by EDWARD TATNALL CANBY
Julian Carillo: Mass for Pope John XXIII (1962). Chorale des Professeurs de Musique de la Ville de Paris, Blot. CRI SD 246 stereo ($5.95).
Did this record ring bells when it came in. Back in the early thirties I owned a 78-rpm disc by this very man, a Mexican experimentalist who had invented quarter tones. Divvy up the ordinary scale into lots and lots of notes, very close together. He wrote music, to show off the system. The bits of his "Prelude to Christopher Columbus" I remember all too well. It was in D Minor, and various instruments sort of went up a fire-siren scale, then came back down again. Period. The quarter tones tended to blend together; the "harmony" just stayed still. Absolutely nothing happened, except the fire sirens up and down in D minor--so I remember it.
Here, many years later, is the celebrated Carillo, in his eighties, writing an impassioned and super-Romantic Mass for the good Pope. In quarter tones. It is sung in quarter tones, for two whole LP sides, by the assiduous Professors of the City of Paris, who obviously would sing twenty-seventh tones if you asked them to.
The work, to be sure, is a lot more sophisticated than the bits of " Columbus" thirty-plus years ago. It is very much in the late-Romantic Church tradition of the Mass, maybe out of Bruckner & Co., which is in its favor. But the elements that are interesting in this long piece are, to my ear, precisely those which are not microtonal: a fair amount of simple counterpoint and some good word setting, all in a timelessly old-fashioned style of Romantic expression.
The microtones? You play this and your turntable seems to develop problems. The voices keep slithering downwards, as though the a.c. were lagging. Or slithering up, as though the power were being restored.
Yep, the same old tricks. Fire-siren scales or rather, slides, slowly down ( quarter-step by quarter-step) or up. Groups of notes repeated, a quarter-tone lower each time, just to show you how it works. Chords that slowly turn inside out, fire-sirening up and down at the same time. All extremely sea-sick! A fine demo of the sound of quarter-tones. But what else?
Musically very little else. Yet behind all the groans and slitherings and seasick gasps there is, of course, sincerity and feeling-the old man really did feel strongly about Pope John, and wanted to say so in his music. Which, alas, does not make it any better.
For my ear, of course. If you want to disagree, by all means try for yourself. All you have to do is sit down and listen to the whole Mass, two complete LP sides of groans and gargantuan sighs and sliding fire-siren pitches.
Performance: A+ Sound: B
Marie-Aimee Varro. (Liszt, Dvorak, Schumann, Smetana). Orion ORS 6912 stereo ($5.98).
Here's that fabulous lady pianist again ( and I can't find her earlier disc, no longer listed as available). Mystery. She looks young in her photo but she studied with Sauer, who would be 108 now if he hadn't died in 1942, and with Alfred Cortot, whose centenary is coming up soon. She is a direct inheritor of the Liszt piano tradition though she didn't quite make it to study with the old man himself.
Whatever her age, I'm here to say she is a fabulous pianist and musician of the old sort, who tosses off the music of the sparkling nineteenth-century pianistic geniuses with aplomb and, what's more important, good sense and utter naturalness. Listen to this gal-and then try some of our silly whiz kids, the kids with the fast fingers! No comparison.
Miss Varro, if I guess rightly, has based herself in Canada and makes her recordings at home, on some elderly species of piano with precisely the right tone for the music, and no great hassle that a few of the notes are out of tune on it. She was on another label, before; evidently the tapes are sold around.
On this record you get the six Liszt Transcendental Etudes based on Paganini, plus super-brilliant pieces by the three other composers-a Dvorak grand Waltz, a stunner by Smetana "On the Seashore" which I'd swear was by Liszt himself, and an early Schummann, the Toccata, Op. 7.
Performance: A, Sound: B+
Choir of St. John'sCollege, Cambridge, (Music by Bairstow, Britten, Howells, Ireland, Orr, Tippett, Vaughan Williams, Walton) dir. George Guest. Argo ZRG 3340 stereo ($5.95).
You'll listen to this with one of two thoughts resulting. (a) How dreadfully stuffy and conservative is this semi "modern" British church music, from big and middling names; (b) how secure is the British church tradition, whereby today's composers can write, straight out of the last three centuries, music that fits ineffably into traditional services as though time had scarcely moved on.
This last, of course, is the whole idea. Tradition, permanence, change. only in an unobtrusive way. All of this music was written not for you and me but for the English church itself-for practical use in the Anglican service. One can object, but not complain, if you see what I mean.
Actually, the range of expression is decidedly varied, within the strict "parameters" of the situation. A good deal is out of the more bombastic late nineteenth century but there is plenty of a more sophisticated earlier lineage, back to Purcell and Byrd; and some genuine modern of sorts. Quite some hi fi effects, too.
Performance: A, Sounds: B+
Purcell: Music for the Chapel Royal. Soloists, Choir of St. John's College, Cambridge, Academy of St. Martin-in the-Fields, Guest. Argo ZRG 5444 stereo ($5.95). Purcell: Ayres. Deller Consort. RCA Vic trola VICS 1506 stereo ($2.49). Astonishing how much music Purcell wrote, back in seventeenth century England, now that it is being put back into production for actual listening. Few of us will have heard any of the fourteen short "ayres" for small ensemble and the six larger works on these two complementary discs.
Until the revived principles of Baroque performance were generally accepted, most of this music was virtually impossible to perform with any sense. The old way of "modernizing" made hash of it--huge, mushy orchestral arrangements, draggingly slow speeds, stumbling, limping rhythms. All wrong. Now, we hear the music as a matter of course in the proper way, with original instrumentation, a brisk and natural range of speeds, and the correct altered rhythms that take the "limp" out and add the right ornamentation. Makes all the difference! Alas, one element is still mostly unreformed--the solo voices. They offer the biggest impediment to sense in both these excellent records, in spite of the fine musicianship displayed. Just not the right kind of voices. Big, fat, wobbly, operatic-type instruments, trained for heavier, slower music and for enormous power; whereas the Purcell musical lines obviously require a wholly different vocal technique-light, flexible, accurate, able to sing fast "runs" and quirky rhythms with the accuracy of the accompanying instrument's. The solo voices in both these records sound like bulls in china shops under the strain of singing the elaborate vocal lines-vast garglings, groanings, choking noises, the actual sense of the music often merely approximated.
'Course all this is perfectly normal for today's English Baroque performances, vocally speaking, and I only make the point that we've a long way to go before the solo voices match the present instrumental forces in sheer intelligibility.
On the St. John's recording of larger works with solos, chorus, and orchestra (for the Royal Chapel), the Choir with its boys' voices makes a fine sound and at least two of the solos are really right--a boy soprano and a high countertenor.
The others boom and gargle. Alfred Deller is the Original countertenor (as to international rep) but his singing is now so mannered that one hears more Deller than Purcell, even though Purcell, too, was a countertenor and no doubt sang the very same music himself. Deller's associates, as usual, are of the big, wobbly voiced kind, though very musical. The "ayres" are solo pieces with continuo and, quite frequently, pairs of recorders, a lovely accompanying sound. If you are at all conversant with Baroque you will be able to hear "past" the wobbles etc. into the gorgeous sense of the music.
Performances: B+; B Sound: B; B
(Audio magazine, Nov. 1970; Edward Tatnall Canby)
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