BEST OPERA RECORDING OF 2015 — Christoph Willibald Gluck: IPHIGÉNIE EN TAURIDE (C. Hulcup, G. Doyle, C. Saunders, C. Richardson, M. Plummer, N. Dinopoulos; Pinchgut LIVE PG006)

CHRISTOPH WILLIBALD GLUCK (1714 – 1787): Iphigénie en Tauride—Caitlin Hulcup (Iphigénie), Grant Doyle (Oreste), Christopher Saunders (Pylade), Christopher Richardson (Thoas), Margaret Plummer (Une prêtresse, Une grecque, Diane), Nicholas Dinopoulos (Un scythe, Un ministre du sanctuaire); Cantillation; Orchestra of the Antipodes; Erin Helyard, Associate Conductor and harpsichord; Antony Walker, Conductor [Recorded ‘live’ during performances by Pinchgut Opera in City Recital Hall, Angel Place, Sydney, Australia, on 3, 5, 7, and 9 December 2014; Pinchgut LIVE PG006; 2 CDs, 111:01; Available from Pinchgut Opera and major music retailers]

When Iphigénie en Tauride premièred at Paris’s Salle du Palais-Royal on 18 May 1779, the sixty-four-year-old Christoph Willibald Gluck was at the end of his three-decade career as a composer of opera. His final opera, Iphigénie en Tauride is in many ways the culmination of the refashioning of opera seria that Gluck initiated with his 1762 Orfeo ed Euridice and continued in Alceste, Armide, and Iphigénie en Aulide. In the second of his Iphigenia operas, Gluck viscerally explores a multitude of emotions, none of which overstays its welcome: there is not in the score of Iphigénie en Tauride one superfluous or dramatically insignificant note. Performances of Gluck’s ‘reform’ operas have traditionally approached the music either from the perspective of the Baroque models of Lully and Rameau or from that of later exemplars of similar serious opera like Cherubini, Beethoven, and Weber. It is true both that without Thésée and Dardanus there may never have been an Iphigénie en Tauride and that without Gluck’s opera there may have been no Médée, Fidelio, or Der Freischütz, but Gluck’s music is to a marked degree sui generis. By Eighteenth-Century standards, Gluck’s was a long life, and his first operas were written when Händel remained active as a composer of opera and his last when Mozart’s Idomeneo was only two years in future. Among his contemporaries, Gluck’s operatic skill set was unique: Hasse’s style was more gallant, Haydn’s operas were less harmonically progressive, Mysliveček’s vocal lines were more instrumental in nature, Salieri’s idiom was more cosmopolitan, and Mozart’s operas even in his youth were less stylized. Whether Gluck was successful in his aim to return to opera a measure of its histrionic inheritance from Greek drama can be debated by pedagogues, but hearing Pinchgut LIVE's new recording of Iphigénie en Tauride, a souvenir of Pinchgut Opera's acclaimed December 2014 production of the opera, leaves no questions about the musical and theatrical efficacy of Gluck's last opera unanswered.

There are many examples of shared guidance of an Arts institution engendering more tribulations than triumphs, but Pinchgut Opera’s productions are superb evidence of what can be achieved when like-minded advocates for opera combine their respective strengths. Guided by Antony Walker, who conducted this production of Iphigénie en Tauride, and Erin Helyard, who served as Associate Conductor and provided the quicksilver harpsichord continuo, Pinchgut’s endeavors benefit from the collaboration of two first-rate musical minds. Walker’s stylish, spirited pacing of a wide repertory has been showcased in opera houses and concert halls throughout the world, and this recording confirms that his command of Gluck’s music is no less noteworthy than his mastery of Nineteenth-Century opera. Under Walker’s direction, the playing of Pinchgut Opera’s resident period-instrument ensemble, Orchestra of the Antipodes, is as red-blooded and large-scaled as Gluck’s score requires. This is not historically-informed playing of the dainty, quills-and-catgut variety. The sounds produced by Orchestra of the Antipodes fabricate a credible recreation of music first performed in 1779 but also enable the listener to appreciate the noble grandeur that so engaged the imaginations of Berlioz and Wagner. The taut construction of Gluck’s score notwithstanding, Iphigénie en Tauride can be surprisingly dull in performance and on disc, but Walker paces the performance that plays out on this recording with unflagging energy and momentum. The elocutions of the ‘Calme’ and ‘Tempète’ of the opera's orchestral introduction are revealing: Walker accentuates the contrast by closely following Gluck's instructions. Walker’s fidelity to the score is admirable, not least for the extent to which adhering to the mandates of the music—and those of Nicolas-François Guillard’s libretto—sharpens the focus of the drama. The continuity of the performance that Walker paces makes it virtually impossible to believe that some of Iphigénie’s most memorable pages are borrowed from other Gluck scores, including the opening scene (sourced from the not-unjustly-neglected L’île de Merlin) and Iphigénie’s impactful ‘Ô malheureuse Iphigénie’ (adapted from an aria in La clemenza di Tito). This is a testament both to Gluck’s talent for molding coherent music dramas and to Walker’s intelligent handling of the music. The alert, ingratiating playing of Orchestra of the Antipodes is complemented by the singing of Cantillation. Throughout the performance, the choristers sing with excellent intonation and precisely the dramatic profile required by each scene. The chorus is of great importance in all of Gluck's ‘reform’ operas but perhaps more so in Iphigénie en Tauride than any other. Responding to Walker’s intuitive management of tempi, Cantillation's singers provide uncommonly well-integrated accounts of Gluck's choruses, thrilling and touching in turns. In many performances of Iphigénie en Tauride, the soloists are betrayed by poor conducting, orchestral playing, or choral singing: in Pinchgut Opera's recording, the efforts of Walker, Helyard, Orchestra of the Antipodes, and Cantillation are vital components of the performance's tremendous success.

Observers who have very publicly caviled at the increasingly ‘international’ casting of English National Opera productions should consider shifting their loyalties to Pinchgut Opera, where there is a firm dedication to casting singers from Australia and Oceania. Furthermore, Pinchgut’s ongoing commitment to recording their productions enables listeners beyond Australia to hear singers whose work is not yet as known internationally as it deserves to be. For their production of Iphigénie en Tauride, Pinchgut assembled an ensemble of Australian singers whose fluency in Gluck’s musical language is impeccable. Portraying both an unnamed Scythe and the Ministre du sanctuaire, bass-baritone Nicholas Dinopoulos—an Oreste in the making—sings handsomely and powerfully, the authority of his voicing of the latter part’s ‘Étrangers malheureux, il faut vous séparer’ markedly increasing the menace of the scene in Act Two in which he appears. His music in Iphigénie en Tauride is neither demanding nor extensive in comparison with other works in his repertoire, but Dinopoulos is a singer whose attractive, assured vocalism and unaffected acting are always noticed. This is also true of mezzo-soprano Margaret Plummer, whose firm, focused tones are heard with pleasure in Gluck’s music for the Prêtresse and the anonymous Grecque. It is as Iphigénie’s deus ex machine Diane that Plummer is most memorable, however. The resonant, aptly unanswerable beauty with which she delivers Diane’s ‘Arrêtez! écoutez mes décrets éternels’ in Act Three is indeed divine. Like Dinopoulos, Plummer is a singer who leaves her mark on a performance and one ready to assume her place as one of opera’s finest leading ladies.

The Scythian King Thoas is sung with villainous glee and robust, rock-solid tone by bass-baritone Christopher Richardson. In Act One, the singer introduces himself with a burly voicing of ‘Dieux! le malheur en tous lieux suit mes pas,’ and he proceeds to sing the Andante ‘De noirs pressentiments mon âme intimidée’ with laudable flair, the repeated top F♯s and Gs seeming to trouble him very little. Not heard again until Act Four, Richardson returns with a ringing account of ‘De tes forfaits la trame est découverte,’ his aggressive but debonair vocalism bringing the cruel, complicated Thoas to unexpectedly sympathetic life.

The career of Central Queensland native tenor Christopher Saunders is a narrative of hardship, resilience, and recovery. Injured in an automobile accident whilst en route to hospital to receive a diagnosis of Bell's Palsy, Saunders is a musical phoenix who rebuilt not only his voice but also his confidence. Singing the rôle of Oreste’s cousin, friend, and comrade-in-arms Pylade in Pinchgut’s Iphigénie en Tauride, he veritably defines what is possible through perseverance. One cannot rebuild the Taj Mahal with Lego bricks, however, and Saunders’s valiant efforts would have achieved nothing had there not been top-quality vocal material with which to work. Pylade was written for and first performed by the celebrated French haute-contre Joseph Legros, whose upper register extended at least to E♭5, and was interpreted in an 1821 revival of the opera by Adolphe Nourrit, renowned for his singing of stratospheric music composed for him by Rossini. Gluck’s demands on Pylade are more modest, but the rôle is a trove of deceptive lyricism. Saunders sings Pylade’s Act One recitative ‘Notre projet est un mystère’ with elegance, the distinctive nasal vowels of the French text suiting the constitution of Saunders’s voice. Pylade’s lovely Cantabile con moto ‘Unis dès la plus tendre enfance’ in Act Two is one of the finest portions of Saunders’s performance, the top As lightly touched in a manner redolent of the voix mixte known to have been employed by hautes-contre of the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries. Saunders does not wholly avoid strain in the upper register, but the moments of stress legitimize the tenor’s deeply-felt depiction of Pylade’s misfortunes. In the Act Three trio with Iphigénie and Oreste, Saunders sings passionately, and his articulation of the recitative ‘Ô moment trop heureux!’ exudes sincerity. His thoughtful ‘Dieux! fléchissez son cœur’ with Oreste is a heart-rending statement of a friend’s anguish that is seconded by an affecting performance of the Allegro espressivo ‘Ah! mon ami, j'implore ta pitié.’ Saunders phrases ‘Divinité des grandes âmes’ with dignity, and his voice audibly brightens in Act Four when Pylade learns that Oreste has been reunited with his sister and saved from sacrifice. There is no doubt that Saunders infuses his singing with emotions channeled from his own personal experiences and is all the more persuasive an artist for it. In this Iphigénie en Tauride, he is a marvelously direct, moving Pylade who sings plangently even when under duress.

From the first bar of his recitative ‘Ô mon ami, c'est moi qui cause ton trépas!’ in Act One, Adelaide-born baritone Grant Doyle portrays an Oreste of integrity and vulnerability. Even before being condemned to slaughter upon his landing on Taurisé’s inhospitable shores, Oreste’s lot has been one of tragedy and misadventure: partly in retribution for his having been complicit in the alleged sacrifice of their daughter Iphigénie [she was, in fact, rescued by Diana and installed in the goddess’s temple on Tauris], Oreste’s mother Clytaemnestra murdered his father Agamemnon and was subsequently murdered herself by Oreste as vengeance for his father. Matricide having been frowned upon even in the bloody world of Euripides, Oreste has been tormented by the Furies, finding solace only in the company of the loyal Pylade. The weight of Oreste’s torment resounds in Doyle’s athletic singing of the Allegro ‘Dieux qui me poursuivez, Dieux, auteurs de mes crimes’ in Act Two, and he declaims the recitative ‘Dieux protecteurs de ces affreux rivages’ with unstinting strength. In fact, Doyle’s emphatic, rousingly masculine vocalism occasionally overwhelms the music, his Oreste therefore sounding more haranguing than heroic. The innovative Andante ‘Le calme rentre dans mon cœur’ is essentially a mad scene in which Oreste is mercilessly hounded by the Furies, and Doyle responds with a performance in which the character’s mental state is uncertain but the singer’s assurance is unflappable. There is tenderness in the baritone’s singing of Oreste’s lines in the Act Three trio with Iphigénie and Pylade, as well as in his ruggedly affectionate ‘Dieux! fléchissez son cœur’ with Pylade. Doyle’s brusque enunciation of the Lento ‘Quoi? toujours à mes vœux vous êtes insensible,’ though vocally impressive, reduces the emotional effect of the number. In Act Four, however, Doyle’s performance is ideal, musically and dramatically. He sings the Larghetto ‘Que ces regrets touchants pour mon cœur ont de charmes!’ with suavity and easy command of the tessitura, but it is his refined treatment of the Moderato cantabile ‘Partage mon bonheur’ that is the apex of Doyle’s performance. Oreste’s destiny ameliorates at last, and the character’s relief permeates the baritone’s singing. Doyle is a captivating actor, but, above all, it is very gratifying to hear a voice of true substance in one of Gluck’s most significant baritone rôles.

In the six decades since the first recording of the opera was released, the title rôle in Iphigénie en Tauride has fared well before microphones, both in studio and on stage. Important singers who have donned Iphigénie’s sacred robes include Patricia Neway, Maria Callas, Hilde Zadek, Sena Jurinac, Régine Crespin, Marilyn Horne, Diana Montague, and Christine Goerke, an eclectic society of singing actresses with little more in common than having sung Iphigénie. Though she memorably recorded Iphigénie’s ‘Non, cet affreux devoir,’ the absence of Dame Janet Baker’s name from the ranks of Iphigénies on disc is surprising. Without question, Baker was the most celebrated Gluck interpreter of her generation, and it is Baker whose vocal prowess and acumen as an actress that mezzo-soprano Caitlin Hulcup’s singing of Iphigénie in this performance often recalls. Accomplished in a repertory spanning multiple centuries of musical invention, Hulcup finds in Gluck’s long-suffering Iphigénie a rôle that might have been written with her individual gifts in mind. Like Baker, she grants music and text equal importance, maximizing the communicative capacities of Iphigénie’s strenuous vocal lines. The unimpeachable security of her repeated ascents to G at the top of the stave in ‘Grands Dieux! soyez-nous secourables’ in Act One illustrates the level of excellence that Hulcup achieves in this music. Her ‘Ô race de Pélops! race toujours fatale!’ is fiery but sophisticated, Iphigénie’s aristocratic demeanor always apparent. The air ‘Ô toi, qui prolongeas mes jours’ is marked by Gluck as très doux, and this perfectly describes Hulcup’s singing, as well. With pitch tuned to A = 430 Hz, a reasonable representation of tuning in Paris in 1779 [a law passed eighty years later standardized pitch in France at A = 435 Hz] and approximately a quarter-tone lower than modern concert pitch, the top As are not altogether comfortable for Hulcup, but she turns occasional hints of overextension to her advantage. The mezzo-soprano’s portrayal of the troubled Iphigénie gains further dimension in Act Two, not least with her subtle singing of the recitative ‘Je vois toute l'horreur que ma présence vous inspire’ and her penetrating ‘Ô Ciel! de mes tourments la cause et le témoin.’ The Classical poise of her voicing of the pained Cantabile con espressione ‘Ô malheueurse Iphigénie’ is a credit to herself and to Gluck, the top As taxing her vocal resources but compellingly conveying the character’s despair and desperation. The recitative ‘Je cède à vos désirs’ and Larghetto cantabile air ‘D'une image, hélas! trop chérie’ in Act Three are delivered with abundant tonal beauty, and Hulcup reaches dizzying heights of tragic expression in the trio with Oreste and Pylade. Her performance of ‘Je pourrais du tyran tromper la barbarie’ alone qualifies her as world-class Iphigénie, but she crowns her interpretation with particularly fine, fearless sing in Act Four. The top As in the recitative ‘Non, cet affreux devoir je ne puis le remplir’ display increased freedom, and she suffuses ‘Ah! laissons là ce souvenir funeste’ with sounds befitting the daughter of a royal house. Not long after singing Iphigénie in Sydney, Hulcup expanded her Gluckian résumé with a much-appreciated portrayal of the titular troubadour in Orfeo ed Euridice for Scottish Opera. Singers with special affinities for Gluck’s music are rare, but even among their sparse company Hulcup is exceptional. A worthy rival to Callas, Jurinac, and Goerke, hers is as well-sung an Iphigénie as has been heard in the modern age.

Expectations are always high when Pinchgut Opera launches a new season. [The 2016 Pinchgut schedule offers the inspired pairing of Haydn’s Armida and Händel’s Theodora.] What sets Pinchgut Opera apart from most of the world’s opera companies is the consistency with which their productions meet and exceed those lofty expectations. Perhaps the land of kangaroos and koalas is not the first locale that comes to mind in contemplation of settings for performances of his ‘reform’ operas that fully realize Gluck’s musical and theatrical goals. It should be. With splendid performances all round, this Iphigénie en Tauride establishes Pinchgut Opera as Gluck’s Bayreuth.

PERFORMANCE REVIEW: Recital by pianist VALENTINA LISITSA (Baldwin Auditorium, Duke University, 11 December 2015)

ALEXANDER NIKOLAYEVICH SCRIABIN (1872 – 1915): Préludes, Op. 11, Nos. 2, 4, 5, 10, 14 – 16, 20; Prélude, Op. 22, No. 1; Prélude, Op. 27, No. 1; Prélude, Op. 35, No. 2; Poème, Op. 41; Danse, Op. 73, No. 2 Flammes sombres; Polonaise, Op. 21; Poème tragique, Op. 34; and Poème satanique, Op. 36 and FRÉDÉRIC FRANÇOIS CHOPIN (1810 – 1849): Scherzo No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 31 and 24 Études for Piano, Opp. 10 and 25 – Valentina Lisitsa, piano [Duke Performances, Baldwin Auditorium, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA; Friday, 11 December 2015]

There is a cherished aphorism that suggests that the road leading musicians to the stage of Carnegie Hall is paved with ‘practice, practice, practice.’ Were Carnegie Hall the nexus of a musical Utopia, this would perhaps be the end of the story: those musicians whose talent and perseverance achieve the perfect equilibrium that cannot be taught in any conservatory would assume the places that they deserve in the firmament of artistic luminaries, and all would be right with the world. This, alas, is anything but a world in which all is right, no Utopia in which the deserving are rewarded without fail. This is a world in which extraordinarily gifted artists struggle in obscurity while the recognition their endeavors merit is enjoyed by pretenders whose artistry is in marketing, not music. ​Even in the realm of Classical Music, where musicians’ abilities to play pieces ought to be far more significant than how they look whilst plying their trade, success is too often gauged not by the quality of a performance but by how many people ‘tweet’ about it. Regrettably, concert-going can be a dishearteningly disappointing experience, especially for young people launching their maiden voyages into ‘serious’ music: what could be more discouraging than finding that admired performers are mere shadows of their punctiliously-promoted reputations? What sustains Classical Music in the dystopian reality of the Twenty-First Century are those glorious instances in which celebrated musicians exceed the expectations engendered by the ballyhoo that heralds them. The Duke Performances Piano Recital series at Duke University provided its audience with such an instance with a recital in Baldwin Auditorium by internationally-acclaimed pianist Valentina Lisitsa. Artists are often mercurial creatures, and the social media maelstroms of which she is a consummate mistress have whirled with commentary on the pianist's political candor, particularly on the topic of the unrest in her native Ukraine. After establishing her credentials as a collaborative artist with a stint as accompanist for Virginia-born violinist Hilary Hahn, it was via a series of widely-viewed YouTube videos—many of them recorded in her adopted home base of New Bern, North Carolina, incidentally—that Lisitsa, a devotee of the piano since the age of three, promulgated evidence of her musical gifts on a global scale. In Durham, she eviscerated any doubts about her ability to match in the concert hall her tantalizing panache before cameras and studio microphones with thoughtfully-planned, luminously-delivered performances of music by Alexdander Scriabin and Frédéric Chopin. Recitals by the greatest pianists can be tedious, but Lisitsa's playing captured the audience's attention from the first note and retained it until she triumphantly bade the enthusiastic throng goodnight.

With a series of acclaimed DECCA recordings to her credit, Lisitsa is among the few pianists in recent memory to have devoted a significant expenditure of creative energy to studying and playing Scriabin’s piano music. Her most recent disc, Nuances [reviewed here], offered a compelling survey of music from virtually the entire span of Scriabin’s compositional career, and her playing of his music in Baldwin Auditorium further confirmed that she is a Scriabin interpreter of the caliber of Vladimir Sofronitsky, the composer’s son-in-law. Though born not in Moscow but in Kiev, Lisitsa seems to share artistic DNA with the Muscovite composer, her interpretations of his music for piano exhibiting the authority of Artur Schnabel's playing of Beethoven and Alicia de Larrocha's handling of Mozart repertory. Like the sequence of works on Nuances, the selections for the portion of her Duke recital dedicated to Scriabin's music displayed an appreciable savvy for using pieces from all phases of Scriabin's career to cogently illustrate the progressive development of his distinctive style.

Opening with the Prelude in B Major (Opus 2, No. 2), the pianist’s traversal of music by Scriabin was remarkable for the range of hues that she coaxed from the instrument. Her technique is well-suited to Scriabin’s style, the great flexibility of her wrists and ease in managing intervals of an octave and greater enabling her to illuminate the expressivity of even the most fatiguing passages. Throughout the recital, her use of the pedals was exemplary: her ability to sustain a single tone whilst applying and releasing the pedals engendered feats of phrasing for which Scriabin surely hoped but must have thought all but impossible. The eight Préludes drawn from the twenty-four that comprise Scriabin’s Opus 11 were chosen with an obvious grasp of their compatibility. As Lisitsa played them, the transitions among individual Préludes were as smooth as those among movements of a sonata. With Nos. 2 in A minor, 4 in E minor, 14 in E-flat minor, 15 in D-flat minor, 16 in B-flat minor, and 20 in C minor, minor keys dominated, but Lisitsa’s playing was wholly free from heaviness. The variety of her accounts of the Préludes was facilitated by far more than different key signatures and tempi: she was a bard telling timeless stories, not just a pianist producing notes. The powerful Préludes Nos. 5 in D Major and 10 in C-sharp Major were conquered, not merely played. Here and in the three subsequent Préludes, the G-sharp minor from Quatre Préludes (Opus 22, No. 1), the G minor from Deux Préludes (Opus 27, No. 1), and the D-flat Major from Trois Préludes (Opus 35, No. 2), Lisitsa built and released anxiety in the music with uncanny dramatic instincts. Under her touch, the major-key Préludes were not without murky shadows, and the numbers in minor keys benefited from glimpses of wry humor.

Scriabin’s Opus 41 Poème is an interlude of marked emotional directness, and Lisitsa dove into its depths without losing sight of the surface, the glow of sunlight never succumbing to the extinguishing abyss. Her performance of Flammes sombres, the second of the Opus 73 Deux Danses, sizzled with ardor, the relative sobriety of the music sharpening the sting of her uninhibited playing. The Polonaise (Opus 21) is, like its cousin in Act Three of Tchaikovsky’s Yevgeny Onegin, a vital fusion of Polish form with Russian spirit. It was impossible to overlook these traits in Lisitsa’s performance. She ended the first half of the recital with Poème tragique (Opus 34) and Poème satanique (Opus 36), two of Scriabin’s most unique works, and both were fired into the auditorium like meteorites. The ‘tragic’ trajectory of the Opus 34 Poème was traced with imagination and boldly expansive phrasing. The interpretive significance of every virtuosic flourish was carefully examined and integrated into Lisitsa’s approach to the music. No one in Baldwin Auditorium ‘went down to Georgia’ during Friday evening’s performance of Poème satanique, but Charlie Daniels would have been most pleased by Lisitsa’s fearless, ferociously inflammatory playing of Scriabin’s diabolical music.

Like most composers of music for piano whose careers began in the second half of the Nineteenth Century, Scriabin was strongly influenced by the work of Frédéric Chopin. Not an artist who is content to accept—or ask her audiences to accept—conventional wisdom without meticulously evaluating the solidity of its foundations, Lisitsa delved into a sonorous explication of the kinship between the Polish composer’s music and the work of his Russian successor by employing for the second half of her Duke recital a programme of pieces by Chopin. In its unabashed Romanticism, her playing of the physically frail but emotionally flamboyant composer’s music recalled the Chopin interpretations of Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz, the latter having also been a champion of Scriabin’s music, but the full-bodied delicacy with which she emphasized the bel canto melodic lines, sometimes seeming to transform the Steinway before her into a turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Bösendorfer, brought to mind Ingrid Haebler’s little-remembered but sublime Chopin interpretations. Unfortunately, Lisitsa was compelled to share the second half of her recital with the conversational obbligato of a gentleman—seated at the front, as such gentlemen invariably are—who seemed physiologically incapable of silence. Such was Lisitsa’s preparation that, though she played from memory, her concentration was never disturbed. The intensity with which she phrased Chopin’s barnstorming Scherzo No. 2 in B-flat minor (Opus 31) was explosive. The familiar strains of the Scherzo’s first bars poured into the auditorium like the boiling waters of a geyser. Never shrinking from dynamic extremes, Lisitsa could fill the space with massive outbursts of sound or, like Zinka Milanov soaring to her trademark pianissimo top B♭ in Act One of La Gioconda, reduce the tone to an always-audible whisper. The symmetry of her playing of the Scherzo was defined by the contrasting rhythmic precision of repetitions of the principal theme and the elasticity of her handling of the development.

Collectively, the twenty-four Études that constitute Chopin’s Opera 10 and 25 are a sequence of works as important to the keyboard as Bach's Das Wohltemperierte Klavier. In the Études, Chopin magnificently tested and in many ways redefined the capabilities of the piano, following Beethoven's lead in establishing the instrument as a concertizing entity in its own right. The foremost wonder of Lisitsa's readings of the Études was her attention to the links among the pieces. Performed without pause, the Études were presented like tableaux vivants within an elaborate musical cyclorama. It seems invidious to consider Lisitsa’s performance of the Études as anything but a gargantuan but astoundingly coherent whole. As in Scriabin’s music, she utilized crescendi and rallentandi in highly individual ways, highlighting the Études’ episodic nature. When playing arpeggios, she often seemed to be playing a harp rather than a piano, and the instrument responded to her touch as though it were an extension of her own body. Lisitsa’s is a dramatic style of pianism, but her technique is clearly founded upon an effort to evince tension in the music by relaxing the musculature employed in playing. Indeed, there were moments on Friday evening when it would have been easy to assume that the music was coming from the lady on stage rather than from the piano. In truth, the instrument was sporadically unworthy of her: the brightness of the upper two octaves of the compass typical of a Steinway undermined the homogeneity of tone that Lisitsa sought, but this limitation did not lessen her astonishing ability to reveal the inner voices ‘singing’ in the Études. The lighter of the Études were sweetly playful, and the darker moments alternated tenderness and thundering potency. As Chopin’s music flowed from Lisitsa’s fingers, the only possible reaction was to surrender oneself to the deluge and rejoice in being submerged in sounds so lovingly shared.

Since its composition in 1847, Franz Liszt’s (1811 – 1886) Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in C-sharp minor (S.244/2) has been a staple of the repertoires of pianists capable of playing it—and, to be frank, of the repertoires of more than a few pianists not up to the task. One of Lisitsa’s most-viewed YouTube videos preserves a performance of the Rhapsody, but her playing of the piece as the encore in her Duke recital possessed a frisson that no recording can convey. The lilting rhythms of the lassú were realized with great bite, and the incendiary frishka intoxicated with the hearty flavor of one of Hungary’s legendary ‘bull’s blood’ wines. The Rhapsody offered an opportunity for Lisitsa to unabashedly display her awesome virtuosity, of course, but in the context of this recital it also emerged as a natural bridge between the milieux of Chopin and Scriabin. Lisitsa’s performance of the Rhapsody was not without a welcome dose of showmanship, but even her showmanship is soulful.

Ideally, a recital should reveal as much about the pianist as about the composers whose music is performed. Anyone who entered Baldwin Auditorium on Friday evening without a familiarity with the music of Alexander Scriabin should have departed with as intimate an acquaintance with the composer and his artistry as many music lovers acquire via lifetimes of listening. Music for the piano by few composers is more widely known than that by Frédéric Chopin, but Chopin, too, was essentially reintroduced, his music played not as polite, pretty salon pieces but as genre-defining offspring of an incomparable artistic mind. There were a few wrong notes, amounting to nothing, but, crucially, the expressive ethos of Friday evening's recital was resoundingly right. Valentina Lisitsa revealed the glistening facets of her artistic personality with a recital that exuded confidence and faith in the communicative power of music. Such magisterial playing is not achieved solely by ‘practice, practice, practice,’ but how wonderful it is to experience the work of an artist who, in practice and not just in reputation, truly deserves that distinction.

Artist in Action: Internationally-acclaimed pianist Valentina Lisitsa, recitalist in Duke Performances Piano Recital series at Baldwin Auditorium on the campus of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, 11 December 2015 [Photo by Gilbert François, © by DECCA / Universal Music Group]

CD REVIEW: Piano Perspectives — Yuja Wang performs works by Maurice Ravel & Gabriel Fauré (DGG 479 4954) and Valentina Lisitsa plays Alexander Scriabin (DECCA 478 8435)

[1] GABRIEL FAURÉ (1845 – 1924): Ballade in F sharp major for Piano Solo, Opus 19 and MAURICE RAVEL (1875 – 1937): Piano Concerto in G major and Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D major—Yuja Wang, piano; Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich; Lionel Bringuier, conductor [Recorded in Tonhalle, Zürich, Switzerland, in April 2015 (Ravel) and Teldex Studio, Berlin, Germany, in May 2015 (Fauré); Deutsche Grammophon 479 4954; 1 CD, 50:15; Available from DGG, Amazon (USA), iTunes, jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

[2] ALEXANDER NIKOLAYEVICH SCRIABIN (1872 – 1915): Nuances – Works for Solo Piano, 1885 – 1912—Valentina Lisitsa, piano [Recorded in Britten-Pears Studio, Aldeburgh, Suffolk, UK, 15 – 17 December 2014; DECCA 478 8435; 1 CD, 76:56; Available from DECCA Classics, Amazon (USA), iTunes, jpc (Germany), Presto Classical (UK), and major music retailers]

It is difficult to imagine three composers of relative chronological proximity whose methodologies were more fundamentally different than Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Ravel, and Alexander Scriabin. Born in the picturesque south of France, Fauré, the elder statesman in this artistic triumvirate, was a product of the traditional French conservatoire system of education and a star pupil of Camille Saint-Saëns, from whom he learned the rudiments of Western music from Bach to Wagner. Ravel, too, was a native of the south of France, in his case a Basque town near the Spanish border, and a student at the world-famous Conservatoire de Paris, where Fauré became director in 1905, but his formal educational experience was more one of rejection than of beneficial tutelage. A native Muscovite, Scriabin studied at the Moscow Conservatory, where he successfully matriculated as a pianist but not as a composer because, like Ravel, his recalcitrant unconventionality failed to please his tutors. The foremost point of intersection of the careers of these diverse composers is music for the piano. Fauré enlarged the piano’s solo repertoire with a body of work that remains under-appreciated and lamentably under-explored by pianists of quality. Ravel’s music for piano, though limited in quantity by the notoriously slow rate at which he composed, exhibits all of the originality for which he is renowned. Spanning his entire career, Scriabin’s piano music collectively traverses as broad a spectrum of styles and ambitions as any composer’s efforts in any genre have done, his Sonatas as significant a benefaction to the piano literature as Beethoven’s and Brahms’s. As with recent recordings of unexpectedly complementary works by Rachmaninov, Shostakovich, and Lutosławski, new discs on Universal labels likewise disclose unanticipated parallels in the piano music of Fauré, Ravel, and Scriabin. Like the composers whose music they espouse, Yuja Wang and Valentina Lisitsa are very different pianists, technically and temperamentally, but these discs, both of which are engineered and produced with meticulous attention to the acoustics needed to give every detail of the composers’ writing its due, confirm that these talented ladies epitomize an abiding commitment to approaching the scores before them with fresh eyes, ears, and fingers. In their hands, the kinships among the dissimilar works of Fauré, Ravel, and Scriabin are made remarkably apparent. Beauty often dwells in strange places that the layperson can reach only with the aid of a guide capable of discerning what others overlook or ignore. Yuja Wang and Valentina Lisitsa guide the listener into the elusive nuclei of the piano music of Fauré, Ravel, and Scriabin, and what beauties they discover there!

Beginning with a performance of Ravel’s daunting, high-spirited Concerto in G major, Wang makes a valuable contribution to Deutsche Grammophon’s initiative to record all of Ravel’s orchestral music with the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich and young French conductor Lionel Bringuier, who possesses qualities that are infrequently encountered among conductors of his generation. He consistently displays an ability to discern among the ledger lines of composers’ scores the elements of the music that transcend the notes. In music as emotionally chameleonic as Ravel’s, he intuitively senses which passages need fire and which need finesse, and he manages instrumental timbres with acuity akin to Baroque masters’ manipulation of counterpoint. It is unfortunate that, in a post-Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan environment, designating an individual a promising conductor can have pejorative connotations, sometimes deservedly so, but Bringuier is a truly promising conductor without willfulness or damaging idiosyncrasies. His approach to conducting Ravel is not unlike Ernest Ansermet’s, his emphases on clarity and delicacy never overriding surges of power when required by the music. The Tonhalle musicians play excellently under Bringuier’s direction, here spotlighting the most minute details of Ravel’s orchestrations without shifting focus away from the overall structure of the music or from the soloist. In the Concerto’s first movement, marked Allegramente – Andante – Tempo I, Wang, Bringuier, and the Tonhalle players balance virtuosity with restraint, refusing to bruise the music with the pomposity with which many performances have assaulted it. Wang’s confident mastery of the tricky writing for the piano is extremely impressive, and she proves herself to be an assured mistress of negotiating the almost schizophrenic, jazz-influenced shifts of mood in the music. The core of tranquility in her playing of the Andante section, answered by instinctive conducting by Bringuier that ideally serves both Wang and Ravel, contrasts with the return to the movement’s initial Allegramente. The Adagio assai second movement receives from Wang and Bringuier a performance shaped by the pianist’s crisp but deeply affectionate phrasing of the extended melodic line. The offensive stereotype of Asian artists focusing on the metronome markings rather than the meanings of music sadly persists, but the Beijing-born Wang’s playing of Ravel’s music reveals the incredible stupidity and shortsightedness of that notion. The brisk Presto movement that ends the Concerto inspires Wang to an exhibition of technical prowess that is far more than a pyrotechnics display. Bringuier and the Tonhalle-Orchester build pedestals of sound upon which Wang places the cornerstones of her interpretation. Then, she and her colleagues string garlands of jubilant sounds across Ravel’s music that illuminate the genius of his writing for both piano and orchestra. Wang and Bringuier offer an unmistakably youthful reading of the Concerto that lacks none of the lucidity and drama of classic interpretations by Jacqueline Blancard, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, and Martha Argerich.

Commissioned by the pianist Paul Wittgenstein after his right arm was lost in the Great War and premièred by him in Vienna in 1932, the Concerto for the Left Hand in D major was, like the G-major Concerto, strongly influenced by jazz, very much en vogue in France in the entre-deux-guerres years. The architecture of the Concerto for the Left Hand remains baffling to many musicians, some advocating a clearly-delineated three-part interpretation and others adhering to Ravel’s assertion that the work was conceived and created as a single, through-composed entity. In their performance on this disc, Wang and Bringuier leave academic analyses of the score to scholars with nothing better to do and simply perform the music. Wang’s visceral account of the opening Lento – Andante – sequence is defined by the pianist’s athletic execution of the opening cadenza, her chiseling of the broad swaths of thematic material from the fine-grained stone of Ravel’s music uncovering surprising niceties of sentiment exegesis. The explosive power of the central Allegro – episode ignites a conflagration fanned by both Wang’s wrists and Bringuier’s baton, the conductor stirring the flames in the orchestra and the pianist soaring through them with the determination of a Brünnhilde of the keyboard. The return to Tempo I redoubles Wang’s already formidable focus, and she and Bringuier build the Concerto’s final pages to an exhilarating climax.

The valley between the peaks of Wang’s performances of the Ravel Concerti is a flexible but rhythmically-taut reading of Fauré’s impeccably-wrought Ballade in F sharp major (Opus 19). The transitions of tempo, beginning in Andante cantabile and moving through Allegro moderato, Andante, Allegro, and Andante before resolving the piece in Allegro moderato, are handled with panache, but the real hallmark of her interpretation of the Ballade is an entrancingly Gallic charm. Whether playing music by Ravel or Fauré, with this disc Wang expands her reputation as an artist capable of fashioning a tremendous range of colors with her palette of black and white keys.

Few composers have covered more stylistic ground in their work for a single instrument than Scriabin did with his music for solo piano. Strongly influenced at the outset of his career as a composer by Chopin, Scriabin worked in virtually all of the forms that his Polish predecessor essentially redefined: etude, mazurka, nocturne, polonaise, prelude, and waltz. As his career progressed, Scriabin increasingly integrated into his music elements of the mysticism and philosophical interests that characterized his life, moving ever further from mainstream, late-Romantic tonalism and ultimately developing his own conceptualized system of atonalism both similar to and markedly different from the work of the Second Viennese School. Logically, then, the pianist who successfully plays Scriabin’s music must have at the ready an uncommon versatility, and in this regard the composer could hope for no more qualified an exponent than Valentina Lisitsa. In the early works, the precise articulation of her fingering would be equally effective in music by Haydn or Clementi, and the forthrightness of her playing of the later, more obliquely Impressionistic pieces yields many instances in which layers of emotional depth obscured in many performances are drawn to the surface. Lisitsa obviously deliberated repertory choices for Nuances at length, and her knowledge of, affection for, and connection with Scriabin’s music are audible in every bar on Nuances. Presenting the pieces more or less consecutively in order of composition and sampling twenty-seven years of Scriabin’s career, Lisitsa engenders both an uncommonly intimate portrait of the composer and a sort of musical family tree, tracing its roots into the soil from which he grew as a musician and looking beyond its highest branches into the wider grove of Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century music into which the seeds of his innovation were dispersed.

The pair of waltzes chosen for Nuances are played with unhurried brilliance, every cascade of notes sparkling with its own individual effect but blending organically with its brethren in the settings of sustained melodic arcs. Waltz in F minor (Opus 1) is clearly an early work, sounding like a lost piece by Chopin or even Schubert, but Lisitsa plays both this and the sentimentally ambiguous Waltz G sharp minor (WoO 7) with the same close attention to the singular accents of Scriabin’s musical language that she devotes to the great masterworks of the composer’s maturity. It is again Chopin who provided the models for Scriabin’s Prélude and Impromptu à la mazur from Trois Pièces (Opus 2) and the Nocturne in A flat major (WoO 3), and Lisitsa pays homage to Chopin without allowing the listener to forget that these are Scriabin’s works.

The Scherzi in E flat major and A flat major (WoO 4 and 5) and Klavierstücke in B flat minor (Anh. 16) inhabit the world of Schumann and Brahms, and Lisitsa again honors the inspirations whilst elucidating the flair with which Scriabin synthesized elements of the music from which he learned into his own distinctive idiom. Recalling Bach, the Fugues in F minor (WoO 13) and E minor (WoO 20) demand concentration no less than what is required by Das Wohltemperierte Klavier and, unsurprisingly, receive it from Lisitsa. No less intense is her playing of the Mazurkas in B minor and F major (WoO 15 and 16), but even among a progression of authoritative performances her accounts of the Nocturne from Opus 9 and Prélude et Nocturne pour la main gauche—a foreshadowing of Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand—are exceptional. It is interesting that Nuances was recorded at Aldeburgh as, like Benjamin Britten’s performances of works by Purcell, Bach, and Schubert, Lisitsa’s playing of Scriabin’s music demonstrates a fellow composer’s sensibilities. She prefers the alternative version of Patetico, the twelfth of the Opus 8 Études, and the unaffected gracefulness of her playing wholly justifies the choice.

The Two Impromptus of Opus 14 are marvelously differentiated by the pianist’s insightful approach, the Allegretto piece dispatched with dynamism and its Andante cantabile partner distinguished by open-hearted expressivity that is wholly free of artifice. Both the Allegro de concert in B flat major (Opus 18) and the animated Allegro maestoso Polonaise (Opus 21) are pieces that, though not long in duration, ask for great stamina from the pianist, and Lisitsa delivers in spades. She takes Scriabin’s Presto marking in the Opus 46 Scherzo at face value, charging through the piece with the unstoppable momentum of an avalanche. The Opus 41 Poème is far more contemplative, and Lisitsa plays it with unapologetic emotional honesty. This trait, too, molds her performance of Poème, the first of the Deux Pièces that constitute Opus 59.

Closing with the first and third of the Opus 65 Études, Lisitsa’s survey of Scriabin’s music is enriched by a galvanizing performance of the Allegretto Étude, the spirit of Chopin now more distant but still hovering at the peripheries of the music. The frenetic Molto vivace receives from the pianist a performance that encapsulates the essence of Scriabin’s art: respect and a measure of nostalgia for the past, trust in the present, and a vibrantly original vision of the future.

On the surface, there is little to connect the music of Fauré and Ravel with that of Scriabin. As men, the circumstances of their births, educations, and existences were very different, and as artists they pursued their own individual paths. So, too, do Yuja Wang and Valentina Lisitsa come to the piano with vastly varied experiences at the hearts of their artistic identities, but the ladies’ playing of the music of Fauré, Ravel, and Scriabin on this pair of wonderful discs confirms anew that music at its best remains a community of shared ideals.

BEST EARLY MUSIC RECORDING OF 2015: MOMENTI D’AMORE (Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli, soprano; Pera Ensemble; Berlin Classics 0300664BC)

GIULIO CACCINI (1551 – 1618), FRANCESCO CAVALLI (1602 – 1676), JOAN AMBROSIO DALZA (1508 – ?), ANDREA FALCONIERI (1585 – 1656), GIROLAMO FRESCOBALDI (1583 – 1643), CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI (1567 – 1643), DIEGO ORTIZ (1510 – 1570), GASPAR SANZ (1640 – 1710), BARBARA STROZZI (1619 – 1677): Momenti d’amore—Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli, soprano; Pera Ensemble; Mehmet C. Yeşilçay, oud, percussion, and director [Recorded in Munich during Summer 2013; Berlin Classics 0300664BC; 1 CD, 50:58; Available from Amazon (USA), iTunes, jpc (Germany), and major music retailers]

What explanation is there for the fact that denizens of a world made smaller in a figurative sense by innovations and technological advances so often seem to be continually drifting further and further apart? Why do we choose to be offended by coffee cups and holiday-themed garments but ignore children who have no winter coats and villages that lack potable water? Why has the ability to instantaneously interact with people anywhere in the world compelled the de-prioritization of humanity and basic decency? Why are suspicion and bigotry so much easier for us than acceptance and forgiveness? Topical as they are (or seem to be), these are questions that artists have sought to answer since modes of communication were first utilized for purposes beyond the most basic pursuit of survival. From Peri’s Dafne and Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo to Nico Muhly’s Two Boys and Jake Heggie’s Great Scott, music for voices and instruments has had as one of its most important objectives the task of examining those elements of humanity that unite and divide people. Whether the individuals involved are Orpheus and Eurydice, Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, or Peter Grimes and Ellen Orford, the circumstances that thwart their efforts at bridging differences are invariably born of cultural misunderstandings and prejudices. Berlin Classics’ Momenti d’amore offers Twenty-First-Century listeners perspectives on the eternal struggles of human minds and hearts drawn from the enchanting, elusive world of Seventeenth-Century Italy. In performances such as those on this disc, even music of poor quality might seem like rediscovered gems, but the pieces chosen for Momenti d’amore are true treasures of their era. Vitally, Momenti d’amore is a disc that proclaims to today’s listeners that complex problems often have simple solutions that have nothing to do with technology or once-per-year charity. The crucial first step on the journey to understanding and thus to peace, Momenti d’amore reminds us, is listening.

The guiding principal of Pera Ensemble, founded in 2005 by Mehmet C. Yeşilçay and Mehmet İhsan Özer and named to honor the Greek term for Istanbul’s artistically- and ethnically-diverse Beyoğlu neighborhood, is thoughtful fusion of Eastern and Western musical traditions. Pera Ensemble’s musicians—James Hewitt on Baroque violin, Serkan Mesut Halili on qanun, Christoph Sommer on lute, theorbo, and Baroque guitar, Franziska Grunze on viola da gamba, and percussionist Murat Coşkun—are dedicated to blending the exotic sounds of traditional Middle Eastern instruments with the timbres—sometimes equally exotic to modern ears—of instruments prevalent in European Early Music. In several widely-acclaimed previous recordings for Berlin Classics, Pera Ensemble’s defining precept has proved a thrilling impetus for unforgettable music-making, but Momenti d’amore is an exceptionally effective recording in which playing of rollicking exuberance reveals the refined discernment of the concept. Under Yeşilçay’s impassioned direction, tempi are chosen with care in each selection to facilitate performances of technical mastery and near-ideal expressive impact. The marvel of the results achieved by Pera Ensemble is that these pieces sound as though they would be equally at home in the ancient streets of Istanbul and the crumbling palazzi of Venice. It is a boon in the context of this disc that so little primary-source information about instrumentation and the realization of continuo survives. Yeşilçay and Pera Ensemble are therefore able to allow their imaginations to soar without trampling on composers’ intentions. The traversals of the music on Momenti d’amore are not ‘safe,’ unadventurous performances that adhere to innocuous notions of historically-appropriate performance practices: this is playing informed by visceral responses to the music, not by having read in books how it ought to be performed.

True to the disc’s title, the quintet of instrumental pieces on Momenti d’amore provide plentiful moments to love, Pera Ensemble’s playing exuding not just technical but also expressive virtuosity. The piquant Passacalle by Andrea Falconieri is delivered with an incredible rhythmic vitality that makes it not a stylized dance but an actual one, the energy of the musicians’ playing igniting the combustive melodic lines. Falconieri’s Ciaccona is traversed with equal poise and panache, the piece—and Pera Ensemble’s playing of it—proving an ideal companion for the Passacalle. Gaspar Sanz’s expertly-crafted Zarabande is also rousingly played by the Ensemble. Joan Ambrosio Dalza’s dazzling Piva and Diego Ortiz’s Recercada segunda are fantastic pieces that create their soundscapes with primary colors, and Pera Ensemble’s spirited performances bring both numbers to life with stunning immediacy. Bolstered by the invigorating pulse of Yeşilçay’s and Coşkun’s percussion, the ensemble’s playing coruscates with ingenuity, innovation, and the simple joy of making music.

The most exquisite instrument in Pera Ensemble is the voice of Italian soprano Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli, a singer for whom the listener’s experience is as important as the fulfillment of her own musical goals. Many young singers are concerned solely with having the notes required by a piece in their voices, but this young singer is equally committed to ensuring that she also has the emotions evinced by the music in her heart. The dividends paid by this investment in expressivity are invaluable, not least in performances of stylized music like that heard on Momenti d’amore. Here, though, Lombardi Mazzulli follows the examples of her Pera Ensemble comrades by leaving the tired, dry ‘traditional’ manner of performing this music to less-imaginative singers. There is nothing unstylish about the soprano’s singing on this disc, however. Gorgeous singing is always stylish, and few performances of music of the vintage of that heard on Momenti d’amore are as gorgeously sung as Lombardi Mazzulli’s, her intonation unerring and the full compass of her voice splendidly even. One of the most gladdening aspects of this disc is its prevailing sense of cooperation: there is never a suggestion of a diva and her accompanists, only of seven brilliant musicians combining their talents like perfectly-fitted puzzle pieces.

Barbara Strozzi is one of the most intriguing figures of the early Italian Baroque. Likely the daughter of a servant and perhaps a courtesan herself, she enjoyed the patronage of a father who recognized and, somewhat atypically in their era, valued her musical talent. Strozzi’s cantata L'Eraclito amoroso (Op. 2, No. 14) is a work of considerable histrionic power, virtually a summation of the expressive capacities of Seventeenth-Century Italian vocal music. Responding to the red-blooded playing of her colleagues, Lombardi Mazzulli sings the tortured phrase 'Ogni tristezza assalgami' with beguiling intensity, the darker sentiments of the text ultimately seeming all the more poignant for being voiced with such beauty and sensuality. A celebrated singer as well as a composer, Strozzi set words with great clarity and effectiveness, and Lombardi Mazzulli’s singing elucidates these qualities in L’Eraclito amoroso. Falconieri’s ‘Cara è la rosa e vaga’ from Il primo libro di Villanelle, first published in Naples in 1616, comes near to matching the level of inspiration evident in Strozzi’s cantata, and Lombardi Mazzulli’s performance of it, supported by superlative playing by her colleagues, bathes every nuance of the music in the liquid ease of her vocalism, the golden tone floating through Falconieri’s ornaments with the grace of a spring zephyr rustling flower petals.

Justly or unjustly, Claudio Monteverdi is widely regarded as the first ‘great composer’ in the history of Western music. It is now established beyond doubt that Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, though inarguably the earliest score still performed with some frequency, was not the first opera in the modern sense as was often erroneously stated in previous generations, but it is difficult to dispute the notion that Monteverdi was the first composer to unite words and music in a manner that has retained its potency. Hearing Pera Ensemble perform ‘Qual sguardo sdegnosetto’ from Scherzi musicali cioè arie et madrigali, no. 2 (SV. 247) and ‘Ohimè ch'io cado’ from the 1624 Quarto scherzo delle ariose vaghezze confirms the legitimacy of Monteverdi’s exalted reputation. Lombardi Mazzulli phrases ‘Qual sguatdo sdegnosetto’ with a poet’s intelligence and intuitive feel for words’ meaning, and her tonal colorations take on chameleonic hues as dictated by the music’s sentimental meanderings. Her ‘Ohimè ch’io cado’ is a masterclass in the art of allying sequences of ravishingly-produced notes with subtly-inflected articulation of text. Girolamo Frescobaldi was no less masterful than Monteverdi at the art of making poetry sing, and his aria di passacaglia ‘Così mi disprezzate?’ is a pinnacle in his output. Lombardi Mazzulli and Pera Ensemble scale the musical and emotional heights of Frescobaldi’s aria with the surefootedness of world-class climbers. Perhaps ‘Ohimè ch’io cado’ is no Everest, but the vista provided by Lombardi Mazzulli’s performance of it is phenomenal.

Lombardi Mazzulli shone as the Moorish queen Zelemina in Spoleto Festival USA’s 2015 modern-première production of Francesco Cavalli’s Veremonda, l’amazzone di Aragona, and her singing of Giunone’s aria ‘Dalle gelose mie cure incessanti lacera’ from Act Two of the same composer’s La Calisto is one of the principal glories of Momenti d’amore. She is never less than superb in any of the selections on the disc, but her experience with Cavalli’s music [she has also recorded the title rôle in Cavalli’s Artemisia] facilitates an interpretation of Giunone’s aria that blazes with dramatic intensity. The character’s jealousy simmers in Lombardi Mazzulli’s singing, and Pera Ensemble’s boisterous playing provides a brightly-lit stage upon which her surprisingly complete characterization plays out. Extracted from Giulio Caccini’s 1601 Le nuove musiche, no. 21, ‘Odi, Euterpe, il dolce canto’ is indeed a ‘sweet song,’ made all the sweeter by the dulcet tone with which Lombardi Mazzulli sings it. Crossing the Mediterranean from Italy to Spain, the lilting ​Sephardic lullaby ‘Durme​’ makes an euphonious finale to Momenti d’amore, a last moment of love of the purest variety. Lombardi Mazzulli’s voice caresses the anonymous text like a mother’s hand soothing her child. Here, too, though, Pera Ensemble’s performance defies expectations: rather than shaping ‘Durme’ as a song designed to gently accompany a child into the land of dreams, this is a lullaby that conjures its own exotic dreamscape.

Early Music is seemingly regarded by many musicians and listeners as an impenetrable fortress of rigid, inviolable doctrines that discourage the participation of all but the most specialized of performers. Different cultures, too, often seem to be viewed as walls that cannot be overcome. Mark Twain wrote in Innocents Abroad that ‘travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness,’ and Momenti d’amore is a voyage that demands that even the most casual and complacent listeners shut out all distractions, abandon preconceptions and prejudices, and follow where the music leads. Not even the finest recordings can resolve the troubles of a deeply-flawed world, but a disc like Momenti d’amore serves as a profoundly engaging testament to what music can achieve. Music is a dialogue, one that ideally eschews faith, race, and every source of divisiveness. Owing to the open-hearted sincerity of these performances by Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli and Pera Ensemble, it is not necessary to understand Italian to feel every emotion that flows through the selections on Momenti d’amore. If only this inspiring, haunting, emboldening disc could prove to every pair of ears on earth that we need not understand one another’s languages, religions, or ways of life in order to love, trust, and foster peace among us.

BEST CHORAL RECORDING OF 2015: James Dunlop — ASCENSION (Portsmouth Cathedral Choir; Riverwood Air Music RAWCD01)

JAMES DUNLOP: Ascension – Alice Burn, Northumbrian smallpipes (Hunting Hall Suite); Portsmouth Cathedral Choir; Dr. David Price, Director [Recorded in Portsmouth Cathedral during October 2015; Riverwood Air Music RAWCD01; 1 CD, 44:54; Available from Riverwood Air Music and major music retailers]

Cited most often in reference to the respective French, German, and Italian operatic repertories, national schools of composition and musical expression are now seldom encountered in the world’s theatres and conservatories except in scholarly tomes. With a history measured not in mere years but in centuries and millennia, the English choral tradition is both one of the most enduring and among the most beloved of national ‘schools’ of musical training and performance practice. From Tudor courts to the dark days of the World Wars, English composers from Thomas Tallis and William Byrd to Sir Edward Elgar and Benjamin Britten have given voice to the cares of their generations in music for choir. Few environments nurture the careers of composers of choral music as affectionately and discerningly as the British Isles, where the endeavors of cathedral and university choirs, community choral societies, and choir festivals are testaments to a deep-rooted national pride in the cultivation and quality of choral singing. Even under such hospitable conditions, however, traditions cannot survive without periodic rejuvenation. Splendidly recorded in Portsmouth Cathedral, Riverwood Air Music’s Ascension is representative of the kind of rejuvenation that keeps both English choral music and Classical Music in general vital and thriving: uniting the creations of a masterful composer with the work of an accomplished choir and one of Britain’s best chorus trainers and conductors, Ascension breaks new ground for a genre built for centuries upon the imperishable handiwork of guardians of England’s emblematic choral legacy.

Much is made of young composer James Dunlop’s Royal Marine service, but it should not be supposed that this is in any way a marketing ploy as cynicism born of observation of today’s Classical Music industry might insinuate. From the first bars of Ascension Fanfare, it is apparent that Dunlop possesses an artistic voice that earns him a position among the ranks of important advocates of contemporary choral music and places him in the glorious lineage of English composers for massed voices. Indeed, much should be made of Dunlop’s military service, but it is his compositional arsenal that here commands admiration. Ascension Fanfare is a difficult piece, but the Portsmouth Cathedral Choir and Dr. David Price conquer its demands with unflinching and unfailingly musical attack, drawing the listener into the disc’s very personal explorations of the theme of Christ’s Ascension. Making insightful use of words from John 16:5 – 7, I Must Leave evinces both the anguished intimacy of a lute song by John Dowland and the concentrated intensity of Sir Michael Tippett’s settings of African-American spirituals in A Child of Our Time. Dr. Price displays a wonderful gift for managing balances among voices whether in four- or six-part harmony, and his comprehension of the architecture of Dunlop’s music enables the choristers to communicate the angst of I Must Leave without ignoring the delicacy that also characterizes the piece. The reverent awe with which Dunlop communicates the wonder of Christ’s Ascension from the midst of his disciples in Presence of Eleven is sonorously manifested in the chorus’s performance, the pianissimo conclusion lofted heavenward with pure, perfect intonation.

Ingeniously incorporating the familiar tones of the ‘Westminster chimes’ into its musical soundscape, Westminster Quarters is an intriguingly original piece, here performed with aptly bell-like tones by the Portsmouth Cathedral choristers. The tenors and basses intone Dunlop’s plainchant setting of ‘Ave Maria’ with the precision of a single voice, honoring the praxis of the Sarum Use prevalent in England since the early Middle Ages.

Written for Northumbrian smallpipes and chorus, Hunting Hall Suite is an invigoratingly innovative work, one in which both traditions and expectations are delightfully turned on their heads. In both of the Suite’s movements, ‘Awakening’ and ‘Ceilidh in the Piggery,’ smallpipes virtuoso Alice Burn plays superbly, her mastery of the ferociously difficult instrument lending Dunlop’s music an added layer of exuberant expression. In ‘Awakening,’ smallpipes and choir duel provocatively, conjuring a primordial scene of both man’s and nature’s rejection of darkness. The frolicsome cèilidh of the second movement places the listener at the center of festivities at a Gaelic wedding, the music so cleverly written as to seem wholly extemporaneous in this performance. The uninhibited liquidity of Burn’s playing and the choir’s singing flows through Dunlop’s music with unmistakable joy. There is a unmistakable specificity in the sonic landscape of Hunting Hall Suite, but this is music that might resound along the banks of the Tees, from the shores of Cape Breton, or among the forests of the Blue Ridge.

The evocatively eloquent Deal is dedicated to the memory of the eleven Royal Marine musicians killed in the 1989 IRA bombing of the Royal Marines School of Music then housed in the East Barracks in the Kent town of Deal, near Dover. Dunlop pays tribute to his fallen forebears in music of somber but optimistic solemnity, the voices used with telling economy that heightens the poignancy of the text. In all of the performances on Ascension, the choristers’ diction is a model of clarity, but the unaffected crispness of their articulation of the text in Deal highlights both the piece’s abiding ethos and the subtle nuances of Dunlop’s word settings. Windrush, a setting of lines from John Keats’s ‘A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever,’ is distinguished by the contrast achieved by offsetting the low writing for the sopranos with the tenor soloist's ascents to top A, beautifully sung by Adrian Green. The altos’ repetitions of the word ‘searching,’ their careful enunciations of the consonants halting the sound, create an extraordinary expressive effect. The pathos of Ascend finds a tremendously touching outlet in the choir’s singing, the cadences of the music resolved with a final ‘mmm’ redolent of emotion too raw for words. The sopranos’ beautiful harmony in thirds on the ascending line of ‘Who has gathered up the wind in the hollow of his hands’ in Miracle, the words taken from Proverbs 30:4, lifts the spirits both of the music and of the listener, echoing the most basic human hope in the benevolence of Providence.

​Dedicated to the D-Day Museum Trust, ​the serene Adagio ​Heroes' Tide​ receives from Dr. Price and the singers under his direction a performance that churns with surging, stirringly-voiced imagery borrowed from the diaries of Britons who landed on Gold, Juno, and Sword Beaches on D-Day. Throughout the piece, Dunlop’s manipulations of dynamics are executed by Dr. Price and the choristers with fidelity that enhances the impact of words and music. The disjointed sentiments of the text recall the confusion of battle, and the expressivity of the statement of ‘Thank the lord for saving us’ in the piece’s final bars is profoundly touching. The depth of Dunlop’s connection with the text is apparent, and the choristers sing Heroes’ Tide as if telling their own stories of survival.

From Thomas Tallis’s Spem in alium to Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, there is a singular power in English choral music that is found in no other repertory. It is perhaps pedantic to suggest that the essence of the nation reverberates in the singing of its choirs, but there is in the pieces on Ascension a vein of musical individuality that is as perceptive a reflection of an unique Zeitgeist as any culture might hope to claim as its own. A listener need not be English in order to be moved by Ascension, however. Perhaps the real power of choral music, English or not, is its implicit universality, the necessity of cooperation among voices regardless of their owners’ differences. James Dunlop harnesses this power as sagaciously as any of his musical ancestors, and Ascension is inspiriting evidence of the undiminished capacity of song to unite and uplift.