Music

If I could keep one Firebird, it would be Antal Doráti with the London Symphony, recorded for Mercury in 1959: the complete 1910 ballet, not the suite. Doráti conducted for the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo in the 1930s, and it shows. The tempos are ones you could dance to, and nothing is lingered over for its own sake. Mercury’s engineers did the rest with a few microphones hung close to the orchestra. Every wind solo lands in your lap, and the bass drum in the Infernal Dance is a physical event. Sixty-odd years on, it still sounds better than most recordings made last year. ...

The story comes not from Goethe but from Nikolaus Lenau’s Faust, and the episode is called “The Dance at the Village Inn.” Liszt printed the plot in the score: a wedding is in full swing, with music and dancing. Mephisto and Faust walk in. Mephisto takes the fiddle from a sleepy village fiddler and starts to play, and the room goes mad. Faust waltzes a dark-eyed girl out the door and into the woods. A nightingale sings. ...

Yesterday I said Perlman likes to push the orchestra. Here’s the best evidence: Tchaikovsky’s Valse-Scherzo, live at the Tchaikovsky Gala. It sounds pretty under-rehearsed. Listen to how the winds struggle. Perlman and the orchestra are rarely in the same place: he’s ahead, then behind, stretching phrases wherever he likes. On paper, a bad collaboration. In practice, a fantastic performance. He dances around the orchestra, and the rubato becomes the waltz. Next to him, the Leningrad Philharmonic, arguably the best orchestra of its day, sounds a little flat-footed. ...

The last movement of Vivaldi’s Autumn: one of my favorite autumn pieces, and I’ve always found it cute. Is it a mazurka? It’s in triple time and it bounces, so I see why it feels like one. But mazurkas didn’t reach the concert hall until Chopin, a century later. Vivaldi titled this movement La caccia, the hunt. The orchestra plays the horn calls and the solo violin runs the chase. ...

Paganini again: the finale of his Second Concerto, played by Alexandru Tomescu. It’s nicknamed La Campanella for the little bell that rings in the orchestra, answered by the violin in harmonics. Most people know it as Liszt’s piano étude, which says something about how often the original gets played. Is it hard? Yes: harmonics, double-stop harmonics, ricochet, leaps across the fingerboard, all fully exposed. But it’s a different kind of hard from Brahms or Tchaikovsky. One tune comes back again and again, each time with a new trick. The orchestra mostly goes oom-pah. There’s no forty-minute structure to hold together. Paganini was friends with Rossini, and you can hear it: this is an aria, and the violin is the soprano. ...

Same album as yesterday’s Godard: Brian Luce on flute and Carrol McLaughlin on harp, this time playing Paganini’s Caprice No. 24. On flute and harp, the surprise is the harp. Wow, I’ve never heard the harp so angry and aggressive before. Listen on Apple Music

Benjamin Godard is mostly forgotten now, except for the Berceuse from Jocelyn and his Suite de trois morceaux, Op. 116, which every flute student knows. He wrote it in 1890 for Paul Taffanel, the father of the French flute school. The Idylle is the slow middle movement: a simple, singing tune over a simple accompaniment. It’s written for flute and piano, but today I listened to it with harp, Brian Luce on flute and Carrol McLaughlin on harp. It’s cute this way. The harp’s texture is softer than the piano’s, and the whole piece feels like silk. Or like waves: a beautiful, classy river with personality. West Lake, or something. ...

Debussy should talk to Saint-Saëns about pieces they don’t like getting published. Saint-Saëns wouldn’t let The Carnival of the Animals be published while he was alive (only The Swan got out), so it came out after he died. Debussy wasn’t so lucky. He wrote Rêverie around 1890 and sold it for the money, and when Fromont went to print it in 1905 he wrote to them that he regretted it — he’d written it in a hurry, and it was a piece of no importance. ...

Tonight at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival I went to see Joshua Redman play solo at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. Rockefeller Chapel, full house. He has decent technique. Joshua Redman, just him and a tenor. But even with a well-trained ear, I couldn’t appreciate the chords, and the melodies felt clueless to me. Sometimes I couldn’t tell whether a note was intentional or a mistake, though often I could tell it was a mistake. ...

On my first day back in Chicago, my friend took me to the CSO. Klaus Mäkelä conducting: Sibelius — Symphony No. 7 Shostakovich — Symphony No. 4 Before Mäkelä walks out. Today is also Shostakovich’s 120th birthday. Happy birthday to the wonderful, rebellious composer. “Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony, written under Stalin’s shadow, shows the composer at his most wild and audacious.” He pulled it during rehearsals in 1936, months after Pravda attacked his opera Lady Macbeth, and it wasn’t performed until 1961. He thought it was never going to be played, but here we are today. ...