The Music of Theodor W. Adorno

ADORNO: 6 Orchestral Pieces, Op. 4: I. Bewig, heftig; II. Sehr ruhig; III. Gigue: Sehr lebhaft; IV. Ausserst langsam; V. Walzer: Leicht; VI. Sehr langsam / Moscow Symphony Orch.; Alexei Kornienko, cond / 6 Studies for String Quartet (1920). String Quartet (1921). 2 Pieces for String Quartet, Op. 2 / Leipzig String Quartet / Piano Piece (1921). 3 Short Piano Pieces (1934/1945) / Steffen Schleiermacher, pno / available for free streaming on YouTube by clicking hyperlinks above

Here’s one of those strange anomalies that I’m sure happens once in a while to almost anyone in their chosen field of work. All through my college years when I studied music most seriously, and for 17 years afterward while reviewing and writing about music, I never even heard of Theodor W. Adorno. In fact, I might still never have heard of him had a reader of my short-lived music ‘zine not written in to me asking what I thought of his philosophy of music.

I looked up Adorno and began to learn about him, but the more I learned about him the less I liked him. Yes, he was a true intellectual, something I do not claim to be although I have a decent I.Q. Yes, he wore several hats including those of psychologist, musicologist, composer, philosopher and sociologist, of which I can only claim full rights in one (musicology) and dabbling rights in two others (philosophy and sociology), but he was also extremely narrow-minded, hateful and condescending towards anyone who liked music and literature that he didn’t, and an armchair Communist who had the wrong-headed idea that Communism would educate the masses to the glories of intellectual music and literature. Ironically the Communists branded him a “cultural Marxist” because they felt he and his ilk were too artsy and not “sufficiently doctrinaire.”

Adorno was also a person who simply didn’t believe in having fun—period, The End. All he ever wanted to do was sit around all day arguing philosophy and sociology, the role of music in those disciplines, bash all forms of capitalism and never really reach a conclusion in anything. When he finally came to America in 1938 and worked in New York, Princeton and Los Angeles, he frustrated his colleagues by never reaching a conclusion in anything he discussed. Adorno wasn’t interested in reaching conclusions except for his two pet hates, capitalism and jazz music. All he wanted to do all day was sit around and bullshit. Smart as he was, he never really accomplished anything except to piss off everyone he considered his intellectual inferior. It took me nearly 12 minutes to find a photo of Adorno smiling, which is the one posted above. 99% of his photographs show a grim countenance, decidedly dour like his personality.

Except, as it turns out, in music. An early proponent of atonal music, he wrote most of the pieces listed above between the ages of 17 (1920) and 31 (1934), and they are astonishingly excellent.

In the 6 Studies for String Quartet, written when he was only 17, Adorno is at this point trying to reconcile an early Romantic bent with more modern harmonies, but this is clearly not serial music despite the use of what we now call “rootless” chords and abrasive seconds in the harmony. More interestingly, despite the brevity of these pieces—the fifth, at 3:23, is the longest—Adorno shows no hesitancy in using silence (rests) as part of the musical progression, and in each piece he finds a way to make the music interesting. In the second piece, “Nicht zu langsam,” he opens with the cello playing a rocking rhythm with the upper strings playing against it,; then, after one of his pauses, the tempo increases and all four instruments are involved in an energetic motif which is tossed around between them. In the third piece, “Schwer und dumpf,” he again uses a rocking motion in the cello but, more importantly, intermixes modal and chromatic harmonies when the cello moves downward against the other strings. And he did this all without making it sound forced or artificial; everything he did here somehow seems organic. The fourth piece, “Sehr heftig” (“Very violently”) uses strong rhythms beneath an top line that vacillates between tonality and atonality. Nor does any of this sound like a young student who is groping for ideas, hoping to create something good and possibly just missing. This music has the sure hand of a composer who may not be in his prime but already knows how to put music together and make it coherent as well as fresh and interesting. Many a composer today would be proud to call these youthful exercises by Adorno their own.

By the time he reached his full-fledged String Quartet a year later, Adorno was already moving towards longer forms, using the experiment of the year before to make significant progress. More interestingly, despite all the harmonic audacity, the first movement of this quartet (“Maβig”) uses what I believe is a popular tune rhythm, a steady 4, something he would avoid in his future works. Heaven forbid that Adorno should be caught trying to write something lively and popular! Happily for him, his Piano Piece of the same year, though also using a rhythmic motif, is far removed from any taint of popularism, yet is again quite original in his use of space, changing tempi and an almost organic-sounding flow of ideas through the course of the music’s length.

The 6 Orchestral Pieces, Op. 4 sound so much like Alban Berg that one is almost astonished. Like Adorno, Berg didn’t always embrace the dodecaphonic style, and he, too, sometimes wrote more lyrical lines than Schoenberg, who in turn was more lyrical than Webern, the most abstract 12-tone composer of all. It is entirely typical of Adorno that the “Gigue” uses a jig rhythm but some of the most abrasive harmonies within thus suite. He certainly didn’t want anyone to misconstrue his intentions and enjoy his music!

As it turned out, Adorno flipped on his own earlier enthusiasm for the 12-tone school and, as a result, stopped composing. In a 1934 letter to Ernst Krenek, Adorno complained about Schoenberg and his colleagues that

Twelve-tone technique alone is nothing but the principle of motivic elaboration and variation, as developed in the sonata, but elevated now to a comprehensive principle of construction, namely transformed into an a priori form and, by that token, detached from the surface of the composition.

I know you probably won’t believe me, but I just discovered that quote on the Wikipedia page dedicated to Adorno. The reason I say that is I’ve been saying the same thing for the past 30+ years, only in a different way, telling all who would listen that the 12-tone technique is an interesting head game but an artistic dead end, because one the process of the composition (arranging your tones so that you use each of the 12 before repeating one) takes precedence over inspiration, you reach an artistic dead end. In short, there’s only so much music you can write in the 12-tone style before you hit a wall and can’t go any further…something Schoenberg himself learned, which is part of the reason he could never finish Moses und Aron and in fact wrote very little new music after 1932.

So there you have a rough description of some of these pieces. All I ask when you listen to them is that you forget the person Adorno was and just absorb the excellent music he left us.

—© 2020 Lynn René Bayley

Follow me on Twitter (@Artmusiclounge) or Facebook (as Monique Musique)

Return to homepage OR

Read The Penguin’s Girlfriend’s Guide to Classical Music

Toscanini’s Acoustics Reissued

GALILEI: Gagliarda (orch. Respighi). DONIZETTI: Don Pasquale: Overture. BERLIOZ: Damnation de Faust: Rakoczy March. MENDELSSOHN: A Midsummer Nights’ Dream: Scherzo (2 tks, 1921 & 1926*); Nocturne;* Wedding March. BIZET: L’Arlesienne Suite No. 2: Farandole. Carmen: Aragonaise. MASSENET: Scènes Pittoresques: No. 4, Fête Bohème. WOLF-FERRARI: The Secret of Suzanna: Overture. PIZZETTI: La Pisanelle Suite: No. 2. MOZART: Symphony No. 39 in Eb: III & IV. BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 1: IV. Symphony No. 5: IV / La Scala Orch., Milan; *New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orch.; Arturo Toscanini, cond / Guild GHCD3504

When I saw this release listed in the Naxos New Release Guide for November, I just ignored it. After all, these recordings are not only famous but have been issued on LP and CD many, many times. Some people swear by the old RCA-BMG Toscanini Collection pressings of the late 1980s-early 1990s; others prefer the Italian release on Grammofono 2000, still others the Naxos Historical release processed by Ward Marston.

But after listening to a few tracks, I felt that I had to review it, because to my ears these are the best transfers of all.

Why? Because whatever one Peter Reynolds of Reynold’s Remastering did to these old recordings, they sound better than I’ve ever heard them. Instead of presenting them “as is” with the original shrill sound and a fair amount of the surface noise, Guild has done just enough cleaning up of these old Victors to make the sound uniform and bearable. Beyond that, it took me a while to figure out what Peter Reynolds did. I downloaded original 78-rpm copies of the Gagliarda  and the Bizet Farandole and tried to make them sound like they do on this Guild release.

What I discovered is that Reynolds did something that I’m sure a few Toscanini fans will consider heresy, and that was to roll back the treble by a few decibels. Then he added a judicious amount of reverb—but NOT echo—to allow the orchestra to resonate in at least some kind of acoustic space. If you think this is heresy, please remember that way back when people bought these original discs and played them on their Victrolas, the sound went out into their living rooms—some of which were fairly large—and thus took on the natural reverb of the room. That was how acoustic phonographs worked. But once these same records were transferred to LP, or CD, the acoustic properties of the recordings were altered. A recording played on a turntable or a CD player does NOT resonate in your living room the same way an acoustic disc played on a wind-up phonograph does, because your LP or CD players do not have a diaphragm with which to make the recorded sound resonate.

I know this because I once owned a Victrola, and playing both vocal and orchestral discs on it produced an entirely different sound than when I played them on my phonograph, even when equipped with a 78-rpm stylus.

The end result is, in most of these recordings, a somewhat more spacious, realistic sound that makes these Toscanini discs almost (but not quite) sound like some of the better acoustics that Victor made by Karl Muck and Leopold Stokowski, and that’s saying quite a bit. For once, you can actually hear the strings, brass and winds in some sort of proportion to one another, not like one congested sound alllinedupinarow. And that makes a big difference.

Similarly, Reynolds did something with the 1926 Brunswick electrics that no one else seems to have done, and that is to play them on an electrical Victrola of the period and record the sound that way; and once again, the sound quality is considerable different. If you play these two Brunswick sides on an electrical turntable, the sound is actually quite muddy, which is the exact opposite of Toscanini’s sound aesthetics. Here, they come across with a brighter quality than ever before.

There is a myth that has circulated about the La Scala acoustics, that Toscanini insisted on so many takes that he almost drove Victor Records bankrupt, but this is really not true. Here is an actual list of all the acoustics he made for the company with the number of takes for each and which take was issued:

Gagliarda: 2 tks, 2nd one issued
Mozart: Symph 39, III – 4 tks, 4th one issued
Mozart: Symph 39, IV – 3 tks, 3rd one issued
Pizzetti: Pisanella – 2 tks, 2nd one issued
Donizetti: Don Pasquale Ov, pt 1 – 6 tks on 12/21/1920 & 2 each on 3/8 & 3/12/1921, none issued; 3 tks on 3/29/1921, 3rd one issued
Donizetti: Don Pasquale Ov, pt 2 – 7 tks on 12/21/1920, 3/8 & 3/12/1921, none issued; 2 tks on 3/29/1921, 2nd one issued
Berlioz: Rakokzy March – 3 tks each on 12/2 & 12/24/1920, 6th one issued
Bizet: Aragonaise – 4 tks on 12/22/1920, 2 on 3/31/1921, 6th one issued
Beethoven 5th finale, pt 1 – 3 tks on 12/24/1920, 1st one issued
Beethoven 5th finale, pt 2 – 3 tks on 12/24/1920, 3rd one issued
Star-Spangled Banner – 1 tk on 12/24/1920, destroyed
Mendelssohn: MND Scherzo – 3 tks on 3/9/1921, 3rd one issued
Mendelssohn: MND Wedding March – 2 tks each on 3/9 & 3/11/1921, 4th one issued
Verdi: La Traviata, Act 1 Prelude – 7 tks on 3/9, 11 & 31/1921, none issued
Wolf-Ferrari: Secret of Susanna Ov – 3 tks on 3/10/1921, 3rd one issued
Bizet: Farandole – 1 tk on 3/11/1921, issued
Massenet: Fête Bohème – 3 tks on 3/31/1921, 2nd one issued

As you can see, the only recording which Toscanini spent an inordinate amount of time on was that of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale overture, in two parts. This took a combined 18 takes, recorded over three different sessions, before he was satisfied enough to approve takes for release. He also spent a lot of time on the unissued Act I Prelude to Verdi’s La Traviata, seven takes with none of them approved. Otherwise, he only made three to four takes, which was scarcely unusual for those days; and, as a matter of fact, Stokowski made even MORE takes of more records before approving them for release than Toscanini did.

Now that we can hear these recordings with their proper balance and amplitude of sound, the aural impact of the performances is considerably different. The careful balance between sections that Toscanini worked out is now much easier to hear, and without the harsh grating sound of yore, the performances are much easier to appreciate. This is particularly true of the last movement of the Beethoven Fifth Symphony, which always struck me an unnaturally harsh in previous releases, but even the opening of the Don Pasquale overture, which I always thought sounded like one big glob of sound, is now much easier to take.

Thus I recommend this CD, particularly to Toscanini fans, as a replacement for whatever incarnation is currently in your collection. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

—© 2020 Lynn René Bayley

Follow me on Twitter (@Artmusiclounge) or Facebook (as Monique Musique)

Return to homepage OR

Read The Penguin’s Girlfriend’s Guide to Classical Music

It’s Music Time With Eddie Sauter!

BASIE-GREEN: High Tide. SAUTER: Superman. Three on a Match. I. JONES: It Has to be You. RODGERS-HART: My Funny Valentine. HILDINGER: Was ist los in Baden-Oos. SOLAL: Dermière Minute* / Rolf Schneebiegl, tpt; Hans Koller, cl/t-sax; Rudi Flierl, bar-sax; Adam “Adi” Feuerstein, fl; Hans Hammerschmid, *Martial Solal,  pno; unknown bs; Sperie Karas, dm (live: Baden-Baden, December 8, 1957) / HILDINGER: Kopf hoch. BASIE: Easy Does It. LANE-HARBURG: Old Devil Moon.* SAUTER: Three on a Match / Schneebiegl, Kurt Sauter, tpt; Otto Bredl, tb; Koller, t-sax; Flierl, bar-sax; Hammerschmid, pno; unknown bs & dm; *Rita Reys, voc. (live: Freiburg, January 12, 1958) / HAMMERSCHMID: Street Market. Port au Prince. LOESSER: Suddenly It’s Spring. HILDINGER: Littler Girl in a Big City.* Reeperbahn.* Spook Walk. SAUTER: Hightor / Schneebiegl, tpt; Bredl, Albert Mangelsdorff, tb; Flierl, t-sax; Willie Sanner, bar-sax; Hammerschmid, pno; Attila Zoller, gt; unknown bs & dm; *Blanche Birdsong, voc (live: Kaiserslautern, January 23, 1958) / SWR Jazzhaus JAH-460

Sometimes I think that Eddie Sauter and his lifetime of work have not only been marginalized by today’s jazz world but completely forgotten. I say this based not just on the extraordinary number of jazz musicians who are constantly reviving jazz of the past but always skipping over Sauter, but also from the even higher number of jazz arrangers who show absolutely no imagination in their scores yet constantly get praised by critics as being “innovative.”

Yet Sauter, though not the first imaginative arranger in jazz—that honor goes to three men from the 1920s, Duke Ellington, Don Redman and Bill Challis—was clearly pushing the envelope even when he worked for the quiet Red Norvo orchestra of 1936-38 but then pulled out all the stops with Benny Goodman in 1939-44, Artie Shaw in 1945 and Ray McKinley in 1946-49. Although the scores he co-wrote with arranger Bill Finegan in the early to mid 1950s were colorful, it was of course their least jazzy work that hit the pop charts, and the collapse of that band sent Sauter to Germany, his ancestral home, where he led some excellent live sessions in the late 1950s. This CD, which came out in 2016 but has only now come to my attention, is one of them.

He is working here with what is essentially a septet in the first two sessions, a nonet (with vocalist added) in the third, yet he and his guest arrangers—Dave Hildinger on My Funny Valentine and Hans Koller on Easy Does It—treat these groups as if they were full orchestras, playing the instruments against one another as if in sections, and it’s utterly amazing the sounds he gets out of them. Count Basie’s High Tide, in fact, sounds so much like a Sauter-Finegan Orchestra piece that even I was utterly amazed, with Sauter pitting the high flute and clarinet against the heaviness of the baritone and tenor saxes as he had in the early-to-mid 1950s. The solos are neat and fit into the scheme of the arrangements; I was particularly impressed by the bass solo by an unknown player. In Superman,  trumpeter Rolf Schneebigl doesn’t quite have the looseness of swing that Cootie Williams imparted on the original record, but the band plays with a quicker tempo and tighter drive than on the famous Goodman recording, and the wonderful Hans Koller plays a superb tenor sax solo.

In addition to the highly imaginative scoring—so far above most of what I hear nowadays as “innovative” that it’s astounding—there is Sauter’s incredible sense of harmonic movement. The underlying harmonies are almost always shifting, using certain notes within each chord as a “pivot point” to change them to sometimes surprisingly remote keys. This eventually became a strong influence on the Stan Kenton and Woody Herman band arrangers, not to mention certain musicians who worked in the 1950s as well, but it is certain that no one ever did this as well as Eddie Sauter did. He was, quite simply, a genius.

And yes, one can tell the difference between Sauter and Hildinger in My Funny Valentine. It’s a good arrangement, to be sure, but not one in which the harmony shifts under the soloist’s feet like quicksand. Ironically, it was these astonishing harmonic shifts that Benny Goodman disliked the most in Sauter’s scores, which is why he recorded a great many of them but played only a few in his live performances and broadcasts of the time. You can immediately tell the difference between the Hildinger arrangement of Valentine and Sauter’s arrangement of Hildinger’s composition Was ist los in Baden-Oos; though he keeps the harmonic shifts to a minimum here, they are still present, and the instrumental voicing is pure Sauter, such as the flute-trumpet chorus around the 4:50 mark. We also get a nice chase chorus here between the tenor and baritone saxes that adds to the fun. On the last number in this set, the great Martial Solal sat in to play one of his own compositions, again arranged by Sauter. It sounds like a contrafact on Sweet Georgia Brown.

In the second session, Sauter had two trumpets, the other being his son Kurt, and once again his use of the baritone sax to anchor the sound—something he borrowed from Sy Oliver—denotes one of his signature sounds. And there is something else that needs to be pointed out. Unlike so many jazz recordings I review nowadays, even the very good ones, Sauter’s bands here sound as if they’re having a ball playing this music. The joie-de-vivre is infectious. Koller’s arrangement of Basie’s Easy Does It is very good in its own way, using the short riff that makes up the melody in overlapping canon form, and includes very fine solos by Hammerschmid on piano and our two trumpeters. One Rita Reys, who sings the vocal on Old Devil Moon, isn’t great but isn’t bad, either. In this set, I was particularly impressed by Sauter’s Three on a Match: the voicing is imaginative but uncomplicated, and it almost sounds like Jimmy Giuffre’s Four Brothers, except with more interjections from the trumpets.

The more you hear the various tracks on this set, the more you notice. Both Sauter as an arranger and the band in general has a lot of fun playing Hans Hammerschmid’s Street Market,  but as soon as you hit Sauter’s arrangement of Suddenly It’s Spring you might as well be in a different world, sound-wise. On Little Girl in a Big City and Reeperbahn, Sauter uses vocalist Blanche Birdsong as a wordless instrumental soloist, as he did with other female singers in the Sauter-Finegan band. This may strike some listeners as the most dated aspect of these performers, but I don’t mind it so much.

There’s no getting around it. After spending nearly 75 minutes in Eddie Sauter’s sound world, you gain a lot of respect for his musical ingenuity. Once in a while you get the feeling that some things are done for effect only, as the xylophone doubling the horns in Hightor, but these slight indiscretions do not erase the memory of some of the most colorful and imaginative jazz arrangements you’ll ever have the delight of hearing.

—© 2020 Lynn René Bayley

Follow me on Twitter (@artmusiclounge) or Facebook (as Monique Musique)

Return to homepage OR

Read my book, From Baroque to Bop and Beyond: An extended and detailed guide to the intersection of classical music and jazz

Scott Lee Through the Mangrove Tunnels

LEE: Thorough the Mangrove Tunnels. The Man in the Water. Naravez Dance Club. Flying Fish. Plaything of Desire. Engine Trouble. The Ballad of Willie Cole. Floating Away / JACK Quartet; Steven Beck, pno; Russell Lacy, dm / Panoramic Recordings PAN20

Scott Lee is a composer who grew up “wandering the swamps and bayous of Florida,” thus he wrote this suite based on “my memories as well as the colorful history Weedon Island, a nature preserve in St. Petersburg that I spent my childhood exploring. The island’s many legends include ceremonial gatherings of Native Americans, landings by Spanish conquistadors, burned-down speakeasies, shootouts, bootlegging, a failed movie studio, plane crashes, and an axe-murder.” So we can surely expect a jolly time as we listen to this music!

Through the Mangrove Tunnels opens with somber, slow bass notes played on the piano, behind which one eventually hears the string quartet making some bizarre sounds, to which the drums are added. Ambient music, perhaps, but ambient music with an edge, and it is developed in an interesting manner. My sole complaint was the bias of the drummer towards a rock beat. This I could have lived without.

But the music is no stranger than Weedon Island itself. Judging from the photo in the booklet, it doesn’t even look like an island, but rather like a series of huge mossy growths sticking up out of the water like fungus. I can well imagine the impression this made on a young boy, especially when combined with tales of criminal activity and violence. The second piece on this CD, “The Man in the Water,” sounds like a riot of psychopaths against sanity—not too far removed from latter-day rioters on both sides of the political spectrum.

The music written for the piano, though edgy, is relatively conventional, but the music written for the string quartet is anything but. The JACK Quartet puts itself through some remarkable musical contortions in each of these pieces, seldom playing as one would expect a string quartet to play; it must have taken them hours and hours to master this music. “Naravez Dance Club” has a rhythm simulating American Indian music but combined with a bit of an R&B swagger before moving, once again, into a rock beat. (Note to modern classical composers: Please can the rock beat. It doesn’t fit in with your music. Thank you.) Finally, in “Flying Fish,” the viola gets something to play that almost sounds like conventional music, albeit atonal music, with the other three instruments occasionally joining in for some swirling figures.

Yet without a score, technical description of each of these pieces is a bit difficult, as one often gets lost in counting beats, as in the opening of “Playthings of Desire” until it settles down into a strangely Chopin-like melody before deconstructing itself over amorphous rhythms and modal harmonies. When the quartet enters, we suddenly return to echt-Romantic melodies, almost slurpy and soothing. As if to offset this, however, “Engine Trouble” is comprised of chaotic, bouncing rhythmic figures played solely by the quartet.

“The Ballad of Willie Cole” is also fast and edgy, starting out with the quartet until the piano and drums enter behind them. The quality of this music is primarily in the modern “shock” style of today, yet with interesting modifications, and in this piece the music suddenly veers towards the soft rock genre. Please, Scott, stop the rock nonsense. Later in the same piece, after a pause, Lee involves the piano quintet in a sort of minimalist fantasy, with the cello playing stretched-out musical lines across the ostinato rhythm…until the rock beat returns and the tempo increases.

In short, it’s an interesting album, full of novel ideas that are for the most part well crafted and extremely fascinating. If your tolerance for rock music is higher than mine, you’ll surely enjoy it.

—© 2020 Lynn René Bayley

Follow me on Twitter (@Artmusiclounge) or Facebook (as Monique Musique)

Return to homepage OR

Read The Penguin’s Girlfriend’s Guide to Classical Music

Bill Evans Live at Ronnie Scott’s

ARLEN-CAPOTE: A Sleepin’ Bee. A. & D. PREVIN: You’re Gonna Hear From Me (2 vers.). KERN-HARBACH: Yesterdays. EVANS: Turn Out the Stars. Very Early. Waltz for Debby. G. & I. GERSHWIN-HAYWARD: My Man’s Gone Now. MANDEL-MERCER: Emily (2 vers.). RODGERS-HART: Spring is Here. G. & I. GERSHWIN: Embraceable You. BRELTON-EDWARDS-MEYER: For Heaven’s Sake. CHURCHILL-MORAY: Someday My Prince Will Come. ZEITLAN: Quiet Now. MONK-HANIGHAN-WILLIAMS: ‘Round Midnight. YOUNG-WASHINGTON: Stella By Starlight. BACHARACH-DAVID: Alfie. PREVERT-KOSMA-MERCER: Autumn Leaves. DAVIS: Nardis / Bill Evans, pno; Eddie Gomez, bs; Jack DeJohnette, dm / Resonance Records HCD-2046 (live: London, July 1968)

This first release of these July 1968 performances by the Bill Evans Trio marks the fifth collaboration between Resonance Records and the Bill Evans Estate. Two of the previous four releases also feature this particular trio. After releasing the “lost” studio session made in the Black Forest in Germany just prior to this engagement, producer Zev Feldman asked Jack DeJohnette if he had any recordings from this London engagement. DeJohnette told him that he did, but that the audio was quite poor.

Fortunately, this turned out to be only partially true. After first hearing the tapes, Feldman decided they were too sub-par to use; but as it turned out, according to the liner notes, “we discovered that what we’d been trying to listen to were actually multitrack tape recordings and the setup we’d been trying to listen to hadn’t allowed us to hear all the tracks. Once we got that sorted, it was amazing to hear the music come alive. These performances were inspired!”

Personally, I agree with the inspiration part of this session—in my view, it is even more exciting than the Black Forest recordings—but I can quite agree that the sound is much improved. No, it’s not as horrible as that once-lost session that Clifford Brown and Sonny Rollins played at the Bee Hive, or the live Five Spot recordings of the Thelonious Monk group with John Coltrane on tenor sax, but it’s scarcely state of the art. The sound is rather shrill, even a bit tinny; having once heard Eddie Gomez live in concert – the one member of this trio I did manage to hear “live” – I can assure you that his bass tone was much richer and fuller than this. I say that because pianos vary from place to place, and although Ronny Scott’s was (and I think still is) a very famous London jazz club, and Scott tried to keep his house instruments in top condition, I really don’t know what this particular keyboard really sounded like in the club, but Gomez brought his own bass.

I do, however, agree with Feldman regarding the high quality of these performances. As much as I admire Evans, I’m pretty judicious when it comes to which albums I keep, though I have several of them. In his early years, Evans was a very adventurous pianist who played in a number of very different and complex settings, including his recordings with George Russell and Charles Mingus, but one he became really famous due to his soft-grained playing at the Village Vanguard with the Scott LaFaro-Paul Motian trio, he pretty much became Mr. Soft Jazz, and although he was always head and shoulders above the rest of that breed, soft jazz is soft jazz and I’m not a huge fan of it. Evans’ Loose Blues album is my favorite of his studio recordings from the ‘60s. Interestingly, when Russell invited him back to play piano on his Living Time album of the early 1970s, with its very edgy, atonal qualities, Evans reveled in it, but when the album was released hundreds of his fans wrote to him and said that if he EVER made another recording like that they would abandon him. Personally, I really don’t care much for the music on that Living Time album, but I admired Evans for leaving his musical “comfort zone” and stretching out into something quite experimental.

On these performances, sound quality aside, Evans is far from the soft jazz pianist most of his fans have come to love and accept as “his” style. On the contrary, he is literally explosive on these performances, playing with a harder attack (as he had on Loose Blues and some of the earlier stuff), in places (i.e., Yesterdays) almost explosive in his approach.

Nor do I think this is just due to the harder, thinner sound quality of the piano as recorded here, because on some of the ballads, such as his own composition Turn Out the Stars, he clearly begins in a soft mode but, surprisingly, begins attacking the keyboard harder when he reaches the improvised section. And it isn’t just the harder attack that mark these performances as special; he literally creates entirely new compositions, with full 16-bar shapes, within these improvs. In short, Evans was on a real creative “high” during this engagement, locked into what he once described in an interview as “the universal overmind.” Was he possibly off narcotics during this engagement, or at least cutting back? We’ll never know what exactly inspired him so, but inspired he most certainly was here.

I may be prejudiced in this respect, but I think that DeJohnette was a more exciting and dynamic drummer than those he normally used in his trios, and this, too, may have acted as an inspiration. Interestingly, although Gomez is playing at his usual high level, Evans only gave him a few spot solos here and there in the first five numbers. Much of the time, you have to hear what he’s doing behind the pianist to appreciate how well he, too, played on this gig, but fortunately he is closely recorded which makes it easy to hear. One thing that makes me think I am right about this is that every time DeJohnette increases the volume and/or starts to kick into high gear, Evans responds with even more exciting playing.

Emily is the sort of performance that, had the microphone placement been a little less up-close, might indeed have sounded “soft,” and here, as in a few other numbers, I think the recorded sound is a bit misleading. Yet once again, listen to what happens when DeJohnette suddenly kicks his drums into gear: Evans increases the tempo, hits the keyboard harder than in the first chorus, and again takes off in new directions. And listen to how crisp and controlled his fast playing is! Then, suddenly, the pianist relaxes the tempo a little, pulls back on the volume and gives Gomez a full chorus—and does he respond! The entire performance of Embraceable You is given over the Gomez’ bass, and he responds with some of his most imaginative playing.

Of course, by this point in his career, Evans’ repertoire had also come to revolve around a set repertoire of pieces old and new that he was comfortable with and thus could play around with in live performances, and these sets are full of them. A Sleepin’ Bee, Yesterdays, Someday My Prince Will Come, My Man’s Gone Now, Spring is Here, Embraceable You and Autumn Leaves were all Evans staples in addition to his own compositions. Two numbers here of particular interest, however, are the then-popular song Alfie (a tune I always hated in the vocal version by Anthony Newley) and Thelonious Monk’s ‘Round Midnight, neither of which he played very often, and he does a great job on them here.

Perhaps one reason why these performances are so exciting is that Evans and his trio were playing in a well-known jazz club, not a cocktail lounge, and thus many of the audience were professional musicians. He could be himself with them and not worry about whether or not his “soft jazz” fans would complain that his playing was too edgy.

The album comes with a lavish 44-page booklet that includes, among other goodies, interviews with DeJohnette, Gomez and Chevy Chase, who is himself a jazz pianist and a huge Evans fan. One teaser from the booklet: I had absolutely no idea that future actress Blythe Danner had been a jazz singer who worked with Chase in live performances.

No two ways about it: this is the finest vintage jazz album of the year to date. If it doesn’t win a Grammy, someone in the Grammy nominating committee has tin ears. But I’m giving it one of my coveted “What a Performance” awards because it deserves it.

—© 2020 Lynn René Bayley

Follow me on Twitter (@artmusiclounge) or Facebook (as Monique Musique)

Return to homepage OR

Read my book, From Baroque to Bop and Beyond: An extended and detailed guide to the intersection of classical music and jazz

Walton’s Chamber Music in New Recording

WALTON: Piano Quartet. Toccata for Violin & Piano. 2 Pieces for Violin & Piano. Violin Sonata / Matthew Jones, vln; Sarah-Jane Bradley, vla; Tim Lowe, cel; Annabel Thwaite, pno / Naxos 8.573892

William Walton, like Sir Arthur Sullivan, was never comfortable with the fact that his highly original and entertaining Façade  overshadowed his more serious works, but in many instances (the First Symphony being just one of them) his more serious scores tended towards bombast. Of his orchestral works, I very much like Balshazzar’s Feast, the Cello Concerto and the Viola Concerto but not much more than that.

On this new recording, however, we begin with a really fine work, the Piano Quartet. Perhaps it is so good because Walton continued to tinker with it over the decades after he originally wrote it in 1918-19, the final revised version as presented here being made in 1974-75. As the liner notes indicate, its gestation is also somewhat obscured by the fact that the original score was lost in the mail for more than a year, thus postponing its official premiere in 1924, five years after it was finished. Some revisions must have taken place in between. Walton always liked this piece, once stating facetiously that “it was written when I was a drooling baby, but it is a very attractive piece.” In actuality he was well past the “drooling baby” stage, but it was put together between the ages of 16 and 17. The music not only has wonderful originality and drive, but the second movement leans heavily on the pentatonic scale, something he clearly borrowed from the French-Russian school, and in the last movement he sets up a three-voice fugue between the three strings. Its energy is, ironically I suppose, not that far removed from Façade which was written the year this quartet premiered in Liverpool.

Of course, much of my impression about this work relies on the extraordinarily energetic playing of the four performers, none of whom I have previously heard of. Violinist Matthew Jones, a member of the Badke Quartet in 2007, gave a critically praised solo recital at Carnegie Hall in 2008 and has since become head of the chamber music department and professor of viola (his second instrument) at the Guildhall School of Music. Violist Sarah-Jane Bradley debuted at Wigmore Hall in 1997. As a champion of new works for her instrument, she has played and recorded modern viola concerti over the years. Cellist Tim Lowe recently debuted as a soloist at Wigmore Hall and has played many recitals throughout the UK and Europe. Pianist Annabel Thwaite, who appears to be the youngest member of this group, is well known as an accompanist, having won several awards in that capacity. So although they may not be all that well known “across the pond,” all are top talents in the UK.

The Toccata was written in 1922-23, thus finished the same year that Façade premiered, and it, too, has tremendous vitality as well as ingenuity in its writing. Both violin and piano play fast, driving figures, often supporting one another but sometimes running off in slightly different directions; the pianist is clearly a soloist in this work and not just a chord-playing accompanist. There are some interesting suspended harmonies using extended chords in the slow middle section, and there is a rhapsodic solo violin cadenza at about the 11-minute mark, followed by an impassioned piano solo . Another excellent piece.

By contrast, the 2 Pieces for Violin & Piano are slow mood music, reminiscent of Walton’s film music. My readers know that, with a very few outliers excepted, I consider film music, even when written by known composers, to be the thrown-away chewing gum on the bottom of the composer’s shoes, so I will pass on further comment.

We close with the Violin Sonata of 1947-49, written for Yehudi Menuhin and Louis Kantner and dedicated to the performers’ wives, who were sisters. According to the notes, the use of commas in Walton’s score were misconstrued for decades to mean musical pauses, when in fact they were intended to indicate a clean bow attack. Truthfully, this is not terribly inspired music; Walton seems to be resting on his composer’s laurels. The piano part is wispy and wimpy and not terribly interesting, though it is academically fine in terms of its function. The violin line isn’t that interesting, either; much of the music goes in one ear and out the other. Nonetheless, it is still very well played by Jones and Thwaite.

Basically a fine album, then, that starts out with a bang but ends with not a whimper but a simper.

—© 2020 Lynn René Bayley

Follow me on Twitter (@Artmusiclounge) or Facebook (as Monique Musique)

Return to homepage OR

Read The Penguin’s Girlfriend’s Guide to Classical Music

Hirota Believes That Small is Beautiful

SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL / SCHOENBERG: 6 Kleine Klavierstücke. KRENEK: 8 Piano Pieces. LIGETI: Invention. BERIO: Erdenklaver. Brin. Leaf. CARTER: 90+. Retrouvailles. BECKWITH: The Music Room. MATHER: Fantasy. CHERNEY: Elegy for a Misty Afternoon. WEINZWEIG: Canon Stride. CARASTATHIS: Traces. KULESHA: 2 Pieces for Piano. LEMAY: 6 Ushtebis. Tanze vor Angst…Hommage à Paul Klee / Yoko Hirota, pno / Navona NV6294

Yoko Hirota is a Japanese-born pianist who now works and teaches at Laurentian University in Greater Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. A champion of modern music, she was inspired in this direction by Canadian pianist and pedagogue Louis-Philippe Pelletier, and this penchant of hers manifests itself in this interesting recital of piano miniatures.

She begins her recital with the fascinating 6 Kleine Klavierstücke of Schoenberg, one of his earliest 12-tone suites, and immediately one is aware of a highly intelligent and committed artist. Not only is small “beautiful” to Hirota, it is also not to be undervalued. She gives each piece and each phrase within each piece her full attention, carefully crafting the music in her own manner. Not for her a completely abstract rendition of modern music; she realizes that these pieces were written by flesh-and-blood human beings who wanted their music to move people, not just stun them with their harmonic and structural daring. As a result, she really communicates when she plays. In this respect, she is a throwback to such pianists of the past as Cortot, Fischer, Cliburn and Lewenthal, even though those musicians played little or nothing beyond the era of Ravel and Debussy.

Following Schoenberg, Hirota digests the surprisingly modernistic 8 Pieces of Ernst Krenek in a similar fashion. Ditto Ligeti’s Invention, the three pieces by Berio and especially Elliott Carter’s music. Never a fan of his scores, I well believed the comment by one associate (who shall remain nameless) who said that “I don’t think even Elliott likes his own music,” but Hirota not only likes it, she almost makes you like it, too by infusing a sense of lyricism into his abstract excursions.

After having gone through five well-known composers, Hirota continues by playing the music of modern Canadians: John Beckwith, Bruce Mather, Brian Cherney, John Weinzweig, Aris Carasthasis, Gary Kulesha and Robert Lemay, the latter a fellow professor at Laurentian University. Most (but not all) of their music is very much in the serial style, sounding like their forebears in Europe and America without really having a strong individual personality though it is all interesting. I especially liked Mather’s Fantasy, which showed good imagination, and Cherney’s Elegy for a Misty Afternoon has a very interesting structure. Weinzweig’s Canon Stride is almost a third stream piece, using the basic principles of stride piano within the context of a 12-tone classical piece…shades of Erwin Schulhoff! And interestingly, Carasthasis’ Traces also contain some very clear jazz references. These two pieces, too, are atonal but not really serial.

This is clearly an excellent album, one of the best of the year.

—© 2020 Lynn René Bayley

Follow me on Twitter (@Artmusiclounge) or Facebook (as Monique Musique)

Return to homepage OR

Read The Penguin’s Girlfriend’s Guide to Classical Music

Juyeon Song’s Stunning Opera Recital

WAGNER: Die Walküre: Ho-yo-to-ho! Siegfried: Ewig war ich. Götterdämmerung: Starke scheite. Tristan und Isolde: Mild und leise. STRAUSS: Salome: Ah du wolltest mich nicht / Juyeon Song, sop; Janáček Philharmonic Ostrava; Niels Muus, cond / Affetto AF2005

This CD, released in July of this year, was NOT included in Naxos of America’s new releases list for that month, but lo and behold, I found it on the Naxos Music Library. Having been highly impressed by Song’s singing in the new Navona release of Tristan und Isolde, I decided to review it.

Like so many huge voices, Song’s sometimes gets a little out of kilter with a bit of an uneven flutter at the beginning of pieces. In the case of “Ho-yo-to-ho!” from Walküre, which is very short, she doesn’t really have time to warm up, although she does attempt the trill which so few Brünnhildes even bother to sing but which is written in the score. In the extended scenes from Götterdämmerung and Salome, however, the voice has time to warm up, thus about five minutes into these performances the voice is “locked in” and nicely focused.

The unusual qualities that I noticed in her Tristan performance—the ultra-bright quality of the voice with almost no low undertones (though she does have low notes, and uses them to good effect) and the piercing tone—work especially well in the Salome excerpt where she sounds youthful, a big plus in this role. But throughout the recital, one thing becomes quite clear, and that is that she is always a very expressive and highly dramatic interpreter. Not a word or phrase goes by that she has not worked on to project the text in a dramatic fashion, thus creating a real feeling of theatricality in everything she sings.

In addition to her exciting singing, one must also praise the little-known conductor Niels Muus. His grasp of these scores is nothing short of miraculous; like conductor Robert Reimer in the Tristan, he grabs your attention and holds it from start to finish in each and every selection.

It’s difficult, on a recording, to accurately judge the size and power of a voice. As I said in my Tristan review, I don’t think that Song’s voice is as voluminous as those of Flagstad, Nilsson or Lindholm, but due to the brightness of her timbre it is the kind of voice that can cut through an orchestra like a knife. No amount of massed strings, winds and/or brass can cover her voice. It has a laser-like focus, not always tonally “beautiful” but clearly impressive in everything she does.

As I said near the end of my Tristan article, if you can adjust your ears to her sound you will find it immeasurably thrilling. She sings from the heart as well as from the mind, and nowadays this sort of quality is exceedingly rare.

—© 2020 Lynn René Bayley

Follow me on Twitter (@Artmusiclounge) or Facebook (as Monique Musique)

Return to homepage OR

Read The Penguin’s Girlfriend’s Guide to Classical Music

Christiane Karajeva’s Piano Recital

BERG: Piano Sonata in b min.: I. Maβig bewegt. MEDTNER: Sonata Reminiscenza in a min.: Allegretto tranquillo. JANÁČEK: Sonata “I.X.1905 – From the Street.” SCHUBERT: Moments Musicaux, D. 780 / Christiane Karajeva, pno / Gramola 99227

This program is unusual not merely for the fact that three fairly modern 20th-century composers are then followed by the music of Franz Schubert, but also because only excerpts are played from the Berg and Medtner sonatas. Yet pianist Karajeva claims that this CD is the result of “about 55,000 hours in my life that I have spent at the instrument.” A friend of hers, listening to this CD, said to her, “This is you. It’s as if you were standing in front of me and telling me stories about your life.”

In addition to being a performer, Karajeva has also taught at the University of Vienna for the past 40 years, so she’s definitely been around a while. But that is neither here nor there; the important thing is how she plays, and she plays with tremendous physical power as well as a depth of feeling that is unusual, particularly in the very modern sonata movement of Alban Berg. Written in 1907-08 when he was still working his way through bitonality and had not yet discovered the 12-tone system, it is still thorny music not usually played with such unbridled passion, but that is exactly what Karajeva brings to the music here.

Indeed, her interpretation of the Medtner sonata movement makes me wish that she would record a complete set of his sonatas. Surely Medtner is in dire need of revival and re-appreciation, and I am convinced that Karajeva is exactly the right pianist to do this.

The Janáček Sonata is from his earlier period and not as harmonically modern as his works from the late 1910s through the late 1920s, yet again Karajeva plays it with great feeling. The same is true of the Schubert Impromptus, which she plays with phrasing and accents a little different from anyone else I’ve heard.

A very fine recital, then, well worth hearing.

—© 2020 Lynn René Bayley

Follow me on Twitter (@Artmusiclounge) or Facebook (as Monique Musique)

Return to homepage OR

Read The Penguin’s Girlfriend’s Guide to Classical Music

Revisiting Sutermeister’s “Romeo und Julia”

SUTERMEISTER: Romeo und Julia / Urzula Koszut, sop (Juliet); Adolf Dallapozza, ten (Romeo); Jörn W. Wilsing, bar (Escalus); Theodor Nicolai, speaker (Montague); Alexander Malta, bass (Capulet); Raimund Grumbach, bar (Balthasar); Hildegard Laurich, mezzo (Countess Capulet); Gudrun Wewezow, alto (Nurse); Ferry Gruber, ten (Servant); Nikolaus Hillebrand, bass (Pater Lorenzo); Gregor Lütje, boy sop (Shepherd/Boy’s Voice); Tölzer Boys’ Choir; Bavarian Radio Chorus; Munich Radio Orch.; Heinz Wallberg, cond / Musiques Suisses MGB CD 626, available for free streaming in small bits on YouTube

This now-old 1980 recording is the only sound document we have of Heinrich Sutermeister’s operatic masterpiece, written when he was only 30 years old and a smash hit across Europe throughout the 1940s. It is also available for streaming on Amazon, where you can also purchase the physical CD which comes with a full libretto (in German only).

I went out of my way to look this up after having been highly impressed by Karajan’s performance of the Sutermeier Missa da Requiem that I recently reviewed. Interestingly, the musical style here is quite different. The Requiem shows very strongly the influence of Stravinsky while Romeo und Julia sounds a great deal in places like Carl Orff. This makes sense when you learn that, as a 21-year-old, Sutermeister left his native Switzerland to study with Orff in Germany. But the music is not entirely Orff-influenced, as we shall discover.

The opera debuted in Dresden in 1940, conducted by Karl Böhm who raved about the young composer as a “genius.” It spread across Europe like wildfire throughout the ‘40s, but by the mid-‘50s Sutermeiester’s harmonic language was considered “dated.” I find this difficult to understand considering that Orff, one of his original mentors, was still writing and getting operas produced using essentially the same harmonic language he had introduced with Carmina Burana and Der Mond many years earlier. I think that, for whatever reason, music critics simply turned their back on Sutermeister. Neither this opera nor his superb Requiem have ever found a place in the standard repertoire, anywhere in the world.

The opening chorus is very much Orff-like in its use of a quick ostinato rhythm and a single chord underneath, with the top line shifting slightly in harmony as the rhythms change as well. It has a very strong Carmina Burana-like feel to it, including two speaking roles which interject a few works from time to time. But Sutermeister’s orchestration is far more colorful than Orff’s, sounding not unlike Stravinsky’s Petrouchka (a work that, I still feel, was incredibly innovative and unfairly overshadowed by Le sacre du Printemps, great as that ballet is). Moreover, Sutermeister wrote here in a more continuous manner than young Orff; each scene blends seamlessly and skillfully into the next, creating a musical and dramatic flow that Orff would not really achieve until the 1950s.

There are also actual arias—brief, but still arias—set to interesting yet essentially tonal musical lines, and this was something Orff was never able to really achieve. For all his brilliance, Orff’s solo spots for singers always consisted of strophic lines, often centered around two or three pitches, and nothing melodic in the true sense of the word. In addition to Orff and Stravinsky, I also hear some influence of Hindemith here, particularly in the latter’s opera Mathis der Maler. Sutermeister also wrote duets in this opera, something Orff almost never did.

By the time you reach track 3, however, the Stravinsky influence really does seem to overshadow that of Orff…but again, it’s not thievery. Sutermeister clearly had his own way of dealing with the Stravinskyisms in his score, blending and morphing them in ways that Igor never thought of. Still, it’s an interesting reference point.

As we get deeper into Act I and the interaction between the two young lovers, the vocal lines become even more lyrical, and there is a note of the tragedy to come in some of the music. Sutermeister laid out his dramatic and musical path in this work with unerring dramatic accuracy. There’s also a nice unaccompanied vocal madrigal between Juliet, Romeo and Friar Laurence in the midst of Act II, Scene 4. As one gets deeper into Act II, one notices that the music is almost symphonically developed, much like Berlioz’ Les Troyens or Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.

Pride of place among the solo singers goes to Urszula Koszut, a soprano I’d never heard of, as Juliet. Her free, open tone, complete vocal control and youthful sound are completely appropriate to the role. Second in excellence is Nikolaus Hillebrand as Father Laurence; his dark, rich basso cantate voice is perfect. Adolf Dallapozza, a pretty well-known light tenor of the time, has a bit of vocal control problems but is completely wrapped up in his role. All of the other singers are also quite good; this was an era when, for the most part, record companies made sure that singers in their opera recordings, particularly in leading roles but also in subsidiary ones, did not have wobbles, poor breath support, unclear diction or other defects. Times have certainly changed.

In the end, however, I found it an interesting work but not a “keeper.” Worth hearing at least once, but as a musical representation of the Romeo and Juliet story I still prefer Berlioz’ “dramatic symphony” and Prokofiev’s ballet score.

—© 2020 Lynn René Bayley

Follow me on Twitter (@Artmusiclounge) or Facebook (as Monique Musique)

Return to homepage OR

Read The Penguin’s Girlfriend’s Guide to Classical Music