Debussy: String Quartet - Shostakovich: String Quartet nr. 10 - Mozart: String Quartet KV 421

I still have to report on a live concert I attended last week at the Brussels conservatory. Thanks to CB for the kind invitation (once again!). The Jerusalem Quartet was visiting with a very interesting programme: Mozart's Quartet nr. 15, Shostakovich's Tenth Quartet and the Debussy Quartet. I had never heard this Israeli ensemble before. I was soon convinced that we were listening to a top class quartet which to my mind excelled with an exceedingly cultured and softly grained sound. In a way their playing, eschewing expressive idiosyncracies, felt very old style.

The Mozart quartet (1783) was an eye-opener (or rather an ear-opener). It's the second of the Haydn quartets and, as is the case with the KV 310 and KV 457 (1784) piano sonatas I listened to recently, the only work in the minor key in that particular collection. Clearly a work with heft and the Jerusalems played it poised and earnestly. They were not able, however, to impart a similar sense of inevitability to the Shostakovich quartet. The op. 110 is a late work, composed in 1964 and one of those wonderfully wry and luminous works of the ageing master. It's perhaps the most beautiful quartet of the whole set. I also like it a lot in Barshai's rendering for chamber ensemble. The Jerusalem Quartet's reading sounded a trifle self-conscious and manicured to my ears. As in many Shostakovich late works, there is this very characteristic mixture of childlike simplicity and violence. Despite the obvious care lavished on the performance, neither was brought off very convincingly. I also thought the long breaks between movements marred the flow of the music.

After the break there was the Debussy Quartet (1893) as 'plat de résistance'. A marvelous work that shows the young Debussy at his most accomplished. Despite the freedom of form, the piece sounds composed through and through. In its multifaceted sense of balance the quartet has jewel-like qualities. It strikes me as an undercover symphony in the garb of a chamber work. Indeed, I'm not surprised that the work has been re-orchestrated for larger ensemble (although it's not clear who the author of the adaptation is; this version certainly is not widely known). One thing that is hard to overlook, particularly in the slow movement, is the kinship with the music of Vaughan Williams. The latter studied with Ravel for a short while (in 1908) and in that short period he must have thoroughly have absorbed the French idiom. Anyway, Debussy's chamber music does not cease to amaze me and I'm putting it well ahead of his piano and orchestral works. The Jerusalem Quartet's performance was a cause for joy: lithe, fluid and strong. Their tone is full and has the patina of well worn beautiful objects. Debussy would have liked it, I'm sure. I've been listening in parallel to recordings with the Tokyo String Quartet and the Belcea Quartet, both of which are of very high quality. The Belcea performance strikes me as a tad more characterful and seems to thoroughly deserve its Gramophone award (in 2001).

The concert was concluded with a brief encore from one of the Haydn op. 20 quartets which reconfirmed the ensemble's mastery in the classical repertoire. Their performance captured the inimitable blend of simplicity and sublime sophistication that is so typical for Haydn to perfection. I'm certainly going to look out for other opportunities to listen to this quartet.

Paddy McAloone: I Trawl the Megahertz

On Friday I had to drive to Arnhem in Holland to deliver a training session and decided to give McAloon's Megahertz another spin in the car. I listened to it three times back-to-back. The impression I had after my first audition persists: hard to tell whether this is a piece of supreme kitsch or an attempt at enchantment based on yet another version McAloone's 'yawning caves of blue'. Anyway, it's the right kind of aural backdrop for long rides. And yesterday, as I was working through a 70 km cycling tour (accompanied by WvdH), this weird and soothing stuff persistently echoed in my head. It's that kind of music.  

Amina Alaoui: Arco Iris

Amazing, my last post dates from almost three weeks ago. I can scarcely believe it. Of course, we spent a week in the Easter holidays at my parents' place, where I barely listened to music. But still, the feeling of time speeding up as we go is something that strikes me more often these days. So, I'll try to give a roundup of my listening experiences over the last few weeks in a slightly more compact form than usual.

I'll start with the recording that I've been listening to most recently. Arco Iris is a recent ECM album by Amina Alaoui, the specialist in arab-andalusian music, whom I got to know via the Siwan project with Jon Balke. Over the last few years I have enjoyed ECM's contributions to the classical, jazz and crossover catalogue immensely. Lately, however, I've started to think that Eicher formula was starting to wear. ECM has always benefited from its niche status but now it's maybe getting too big and exposed for its own good. But then comes along an album such as Arco Iris where everything just fits and one is happy that the old magic hasn't disappeared.

It starts with the cover: a tantalising image of vast and elementary spaces, awash in a palette of bronze, gold and shimmering metal, that kindles a desire for the infinite (photo: Alejandro Torres). The album is almost exclusively devoted to Alaoui's own music, set to her own words or those from early or late medieval poets and mystics. She sings, as is her custom, in arabic, Spanish and Portuguese. Despite the mixture of literary sources, fado is the unifying thread that runs through the whole album. The ensemble that supports Alaoui is of much more modest scope than the full-fledged baroque orchestra plus various soloists on Siwan. Here we have Saïffallah Ben Abderrazak on violin, Sofiane Negra on oud, José Luis Monton on flamenco guitar, Eduardo Miranda on mandolin and Idriss Agnel on percussion. All these musicians are astonishingly accomplished and provide a masterful foil for Alaoui's tantalising voice. The music, produced by Eicher, has been recorded in the studio of the Swiss Radio and Television in Lugano. But the ECM team has created something very different from a typical studio ambiente for this album. The sound is fairly warm and reverberant without losing focus, however. We have the impression that we are listening to a performance in a small chapel, or in a cloister garden. There is this combined feeling of space and intimacy with fits the music just right. It's truly ravishing. The music itself then. There are 12 tracks totalling to more than an hour's music. Those familiar with Siwan will recognise Alaoui's style of florid and passionate extemporisation on arab-iberan themes. Her voice launches into amazing arabesques. In the booklet she writes:

The challenge of the fado singer is having the audacity that comes with freedom and savouring the risk of learning to walk on the moon, an extraordinary balancing act in which the old landmarks no longer suffice. I set foot on unknown ground. Teeter to the right and left. Body and voice suspended in atmosphere. I spin round and then slide, lose my way and try not to fall. Drawn in on the breath of strange, dizzying arabesque, which pulverises all symmetry and all sense of centre as it moves. It is a curve of abstract and relative truth, a sinuous improvised line, which spirits away the finite and flirts with the infinite. Pure equilibrium on this lunar field. Yet music as mysticism knows this modus vivendi. 

The mood is generally intimate and reflective, but there are long tracks (Flor de Nieve, Ya laylo layl, and particularly Las Morillas de Jaén) that are more lively and dramatic. The accompaniment is, as already said, stellar. The timbres of the different string instruments mingle in the most delicate fashion. Negra's oud sounds wonderfully mysterious. I'm particularly impressed by José Luis Monton's pyrotechnics (but always at the service of the music) on his flamenco guitar. It meshes beautifully with Miranda's mandolin. Idriss Agnel's percussion is most discreetly but effectively present. Abderrazak's violin breathes langourous and poetic lines.

As said: on this album everything just fits: the artwork, the recording, the liner notes, the music, the voice, the ensemble. My confidence in Eicher's project is fully restored.

Anima Eterna - Symphonic Silver

A couple of weeks ago DD, a reader of this listening diary, sent me a complimentary LP, issued in a limited edition of 500 copies (mine is nr. 28) on the occasion of Anima Eterna Brugge's silver jubilee. The luxurious and lavishly decorated double sleeve album was personally signed by Jos van Immerseel, the orchestra's conductor and tireless 'animator'. A very friendly gesture of both sender and signer, for which many thanks!

I must confess that Anima appeared on my radar only at a fairly late stage in their existence. It was their Beethoven set, recorded in 2005 for the Zig-Zag label that struck me more or less like a bolt from the blue. Up to that point I had been rather sceptical about the whole HIP movement, but van Immerseel with his Beethoven finally convinced me to embrace what period performance had to offer. That doesn't mean that I'm going along in their conception of 'authenticity' which, for me as a listener (and not as a music scholar), is largely besides the point. Being true to the spirit of the music is for me much more important than being true to the text. (Here I'm reminded again of that Debussy encore by Horowitz that I listened to last week. In his superslow rendering of the Serenade for the Doll, he must have taken terrific liberties with the score. And it was performed on a Steinway and not an Erard to boot. But who cares when this trifle nestles itself in your brain and mercilessly haunts you for a week on end!) It's an endless debate, of course, and we're not going to resolve it here. Suffice it to say that for me it is immaterial on which instrument a piece is played as long as it speaks to me as a human being. Or think about it this way: what a priceless legacy would we lose if everything that was recorded by traditionalists would simply be binned on the grounds that it didn't meet requisite criteria for 'authenticity'? That wouldn't make sense at all, wouldn't it?

van Immerseel's Beethoven was very good and his Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique was an utter revelation. I wrote a glowing Amazon review about this recording of which I'm still very fond. Sadly I have not yet been able to investigate other Anima Eterna recordings. I seem to remember that Robert Redford, in a column for Gramophone magazine, picked the orchestra's recording of Ravel's Boléro as his most treasured disc. I also would love to hear their Strauss, Liszt and Rimsky recordings. It will come, in due time. These days, Anima is touring with a Debussy programme which I sadly missed when they performed it in Brussels and Antwerp. Unfortunately there seem to be no plans to record it.

What I appreciate first and foremost in the van Immerseel/Anima Eterna recordings I know is a compelling view of 'the whole'. It's in my opinion a minimum requirement for any performance that aims for the status of greatness. If the overall architecture isn't right, then scrupulous attention to authentic detail won't save it (Debussy's music may be a terrific exception to this rule, as I tried to argue rather helplessly in my exchange with Mark DeVoto). And then there is the typical bonus that comes with period performance in the form of lean textures, crisp articulation and an overall more transparant sonic image. Luckily van Immerseel steers a middle course between the lushness of traditional performances and the brutish attacks of iconoclasts such as René Jacobs and Giovanni Antonini for whom textural ugliness seems to be a virtue. Anima Eterna produces a quite beautiful, sophisticated sound and there is a distinctive and beguiling earthiness to it that I'm not hearing anywhere else. This 'middle course', however, does not imply that van Immerseel's interpretations aim for a safe middle ground. I seem to notice that his recordings elicit very polarised reviews.The contrast between these two assessments of Anima's recent Poulenc disc is quite typical. I seem to think that van Immerseel is not too unhappy with this state of affairs.

The LP features a potpourri of pieces, from the early baroque to the 20th century, to illustrate the orchestra's breadth of repertoire. Some are excerpts from albums that have been issued earlier on Channel Classics (Mozart's piano concertos) and Zig-Zag (the Beethoven symphonies, the Poulenc concerto for two pianos). But the LP includes two unreleased tracks: a live recording of De Falla's Fire Dance (from Amor Brujo) and the finale from Schubert's Second Symphony from an archived studio recording. What, surprisingly, struck me most from the pieces included is an excerpt (Klaglied) from an early (1994) recording of a Buxtehude cantata (Mit Fried und Freud, ich fahr dahin, Bux WV 76) with the Collegium Vocale Gent. Limpid, harmonically rich but most effective in its simplicity it touched a nerve. It went straight onto my wishlist. Beyond the Buxtehude there is much to enjoy. I liked the measured approach to the Fire Dance a lot (as I did appreciate the deceptively leisurely take on Berlioz' Marche au supplice). Anima turned it from just another orchestral spectacular into a compelling study in colours and rhythms. The fiery Schubert finale is another highlight. I'm not so sure what to think of the Larghetto taken from the Poulenc double concerto. The sonic signature is very different from other Anima recordings, with the orchestra and soloists recorded as if from a rather great distance. In combination with the 'watery' sound of the two Erard pianos this creates a dreamy atmosphere as if we are hearing the piece in half-sleep. Finally, I've never investigated van Immerseel's take on the Mozart piano concertos. This was the recording project that brought him and the orchestra an international audience. But judging from the Allegro from KV 450 I seem to understand better what all the fuss at the time was about. If Channel Classics could be persuaded to re-issue the full set at an affordable price, I'd jump on it.

The technical quality of the LP is very good. I did an A/B comparison with the CD recording of the Beethoven Prometheus overture and the LP seems marginally more lively. Again, thanks for this generous treat to 'symphonic silver'.

Comment: Debate on Debussy

I've had a little discussion with Mark DeVoto, retired professor in musicology and author of 'Debussy and the Veil of Tonality', on the website of the Boston Musical Intelligencer. Also with HVC, who has sent me a short essay of his hand on Debussy, I've been exchanging ideas lately.