Stephen Layton's Goldilocks "Messiah" recording: Just Right
Each year there are multiple new recordings of Handel’s most famous work, Messiah. Since Handel revised the work for each performance that he gave of Messiah, there is no such thing as an “original version,” so most recordings now attempt to recreate some particular performance or other, or occasionally other arrangements (e.g. Mozart’s) of the oratorio. Many of them are outstanding, but it is somewhat refreshing to hear a new recording that is a middle of the road performance, with a nod toward being historically informed, but performed with modern instruments.
Such is Stephen Layton’s new recording of Messiah with that wonderful British vocal ensemble Polyphony and the Britten Sinfonia. The uniformly excellent soloists are Julia Doyle, soprano, Iestyn Davies, countertenor, Allan Clayton, tenor, and Andrew Foster-Williams, bass. Iestyn Davies is an up-and-coming countertenor, and to my mind is the best of the group. Andrew Foster-Williams has a lovely, well-produced voice, but it seems a little light for some of the great exclamations required in Handel’s arias, especially “The Trumpet Shall Sound,” which for me the standard will always be John Shirley-Quirk in Coliin Davis’s landmark recording from the mid-1960s.
The recording follows a live London performance with these forces in December 2008. Polyphony’s annual performances of Messiah are a London tradition, so it is good to have a permanent audio souvenir.
Polyphony’s choral sound is clear and bright, with excellent diction. A few of Layton’s dynamic choices seem a bit mannered, and I’m not sure what prompted his decision to begin the closing “Amen” chorus a capella, especially since Handel has a figured bass part for the opening of the chorus.
But like Goldilocks’s adventures at the three bears’ house, this recording is neither too hot at the cutting edge of performance practice, nor too cold with no style. Rather it is a fine sensible and tasteful performance that should be pleasing to a wide audience.
Plain Dealer announces Telarc cutbacks
In a blog entry posted yesterday evening, the Plain Dealer’s Frank Bentayou reported that Telarc International, Cleveland’s highly regarded recording company has cut 26 employees, reducing the number of employees by half, and Telarc’s founder, President and legendary classical recording producer Robert Woods will leave the company in March. Woods is setting up an independent production company which will manage classical music artists and produce their recordings.
Telarc was bought by the Concord Music Group in 2005. Telarc will no longer produce its own recordings, but will outsource the production to others. Physical production of the CDs themselves has been outsourced for years. (I note that most, if not all, of Telarc’s catalog is now available as downloads from emusic.com, and perhaps other online venues as well.)
Telarc has received numerous Grammy awards over the years, and has recorded such artists as Lorin Maazel and Christoph Von Dohnanyi and the Cleveland Orchestra (not simultaneously), Robert Shaw, both with the Atlanta Symphony and Chorus as well as with his Robert Shaw Festival Singers. How many singers who have gone on to high-flying careers made some of their first recordings on Telarc? (Christine Brewer and Renee Fleming are among them.) Telarc has always been known for the high production values of their recordings and pristine nature of their recorded sound. In more recent years Telarc had branched out to jazz recordings.
This is just more evidence of the sad state of the American recording industry.
James MacMillan's "St. John Passion" – a masterpiece
James MacMillan St. John Passion
The London Symphony’s LSO label has released a live recording of James MacMillan’s St. John Passion. It is already released in the UK, and will be available from Amazon next week, but is already available from iTunes as a download. (The iTunes download comes with a PDF digital booklet with program notes and complete text.) I have long been a fan of Scottish composer James MacMillan, especially his choral music (Mass, the Magnificat and Nunc dimittis, several smaller choral works, “Cantos Sagrados“). He is devoutly Catholic, and his earlier music espoused the concepts of Liberation Theology, so it seemed only a matter of time until he took on the Gospel Passion story. Bach, Schütz, Penderecki and many others have used these texts to write their masterpieces; James MacMillan now takes his place in the list.
His St. John Passion is a triumph, combining MacMillan’s strengths of drama (what could be more dramatic than the crucifixion of Jesus?), incredible lyricism adjoining fantastic dissonance, extraordinary orchestration and fiercely difficult but idiomatically beautiful choral writing.
MacMillan uses the structure of a single baritone soloist in the role of the Christus, with a small chamber choir singing the connective narrative and a very large chorus singing all the other roles (Peter, Pilate, the chorus of Jews, etc.) and, at the end of each large musical segment, singing a non-biblical musical commentary in Latin. The work ends at Jesus’s death with a a darkly-orchestrated instrumental-only movement, ending with an affirming melody in the low brass with chattering winds above. In the LSO recording Christopher Maltman is the brilliant Christus. The LSO Chorus is beyond reproach in their performance. Colin Davis, to whom the work is dedicated, is the conductor. (One notes that at a few points, particularly in the closing instrumental movement, the conductor can be clearly heard humming along–this is a live recording.)
For me the mark of a great work is whether I not only carry it in my mind after hearing it, but continue to think about how it works. At the end of my first listen straight through, I was dumbfounded and sat in silence for about ten minutes thinking about what I had just heard. (I can imagine it must have been overwhelming in the concert hall.) And in the several days since then I have been thinking about several passages, textures and just the mechanics of how MacMillan has assembled this austerely beautiful new addition to the musical Passion literature.
Boy George's "Yes We Can": Dance Hit for the 2008 Election
Boy George: Yes We Can
Boy George, late of the 1980s group “Culture Club” and sometime New York street sweeper, has a new dance tune out in the U.S. (It’s been out in the U.K. for several months). “Yes We Can” samples several of Barack Obama’s speeches and uses them as the raw material around a quite danceable cut. We hear Barack’s words “Change” and “Promised Land” all woven into Boy George’s lyrics. It’s fun. I especially like the 1st track mix. (Click on the image above to go to amazon.com to download the mp3.)
Yeow!
Porn star/singer and all-around silver daddy Colton Ford’s recent video, “That’s Me” (Obligatory warning: If you don’t like skin, don’t watch the video.)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsajH3pk7Uc]
Paul Jacobs plays Debussy
“Debussy: Préludes for Piano, Books 1 & 2″ (Nonesuch)
This evening I have been listening to the landmark recording of the Debussy Préludes made by the American pianist Paul Jacobs recorded in 1978, and recently made available as a download from Amazon. Jacobs died in 1983 from AIDS-related illness. But his legend lives on through his recordings of Debussy and Elliott Carter. The clarity and intellectual power, yet sheer musical elegance, of his performances have stood the test of time.
Deutsche Grammophon launches download site
The grandaddy of all high-class classical music recording companies, Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft has today opened up their online download site, which features non-DRM mp3 files encoded at a lavish 320kbps. The site has available for download most of DGG’s latest releases (including the Cleveland Orchestra’s new recording of the Beethoven 9th Symphony, which up to now has only been available for download from iTunes in a lower-resolution format with DRM protection. I’m glad I waited….) and a host of classic recordings, many of which have been out of print in CD format and are now available as downloads.
Registration for the site is easy, although you do have to surrender your name and email address to them. If you sign up for their email newsletter they give you one free track download. (I chose the “Adagietto” movement from Mahler’s Symphony no. 5, performed by the acclaimed Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, conducted by the hot young composer Gustavo Dudamel. All went smoothly with the download, although it was a bit slow–I can imagine that there may be a run on the DGG servers on their first day of operation.)
This is big! DGG is following the lead of EMI, Chandos, and some other smaller labels. We can hope that the other branches of the Universal Music Group (Decca main among them) will follow DGG’s first step. Warner Music and Sony BMG, where are you? Come on in–the classical music audience isn’t going to steal you blind.
Lauridsen rarities
Readers of this blog know of my pleasure in the music of Morten Lauridsen. Today I found a CD of vocal and choral music by him called Northwest Journey that has a few rarities, including a couple of arrangements for solo voices of famous choral works. His arrangement for solo soprano and piano of “O Magnum Mysterium” is simply ravishing. The composer himself is the pianist, and Jane Thorngren is the soprano, soaring up to the “Alleluias” and ending below the treble staff.
I have heard of Jane Thorngren for over 30 years, because she was in my time the most distinguished vocal alumna of Drake University, however, until this CD I have never actually heard her voice, which is very rich but lyric throughout its range. There is a picture on her web site of her as Mimi in the famous Zefirelli production of La Boheme at the Met.
I recommend the album.
Neglected Vaughan Williams
Today I have spent part of the day listening to a fairly recent recording of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s opera The Pilgrim’s Progress, based on John Bunyan’s famous allegory of the same title. I think it is among Vaughan Williams’ most neglected works, partly because of the subject matter (not a laugh-riot night out at the opera house) and partly because of the enormous cast—some twenty or more named characters, plus a large chorus and orchestra. I actually own two recordings of the opera: the old classic recording by conducted by Sir Adrian Boult in the ’60s, and the one I’m listening to day conducted by Sir Richard Hickox with the chorus and orchestra of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden. The role of the Pilgrim in the Hickox recording is the phenomenal Canadian baritone Gerald Finley. (He most recently gained notoriety in the U.S. playing the title role of Robert “Dr. Atomic” Oppenheimer in John Adams’ most recent opera.) As Vaughan Williams’s Pilgrim, Finley is tireless. The character is on stage for most of the opera’s duration and is singing much of the time in a quite high tessitura. This role is a marathon and Gerald Finley is more than up to it.
There is so much beautiful music in The Pilgrim’s Progress. Much of the libretto is taken from various biblical sources. Especially the passages of choral music such as the “I will put on the whole armour of light” sequence are radiantly top-drawer Vaughan Williams. The composer imported wholesale an earlier short opera, “The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains” than contains a melting setting of the 23rd Psalm.
I’ll probably never see The Pilgrim’s Progress performed, but at least we have two excellent recordings to savor the music.
"Lazy"
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This afternoon I was listening to the Internet dance music radio station that is often playing at home, Music One, when I heard this irrestible song. I got up and looked at the screen to see what it was. Not a group I had every heard of before, X-Press 2, and the song was called “Lazy.” A bit of investigating on the iTunes Music Store, and I found it. It turns out that David Byrne, late of Talking Heads fame, does the vocal. It’s an old song (2002), but it’s still sexy and David Byrne’s voice has just the right amount of “lazy”.
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