On Music
GUREWITSCH, M. ANATOLE
On Music CLASSICAL TRIPTYCH BY M. ANATOLE GUREWITSCH there are two composers whose movie scores have made the transition to the concert stage as "serious" works in their own right, the second...
...flutes wail as from afar...
...Leopold Hager conducts the Mozarteum Orchestra no more than dutifully...
...More to the point, the sonic vistas evoke dizzying, unchartable inter-galactic expanses...
...Another recent world-premiere recording is La Betidia liberala (Philips 6703 087), a sacred oratorio telling the Biblical tale of Judith and Holofernes that dates from Mozart's 15th year...
...when they join forces, though, he elicits a true and jaunty esprit de corps...
...The Wun-derkind par excellence received the commission to write it from the Regio Teatro Ducal in Milan at age 14...
...The Philharmonia gives this story bold, vivid colors...
...and Andre Previn's performance of Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra (Angel SB-3853...
...the piano twinkles on...
...the tango falls into silence...
...To pass the basic-literacy test in the subject of 20th-century French music, you must remember among other things that Darius Milhaud(1892-1974) incorporated Latin American dance rhythms in his work and was deeply influenced by jazz, and that Catholic visionary Olivier Messiaen (born 1908) weaves vast mystic tapestries of sound that combine Hindu, Greek and serial-ist compositional techniques and are shot through with birdsong...
...In the ominous ninth movement of the symphony, desolate, lost voices cross over a bleak silence...
...there are more famous chapters in Mozart lore than the circumstances surrounding the composition of his opera Mitridate, re di Ponto...
...If we fail to resonate to the work itself—and many listeners can find in it little except rodomontade, pretension and rant—the fault does not lie with the performers...
...We may not share the faith, but we can see the light...
...It has, in short, been a sad season for Mozartean music drama on disc...
...I suspect I am not alone in feeling that love as Messiaen expounds it in the 10 movements of this symphony has al- ?most nothing to do with any state of mind or passion a mere mortal might ever experience...
...But I have one complaint...
...Milhaud is cosmopolitan...
...Two splendid new recordings by American conductors will help impress these facts on your mind: Leonard Bernstein's Milhaud disc featuring the Or-chestre National de France in La Creation du monde, Le Boeuf sur le toil and four dances from the suite Saudades do Brasil (Angel S-37442...
...Messiaen is cosmic...
...Certainly the titles of some of the sections point cryptically beyond any realms we know: " Joie du sang des etoiles" ("Joy of the blood of the stars"), for example, or " Jardin du sommeil d'amour" ("Garden of the sleep of love...
...the Ambrosian Chorus contributes a remarkably true "Russian" sound in the many songs of joy and lamentation...
...In the world premiere recording (Deutsche Grammophon 2711 021) soprano Arleen Auger gives a limpid portrayal of Aspasia, King Mitridate's betrothed and the love of both his sons...
...Events are chronicled by a narrator (Boris Morgunov) who speaks as omniscient historian, in the voice of Ivan himself and, in one eerie passage, as a wheedling prophet of doom...
...Under these circumstances it does no great harm that the men in the cast, who shall remain nameless, perform without suavity or humor...
...Exhibitionists equal to the naked virtuosity of these showpieces are in short supply today, and the necessary castrati (Mozart's assignment entailed servicing three) are not available at all...
...bells toll...
...The loud sections thunder, whir, whoosh, whiffle, bleep, zing and crangle...
...On Music CLASSICAL TRIPTYCH BY M. ANATOLE GUREWITSCH there are two composers whose movie scores have made the transition to the concert stage as "serious" works in their own right, the second does not come readily to mind...
...Unfortunately, Lombard's funereal tempos and the Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra's murky intonation cast a pall over the score's sparkle...
...Te Kanawa's burnished phrasing and smoothly integrated registers cannot prevail...
...Milhaud's catchy tunes play in the ears for days, and keep the toes tapping...
...Messiaen's discomforting ecstasies shudder and echo through one's darkest nightmares...
...I can well believe it...
...Messiaen broods...
...Everywhere else his reading seems to me to fulfill an impossible demand: It spreads Messiaen's visions before us to contemplate in all their unworldly sublimity...
...Before even reaching Milan, where he would tailor the florid arias to the performers' specifications, the young composer wrote his mother at home in Salzburg that his "fingers hurt very much from writing so many recitatives...
...He did not live to do the same with his score for Eisenstein's other epic of medieval Russia, Ivan the Terrible, but Abram Stasevich, the conductor on the soundtrack, has assembled the individual pieces as a mighty fresco (he calls it an oratorio) and Riccardo Muti has now rendered it stunningly on record (Angel SB-3851...
...The soloists, Michel Beroff on the piano and Jeanne Loriod on the Ondes Martenot, play their parts with virtuosity and supreme conviction, and so does every single member of the London Symphony...
...and Muti, alternately hurtling forward and powerfully reining back, achieves the immense breadth of epic...
...Whatever the inadequacies of Mitri-date and La Betulia liberata, they do have some academic interest and they earn their place in the discography by filling gaps...
...The work suffers from the prolixity of its vocal utterances, however, and from a feeble libretto laced with doctrinal disputes...
...The recitatives drag on endlessly, and the arias, which delighted the singers with their yardage of elaborate vocal display, proliferate with still greater disregard for the passing hours...
...And yet, the Bernstein and the Previn discs resemble each other, first, in the brilliance of the instrumental execution, and second, in their rhythmic force and persuasiveness...
...In the climactic surges of the fourth movement, Previn's beat is so foursquare that the music does not breathe, despite the tremendous orchestral resources marshaled to make it do so...
...The dissimilarity between the two albums is, as the preceding ought to have suggested, just about toal...
...establishing a mood in the space of a few measures, he meditates on it at immense length with titanic single-mindedness...
...its deep, swelling strain has never sounded so tidal and moving...
...As Amital, a noble Israelite lady of uncertain faith, Kari Lovaas sweeps into her music with strength and authority...
...The album, moreover, includes an excellent three-column libretto that gives the Russian text in Cyrillic and in Roman transliteration, as well as in English translation, making it an easy matter to follow the action...
...The Turangalila, the song of universal love in both its creative and in its annihilating aspects (Messiaen never takes on anything petty), is built around two central motifs: the forbidding, massive forms of the male "statue theme," and the sinuous, caressing curves of the female "flower theme," both fusing in the "theme of love...
...Working with Milhaud's small, highly individualized ensemble, Bernstein allows his players to exhibit their personal flare during their solo licks...
...Alain Lombard's newly released Cost fan tulle (RCA FRL 3-2629), on the other hand, turns out to be entirely superfluous...
...Vittorio Negri draws from the Berlin Chamber Orchestra an astringent sound strangely in conflict with the twangling, starry playing contributed by Jeffrey Tate at the harpsichord...
...but the splendid engineering reveals instrumental dazzle and variety one would never suspect after listening to the low-fi blaring at the local art-movie houses where Ivan the Terrible is generally seen...
...The other cast members struggle against the odds and achieve their little victories here and there...
...But Birgit Finnila, in the central role of Judith, strangles on the low tessitura, and sounds sullen and dull throughout...
...Mor-gunov's resonant, richly inflected delivery and full-blooded, old-school theatricality likewise enhance the musical thrills...
...Milhaud keeps one spiffy invention chasing another, and in no more than a single beat can transform the tone from lyric to brassy to steamily seductive...
...The highfalutin' libretto—dealing with love, treachery, and political and generational clashes in a tight family circle of kings, queens, princes, and princesses—derived from Racine...
...and the sounds break off as if in mid-gesture...
...The beautiful repose of the chant of the sea, spun out in a lovely cantabile by celebrated Soviet mezzo-soprano Irina Arkhipova, also seems at once familiar and new...
...Previn's task, at the head of Messiaen's big artillery, is of another sort: to give pulse and coherence to some of the gaudiest, most sprawling sonorities ever conceived by the human mind...
...The lack of spirit kills all...
...For people who have seen the film, the clanging bells, the cascading chimes, the cracking percussion, and the monumental droning of massed brass will strike a familiar chord...
...Alto Agnes Baltsa, in contrast, performs the castrato part of Farnace, the fierier and less loyal of the two princes, with stunning passion and immense skill...
...Nor does it help much that Frederica von Stade and especially Kiri Te Kanawa are on hand to lend the well-born ladies Dorabella and Fiordiligi refinement and vocal gorgeousness...
...The piece tells how Ivan subdued the Russian warlords, united the people and established himself as the first of the tsars...
...Holofernes does not even put in a personal appearance...
...a distant, sleazy suggestion of a tango arises, encrusted with a rhinestone keyboard obbligato...
...This keen-eyed comedy, one of the undisputed masterpieces of Mozart's maturity, concerns two young officers who learn a thing or two about women's constancy when, on a wager, each goes courting the other's beloved in disguise...
...It contains several handsome episodes, and the composer's handling of the orchestra shows some advance over Mitridate in its inventiveness and expressiveness...
...In quiet interludes, bird calls tremble over shimmering pools...
...The first, of course, is Prokofiev, who arranged his music for Sergei Eisen-stein's A lexander Nevsky as a cantata...
...the trumpets blare, the piano splashes, the strings beam, and the electronic Ondes Martenot coo and glide...
...Because the singers (male, female and castra-ti—prima donnas all) enjoyed noble patronage, they could demand that their whims be catered to point for point...
Vol. 61 • September 1978 • No. 19
