Musical America Blogs

By Sedgwick Clark

I’ve been a parsimonious blogger this season. But the coming week in New York City concert halls has brought out the town crier in me. The week is bookended by performances of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata by two pianists I never expected to hear ascend this Everest of the keyboard: Murray Perahia at Lincoln Center’s Geffen Hall on Sunday the 8th at 3:00 and Yuja Wang at Carnegie Hall on the following Saturday the 14th at 8:00. In between, at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday the 11th, Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra in the first Mahler symphony I ever heard, the Tenth, in Eugene Ormandy’s impassioned 1965 recording with this very orchestra.

In the past, Perahia has been hesitant to tackle such huge virtuoso piano works because some critics have branded his playing “small scale.” But his performance of the Appassionata some years ago at Carnegie was one of the best I’ve heard—quite different than the hair-raisingly aggressive Richter recording yet no less satisfying interpretively. One could imagine a sublimely musical Liszt Sonata from Perahia as well. But one shouldn’t be greedy: I can’t wait to hear how he renders the Hammerklavier’s slow movement, in particular.

Yuja Wang is walking an entirely different tightrope. A lioness of the keyboard, she has specialized in finger-busting repertoire by Scriabin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, and Messiaen—the flashier the better. Until now, she has studiously avoided the German classics. Evidently, however, the 29-year old has decided that it’s time to test her mettle in an altogether “serious” program, which Deutsche Grammophon will surely record for video and CD release, of two Brahms Ballades, Schumann’s Kreisleriana, and the Hammerklavier. Will she muster the depth as well as her accustomed dexterity? The answer is what keeps us returning to the traditional repertoire. I wouldn’t miss it.

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) succumbed to a heart condition before he could finish his Tenth Symphony. For over 50 years it was known solely by its only completed movement, its first. Mahler had sketched out four other movements, however, and several musicologists have tried their hands at “completing” the work. The British musicologist and critic Deryck Cooke was the first to succeed in fashioning what he called a “performing version.” It remains the best, actually sounding like Mahler throughout, where his successors succumbed to modernized harmonies and fanciful orchestration. Nézet-Séguin wisely leads the Cooke version. The concert begins with Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 1, with Lang Lang certain to make a meal of the young composer’s bravura piano writing.

By Sedgwick Clark

Last Monday was one of the best concerts I’ve heard so far this season. Itzhak Perlman led the Juilliard Orchestra in an all-Tchaikovsky program at David Geffen Hall: Romeo and Juliet, Rococo Variations for cello and orchestra, featuring the impressive soloist Edvard Pogossian, and the Sixth Symphony (Pathétique). I love the commitment and brio of student orchestras, and these young musicians were true to form.

The glory of the evening—surprise, surprise!—was the warm and expressive string tone that Perlman elicited from the orchestra, in a hall notoriously unfriendly to such qualities. Vibrato in unison was the watchword of the night, and the sound bloomed from the stage with unerring beauty. Blindfolded, one even might have mistaken them for the Philadelphia Orchestra, with which Perlman recorded the Tchaikovsky concerto under Ormandy. The love music in Romeo and the often-distorted second theme in the first movement of the Pathétique sang as if one were hearing them for the first time. How fortunate that these young musicians were able to play these melodies so simply and eloquently under Perlman, before maestro X commands them to torture the line with “personal” expressiveness.  And yet Perlman was never impersonal—his love of Tchaikovsky shone through vividly in every bar, with no accelerandos where the score didn’t ask for them, just a natural tightening of tempo that any great musician feels in an emotionally heightened passage.

The sound in row V, directly in the middle of the orchestra section, offered ideal balances, admirably clear details, and a welcome absence of glare. Amazingly, the strings were never overwhelmed, even by Tchaikovsky’s brassy double- and triple-forte climaxes at the height of Romeo’s family feuding and the Pathétique’s third-movement March. I was even ready to suggest that Lincoln Center should forget the renovation until I spoke afterwards with friends in a side box who experienced the same old same old.

Perlman turned 70 this year. I first heard him in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall on December 28, 1966, an all-Stravinsky program in which the 21-year-old violinist played the 84-year-old composer’s Violin Concerto, conducted by Robert Craft. I was blown away! Stravinsky, in what was billed as his “final Chicago appearance,” conducted his Fireworks, excerpts from Petrushka, and the 1945 Firebird Suite. Perlman’s birthday was celebrated by Warner Classics on disc by a 77-CD box of his EMI recordings and by a 25-CD Deutsche Grammophon box of DG and Decca recordings. Perhaps his next celebratory release will contain recordings as a conductor.

By Sedgwick Clark

I had the great pleasure of attending this year’s Sibelius Festival in Lahti, Finland, about an hour northwest of Helsinki. From August 31 to September 5 I heard all seven of the symphonies plus the early Kullervo Symphony, the Violin Concerto, and a number of shorter works. Chamber, solo, and vocal works were also played, but I only caught a nice performance of the composer’s wonderful “Voces Intimae” Quartet by the Tempera Quartet, an 18-year-old foursome of Finnish women. My review appears on the Musical America website in two parts, on 9/17 and 18.

I discovered two conductors I had never heard in concert, Okko Kamu and Leif Segerstam.  I only have one of Kamu’s recordings—a Sibelius Third Symphony on DG that he recorded in 1969 when he won the Karajan International Conducting Competition. Karajan didn’t like the Third, and when DG couldn’t talk him into recording it to complete the cycle, the label gave it to Kamu. I think he also recorded the Second for DG (I’ll have to look for that) because Karajan eventually did the First and Second for EMI. Kamu’s bio says that he has recorded over 100 CDs; I have a lot of catching up to do!

I have none of Segerstam’s, even though he made a cycle of Sibelius symphonies for Chandos. The Gramophone reviews found them eccentric, so I didn’t bother with them, but I think I’ll try to find them now that I enjoyed his concert so much. I doubt if I’ll ever get to hear him live again, however. He’s rather portly, and he shambled on- and offstage precariously; he sat to conduct, but his broad tempos certainly never lacked energy. When I googled him, I was astonished to find that he is only 72.

This will be Kamu’s last season, after five years, as principal conductor of the Lahti Symphony. I was quite bowled over by his knowing way with Sibelius—warm, expressive, unaffected, relaxed but never slack or soft-edged, and with a natural give and take between sections. How rare all these qualities are in one package. Furthermore, so many conductors and, in the Violin Concerto, soloists play Sibelius’s music lugubriously these days. I told him backstage how much I liked his tempos, and he chuckled, saying, “I was told they were too slow.”  BIS has just released a set of the seven symphonies with Kamu, which I look forward to hearing.

Like all great music, Sibelius’s is open to many interpretive approaches, and they were in evidence in Lahti. Most I liked, some I didn’t, and that’s okay. Since his centennial in 1965, they have been increasingly preserved on recordings. Leonard Bernstein’s unabashedly Romantic cycle (Sony) dominated our Stateside view of the symphonies, whereas in Europe the grandeur of Sibelius’s Germanic influence was personified by Herbert von Karajan (DG and EMI). In the 1970s, the more austere visions of Colin Davis (Philips) and Paavo Berglund (EMI) held sway.

Today’s reigning Sibelian is undoubtedly Finnish firebrand Osmo Vänskä, whose Lahti recordings on BIS’s complete works of the composer have won wide critical approval. To no surprise, his festival concert was excellent. Last season he proved his commitment to his fellow Finn’s music when he resigned his Minnesota Orchestra music director post after a labor dispute resulted in the cancellation of his complete Sibelius symphony cycle at Carnegie Hall. The upshot: Sibelius and Vänskä triumphed. The musicians implored their conductor to return, and top administrators and board members quit. Carnegie could only schedule the first of the two Minnesota concerts in its upcoming season, and Vänskä told me he had heard that it was nearly sold out. The second is sure to follow.

I expected this to be a short blog of postscripts to my Musicalamerica.com review, but it’s gotten out of hand. Still, I must comment further on Lahti’s extraordinary Sibelius Hall. What a beautiful, sonically natural acoustic. Instruments are fanned out on risers, yielding distinct separation of the five string choirs, unique woodwind timbres, and gleaming but never glaring brass. The drums are effortlessly audible from the slightest tap to the most dramatic thwack.

Christopher Storch, a former Artec partner who worked on the acoustics of Sibelius Hall and the chamber-music hall in midtown Lahti, was attending the festival. He explained to me that “our goal was to remove as much background noise as possible so that the musicians could exploit the widest dynamic possible. When the conductor raises his baton, and the audience holds its breath in anticipation, one should hear nothing—no lights buzzing, no ventilation noise, nothing.”

What about those patented Artec acoustical “doors,” which theoretically provide greater resonance when open. Jukka-Pekka Saraste wanted them open for his concert, and they were also open for Kamu’s final concert in the hall. Acoustician Russell Johnson is no longer around for friendly disputation, but Chris and Larry King, another former Artec acoustician and a longtime buddy, were. I definitely prefer the superior instrumental focus and smoother decay when the doors are closed. I could close my eyes and know where every instrument was. To hear the French horns, positioned on the back left (audience perspective) of the stage, ricochet around the right side of the auditorium was most disconcerting. I can’t believe that Johnson would have approved.

The day after I returned to New York, I got a call from Musical America contributor Mark Swed, who had just reviewed concerts at the Lucerne Festival in the Los Angeles Times. A woman had walked up to him at a Santa Monica farmer’s market and declared, “You should have been at Lahti’s Sibelius Festival.” Word gets around.

 

By Sedgwick Clark

There is nothing hum-drum about the annual Lincoln Center Festival. Festival Director Nigel Redden likes to take chances, scouring the globe during off-summer months for new takes on traditional works in all the performing arts, balanced by newer works for which the word “unique” was invented. One of the latter was an opera by American composer Harry Partch, Delusion of the Fury, which has been rarely mounted since its premiere at UCLA in 1969. Last week it was given its Lincoln Center outing (oddly, at City Center) by Ensemble Musikfabrik, directed by Heiner Goebbels.

Partch (1901-1974) was one of those 20th-century American mavericks like Ives, Ruggles, Nancarrow, Cage, Glass, and Reich. He built his own instruments capable of producing fractional intervals, invented a 43-tone scale, and wandered America, in the words of Nicolas Slonimsky, “collecting indigenous expressions of folkways, inscriptions on public walls, etc., for texts in his productions.” By the time he wrote Delusion, Partch had created 27 instruments, and I must admit that on my first live hearing and seeing I found its plethora of percussion and overactive staging a bit diffuse.

To my good fortune, I was accompanied on that evening by the composer and conductor Victoria Bond, who just so happens to have sung the role of the Old Goat Woman in that UCLA premiere. Speaking with her afterwards, I came to understand my reaction better and figured that you, my readers, would too. So I invited her to write about working with the composer, what that production was like, and how the new Heiner Goebbels view stacked up to it. Take it away, Victoria!

“Harry Partch originally intended the roles in his opera Delusion of the Fury to be performed by musicians who could also act, sing, and dance. However, the dancer who was to play the principal female role of the Old Goat Woman could not sing the part, so I was called in to audition for Partch. Although I was a classically trained opera singer, Partch wanted a raw, primal sound, with an almost yodeling quality. This was difficult for me to achieve at first, as it went against everything I had been trained to do with my voice. But once I had mastered the sounds he wanted, I found the technique to be expressive in a way that was new to me. Partch invited me to join the cast and spent a lot of time teaching us his unorthodox vocal techniques until we sounded like participants in an ancient tribal ritual. The arrangement was to be that I and the other principal singers were to be in the pit with the musicians, and the dancers were to be on stage, lip-syncing.

“Delusion of the Fury combines two folk tales, one serious and the other a comedy. The first, taken from a Japanese Noh drama, is about a warrior searching for the ghost of a man he has killed. The second, adapted from an Ethiopian folk tale, is a farce about miscommunication. The two stories are connected by the characters who portray roles in both. My role, the Old Goat Woman, was part of the farce, and Partch wanted me to emphasize her comedic qualities in my vocalizations. After many hours of rehearsals, I felt prepared to let loose with some yelps and hollers and the primitive guttural sounds that Partch wanted. The premiere took place on January 9, 1969, at UCLA, and the audience whooped and hollered its approval at the conclusion. What a joyous moment it was for all of us, particularly as we had no idea how this radical opera was going to be received!

“Although Partch was pleased with the results of his tireless coaching of singers and instrumentalists, he was not equally pleased with the staging. Because he had lavished most of his time on us, he did not see the costumes or choreography until shortly before opening night, when it was too late to do anything about them. He feared the worst, and was relieved when the audience cheered on opening night and the glowing reviews proclaimed the work a masterpiece.

“The recent performance by Musikfabrik as part of the Lincoln Center Festival was performed on instruments copied from those originally built by Partch. The playing and singing were brilliant, and it was gratifying to hear such virtuosity from this later generation of Partch enthusiasts. Much as I enjoyed the musical realization, however, I thought the staging fussy and distracting rather than an enhancement of the performance. The grandeur and simple elegance of the Noh drama was lost in the lugubrious lighting of the first part, and although the whimsical Ethiopian story started promisingly, it deteriorated into a campy romp with a large cutout of what looked to be Kentucky Fried Chicken’s Colonel Sanders carried onstage amidst a herd of toy goats.

“It made for a crowded picture. The principal of less-is-more might have given us the opportunity to savor each detail without the clutter of a tank of water, a herd of goats, a large cutout, a fire and other assorted bells and whistles. On the other hand, the decision to have the instruments onstage rather than in the pit was most welcome, as they are so beautiful to behold and were played with such conviction and expressivity.”

By Sedgwick Clark

NOT TO BE MISSED! This week, the Metropolitan Opera pays tribute to the late Jon Vickers by devoting its entire programming on Sirius XM to archival broadcasts featuring the great Canadian tenor. The second opera I ever heard live was this Peter Grimes, and I was fortunate to attend at least one performance of every Met production in which he appeared thereafter.

Once heard, never forgotten. Looking over the repertoire list in the Met’s press release below, I realize how Vickers’s inimitable singing style, intensity, and commitment—especially as Florestan, Grimes, and Otello—colored my expectations whenever I heard another artist in the role.

Vickers made his Met debut as Canio in Pagliacci in 1960 and appeared in the opera for the last time 25 years later.  I’ll never forget the scene where Canio frantically pursues his wife’s young lover, Silvio. The 59-year-old Vickers tore downstage like a man unhinged—not for a second allowing his age to compromise the dramatic moment.

Will Crutchfield provided an insightful summation of the tenor’s artistry in his Pagliacci review in the Times (11/25/85): “Mr. Vickers is utterly committed to the truth of each moment as it goes by, and . . . the strength of spirit and personal magnetism he brings to that commitment is enormous. In ‘Un tal gioco’ he was addressing the villager whose joke had touched a raw nerve, fixing him in the eyes. The man seemed a little shaken, as though it were real—just as, at the end, the Met choristers seemed really to be on the edge of their seats, watching Vickers-Canio step over the border between theater and life.”

 

New York, NY (July 17, 2015)— The Metropolitan Opera on Sirius XM (Channel 74) will honor the memory of the late Canadian tenor Jon Vickers, who passed away last week, by playing seven of his greatest Met performances in rotation throughout the week of July 20. The legendary dramatic tenor gave 280 Met performances during his career with the company, which spanned 27 years and included 17 different roles.

The company will honor Vickers in other ways throughout the coming season, including dedicating the opening night performance of Verdi’s Otello on September 21 to his memory.

The archival broadcasts that will air in rotation next week cover the full span of Vickers’s Met career, from 1960 to 1987. The performances include a 1960 matinee of Beethoven’s Fidelio, conducted by Karl Böhm and also starring Birgit Nilsson; a 1961 performance of Wagner’s Die Walküre, in which Vickers sang his most frequent Met role, Siegmund, opposite Nilsson and Gladys Kuchta, conducted by Erich Leinsdorf; performances of two of the title roles with which he was most identified, Britten’s Peter Grimes (from 1969) and Verdi’s Otello (from 1978); a rare comic role, Vašek in a 1978 performance of Smetana’s The Bartered Bride; a 1979 performance of Wagner’s Parsifal, also starring Christa Ludwig and conducted by James Levine in one of his first Met performances of the opera; and Vickers’s final Met performance, the April 18, 1987 matinee of Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila, also starring Marilyn Horne.

More details on the seven performances, each of which will air 3 or 4 times during the week, is available below. For a complete schedule with broadcast times, please visit http://metopera.org/Season/Radio/Sirius-XM/.

Metropolitan Opera Radio on Sirius XM

Jon Vickers Tribute: July 20-26

 

Fidelio (February 13, 1960). Conductor: Karl Böhm. Starring: Birgit Nilsson, Jon Vickers, Hermann Uhde, Oskar Czerwenka, Laurel Hurley, Charles Anthony, Giorgio Tozzi

Die Walküre (December 23, 1961). Conductor: Erich Leinsdorf. Starring: Birgit Nilsson, Jon Vickers, Gladys Kuchta, Otto Edelmann, Irene Dalis, Ernst Wiemann.

Peter Grimes (April 5, 1969). Conductor: Colin Davis. Starring: Jon Vickers, Lucine Amara, Geraint Evans.

Otello (February 4, 1978). Conductor: James Levine. Starring: Jon Vickers, Katia Ricciarelli, Cornell MacNeil, Frank Little, James Morris.

The Bartered Bride (December 2, 1978). Conductor: James Levine. Starring: Teresa Stratas, Nicolai Gedda, Jon Vickers, Martti Talvela.

Parsifal (April 14, 1979). Conductor: James Levine. Starring: Christa Ludwig, Jon Vickers, Bernd Weikl, Martti Talvela, Vern Shinall.

Samson et Dalila (April 18, 1987). Conductor: Jean Fournet. Starring: Jon Vickers, Marilyn Horne, Louis Quilico.

By Sedgwick Clark

A purported “Russian Day Celebration” on June 12 at Carnegie Hall was one of the more perplexing concerts of the season. Widely publicized was the legendary St. Petersburg Philharmonic, with the orchestra’s “Deputy Artistic Director,” Nikolai Alexeev, on the podium rather than its distinguished artistic director, Yuri Temirkanov. The program was unimaginative, but Tchaikovsky’s Fourth and Shostakovich’s Fifth are two of my favorite symphonies, and it was a Friday night with nothing else to do. It turned out that an intermission kerfuffle was most memorable.

Alexeev proved himself to be a faceless time beater. His Tchaik 4 was low voltage and disgracefully uncommitted for an orchestra of the SPb Phil’s heritage. The famous pizzicato scherzo, in particular, was shockingly flat. For some reason, the orchestra seemed transformed in the Shosta 5. After several ragged attacks at the beginning, the players settled down and proved that they hadn’t forgotten what the music means, playing with genuine involvement. The double basses dug in, violins had bite in the pianissimos, pizzicatos had presence, and the players were attentive, no longer swallowing their notes as they had in the Tchaikovsky. Even the conductor showed some involvement, although not to the point of any interpretive distinction. The finale’s coda was played the Russian way, slowly.

Oh, yes, the kerfuffle.

An imposingly large Russian audience member, decked out head to toe in white with a red sport coat, was sitting on the other side of the aisle, two rows in front of us. He had been flipping nonstop through photos, apps, and websites on his Smartphone throughout the first half. During intermission, an elderly American concertgoer in the row behind him politely asked the Russian to stop disturbing his neighbors. The Russian stood up and shouted, “Who are you?” He pointed at the man and said, “Go sit down. Do you know who I am? You won’t get home tonight.” The American replied, “You’re not in Russia now,” and went to get an usher. PK then went over to the ruffian and said, “I was actually about to ask you the same thing,” to which he demanded, “Why are you looking at my phone?” She countered that “it is directly in my sightline and I can’t avoid it.” He was chastened enough that he put his phone away and just fidgeted incessantly throughout the Shostakovich. Is this the sort of Russian Day performance Mr. Putin had in mind?

By Sedgwick Clark

Alan Gilbert’s recorded cycle with the New York Philharmonic of Danish composer Carl Nielsen’s symphonies and concertos was feted on Monday by the orchestra at SubCulture, the lower Eastside concert venue. The symphonies were released in pairs as recorded by the orchestra live in concert over the last four years by the Danish Da Capo label. The completed four-CD set includes the three concertos—for violin, flute, and clarinet, superbly performed in concert by Nikolaj Znaider, Robert Langevin, and Anthony McGill, respectively. I’ll report on the concertos and revisit the symphonies soon, along with two other recently completed symphony cycles I’ve yet to hear by Colin Davis and the London Symphony on LSO LIVE and Sakari Oramo and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic on BIS.

There was talk at the SubCulture event, to be sure, but there’s no doubt that a captivating pair of live performances will last longer in the memory. First, Nielsen’s distinctive humanity, warmth, and wit were ideally captured by five Philharmonic section leaders in his delectable Wind Quintet, Op. 43 (1921-22). I’ve marveled at the bold individuality of the Philharmonic winds on record and in concert for over 50 years, and it amazes me that this unrestrained projection of character and drama remains similar throughout many changes of personnel over the years. On this evening, Robert Langevin (flute), Liang Wang (oboe), Anthony McGill (clarinet), Judith LeClair (bassoon), and Philip Myers (horn) played impeccably, delightfully attuned to the composer’s cheerful sense of humor.

Nielsen’s four string quartets are considered more earnest than inspired; indeed, he abandoned the genre following the premiere of the Fourth Quartet in 1907, four years before completion of his Third Symphony, the work that established his repute as a major composer. But more performances like the impassioned one by Denmark’s Nightingale String Quartet of the first of his quartets, in G minor, Op. 13 (1887-88), might well cause some reappraisal among Nielsen scholars. Mark my words, given perspicacious management, the talented young women of the NSQ will be back again soon.

Walter Weller—Master of the Russians

News came on Wednesday of the death, at 75, of Walter Weller, a concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic and founder of the Weller Quartet before taking up conducting and making several memorable recordings for Decca-London. Among them, a noteworthy Prokofiev symphony cycle with the London Philharmonic included a revelatory performance of the composer’s bombastic Age of Steel Second (for once it didn’t sound careful). The end of his excellent Shostakovich First recording with the Suisse Romande, coupled with a delightful Ninth, featured one of those patented Decca bass drums that blows you out of the room. Nor did he hold back the savage timpani attacks in the finale of his Rachmaninoff First with the Geneva orchestra.

I only heard him in concert once, with the New York Philharmonic in February 1980—not a distinguished evening, I’m afraid. All I recall is that the strings fell apart in the closing diminuendo of the Mahler Fourth slow movement, and the Times’s Harold Schonberg turned around to me and exclaimed sotto voce, “Did you hear that? I’ve never heard that happen before!”

Weller held several European posts, including music director of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic, Scottish National Orchestra, and most recently the National Orchestra of Belgium. “He was so well-liked in Scotland,” reports Musicalamerica.com, “that the government printed his image on a special £50 note.” Now that’s class!

By Sedgwick Clark

When Richard Strauss conducted the Boston Symphony in 1904, he stopped the players during a rehearsal and said, “Gentlemen, when you play my music I hear all the notes. But I don’t want to hear all the notes.” My guess is that he would have loved to hear Andris Nelsons conduct his Ein Heldenleben last week at Carnegie Hall. Leading the BSO in his first New York appearances since becoming the orchestra’s music director at the beginning of this season, the 37-year-old Latvian maestro conjured a glorious wall of sound in which the mass was never distracted by extraneous details.

My last critical encounter with Nelsons was his Carnegie Hall concert performance of Richard Strauss’s Salome with the Vienna State Opera a year ago (3/16/14), of which I wrote that he made the composer “sound like an amateur orchestrator.” Moreover, “he is impossible to watch . . . describing every little detail in the air to players far more acquainted with the music than he.” I concluded that at a subsequent Vienna Philharmonic concert his “tired reading of Brahms’s Haydn Variations and a sprawling Third Symphony were not encouraging.”

But Nelsons’s three concerts with the Boston Symphony couldn’t have been more encouraging. In Ein Heldenleben, the Bostonians seemed to have recaptured that plush, old-world sonority of the best Koussevitzky recordings. No Boulezian clarity and detail for this guy: Nelsons’s expressive rubato, bass-oriented textures, and broad tempos (except in his uncommonly brisk, snarling treatment of The Hero’s Adversaries) reminded me of Christian Thielemann’s expansive performance with the New York Philharmonic in March 1997. The offstage brass in the Battle scene, so often too close at Carnegie, were perfectly judged.

I was unable to hear the second concert, in which Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony was the centerpiece. Friends reported an extraordinary performance, and the Times’s Anthony Tomassini wrote that this concert was the best of the trio.

The final concert featured a driving, energetic Mahler Sixth Symphony in the Bernstein mode, which only flagged somewhat in the second-movement Scherzo’s trios.

Expecting to be distracted by Nelsons’s overconducting, as the year before, I came armed with the Strauss and Mahler scores. To my surprise, I found that he has tempered his flailing beat, and I could safely steal a momentary glance at the stage—a sign that trust has built up in Boston’s Symphony Hall!

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts (8:00 p.m. unless otherwise noted):

4/24 at 7:30. The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America. 1161 Amsterdam Avenue. The Serge Prokofiev Foundation honors the opening of the Prokofiev Archive at Columbia University. Sergei Dreznin, piano; Barbara Nissman, piano; Erika Baikoff, soprano. Prokofiev: Sonata No. 1; The Ugly Duckling; Tales of the Old Grandmother; Sonata No. 6. Pre-concert lecture by Simon Morrison at 6:30.

4/27 Symphony Space at 7:30. Cutting Edge Concerts. Victoria Bond: Clara.

4/28 Carnegie Hall. New World Symphony/Michael Tilson Thomas; Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin. Schubert: Incidental Music from Rosamunde. Berg: Violin Concerto. Norbert Moret: En rêve. Debussy: La Mer.

5/29 Carnegie Hall. Audra MacDonald.

By Sedgwick Clark

Repertoire for international orchestra tours is usually so ho-hum that Alan Gilbert’s tour with the New York Philharmonic, which began on April 16 in Dublin, came as a jolt to me. If you’ve been going to his concerts the past few weeks, you’ll have heard the music—and noted, I should add, the top-notch level of performances.

The majority of the works are early 20th century—Stravinsky, Ravel, Debussy, Bartók, and Richard Strauss—but work their way up to Shostakovich’s Tenth (1953) and then to downright contemporary fare: Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Nyx, the world premiere of Peter Eötvös’s Senza sangue, and five composers on one of Gilbert’s new-music CONTACT! concerts of whom only Salonen is well known.

Being of critical mien, I might have had my druthers to strut the Phil’s stuff to the world, beginning with a couple of Carl Nielsen’s works that Gilbert led so magnificently earlier this season—the Fifth or Sixth symphonies or the Clarinet Concerto with the orchestra’s superb new principal clarinet, Anthony McGill. But perhaps the maestro has chosen the great Dane’s effervescent Maskarade Overture as an encore.

I suppose the programs of largely familiar fare below will daunt a few concertgoers in some backward bergs, but only the Cologne concert on May 1might be chancy for New York subscribers. The distinguished German, Viennese, French, and Russian orchestras bring their music here (although rarely do the British ones, which should change with the onset of Simon Rattle at the LSO). So now Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic are giving them a taste of their own music the way we do it over here.

 

 

New York Philharmonic/Alan Gilbert: EUROPE / SPRING 2015 tour (April 16–May 1)

 

April 16

Dublin, Ireland

National Concert Hall

Esa-Pekka Salonen: Nyx

Ravel: Shéhérazade (with Joyce DiDonato, mezzo-soprano)

Ravel: Valses nobles et sentimentales

R. Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier Suite

 

April 17

London, England

Barbican Centre

Esa-Pekka Salonen: Nyx

Ravel: Shéhérazade (with Joyce DiDonato, mezzo-soprano)

Ravel: Valses nobles et sentimentales

R. Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier Suite

 

April 18

London, England

Milton Court Concert Hall

CONTACT! 

Daníel Bjarnason: Five Possibilities

Timo Andres: Early to Rise

Missy Mazzoli: Dissolve, O My Heart

Esa-Pekka Salonen: Homunculus for string quartet

Shulamit Ran: Mirage for five players

 

April 19

London, England

Barbican Centre

Young People’s Concert

Stravinsky: Petrushka (staged)

Doug Fitch, director/designer

Edouard Gétaz, producer

A Production by Giants Are Small

Tom Lee, puppetry director

 

April 19

London, England

Barbican Centre

Bartók: The Miraculous Mandarin Suite

Debussy: Jeux

Stravinsky: Petrushka (staged)

Doug Fitch, director/designer

Edouard Gétaz, producer

A Production by Giants Are Small

Tom Lee, puppetry director

 

April 21

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Royal Concertgebouw

Esa-Pekka Salonen: Nyx

Ravel: Shéhérazade (with Joyce DiDonato, mezzo-soprano)

Ravel: Valses nobles et sentimentales

R. Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier Suite

 

April 22

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Royal Concertgebouw

Stravinsky: Petrushka (original 1911 version)

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 10

 

April 23

Luxembourg

Philharmonie Luxembourg

Ravel: Valses nobles et sentimentales

Ravel: Shéhérazade (with Joyce DiDonato, mezzo-soprano)

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 10

 

April 25

Paris, France

Philharmonie de Paris

Esa-Pekka Salonen: Nyx

Ravel: Shéhérazade (with Joyce DiDonato, mezzo-soprano)

Ravel: Valses nobles et sentimentales

R. Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier Suite

 

April 26

Paris, France

Philharmonie de Paris

Stravinsky: Petrushka (original 1911 version)

Debussy: Jeux

Bartók: The Miraculous Mandarin Suite

 

April 28

Frankfurt, Germany

Alte Oper Frankfurt

Stravinsky: Petrushka (original 1911 version)

Ravel: Valses nobles et sentimentales

R. Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier Suite

 

April 30

Cologne, Germany

Kölner Philharmonie

Stravinsky: Petrushka (original 1911 version)

Ravel: Valses nobles et sentimentales

R. Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier Suite

 

May 1

Cologne, Germany

Kölner Philharmonie

Esa-Pekka Salonen: Nyx

Bartók: The Miraculous Mandarin Suite

Peter Eötvös: Senza sangue (world premiere of New York Philharmonic co-commission,

with Anne Sofie von Otter, mezzo-soprano & Russell Braun, baritone)

 

By Sedgwick Clark

Pierre Boulez turned 90 last week, on March 26. At first he struck fear in the ears of traditional concertgoers. But by his eighties he was hailed as a grand old man of music, in demand by all the major orchestras of the world. Fortunately, Boulez’s performing career is well documented, and his recording companies have celebrated his birthday in rare form with several box sets that include nearly his entire recorded output.

Boulez the Enfant Terrible. He revealed the lineage of 20th-century composition like no one else. His earliest recordings, dating from 1958-67, are with Domaine Musical, the French ensemble he formed in 1954. Works by Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Varèse, Messiaen, Stravinsky, and his own music (including two recordings of Le Marteau sans Maître) dominate the recorded Domaine repertoire. A smattering of his modernist contemporaries, Pousseur, Stockhausen, Berio, Henze, Cage, and others are included. Also included is a performance of Stravinsky’s Agon, with Hans Rosbaud conducting the Orchestre du Sudwestfunk, Baden-Baden. Deutsche Grammophon has handily gathered all these recordings on a 10-CD set, allowing us to jettison our crackly budget LPs at last.

The New York Philharmonic Years. Columbia Records signed Boulez in 1967 to record 20th-century repertoire, which is now all available on Sony Classical on a 67-CD set, primarily performed by the New York Philharmonic and London’s BBC Symphony. Boulez felt that before audiences could understand the music of the present, they must be conversant with contemporary composers’ historical forebears. Hence, these recordings concentrate on the works of Debussy, Ravel, Bartók, Berg, Schoenberg, Webern, Varèse, and Stravinsky; several of Boulez’s own works and Luciano Berio’s are included as well. Sony missed an opportunity, however, to include a never-before-released Boulez recording of Debussy’s Symphonic Fragments from The Martyrdom of St. Sebastien. Unedited tapes of a New York Philharmonic studio recording lie fallow in Sony’s icebox, never released for lack of an LP discmate; I recall the live performance as luminous. Sony’s CD reissues back in the ’80s by George Kadar were not transferred from the original analogue master tapes and betrayed light hiss levels that could have been avoided. Sony’s p.r. release for the box set claims that the recordings were mastered from original sources. I’m skeptical, but I’ll suspend judgment until I’ve heard the box set.

Warner’s Erato Set. Boulez’s departure as music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1977 for Paris to head up the contemporary-music organization IRCAM effectively ended his Columbia contract. The French label Erato stepped in during the 1980s to fill gaps in the conductor’s discography by Stravinsky (Pulcinella, Le Rossignol, L’Histoire du soldat), Schoenberg (Violin and Piano Concertos), and several important Boulez works—all now available in a 14-CD box released by Warner Classics. Perhaps one of these days Warner will also reissue Boulez’s early-1970s EMI recordings of Bartók’s Piano Concerto Nos. 1 and 3 with Daniel Barenboim and Berg’s Violin Concerto and the two Bartók Violin Rhapsodies with Yehudi Menuhin.

DG’s Class Act. In 1990, Deutsche Grammophon signed the composer/conductor to undoubtedly the most fruitful of his recording contracts. DG pulled out all the stops for Boulez, enlisting the Chicago Symphony for Bartók and Stravinsky, the Berlin Philharmonic for Ravel and Webern, the Cleveland Orchestra for Debussy and Stravinsky, the Vienna Philharmonic and Cleveland for Mahler’s symphonies and the song cycles, and the Ensemble Intercontemporain for his own works and those by Ligeti and Birtwistle. The Columbia recordings were very impressive for their revelation of Boulez’s incredible ear for detail, but I well recall being blown sideways by DG’s addition of spectacular digital sonics and Rolls Royce orchestras. I’m still amazed.

Not all the works recorded by the New York and BBC orchestras on Columbia in the late 1960s and ’70s were re-recorded by DG. Boulez never got around to re-doing Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder, for example, but he did re-record a superb Moses und Aron with none other than the Royal Concertgebouw! Thus, Boulez fans will need all these commemorative sets on their shelves.

DG has also released an elegantly designed seven-CD set of all of Boulez’s music, which includes the Erato recordings of Boulez works that he never recorded for DG to make this set note-complete.

 

Domaine Musical recordings (1958-1967) on Deutsche Grammophon

 

CD 1: Le concert du 10è anniversaire

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928 – 2007)

Kontra-Punkte Opus 1

Pierre Boulez, Solistes du Domaine Musical

 

Luciano Berio (1925 – 2003)

Serenata 1 Pour Flûte Et 14 Instruments

Severino Gazzelloni, Pierre Boulez, Solistes du Domaine Musical

 

Pierre Boulez (1925 – )

Le Marteau sans Maître

Jeanne Deroubaix, Solistes du Domaine Musical, Pierre Boulez

 

Olivier Messiaen (1908 – 1992)

Oiseaux Exotiques

Yvonne Loriod, Rudolf Albert, Orchestre Du Domaine Musical

Total CD Playing Time: 1:07:47    

 

CD 2: Les références françaises

Claude Debussy (1862 – 1918)

Syrinx Pour Flûte Seule 

 

Edgar Varèse (1885 – 1965)

Densité 21, 5, Pour Flûte Seule 

Severino Gazzelloni

 

Hyperprisme, Pour Petit Orchestre Et Percussions 

Pierre Boulez, Orchestre Du Domaine Musical

 

Octandre 

Pierre Boulez, Jacques Castagner, Claude Maisonneuve, Guy Deplus, Marcel Naulais, André Rabot, André Fournier, Roger Delmotte, René Allain, Jacques Cazauran

 

Intégrales, Pour Petit Orchestre Et Percussion

Pierre Boulez, Orchestre Du Domaine Musical

 

Olivier Messiaen (1908 – 1992)

Cantéyodjaya

Yvonne Loriod

 

Sept Haikai

Les Percussions De Strasbourg, Orchestre Du Domaine Musical, Pierre Boulez, Yvonne Loriod

Total CD Playing Time: 1:02:37    

 

CD 3: Le compositeur Pierre Boulez

Pierre Boulez (1925 – )

Structures, Livre 1 et 2 Pour 2 Pianos

Aloys Kontarsky, Alfons Kontarsky

 

Sonatine Pour Flûte Et Piano

Severino Gazzelloni, David Tudor

 

Piano Sonata No.2

Yvonne Loriod

Total CD Playing Time: 58:09    

 

CD 4: Les compagnons de route

Mauricio Kagel (1931 – 2008)

Sextuor à cordes

Pierre Boulez, Solistes du Domaine Musical

 

Luigi Nono (1924 – 1990)

Incontri, Pour 24 Instruments

Pierre Boulez, Orchestre Du Domaine Musical

 

Hans Werner Henze (1926 – 2012)

Concerto Per Il Marigny

Yvonne Loriod, Rudolf Albert, Orchestre Du Domaine Musical

 

Henri Pousseur (1929-2009)

Madrigal III

Guy Deplus, Gérard Jarry, Michel Tournus, Jean-Charles Francoise, Diego Masson, Fabienne Boury

 

Mobiles, Pour 2 Pianos

Aloys Kontarsky, Alfons Kontarsky

 

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928 – 2007)

Zeitmasse, Op.5

Jacques Castagner, Claude Maisonneuve, Paul Taillefer, Guy Deplus, André Rabot

 

Klavierstück VI, Op.4/II

David Tudor

Total CD Playing Time: 1:12:45    

 

CD 5: Igor Stravinsky

Igor Stravinsky (1882 – 1971)

Concertino pour 12 instruments

Pierre Boulez, Jacques Parrenin, Pierre Penassou, Jacques Castagner, Claude Maisonneuve, Paul Taillefer, Guy Deplus, André Rabot, Jean-Pierre Laroque, Pierre Pollin, Jacques Lecointre, René Allain, Maurice Suzan

 

Three Pieces for solo Clarinet

Guy Deplus

 

3 Pieces for String Quartet

Quatuor Parrenin, Jacques Parrenin, Jacques Ghestem, Michel Wales, Pierre Penassou

 

Symphonies d’instruments à vent

Orchestre Du Domaine Musical, Pierre Boulez

 

Renard

Pierre Boulez, Jean Giraudeau, Louis Devos, Louis Jacques Rondeleux, Xavier Depraz, Elemer Kiss, Orchestre Du Domaine Musical

 

Agon – Ballet (1957)

Orchestre Du Sudwestfunk Baden-Baden, Hans Rosbaud

Total CD Playing Time: 1:01:39    

 

CD 6: L’école de Vienne I. De 1899 à 1912

Arnold Schoenberg (1874 – 1951)

Verklärte Nacht, Op.4 – Version for String Sextet

Jacques Parrenin, Marcel Charpentier, Denes Marton, Serge Collot, Pierre Penassou, Michel Tournus

 

Anton Webern (1883 – 1945)

Six pieces for orchestra, Op.6 – Original version (1909)

Orchestre Du Sudwestfunk Baden-Baden, Hans Rosbaud

 

Arnold Schoenberg (1874 – 1951)

Three Pieces for Chamber Orchestra (1910)

Pierre Boulez, Orchestre Du Domaine Musical

 

Pierrot Lunaire, Op.21 (1912)

Pierre Boulez, Helga Pilarczyk, Maria Bergmann, Jacques Castagner, Guy Deplus, Louis Montaigne, Luben Yordanoff, Serge Collot, Jean Huchot

Total CD Playing Time: 1:14:08    

 

CD 7: L’école de Vienne II. De 1906 à 1943

Alban Berg (1885 – 1935)

Sonate Pour Piano Op. 1

Yvonne Loriod

 

3 Pieces for Orchestra, Op.6 (Revised version of 1929)

Hans Rosbaud, Orchestre Du Sudwestfunk Baden-Baden

 

Arnold Schoenberg (1874 – 1951)

Kammersymphonie N° 1 Op.9

Pierre Boulez, Solistes du Domaine Musical

 

Anton Webern (1883 – 1945)

2 Songs op.8 for voice and eight instruments

Pierre Boulez, Orchestre Du Domaine Musical, Jeanne Héricard

 

4 Songs op.13 for voice and orchestra

Jeanne Héricard, Orchestre Du Domaine Musical, Pierre Boulez

 

I. Kantate op.29 for soprano, mixed chorus and orchestra

 

II. Kantate op.31 for soprano solo, bass solo, mixed chorus and orchestra

Chorale Elisabeth Brasseur Versailles, Orchestre Du Domaine Musical, Pierre Boulez, Ilona Steingruber, Xavier Depraz

Total CD Playing Time: 1:13:51    

 

CD 8: L’école de Vienne III. Le sérialisme

Arnold Schoenberg (1874 – 1951)

Serenade for Septet & Bass Voice, Op.24

Pierre Boulez, Guy Deplus, Louis Montaigne, Paul Grund, Paul Stingl, Luben Yordanoff, Serge Collot, Jean Huchot, Louis Jacques Rondeleux

 

Suite, Op.29

Pierre Boulez, Jacques Ghestem, Marcel Naulais, Guy Deplus, Louis Montaigne, Luben Yordanoff, Serge Collot, Jean Huchot

 

Anton Webern (1883 – 1945)

Variations for Piano, Op.27

Yvonne Loriod

 

Symphony, Op.21

Pierre Boulez, Orchestre Du Domaine Musical

Total CD Playing Time: 1:10:06    

 

CD 9: IIIè concert – Saison 1956

Giovanni Gabrieli (1553 – 1612)

Canzon duodecimi toni a 8, No 5, C. 174

Canzon septimi toni à 8 (Sacrae symphoniae 1597, No.3)

Igor Stravinsky (1882 – 1971)

Symphonies of Wind Instruments

Rudolf Albert, Orchestre Du Domaine Musical

 

Hans Werner Henze (1926 – 2012)

Concerto Per Il Marigny

Olivier Messiaen (1908 – 1992)

Oiseaux Exotiques

Yvonne Loriod, Rudolf Albert, Orchestre Du Domaine Musical

 

Jean-Claude Eloy (1938 – )

Equivalences

Pierre Boulez, Solistes du Domaine Musical, Les Percussions De Strasbourg

Total CD Playing Time: 46:56    

 

CD 10: Une histoire d’amitiés…

1. La genèse / [Le Domaine Musical]

2. Domaine musical, année zéro / [Le Domaine Musical]

3. Le répertoire / [Le Domaine Musical]

4. Les références / [Le Domaine Musical]

5. Les compagnons de route / [Le Domaine Musical]

6. Les interprètes / [Le Domaine Musical]

Pierre Boulez, Claude Samuel

 

Pierre Boulez (1925 – )

Le Marteau sans Maître

Pierre Boulez, Solistes du Domaine Musical, Marie-Thérèse Cahn

Total CD Playing Time: 1:19:30    

 

 

Pierre Boulez Recordings (1967-1977) on Sony Classical

DISC 1:
Berg: Wozzeck, Op. 7. From the drama by George Büchner (beginning)

DISC 2:
Berg: Wozzeck, Op. 7. From the drama by George Büchner (conclusion)

DISC 3:
Messiaen: Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum
Messiaen: Couleurs de la Cité Céleste

DISC 4:
Debussy: La Mer
Debussy: Prélude a l’après-midi d’un faune
Debussy: Jeux

DISC 5:
Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14

DISC 6:
Berlioz: Lelio, ou Le Retour a la vie, Op. 14b

DISC 7:
Bartók: Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (Sz 106)
Stravinsky: The Firebird Suite (1910)

DISC 8:
Berg: Chamber Concerto for Violin, Piano & 13 Wind Instruments
Berg: Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6
Berg: Altenberg Lieder, Op. 4

DISC 9:
Debussy: Images pour Orchestra
Debussy: Danses sacrée et profane

DISC 10:
Stravinsky: Le sacre du printemps (original version)

DISC 11:
Mahler: Das klagende Lied

DISC 12:
Beethoven: Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67
Beethoven: Cantata – “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage,” Op. 112
Mahler: Symphony No. 10 – Adagio

DISC 13-15:
Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande, Drame lyrique en 5 actes

DISC 16:
Boulez: Pli Selon Pli (“fold according to fold”)

DISC 17:
Debussy: Nocturnes
Debussy: Printemps
Debussy: Première Rhapsodie for Clarinet and Orchestra

DISC 18:
Ravel: Daphnis et Chloé, Suite No. 2
Ravel: Pavane Pour une Infante Défunte
Ravel: Rapsodie Espagnole
Ravel: Alborada del Gracioso

DISC 19:
Stravinsky: Pétrouchka (1911 version)

DISC 20:
Bartók: The Miraculous Mandarin, Op. 19
Bartók: Dance Suite (Sz 77)

DISC 21:
Ravel: Concerto in G Major for Piano and Orchestra
Ravel: Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D Major

DISC 22:
Berlioz: Benvenuto Cellini (excerpt)
Berlioz: Les Troyens (excerpt)
Berlioz: Beatrice et Benedict (excerpts)
Berlioz: Le Carnaval Romain, Op. 9 – Concert Overture

DISC 23:
Berg: Seven Early Songs
Berg: Wozzeck. Act III

DISC 24:
Ravel: Une Barque sur L’Océan
Ravel: Valses Nobles et Sentimentales
Ravel: Le Tombeau de Couperin

DISC 25:
Boulez: Le Marteau sans maître
Boulez: Livre pour Cordes

DISC 26:
Wagner: Prelude to Act I from The Mastersingers of Nuremberg
Wagner: Tannhäuser and the Song Contest on the Wartburg Overture
Wagner: Faust Overture
Wagner: Prelude to Act I and Isoldes Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde

DISC 27:
Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra

DISC 28:
Ravel: La Valse
Ravel: Menuet Antique
Ravel: Ma Mère L’oye
Ravel: Boléro

DISC 29-30:
Schoenberg: Gurre-Lieder

DISC 31:
Handel: Water Music: Suite No.1 in F Major for Orchestra, HWV 348

DISC 32:
Stravinsky: The Firebird
Stravinsky: The Song of the Nightingale

DISC 33:
Ravel: Daphnis et Chloé

DISC 34:
Berio: Nones
Berio: Allelujah II
Berio: Concerto for Two Pianos

DISC 35-36:
Schoenberg: Moses und Aron

DISC 37:
Falla: El sombrero de tres picos
Falla: Concerto for Harpsichord, Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Violin and Cello

DISC 38:
Bartók: Bluebeard’s Castle, Op. 11 (Sz 48)

DISC 39:
Dukas: La Péri
Roussel: Symphony No. 3 in G minor, Op. 42

DISC 40:
Bartók: The Wooden Prince, Op. 13 (Sz 60)

DISC 41:
Varèse: Amériques
Varèse: Ionisation
Varèse: Arcana

DISC 42:
Berlioz: Les Nuits d’été, Op. 7
Berlioz: La Mort de Cléopâtre

DISC 43:
Stravinsky: Pulcinella Suite
Stravinsky: Scherzo fantastique, Op. 3
Stravinsky: Symphonies of Wind Instruments

DISC 44:
Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21

DISC 45: Wagner: Das Liebesmahl der Apostel
Wagner: Siegfried Idyll

DISC 46:
Webern: Passacaglia for Orchestra, Op. 1
Webern: Entflieht auf leichten Kähnen, Op. 2
Webern: Six Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6
Webern: Zwei Lieder für mittlere Stimme und acht Instrumente, Op. 8
Webern: Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 10
Webern: Vier Lieder für Sopran und Orchester, Op. 13
Webern: Sechs Lieder für Singstimme und vier Instrumente, Op. 14
Webern: Fünf geistliche Lieder für Sopran und fünf Instrumente, Op. 15
Webern: Fünf Canons nach lateinischen Texten für Sopran, Klarinette und Baßklarinette, Op. 16
Webern: Drei Volkstexte für Singstimme und drei Instrumente, Op. 17
Webern: Drei Lieder für Singstimme, Es-Klarinette und Gitarre, Op. 18
Webern: Zwei Lieder für gemischten Chor und fünf Instrumente, Op. 19
Webern: Symphony for Chamber Orchestra, Op. 21

DISC 47:
Webern: Quartet for Clarinet, Tenor Saxophone, Violin and Piano, Op. 22
Webern: Concerto for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Horn, Trumpet, Trombone, Violin, Viola and Piano, Op. 24
Webern: Das Augenlicht für gemischten Chor und Orchester, Op. 26, Worte von Hildegard Jone
Webern: Cantata No. 1, Op. 29
Webern: Variations for Orchestra, Op. 30 (1940)
Webern: Cantata No. 2, Op. 31
Webern: Fünf Sätze für Streichquartett, Op. 5
Webern: Fuga No. 2 (Ricercata) a 6 voci from Musikalisches Opfer, BWV 1079, No. 5

DISC 48:
Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4 (Version for String Orchestra, 1943)
Berg: Three Pieces from “Lyric Suite”

DISC 49:
Handel: Music for the Royal Fireworks
Handel: Berenice, HWV 38
Handel: Concerto in F Major for 2 Wind Choirs and Strings, HWV 334

DISC 50:
Berg: Lulu – Suite
Berg: Der Wein

DISC 51:
Carter: Symphony of Three Orchestras
Carter: A Mirror On Which To Dwell – Six Poems Of Elizabeth Bishop

DISC 52:
Schoenberg: A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46
Schoenberg: Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31
Schoenberg: Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16
Schoenberg: Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene, Op. 34

DISC 53:
Wagner: Wesendonck Lieder
Mahler: Rückert Lieder

DISC 54:
Schoenberg: Serenade, Op. 24
Schoenberg: Lied der Waldtaube
Schoenberg: Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, Op. 41

DISC 55:
Schoenberg: Die Jakobsleiter
Schoenberg: Erwartung, Op. 17
Schoenberg: Die glückliche Hand, Op. 18

DISC 56:
Schoenberg: Chamber Symphony No. 1, Op. 9
Schoenberg: Chamber Symphony No. 2, Op. 38
Schoenberg: 3 Pieces for Chamber Orchestra
Schoenberg: Four Orchestral Songs, Op. 22

DISC 57:
Boulez: Eclat
Boulez: Multiples
Boulez: Rituel (In Memory of Bruno Maderna)

DISC 58:
Varèse: Equatorial
Varèse: Deserts
Varèse: Intégrales
Varèse: Hyperprism
Varèse: Octandre
Varèse: Offrandes
Varèse: Density 21.5

DISC 59:
Ravel: Shéhérazade
Ravel: Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé
Ravel: Chansons madécasses
Ravel: Don Quichotte à Dulcinée
Ravel: Cinq Mélodies populaires grecques

DISC 60:
Schoenberg: Suite for 2 Clarinets, Bass Clarinet, Violin, Viola, Cello and Piano, Op. 29
Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4

DISC 61:
Berg: Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (To the Memory of an Angel)
Berg: Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6

DISC 62:
Boulez: Le Marteau sans Maître
Boulez: II Notations Pour Piano
Boulez: III Structures Pour Deux Pianos, Livre II

DISC 63:
Schoenberg: Friede Auf Erden, Op. 13
Schoenberg: Kol Nidre, Op. 39
Schoenberg: Drei Volkslieder, Op. 49
Schoenberg: Zwei Kanons
Schoenberg: Drei Volkslieder
Schoenberg: Vier Stücke, Op. 27

DISC 64:
Schoenberg: Drei Satiren, Op. 28
Schoenberg: Sechs Stücke, Op. 35
Schoenberg: Dreimal Tausend Jahre, Op. 50A
Schoenberg: De Profundis, Op. 50 B (Psalm 130)
Schoenberg: Moderner Psalm, Op. 50 C

DISC 65:
Berio: IL Ritorno Degli Snovidenia per solo violoncello e piccolo orchestra (1976)
Berio: Chemins II (su/after “Sequenza VI”) (1967)
Berio: Chemins IV (su/after “Sequenza VII”) (1975)
Berio: Corale (su/after “Sequenza VIII”) (1981)
Berio: Points On The Curve To Find… for piano and 22 instrumentalists (1974)

DISC 66:
Berg: Sieben frühe Lieder
Berg: Fünf Orchesterlieder von Altenberg Op.4
Berg: Jugendlieder (Selections)
Berg: Zwei Lieder
Berg: Er klagt, dass der Frühling so kurz blüht from Jugendlieder (Excerpt)

DISC 67:
Scriabin: Symphony No. 4, Le Poeme de l’extase, Op. 54
Bartók: Four Pieces, Op. 12 (Sz 51)
Bartók: Three Village Scenes (Sz 79)
Stravinsky: Suite No. 1 pour petit orchestre
Stravinsky: Suite No. 2 pour petit orchestra

 

 

Pierre Boulez on Erato (1980-1990)

CD 1

Stravinsky: Pulcinella. Le Chant du Rossignol

CD 2

Stravinsky: Le Rossignol. Quatre Chants paysans russes “Les Soucoupes”

Trois pieces pour quatuor à cordes. “Madrid.” Quatre Etudes pour orchestre

CD 3

Stravinsky: L’Histoire du soldat. Concertino for 12 instruments

CD 4

Schoenberg: Pelléas et Mélisande. Variations op. 31

CD 5

Schoenberg: Violin Concerto, op. 36. Piano Concerto, op. 42

CD 6

Messiaen: Et exspecto ressurectionem mortuorum. Couleurs de la Cité Céleste

CD 7

Berio: Sinfonia. Eindrücke

Xenakis: Jalons

CD 8

Donatoni: Tema for 12 instruments. Cadeau

Ligeti: Etudes for piano (Book 1)

Trio for violin, horn and piano

CD 9

Kurtág: Messages de feu Demoiselle R.V. Troussova

Birtwistle: …AGM…

Grisey: Modulations

CD 10

Carter: Concerto for Oboe. Esprit rude/Esprit doux

A Mirror on which to Dwell. Penthode

CD 11

Dufourt: Antiphysis

Ferneyhough: Funérailles I & II

Harvey: Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco

Höller: Arcus

CD 12

Boulez: Pli selon pli

CD 13

Boulez: Le Visage nuptial. Le soleil des eaux. Figures, Doubles, Prismes

CD 14

Boulez: Sonatine for flute and piano. Piano Sonata No. 1. Dérive I

Mémoriale (…Explosante-fixe…Originel). Dialogue de l’ombre double

cummings ist der Dichter

 

 

PIERRE BOULEZ: 20th CENTURY (1990-2013) on Deutsche Grammophon

 

CD 1–8 BÉLA BARTÓK

 

CD 1

4 Pieces for Orchestra op. 12 (Sz 51)

Concerto for Orchestra Sz 116

Chicago Symphony Orchestra

(P) 1993

 

CD 2

Dance Suite Sz 77

Two Pictures op. 10 (Sz 46)

Hungarian Sketches Sz 97

Divertimento for String Orchestra Sz 113

Chicago Symphony Orchestra

(P) 1995

 

CD 3

The Miraculous Mandarin op. 19 (Sz 73)

Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta Sz 106

Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus (Sz 73)

 

CD 4

Cantata Profana Sz.94 – The Nine Splendid Stags

The Wooden Prince, Sz. 60 (Op.13)

John Aler, tenor, John Tomlinson, baritone

Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus (Chorus Master: Margaret Hillis)

 

CD 5

The Piano Concertos

No. 1 Krystian Zimerman / Chicago Symphony Orchestra

No. 2 Leif Ove Andsnes / Berliner Philharmoniker

No. 3 Hélène Grimaud / London Symphony Orchestra

 

CD 6

Concerto for 2 Pianos, Percussion and Orchestra Sz 115

Tamara Stefanovich, piano 1

Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano 2

London Symphony Orchestra

Violin Concerto No. 1 Sz 36

Gidon Kremer / Berliner Philharmoniker

Viola Concerto Sz 120

Yuri Bashmet / Berliner Philharmoniker

 

CD 7

Violin Concerto No. 2

Rhapsodies Nos. 1 + 2

Gil Shaham / Chicago Symphony Orchestra

 

CD 8

Bluebeard’s Castle Sz 48

Jessye Norman (Judith) · László Polgár (Bluebeard) · Nicholas Simon (Prologue)

Chicago Symphony Orchestra

 

 

CD 9–12 ALBAN BERG

 

CD 9

Chamber Concerto for Piano and Violin with 13 Wind Instruments

Daniel Barenboim, piano · Pinchas Zukerman, violin

Ensemble Intercontemporain

+

Lulu-Suite

Wiener Philharmoniker

 

CD 10–12

Lulu (Complete opera in 3 acts)

Stratas · Minton · Schwarz · Mazura · Riegel · Blankenheim · Tear · Pampuch

Orchestre de l’Opéra de Paris

 

 

CD 13 & 14 HARRISON BIRTWISTLE

 

CD 13

Theseus Game* 33:14

Earth Dances 33:17

*Brabbins, Valade, Diry, Kretschmer

Ensemble Modern

 

CD 14

Secret Theatre

Tragoedia

Five Distances

3 Settings of Celan*

Christine Whittlesey,*

Ensemble Intercontemporain

75:43

 

The Triumph of Time 27:43 (Decca) – see CD 37

 

CD 15–19 PIERRE BOULEZ

 

CD 15

Notations for piano solo (Aimard) 10:43

Structures pour deux pianos 22:06

…explosante-fixe… 36:43

Ensemble Intercontemporain, Pierre Boulez, Sophie Cherrier, Emmanuelle Ophele, Pierre Andre Valade

 

CD 16

Le Marteau sans maître (1953–1955)*

Dérive 1 (1984)

Dérive 2 (1988/2002)

Hilary Summers,* soprano

Ensemble Intercontemporain

 

CD 17

Pli selon Pli (1957–1989)

Christine Schäfer, soprano

Ensemble Intercontemporain

 

CD 18

Répons (1981–1984)

Vassilakis, Boffard, piano / Cambreling, harp / Bauer, vibraphone, CIampolini, xylophone & Glockenspiel / Cerutti, cimbalom

Ensemble Intercontemporain

Dialogue de l’ombre double (1985)

Alain Damien, clarinet

 

CD 19

Sur Incises

Messagesquisse

Jean-Guihen Queyras, Ensemble Intercontemporain

 

 

CD 20–21 CLAUDE DEBUSSY

 

CD 20

Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune

Images pour Orchestre

Printemps

The Cleveland Orchestra

 

 

CD 21

Trois Nocturnes*

Première Rhapsodie pour clarinette et orchestra

Jeux

La Mer

Franklin Cohen, clarinet

The Cleveland Orchestra Chorus*

The Cleveland Orchestra

 

See also CD 29

 

 

CD 22–23 GYÖRGI LIGETI

 

CD 22

Chamber Concerto for 13 instrumentalists (1969–70)

Ramifications for string orchestra or 12 solo strings (1968–69)

Aventures for 3 singers and 7 instrumentalists (1962)

Nouvelles Aventures for 3 singers and 7 instrumentalists

Jane Manning, soprano / Mary Thomas, mezzo-soprano / William Pearson, bass

Ensemble Intercontemporain

 

CD 23

Piano Concerto (1985-88)

Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano

Cello Concerto (1966)

Jean-Guihen Queyras, cello

Violin Concerto (1992)

Saschko Gawriloff, violin

Ensemble InterContemporain

 

 

CD 24–25 OLIVIER MESSIAEN

 

CD 24

Poèmes pour Mi

Françoise Pollet, soprano

Le Réveil des oiseaux

Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano

Sept Haïkaï

Joela Jones, piano

The Cleveland Orchestra

 

CD 25

Chronochromie

La Ville d’en haut

Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum

The Cleveland Orchestra

 

 

CD 26–29 MAURICE RAVEL

 

CD 26

Ma Mère l’Oye

Une Barque sur l’océan

Alborada del Gracioso

Rapsodie espagnole

Boléro

Berliner Philharmoniker

 

CD 27

Daphnis et Chloé*

La Valse

Rundfunkchor Berlin,* Berliner Philharmoniker

 

CD 28

Piano Concerto in G

Valses nobles et sentimentales

Piano Concerto for the Left Hand*

Krystian Zimerman, piano

The Cleveland Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra*

 

CD 29

Shéhérazade* · Le Tombeau de Couperin · Pavane · Menuet antique

*Anne Sofie von Otter, mezzo-soprano

+

CLAUDE DEBUSSY

Danses for Harp and Orchestra*

5 Poèmes de Charles Baudelaire**

3 Ballades de François Villon**

Alison Hagley, soprano** · Lisa Wellbaum, harp*
The Cleveland Orchestra

 

CD 30–33 ARNOLD SCHOENBERG

 

CD 30

Pelleas und Melisande op. 5

Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester

+

Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 42

Mitsuko Uchida, piano

The Cleveland Orchestra

 

CD 31

Pierrot Lunaire op. 21

Herzgewächse op. 20

Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte op. 41

Christine Schäfer, soprano

David Pittman-Jennings, narrator

Ensemble InterContemporain

 

CD 32-33

Moses und Aron

Merritt · Pittman-Jennings, Fontana · Naef · Graham-Hall

Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra

 

 

CD 34–39 IGOR STRAVINSKY

 

CD 34

IGOR STRAVINSKY

Le Chant du rossignol

L’Histoire du Soldat – Suite

Scherzo fantastique

Le Roi des étoiles

The Cleveland Orchestra & Chorus

 

CD 35

The Firebird

Fireworks

4 Etudes for Orchestra

Chicago Symphony Orchestra

 

CD 36

Pétrouchka (Original Version: 1911)

Le Sacre du Printemps

The Cleveland Orchestra

 

CD 37

IGOR STRAVINSKY

Symphony of Psalms*

Symphony in 3 Movements

Symphonies of Wind Instruments

Rundfunkchor Berlin,* Berliner Philharmoniker

+

HARRISON BIRTWISTLE: The Triumph of Time 27:43 (Decca)

BBC Symphony Orchestra

478 4249, tr.  1

 

CD 38

IGOR STRAVINSKY

Ebony Concerto

3 Pieces for Clarinet Solo

Concertino for String Quartet

8 Miniatures

Concerto in E flat “Dumbarton Oaks”

Elégie for Viola Solo

Epitaphium

Double Canon for String Quartet

Michel Arrignon, clarinet

Ensemble InterContemporain

 

CD 39

Songs

Pastorale, 2 Poems by Paul Verlaine, 2 Poems by Konstanin Bal’mont, 3 Japanese Lyrics, 3 Songs (Recollections of my Childhood), Pribaoutki (4 Songs), 4 Cat’s Cradle Songs, 4 songs, Tilim-bom, Songs of Parasha (Mavra), 3 Songs from William Shakespeare, In memoriam Dylan Thomas, Elegy for J.F.K., 2 Sacred Songs from Spanisches Liederbuch / Hugo Wolf

Phyllis Bryn-Julson, soprano · Ann Murray, mezzo-soprano

Robert Tear, tenor · John Shirley-Quirk, baritone

Ensemble InterContemporain

 

CD 40 KAROL SZYMANOWSKI

 

CD 40

Violin Concerto No. 1 op. 35 (1916)

Symphonie No. 3 op. 27 »Song of the night · Piesn o nocy«

Christian Tetzlaff, violin · Steve Davislim, tenor

Singverein der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde Wien · Wiener Philharmoniker

 

CD 41 EDGARD VARÈSE

 

CD 41

Amériques

Arcana

Déserts

Ionisation

Chicago Symphony Orchestra

 

 

CD 42–44 ANTON WEBERN

 

CD 42

Passacaglia für Orchester op. 1

5 Movements op. 5 (Version for Orchestra)

6 Pieces for Orchestra op. 6

Im Sommerwind

Fuga (Ricercata)

German Dances

Berliner Philharmoniker

 

CD 43

Symphonie op. 21

Cantatas Nos. 1 & 2

3 Songs

Das Augenlicht op. 26

Variations op. 30

5 Pieces for Orchestra

Christiane Oelze, soprano · Gerald Finley, bass

BBC Singers, Berliner Philharmoniker

 

CD 44

Songs and Choruses

Piano Quintet (1907)

„Entflieht auf leichten Kähnen“ op. 2, 2 Lieder op. 8

5 Pieces for Orchestra op. 10

4 Lieder op. 13, 6 Lieder op. 14, 5 Sacred Songs op. 15, 5 Canons op. 16

3 Traditional Rhymes op. 17, 3 Lieder op. 18, 2 Lieder op. 19

Quartet op. 22

Concerto op. 24

Françoise Pollet, soprano (opp. 8, 13, 14) · Christiane Oelze, soprano (opp. 15 – 18)

Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano

BBC Singers (opp. 2, 19)

Ensemble InterContemporain