Bartok - 44 Duos for Two Violins

The exploration of Bartok's oeuvre continues with a work that I hadn't heard before. What a magnificent, heartwarming ECM production this is ! I have confessed my love for this record label (if we can call it like that) before. This, once more, is a perfect package. The 44 Duos are a work that is singular in its scope, form and instrumentation. The musicianship is of the highest order, but at the same time it is also relaxed and down to earth. The recording (at ECM's familiar Kloster St Gerold in the Austrian Vorarlberg) is transparent, vivacious and set in a pleasingly resonant acoustic. Finally, the accompanying booklet is impeccably produced with an intelligent essay by Wolfgang Sandner (music editor at the FAZ) and a very evocative picture by Peter Nadas gracing the cover.

This is Bartok at his most approachable. The 44 Duos were composed in the early Thirties as a kind of pendant to his For Children for the piano. The initial purpose was didactic: a set of pieces for a German compendium of graded violin pieces. A little later this concept blossomed into the Mikrokosmos. Almost all are based on folk material, from all over the Balkans. Initially Bartok arranged them in order of difficulty but he anticipated that people would make selections of pieces for concert performance. In this recording, Andras Keller and Janos Pilz (both founding members of the Keller Quartet) have rearranged the order of the pieces so as to allow for sustained listening throughout the whole set. And this works admirably. It really is not a burden to sit through 52 minutes of music which occupies after all a relatively narrow textural bandwith. The overall impression is uplifting and cheerful but also epic, timeless. The music sounds like unbuttoned folk, yes, but in addition we hear echoes of Bach, Beethoven and, as Sandner discusses in his essay, also the grammar of New Music is brilliantly woven into the music (Malcolm Gillies makes a similar argument in The Bartok Companion). The avant garde echoes are reinforced by the two very short works from other Hungarian composers - Ligeti and Kurtag - that are complementing this recording.

Bartok - Divertimento

I took my leave of the Divertimento with another audition of the Camerata Bern/Zehetmair version. The smaller ensemble (slightly over 20 strings; similar in size to Sacher's orchestra at the premiere) and the typically airy ECM recording make for a transparent, pulsating reading which brings the concerto grosso-character of the work nicely into relief. Zehetmair's is also a very romantic reading that underscores the contrast between the lively outer movements and the somber Molto adagio. The ensemble plays with great precision and verve.

Dorati's recording with the BBC Symphony Orchestra is also very compelling. A bigger ensemble, it seems, that produces a rather compact and weighty sound. But that accords well with a rugged vision which is projected on a more epic scale than in the ECM version. The recording incidentally is also very good: originally released on the Mercury Living Presence label it features the depth and liveliness customary for this source. I have the CD on loan from HVC and comparison between vinyl and CD shows them very close. Not surprising, maybe, given that Wilma Cozart Fine, who produced the original recordings, was also responsible for the transfer to the new medium.

The Blue Nile - Hats

On Saturday a pop intermezzo. Ever since I received a Blue Nile CD - 'Peace at Last' - from PC (part of our exchange project) I have held them in high regard. Nevertheless it took a long while before I added two other CDs to my collection: 'Walk across the rooftops' (1984) and 'Hats'(1989). I like all of them, but Hats is my favourite. A collection of moody ballads drenched in boreal spleen, carried by Paul Buchanan's melancholy voice, tastefully arranged (guitar, bass, drums, synths and strings), and superbly recorded (by Linn Records; in fact it appears that the record label was established with the express purpose to release the band's first CD). I also love that the songs are rather long, with three of the seven songs on the disc lasting over six minutes. 'Over the hillside' is a great opener with the thumping bass and morose horn suggesting the exhilaration of travel and the pang of farewell, respectively.

Bartok - Divertimento

I have been listening the whole day to the Divertimento - in my head! Particularly shreds of the first movement have been streaming from my internal headphones.

Bartok - Divertimento

Another great Bartok piece! Although it is rarely included in his canon of masterpieces, I find it heartstoppingly beautiful. Ever since I wrote a program note about it, maybe 20 years ago, for the Royal Flanders Philharmonic (now De Filharmonie) the Divertimento has been very dear to me. Despite its ostensibly genial and sunny disposition I find it a very disquieting work which is pervaded by an atmosphere of doubt and even doom. That it was hastily written in those last fateful days in August 1939 before a cataclysm swept over Europe is a circumstance that I find difficult to dismiss. The works that, for me, show a musical and emotional kinship with this music all have to do with war: Strauss' Metamorphosen and Britten's War Requiem. As regards the latter I am particularly thinking of the undulating theme in the strings that underpins the moving Agnus Dei. It so closely resembles the Divertimento's main theme from the Molto Adagio that I wonder whether Britten was consciously quoting it.

I am lucky to have a number of very good recordings of the Divertimento. The one that has been longest in my collection is a Capriccio recording dating from 1988 by the Camerata Academica des Mozarteums Salzburg, led by the venerable Sandor Vegh. Then there is also an ECM recording with the Camerata Bern under Thomas Zehetmair. Finally, an LP version with Antal Dorati and the BBC Symphony Orchestra (the back side of a Music for Strings etc which I found only soso).

All of them have great qualities. I will get back to them in a separate post.

Bartok - Music for String, Percussion and Celesta

It's time to move on, it seems. I have listened now so many times to this piece and I must say that it is fiendishly difficult to find a well-rounded, engaging performance.

Tonight I listened first to a performance with the Budapest Festival Orchestra and Ivan Fischer. It's a recording from 1985, taped by Hungaroton engineers at an unspecified location in Budapest, and marketed by Philips. It's not a bad reading but rather run of the mill. What is disturbing is the generic, lifeless quality of the strings. Maybe it's just a typical early digital recording, maybe the orchestra had not had enough time together to produce a more vibrant string sound (the BFO had been established just two years earlier and was still functioning very much as a project ensemble). Anyway, I certainly missed the excitement I had experienced at a live concert with the same orchestra and conductor 20 years later.

Then came a disappointing trio of recordings on vinyl. First the Reiner/CSO which I also have on CD. This particular LP had not been taken through a Keith Monks treatment and it showed. The acidic highs made listening well nigh impossible. A pity as it is probably the most compelling version available at this point.

After that a recording with the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barenboim (EMI, presumably from 1972). A scrappy affair with a small ensemble that was clearly ill at ease in this music. The whole thing struck me as extremely contrived and underrehearsed. For those interested, it can be downloaded in lossless format here. There's also a contemporaneous Gramophone review on that site which is far too polite in my opinion in pointing out occasional problems of intonation. I found the recording average at best.

Finally a version with the Philarmonia Hungarica under Antal Dorati on Philips. Another a muddy recording which didn't bring anything new in my opinion. I will likely not revisit it.

So it looks like, for the time being, we will have to rely on either the Reiner recording (dating from 1956!) or the Boulez live concert in the Berlin Philharmonic's Digital Concert Hall.

Mahler 2

After having sampled a Boulez concert (with Bartok's Music), I slipped into the Berliner's Digital Concert Hall to attend a performance of Mahler's Second Symphony "Auferstehung". Simon Rattle conducted the house orchestra with Magdalena Kozena (mezzo), Kate Royal (soprano) and the Rundfunkchor on duty. It's supposed to be a live concert, but I am not sure exactly how 'live' it is.

Anyway 'slipped' is the word as my initial attempts to connect were rebuffed because of server capacity problems. When I finally got in the first piece, Schoenberg's Survivor from Warsaw, was already well under way. It was the first time I heard this work which must still create some rather uncomfortable vibes in Berlin.

The Mahler symphony started without much ado immediately after the last bars of the Schoenberg had died down (one reason why I suspect it is not a genuine live event). I must admit not being a great admirer of this particular work. In Mahler's canon it's the symphony I return least often to. It's the scale, the melodrama, the pious claptrap that goes with it which feed my circumspection. Despite the scale and the use of progressive tonality, I also feel this is a work which belongs more firmly to the 19th century than anything else that Mahler has written. In a way Brahms' Fourth symphony sounds more modern to my ears. So, I've gradually come to sympathise with Debussy and Dukas who at the time left a Paris performance objecting that the music sounded 'too Schubertian'. I certainly prefer the more abstract and modernist late Mahler.

Kudos to Rattle and his Berliners then to prove my prejudices very wrong! I had to laugh a little at myself when I was sitting mist-eyed through the rousing finale. The great thing about this performance was Rattle's impressive grip on this sprawling mega-structure. There was nothing particularly new or revelatory about anything in this reading. Luckily no disturbing histrionics, only an occasional indulgence in highlighting an expressive detail. But the sentiment of a vast structure gradually, relentlessly unfolding was there from the beginning, a spellbinding ebb and flow stretching away over movements, culminating in that outrageous last stanza of the Klopstock hymn. Remarkably, those 80 minutes seemed only half as long. 'Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit', to put it with a Wagnerian cliché.

Enough said. It was a great performance. Rattle and his Berliners and the soloists put their hearts in it. My faith in the Resurrection has been re-confirmed. Also lately my confidence in Rattle has been on the rise. I have never been a great admirer of this conductor. Too many times I have been disappointed by recordings that show all the portents of perfection but in actual effect sound terribly dull and lifeless. But last year I was impressed by a performance here in Brussels with the Berliners in a truly terrifying Bruckner Ninth. And then now this riveting Mahler symphony ... Maybe Rattle is maturing, maybe he just doesn't shine in the studio. I will have to dig a little deeper in the Digital Concert Hall archives to recalibrate my view on this conductor.