MusicWeb Reviewer’s log: February/March
2009
Reviewer: Patrick C Waller
The first half of
January was spent virtually exclusively in the company of Messiaen,
listening to his complete works via DG’s commemorative box (see
review)
- this was a very positive experience. On returning to “normality”
I caught up with a couple of very different discs with positive
reviews from MusicWeb colleagues – Marc-André Hamelin’s In
a state of Jazz and the recent Sibelius
orchestral collection from New Zealand conducted by Pietari
Inkinen. Both were indeed very worthwhile with well-designed
programmes, excellent playing and attractive sound.
Aside
from the above discs, almost all most of my listening to unfamiliar
recordings has in the past couple of months come through downloading.
There has certainly been a marked leap in the level of availability
of classical recordings through this mechanism recently and
prices are beginning to tumble. It felt as though I must be
one of the last people left without an mp3 player but finally
I fell for a neat little Sony gadget (NWZ-B135) costing about
£30 which is as big as a memory stick, charges when in a USB
port and hold 2 gigabytes. Files are simply dragged and dropped
onto it via Windows explorer. The sound is pretty good too although
it’s not powerful enough to be much use on an airplane – nothing
to do with “interfering with aircraft systems” more the other
way round!
In the UK, Amazon
have become a major player in the download field overnight and
they seem quite flexible in their pricing structure meaning
that there are some considerable bargains on the site. One example
is Nathalie Stutzmann’s Winterreise
which is going for a mere £3 at the moment. As with other sites,
there is some duplication of the same recordings – presumably
with full-price previous issues – and their prices may be different
(this one is also available for £6-79). Stutzmann probably has
the lowest female voice ever to record the piece and is well-worth
hearing although my allegiance to Christine Schäfer’s Onyx recording
is not displaced (see review).
Interestingly – and perhaps surprisingly – these two versions
were the last two left standing in BBC Radio 3’s recent Building
a Library review, with Schäfer taking the palm. A more recent
issue of mostly well-known Schubert
songs from Bernarda Fink is certainly in the same league and
also available to download from Amazon UK for about half the
cost of the full price disc.
Downloading is also
opening up the possibility of acquiring rare recordings that
one could only otherwise find in “second-hand” shops. Looking
for recordings of Bach’s
Two- and Three-Part inventions on Amazon UK I unexpectedly
found Tatiana Nikolayeva’s recording for Olympia going for £5-99.
I haven’t managed to find any other Olympia discs yet - that
might reflect the limitations of their search facilities or
my understanding of them! But I did find Ralph Kirkpatrick’s
1950s recordings of 53 Scarlatti
sonatas previously issued on Urania and I would recommend these
in preference to his later recordings for Archiv Production.
Another 1950s recording I enjoyed was the Ninth symphony of
Hovhaness
which can be downloaded from Classicsonline
for just £1-99.
Bohuslav Martinů
is one of my favourite composers but the 50th anniversary
of his death this year seems to be attracting relatively little
attention. His six symphonies are great favourites and, having
owned Järvi’s discs since they were first issued, I was keen
to hear some competition. In terms of a complete cycle, Bryden
Thomson’s version with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra
seems to be the main rival and can be acquired in mp3 format
for just £9-99 from the Classical
Shop. I have still to hear the Fourth but initial impressions
of the rest are favourable. Thomson is often more urgent than
Järvi and the slow movements of the second and third seem surprisingly
quick but there’s no denying the power of these readings. I
saved the Fourth until last because I have heard a different
version of it several times recently – Turnovsky on Apex.
This is a bargain-priced disc and, although I did download
it, I didn’t save money in doing so. Still it was worth every
penny and the couplings of the Fourth Piano Concerto and Tre
Ricercari are excellent too.
The other composer
I have been majoring on is Bruckner and Amazon
UK has some considerable bargains recordings of his music. Most
notable are Wand’s Berlin series going at £3-16 per symphony,
including the Eighth which runs to two CDs. That has been in
my collection since it was issued but it was good to hear the
Fourth
and Fifth.
The other conductor I have been catching up on is Celibidache,
recently hearing for the first time his Munich recordings of
the Symphonies Nos. 5, 7, 8 and 9 acquired from various sources,
including Passionato.
All these readings are as slow as they come yet they are magnificent.
Making Wand seem urgent indeed, they defy logic and are completely
compelling. The Eighth is the most extreme, running to 104 minutes
– about a quarter of an hour longer than most and over half
an hour longer than the quickest versions that I know.
Downloading is not
all a “land of milk and honey”, whatever one thinks about mp3
sound quality. In the course of my Bruckner searches on Amazon
UK I came across a recording of the Eighth by the “South German
Philharmonic Orchestra” by an unnamed conductor. Expecting to
be able identify him from this comprehensive Bruckner discography,
I could not do so and therefore contacted the editor. Since
he couldn’t immediately identify the recording either and it
wasn’t available to him to download in the USA, I agreed to
do so for identification purposes. Whilst doing this I noted
that the finale supposedly ran for just over 2 minutes (!) and
indeed it turned out to be that short but the track was of some
baroque music. Nevertheless the first three movements were sufficient
to identify the recording as being conducted by Bernhard
Geuller and Amazon gave me my money back. I also got a refund
from Passionato for Celibidache’s Bruckner 7 because of a loud
momentary click at about 5 minutes into the first movement.
They removed the recording from their site but it was also on
Amazon UK and so I paid 79p in the hope of losing the click
but to no avail. And finally, the last couple of seconds of
the third movement of Sibelius’s
Sixth Symphony conducted by Sakari Oramo was irritatingly
missing from an Amazon UK download. They refunded my money and
removed the disc I had downloaded but they left a duplicate
of the Sixth only, so don’t download that. The relevant track
lasts for 3:19 on Amazon and is timed at 3:20 elsewhere. So
I downloaded just that track from Tesco for pennies but it was
still curtailed and I have given up on that one. I did, however,
get Oramo’s Tapiola and Seventh Symphony for nothing
and the former in particular is impressive – see review.
Finally, I was interested
to see that Nimbus have issued their Esterhazy Haydn
symphony cycle in mp3
format on 8 CDs very cheaply – i.e. about £20-25. I won’t
be buying it because I already have most of the discs but it
does now seem like a sensible way to present large chunks of
music so I hope it catches on. Having read Margarida Mota-Bull’s
review of Richard Wigmore’s Pocket
Guide to Haydn Book and her interview
with the author, I couldn’t resist getting hold of it. At the
moment I am part way through the biographical part and enjoying
it very much. On 13-15 March 2009 in Southampton various local
orchestras are performing all his symphonies in one weekend
for Comic Relief – this is called the Haydathon. I hope to be there
for part of it and the book will be in my pocket.
Patrick C Waller
