On Music
SIMON, JOHN
On Music Justice for Jacques Ibert By John Simon Who, exactly, are the worthy minor composers? The question is important, because in the entire 20th century there were probably no more...
...This is music to cheer you up on a dull day...
...This work alone would have merited election to the Institut de France, an honor accorded Ibert a decade later...
...The last movement, allegro brillante, alternates between pizazz and pensiveness, and ends with an unexpected fugato in baroque fashion...
...Jacques, though, was interested enough in theater to enroll in the Paris Conservatoire as an acting student...
...A masterly performance conducted by Jean Martinon is available on a superb EMI recording (64276...
...The piece begins with a spoken dialogue, recalling the Don's funeral, then segues into four ballet scenes: the windmills, the liberated galley slaves, the Age of Gold (the Don and Dulcinea mingling with dancing peasants), and the Don's fatal encounter with the strolling players...
...someone with a recognizable style, a personal voice...
...Yet, as Ibert said, "All musical systems are valid on condition that one can derive music from them...
...Ibert's father destined the son for the family business, but his mother, a pianist and distant cousin of Manuel de Falla, encouraged his musical potential...
...The opening allegro con moto exhibits what Roger Delage has called that very French trait "where the subtlest humor and the most refined sensitivity, extroverted emotion and an almost folksy banter intermingle...
...We come now to the Trio for Violin, Cello and Harp (1944...
...A patronizing note is discernible in a couple of assessments...
...Ibert's earliest orchestral work, the suitably gloomy Ballad of Reading Gaol, plus the invitingly danceable Les Rencontres, the genuinely fairy-like Féerique, the madly glittering Chant de Folie, and the rather staid Suite Elizabethaine have been brought together, too (Marco Polo 223508...
...The curtain falls on a seemingly happy ending, but Boniface re-emerges with the words, "She is still for sale...
...Much less familiar is the bizarrely titled Tropismes pour des amours imaginaires (1957), possibly intended as a ballet...
...It also jumps out at you from every photograph of the man...
...Catch it in the compilation Made in Paris by the Holland Wind Players (Etcetera 11910) or, if you don't mind the slightly overreverberant acoustic, withNathanielRosen and the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra under Richard Aulden Clark (Newport Classics 85598...
...Of the five CD versions I own, I especially enjoy the fleetest: Jean-Pierre Rampai with the Lamoureux Orchestra under Louis de Froment, on the two-disc 20-Century Flute Masterpieces (Erato 45839...
...I shall deal only with the farce Angélique, alone available on CD (Hommage 7001833...
...The Penguin CD Guide 2000/1 rightly declares: "There is not a dull or unimaginative item here, and these excellent Dutch players have the full measure of the witty, piquant Poulenc manner...
...SPECIAL mentionmust,however, be made of Le Chevalier errant (The Knight Errant), a unique genre piece commissioned by the notorious patron, performer and dilettante Ida Rubinstein...
...Each is based, as his biographer Gérard Michel observes, "on a different but very specific genre...
...the andante assai, whose pathos combines with reserve...
...Cigarettes were hard to come by in wartime, and Jacqueline (who was to die in a tragic accident in 1952) bribed Papa with her cigarette rations...
...Searching, speculative eyes topped by full brows, often under a jaunty beret or chic fedora, complete the picture...
...The so-called choreodrama —part dance, part pantomime, part play —was created in 1935-6...
...My second choice is Timothy Hutchins under Charles Dutoit and the Montreal Symphony (Decca 440332...
...But he retained a lifelong love of theater, for which he was to compose much background music, to say nothing of his 60-odd film scores...
...Jacques François Antoine Ibert has yet to receive his full due...
...Along with my string quartet, the concerted symphony is my most carefully considered work," Ibert used to say...
...Three diverse suckers present themselves, and each is conned into buying...
...It is on the second CD that we get two of this composer's masterpieces...
...I myself favor, despite the somewhat florid soundscape, the impassioned playing of the Ensemble Arpeggione (Adda 581060...
...It is decently enough performed by the Teatro Massimo orchestra of Palermo under Yoram David, though the recording is rather poorly balanced...
...Especially fine is the 30-bar oboe cadenza...
...It was composed in 1948/49 in Rome and Versailles on a commission from Paul Sacher...
...The four songs from Don Quichotte you can hear with the superannuated Chaliapin on the aforesaid Decca and édition digitale discs, or here, nicely sung by the American Henry Kiichli—plus a lusty, newly rediscovered fifth song for Sancho Panza, not available elsewhere...
...It is a chaste, solemn work, atypical yet strong (l'empreinte digitale 13110...
...Unfortunately, it does not come fully across on a recording...
...In my view, a worthy major-minor composer is someone with a sufficient body of work to be, if not a mountain, surely a hill on the landscape...
...Norman Lebrecht's Companion to 20th Century Music says of Ibert: "French composer of the old school —suave, elegant and tart as citron....' "Elegant" or "elegance" appears in virtually every description of Ibert's music...
...As Boniface resolves to kill himself, his wife becomes loving and declares she couldn't live without him...
...And an elegant movement it is, even if not particularly melodious...
...It has a structure and feel much like the Flute Concerto's, but is even more concise and whimsical, and allows the slightly nasal quality of the saxophone to fluctuate between melancholy and cheekiness...
...Throughout, there are two speakers, two singers, and lots of choric song...
...The first two scores, for all their interest, need to be heard along with their films...
...But you cannot go really wrong with any version...
...In his fastidious appearance Ibert suggests Ravel, as does his music to an extent...
...Like many Ibert movements, it is made up of a staccato and a legato theme...
...Both works scintillate on Arion 68117...
...The Symphonic Suite: Paris (1932) is another irresistible work, composed as stage music for Jules Romains' Donogoo-Tonka, mounted by the great Louis Jouvet...
...Golgotha, for Julien Duvivier's movie (1935...
...In it, soloists from all three string groups, individually or jointly, accompany the oboist, with virtuosic writing for one and all...
...This trio, for a combination of instruments not previously thought of, strikes me as one of the most beautiful chamber works ever written...
...They add to the stature of this lovable composer, whose status might well modulate someday from minor to major...
...They are very well recorded...
...Traces of jazz similarly enrich the enchanting Capriccio (1937-38) for 10 instruments, each treated in concertante style...
...One is the String Quartet (1937-42), delayed by having been mislaid, then by World War II and Ibert's having to leave Rome...
...Clemens Birnbaum calls it "funeral music...
...Later he switched to music, where he befriended fellow students Arthur Honegger and Darius Milhaud...
...The movement is highly contrapuntal, laid out in classic sonata form, buttweaked into modernity with tiny asides...
...Eventually, he became head of the French Academy's delightful Roman quarters at the Villa Medici, a post he held off and on for 23 years...
...For a crisper version in a drier acoustic, pick the Jean-Louis Petit chamber orchestra (REM 311146...
...An earlier short effort is the Concerto for Cello and Wind Instruments (1925...
...I like the old John de Lancie version with the London Symphony under Andre Previn (BMG Classics 7989), and still more the recent one with Hansjörg Schellenberger and the Liszt Chamber Orchestra under Zoltân Peskó on a demonstration-quality disc (Campanella 13045...
...The amiable suite Histoires (1922) contains the ever-popular "Little White Donkey," which, along with much else, is warmly played by Hae-won Chang (Naxos 554720...
...Almost as delectable are two other ballets: Diane de Poitiers, based on snazzily updated Renaissance dances, and La Licorne (The Unicorn, aka The Triumph of Chastity), which boasts a rhumba, a blues, and various other modern dances (Marco Polo 223654...
...The next year (1935) came the Concertino da Camera for alto saxophone and 11 instruments...
...Jean Roy has correctly characterized the four movements: the allegro risoluto, whose gravity allies itself to vivacity...
...That brings us to Ibert's six operas...
...He studied under Gabriel Fauré and that inspiring teacher André Gédalge among others...
...Manuela Wiesler, who plays the piece on BIS-529, observes: "Although this concerto is crafted with such care and refinement, it gives an impression of having been tossed off with a typically French, casual flick of the wrist...
...But what imagination within order, what whimsy along with balance, what feeling amid restraint...
...But the best rendition is by José Van Dam on Virgin Classics 592236...
...I find it a little too arch for its own good, and there is a certain nonchalance verging on haphazardness about it, but it ends with a wonderful dance movement, Gigue, that is over too soon...
...The question is important, because in the entire 20th century there were probably no more than a dozen agreed-upon major composers—and that is not enough for a lifetime's listening...
...You may get individual items performed marginally better elsewhere, but if you own this very satisfying two-anda-half hour set, you need look no further...
...Prematurely gray and balding, his perfectly oval face was accented by a modest, neatly trimmed mustache...
...Escales (Ports of Call), a rollicking travelogue, and Divertissement, stage music for a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, are so famous and beloved that I need not deal with them here...
...Of the sundry versions, I recommend the one with the eminent British saxophonist John Harle, accompanied by Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St...
...Though from different phases of his creativity, one finds, even in the darker passages "the musical hedonism" said to be his hallmark...
...Again for 10 instruments, but in this case including celesta, harmonium and xylophone, it summons up six different parts and aspects of Paris —the Métro, the suburbs, the Arab quarter, dinner-dancing in the Bois de Boulogne, etc.—in an entrancingly playful, jazzily titillating manner...
...The third movement ends with what has been called "a blast of fireworks suspended in midair...
...But that, as one writer remarked, "excludes none of the seriousness of composition and assurance of craft...
...Most of them are tinged with an aristocratic melancholy, but they are as fine as any melodies you have ever heard...
...Two of them, Persée et Andromède and L'Aiglon (one of two written in collaboration with Honegger), were issued on LP and are well worth tracking down...
...Its first movement, allegro tranquillo, alternates between crispness and tenderness, volubility and caressing lyricism...
...The first CD contains 80 minutes of unalloyed charm, mostly light stuff ranging from the gossamer Six Pieces for Solo Harp (written by Ibert in 1916-17 during his service in a field hospital, as a respite from the 800 operations he assisted in) to the more assertive and originally scored suite drawn from the music for the play The Gardener of Samos...
...Finally, there exists a selection of Ibert's songs, performed by the soprano Marie-José Dolorian on PMP 007...
...and the already mentioned songs for Pabst's cinematic Don Quichotte...
...Henri Dutilleux, the finest living French composer, has written: "His art is timeless because it is essentially classic...
...It is a slightly disjointed piece, but its every movement scores separately with its polish and expressiveness...
...An example is Jacques Ibert (1890-1962...
...Among other marvels, it has one of the loveliest waltzes known to me, an impudent foxtrot, two wonderfully dreamy slow movements, and a triumphantprocessional...
...Aside from his two or three standards, his catalogue contains many works requiring only a little more exposure to become hits...
...The ensuing andante (about 6 minutes) is a meditation circling around motifs from the allegro, but imbuing them with an unsentimental dreaminess...
...Then the Devil claims Angélique, only to hasten back with her after she turns Hell upside down...
...The middle movement has been compared to a lied, and it does have that Germanic yeamingfulness, derived from the first-movement cadenza, but, as adagio ma non troppo suggests, mawkishness must be eschewed...
...Of the sundry Ibert orchestral works...
...The closing movement, scherzando con moto, snaps you out of that deliquescent mood with crackling, goodhumored energy...
...The flute gets a meditative cadenza preceded by a melody of insidious charm and followed by bursts of archetypally Gallic wit...
...It evokes Jupiter's adulterous dalliances aided by Mercury, and the prodigal's return to the spousal arms of Juno...
...So let's start with the splendid 1934 Flute Concerto, written for the great flautist Marcel Moyse...
...After serving in the Navy during World War I, Ibert won the coveted Prix de Rome on his first try in 1919, with a ballet called The Poet and the Fairy...
...it should be seen staged along with another Ibert short opera, say, Le Roi d'Yvetot...
...Ibert remarked that its esthetics "conform simply to my momentary fantasy, spared any processing or preconceived system...
...Ballet was another of Ibert's fortes, and here the masterwork is Les Amours de Jupiter, composed for the opening season of Roland Petit's Ballets des Champs-Elysées in 1946...
...A more substantial piece of almost a half hour is the Symphonie concertante for oboe and string orchestra...
...Ibert himself conducts the Paris Opéra orchestra, with ample sound belying the 1954 recording date (EMI 63416...
...Late in life he also briefly ran the Paris Opéra and Opéra-Comique...
...It opens with an allegro that is more debonair than tuneful, yet has the slightly nervous, brisk quality of a short constitutional (under 5 minutes) meant to arouse the appetite...
...On a friend's advice, he advertises "Woman for Sale...
...it comprises mostly short, sassy pieces that make for relaxing listening...
...This 44-minute work, on a text by Ibert's brother-in-law Nino, is full of spirited hokum and clever musical stratagems...
...He dressed smartly (shapely bow tie, contrasting with a usually bold, but not too bold, tweed jacket) and was strikingly handsome...
...Of Ibert's abundant film music, three scores are obtainable in suite form (Marco Polo 223287): Macbeth, for Orson Welles' movie (1948...
...if so, it is funeral music of a nobly resigned sort...
...Martin in the Fields (EMI 54301...
...Not until he joined the Resistance could he finish the quartet...
...WIND INSTRUMENTS were Ibert's favorites, especially the flute, whose timbre is well suited to his playfulness and piquancy...
...The middle movement, andante sostenuto, is meltingly seductive, exuding a beauty so intense it hurts, but you don't want it to end...
...someone, moreover, who has written a few outstanding works sure to endure beyond a mere life span...
...it comprises four episodes from the doings of Don Quixote and imitates 17th-century balletopera...
...Chamber music was one of Ibert's fortes, and all of it has been conveniently reissued as a single two-disc set (Olympia 707...
...The French term allant (bustling) well describes the outermovements...
...I BERT S PIANO MUSIC IS not profuse...
...Its beginning and end are fairly conventional, but its middle section is pure jazz, displaying Ibert's savvy in that mode, which periodically crops up throughout the oeuvre...
...But after brief exposure to the termagant, all three (an Italian, an Englishman, an African) clamor for their money back...
...Finally, the allegro scherzando (circa 8 minutes), the climactic marriage of gusto and introspection, reflection and release...
...On Olympia, it is well played until the last movement, which drags a little...
...Claude Rostand, in his Dictionnaire de la musique contemporaine, writes: "Despite a language sprinkled on the surface with some postRavelian harmonic impertinences, [Ibert] is a classicist and traditionalist of academic elegance...
...In 1932, when the great German director G. W. Pabst planned his movie version of Don Quichotte with the aging Chaliapin, the composer chosen was Ravel, but he was late delivering the few needed songs and the faster Ibert got the assignment...
...the presto (all delightful pizzicato), where order and fantasy merge...
...Angélique (1927) concerns Boniface, married to a shrew ironically bearing that name, who bullies and beats him...
...This culminates in a heroic apotheosis of the dead Don...
...and the closing allegro marcato, where ardor and a strong will are fused...
...Called up into the naval reserve, he was falsely accused by the Vichy government of deserting, and his music could not be performed...
...The composer's daughter, Jacqueline, a gifted harpist, solicited her father to write a piece for her...
Vol. 84 • January 2001 • No. 1
