RECORDING REVIEW: J. S. Bach, F. Liszt, G. Bizet, G. Fauré, C. Debussy, & S. Rachmaninoff — Terrific Transcriptions — Trills and Thrills for Organ (Dr. David von Behren, organ and violin; David von Behren Music 2024)

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685 – 1750), FRANZ LISZT (1811 – 1886), GEORGES BIZET (1838 – 1875), GABRIEL FAURÉ (1845 – 1924), CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862 – 1918), and SERGEI RACHMANINOFF (1873 – 1943); Terrific Transcriptions — Trills and Thrills for Organ — Dr. David von Behren, organ and violin [Recorded in First-Plymouth Church, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA; David von Behren Music 2024; 1 CD, 57:32; Available from Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube Music, and major music retailers and streaming services]

When their tasks are performed with imagination and integrity, translators are often among Literature’s most accomplished—and in too many instances unheralded—artists. Though the writers commissioned by Britain’s King James I to translate the Bible into then-contemporary English distorted the meanings of numerous passages of the original texts and the earlier translations at their disposal, as did Saint Jerome when preparing his Latin translation in the Fourth Century, the King James Version is unquestionably a work of tremendous poetic refinement and literary merit in its own right. The same is true of Seamus Heaney’s, Rolf Fjelde’s, and Lydia Davis’s respective translations of Beowulf, Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Both true to their sources and representative of the insightfulness of their creators, the finest translations are works of art that stand not behind but alongside the masterworks of world literature.

The increased recognition and respect that are at last enjoyed by gifted translators and their work still too frequently elude musical transcriptions and the composers who create them. Despite—or perhaps owing in part to—the widespread popularity of works like Leopold Stokowski’s orchestral arrangements of organ music by Johann Sebastian Bach, transcriptions are seldom acclaimed with the enthusiasm that original pieces can induce. Transcriptions are present in some form in virtually every musical arena of life, echoing in cathedrals and enlivening television advertisements, yet they are denied the study devoted to other works. Thankfully, many important composers, ranging from Renaissance masters to celebrated artists of the Twenty-First Century, have rejected this scornful attitude of dismissing transcriptions as music of lesser value. Their embrace of the art of transcription is both shared and vindicated by David von Behren, a musical adventurer whose boundless interpretive intuition is propelled by extraordinary technical acumen. With Terrific Transcriptions, his traversal of a perspicaciously-selected assortment of ‘trills and thrills’ for organ, one of today’s foremost virtuosi elucidates the ingenuity of artful transcribing, exploring the work of brilliant transcribers and adding his own name to their company.

Playing the 1997 Schoenstein and Company Opus 126 organ of First-Plymouth Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, Dr. von Behren utilizes the complete panoply of the instrument’s aural capabilities to showcase the efficacy and immediacy with which the most complex orchestral and vocal effects can be replicated and even enhanced in transcriptions for organ. Michael Raleigh’s sonic engineering enables the organ’s pipes—numbering greater than five thousand—and the natural ambiance of the space in which they reside to soar, swell, and sigh rousingly, whether heard through headphones or speakers, providing a soundscape in which Dr. von Behren’s inventive registrations deftly engage the organ’s pistons and the listener’s emotions. The performance of the transcription of the G-minor Prelude (No. 5) from Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 23 by Gottfried H. Federlein (1883 – 1952) with which this recorded recital begins reveals Dr. von Behren’s affinity for illuminating pieces’ harmonic and sentimental intricacies. The power of his playing of the Prelude and its companions on Terrific Transcriptions is derived in no small part from an astonishing balance between grandeur and grace, the former giving each performance momentum and the latter shaping melodies with compelling expressive sincerity.

The fourteenth of his Opus 34 Romances, the Vocalise for high voice and piano is one of Rachmaninoff’s most familiar works, the appeal of its wordless melody enkindling many arrangements, including the composer’s own expansion of the piano accompaniment for orchestra. Here using a beautifully-conceived transcription by Patricia A Bird, Dr. von Behren phrases the Vocalise’s much-loved melodic line with a Lieder singer’s attention to light and shade. Without words, Rachmaninoff crafted a vivid narrative, the enduring affection for which arises from how moving a thoughtful singer’s performance of the Vocalise can be. Dr. von Behren fashions a firm but flexible foundation, honoring the undulating figurations of the version for piano and the broader textures of Rachmaninoff’s orchestral enlargement. From that sound world emerges a story told with eloquence that needs no text to communicate its universality.

Few composers in the Western canon wrote as marvelously for the organ as did Johann Sebastian Bach. Twenty-First-Century listeners are sometimes surprised by history’s assertion that it was primarily as an organist rather than as a composer that Bach was renowned during and immediately after his life, including by his children. It is not surprising, however, that Bach’s music for other instruments also proves to be well-suited to the organ. Dr. von Behren’s playing of a transcription by Harvey Grace (1874 – 1944) of the Sinfonia from Bach’s BWV 29 Cantata ‘Wir danken dir, Gott, wir danken dir,’ written in 1731 for a ceremony fêting a newly-inaugurated Leipzig city council, discloses the organ-friendly construction that serves as the core of much of Bach’s writing. The three trumpets and two oboes for which the Sinfonia was originally scored resound in the judicious management of stops, heightening the festive mood of the performance.

A violinist since the age of five, Dr. von Behren unites the violin with the organ in his transcriptions of two Bach pieces, his performances of which are characterized by hypnotic lyricism. Owing to Procol Harum and countless other acts, the Air from the D-major Orchestral Suite (BWV 1068) is little less ubiquitous in popular music than in Classical circles, but this arrangement and the performance that it receives exude spontaneity. The Air’s beloved melody and the principal theme of the Aria mit Choral ‘Ich steh mit einem Fuß im Grabe’ from Cantata BWV 156, composed for liturgical use on the third Sunday after Epiphany, are sculpted with unmistakable tenderness, Dr. von Behren playing the violin with unerring intonation, rhythmically-precise trills, and beauty of tone. In his transcriptions, the organ’s pedals are deployed as the ground bass, and Dr. von Behren’s simultaneous rendering of the part predictably yields perfect ensemble and organic pacing.

Though predating most of the works that secured the composer’s fame, Claude Debussy’s Deux arabesques (L. 66) prefigure the Impressionistic style that reached full maturity in the tone poems Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and La mer and the opera Pelléas et Mélisande. Transcribed for organ by Helmut Michael Brand (born 1959), Debussy’s diaphonous writing for the piano metamorphoses to the organ with ethereal sophistication, especially in the Andantino arabesque. Under Dr. von Behren’s touch, the triadic writing coruscates alluringly, each transition of mood conveyed with effervescent navigation of harmonic shifts. The second arabesque (Alegretto scherzando) is played with burgeoning fervor, the trills evocative of whirling ballerinas. The arabesques share early experimentation with pentatonic scales, advancing Debussy’s compositional language towards its eventual distinctive dialect. In these performances, these devices are interwoven into the arabesques’ meandering transpositions, accentuated without being given undue prominence.

Like Bach before him, Camille Saint-Saëns (1835 – 1921) owed much of his early fame to his work as an organist, being awarded the title of Chevalier of the Ordre royal de la Légion d’honneur in 1867 as much in recognition of his service as organist at the Madeleine as of his composing. As have many conscientious organists past and present, Saint-Saëns enriched his repertoire with trascriptions, some of them benefiting from his compositional genius. Written for solo piano in 1863, the first of Franz Liszt’s Deux légendes, ‘La prédication de Saint François d’Assise aux oiseaux’ (S.175/1), is a vivid depiction of the saint’s sermons to the birds, adapted to the organ by Saint-Saëns with wonderful vibrancy. Liszt incorporated many influences into the mode of writing for piano that he inherited from Chopin, combining these in this Légende into tone painting presaging the music of Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Erik Satie. Dr. von Behren’s performance of the Légende shimmers with an apt aura of mysticism, birdsong melding with the spirit of the saint’s message of faith and praise. Liszt’s music is rarely wholly innocent of unabashed showmanship, but the exhibitionist elements of the Légende are assimilated in this performance into a heartfelt portrait of perhaps the best-known episode in the hagiography of Saint Francis.

Liszt’s Ave Maria d’Arcadelt (S. 183/2), published alongside an Alleluia in 1862, is an arrangement of Louis Dietsch’s 1842 adaptation of a Sixteenth-Century chanson by Jacques Arxadelt, deceptively publicized by Dietsch as a rediscovered work wholly by Arcadelt. The transcription for organ played by Dr. von Behren is Liszt’s own, and, as in his playing of the Légende, the organist proves to be a superb exponent of the composer’s work. The music’s considerable demands are met with absolute assurance, but Dr. von Behren also conquers aspects of Liszt’s writing that are too often neglected, of which none is more consequential than its emotional directness. This Ave Maria is not a work of doctrinal profundity in a religious sense, but Dr. von Behren finds in its juxtaposition of concert hall and confessional a vein of reverent serenity.

From the time of its publication in 1878 as one of the Opus 7 Troia mélodies, Gabriel Fauré’s ‘Après un rêve’ has been a cornerstone of the Art Song repertory, many crimes against the French language having been perpetrated in response to the song’s memorable melody and audiences’ desire to hear it. The organ transcription by Édouard Nies-Berger (1903 – 2002) preseeves the mélodie’s charm and engenders an atmosphere of romantic ardor that blossoms in Dr. von Behren’s playing. Each of the pieces on Terrific Transcriptions is performed with keen focus on its unique artistic context, and the perceptiveness evinced by the realization of the animas of the mélodie’s line ‘Tu rayonnais comme un ciel éclairé par l’aurore’ is awe-inspiring. Dr. von Behren offers a lesson in subtlety and elegance from which any chanteur could learn.

Perpetual repetition has not increased the veracity of the tale of the unmitigated failure of his opera Carmen at its première at the Opera-Comique in 1875 having precipitated Georges Bizet’s early death three months later. The ambivalent reception that the opera elicited from the Parisian musical establishment undoubtedly exacerbated the illness that ended Bizet’s life, but the rapidity of Carmen’s infiltration of the international repertory is evidence of the enchantment of the score and its spirited heroine. Playing a transcription by Edwin H. Lemare (1865 – 1934), Dr. von Behren conjures the frisson of the opera house from the opening strains of the Carmen Fantasy. The vitality of the opera’s Prélude veritably erupts from the organ, the chimes seeming to clang through the streets of Sevilla. Seductiveness is a quality that is not often associated with the organ, but Dr. von Behren plays the lilting subject of the sultry Havanaise with a beguiling essence of Carmen’s charisma. The contrast between the pensive Act One duet for Micaëla and Don José, ‘Parle-moi de ma mère,’ and Escamillo's chanson de toréador is all the greater for being unexaggerated, the music given the freedom to work its magic without histrionic excess. As in the opera’s final act, the concluding sequence of the Fantasy transports the hearer to the bustling plaza de toros, but this performance ends not with confrontation and death but with jubilation and a pulse-quickening showcase of all that an organ can do when a great artist is at the console.

Translating a literary work presents many challenges, none of which is greater than assessing the ratios of literal to conceptual renderings that the source materials require. Similar choices complicate the transcribing of music intended for specific instrumental complements for performances by other instruments. With the persuasive advocacy of his playing, Dr. von Behren affirms that the selections in this recital are indeed terrific transcriptions, his translations of written notes into sounds that captivate, cajole, and comfort transcending all musical and linguistic barriers.

PERFORMANCE REVIEW: W. A. Mozart, F. Schubert, F. Mendelssohn, G. Fauré, C. Debussy, M. Ravel, & J. Kosma — Dans un bois solitaire (Anna Reinhold, mezzo-soprano; Jory Vinikour, piano; 28 Chairs, Asheville, North Carolina, 29 May 2024)

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756 – 1791), FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797 – 1828), FELIX MENDENSSOHN (1809 – 1847), GABRIEL FAURÉ (1845 – 1924), CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862 – 1918), MAURICE RAVEL (1875 – 1937), and JOSEPH KOSMA (1905 – 1969): Dans un bois solitaire: an Evening of German Lieder and French chansons — Anna Reinhold, mezzo-soprano; Jory Vinikour, piano [28 Chairs, Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Asheville, Asheville, North Carolina, USA; Wednesday, 29 May 2024]

Though the concept of the Liederabend evokes the years in the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century during which Franz Schubert and his friends enchanted their fellow denizens of Habsburg Vienna with informal performances of the composer’s songs, it is likely that people have gathered to hear musicians communicate through singing since it was first discerned that melodies, harmonies, and rhythms elucidate the meanings of words with universal immediacy that speech often lacks. The most eloquent orator could not meld music and words as mesmerizingly and memorably as Anna Reinhold and Jory Vinikour interwove them in the inaugural presentation of their recital programme Dans un bois solitaire, presented in the beautiful space and bright acoustic of Asheville’s Unitarian Universalist Congregation in advance of performances in Virginia and New York. Voice and piano intertwined as though wielded by a single artist, baring the soul of song.

Founded by Asheville native Jessica Honigberg with the mission of enriching communities with ‘beautiful little concerts,’ 28 Chairs brought Dans un bois solitaire to the Blue Ridge, an apt setting for the programme’s emphasis on parallels between human emotions and natural landscapes and phenomena. Presently based principally in the District of Columbia, future 28 Cha​irs seasons will be centered in Asheville, furthering the organization’s commitment to introducing appreciative audiences to world-class artists and performances. Neither a more welcoming location than Asheville’s UUC nor a more attentive company of listeners than those who assembled therein could have witnessed the birth of an enchanting programme and an uncommonly fruitful artistic partnership.

Composed during Mozart’s time in Mannheim in 1777 and 1778 and dedicated to the soprano Elisabeth Auguste Wendling, daughter of the celebrated flautist for whom Mozart composed several of his best-known works for flute, the ariette ‘Dans un bois solitaire et sombre’ (K. 308/295b) is a setting of an atmospheric text by Antoine Houdar de La Motte upon which Mozart lavished the full panoply of his resources as a musical dramatist. Complementing the unwavering energy and rhythmic vitality of Vinikour’s playing, his approach to the music alert to its propulsive treatment of the words, Reinhold transformed the piece's vocal line into an emotional journey of operatic intensity, establishing the piece as an ancestor of Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung. Similar dramatic focus through the voice provided the frame in which the mezzo-soprano animated ‘Als Luise die Briefe ihres ungetreuen Liebhabers verbrannte’ (K. 520), a Lied dating from May 1787 that was fraudulently circulated after Mozart’s death as the work of another composer. As Mozart’s widow Constanze did in 1799, Reinhold and Vinikour reclaimed the song for the Mozart canon, their performance illuminating the genius of its construction.

Products of a period of inspired industriousness typical of Mozart’s time in Vienna in the summer of 1787, ‘An Chloë’ (K. 524) and ‘Abendempfindung’ (K.523) date from the period during which much of the composer’s energy was devoted to completing and preparing the score of Don Giovanni. It can be argued that shadows of Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, and Zerlina can be perceived in these Lieder. Vinikour’s experience with playing continuo in performances of Mozart’s operas lent his playing of these Lieder special distinction, the modern instrument seeming to assume the sonic palette of a period fortepiano. The texts of both songs were delivered by Reinhold with suavity and evanescent ambiguity, the amalgamation of wit and wistfulness drawn from rather than imposed upon the music. Infrequent lapses in intonational purity in the middle of the voice, here and in other selections, were offset by consistent, flawless placement of tones at the top of the stave.

As the Mozart songs in the recital indicated, the German Lied did not originate with Franz Schubert, but few musicisns or musicologists would be likely to contradict the assertion that it was Schubert’s work that elevated Lieder from humble beginnings to often being esteemed as the greatest tests of singers’ artistry. Setting a poem by his friend Franz von Schober, Schubert produced one of the enduring masterworks of the song repertory with his 1817 Lied ‘An die Musik’ (D.547). It is logical to expect a composer to endeavour to give of his best when writing a paean to music, but, their great promise notwithstanding, a performance of ‘An die Musik’ of the radiant serenity achieved by Reinhold and Vinikour is ever a thing of spontaneity that cannot be foretold. 'Die Forelle' (D.550) is unquestionably also one of Schubert's most popular Lieder. That popularity sometimes engenders complacency, deceiving performers with a false impression that the song will succeed even when badly done. In the performance in this recital, Schubert’s splendid riparian piano writing and Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart’s words were articulated with extraordinary verve and inviolable musicality.

Vinikour played the first of two solo pieces, the opening Andante con moto Lied of Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 19b Lieder ohne Worte, with poetic fervor ideally suited to the music’s Romantic zeal. Deftly navigating Mendelssohn’s dense but diaphonous writing, Vinikour devoted particular delicacy to his renderings of the Lied’s integral echo-like repetitions of simple descending figurations, touchingly suggesting pensive hesitation or resigned regret. The richness of Mendelssohn’s harmonic language, presaging Schumann, Brahms, and Mahler, was fully realized, but the Classical poise of the Lied's melodic line was always apparent. Exhibiting intuitive handling of the instrument that is not present in the pianism of some harpsichordists, Vinikour neither abused nor neglected the pedals, employing sostenuto sparingly but with finely-judged interpretive impact.

Even among native speakers, French diction of the clarity and responsiveness to verbal and emotional nuances of text demonstrated in Reinhold’s singing of the Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel chansons included in Dans un bois solitaire is uncommon. The expressive efficacy of Reinhold’s interpretations was therefore no less exhilarating than her musicianship, both in the French selections and in the Mozart and Schubert settings of German texts. The text of the opening song in the set of three published as Fauré’s Opus 23, ‘Les berceaux,’ can seem vaguely chauvinistic to Twenty-First-Century listeners, but the expressive honesty with which Reinhold sang the melodic line imparted the abiding humanity of Fauré’s handling of the words. The very different ‘Mandoline’ from the Opus 58 Cinq mélodies de Venise was sung with equal attention to the subtleties of its text and musical details, the voice floating atop Vinikour’s gossamer pianism.

First performed in 1900 by soprano Blanche Marot, with the composer at the piano, Claude Debussy’s Trois chansons de Bilitis (L.90) simmer with the latent eroticism of their words, the sensual subtexts of which are limned in music of chameleonic shades. The prevailing mood of each song rises from the writing for piano, executed in this performance with imaginative elasticity of approach. Vinikour’s rhythmic drive gave Reinhold a strong pulse over which she breathed life into ‘La flûte de Pan.’ The collaborative synchronicity of their performance of ‘La chevelure’ highlighted the sly sybaritism of Debussy’s coupling of music and text. An understated but pervasive starkness palpitated in ‘Le tombeau des naïades,’ Reinhold projecting an arresting vocal hollowness that evinced the song’s bleak sepulchral setting.

Vinikour’s second solo selection was the Sarabande from Claude Debussy’s suite Pour le piano, completed in 1901 and later orchestrated by Maurice Ravel. Observing Debussy’s instruction that the piece be played ‘avec une élégance grave et lente’ with unwavering fidelity, Vinikour reminded the Asheville audirnce of his renowned prowess in French Baroque music. The modernism of Debussy’s musical language in this Sarabande contains accents learned from Lully, the Couperins, and Rameau, composers whose works feature prominently in Vinikour’s repertoire as a harpsichordist. In his hands, this was an authentic sarabande but one with no pretense of ‘period’ quaintness.

As their title suggests, Maurice Ravel’s Cinq mélodies populaires grecques are arrangements of folk songs from the island of Chios, for which Ravel matched the traditional melodies with original piano accompaniments. Ravel’s Basque heritage perhaps heightened his propensity for musical exoticism, and the inventiveness of his settings intimates that these Greek songs appealed to his harmonic curiosity. Reinhold and Vinikour suffused their account of ‘Chanson de la mariée’ with an air of amorous discovery, the lascivious undertones of the words treated with sly humor. An attitude of solemnity permeated ‘Là-bas, vers l’église,’ Vinikour’s playing adopting hymn-like sobriety. The sequence of ‘Quel galant m’est comparable,’ ‘Chanson des cueilleuses de lentisques,’ and ‘Tout gai!’ was a musical journey upon which Reinhold and Vinikour guided the audience through a kaleidoscopic array of emotions, each of which was differentiated by the singer’s vocal inflections. Like Debussy, Ravel gleaned much about musical form from his Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century forebears, and every ‘antique’ element gained novelty from Vinikour’s expertise.

Made famous by the actress Juliette Gréco, Joseph Kosma’s and Jacques Prévert’s standard ‘Et puis après’ exuberantly codified the artistic credo exemplified by Reinhold, Vinikour, 28 Chairs, and Dans un bois solitaire. ‘Nous sommes comme nous sommes,’ their encore declared with irreproachable musical integrity and genuine mirth, ‘et nous sommes maîtres de la chanson—dans un bois solitaire, ou dans les plus célèbres salles de récital du monde!’