finale, Temple Swallows by Benjamin Sabey, tells its tale mostly in bits and pieces, adding a cello to the mixture. As the piece progresses, we hear a great deal of quiet space and a few notes sprinkled in here and there for effect.

All in all, an interesting album, a bit uneven in quality but fascinating all the same.

—© 2018 Lynn René Bayley

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Blumina Plays Weinberg

WEINBERG: Piano Sonata, Op. 49b. Piano Sonatas Nos. 2 & 4 / Elisaveta Blumina, pno / CPO 555104-2

Since I already own, and enjoy, Allison Brewster Franzetti’s 2-CD set of Weinberg’s complete piano sonatas, I was curious to hear how Elisaveta Blumina played the three on this album. She takes what I would characterize as a more “Russian” approach to the music, i.e., crisp rhythms and a rich tone, bringing the music more in line stylistically to that of Shostakovich. It’s a fascinating way of looking at them; by putting as much if not more focus on the music’s structure as on its moods, Blumina gives the music a crisper, more direct sound profile. Considering this approach, I was somewhat surprised to learn that she is a German pianist.

In characterizing her playing this way, I am not trying to say that her approach is too direct or that it glosses over the subtleties in Weinberg’s music. On the contrary, she relaxes her tone and style in the slower movements, and in the softer sections within the fast movements, to bring out the unusual quality of his music. This is particularly evident in the Op. 49b sonata, played with great sensitivity and attention to detail. Blumina also captures the quirky musical progressions and rhythms perfectly.

My sole caveat was that Blumina tends to make all of the sonatas sound pretty much alike. Although there are common features among them, her basic approach and sound palette seem geared towards a one-size-fits-all approach. She really only has three volume levels, soft, medium and loud, and for whatever reason her playing tends towards a surface reading of each sonata. Franzetti gave more variety to the music, in my view. Nonetheless, if you do not have the Franzetti recordings, Blumina’s approach is certainly appealing on a certain level. I just felt that it wasn’t quite varied enough for Weinberg.

—© 2018 Lynn René Bayley

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Beverly Beirne Just Wants to Have Fun!

 

JJWTHF / LEA-HOLDER: Come On Feel the Noize.³ ANT-PIRRONI: Prince Charming. DeSHANNON-WEISS: Bette Davis Eyes. DAMMERS: Ghost Town. FAIRBRASS-MANZOLI: Deeply Dippy. FRY-WHITE: When Smokey Sings.³ JOLLIE-SWAIN-DALLIN-WOODWARD-FAHEY: Cruel Summer.¹ SCOTT: Pop Muzik. BEGGS-HAMILL-STRODE-ASKEW-MEALE: Too Shy. IDOL: Hot in the City.³ JONES-GRAMM: Waiting for a Man Like You.^3,4 HAZARD: Girls Just Want to Have Fun² / Beverly Beirne, voc; Rob Hughes, sax/fl; Flo Moore, bs; Ben Brown, dm/perc; ¹Romero Lubambo, ²Dean Brown, gtr; ³Sam Watts, pno; ⁴Jason Miles, Hammond B3 org / BB Records, available at Amazon, iTunes & Google Play

Sometimes, we here “across the pond” from England miss out on certain British jazz artists. Oh, sure, we hear the famous ones—Ronnie Scott, Johnny Dankworth, Annie Ross, Cleo Laine, George Shearing, etc.—but some of the others fall through the cracks. Beverly Beirne, a Yorkshire-born jazz singer who studied classical voice, is one of them. She has a rich, full mezzo that she likes to open up and really swing with, and her working quartet of saxist-flautist Rob Hughes, bassist Flo Moore and drummer Ben Brown is solid and swinging.

On this album, due out on June 11, Beirne pays tribute to pop and rock tunes of the 1980s. I had completely cut myself off from pop culture by that time with the exceptions of Blondie and Billy Joel, so since neither of them are represented here the only song I recognized was Cindi Lauper’s Girls Just Want to Have Fun, a cute tune that one really could not escape during that period. I also heard of Bette Davis Eyes but didn’t recall it much. In addition to using hits by American pop and rock artists, Beirne also includes a few tunes made famous by Brits, not all of whom also had an impact across the pond. For those who are taking notes, here’s a list of the tunes and the original artists:

Song	Original Artist
Come On Feel The Noize	Slade/Quiet Riot
Prince Charming	Adam Ant
Bette Davis Eyes	Kim Carnes
Ghost Town	The Specials (British)
Deeply Dippy	Right Said Fred (British)
When Smokey Sings	ABC
Cruel Summer	Banamarama
Pop Muzik	M
Too Shy	kajagoogoo
Hot In The City	Billy Idol
Waiting For A Girl (Man) Like You	Foreigner
Girls Just Want To Have Fun	Cyndi Lauper

Happily, jazz artists work on transformation, meaning that Beirne and her talented band have turned these songs into jazz vehicles. The initials of the album’s title stands for Jazz Just Wants to Have Fun, and fun is the keynote of this album. After a slow, sultry opening, Beirne and the band up the tempo and really swing on the opener, Come On Feel the Noize. The album’s co-arranger, Sam Watts, adds his sparse, swinging piano to the group, with good effect. I was absolutely thrilled by the way Beirne handles her voice, singing “out” most of the time, swinging in a relaxed and masterly fashion, and even in soft passages the voice is perfectly placed. If she wanted to, I think she could easily sing in a club without a microphone. Her diction is also flawless (oh, how I wish half her classical sisters would pay heed to this!), with only a very few hints on some vowel sounds that she is British and not American.

Even in Adam Ant’s Prince Charming, where she lays back on the beat and sings softly, Beirne knows how to swing. In Bette Davis Eyes, turned into a relaxed 6/8 tempo, Beirne also displaces the beat with finesse, using her voice like an instrument. Upping the tempo a bit, Hughes takes a great tenor solo before Beirne re-enters, then plays behind her after a few bars with wonderful effect.

Indeed, throughout this set Beirne and her band play with both a tight and relaxed sound. The musicians back her rich contralto with lightness and finesse; this is a group that really does want to have fun, and because of this the listener does, too. Ghost Town is the epitome of hip: though taken at a medium tempo, both the singer and her band swing with heat. And between you and me, I was positively thrilled that the program was not too overloaded with ballads. Moore plays a tasteful bass solo on Deeply Dippy, and on When Smokey Sings, one of the few ballads in the set, Beirne and the band still manage to swing. Watts also returns on piano in this one. Ironically, considering the origin of these songs, the performances are far less rock-oriented than many a “jazz” album I am often asked to review…thank goodness! Cruel Summer, in fact, has a sort of salsa/jazz samba feel to it, which made for an effective contrast to the surrounding material. Hughes plays a nifty flute solo on this one, and Beirne again stretches and contracts the beats within bars masterfully.

Every track on this album is, quite simply, a pleasure to hear. June was a perfect time to schedule for release of this disc, because it’s great summertime jazz. Her scat solo on Pop Muzik shows her admitted debt to Ella Fitzgerald (she also admires Nneena Freelon), and Too Shy is a wonderful example of Beirne and the band swinging at an almost manic uptempo, her voice riding relaxed above the rhythmic frenzy. Hot in the City has a sort of My Boyfriend’s Back feel to it with a New Orleans vibe (thanks in large part to Watts’ Professor Longhair-styled piano). In track after track, Beirne and her talented group transform these pop tunes into jazz classics. (I can just imagine other jazz singers, hearing this disc, chomping at the bit to “borrow” some of these arrangements for themselves.) Even in the R&B-influenced Waiting for a Man Like You, Beirne give you a pure jazz treatment.

The finale, Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Want to Have Fun, is transformed into a Louis Prima-Keely Smith shuffle-rhythm R&B number, with Dean Brown’s guitar added to the mix and saxist Hughes pumping away like Sam Butera.

This is an utterly delightful album. You certainly don’t have to be an ‘80s pop fan to enjoy it; I loved it!

—© 2018 Lynn René Bayley

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