On Music
GOODMAN, HAL
On Music NEGLECTED TREASURES BY HAL GOODMAN THE RECORD INDUSTRY is in recession, too. From rock to baroque sales have been sinking, with classical recordings feeling the tightest pinch. In the...
...The Six Rumanian Folk Dances, composed in 1915, are as close to straight transcriptions as Bartok gets...
...These pieces were written over a span of 24 years...
...It was not his fault that he was born at the wrong time...
...In the case of Luigi Boccherini, the term "less well-known" applies to practically his entire life's output...
...They are clearly present, and so, one would think, are40 or 50 other invisible blaring and pounding instruments...
...Another technique that Mozart had not yet mastered in these quartets was contrast...
...Proof comes in three new releases devoted to some of the less well-known creations of Bartok, Mozart and the 18th-century Italian composer Luigi Boccher-ini...
...Keller, I beg to differ...
...In 1809,18 years after Mozart's death, one J.B...
...A contemporary critic, Hans Keller, called Mozart's early quartets "quite abominable" and "not even worthwhile playing...
...But all three will sound superb on whatever you own...
...Bartok'sinsistent rhythms are allowed to express their full power, but never to grind down the subtler aspects of the music...
...The Boccherini Ensemble has that sense...
...The melodic invention and instrumental arrangements often rival Mozart's, although Boccherini falls short in harmonic and structural development...
...Some show the composer at his most tonal, others at his most dissonant...
...They are to be commended for neither condescending to nor standing in awe of the composer's tender age at the time of writing...
...In his later masterpieces, Mozart liked to open with his themes, too, but by then he had found more convincing ways of doing so...
...He is always in com-plete control...
...Slow themes are followed by slow themes, fast by fast...
...They are at their best when Mozart is at his, in the D Minor, deftly handling the syncopation and abrupt shifts from relaxation to high energy...
...Also presented are the Quartet in C Major, K. 157, and the G Major, K. 156...
...By 1920, when he wrote Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs, Bartok was solidly in the grasp of dissonance (or, rather, it was solidly in his), and the original tunes only peek through here and there as jumping off points for powerful flights of imagination...
...The slow is briefly stated at the outset, thus it serves as an introduction...
...The album's spectacular curtain raiser is Out of Doors, a five movement programmatic suite composed in 1926 that fully reveals Bartok's genius for instrumental effect...
...Though what Bartok found on this trip colored everything he wrote for the rest of his life, its influence is most obvious in his piano compositions...
...In the Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm, written in 1939, Bartok turned his attention to capturing the unique phrasing of the Balkan folk dances, weaving his way in and out of such rhythms as 4-2-3 and 3-3-2...
...Schaul complained that the late Wunderkind from Salzburg led his listeners "between steep rocks into a thorny forest in which flowers grow but thinly...
...The technology of the space shuttle age has been brought to bear on the compositions of the immortal masters here, so the Bartok is intended to be played through a CX decoder, while the other two disks are meant for digital equipment...
...It is very easy, even for a group specializing in Boccherini, to deprive the listener of this variety by giving both quintets the same interpretation...
...I suppose this is only natural...
...Quintet Number 19 in C Minor is rooted squarely in early classicism...
...As a group they demonstrate that Bartok, the master of orchestral effect, never really needed an orchestra to produce his effects...
...Throughout the smorgasbord of styles, Evans proves his reputation to be well-earned...
...The exception is the D Minor, where the first movement alternates slow and fast themes...
...In EineKleine Nachtmusik, for example, the first two phrases are played forte and in unison, then theensemble takes a deep breath and is on its way...
...The piano concerti, the string quartets and the ConcertoforOrchestrahoggedmostof the attention, while many eminently enjoyable pieces, though they did not go unperformed, were presented as appetizers before the main gorging...
...In the best of times they are andante sellers to pop's presto...
...These two were written only five years apart, but the vast difference between them gives a good idea of the composer's diversity...
...when times are tough they show it first...
...Just as it wouldn't be New Year's Eve without champagne, so it wouldn't be Bartok's birthday without the Concerto for Orchestra...
...The Sonata (1926) is a dissonant work in a standard fast-slow-fast form...
...One does not need to read the subtide, With Drums and Pipes, to hear them drumming and piping away inside the piano...
...There are a few intonation problems in the first movement of the A Major, but this is a small blemish...
...The record is a satisfying tribute to a composer too often overlooked...
...For it takes a solid sense of history to show, through the music, this composer's influence on his more famous colleagues...
...Fiveyears and 33 quintets later, the spirit of Number 52 in A Major is closer to the late quartets of Beethoven, especially in the folk-like finale and the brooding, introspective largo...
...When Bartok was in his early 20s, he and fellow-composer Zoltan Kodaly armed themselves with recording equipment and set forth into the wilds of Hungary to unearth authentic peasant music...
...The more delicate pieces have a crystalline purity in Evans' hands...
...Their performance is sensitive to the musical and historical demands of the work...
...LET IT NOT be thought that Boccherini has always taken a back seat to Mozart...
...This is understandable—he has been overshadowed by his contemporaries, Haydn and Mozart—but also unfortunate...
...Here the listener finds himself tossed into the middle of the music without being quite sure how he got there...
...They are tonal, airy and joyful...
...The album they have produced is a necessary item for every Mozart collection, unless the collector is a young composer given to feelings of inferiority...
...the melodies are Mozartian, while the playful minuet smacks of Haydn...
...Boccherini's favorite vehicle was the string quintet (formed by adding a second cello to a string quartet...
...The high points of the album are the fugal finale of the F Major Quartet, K. 168, and the first movement of the D Minor, K. 173, which deserve to be ranked with Mozart's more mature efforts...
...The musicians of the Sequoia Quartet bring to their selections the proper mixture of playfulness and seriousness, grace and precision...
...Most conspicuous is the absence of introductions, or any sort of solid beginnings...
...they do not have the power that judicious use of this device could have given them...
...Nonetheless, they are gorgeous pieces of music: well constructed, artfully arranged, and most certainly worth playing—and hearing...
...He wrote 197 of them, and two have been freshly recorded by the Boccherini Ensemble (Boccherini String Quintets, Vol...
...had Mozart not come along, the three Bs might be Bach, Boccherini and Beethoven...
...With apologies to the estimable Mr...
...Indeed, the mistake is often made...
...And Evans' choices show us the many ways Bartok manifested his love of folk music...
...Again, the D Minor is an exception...
...1, Nonesuch D-79025...
...The movements are certainly unified...
...Boccherini, on the other hand, took one "into serene country with flowering meadows, clear, rushing brooks, and thick groves...
...To be sure, there are clues to Mozart's youth and relative lack of experience...
...Yet despite these inhospitable circumstances, at least a few record companies are still trying to serve the public as well as their accountants...
...the violent ones are, as they should be, rousing and at times frightening...
...The works, all written around Mozart's 19th birthday, may not represent the height of the great man's inspiration...
...The late adolescent Mozart evidently decided that the best way to begin a piece was simply to state the theme, and he did this in three of the four quartets...
...His music is of great historical interest (a large number of Mozart's works are based on it, directly or indirectly), and very much worth getting to know on its own terms...
...Yet they are a bit tame...
...In the hoopla surrounding Bela Bar-tok's 100th birthday on March 25,1981, certain portions of his work seemed to be undeservedly slighted...
...In what I would like to think is a gentle protest, however, and a celebration of the 101st birthday, the Gasparo label has issued a delightful album of Bartok's solo piano music, performed by one of his most highly regarded contemporary interpreters, Phillip Evans (Phillip Evans Plays Bartok, GS211CX...
...Many of Boccherini's masterpieces," he wrote, "are...immeasurably superior____" Four of these "abominable" compositions, performed by the Sequoia String Quartet, have now been released (Four Early Quartets, Nonesuch D-79026...
...Either attitude could have marred their performance...
...Mozart never carried contrast to the same violent extremes as Beethoven, but he did eventually come to make effective use of it...
...A llegro Barbaro (1911) is a rhythmic morsel that in just over three minutes goes from a Bacchanalian revel (which again owes much to peasant songs) to a light, humorous middle section, and back...
Vol. 65 • April 1982 • No. 8
