Leonard Link

"The Remains of Romanticism" at the American Symphony Orchestra, Nov. 15, 2009

This afternoon, Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra presented a program at Lincoln Center called "The Remains of Romanticism," providing a cross-section of works by late Romantic German composers.  The works spanned the period from the 1860s through the first decade of the 20th century, assembling music by composers whose names may be vaguely familiar from the biographies of the great composers of the time, and concluding with a relatively unknown early work by the major repertory composer on the program, Richard Strauss.

But first, the obscurities.  I use that word not as a judgment but as a description, for surely to the early 21st century American concertgoer the music of Robert Fuchs (1847-1927), Siegmund von Hausegger (1872-1948), Hermann Goetz (1840-1876), and Ludwig Thuille (1861-1907) will be terra incognita.  All of them won some degree of reknown in their own time, although some (Goetz and Thuille) died too young to leave the kind of major mark they might have left had they the opportunity of a few more decades of active compositional life.  They were all accomplished craftsmen, capable on the evidence of this afternoon's concert of writing credible works with beautiful orchestration, interesting figurations and harmonies, and intensely dramatic moments.  What none of them could achieve, however, is the kind of original first-rate tune that sticks in your head and haunts you for days and makes you want to listen to their music over and over.  And this explains, in my opinion, why they are obscurities.  Thuille's Romantic Overture, for example, is a thoroughly Wagnerian essay but without Wagner's inventive melodic gift or his ability to sustain an interesting harmonic tension over a long time period.  There were moments that sounded to me like snippets of the Tannhauser Overture and Bacchanale -- but of course I can hear those moments in a more interesting context by listening to the model and eschewing the knock-off.  Similarly, the Goetz Violin Concerto, a product of the 1860s, prefigures the great violin concerti that were to follow over the next few decades - Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak....  But it lacks their memorability of tunes, sounding more like elegant, well-orchestrated note-spinning.

Is this damning with faint praise?  Well, yes.  Each of these pieces was fairly interesting while it was being played, and sometimes even more than that, given the talent for orchestration among late 19th century German romantic composers, and one wouldn't mind hearing any of these pieces again, perhaps more suitably ensconced in the midst of a more varied program so they wouldn't wear out their welcomes.   But none of these pieces was crying out to be heard again any time soon.

On the other hand....

Quality will out.  Richard Strauss was a great composer.  He wrote pieces that remain part of the standard orchestral repertory more than a century later, the early tone poems.  He wrote operas that are part of the core repertory up to a century after their introduction, such as Salome, Elektra, Rosenkavalier.  His 4 Last Songs have entered the standard repertory, and such major effusions as Heldenleben and Don Quixote get played frequently to great acclaim.  So here was a member of the company of musical geniuses, whatever one thinks of his politics, and hearing the work of the 20 year old Strauss in his Symphony in F Minor, OP. 12, of 1884, is quite tantalizing.  He was not yet the fully formed master he would become, but there is much to admire in this symphony, especially in the Andante cantabile.  I thought the finale owed much at times to Bruckner, and wonder whether the 20 year old Strauss would have heard much of Bruckner's music?  Or were there just musical ideas in the air at a time when both composers, the elderly Bruckner and the youthful Strauss, could breath them in?  The first two movements are less distinguished, although the scherzo at times has a Mendelssohnian quality of scurrying lighteness. 

Botstein and the ASO make a great contribution by bringing this music "out of the closet" and letting us hear it in acceptable (if at times this afternoon a bit rough-and-ready) performances.  None of this music is familiar to the orchestra, so allowances can be made.  After all, the major orchestras mainly subsist on playing the same familiar core repertory as a significant portion of their concertizing, leaving plenty of time to learn the few novelties they stick into their programs.  At an ASO concert, however, one can almost guarantee that all the musicians had to learn every piece fresh for these performances, making their accomplishment most worthy.

The next concert in this series promises to be quite revelatory - an entire evening (January 29) devoted to the mainly forgotten music of Henry Cowell, an American pioneer of mid-20th century music who, to judge by the handful of works in my record collection, was a most inventive composer whose work is always worth hearing.  Be there or be square.... quite literally.  (And for those interested in gay cultural history, Cowell, although married, played around with the boys and even did prison time for some incautious cruising activity....)

Mighty Russian Music - Medtner, Rachmaninov, Shostakovich

Yevgeny Sudbin's new recording is finally available: the original 1926 unabridged version of Rachmaninov's 4th Piano Concerto, coupled with Medtner's 2nd Concerto and a Sudbin transcription for solo piano of a Rachmaninov song as an encore.  Grant Llewellyn and the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra are the collaborators.  The recordings were made in Raleigh, NC, in 2008, by BIS.  Of course, there is a detailed essay about the music by Sudbin, as in his prior recordings.

This young pianist has impressed me tremendously, both in recordings and in his solo recital at Peoples' Symphony Concerts last season.  He has incredible technical and interpretive gifts, everything he plays comes alive, and he makes what he plays sound better than it really is!  Rachmaninov was dissatisfied with the original version of his 4th Concerto, and produced a concise revision making major cuts, but Sudbin makes a convincing piece of the original.  Medtner's piano concerti have never found broad popularity, there are few recordings, but while you are listening to Sudbin in this or the 1st Concerto (on a prior Sudbin release), you are convinced it is a terrific piece.  The North Carolina Symphony Orchestra sounds like a major league band on this recording, which features the usual rich BIS sound.  Highly recommended!

For my gym listening this morning, I pulled off the shelf Valery Gergiev's recording of Shostakovich's 7th Symphony, made in a joint concert by the two orchestras he was directing back in 2001 - the Rotterdam Philharmonic and the Kirov Orchestra.  I had bought this when it was first issued and just never got around to listening until now.  There is only word for this recording: WOW!  I'm late to the game, so I suspect most real Shostakovich fanatics will have long since acquired this one.  If not, don't hesitate...

City Opera Revives Weisgall's "Esther"

I attended the world premiere production of Hugo Weisgall's opera, Esther, written for the New York City Opera, back in 1993.  They didn't have much faith in new operas back then.  Esther was one of a handful of new operas commissioned by City Opera and put on during that season, receiving only two performances each.  Esther received rave reviews, and I bet they wish they had scheduled more performances.  Surprisingly, given the excited reception from the audiences and the critics, they did not reprise the production in subsequent seasons, and only now, a decade and a half later, has the City Opera remounted Esther. 

I was really excited by that 1993 performance.  I found the opera involving, even though the musical idiom was rather forbidding - atonal and lacking in contrast as the music unfolded.  This time around, I found it less involving.  Saturday's performance actually marked the return of City Opera after a year's hiatus.  They did a concert a few nights ago to show off the hall, but this first performance of four that will be offered of Esther was the first fully-staged opera they have mounted since the end of the 2007-2008 season.  It was unclear to me whether this was a totally new production, or whether they reused sets and costumes from that long-ago premiere.  In any event, the production was comprised of projections and scrims, not actual built-up sets, with colorful costumes meant to invoke ancient Persia where the story of Esther (from the Megilla, a Jewish sacred text) supposedly took place.  The opera's libretto is relatively faithful to the ancient scripture, fleshing out characters a bit but following the old story line.

The problem for me, I guess, is that the music remains mostly forbidding and grey, due to a lack of melody and a lack of contrast.  It seems to be continuously shouting at one, with little in the way of tenderness.  I did find that the second and third acts, especially the third, seemed more listener-friendly, and perhaps it was the spectacle of the final movements, with semi-clad exotic dancers and the colorful garb of the courtiers, that softened the music a bit.  Or perhaps one becomes more accepting of the idiom as the evening wears on.  In any event, I found the opera a bit static and, lacking memorable themes, a bit difficult to maintain focus upon.  I found my mind wandering....  It may also be that George Manahan, City Opera's music director, had more difficulty finding the "music" in the "notes" than his predecessor from that long ago season.  Lauren Flanigan reprised her role as Queen Esther, and made the most of it.  James Maddalena is Mordecai was excellent.  Stephen Kechulius as Xerxes, King of Persia (Ahasueras in the ancient Hebrew text), was OK without being really commanding - one never really understood his professed love for Esther.  Most effective for me were Roy Cornelius Smith as Haman, the evil prime minister who plots the murder of the Jews, and Margaret Thompson as Zeresh, Haman's wife and co-conspirator.  Maybe it's just that the folks who sing the roles of villians can be more easily memorable.

The audience gave a great ovation at the end, but it's hard to judge anything by that.  Certainly this was an honorable effort by all involved, and given the great reception the opera had on its first performance it should have been revived before now, but I would count this revival as only moderately successful, for which more blame accrues to Weisgall, since deceased, than anybody connected with the current production.

As to the theater - this was my first time back since the renovations that largely closed down the company last year.  I was in the third ring center, front row, from where the sound was pretty good.  The new seats are firm but comfortable -- the old seats REALLY needed replacing, as you could feel the springs in the seats, the covers were worn so thin over time -- but their design precludes stuffing one's coat under the seat, due to the presence of a large metal bar.  The lobby has been brightened up with better lighting and an illuminated wall for the ticket windows, but the fat ladies still dominate the orchestra-level lobby!  It will take more listening to judge whether the renovation was an accoustical success.  There are new aisles in the orchestra to ease getting to and from seats, but since I wasn't sitting down there I have little basis to judge that experiment.  The opera pit is bigger, so they are less crowded and can expand the orchestra for the big romantic operas.  That will be interesting to hear.

Welcome back, NYC Opera!

Beethoven and the Boston Massacre

While James Levine is recovering from surgery, the Boston Symphony has lined up a bunch of guest conductors to take over his concert dates.  Last night at Carnegie Hall, Lorin Maazel led the orchestra through readings of two Beethoven Symphonies, Nos. 6 (Pastoral) and 7.

This is about the most unimaginative concert programming possible.  Two Beethoven symphonies.  Nothing else.  Perhaps Levine expected to produce an extraordinary effect with probing, insightful readings, but we didn't get Levine. We got Maazel.  My verdict on him, after his years at the NY Philharmonic, is that every year he seemed more bored with the standard repertory works he was recycling (under Maazel, the NYP spent most of its time playing music it had recently played, over and over and over again....), and boredom can lead a super-technician like Maazel to do crazy things.  I think Beethoven is the greatest composer for orchestra who ever lived, as I wrote on Saturday about the NYP's performance (led by Alan Gilbert) of the Egmont Overture and 3rd Piano Concerto with Emanuel Ax.  And I guess each Beethoven Symphony is its own creative world, so you can make a good concert out of two of them.  But still, this is programming that lacks imagination, and to make it worth while you have to do a really good job of it.

Last night, an inert Pastoral Symphony was followed by a 7th that seemed to present all the wrong interpretive choices, strange tempo fluctuations, wierd balances (Maazel defied Richard Strauss's dictum not to look at the trumpets because it only encourages them; he visibly cued them to blare out their high notes and distort the balances), an allegretto that sacrificed all the drama and mystery of its opening with too loud, too thick sound from the low strings, and, in the finale, a mad dash through to the end that got the audience hysterically excited but slaughtered poor Beethoven.  It was as if Maazel had heard the recent recording by Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela and decided, anything he can do I can do faster.  Dudamel's 7th finale is about as fast as it can be played while still articulating the notes.  Maazel took it faster than the notes can be articulated, a real mad dash that bludgeoned the music and removed all the drama, transforming it into a carnival of speed.  No, Maazel, you are not "the Dude"....

I came away from the performance of the 7th quite disgusted, but the 6th merely bored me.

The "New" Juilliard Quartet at Peoples' Symphony Concerts

Peoples' Symphony Concerts presented the second program in the "Mann Series" (named for their long-time former manager, Joseph Mann) last night at Washington Irving High School in Manhattan.  The Juilliard Quartet performed, as they have continuously since they were first founded, with something new: Nick Eanet was sitting in the first violin chair for the first time at Peoples' Symphony.  And perhaps he provided the extra spark, because this did seem like a "new," rejuvenated Juilliard Quartet.

The program was a bit on the long side.  Schubert's A minor Quartet, D. 804, known as the Rosamunde because one movement uses a theme from the composer's incidental music to the play of that name, is one of the long quartets from his last period of composition.  This was followed by Bela Bartok's Quartet No. 2, also long compared to his other early quartets.  After intermission we had Beethoven's final work in the genre, Quartet No. 16 in F, Op. 135.  The program, which began at 8, stretched far beyond 10 pm.  But that didn't deter the Juilliard from playing an encore in response to the rapturous response they got from the audience: the minuet movement from Felix Mendelssohn's Quartet #3 in D, a bit of loveliness to send us off into the night.

What distinguished the Juilliard's playing last night for me was the full, luscious tone they produced in the quieter moments throughout the program, and their ability to make the occasionally abstract-sounding Bartok acquire rather more emotional resonance than one usually hears.  By contrast, the second movement of the Bartok and the second and final movements of the Beethoven sometimes had a coarse-sounding quality, but that seemed appropriate in light of the interpretations.  The middle movement of the Bartok is clearly intended by the composer to be rough-hewn, racous at times, and so it was played here.  Beethoven's scherzo also has a sort of rough, burly humor, well caught by the Juilliards.

I was only let down a bit by the Schubert, and it was not the fault of the musicians.  Schubert's "late" quartets ("late" only in the sense that they were composed in his final years - Schubert did not live long enough [1797-1828] to have a "late" period) are just too long.  I suppose they are not too long in the sense that they are made up of gorgeous music and all of the structural implications are worked to their full extent, but they are too long in the sense that things begin to feel repetitious and overextended.  My theory is that Schubert, not being taken up quickly into the repertory of public performance in Vienna during his lifetime, suffered a bit from the problem of not getting to hear his works performed before large concert audiences, and thus not getting that crucial feedback necessary to revise his work.  If he had that opportunity, perhaps he would have been inspired to do some judicious editing of his work before it was published.  But since the publications of his "late" works were posthumous, they are complete, since who would dare tinker by making cuts?  And the tradition has been to play Schubert's late quartets and sonatas complete, treating every note as sacred.  I think Schubert needs a good editor....

On this occasion, the venue of Washington Irving High School was less than ideal.  The place has great acoustics, but in bad weather can be less than salubrious due to noise.  Heavy rain burst out several times during the concert, and could be clearly, even a bit obtrusively, heard pounding on the roof of the old school building.  Things were not helped by the unseasonably warm night, since the doors to the auditorium had to be kept open for ventilation and it sounded like the janitorial staff was busy making some sort of repairs that require hammering somewhere in the distance during the final movement of the Beethoven....  (On Saturday night??)

Emanuel Ax Struts His Stuff with NYP Musicians in a Magnificent Matinee

A belated thanks to the U.S. Department of State for screwing up the NY Philharmonic's planned jaunt to Cuba for some concerts by refusing to allow the donors who were underwriting the tour to go along.  Under the circumstances the Philharmonic cancelled the tour, since they had set it up as a trip for the underwriters as well as the orchestra....  My belated thanks is because the Philharmonic decided to use the time instead to play some more concerts at home -- most innovatively, today's matinee in which Emanuel Ax joined three NYP string section leaders and Maestro Alan Gilbert (who was a violinist before he was a conductor) in a rousing performance of Schumann's Piano Quintet, returning after intermission (and a spirited run through of the Egmont Overture by the orchestra) for a sublime rendition of Beethoven's 3rd Piano Concerto.

This was a wonderful event.  Maybe I'm in the minority on this, but I consider the Schumann Piano Quintet to be one of the high points in 19th century chamber music, and definitely one of the best pieces that Robert Schumann ever produced.  Every movement is packed with memorable themes, interestingly worked out, lots of drama and sentiment in good proportion, and rousing endings for the fast movements.  Gilbert held up his end at second fiddle quite well, considering the company he was in: Ax, concertmaster Glenn Dicterow, principal violist Cynthia Phelps, and principal cellist Carter Brey.  That's an all-star cast in anyone's book, and Alan Gilbert pulled his weight in this excellent ensemble.  They all seemed to be having a great time down on the stage, and I think we in the audience were having a great time as well, as indicated by some spontaneous erruptions of applause after the first and third movements.  (It's a four-movement piece.)

The second half was all-Beethoven.  Enough said.  Once again, I may be in a minority on this -- although I'm less certain of that -- but for my money Beethoven was the best composer of orchestral music who ever lived.  There is plenty of great music by many other composers, but I don't think anybody else touches Beethoven for the sheer inspiration and quality of his work.  As someone once said, great music is better than it can ever be played, and that's true of Beethoven's music.  But this afternoon's performances met a high standard and gave great pleasure.  Tempi were solidly middle-of-the-road, nothing exaggerated, nothing super-flashy, nothing long-drawn-out and dull, just solidly centered with great care over balances and phrasing, nicely capturing the changing moods of the overture and the concerto.  I think it is terrific that a young conductor like Gilbert can be so enthusiastic about Beethoven, as his conducting clearly communicates.  The highest achievement for an interpreter of this repertory is to animate the music -- give it real life -- without getting in the way, and that was achieved this afternoon.

As for Ax --  I went through a time of thinking Ax a dull pianist, but I've come to realize that in fact he is a fantastic pianist.  He also does not go in for exaggeration, inappropriate flashiness, histrionics at the keyboard, etc.  He's all business.  But the point is that he loves the music, he has the technique to play it very well, he understands what he is doing, and he communicates all of this on a high level.  I've come to appreciate that he makes his points with subtlety and grace, that he is a true collaborator with the orchestra, not a show-off.  I believe I've heard him in concert now in all three of the mature Beethoven concerti, and each was a delightful experience.   Now I understand why Artur Rubinstein raved about the very young Ax the first time he heard him.  He is really special.

Wouldn't it be fine if Ax, Gilbert and the NYP could record a Beethoven concerto cycle?  The shoe has yet to drop, at least publicly, on commercial recordings by Gilbert and the NYP, but I hope those will come, because I think this is a partnership that is quickly showing terrific synergy, and the orchestra -- kept in fine technical shape by Masur and Maazel, regardless what you think of their interpretations -- is playing at such a peak of accomplishment that it would be a shame not to create a permanent record of its work that could be shared in the best of modern sound reproduction with a large audience.

After the concert, Ax and Gilbert returned to the stage with cellist Carter Brey as moderator for a brief "talk back" to the audience, first with questions put by Brey, and then by members of the audience.  The best part, for me, was the response from Ax and Gilbert to an audience member's question about applause between movements, a subject on which Ax has written on his own blog.  I strongly agree with Ax that when audiences are moved to show their appreciation after a movement, they should do so.  I would go a step further.  It seems clear to me that certain music is meant to rouse applause, and that includes the endings of the first movements of most symphonies.   There are occasional exceptions, first movements that end softly, such as those of the Brahms 2nd and 3rd Symphonies, but I've always thought that audiences sitting on their hands at the end of Beethoven Symphony first movements was awkwardly artificial, and that's true for most scherzi as well.  I think it was Gilbert who made the point that in Beethoven's time a symphony would be strewn throughout a concert program with other events intervening between the movements, and if there was no applause after a movement, Beethoven would have been quite unhappy, thinking nobody liked his music.  This idea of silence between all movements is a 20th century development and a most unwelcome one. 

The other night at Carnegie Hall when Tilson Thomas and the Juilliard Orchestra were playing Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, some enthusiasts began to applaud after the first tenor song, and there was lots of hushing and Thomas whirled around to signal quiet.  You know what?  Although Mahler did not live to conduct the premiere of this piece, I bet he would have been delighted if there was applause after the first tenor song.  I can understand the need to sustain a mood between movements when a movement ends softly, but when a movement ends with a loud flourish, I don't see how clapping "breaks the mood."  And I feel sorry for the tenor in a performance of Das Lied, since he sings numbers 1, 3, and 5, and the mezzo sings numbers 2, 4 and 6, so the tenor never gets quite the applause he deserves because there is no applause until the end AND the ending of 6 is the most fantastic thing in the world so the mezzo reaps the most applause from that.  Who remembers what the tenor was doing half an hour ago?  End of rant.  We must abandon this strange custom.  This Monday night the Boston Symphony does Beethoven Symphonies 6 and 7 at Carnegie.  Everybody should applaud after the first movement of the 7th.  (Even if Maazel mucks it up.)  C'mon, guys....

Another Naxos Discovery - Orchestral music by Ildebrando Pizzetti

Naxos, the budget label that is apparently attempting to record all the concert music ever written, has released a marvelous disc of orchestral music by Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880-1968), an Italian composer whose works have been overshadowed by the more popular Ottorino Respighi, but who certainly deserves a sympathetic listening, judging by this program excellently played by the Thessaloniki State Symphony Orchestra (Greece) and its artistic director, Myron Michailidis. 

Two of the works on the recording are billed as world premiere recordings: A suite of three pieces for orchestra from incidental music to Greek dramas, grouped under the name The Feat of the Panathenaea, and the Prelude to Pizzetti's opera Clytemnestra.  Works available in alternative recordings are Concerto dell'estate, and the three Preludes for Sophocle's tragedy Oedipus the King.  All of this music sounds very much like Respighi, with the same rich, warm orchestral sound, and the same practice of building to huge climaxes pulling in the full weight of a large romantic orchestra.  The recording sounds excellent to me, and the music is enchanting, if not so memorable in terms of the themes and their working out as Respighi's Roman Trilogy.   But anybody searching for some splendid-sounding romantic music in gorgeous performances can't go wrong with this budget Naxos release.  I applaud their initiative in seeking out unusual repertory and finding good, underrecorded groups to perform it.

Alan Cumming's benefit for ESPA

On October 25, Alan Cumming, the multitalented entertainer of Scottish descent (and U.S. citizenship, as he explained to us), presented a concert to benefit the Empire State Pride Agenda, the LGBT political lobbying group that has been working its heart out trying to secure marriage equality for LGBT people in New York.  It was a worthy cause, worthily served on this occasion.

Mr. Cumming is pure entertainment, through and through.  Although much of his repertory is outside the type of music I usually hear, he nonetheless worked hard and successfully to put over every song.  And the line of patter he kept up between numbers was perfect.  The man has a great ear for an anecdote and a great way of telling them.  It was very pleasant to spend this time with him in an "intimate" setting, more of a nighclub than a concert venue.  Rush right out to get his new album, on which much of the music in the show was based.  The show was one-time-only, but the man is so busy with music and theater that catching up with him at some point is inevitable.

A great classic Scarlatti recording resurfaces - but only partially....

Back in the early days of the early music revival, the first great champion of Domenico Scarlatti's keyboard pieces played on the harpsichord was Wanda Landowska, who recorded a generous recital in the days of 78 rpm.  This was based, of course, on the old edition prepared for the Italian publisher Ricordi by Alessandro Longo, who treated the pieces as piano compositions, supplying dynamic and expressive markings and tempo indications missing from the originals, which were conceived by the composer for the keyboard instruments available to him - harpsichords, clavichords, and early fortepianos towards the end of his career.  (Scarlatti's dates are 1685-1757; he was an exact contemporary of J.S. Bach, although he lived a few years longer.)

Then along came Ralph Kirkpatrick, a scholarly sort who realized that Longo's edition distorted the originals, published them in the "wrong" order where chronology was concerned, and failed to notice the links between pieces that counseled performance in sets of 2 or 3.  Kirkpatrick published 60 of the pieces in his own more "authentic" edition with G. Schirmer, wrote a lively biography of the composer, and recorded his sixty pieces on the harpsichord for Columbia records, a 4-LP collection issued in 1954.

Then Fernando Valenti got into the act, the first to attempt the entire set of more than 500 pieces, for Westminster, a series that eventually died out after covering a substantial portion of the corpus.  It wasn't until the stereo period that Scott Ross achieved the feat of a "complete" recording of all the known Scarlatti sonatas on harpsichord.  During the 1970s, Ralph Kirkpatrick was back in the studio with a stereo recording of 18 sonatas for DG Arkiv, which was a highlight of Scarlatti recording in the stereo period.  Of course, all along pianists have been playing them as well, usually from the Longo edition, and Vladimir Horowitz picked them up with enthusiasm, recording a substantial number for an all-Scarlatti Lp for Columbia that has resurfaced from time to time on CD.

But Kirkpatrick's early set of 60 on harpsichord disappeared from the active catalogue with the disappearance of classical LPs in the 1980s.  Now it has made a partial return, via Italy.

The Urania Historical Records CD series has issued a two-CD set carrying 53 of those 60 sonatas.  (And that is literally all that you can squeeze onto a two-CD set, as a CD has a practical limit of about 80 minutes, and the total running time for this two-CD set is reported on the inlay card as 154'27", over 77 minutes per CD.  Since the typical Scarlatti sonata as rendered by Kirkpatrick runs 3-4 minutes, I suspect that all seven of those omitted from the original production had to be omitted if this was to be a well-filled 2-CD set rather than a skimpily filled 3-CD set.)

While I mourn the loss of the 7 sonatas omitted from the original recording, I celebrate the issuance of the remaining 53, because this recording is of more than merely historical interest.  Kirkpatrick was a musician of keen insight and high technical accomplishment, and this set of Scarlatti sonatas is very well played, well-recorded in clean mono sound, well put together in terms of a chronological look through Scarlatti's sonata-writing career, from K. 3 through K. 545, and constantly entertaining and fascinating.

Kirkpatrick did record harpsichord music by composers other than Scarlatti, and had Urania wanted to issue the entire original 60, they could have made a 3-CD set and filled it out with other recordings by Kirkpatrick (or perhaps even other historical Scarlatti recordings by Landowska and others), and maybe some day we will get the remaining sonatas on CD from somebody else.

In the meantime, this is to be greatly enjoyed, supplemented, of course, by the more flamboyant recordings of Valenti for Westminster, which are being reissued on CD by Pristine Classical in excellently mastered CDs available on order from France through their website.  Pristine is issuing the original Valentis from good Lp copies in their original format, so each CD tends to run about 45 minutes.  I've acquire the first three volumes, and they sound really terrific compared to the old Westminster Collector Series Lps that I first bought as a college student in the early 1970s.

I don't know if Columbia authorized this Urania issue, but they don't hide the source.  The inlay card states (P) 1954 American Columbia Broadcasting System, and indicates the remastering was done in 2009.  There is no indication whether the remastering was done from original tapes, or from good Lp pressings, but I did not hear any sounds of Lp surface noise while listening to the first disc over loudspeakers and the second over headphones. The release in Italy was in June 2009, but the U.S. distributor for Urania has just released it in the US.  I picked up my copy at J&R music this week, after a futile search on-line, so it hadn't hit the on-line US-based distributors as of the past few days.  It's worth a search.

Borealis String Quartet at Peoples' Symphony Concerts in NYC

The youthful Borealis String Quartet gave the first concert in Peoples' Symphony Concerts' Mann Series tonight at Washington Irving High School in New York City.  This was an auspicious PSC debut, and I hope we will hear them again before long.  This British Columbia-based ensemble is truly international in scope, with players from three continents and a modern outlook on the classic string quartet repertory.  After Taiwanese cellist Shih-Len Chin joined the group in 2006, they had a spectacular debut in Taiwan, which brought a loan of spectacular old instruments from the CHIMEI Culture Foundation, and these were the instruments they used for tonight's concert.

The Borealis impressed before they had played even one note, through the originality of their programming.  Who plays Ottorino Respighi's Quartetto Dorico today??  This novelty was the centerpiece of the program, surrounded by Beethoven's first published string quartet, Op. 18, No. 1, and a late work of Mendelssohn, the F Minor Quartet, Op. 80.  A check of their website shows that they offered three programs to concert venues this season, each with an unfamiliar piece in the center, surrounded by standard works of the quartet repertory.  In other words, this is a quartet that takes seriously the  responsibilities of presenting the greatest pieces from the repertory in tandem with new or less familiar works, to help build the quartet repertory, to bring contrast and novelty to their programs, and to satisfy the curiosity of their listeners.

Once they began to play, it was clear that this is a group worth watching out for.  They bring youthful vigor to their music-making, and great joy, while also showing the necessary restraint and maturity when that is needed to season all those youthful high spirits.  I thought the most effective performance was the last - the Mendelssohn - but all three works benefited from their dedicated performances.  Most importantly, they seem to take great joy in their music-making, and they communicate this to their listeners.  They ended the program with an unusual encore, an arrangement for string quartet of a traditional Taiwanese folk song that included a false ending (yes, I was among those led to applaud prematurely). 

Please, PSC season planners, bring these excellent performers back as soon as possible!