Chicago Pro Musica is, or was, an ensemble founded in 1979 by
John Bruce Yeh, a long-serving clarinettist with the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra. I’m unsure if the group is still in
existence. The members of CPM were all colleagues of Yeh in
the Chicago Symphony. With that pedigree technical excellence
can be pretty much taken as read and, indeed, all the playing
on these discs is out of the top drawer. I imagine the ensemble
was flexible as to membership, depending on what music was being
performed. Twenty-five musicians are listed in the booklet,
mainly wind and brass players. It’s a shame that we aren’t
told the names of the players who took part in each performance
but maybe that information isn’t available any longer.
It’s worth saying at this point that the booklet contains
notes on each piece which, I suspect, were written when these
recordings were originally issued. Most of the notes are by
Edward Kaufmann and these are excellent, discussing the music
as well as the background to each composition. The notes on
the works by Weill, Bowles, Martinů and Varèse are
by Patrick Rucker and these, by comparison, are disappointingly
superficial, giving little away about the music; that’s
a pity because many listeners may be unfamiliar with those pieces
in particular.
No complaints, however, about the performances. The Walton,
for example, is despatched with great vitality. The tango part
of ‘Tango-Pasodoble’ sways seductively before the
music becomes racy. The ‘Polka’ is cheeky and the
famous ‘Popular Song’ is deliciously inflected.
The ’Tarantella’ brings the suite to an exuberant
close.
Franz Hasenörl’s ‘take’ on Till Eulenspiegel
is ingenious. “Einmal Anders!” can be translated
as “another way” and this inventive, clever contraction
- in more ways than one - of Strauss’s virtuoso tone poem
definitely represents “another way”. Not only is
the music shortened significantly but the original opulent orchestration
is slimmed down to just five instruments - violin, double bass,
clarinet, bassoon and horn. This is Strauss after a crash diet!
It sounds unlikely but actually it works rather well, especially
in an effervescent performance such as this one. By contrast,
there’s no compression involved in the Nielsen work, which
was designed from the outset by its composer for very similar
forces - clarinet, bassoon, horn, cello and double bass. Nielsen
himself described the Serenata in Vano as a “humorous
trifle”. It may be trifling by the side of, say, his symphonies
but it’s still a very well-crafted miniature and it’s
extremely well done by these Chicagoans.
The Stravinsky is not a work for which I care very much, though
I admire it as a work of art. The performance here is crisp
and suitably pungent in tone. “Pungent” is certainly
an adjective that can - and should - apply to Weill’s
Threepenny Opera Suite. This performance is an unqualified
success. The second movement, ‘Moritat of Mack the Knife’
is properly seedy; there’s an excellent trombone solo
in ‘Instead-Of Song’; and the ‘Ballad of the
Easy Life’ has a super feel of the ’Twenties to
it. The ‘Tango-Ballad’ features an oily saxophone
while the ‘Cannon Song’ is given a hell-for-leather
performance.
The piece by Paul Bowles was new to me. It derives from incidental
music written for an unsuccessful 1938 Orson Welles production
of the stage play, Too Much Johnson by William Gillette.
It consists of seven short movements and the music is mainly
bright and pithy though the fifth is slow in tempo and rather
touching. This is one of the cases where the notes are of little
help in telling us what an unfamiliar score is about - or even
the forces for which it was written.
I enjoyed the sprightly performance of Martinů’s
spiky 1927 experimental stage score Le Revue de Cuisine
but even expert players such as these can’t reconcile
me to Varèse.
You may wonder what on earth Rimsky’s brilliant orchestral
score, Capriccio Espagnol is doing in this company.
Well, it’s Rimsky but not as we know him! Composer and
pianist Easley Blackwood, a member of Chicago Pro Musica, has
managed the not-inconsiderable feat of reducing Rimsky’s
scoring to flute, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, violin,
cello, double bass and piano. Can that possibly work with a
piece which, as Rimsky himself said “glitter[s] with dazzling
orchestral colour”? Well, yes it can, though I admit I
didn’t expect that it would. As annotator Edward Kaufmann
says “what emerges is a musical entity sonorously transformed
but persuasively effective on its own terms”. One wouldn’t
want to hear the piece in this fashion too often but the arrangement
has been done with skill and affection and it’s good fun.
There’s some very clever music here. These sparkling Chicago
performances are well recorded and I enjoyed them very much.
John Quinn
see also review by Rob Barnett
Chicago Pro Musica
