Assorted Celebrations
GUREWITSCH, M. ANATOLE
On Music ASSORTED CELEBRATIONS BY M. ANATOLE GUREVVITSCH with his lyre, Amphion raised the walls of Thebes. I can think of no more splendid image for the power of music. Impalpable and fleeting,...
...Here and on the rest of the disc (which also includes Trio No...
...Other performances in the set are in a similar vein...
...There can never—even in Harry Haller's acid-dreams—have been a more gruesome and infernal Hallelujah, and the pity is that here this evening of stars in ill-fated conjunctions seems to have found its true level...
...The movement does not proceed from formal or emotional simplicity to complexity, for the underlying theme is probably never stated with "ideal," unadorned directness...
...On all counts, a most impressive album indeed...
...40 in G Minor (Phillips 6500 430), on the same exemplary level...
...A sampler from a commemorative set of five double albums covering the age of recorded sound has now been released (Deutsche Grammophon 2721 115), documenting an era of remarkable and consistent achievement...
...It is played here with understated dispassion, as the proudly restrained fire of the Molto allegro builds through the course of the developing movement...
...The record is joyous and irresistible...
...16 and No...
...50, Vladimir Horowitz, Isaac Stern and Mstislav Rostropovich team up with unhappy results—the plashing pianism and glorified gypsy fiddling being ill-suited to each other or to the cello's Olympian nobility...
...In his late compositions (notably the last three symphonies, 39, 40 and 41), Mozart discovered how to use forms of purest transparency to touch chords of heroic affirmation and welling passion...
...M. M ayreuth has been celebrating Wagner for a full century...
...A second elegiac piece, the Andante from Rachmaninoff's Sonata for Cello and Piano in G Minor, Op...
...Horowitz is also the villain in the rendition of Schumann's song cycle Dichterliebe...
...To blend the lucidity and romance of these works in a "stereoscopic" account—there lies a challenge...
...it makes you sit very still and attend absolutely...
...they were keyed to the abilities of young amateurs gathered together with less an esthetic than a matrimonial purpose in view...
...But Horowitz, who has hardly pursued the career of the compleat accompanist, fusses through the piano part with a distracting superfluity of coloristic and dynamic detail, and the continuity of Schumann's cycle is not broken only because it has never been established...
...Krips' masterly overview of the score creates a reading at once festive and severe, with amazing depth of expression exquisitely uncovered...
...13 in C Minor begins with a theme-and-variations movement (marked Andante) that unfolds suoh a subtle and captivating pattern...
...Thanks to a superb engineering job that minimizes as much as possible of the surface noise of the older material, everything comes through crisp and clear...
...13 a genuine celebration...
...Haydn's Piano Trio No...
...Amsterdam's Concertgebouw Orchestra, under Josef Krips, performs two of Mozart's undisputed masterpieces, Symphony No...
...He puts his probing intelligence and unsurpassed musicianship in service of a coherent portrait of the poet as a keenly sensitive yet attitudinizing young man whose experience of love, with its absurd heights of exuberance and depths of gloom, culminates in a renunciation equally immature...
...The hell it is...
...Mel-chior's ringing sound and dramatic sensitivity in Tannhauser's Rome Narrative...
...The violin variation in major that follows embellishes the theme with bright shining scales darting up, and cascades of portando arpeggios and trilling descents back down to the familiar melodic line...
...in his attempts to be lambent, he ceases to phrase at all...
...But it is music in Am-phion's tradition, and many audiences prefer the clatter of walls caving in...
...Strauss' infectious score, overplayed to the point of outright pestilence, is restored to new sparkle with charm and clockwork accuracy by Carlos Kleiber, the dashing Bavarian State Orchestra and a fresh-voiced cast...
...Franz Volkerls suave, impassioned delivery of Lohengrin's Farewell...
...The Beaux Arts Trio, in the seventh volume of their ongoing Haydn piano trio series (Phillips 9500 035), make the Andante of Trio No...
...Quality tells...
...not so the abysmal execution of Bach's Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins, featuring Yehudi Menuhin and Stern, with Bernstein conducting from the harpsichord?about which no more need be said...
...Impalpable and fleeting, its designs can display vast conceptions that linger as its sounds disappear...
...The "Concert-Celebration Observing the 85th Anniversary of the Opening of Carnegie Hall . . ." was recorded live on May 18, 1976, and has recently been released in a really beautiful box (Columbia M2X 34256) bearing the unassuming title Concert of the Century...
...It concludes with the Hallelujah Chorus from Messiah, a good choice that is regrettably trashed by the squawking of the evening's instrumental soloists, perched as vocalists at the front of the stage...
...First stated somewhat haltingly by the piano in the minor key, the theme seems to burst forth for the first time when picked up and translated into major by the violin, striking straight to the heart with the eloquence of its classical purity, and singing phrases that exploit with particular resonance the rich deep and middle range of the instrument...
...But the amateur in 1789 had musical training rather more advanced than his 1977 counterpart, and as the example of a single movement indicates, Haydn managed to achieve with modest means highly sophisticated musical results...
...Mozart's grandeur, like Haydn's, reveals itself not so much through volume as through a more elusive quality that one might call spaciousness or amplitude, since it depends on the relationships of proportion and measure among elements in the musical structure...
...After a moody variation (led by the piano) that weaves restlessly through the major and minor, the violin restates the work's theme for the final time, delving into a darker and most resonant register...
...Many conductors favor a more somber view than does Krips of the breathless palpitating viola theme that begins Symphony No...
...Inspired by a lusty din, they will try to finish the destructive work with the ferocity of their applause...
...At least Dichterliebe fails with honor...
...Max Lorenz's vibrancy in "Ein Schwert verhiess mir der Vater...
...3. He phrases propulsive themes so podnt-lessly that they turn into musical gibberish...
...Music this rich, executed this wonderfully, compels attention...
...and Varnay and Wolfgang Windgassen's exultation in (he final pages of Siegfried...
...Instead, it manifests itself through the procession of variations as mood, melody and harmony move freely in alternating darkness and light...
...39 in E Flat and Symphony No...
...Joining a warm, autumnal sound to a crisp attack and precisely weighted phrasing, the Concertgebouw gives a fine, memorable reading of Mozart's sublime scores...
...The piano takes the lead again, this time more fluently, for a rippling variation in minor...
...In the excellent selection from all of Wagner's major operas, the following excerpts stand out: Onegin's dignified, moving recital of Wal-traute's Narrative...
...A similar sense of architectonics binds together the performance of the entire symphony, from the elemental, darkly yearning evolution of the opening Adagio to the whirling and jubilantly expansive Finale...
...To close on a lighter note, a bouquet for a new Fledermaus (Deutsche Grammophon 2740 152-32...
...In a stroke of lunacy, Iwan Rebroff, the titanic Russian basso profundo, takes the alto travesti part of Prince Orlofsky and sings it in a wicked, poisonous falsetto...
...39, deft rhythmic emphasis subtly underscores the elegant harmonic progressions, even as the scalloped melodic line sustains the movement's emotional continuity...
...For the finale, the Oratorio Society, under Lyndon Woodside, warms up unobjectionably with another Tchai-kowsky piece, Pater Noster...
...Dietrich Fischer-Dies-kau is doubtless the foremost interpreter of this music in our time...
...The line-up runs from Emmy Destinn (1907) to Birgit Nilsson (1966), and includes such other artists as Sigrid Onegin, Friedrich Schorr, Lauritz Melchior, Frida Leider, and Astrid Varnay...
...19, finds Horowitz in a positively nightclubby mood, endlessly modulating, rippling and banging, while Rostropovich carries on only remotely less intolerably...
...17) they articulate Haydn's brilliant inventions with perfect clarity, displaying in the excellently focused, forthright delivery the profound expressiveness of his lines...
...Bernstein's elephantine conceptions do generate excitement of a certain kind, though, and the orchestra responds with shrill and bombastic enthusiasm...
...In the Andante con moto of No...
...Schorr's sable tones and velvety phrasing in "O du, mein holder Abendstern...
...Perhaps because Bayreuth has fallen on hard times in the last 15-20 years, the records concentrate on a more distant past...
...It kioks off with Leonard Bernstein conducting "Members of the New York Philharmonic" in Beethoven's Leonore Overture No...
...Fortunately, Concert is in no way representative of Carnegie Hall's illustrious 85-year history...
...In the overextended and stentorian first movement (Pezzo elegiaco) of Tchaikovsky's Piano Trio in A Minor, Op...
...Few would place the piano trios at the top of a list of Haydn's "important" compositions...
...But Julia Varady (Rosalinde), Lucia Popp (Adele) and Hermann Prey (Eisenstein) acquit themselves with wit, style and verve...
Vol. 60 • July 1977 • No. 15
