Those who enjoyed Naxos’s previous issues of music by Moravec
including his Pulitzer Prize-winning Tempest Fantasy
(see reviews)
will need no recommendation to investigate this disc compiling
three different pieces scored for different forces. They will
not even mind the inconvenience of having to visit the Naxos
website to download the essential texts which fit easily onto
two pages and could without difficulty have been printed in
the booklet. Otherwise this issue can be greeted with only modified
rapture.
The opening of Vita brevis arouses high and delectable
expectations; the music is lucid, and the re-scoring by the
composer for piano trio works well. As soon as the voice enters
pleasure becomes distinctly diluted. Amy Burton sounds at first
like a slightly tremulous child, and one initially thinks this
may be characterisation of James Agee’s poem A lullaby
- which is not available on the downloaded texts; but as soon
as the voice comes under pressure either of volume or pitch
it develops a more adult vibrato, and at the end of
the third song Mezzo Cammin is decidedly below the
correct pitch. One should be grateful, one supposes, in modern
music when the listener can identify when the voice is
out of tune; but it does not help to ameliorate one’s distress
at the discovery. The booklet note tells us that the singer
is “renowned for her performances” and investigation of her
website would seem to indicate that her stage presence in such
roles as the Governess in Britten’s The turn of the screw
and the abandoned woman in Poulenc’s Voix humaine have
been critically admired. Either she was having a bad off-day
at the time of this recording or her dramatic voice is simply
not suited to this music. There is an alternative reading available
as part of a recital of New American Song Cycles by
Paul Sperry on the Albany label but this uses the original (and
less effective) accompaniment for piano only. The high tessitura
puts a degree of strain on the male voice which brings in its
turn a slightly uncomfortable air of Peter Pears at his least
ingratiating.
After this Simon Mulligan’s performance of Characteristics
is refreshingly direct and superbly virtuosic. This is a set
of ‘enigma’-type variations for piano solo, giving us a series
of portraits of various of the composer’s friends in various
styles. The ‘serene’ portrait of counter-tenor Russell Oberlin
and the ‘humorous’ one of Sara Davis Buechner (the descriptive
adjectives are the composer’s own) are both delightfully expressive.
Mulligan gave the world première of these pieces in New York
in 2004 – eight years after they were written. He clearly enjoys
himself in the stunningly ‘vivacious’ portrait of Maria Bachmann.
The final work here is the ‘Franklin fantasy’ Useful Knowledge,
a setting of bewilderingly varied texts by the eighteenth century
American polymath ranging from ecstatic religious expostulations
to practical instructions for the creation of a lightning rod.
Although the text from the internet implies that there are seven
separate movements, the music is in fact continuous and moves
almost instantaneously from one section to another. The music
is sublime when required, and even manages to make something
out of lines like “fasten about a foot of brass wire the size
of a common knitting needle, sharpened to a fine point; the
rod may be secured to the house by a few small staples” which
must be counted among the least inspirational words that any
composer has ever tried to set to music. And Scarlata is a fine
singer even if his diction sometimes makes it unclear what he
is singing - even with the aid of the downloaded texts. But,
but … the recording is disastrously close, with both the singer
and the five players of La Fenice all jostling together in the
foreground. The result obscures the singer’s words further,
and deprives the music of all sense of enchantment. You may
manage to add some resonance and echo through the use of a graphic
equaliser.
In his booklet note the composer draws attention to his use
of a glass harmonica in this piece, and the player is given
solo credit both in the booklet and on the CD cover. Moravec
states that the instrument was the “favourite invention” of
Franklin, and that it “attracted the interest of several prominent
musicians of the time, including Mozart, who composed for the
instrument.” One must take issue with this assertion. According
to Norman del Mar’s Anatomy of the Orchestra the ‘instrument’
Mozart wrote for as ‘Harmonika’ in his Adagio and Adagio
and Rondo was the well-established Musical Glasses, “quite
simply a row of glasses variably filled with … water and rubbed
with the moistened fingers.” What Franklin appears to have invented
was something quite different, a keyed instrument which did
find some favour with later composers such as Donizetti (who
appears to have envisioned it originally for what later become
the flute solo in the Mad Scene from Lucia di Lammermoor)
and Glinka (who used it in an elaborate part in Ruslan and
Ludmila nowadays played on glockenspiel or celesta). In
any event the use of this instrument and Cecilia Bauer’s star
billing goes for nothing here, since in the closeness of the
recorded focus accorded to all the other instruments her contribution
is all but inaudible.
Those who enjoy the music of Moravec – and I am one – will welcome
the chance to make acquaintance with more of his music. Those
who are coming to this composer for the first time should proceed
with a degree of caution, not because of the music itself but
because of the unsatisfactory quality of some of the performances
and recordings here.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
Communication received:
Dear Mr. Barnett,
I belatedly discovered the review of Paul Moravec's "Useful
Knowledge: A Franklin Fantasy" on your website, and wish
to correct an error. I was one of the musicians in the recording,
and I would like to inform Paul Corfield Godfrey that he is
not correct about the instrument Benjamin Franklin invented,
the glass armonica. Pace Norman del Mar, it was indeed
the instrument which Mozart wrote for, i.e. comprised of a graduated
set of glass bowls on their sides which turn with a foot pedal
and are played with moistened fingers held against the bowls
as they turn.
Here is a link to the Benjamin Franklin Museum with photographs
of the instrument, which does not have keys.
Cecile Brauer is one of the few people alive who still play
this instrument; she was over 80 when we recorded "Useful
Knowledge." The armonica is only used at the beginning
and the end of the piece, so it is not "inaudible"
during the rest of the piece, it has a long rest until the end.
Donizetti composed for it too: here
is a video of Cecile Brauer playing the same instrument
in "Lucia di Lammermoor" at the Metropolitan Opera
House.
Sincerely yours,
Diane Walsh
Pianist, La Fenice quintet
Paul Corfield Godfrey replies:
I am grateful to Diane Walsh for raising the vexed question
of the nature of the 'glass armonica' invented by Benjamin Franklin
- on which the Benjamin Franklin Museum website she recommends
is very informative - and the 'Armonika' for which Mozart wrote.
In my necessarily concise discussion of the matter in the course
of my review I was certainly guided by Norman del Mar's two-page
dissertation on the matter in his Anatomy of the Orchestra,
which I have always found to be a most reliable guide to orchestral
instruments and which I earnestly recommend to my orchestration
students both as a practical guide by an experienced conductor
and also as a valuable corrective to the more academic approach
to the subject by Walter Piston and the more dated works by
authors such as Cecil Forsyth. Norman del Mar does not mention
Benjamin Franklin's 'armonica' in his book, but I would hesitate
to quarrel with the opinions of one who was an expert on the
music of Richard Strauss, probably the last composer (before
Moravec, of course) to employ the instrument in an orchestral
work - in his case, the final scene of Die Frau ohne Schatten.
Percy Scholes (or his later editors) also includes a lengthy
discussion on the topic in his Oxford Companion to Music running
to nearly one-and-a-half pages in rather smaller type in the
tenth edition of 1970. He begins his article with the valuable
warning: "Harmonica. This is a word of so many different
applications in different countries and periods that precise
definition becomes almost impossible." Never was a truer
word spoken! However Scholes points out that what Franklin actually
did was to improve an already existing instrument (known to
Gluck) after he encountered performances on it in England in
1757, and that following this "numerous attempts to modify
or improve Franklin's version" were made including the
addition of a keyboard by Karl Leopold Rölling in Hamburg
who published a treatise on his instrument in 1787. Dussek also
apparently was performing on a keyboard version of the instrument
in 1785 in Cassel. Scholes informs us that Mozart played the
harmonica at a garden concert in Vienna when he was seventeen,
but this would almost certainly have been one of the German
instruments with a keyboard; and Haydn in 1792 was reported
as having played a "newly invented instrument, the Harmonica
Celestina."
Scholes reproduces an engraving on Franklin playing his 'armonica'
in about 1760 (which is not on the website which Diane Walsh
recommends) and we can gain some impression of the method of
playing which was involved from this. The instrument involved
seems to be somewhat smaller than the example shown on the Benjamin
Franklin Museum website, but Franklin is shown playing with
both hands and treating the instrument very much like a keyboard
instrument; and he is also shown using the foot pedal to which
Ms Walsh refers. What however is certain is that this instrument
could not have been - how can one put this? - very nimble in
response. It could not, for example, have been used to play
the flute cadenza at the end of the mad scene in Lucia di Lammermoor,
and in the video from the Met the flute is indeed used in the
more florid passages. Similarly it could not have been the instrument
for which Glinka wrote the elaborate part in Ruslan and Ludmila,
which almost certainly requires a more percussive tone.
The instrument could however be precisely what Strauss requires
in the short passage he wrote in Die Frau ohne Schatten, at
the point where the Empress receives her shadow; the unearthly
sound of the instrument, rather like a very early ondes martenot,
would seem to fit the situation perfectly although (as is not
uncommon in Strauss) he seems to expect an instrument with a
very wide range of two and a half octaves and employing up to
eight notes at a time. Norman del Mar, in a footnote, says that
"the part is played at Covent Garden on two vibraphones"
and this seems to have been the solution adopted by Solti not
only in London but in his two recordings with the Vienna Philharmonic.
But the initial attack of the vibraphone would appear to be
wrong.
Another work involving the 'harmonica' where a version of Franklin's
instrument might well sound very good comes in the well-known
use of it in the Aquarium movement of Saint-Saëns's Carnival
of the Animals, but the use here of glissandi and trills would
again seem to anticipate the use of a keyboard mechanism - and
most certainly not the mouth organ used by Kostelanetz in his
1950s recording!
Which brings us back to the vexed question of what instrument
Mozart had in mind when he wrote his pieces for 'Harmonka'.
Bruno Hoffman in his recordings uses, according to del Mar,
"simply a row of glasses variably filled with, or immersed
in, water and rubbed with the moistened fingers." The use
of moistened fingers would seem to be the only connection between
Franklin's invention and this sort of procedure. However I would
hazard a guess that what Mozart may actually have had in mind
was one of the keyboard "improvements" of the original
Franklin 'armonica' since this would have been the sort of instrument
that Mozart and Haydn might have been expected to play, rather
than an instrument with a very different technique using moistened
fingertips as is shown in the Franklin engraving.
As will be seen this is indeed an extremely complex web, and
I am sorry if my necessarily abridged summary of the argument
in my original review may have caused misunderstanding. I am
delighted to learn that the instrument, and performers on it,
are still to be found even if the player on the Moravec recording
is inevitably reaching the end of her career. One can indeed
detect the sound of the instrument at the beginning and end
of the piece, but I stand by my comments that the smallness
of its sound would seem to demand some form of electronic amplification
if it is to be employed other than as a solo instrument; and
that the recorded balance on the disc does not begin to achieve
this. However I am delighted that Moravec has taken up the non-keyboard
version of the 'armonica' and (with suitable amplification)
the instrument could well be revived in this form.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
Amy Burton (soprano)1; Trio Solisti1; Simon
Mulligan (piano)2: Randall Scarlata (baritone)3:
La Fenice3: Cecilia Brauer (glass harmonica)3