[See the opening paragraph as well as "Still to come" notes
and, now, updates from both Monday and Tuesday]
In this unusual socially distanced configuration, with the clarinetist's back to the string players, Mozart's Clarinet Quintet was performed yesterday in the live-streamed Berlin Phil Series program "An Evening in Vienna" by Wenzel Fuchs, clarinet; Daishin Kashimoto and Romano Tommasini, violins; Naoko Shimizu, viola; and Ludwig Quandt, cello.
NO, THIS ISN'T THE MOZART CLARINET QUINTET
BUT THE OTHER FEATURED WORK YESTERDAY:
i. Allegro con brio
ii. Adagio
iii. Theme with variations ("Pria ch'io l'impegno"): Allegretto
Of the three recordings sampled above, one is American, one British, and one Czech -- think you can tell which is which? (All will be revealed eventually.)
MONDAY UPDATE: Um, hold on a sec! Obviously the continuation of this proto-post has been taking way longer than anticipated (see note below), but while playing with the new audio clips, I was waylaid by one you really ought to hear, like now. (For sure, we'll be talking about it eventually.)
It's the finale, Allegretto con variazioni, of the Mozart Clarinet Quintet:
Nash Ensemble: Michael Collins, clarinet; Marcia Crayford and David Ogden, violins; Roger Chase, viola; Christopher van Kampen, cello. CRD, recorded July 1-2, 1986
by Ken
For today we're taking a break from Mahler (while I ruminate on how to proceed with Mahler 4 and the world of Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn songs), in the form of a happy lookback at yesterday's live-streamed Berlin Phil Series program "An Evening in Vienna," featuring both of the orchestra's principal clarinetists, Wenzel Fuchs and Andreas Ottensamer, who happen both -- as I learned from the Digital Concert Hall's promotional note -- to be Austrian!
This "Evening in Vienna" was not, as the title led me to expect, a toe-tapping program of waltzes, polkas, and such by the Vienna Strausses and kindredly Viennese composing spirits, as you can tell from the above screen grab from the opening work: Mozart's sublime (a word I don't throw around casually) Clarinet Quintet. Which is one reason I decided to create this blog interlude -- I couldn't remember whether we've ever heard the Mozart Clarinet Quintet here at Sunday Classics. I couldn't remember a post that included it, but I've learned not to trust memory for, well, all sorts of things, but certainly not each and every blogpost past. As best I can tell, though, looking in the SC audio archive, we haven't. I guess I never found what seemed a fit peg on which to hang it.
This omission ends today. We've got a lot of music to cover today, including a more leisurely stroll through the Clarinet Quintet, but let's jump in and plug this particular hole right now.
MOZART: Clarinet Quintet in A Major, K. 581
i. Allegro (at 0:02)
ii. Larghetto (at 8:41)
iii. Menuetto (at 14:59)
iv. Allegretto con variazioni (at 21:12)
Peter Simenauer, clarinet; Pascal Quartet (Jacques Dumont and Maurice Crut, violins; Léon Pascal, viola; Robert Salles, cello). Musical Masterpiece Society, recorded c1953 (digital transfer by F. Reeder)
MONDAY UPDATE ABOUT THE CONTINUATION OF THIS
PROTO-POST'S TAKING WAY LONGER THAN ANTICIPATED
Uh, let's see, I think I already mentioned that the continuation of this proto-post is taking way longer than anticipated. For one thing, there are about a zillion audio clips to be made from scratch (generally when I start clipicizing for a post I've got a head start), and (attachment to the "one thing") the audio-host website is taking forever for the uploading and file-making for every damned clip. For another thing, well, it's the usual -- it's just, you know, hard.
STILL TO COME, TUESDAY EDITION
In a post-concert "Berlin Phil Lounge" held on Facebook, we got to spend time with four friends from the orchestra, seen here with the tools of their trade: our old friend Sarah Willis with her horn, Julia Gartemann with her viola, Daishin Kashimoto with his violin, and Stephan Koncz with the cello he'd just had to go and fetch.
We've still got a lot to do. We're still going to hear a good deal more of the two featured works from the "Evening in Vienna" program: the opening Mozart Clarinet Quintet (which earlier on we heard straight-through-plus) and the closing Beethoven Clarinet Trio (which we've also heard straight through, in the form of the "mystery" work near the top of this post). We'll be working our way through each, movement by movement -- the audio-clip-making has been so excruciatingly slow that it's just stretching out endlessly.
In addition, we're going to at least acknowledge the in-between works: from the Berlin Phil archives, orchestrally accompanied performance of three songs, two by Schubert ("Gretchen am Spinnrade" and "Der Erlkönig") and one by Wolf ("Der Feuerreiter") framing live performances of two Mozart duos.
With the MONDAY UPDATES we already heard "Der Feuerreiter," but the TUESDAY UPDATES include considerable expansion of that presentation: more recordings, and samples of the remarkable commentaries on the music offered by critic and obvious Wolf aficionado Ernest Newman for the booklets that accompanied the six 78-rpm albums that saw the light of day in the 1931-38 Hugo Wolf Society subscription series. If it seems odd that I've devoted so much attention to a work that occupied a mere five minutes of the "Evening in Vienna" program while leaving so much still to be done on the featured works, I guess it is pretty odd. All I can say is that it must have occurred to me that we haven't heard much Wolf in the many seasons of Sunday Classics, and this isn't a composer one wants to take a quick pass at.
SO LET'S PROCEED WITH THE FURTHER-AMPLIFIED
PRESENTATION OF WOLF'S "DER FEUERREITER"
As noted, the live-streamed Berlin "Evening in Vienna" included performances of three Lieder in orchestrally accompanied format. Only one of the orchestrations was concocted by its composer: Hugo Wolf's Mörike setting "Der Feuerreiter" ("The Fire-Rider"). Wolf in fact orchestrated 13 of the Mörike-Lieder, and that's the form in which we heard "Der Feuerreiter," in a rousing performance by bass-baritone Gerald Finley, conducted by Daniel Harding. I missed the date, and then couldn't find it in the Digital Concert Hall listings, which only indicate that it will be "available soon" -- as part of the "Evening in Vienna" itself, now being prepared for posting.
This weird and wild melodrama is one of Wolf's Mörike-Lieder, published as a set of 53 songs, the product of the composer's first extended immersion in the work of a single poet, in this case the Lutheran pastor Eduard Mörike (1804-1875) -- an immersion that Wolf credited with enabling him to define himself as a composer. (Naturally there's a sprinkling of "stray" Wolf Mörike settings. In Frauke May's 2002-3 recording of what was billed as the "first complete edition" of the Mörike-Lieder, from which we'll hear "Der Feuerreiter" in a moment, the total count is 57, including two "world premiere recordings.") Many of the Mörike songs are fairly brief, but there are exceptions, with "Der Feuerreiter" perhaps the most exceptional.
WOLF: Mörike-Lieder: "Der Feuerreiter" ("The Fire-Rider")
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone; Gerald Moore, piano. Orfeo, recorded live at the Salzburg Festival, July 28, 1960
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone; Sviatoslav Richter, piano. DG, recorded live in Innsbruck, October 1973
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone; Daniel Barenboim, piano. DG, recorded c1973
Brigitte Fassbaender, mezzo-soprano; Jean-Yves Thibaudet, piano. Decca, recorded in Montréal, October 1992
Frauke May, mezzo-soprano; Bernhard Renzikowski, piano. From May's 2002-3 Arte Nova edition of not 53 but (count 'em) 57 Wolf Mörike settings, recorded at WDR studios, Cologne
Helge Roswaenge, tenor; Gerald Moore, piano. EMI, recorded as part of the Hugo Wolf Society subscription series, Apr. 20, 1937
RECORDINGS NOTE: It's hardly surprising that Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, as a native singer with a passionate devotion to the German art song, had an often-expressed deep love for the songs of Wolf, which he performed and recorded extensively. Given his own penchant for the histrionic, he's the obvious singer I would think of for "Der Feuerreiter," and it would be hard to imagine those expectations being more fully realized than in this 1960 Salzburg performance, which finds him in his freest, rollingest, most sonorous vocal estate. When Fischer-Dieskau yielded to his ham-actor instincts, he didn't always, or even often, have this kind of vocal luster at his disposal. And of course Gerald Moore (with whom he did make at least one studio recording of the song) is the pianist we want to hear attacking the keyboard part. (LATER THAT DAY: I couldn't resist tossing in the two later recordings. The live one, with the great Sviatoslav Richter having fun whipping up a frothy storm, is kind of the F-D hambonery one expects, and it's there too, though more controlled, in the studio version with Daniel Barenboim, from Vol. 1 of their eventual three-volume, nine-LP mid-'70s Wolf project. I kind of like the clean logic of Barenboim's playing; it's interesting to compare the three piano accompaniments, though I"m happy to stick with Moore's.)With regard to the song itself, since I had the box out, I was looking in the extraordinary booklet that accompanied EMI's monumental 1981 reissue of the 1931-38 Hugo Wolf Society subscription recordings (including the Roswaenge "Der Feuerreiter" we just heard), which fit each of the six original 78-rpm Wolf Society albums onto a single LP and added a "sequel": a seventh LP containing recordings, a number of them cannily coaxed out of the archives (by singers as considerable as baritone Herbert Janssen and bass Ludwig Weber), which had apparently been intended for future volumes in the series which never came about because of the halting of the project in 1938 owing to the ominous political climate in Europe. Among other things the booklet reproduced the voluminous notes written by Ernest Newman for the original Wolf Society issues -- for each album he supplied a "Foreword" in the form of a quite extensive essay as well as notes on each song. As long as we're listening to "Der Feuerreiter," I thought we should have his note at hand. [TUESDAY UPDATE: Now we do! -- Ed.]
We also heard GM in 1937 accompanying Helge Roswaenge, whose robust tenor probably comes as close as we're likely to hear to the voice heard in the head of Wolf, whose singer acquaintances were mostly of the tenor variety.) Brigitte Fassbaender strong mezzo and animated temperament seemed a good fit for the song, and I thought it would be interesting to hear Frauke May from the above-mentioned super-complete set of the Mörike-Lieder.
Before we get to Newman's note on "Der Feuerreiter" . . .
. . . which leads off Album VI, my eye happened to light on this bit that seemed pretty pertinent, from the final section of the Foreword to Album V, titled " 'Declamation' and Form in Wolf"):
Let us not fall, then, into the conventional error of supposing that all that Wolf does is to "declaim" with a scrupulous regard to word-values. This "declamation" is only one element in an organic poetic and musical whole, and it would, indeed, have been impossible without the intensity and swiftness of musical imagination that made him see each poem as a unique problem in form, and without the craftsmanship that enabled him to solve each of these special problems in terms of the problem itself. Many of his songs defy analysis. . . .Now, as to Newman's commentary on "Der Feuerreiter":
It is the form that is the vital constructional element in Wolf, not the declamation; and, as I have suggested, none of these forms can be reproduced by other composers, because they are not formulae imposed on the poem from without but something born, in a flash, of the blended poetic and musical vision of the moment. . .
Composed 10th October, 1888In addition to the orchestral version of "Der Feuerreiter" that we heard in the "Evening in Vienna" program, Wolf produced -- as Newman notes -- what we might call a Lollapalooza Version for chorus and orchestra. Come on now, we want to hear that, don't we?
Several of the poems set to music in the Mörike volume were originally embodied in the narrative of a novel, Maler Nolten, which Mörike published in 1832, and find their full elucidation there. One of the characters in the volume describes a strange figure, known to his associates as "the mad Captain," who is alleged to have lived in the period of the Thirty Years War. He had taken up his abode in an ancient tower adjoining the local inn. "It was said that he had been a Captain in some imperial regiment, who had forfeited his citizen's rights on account of some crime or other. His destiny had made a solitary of him: he associated with no one, and never appeared in the streets from one year's end to another except when a fire broke out in the town or the neighbourhood. He could scent a fire at once, and when he did, he would be seen at his little window, deadly pale, wearing a red cap and restlessly pacing up and down. At the first alarm of the fire -- often, indeed, before it, and before anyone else knew exactly where it was -- he would get a lean nag out of the stable and ride with an infallible instinct, at full gallop, to the scene of the disaster."
At the request of the company, the actor who is telling the story then sings the ballad of the Fire-Rider. The poem fascinated Wolf, who, to get completely into the bizarre atmosphere of it, immersed himself in such records as he could find of this popular belief in beings who had an uncanny instinct for scenting out fire, which had an unholy attraction for them.
Wolf's setting is constructed on two main motives -- (a) that of the opening bars, which is developed symphonically as a symbol of the restless creature in whose blood the thought of the fire acts as a poison; (b) the wild cry that always accompanies the words "Hinter'm Berg, hinter'm Berg, brennt es in der Mühle." The section beginning "Der so oft den rothen Hahn" links up with that beginning "Nach der Zeit ein Müller fand," in spite of the fact that the vocal line is different in the two instances. A grisly effect is obtained, just before the finish (after "Da fällt's in Asche ab"), by clumped chords of the diminished seventh, pppp, in widely separated registers of the piano. At "Lebe wohl, ruhe wohl" the wild cry of the "Hinter'm Berg" motive is softened to an epitaph upon the Fire-Rider.
Wolf arranged "Der Feuerreiter" as a ballad for choir and orchestra. In this form it is exceedingly effective; the larger material at his disposal enabled Wolf to add many telling touches of colour, such as the ghostly drum-taps at the end. -- Ernest Newman
WOLF: "Der Feuerreiter" ("The Fire-Rider")
(arranged by the composer for chorus and orchestra)
Rundfunkchor Berlin, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Kent Nagano, cond. Harmonia Mundi, recorded 2005
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