On Music

...As soon as they begin, it is plain that no improvement will come from the vocal contingent...

...Her lover reassures her...

...Still, he delighted in emblems less for their own sake than for the burden of higher speculation that he could make them bear...

...As the title suggests, the action takes place in olden times, among the Druids, whose ancient rites have been outlawed by conquering Christian armies...

...The music world has its mysteries, and to me his flourishing international career is one of the most impenetrable...

...The woman confesses that she is carrying a child—not his...

...a pity he has not learned to use it...

...A more resourceful tenor than Jerold Norman, however, could surely have been entrusted with the Druid's lyric opening and with the Christian Guard's breathless flight from the hellish charade...

...The Priest's music is by turns stalwart and hymnic...

...The case of the bass parts is another matter...

...After a decade and a half before the public (including engagements under the baton of such an Apollonian maestro as Carlo Maria Giulini), he remains raw as a vocalist and a musician, not to mention helpless as a linguist...

...To awaken the gentle glow of spring rejoicing calls for a greater depth of imaginative effort, and Or-mandy does not manage it...

...Goethe's text was written to be set to music, but until Mendelssohn happened along, the poem had gone begging for a composer...

...All the same, it is unquestionably better to have the contrasting sound of two voices...

...Lacking any inner brightness, his invitation to the ancient celebrations does not stir us, nor does the tepid reply of the Mendelssohn Club (hazily miked, veiling somewhat their impure intonation and listless diction...

...But this effect, clearly anticipated by the score, is within the grasp of the dullest literalist...

...Rose Taylor, as an Old Pagan Woman who warns against breaking the laws of the murderous conquerors, shapes her phrases with care for the sforzandi on which the evocation of dismay rests...

...In either form, it stands at a crucial juncture between the advanced chromaticism of Wagner and Richard Strauss and the atonality of the Second Viennese School, founded of course by Schoenberg...

...It is tempting to fill several parts for a single fee, and in the case of the cantata's two tenor roles, there is no good reason not to do so: both are short, and their statements are not contiguous...

...On Music MENDELSSOHN MISHANDLED BY M. ANATOLE GUREWITSCH D ecades have passed without so much as a mention of Felix Mendelssohn's once hugely popular choral spectaculars, and suddenly this season they are being given multiple revivals...

...Goethe, like many another sage of the Enlightenment, waged war against institutional Christianity, and read folklore with an aggressively revisionist eye...

...Boulez' own compositions are among the masterpieces of the century, and his insight into the trailblazing work of Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton von Webern is unsurpassed...

...There is a silky radiance in the strings, but the rhapsody is not there...

...Stylistically, the two parts must be sharply distinguished, all the more because the Druid Guard's address is preceded and followed by the principal utterances of the Priest...

...he ransacked whole cultures to come up with the allegories scattered through the Second Part of Faust...

...so the performance derails before the action and the singing get underway...

...Die erste Walpurgisnacht demonstrates Mendelssohn's full range of expressivity...

...Returning as the Priest, Estes wreaks further havoc, but Ormandy is glaringly at fault here, too...

...There are those, to be sure, who think his imperial Violin Concerto merely "pretty...

...The bond that unites them, he insists, will make the child kin to him...

...Schoenberg's thematic structure closely follows the development of Dehmel's stanzas, but of course the musical value does not rest on the poem, and the composer's passionate gestures are perhaps even more eloquent when abstracted from the soap opera of the text...

...But since Boulez' work as a conductor, especially in the romantic repertoire, has frequently been faulted as cerebral and chilly, his affinity to Schoenberg's transitional score—a late replay of high-romantic, erotic anguish and resolution—might be expected to be remote...

...While Goethe deeply admired Mendelssohn, who revered him, on the evidence of the cantata they mined their material from opposite ends of the imaginative spectrum...

...In his poem, the Christians stumble through a maze of error outside the sacred precinct* of the Druids, whose natural religion represents truth, and demons exist only in the minds of the benighted...

...Although Ormandy's reading of the overture is not what the world has been waiting for, it succeeds brilliantly in one respect...

...Armed with pitchforks, lanterns and rattles, they fill the night with a ghostly pageant to terrorize their superstitious oppressors...

...For Mendelssohn, on the other hand, sprites and goblins arise from the infinite depths of fantasy with the relentless insistence of elemental forces...

...that of the Druid Guard, who launches the spectral offensive, is monstrous and grotesque...

...No tribute to his craftsmanship is too great, but there is another side to his art: the unclouded originality, the fabulous assurance of the grand design, the exalted breath of epic within the bounds of classical perfection...

...his dicey intonation and strangled elocution put out every gleam and flash of Mendelssohn's phantasmagoria...

...Goethe was, of course, no enemy of symbols...

...Estes is heard first in the part of a Priest, later as a Druid Guard, and finally again as the Priest...

...Certainly the Boulez performance, transparently textured and delivered with immense coloristic refinement, has the power to mourn, exclaim, console, and even transfigure, without reference to the program...

...She has found love, she says, too late...

...its pitch of passion owes nothing to relentless tuttis blared fortissimo...

...the music hurtles forward, and we are swept along, drifting towards and away from the traveling storm center...

...His oratorio Elijah, considered too heady with Victorian incense for the austere, Urtext tastes of our serious concert-going public, returned to the New York Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta in late November and early December for now cherished performances...

...Doubling is an economy that has its price...

...o n the other hand, the New York Philharmonic's performance of Arnold Schoenberg' Verklarte Nacht (TransfiguredNight), under Pierre Bou-lez, is a night to remember...

...Played thus, Dieerste Walpurgis-nacht is a night to forget...

...Their yoke shaken off, the Druids triumph in their ancestral worship of the universal father, the fountainhead of light...

...Her lapses are as nothing beside the disgrace of Simon Estes...

...His new recording, on Columbia M 35166, proves quite the contrary...

...Yet this is Bayreuth's much-applauded Dutchman...

...Mendelssohn's more familiar compositions possess such harmony of proportion, transparency of design and polish in every detail that many listeners mistake him for an accomplished miniaturist of safe, domesticated sentiment...

...Sherrill Milnes sang the title role at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall and will repeat it next April 11 and 12 with the Boston Symphony under Seiji Ozawa, whose manner with the score is unlikely to bear very much resemblance to Mehta's...

...In the hasty intermezzo of the Christian Guards, he loses track of the finale's arching contour and snaps the rousing anthem in two...

...Elijah is not scheduled for the Boston Symphony's spring series in New York's Carnegie Hall, but the concerts will be broadcast live on national radio...

...and it modulates magically into the softer airs of the approaching springtime...

...Originally scored for string sextet, the piece was later recast for string orchestra...

...The overture, "Das schlechte Wetter" ("Foul Weather"), is as remarkable for its fury as for its control...

...By scrupulous attention to dynamic fluctuations, he creates a feeling, even within the confines of one's living room, of amazing space...

...his attempt to substitute blunt force for a free, ringing phrase does not succeed, and would be unmusical even if it did...

...The printed scores of Verklarte Nacht are prefaced by Richard Dehmel's poem of the same name, whose subject is sexual guilt and loving acceptance: Two lovers are walking through a wintry wood...

...From the first chords, it unleashes fearful power without becoming thick in texture...

...The spiritual uplift of the Druid's opening statement is marred by Jerold Norman's tense, unlovely tenor...

...Despairing of happiness and longing for motherhood, she has already given herself to a stranger...

...Not that his particular brand of the grotesque serves for the Druid Guard's music either...

...When spring returns their forbidden faith grows strong once more in them...

...In fairness, it must also be said that his bass is a glamorous instrument...

...Her rich, dark sound suits her part well, although her contribution (the best of a bad lot) is disfigured by the ugly weights she hangs on her low notes...

...As for Estes, whose prodigal gifts are trapped in their raw state of nature, he is grotesque from his first syllable as the Priest and therefore has nowhere to go as the Druid Guard...

...True, a few artists have been capable of such a quick change: Gottlob Frick comes to mind, he of the pitch-black timbre and the expressive compass that extends from depths of serenity to peaks of satanic glee...

...Mendelssohn's dramatic cantata Die erste Walpurgisnacht (The First Witches' Sabbath), which I have never encountered on the concert stage, is another object of renewed interest...

...In the wake of a Turnabout recording under Christoph von Dohnanyi with the Frankfurt Museum Orchestra, and one on the Angel label under Kurt Masur with the Leipzig Gewandhaus, RCA has just released Eugene Ormandy's version of the work with the Philadelphia Orchestra...

...His exploration on disc of the complete works of Webern began in 1978 with a magisterial four-record set on Columbia Master-works M4 35193...

...It features the chorus of the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, and the soloists Simon Estes, Rose Taylor and Jerold Norman (ARL 1-360...

...I can suspend disbelief as long as he confines his activities to the minor stages of this country, for he is an imposing figure of a man with a trumpet of a voice, and to provincial ears, gushers of sheer volume are impressive...