A little while back, I wrote up Marc Minkowski's Rameau disc,
promising a series of capsule reviews of other outstanding releases. I
lied. I'll try to zip through the rest in telegraphic style. Links are
to Barnes & Noble, which, unlike some other online stores, does not
give money to morally disgusting politicians. Gidon Kremer's set of the
Bach Sonatas and Partitas
belongs among the classic recordings this cycle has received. In the notes
Kremer calls the Chaconne in D minor a "dance of life and death," and that is
what he plays: earthy accents on the beat in the opening recitation of
the theme, giving way to ever more ghostly, weightless, shivering sounds. The
recording was made at the Pfarrkirche in Lockenhaus, home of Kremer's
famous festival; you can almost smell the damp stone. (See Adam Baer for more.) Arvo Pärt's Lamentate,
also on ECM, finds the master of serenity in a severe, even
violent mood. I talked to Pärt around the time Lamentate was
conceived, in 2002, and, if the drift of our conversation was any guide, his
mind was on September 11th, which fell on his birthday. When I was at a Virgin Records last summer, this music came crashing over the loudspeakers on the pop floor, and everyone froze.
Andrew Manze,
the Gidon Kremer of early music, has made a hugely vibrant recording of
Mozart's 1781 violin sonatas,
with Richard Egarr on fortepiano. The riot of contrasting timbres right
at the start of K. 376, not only between violin and fortepiano but also
between the fortepiano's upper and lower registers, had me thinking for
a split second that Manze had done a crazy thing and transcribed the
sonatas for chamber ensemble. A rival Mozart disc by the brilliant Hilary Hahn
sounds drab by comparison. (Russell has more.) Boris Berezovsky delivers a barn-burning,
chicken-devouring rendition of the Chopin-Godowsky Etudes;
Chopin's originals and Godowsky's impossible transcriptions unfold side
by side, in a sequence of parallax views. John Eliot Gardiner's cycle
of Bach cantatas,
recorded live in churches across England and Europe in the year 2000,
goes from strength to strength. Volume 8 travels
from the seductive melancholy of "Komm, du süße Todesstunde" (Mark
Padmore singing "Mein Verlangen") to the muscular joy of "Jauchzet
Gott."
Michael Finnissy, a composer sometimes associated with the New
Complexity movement, goes his own way in Maldon
and companion choral pieces; in the title piece, riotous instrumental textures and extended
vocal techniques (unsettling high glissando trombones at the beginning) mix with dark slabs of ancient Anglo-Saxon chant. Throughout the album, old sounds (folksongs, ballads, chorales, chant) intersect with modern ones, in fabulously eerie and transfixing ways. Hats off to the
half-century-old Kyle Gann for brightening the planet
with his Studies for Disklavier.
I first encountered these pieces at the Sounds Like Now festival last year;
some ("Texarkana," "Despotic Waltz") draw Chaplinesque
comedy from the hyperkinetic action of the computerized piano, while
others summon clouds of Ivesian mystery ("Unquiet Night") or simply
make you happy ("Bud Ran Back Out"). Perhaps one day Berezovsky will
try to play them live. Finally, Gimell's reissue of classic Tallis
Scholars recordings of Iberian Requiems — works of Victoria, Lôbo, and Cardoso — has lately spent more time in my Denon than anything else. The Overgrown Path
concurs, saying that if you buy one CD this year it should be this. I
can't argue too strongly with that, although right now Gidon's Bach is
at the top of my forthcoming best-of list.