Ernest BLOCH (1880-1959)
Nigun for strings, timpani, trumpet and tam-tam (orch.Stakevich)
(1923) [8:47]
Schelomo - Hebrew Rhapsody for cello and orchestra (1916)
[24:42]
Israel - Symphony for orchestra and five soloists (1914) [34:16]
Galina Boyko; Natalia Gerassimova (soprano); Elena Alexandrova, Galina Borissova
(alto); Anatoly Safiulin (bass); Alexander Kniazev (cello)
Russian State Symphony Orchestra/Evgeny Svetlanov
rec. Moscow, 1988. DDD
BRILLIANT CLASSICS 9164 [67:55]
Ernest Bloch was born in Switzerland but ultimately after peripatetic years
around Europe lived in the USA spending his last years in Oregon. While his
music has a much broader span of styles he is most enduringly known for the
music he wrote with what we now recognise as a Jewish turn of phrase. That
said Bloch ‘created’ that sinuous sway in much the same way that
Vaughan Williams ‘created’ and idiom that will be eternally associated
with the English pastoral idyll. It must be added that both composers achieved
much more than that. Bloch wrote an impressive grand psychological opera in
Macbeth (recorded by Capriccio and Actes Sud). His string quartets
are often searing. His gratitude to the USA for providing him with refuge
and livelihood is reflected in his America
- an Epic Rhapsody. His homeland is celebrated in a similarly discursive
orchestral rhapsody: Helvetia.
The lavish arrangement of Nigun presents all the right credentials
and fairly smokes with exotic intensity. We might easily be listening to a
score for a Hollywood Biblical epic of the 1950s. Svetlanov might well have
turned in a reflective Planets on another Brilliant reissue but this
is the conductor under full sail and with a heady ecstatic charge zinging
through these pages. Nigun is one of three pieces making up Baal
Shem - Three pictures from Chassidic Life. The imperious trumpet
plays its cantorial role - part high priest, part priapic symbolism.
Kniazev’s Schelomo has sumptuous immediacy as a recording and
while the effect is lavish this does not cloud detail. Just listen to the
passage from 2:28 to 3:20 and the abrasive brass calls at 9:05. This is indeed
a rhapsodic piece where orchestra and soloist appear caught up in the moment
from bar to bar proceeding under the impression of instinct even if much of
the score is soulfully introspective rather than extrovert.
The Israel Symphony is something of a rarity and it is a pleasure to
hear this refulgent work in such vivid sound even if it occasionally has a
rasping lisp as in the trumpet assaults at the start of the second movement.
That first movement has an Elgarian lassitude mixed with some very grotesque
and satisfying sounds which recall parts of Sibelius’s Tapiola
and Tempest. There is genuine rampant excitement at the extended climax
at 10:00 onwards; something which Abravanel on his 1960s Vanguard
CD did not achieve. The full-throated romantic violins at 13:00 are simply
magnificent. The singing in the finale is suitably distanced and mystical
and that tangy brass writing is a strange blend of Bax and Sibelius.
The Israel Symphony has had few recordings; this for me is its best.
I should add that Brilliant have given us the work in a single uninterrupted
35 minute track. It’s a pity each movement was not allocated its own
track.
There are decent notes by Malcolm Macdonald. Sadly the sung words of the finale
are not provided.
This is Bloch at his most cinematically vivid. Svetlanov conspires to heighten
the effect with a typically perfervid approach. It will appeal among others
to those who warmed to the Timpani
disc of Bloch’s lush pre-WW1 works with voice and orchestra. Here his
impressionism begins to marinade in semitic material. This Brilliant disc
makes a very fine bargain indeed. There is nothing routine about these performances
and recordings.
Rob Barnett
Bloch at his most cinematically vivid, the effect heightened by Svetlanov’s
typically perfervid approach.