Brahms: Symphony nr. 2

The recording that has spooked around in my head a lot of the time the past few weeks is a 1977 recording of Brahms' Second. It is one of Stokowski's very late recordings - the symphony was taped in the spring and the man died in the fall of that same year - but it doesn't sound at all as if a 95-year old stood on the rostrum. To the contrary, this is a reading with a very energetic pulse, though never aggressive. There are none of the quirks we are associating with this conductor. The playing has poise and flourishes vibrant autumnal colours, avoiding the shrill melodrama that tends to mar symphonic Brahms. As I said, I have been carrying this music around for a while now. Not even the splended Mahler Seventh I heard in a live performance yesterday seems to be able to dislodge it from my mind.

This recording has been previously issued (by Cala) but is now repackaged in a budget-priced 10 CD box with Stokowski's stereophonic recordings for CBS from the early 1960s onwards.

Mahler: Symphony nr. 7

I'm crawling back into the blogging routine after an unusually long break. It just happened. I 'fell out of music' and my spare energy and attention were to a significant extent redirected to everything connected to ... cycling. So I have listened, but really very little. The concert season took off with a flourish but without me. Yesterday was the first time back in the Henry Le Boeuf hall at Bozar. But it was a joyous occasion and it has given me the impetus to pick up the thread of my listening diary again.

Yesterday night's program consisted of a single work, Mahler's Seventh. If I'm looking back over my blogging notes of the last two years it is certainly the Mahler symphony I spent most time with. On the podium was DeFilharmonie (the former Royal Flanders Philharmonic) led by their chief conductor Edo De Waart. I've always had a soft spot for this orchestra with which I have been associated, many years ago, as a program notes writer. But I haven't consistently followed them over the years, However, with Edo De Waart they have engaged a superbly experienced chef and I was curious to hear how the orchestra responded.

The Bozar main hall wasn't even half filled for this concert. Is it just because we were in Brussels where DeFilharmonie has only a skimpy following? Or is it a sign of the times that you can't even get a hall filled for such a complex and magnificent work as the Seventh? No idea, but somebody (the Bozar, the orchestra, tax payers) must have lost an awful lot of money on this evening.

Anyway, the orchestra didn't take it personally and they played their butts off in a wonderful reading. I was sitting in my favourite seat in the 'fauteilles de loge' on top of the ensemble. Again I was mesmerized by the myriads of details you can be part of from that privileged viewpoint: the concentration and quiet professionalism of the musicians, how they hold their instruments when they're not playing, the way the first horn blows her flatterzunge, the blush that appears on the mandoline player's cheeks when her solo is approaching, ... It's a feast to the eyes and ears. Of course, I also had a first rate view on De Waart shepherding his orchestra through this hypercomplex score. His gestures are energetic but unostentatious. A professional orchestra builder. You can see that.

In another post I suggested that interpretations of this work roughly fall into two categories: the romantic (Sinopoli, Abbado, Chailly) and the classical (Solti, Scherchen, Gielen). Both can be very satisfactory. A litmus test is maybe how the rondo finale fits in. Paradoxically, romanticists usually have more difficulties in giving it a place whilst classicists seem to have no qualms with this rambunctious symphonic extravaganza. De Waart quite clearly embraced the classicist approach, with finely judged but rather brisk tempos and an analytic perspective guided by clear lines, textures and volumes. The performance was kaleidoscopic yet coherent, objective and humane, virile and tender. Quintessentially Mahlerian, I would say. The orchestra played gloriously. The countless solos and mini-ensemble pieces were a delight as were the stormy tuttis. It all flowed seamlessly and vibrantly into an amazing, panoramic tapestry of music.

Soon De Waart and DeFilharmonie will perform another major neo-romantic masterpiece: Elgar's Dream of Gerontius. I must not forget to book tickets for that.

Alt J: An Awesome Wave - Roscoe: Cracks - The Maccabees: Given to the Wild

It's become almost a tradition now to go out and buy a pile of new pop cds to keep us company on the long drive to our holiday destination. This year I spent three days on (very) small roads on my way to pick up Ann in the Alps and together we added another day crossing France East to West. Later we pushed on to Asturias in Spain. And then there was the long trip back north. It's refreshing to travel slowly, avoiding the numbing monotony of the motorway. 

The musical harvest was pretty good, with three outstanding albums that have seen a lot of rotation in the last few weeks. All three are by bands I hadn't heard before.

The Maccabees are a British indie rock band that has been around for a while. Their first album was released in 2007 (Colour It). Given to the Wild is their third and most recent production (2012). It's a fast-paced and breezy album that grasps back to 1970s alternative rock and 80s Britpop tunes. The close harmony choruses that feature in many songs remind me of the Moody Blues' distinctive sound. Altogether a very entertaining collection, ideal for long stretches on the road.

Roscoe's Cracks was a surprise. A moody and sophisticated debut recording by a Belgian, nay Wallonian band. The quintet hails from Liège. After the first few auditions I was enthralled. Now, after having heard it many times my judgment is slightly more reserved, if only because it strikes me that the album suffers from a certain monotony. Maybe I just need to put it aside for a while as there is no doubt that this is a most promising debut. The sound is quite distinctive, with a solid folkrock backbone that spills over in the expansiveness of Sigur Ros, and occasionally hints of the earlier, classic Radiohead. The songs have substance and depth. The production is positively luxurious, with several tracks featuring added strings and exotic instruments such as mandoline and Indian harmonium. The whole thing flows seamlessly. The CD is excellently recorded to boot.

The third revelation was An Awesome Wave, another debut by a Leeds-based alternative indie band with the enigmatic name Alt-J. This is likely the album that has been listened to most often over the past weeks as it found favour with all members of the family. The music is very difficult to pigeonhole. It reminds me somewhat of the sultry sparseness of The XX and the androgynous eroticism of the Wild Beasts. But it surpasses both in terms of its waywardness, imagination and poetic precision (the origami-like folded holder for the cd aptly captures that spirit). At first hearing the album presents itself misleadingly innocuous. But after hearing it again and again its wonderful layeredness unfolds. Our favourite track no doubt is the very last one - Taro - which is in fact a moving threnody for war photographer Robert Capa.

The other albums varied from the palatable to the merely dull. Moby's Last Night is a 2008 album that captures the mood of a Manhattan night of clubbing. So predictably it's rather dance oriented, with a trademark quiet finale. All the vocals are done by female guest singers which sets it apart in the burgeoning output of the Moby-factory. There are a few good tracks but as a whole the album does not come close to his best work. However, it's prettly listenable, which is more than I can say of his most recent release, Destroyed. I only listened to it once but found it impossibly trite.

Radiohead's King of Limbs seems to be a transition project. Are they genuinely exploring new artistic avenues or are they merely trying too hard to be smart and artsy ? This 35 minute, acerbic spiel of obsessive rhythms and delirious vocals didn't really capture my imagination. We'll have to wait for the next Radiohead installment.

Band of Horses' Cease to Begin is an ok folkrock album that stays demurely within the stylistic conventions of the genre. Again, not a highflyer.

DEUS' surprise release Following Sea continues the path taken since Pocket Revolution. There's really nothing to fault here. These guys are masters at their game. They can do anything. The songs in themselves are excellent, the lyrics are top (as always), the arrangements and mixing leave nothing to be desired. But the whole damn thing misses soul. Whilst the music reminds me in more than one way of their early work and the band worked hard to impart the album with a gritty urban feel, it doesn't capture the epic flow of an album like The Perfect Crash (which I must have listened to literally hundereds of times in my commuting days). Is DEUS going the same way as U2: a collection of stellar professionals who are perfectly capable of putting together a very polished but ultimately banal entertainment product?

But all in all it was not a bad harvest. Meanwhile I've also purchased the fabulous Autumn Chorus CD The Valley to the Vale (previously only available via download). And now I'm looking forward to discovering the new Elbow, XX and Mumford and Sons albums, all recently released or due in the next few weeks.

Adams: Naive and Sentimental Music

This is another major Adams work, dating from the late 1990s, that up to now escaped my attention. I guess that buying the 10 CD Nonesuch Earbox, many years ago, made me a little complacent, assuming that I had everything there was to have by this composer. But Adams is alive and kicking and time moves on. Furthermore, as in Dharma at Big Sur the innocuous title belies the grand ambitions of this big symphonic piece. Finally, even when I snapped up the album at iTunes for a paltry 2,49 euro I was under the impression that I was duplicating another recording in my collection. But very soon it became clear that I was mixing up Naive and Sentimental Music with Common Tones in Simple Time, Adams very first orchestral composition from 1979.

So maybe someone should give John Adams the friendly advice to let go of the fancy titles and simply label this piece, say, Symphony nr. 4 (after Harmonium, Harmonielehre and El Dorado as numbers 1, 2 and 3, respectively). Because there is no doubt that Naive and Sentimental Music is a symphony, and one with grand ambitions to boot. By the way, in his biography, Halleluja Junction, Adams himself has no qualms in referring to this work as such.

It's a three part work that lasts about 45 minutes, giving it pride of place as Adams' longest orchestral composition. In his biography Adams reminisces that the creative impetus for the work came from attending a rehearsal of Bruckner's Fourth Symphony by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the LA Philharmonic. Up that point, Adams hadn't bothered much with Bruckner. But here he was intrigued by the "long, leisurely accretions of mass and energy", suggesting mountain ranges in the distance. He added that Bruckners formal technique, "although in one sense quite textbook conventional, was nevertheless strange and mysterious, reminding me of certain slow-motion cinematic techniques." It is telling that Adams condenses these observations in visual impulses which then seem to stir his creative energy.

The title of the work is drawn from Schiller's well-known essay in which the German writer contrasts two types of artist: the 'naive' or 'unconscious' who does not experience a cleft between himself and the medium of his artistic expression, and the 'sentimental' or 'self-conscious' for whom this primordial, sensuous unity is gone. Adams sees the struggle to recapture the naive stance as "one of the great gestures in the history of all artistic endeavour". Honestly, whilst I have nothing against the mixing of music and ideas, I find this to be a rather dubious and over-intellectualized starting point for a symphonic work that is supposed to breathe an integrative inner logic. Likely, Adams is aware of the disconnect as (in his biography) he is at pains to stress that Naive and Sentimental Music does not take its title too literally: "the essence of the piece is the presence of very simple material (...) which exist in the matrix of a larger, more complex formal structure." The nature images, the Brucknerian inspiration and the structural integration of bathetic elements in a large canvas all hint at a programme with a marked Mahlerian signature.

Whilst Adams evokes images of majestic nature ('mountain ranges in the distance') as seminal impulses, for me the music projects a brash, urban mood. The piece kicks off in the most unostentatious way possible, with what Adams refers to as a 'naive' theme on flute, accompanied with a strumming guitar. But maybe the theme is not so naive after all. I had the definite impression that I heard it already elsewhere and came to the conclusion that the first bar or so shows an uncanny resemblance with a theme Mahler used in Der Abschied, the last song in Das Lied von der Erde. I'm thinking more particularly of the instrumental music ('fließend') at Fig. 23, after the morendo passage that concludes the A minor recitative. Adams' melody, harmony, rhythm and orchestration are very similar (Mahler uses double flutes accompanied by mandoline and harp). However, the latter part of the naive theme, an irregularly descending 7-note pattern led me back to Strauss' Heldenleben, more specifically the brass theme that descends as a gleaming cataract to announce the Hero's victory over his critics. The naive theme a hybrid between snippets from Mahler and Strauss? Maybe only in my mind. Anyway, Adams takes some time to massage this material into position for an epic and craggy series of variations which remind me of Ruggles' stern expressionism rather than Bruckner. I truly like this 18 minute symphonic extravaganza. The LA Philharmonic play it marvelously under Salonen's guidance.

The second movement (Mother of the Man) provides ample relief after the excitement of Adams' opening gambit. Allegedly it's a gloss on Busoni's Berceuse Elegiaque (which I did not relisten). It's basically a romanza that revolves around a theme that is presented very slowly, almost drowsily, by the strings. The guitar musings and the bassoon solo reinforce the atmosphere of pastoral dolce far niente. Glockenspiel infuse the music with a solemn, mysterious mood. There is an animated middle section in which the somnolent string melody starts to be subjected to centrifugal forces. Suddenly Adams throws in magnificent chords for the lower brass (a moment of Bruckerian grandeur). A high trumpet momentarily opens a celestial door. As the panic in the orchestra subdues, the music return to the initial, quiet mood.

With the third movement (Chain to the Rhythm) we are back in familiar Adams territory. Adams: "Small fragments of rhythmic cells are moved back and forth among a variety of harmonic areas and in so doing create a chain of events that culminates in fast, virtuoso surge of orchestral energy." It's quite engaging but not totally convincing. I'm really missing a strong finale to provide counterweight to the epic opening movement and the 12 minute long slow movement. A shorter version of the now concluding third movement would have made a terrific scherzo. And then we would have needed a 12-14 minute, brazen finale (based on material from the movement's latter part) to cap the whole thing off.

So what to make of it all? I find Naive and Sentimental Music a great work but the finale lacks weight. Furthermore, whilst it is arguably one of the most symphonic things that Adams has yet written, to my mind it does not display the rhizomatic depth and breadth of development that one would expect from a truly, truly great symphony (say, of the calibre of a Shostakovich 10 or Mahler 9). I'd put it even a notch or two below Peter-Jan Wagemans' Zevende Symfonie that I was so enthralled with a few months ago. Nevertheless, I am quite happy to have discovered this very worthwhile symphonic piece.

Wanted to end with a brief comment on the very nice presentation of this Nonesuch release. I love the fantastic picture on the cover of the CD. It's an untitled exposure taken around 1883 by Gustavus Fagersteen of an overhanging rock in the Glacier Point area, Yosemite, with the hulking presence of Half Dome in the background.

Gordon: Rewriting Beethoven's Seventh

Whilst googling around John Adams I came across this: Michael Gordon's orchestral piece Rewriting Beethoven's Seventh (Adams, as conductor, took Gordon's Sunshine of Your Love on tour in 1999 together with his own then newly written Naive and Sentimental Music). Gordon's work is a pastiche in the same vein as Berio's Sinfonia, composed by stripping, hacking and mashing a canonic masterpiece. But whilst Berio sublimates one engaging musical process into another one, here we merely end up with a feeling of ears and mouth full of sawdust. The moniker 'minimalist drivel' is totally appropriate for this kind of adolescent nonsense. I might be able to come up myself with a piece like this give or take 2 weeks toying with GarageBand. Won't be spending more time on this.

Adams: Dharma at Big Sur

This is John Adams' 'other' violin concerto. I wasn't even aware that he had written one until I figured out that behind this catchy title was hiding a concerto for electric violin and orchestra. An electric violin is basically an electrically amplified violin which may or may not have a quite different tonal signature than an acoustic instrument. It's a rare appearance in the classical concert hall. Here Adams calls for a six-stringed solid-body instrument that is played in 'just' intonation, with intervals between the notes of the scale differently tuned than in Western, equal tempered manner. Also the piano and harps in the orchestra are tuned to just intonation.

As in the 1993 Violin Concerto the soloist very much dominates happenings. Once a Brucknerian tremolo has risen the curtain over California's jagged coastline at Big Sur the violin leads the equally capricious musical line with a bustling orchestra in attendance. The soloist's voice is littered with slidings and portamentos and sounds very improvisatory (but, make no mistake, everything is precisely written into the score) giving the piece a very exotic, Eastern feel. Yet the inspiration for this piece was profoundly Californian.

Adams wrote the music for the inauguration of LA's fabled Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2003. The subtext for the two-movement work is provided by Jack Kerouac's Spontaneous Prose (hence the references to Dharma and Big Sur) and by the accomplishments of Adams' older peers Lou Harrison and Terry Riley. Harrison was an American composer who often wrote in other tuning systems. Riley is one of the fathers of the so-called Minimalist movement. The first part of Dharma (A New Day; dedicated to Harrison) is a long and intense meditation, the second an ecstatic dance (Sri Moonshine; dedicated to Riley). The composer provides a rich description of the piece's background and structure on his website.

Dharma at Big Sur provides a very compelling listening experience. Initially I didn't like it as much as the Violin Concerto but after multiple auditions I'm valuing it quite highly. The piece forms one big crescendo arc from the whispering opening bars to the exultant finale. The mood is celebratory throughout and I find that Adams has been able to capture something of the profound and exuberant insouciance that is the hallmark of the best of Beat Generation.

This recording I listened to dates from 2005 and relies on the commissioning orchestra and its former musical director (Esa-Pekka Salonen) but features a different soloist (Leila Josefowicz) from the premiere (the American electric violin specialist Tracy Silverman). It has been issued under the DG Concerts label and is only available for downloading via iTunes or Amazon. I've listened (via YouTube) to the Nonesuch recording (with the BBC Symphony Orchestra led by Adams and with Silverman as a soloist) for comparison and it seems to me that this is the one to go for. Silverman's playing is more imaginative and authoritative and the recording strikes me as airier than the live tape at Disney Concert Hall. With a delicately embroidered musical tapestry such as Dharma at Big Sur more air is certainly desirable.

Roukens: Concerto Hypnagogique

Over the last two weeks I have been firmly on the Adams trail, surveying some major works in the process. However, before I summarise those listening impressions I'd like to make to make note of a very interesting discovery. Joey Roukens is a very young Dutch composer (°1982) who is starting to make a name for himself. In 2010 the Royal Concertgebouw commissioned an orchestral piece from him (Out of Control, 16') and in 2011 the Concerto Hypnagogique was premiered by the Radio Kamer Filharmonie led by Thierry Fischer and Ralph van Raat on piano as soloist. It is this piece that I discovered via Dutch Radio 4's Concerthuis. Sadly, the recording of the May 12th Zaterdagmatinee is not available anymore. For the time being we'll have to do with two longish excerpts on the composer's YouTube channel. Roukens describes the piece as follows on his website:

A piece for piano and orchestra evoking images, moods and atmospheres one might experience in a state of hypnagogia - the borderland state between wake and sleep -, ranging from the delicately ethereal to the wildly frenzied. There are four movements:

I. Prelude (Strange Glowing Shapes)
II. Running through Lucid Dreams
III. Chorale and Landscape
IV. Final

I was immediately smitten after the first audition. Roukens' musical idiom is very accessible. Tonal through and through and with plenty of references to 19th and 20th century models there is a lot to latch on to for experienced listeners. But the 40' concerto is played without a break, there is no recognisable formal template, the orchestration is exceptionally vivid and the level of invention is very high, with bucketloads of ideas piled on top of one another. All this lends the piece a cinematic and even kaleidoscopic quality that may prove to be disorienting for first-time hearers. The reference to cinema is not unjustified as we might listen to the work as the soundtrack for a wild, garish, manga-like filmfest. The surface brilliance, references to popular culture and strong visual images also remind us of the spirit of John Adams. Other reference points that came to mind are Danny Elfman's 1989 score for Batman, Guillaume Connesson's Cosmic Trilogy and Kevin Volans' Third Piano Concerto that was premiered at the Proms last year.

I find this Concerto Hypnagogique very gratifying to listen to. The piece does not have the metaphysical ambitions of a Missa Solemnis. Rather we need to place it more in the lineage of the Lisztean tone poem: colourful canvases for virtuosic orchestral display. It does indeed strike me more as a symphonic piece with an obligato piano part rather than as a concerto pur sang.

I've roamed the internet to get access to other pieces from the hand of Joey Roukens. His own YouTube channel offers fragments from a number of other compositions. Via Radio 4's channel we can hear a full performance of the 40' Percussion Concerto. There is a nice video portrait (in Dutch) made in the runup to the premiere of the Hypnagogique here. Whilst there is a lot that confirms the amazing talent and orchestral imagination of this young composer (take, for instance, the excerpts from Scenes from an Old Memorybox) it seems to me that the Concerto Hypnagogique puts his abilities in the very best light. I'll certainly keep track of Joey Roukens. And I hope we can count on having access to a recording of this wonderful piece very soon (back to back with Volans new concerto, that would be something ...).