Nikolai RIMSKY-KORSAKOV (1844-1908)
Scheherazade, op.35 (1888) [47:54]
Mily BALAKIREV (1837-1910)
Islamey – oriental fantasy, op.18 (1869) [8:54]
Mikhail IPPOLITOV-IVANOV (1859-1935)
Caucasian sketches suite no.1 – sketches 2 and 4 (1894) [10:12]
Ulvi Cemal ERKIN (1906-1972)
Köçekçe – dance rhapsody for orchestra (1943) [9:47]
Pelin Halkaci Akin (violin)
Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra/Sascha Goetzel
rec. Istinye, Istanbul, 11-15 February 2014
ONYX 4124 [77:13]
For those unfamiliar with BIFO - an acronym derived from its Turkish
initial letters - this is an orchestra that was established less than
twenty years ago to promote classical music to Turkish audiences. Anyone
who has visited the city of Istanbul and seen how enthusiastically its
citizens embrace many western values will have more than an inkling of
why such an enterprise has been, it appears, something of a success.
This is BIFO's third release on Onyx. Its two predecessors showcased
repertoire that avoided the mainstream and instead allowed the Turkish
players' to demonstrate their eclecticism and spirit of adventure.
The first (Onyx
4048) featured music by Respighi, Hindemith and Schmitt. The second
(Onyx
4086) brought together works by the not altogether obvious grouping
of Bartók, Holst, Prokofiev, Ravel and Schulhoff under the portmanteau
title Music from the machine age. Both releases were very well
recorded and this well-filled third disc maintains their high technical
standards. The newcomer enters, however, a far more familiar and competitive
field by offering Rimsky-Korsakov's ever-popular Scheherazade
as its main attraction. That is backed up by a couple of other pieces
of 19th century Russian pseudo-exotica and one novelty - a foot-tappingly
atmospheric and attractively enjoyable "dance rhapsody" by the
pioneering 20th century Turkish symphonist Ulvi Cemal Erkin. In many ways,
the consistently high standard of performance confirms the positive points
made about those generally well-received earlier releases. That said,
in this more popular repertoire, the Istanbul players are competing with
many of the world's finest orchestras and conductors.
Anyone who decides to buy this disc on the basis of its packaging, will
have no reason to suspect that such a musical contest will be taking place
on anything other than a level playing field. True enough, a brief note
on the rear cover does drop a couple of hints of something a little out
of the ordinary, with references to "music from different traditions
- a multicultural mosaic ... [and] music of composers from different backgrounds
with a similar [my own emphasis] musical language". It also
mentions "identifying elements of the eastern side of the Bosphorus
which have influenced the Western cultural background of most of these
composers". That somewhat elliptical language rather naughtily fails
to make clear that, in overtly capitalising on its "eastern"
credentials, BIFO is entering the international competitive lists very
much on its own terms. In so doing, it has created musical accounts that
are, in some respects, utterly unique. That issue must be addressed first
of all.
The disc kicks off with a performance of Scheherazade in which
Rimsky-Korsakov’s justly feted and already colourful orchestration
is augmented by the addition of a variety of exotic instruments. They
include not only "oriental triangles and cymbals" but also,
so we learn, the darbuka, the def, the bendir and the kudüm. Even
more idiosyncratically, the harp that's traditionally deployed
to support the solo violin "voice" of the story-telling heroine
is jettisoned in favour of a qanun. Quite apart from novel orchestration,
some new music is also saddled on to Rimsky's ageing but still
very sprightly warhorse. An oud plays 45 seconds of what conductor Sascha
Goetzel's booklet notes assure us is a traditional melody to link
together the first and second movements, while the aforementioned qanun
subsequently returns to perform a new episode of 15 seconds duration between
movements III and IV.
As one who shamefacedly admits that he doesn't know a darbuka from
a donner kebab, I merely report that the booklet notes imply - by making
no specific mention to the contrary - that Balakirev's Islamey
has been left untouched. The two extracts from Ippolitov-Ivanov's
Caucasian sketches that follow are, however, certainly not something
you'll have heard done this way before: a zurna replaces the cor
anglais in In a village, while "many traditional percussion
instruments including piccolo tympani" pop up, we are informed, in
that old Housewives' choice favourite Procession of
the sardar.
Is all this tinkering simply a cynical marketing gimmick from those A&R
chaps at Onyx? Apparently not, for Mr Goetzel's own notes mount
something of an artistic defence for it. Much of his argument, however,
depends on little more than second-guessing what just might have
been in the various composers' minds more than a century ago. "[We]
have created a musical language", he writes, "which I think
is closer to the original sound that the composers had in mind
[my own emphasis] when writing their music for Western-style orchestras".
As Evelyn Waugh would have put it: "Hmmm, up to a point, Lord Copper..."
Similarly, the insertion of the episode for the oud between movements
I and II of Scheherazade is justified as "setting the atmosphere
and recalling the magic and drama of the Tales of 1001 Nights".
Well, excuse me for just a moment, but isn't that exactly what
Rimsky-Korsakov's original score has been doing successfully -
and without any help from anyone else at all - for no less than the past
46,000 or so nights?
Moving along to the other changes in scoring, the argument advanced for
applying them to Ippolitov-Ivanov's In the village merits
quoting in full: "The original orchestration asks for the cor anglais
to play an exotic tune in imitation of the native region's Zurna.
We couldn't find a Zurna to match the tuning of a modern symphony
orchestra, so we compromised with a Ney flute to represent a close original
sound. There are different sizes of Ney flute for higher and lower registers;
we chose a bigger flute to match the special tonal colour of the cor anglais".
All that is certainly very interesting and enlightening - but, as that
passage makes plain, we are expected here to make not just one, but several
successive leaps of faith. Matching speculation for speculation, perhaps
I could put forward the suggestion that the composer might actually have
written the cor anglais into his orchestration because he simply liked
its "special tonal colour", rather than because he assumed that
orchestras wouldn't have a zurna to hand - or even, for that matter,
a ney.
Such fanciful and entirely speculative assertions that the composers would
surely have utilised eastern instruments if they'd been
more widely available - or that they would have adopted a different musical
language for their "eastern" compositions if they hadn't
been writing for "western" symphony orchestras - are less than
convincing. It would surely have been better to present these perfectly
legitimate 21st century re-workings as bold, positive and modern
experiments that seek to re-imagine the scores from a specifically and
genuinely "eastern" perspective. As it is, the specious justifications
that we are offered instead leave an ordinary listener like me wondering
what exactly we are supposed to be listening to - and what its relationship
to the traditional performance tradition actually is.
Perceptive readers will have noted that everything I have written so far
is based solely on the underlying thinking behind this release, rather
than on the performances themselves. For some, my comments may have already
ruled the disc out of court before they have heard even a note of the
performances. In all fairness, this issue like any other merits a critical
assessment of its musicianship and technical quality, even if, for reasons
already explained, comparison with other accounts has been rendered problematic,
if not impossible.
The first point to make is that BIFO under its artistic director and principal
conductor Mr Goetzel is clearly a fine orchestra. It certainly deserves
to be better known - a deficiency that its high-profile debut performance
at this year's Proms is presumably intended to redress. The brass
take the fullest advantage of Scheherazade's opportunities
and make, unsurprisingly, the most telling immediate impact from the work's
grandly declamatory opening phrases onwards. The orchestra's characterful
string and woodwind players certainly make a strong impression too. In
general, the orchestra can be said to possess a weighty but mellow and
silkenly homogenous tone.
Entirely admirable though those characteristics are, they are not necessarily
enough to make an orchestra stand out from the crowd. That is well evidenced,
for instance, in Islamey where, compared to my benchmark recording,
a strikingly incisive Technicolor account from the USSR Symphony Orchestra
under Evgeny Svetlanov (BMG/Melodiya 74321 49608 2) that buzzes through
its opening allegro agitato like a very angry bee, the Istanbul
players are, while entirely musical, rather penny plain. In much the same
way, their performance of The procession of the sardar fails,
to my ears, to make the impact achieved by the National Symphony Orchestra
of Ukraine under Arthur Fagen (Naxos 8.553405). In taking a full minute
longer (4:50 as opposed to the BIFO players' 3:50), Mr Fagen makes
the music far more sinuous and - what, to western ears, at least sounds
- "exotic". To return briefly to my earlier musings, perhaps
the BIFO performance is making the point that genuinely "eastern"
music needn't exhibit the clichés that Ippolitov-Ivanov
and others have attached to it. That said, one could respond to that by
observing that those composers weren't actually seeking to write
authentic oriental scores in the first place, merely ones that
conformed to what western audiences of their time thought such music ought
to sound like.
As I've pointed out that BIFO's sound is consistent with
that of many other orchestras, you may now be wondering what impact if
any was made by the bendir, the qanun and all the rest. In most cases
it turns out to be not as much as you might have expected, presumably
because those instruments were never designed to be played in conjunction
with the full resources of a modern symphony orchestra. It isn't
surprising, for example, that a traditional qanun cannot equal the volume
generated by a modern concert harp that’s been designed to fill
a large auditorium with its sound. As a result, it struggles to make the
same impact when accompanying Scheherazade's solo violinist
- an accomplished player, by the way, who suffers the indignity of having
her name misspelled at least twice on the packaging. I actually found
that it was necessary to turn the volume up at that point - and then reduce
it subsequently - in order to appreciate the qanun's distinctive
sound at all. In a similar manner, the "oriental triangles and cymbals"
that feature in the same work may easily pass you by unless you are really
straining your ears to catch them. In such ways the disc highlights the
mismatch between, on the one hand, traditional folk instruments that are
more effectively heard solo or in small ensembles and, on the other, the
western symphony orchestra at full throttle and in its plushest late 19th
century mode.
This is, then, a release that falls somewhat between two stools. On paper
the modifications to the traditional scores' orchestration and
the addition of those new linking passages appear so substantial that
some potential buyers may be alienated from even considering a purchase.
On the other hand, those changes, while certainly novel and interesting
in themselves, will for others be insufficiently radical in practice either
to justify the claims made for them or to render the revised versions
of much real interest.
One final observation ... If, like me, you want to discover more about
this accomplished and interesting orchestra, you may well choose to consult,
among other resources, BIFO’s
entry on the Wikipedia website. Should you do so, you will find that
it is headed by a warning that someone has posted to the effect that "This
page has some issues". So too, it might equally be said to anyone
looking for a more mainstream approach to this music, has this new release.
Rob Maynard
Masterwork Index: Scheherazade
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