Sonatas for Clarinet and Piano. (Reger: Sonata Op. 107.
Gallon: Cantabile. Martinu: Sonatina.) John Norton, Gary Wolf. Golden Crest RE 7084, stereo,
$8.98.
The Art of Richard Stoitsman. Saint Saens: Clarinet Sonata, Op. 167. Honneger: Sonatine. Debussy: Petite piece; La filie aux cheveux de lin. Poulenc: Sonata. With Irma Vallecillo, piano. Desmar DSM 1014G, dbx encoded, stereo, $8.98.
Mendelssohn: Clarinet Sonata. Reger. Clarinet Sonata, Op. 49, No. 2. John Russo, Lydia Walton Ignacio. Crystal S 334, stereo, $7.98.
An interesting thing has been happening these days in and around our college and university music schools: Hundreds of good American professional performers are just aching to get themselves on record-any record. For a good half century, most such professionals stuck to the old disdainful attitude towards recording, so neatly summed up by union man James Petrillo as canned music. But time moves on, and each succeeding generation has been a bit more appreciative of our audio art. Bound to happen among intelligent people, I say. So, as the benefits of ever-improving records began to sink into these minds, a lot of solo and chamber music players began looking for ways and means to get themselves down, and into a four-color LP record jacket. It figured. At first, the universities themselves tried starting up their own labels. Not a good idea. They don't know enough about record making, and even if the local audio people did a good job, there was distribution-woefully inadequate. Most of these labels haven't got very far by themselves.
Now-bonanza! Some of the wide awake, smaller professional record labels have discovered this gold mine of material, waiting, so to speak, with tongues hanging out, a catalogue all set and ready to go. It makes for ideal team work. The music people provide the sonic input, the record labels do the production and distribution, each with the right know-how. An excellent idea and there's only one danger glut.
If I have one tuba record on hand, I have 20. There are trombone discs, trios, quartets, brass ensembles, harp, bassoon, by the dozens of each, enough to burn up the turntable.
While the big record labels lately have skimped along with meager releases or almost none, these littler outfits blithely ship out vast boxes of discs to every reviewer in the country. It's a phenomenon. And even more so is the generally superior audio quality which we find in these products. As I keep saying, the small labels are the leaders in the record field today.
The three records picked here are not necessarily typical of their respective labels but, rather, serve to show how easy it is to find abundant material even in the most specialized corners of music. If, for clarinet and piano, you read saxophone, flute, trumpet, it is the same. Of the three clarinet-and-piano teams, the most effective on record here is Golden Crest's John Norton, with Gary Wolf as his pianist.
He puts down a splendid, intense clarinet sound, even if the piano (excel lent player) is miked too far in the background. A lively and human performance of the long, turgidly Brahms-like late Reger sonata and a spicy doing-up of Martinu, late-late Roman tic a la Francaise in 1956.
The very young looking Richard Stoltzman is praised as a real genius and his clarinet technique on Desmar (dbx coded) is indeed phenomenal.
But, on this record at least, he is curiously deadpan. Everything sounds the same. Big, fine piano sound to go with him but the record is musically unconvincing, even with dbx coding.
On Crystal, which already has an enormous catalogue of similar recital recordings, John Russo and Lydia Walton Ignacio, husband and wife, play a mixed bag. In the early Mendelssohn she bubbles, he is timid; the music suffers the fate of much music by that composer, just diddling along, vast numbers of notes and a passel of pat cliches. More could be done with it, I am sure. But on the reverse the early Reger, lighter and smoother than the big Op. 107, is played with a lot of excellent expression and I enjoyed it.
This particular Crystal disc seems to have an inordinate number of noisy defects but that is not typical of the company's product and must have been just one of those things, i.e. gremlin department.
Robert Davine, Accordion. With the Lamont String Quartet, James Carroll, string bass. Crystal S 106, stereo, $7.98.
Classical accordion! Contemporary music too. Crystal's ever-flowing recital series even gets to the accordion, and this is a really enjoyable disc, beautifully recorded, a profusion of colorful works ranging from turn-of-the-century stylings to some quite modern stuff. There's tonal variety judiciously added, first by a group of solo strings (note the excellent sound of the string bass in the Pino Concerti no, side 2) and then in duet between accordion and cello. All the works are worth hearing and I particularly liked the Pino and the Norman Lockwood (b. 1906).
Sound: A- Recording: A Surfaces: A
Eberley Sings Strauss. Helen-Kay Eberley, Donald Isaak, piano. Eb-Sko 1005, stereo, $8.98.
Sixteen songs by Richard Strauss, and many of them fresh and new, merely through being unfamiliar. It isn't easy to review this husband and wife label because they insist on pushing their product by personal phone contact, even personal appearances, enough to annoy any reviewer, though maybe necessary to survive-who knows? But even so, I did try this one, and it is well worthwhile for anyone interested in voice or, more especially, in that remarkably long-lived vocal composer, old Strauss. The earliest songs here are from the 1880s, the latest, 1919, but the man lived on until the late 1940s and his Four last Songs, with orchestra, are masterpieces. Listening to 16 of these in a row, one comes to realize that not only was Strauss first of all an opera composer, but he was also very much a great song writer, following directly after Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Hugo Wolf, n the grand German tradition.
Helen Eberly, as I once said in an earlier review, has a Strauss-type voice, powerful sweet and very high. She sings everything that way, and some of her music is not good for this reason but Strauss, yes. Very few singers out side the immediate European tradition, mainly Germany and Austria, can do these songs real justice. Eberly is not quite among the very top, from Lotte Lehmann to Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, Lisa Della Casa and others, but she comes hearteningly close, perhaps lacking only the longer line, the follow-through, that the best of these command. In this record there is also a lack of diction, perhaps because the language is not her native one; but it also could be in part a trick of the microphone. She is placed rather distantly, and for once-so rare-I feel a need to get her up a bit closer! Usually it's the other way around. Those who dislike powerful close-up voices, bel lowing in their ears from the loudspeakers, need have no fear of this recording.
An unusual item here is a group of three songs from the Opera Hamlet of 1919, as sung by the mad Ophelia. I had never even heard of the opera, let alone the songs. They run us straight into the old Ophelia problem of the original play-how does one portray Ophelia's madness? No problem with the Strauss accompaniment; it is ominously mad in the manner of Salome looking at the head of John the Baptist in the Strauss opera of years before. As for the voice, singing the German version of Ophelia's mad words, Miss Eberley puts on a little-girl tone, rather startling if you haven't been following the program notes. As good as any thing else, I guess! Interesting.
Sound: A- Recording: B- Surfaces: A
Brahms: Piano Music. Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, Op. 24; Fantasies, Op. 116. Daniel Graham. Vivace VCR 1101, stereo, $7.95. (Vivace Classic Recordings, 1322 Delgany, Denver, Col. 80202.)
Vivace isn't listed yet in Schwann and there are some technical signs of opening jitters, so to speak, in this premiere release-no matter. The record is well worth the attention of those who go for Brahms and, especially, who try to play him on their own pianos (as plenty do).
Daniel Graham makes a fine, bold Brahms man, accurate and non-smudgy (Brahms is easy to smudge up with the pedal) but full of fire. Obviously he has the intelligence not to be afraid of an all-out specialty like this; most performers take on the flashier, more finger-displaying composers for their recordings. What is interesting here, too, is the complete performance of the seven pieces in Op. 116. Most pianists sample Brahms here and there, from different sets of works.
Opus 116 is the passionate but tumescent, late Brahms, very thick music Graham lubricates it beautifully. And, to complement Op. 116, he drives the early and brilliant Handel Variations (by a beardless Brahms whose picture is on the cover) straight through for 25 minutes of cumulative impact ending with the big fugue.
Technically, side 1, containing the Variations, is cut with unusually shallow grooves-my extra-light arm skittered straight across on the first play. Reason obvious: 25 minutes of straight piano with the loudest cut at the final grooves. Try that on your cut ting lathe. On this side the piano is a bit bangy and punchy, the bass slightly thin; on side 2 the sound seems fuller and more suave, just possibly a different recording circumstance, and with more groove leeway. All in all, not a bad job, with excellent pressing to help.
Sound: B/B+ Recording: B+ Surfaces: A
La Notte. Vivaldi: Flute Concerto in G Minor; Biber: Serenade in C. Mozart: Serenade in G (Eine Kleine Nachtmu sik). Boccherini: Quintettino in C (Musica Notturna delle Strade di Ma drid). Lucerne Festival Strings, Baum gartner; lames Galway, flute; Karl Rid derbusch, bass. Vanguard VSD 71266, stereo, $7.98.
A collection of "night music" by four composers, two out of the Ba roque and the other two from the late 18th century, in each pair one well known work and the other unfamiliar.
Nice symmetry! Also, very nice playing. After so much American and Japa nese music making on recent digital/ audiophile discs, it is worth noting that classic European music still gets played best by the Europeans whose natural heritage it is. That's what we have here, the performers ranging from Irish to Swiss.
Those who know the familiar Vivaldi Four Seasons will find his La Notte concerto quite fascinating, for it is an other working-out of material also heard in that work, under "autumn" i.e. the approaching night among the seasons. Galway's flute is superb, less flashy than Rampal's and better integrated with the orchestra. Heinrich Biber was an earlier Austrian Baroque composer and trickster with the fiddle whose music has a singular purity and charm. He's beginning to get around and rightly. In the middle of his night serenade the bass voice of a night watchman is unexpectedly heard, a bit of descriptive music. Not well man aged here-it should be in the back ground but, instead, this enormous bass sings close-up, like a huge Hans Sachs out of Wagner. Unimaginative production.
On side 2 the familiar Mozart serenade gets an excellent and accurately casual performance in contrast to too many stunty versions by those who have to ham up the little piece. These people just play it, and correctly. As for Boccherini, who was once ineptly subtitled "the wife of Haydn" (he does sound somewhat like Haydn), this Quintettino, out of zillions of his many Quintets, etc., does indeed give us a mildly Spanish impression (like D. Scarlatti, he lived in Spain). It is a pastiche of local melodies as heard in the streets during the 18th century, which was a bit before Carmen and her bull ring.
A nicely recorded sound, well miked (that bass solo aside), but there are noticeable groove echoes here and there.
Sound: B+ Recording: A- Surfaces: B+
Johannes Ockeghem, Prince of Music. Capella Nova, Richard Taruskin. Musical Heritage MHS 4026, stereo. (Mail order: 14 Park Road, Tinton Falls, New Jersey 07724.) A very unusual choral recording here from a source of recorded music that, being wholly mail-order, is too often ignored by those in the hi-fi and music listening area--MHS offers an immense and impressive catalogue like a whole mini-Schwann unto itself, though not listed in Schwann because they're not available in record shops.
Every so often I get hold of one of these and have seldom been disappointed in any way.
Ockeghem, who died just before 1500, was one of those absolutely first-rank artists who in our recent musical eras simply did not exist, lost in the uncomprehending mists of time. We continue moving backwards, to bring back more and more of these past great musicians of our Western culture, understanding, at last, .that "progress" is not always upwards in our world and that men of 500 years ago were exactly as capable of genius as are we today--and were 15,000 years back when the cave-painting artists flourished.
Richard Taruskin is the right man for Ockeghem, a dynamic, intensely magnetic young conductor with precisely the right background, ability and re sources (Columbia University) to make of this relatively old music a living thing, performed with professional exactitude and yet with enormous emotional intensity. You may find it strange music at first, but you cannot be bored unless you don't listen.
The bulk of the record, sung without instruments (an interesting new Taruskin theory for this period, in contrast to the current "in" use of old instruments in virtually all old music) is a Mass, Missa Prolationem, in the traditional five segments; a rich and "instrumental" texture of sonics though perhaps composed for voices alone, very unlike later so-called polyphonic music of the 16th century, the "Gold en Age of Polyphony"--a misguided term, since after all any age is Golden if you think it is. (In my student times, Ockeghem still belonged in the age of "mathematical" music, which was supposed to be unexpressive and merely technical, thus incomprehensible to the modern ear trained in "expressive" music).
A tremendous plus in this performance is the blend, and the lack of any vibrato in the voices, which sound al most like strings in their outgoing purity. A slight minus, for my ear, is a too--great tendency towards swelling-up and dying-away, a choral mannerism that is plenty effective but not necessarily out of the 15th century--more likely a faint leftover of our recent 19th-century habit of Romanticism. If Dr. Taruskin firmly states that this IS the way people sang in those days, I cannot argue, I would not know. If it is simply an intuitive, artistic expression on his part, I must be all for it--more power to intuition I say, if it comes from such an original and powerful musical mind as Richard Taruskin's! You'll like it.
Really gorgeous recording, analog or no-analog, precisely right in its luminously distant effect for this church music. And the MHS surfaces too are excellent. Look out, audiophile recording people, THIS is what you must keep ahead of.
(Audio magazine, Nov. 1980; Edward Tatnall Canby)
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