01 Cecilia MendelssohnMendelssohn – String Quartets Op.44 Nos.1&2
Cecilia String Quartet
Analekta AN 2 9844

Having played these two quartets many times over the years and listening to them, one way or another, countless more times, I am still amazed at the enchanting influence Mendelssohn’s quartets hold over string players and their audiences. His penchant for combining beautiful melodies with the intricate underlying textures seems especially suited to the Cecilia Quartet, who bring out a weaving of the voices in the most enticing manner. Sonorous, youthfully energetic, refined and exuberant at the same time – all are characteristics of this recording, but what I was most impressed with was the element of subtle understatement that Cecilia Quartet mastered throughout. This ensemble did not put the emphasis on the most obvious elements of Mendelssohn’s music (though they are, of course, undeniable) but, rather integrated it with the delicate texturing of phrasing and enunciation.

The three quartets opus 44 were written within a year (1837-1838), at the most prosperous time of Mendelssohn’s life. The newly married composer began working on them on his honeymoon and the opening of the Quartet in D Major, Op.44 No.1 carries through the buoyancy and generosity of happiness discovered. Two middle movements are more classical in nature, while the finale brings out the spirited dance elements.

Mendelssohn was the master of combining a sense of urgency with melancholy and such is the opening of the Quartet in E Minor, Op.44 No.2 in contrast to the sentimentality of the third movement. Cecilia Quartet is particularly adept at highlighting the nimbleness of the Scherzo with their impressive bow technique but they certainly don’t lack power in the final movement.

Recommended to all the admirers of notes ingenious and pleasing.

02 Liszt InspectionsLiszt Inspections
Marino Formenti
Kairos 0013292KAI

The magician of the keyboard, Franz Liszt started early and lived a long life playing, composing and experimenting. His son-in-law Wagner already blew apart traditional harmonies with Tristan, but Liszt introduced atonality for the first time (see Faust Symphony, first movement). Atonality of course later became the cornerstone of the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg and also the starting point of Italian pianist and conductor Mario Formenti’s remarkable journey: Liszt Inspections.

Formenti selects over a dozen of Liszt’s less familiar pieces, played so sensitively that those alone would make this an attractive set to have, but that’s not his purpose at all. Instead he looks into various aspects (he calls it Vocabulary) of music common to both Liszt and a number of avant-garde composers and builds a well-argued thesis unearthing and proving these relationships. Each of the Liszt compositions illustrates one point of the Vocabulary (e.g. constructivism, sound, minimalism, death, remembering-forgetting, elimination of the metre, silence and more) and by this process he achieves two things: 1) proving Liszt’s genius and his vision into the future and 2) bringing a number of contemporary pieces into focus highlighting them so the average listener who’d otherwise willfully reject new music, is enticed to listen. I am willing to bet that the next time any of these composers’ music is played he will do so with interest. There are at least a dozen composers, like Adams, Berio, Kurtág, Ligeti, Rihm, Stockhausen etc., each with his own unique style that up to now I had considered so much noise and hogwash. In the shining light of Liszt these begin to shine as well. Nice achievement for Signor Formenti.

03 Brahms FaustBrahms – Violin Sonatas; Schumann – Romances; FAE Sonata
Isabelle Faust; Alexander Melnikov
harmonia mundi HMC902219

Isabelle Faust has become famous for her performances on a gut-strung 1799 Strad that in almost every case have become models of period performance practice successfully extended into works of the mid-19th century. To today’s ears, her return to the more intimate, late romantic values could sound reticent with her unusually delicate, lean tone, very simple and deeply penetrating. Her recent Schumann piano trio recordings are shining examples of her persuasive approach, with its chaste, almost textured tone. She had already recorded Brahms First Violin Sonata (HMC901981) and this new disc once again features the like-minded approach of Alexander Melnikov playing his own 1875 Bösendorfer which can hardly be mistaken for the more recent instrument to which we have become attuned. The employment of this earlier practice versus the more viscerally robust esthetic of today’s Brahms is illuminating. Here Brahms is speaking rather than being spoken about. Melnikov has a rare affinity to perform Brahms and he and Faust are of one mind. The Schumann pieces are wonderfully poetic, leaving no doubt that they have the exact measure of this gentle, tragic composer.

The unusual F.A.E. Sonata is a four-movement work written in 1853 by Albert Dietrich, Schumann and Brahms for violinist Joseph Joachim to identify the composer of each movement. He had no trouble doing so.

The flawless sound places the listener about five rows back, at which point the two instruments are correctly balanced. This very successful album is most enthusiastically recommended.

05 Saint Saens Violin

Saint-Saëns – Complete Violin Concertos
Andrew Wan; Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal; Kent Nagano
Analekta AN 2 8770

Review

Even though Camille Saint-Saëns was an exceptionally prolific composer, it seems that his temperament was especially suited to the form of the solo concerto, allowing him to blend virtuosity (which he held in high regard) with the wealth of his musical ideas. He also had a special fondness for the violin, especially after meeting Pablo de Sarasate (the 19th century violin superstar) to whom he dedicated his first and third violin concertos. It comes as no surprise that Andrew Wan, another violin superstar (though from an entirely different era) and one of the youngest concertmasters of a major symphony, has performed and recorded Saint-Saëns’ complete violin concertos with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, the very orchestra he leads. This certainly has an advantage point – the soloist and the orchestra have an astonishing rapport on this recording.

Captured here are live recordings from a series of concerts held at Maison symphonique de Montréal in November 2014. It is no small accomplishment to be able to perform all three concertos, as they are not only technically demanding but also ask of the soloist to be both versatile and flexible in their interpretation. Andrew Wan stands up to this task easily and fiercely – while technically superb in the live performances, he captures his audiences even more with his passion and the constant changes of sound colour.

The first two concertos have been unfairly neglected on the concert stage – they are every bit as exciting and expressive as the third one – but this recording just may change that.

06 Rachmaninov

Rachmaninov Variations
Daniil Trifonov; Philadelphia Orchestra; Yannick Nézet-Séguin
Deutsche Grammophon 4794970

Review

How appropriate that a pianist by the name of Daniil Trifonov would record a disc of music by Sergei Rachmaninov plus a composition of his own titled Rachmaniana. To be honest, I was unfamiliar with his name, but it seems this 24-year-old already has more than a few feathers in his cap. Not only has he been the recipient of numerous prizes, including first prize in the prestigious Arthur Rubinstein competition, but he is making a worldwide name for himself. In this recording – his sixth – he has teamed up with Canadian conducting superstar Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra, resulting in a fusion of two great artists.

There are innumerable recordings of the Rachmaninov Paganini Variations, but this is surely one of the finest. Trivonov’s flawless technique is matched throughout by the Philadelphia Orchestra’s full-bodied and robust sound. The variations literally fly by the listener in rapid succession, each a musical microcosm, notwithstanding the poetic and familiar No.18 which is treated with the heartfelt lyricism it so deserves. Both soloist and orchestra make ease of the enormous technical demands presented in the variations leading to the tumultuous finale, doing so with a sense of strong self-assurance.

Rachmaninov’s Variations on a Theme by Chopin Op.22 are based on the familiar Prelude Op.28 No.20. Trifonov approaches the music with great sensitivity, deftly capturing the kaleidoscopic moods of the 22 movements. His own set of variations, Rachmaniana, was written out of homesickness for his native Russia while temporarily residing in the U.S. While there is much originality within the score, the style also draws from Rachmaninov’s own musical idiom – the work opens in a quietly introspective manner, but the finale is a burst of technical exuberance.

The familiar Variations on a Theme of Corelli predate the Paganini Variations by only three years. Despite the myriad of moods conveyed within, Trifonov creates a unified whole, demonstrating intelligence and an innate musicality for this most demanding repertoire. While a Russian artist performing Russian music doesn’t always guarantee a stellar performance, in this case it did – this recording is bound to be a benchmark.

07 Satie Poulenc

Satie; Poulenc – Le comble de la distinction
David Jalbert
ATMA ACD2 2683

Review

Francis Poulenc (1899-1963), composer and pianist, was a man of many contradictions, perpetually vacillating between the sacred and profane. Paradoxically, this bipolar anxiety constitutes the very essence and charm of his music. His sometimes drastic stylistic mood swings are exemplified in Jalbert’s deeply affectionate performance of Poulenc’s Soirées de Nazelles that opens this album, a lengthy work for solo piano consisting of a series of 11 musical portraits of personalities he encountered while on vacation in central France. The music of Erik Satie (1866-1925) is interspersed throughout this album in a compelling dialogue with Poulenc’s. Poulenc himself greatly enjoyed the company of Satie in that composer’s twilight years, finding him “marvellously funny” and a fertile source of musical and spiritual inspiration. In fact, Poulenc’s public debut composition, the Rapsodie nègre of 1917, is dedicated to him. Jalbert’s hypnotic performance of Satie’s austere Trois Gymnopédies is followed by Poulenc’s three unusually focused Mouvements perpétuels. Poulenc the magpie is here too, in the form of two Improvisations honouring Schubert and Edith Piaf. The subsequent selections of Satie’s Valses distiguées… and Je te veux invoke the spirit of the cabaret that Poulenc also expressed so well. Poulenc the miniaturist returns to centre stage in the final selection, a masterly rendition of the kaleidoscopic Nocturnes composed over the course of 1929-1938.

In an age of knuckle-busting keyboard technicians fixated on a single era, composer or concerto it is a great pleasure to encounter an artist of Jalbert’s stature for whom the piano is simply a transcendent means of human expression. My only frustration with this admirable disc is the generic program notes which fail to explain the ironic subtitles of the two Poulenc suites. For the record, the title track has been rendered elsewhere as “The epitome of distinction.”

08 Massenets Elegy

Massenet's Elegy
William Aide
Oberon Press 978 0 7780 1429 4 (oberonpress.ca)

Review

When you open the back cover of this book of poems, you find a CD tucked into a plastic sleeve. It contains a collection of live recordings spanning 30 years by one of Canada’s premier pianists and teachers, William Aide. The sound quality is variable, but the performances all dazzle – from his incisive Chopin and colourful Schumann to two luminous Debussy pieces. But it’s the poems that are the main attraction here. Aide is that rare musician who uses words as expressively as music. His irrepressible search for grace has universal appeal. For music lovers there’s the way he invokes composers like Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, and – surprisingly – Massenet, whose Elegy inspired Aide to become a pianist.

Here is how he begins To an Old Executor:

“Skip the need to dig the sod
Buy a flowering linden tree
And sentimental as can be
Commit to Schubert, not to God.

Some of Aide’s most affecting poems are tributes to people who changed his life, like his first piano teacher Miss Myrtle McGrath, who taught him the Elegy, his later teacher the Chilean master Alberto Guerrero, who taught so many of Canada’s finest pianists (see John Beckwith’s excellent biography), his fellow student Glenn Gould, and his own student Peter Vonek, whose death from AIDS left him bereft.

Aide has long been recognized as a significant voice in Canadian music. With four fine books (one a gutsy memoir) under his belt, he is unquestionably a voice that matters in Canadian literature as well.

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