Just so you know what we're up to: Three familiar larks, a bonus lark, and (oh yes!) Death and a maiden

Alauda (the Eurasian or Oriental skylark)

"[Larks] have more elaborate calls than most birds, and often extravagant songs given in display flight. These melodious sounds (to human ears), combined with a willingness to expand into anthropogenic habitats -- as long as these are not too intensively managed -- have ensured larks a prominent place in literature and music, especially the Skylark in northern Europe and the Crested Lark and Calandra Lark in southern Europe." -- Wikipedia

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: The Lark Ascending (romance for
violin and orchestra)

Jean Pougnet, violin; London Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Adrian Boult, cond. EMI, recorded in Abbey Road Studio No. 1, Oct. 21, 1952

Hugh Bean, violin; New Philharmonia Orchestra, Sir Adrian Boult, cond. EMI, recorded in Abbey Road Studio No. 1, Mar. 1, 1967

[NOTE: Sir Adrian Boult (1889-1983) of course had a warm relationship with Ralph Vaughan Williams, and remains for me on the whole his most persuasive recorded exponent. And much as I love the more spacious and colorful 1967 recording (which was my first Lark Ascending), with a suitably engaged performance of the solo violin part by New Philharmonia concertmaster (among his wide range of musical activities) Hugh Bean (1929-2003), I'm happy to have as well the more streamlined 1952 one, which though mono still sounds awfully good, and has a really subtly inflected solo performance by Jean Pougnet (1907-1968), whose unsummarizably diverse personal and professional history is worth looking into. -- Ed.]

by Ken

A couple of further projects cropped up in last week's, er, post, "Taking our good old time with the Gabrieli String Quartet." Yes, I know, I'm still supposed to be going over the whole thing to make a proper post out of all the ingredients, and I really, really still mean to -- any day now, or maybe any week. What mattered most to me was that the music was, or at least should have been (I make no assumptions about what's there till I muster the courage to look at it), all in place.


FIRST, WE'RE IN THE GRIP OF . . . LARKMANIA!

Preview: Preparing to attack Mahler's First Symphony

The young Gustav Mahler

Start

Finish

Concertgebouw Orchestra, Bernard Haitink, cond. Philips, recorded September 1962

Start

Finish

New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. CBS/Sony, recorded Oct. 4 and 22, 1966

by Ken

Every now and then I remind myself that, while we've "done" a bunch of Mahler symphonies, including the whole of the Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, and Ninth, and while we've had posts that took us inside the first, second, and third movements of the Mahler First, we still haven't properly done the symphony.

So we've started, above, by hearing how the Mahler First starts and finishes. That's the introduction and exposition from the first movement (the Bernstein version, you'll note, takes the first-movement exposition repeat), and the final five-minute-plus chunk of the finale.

AND THEN, AS LONG AS WE'VE ALREADY HEARD
THE EXPOSITION OF THE FIRST MOVEMENT . . .

Sunday Classics chronicles: Remembering Eugen Jochum (4) -- Overtures Plus, part 2 (Wagner's "Lohengin" and "Parsifal")

Is there anyone who doesn't know this music?

As you probably know, the world's best-known wedding march isn't a wedding march at all. Elsa and her unknown knight were married at the end of Act II of Lohengrin. Here, at the start of Act III, they're being escorted to their bridal chamber. The 1954 Bayreuth Festival Chorus and Orchestra are conducted by our man of the hour, Eugen Jochum.

by Ken

We're forging ahead with our remembrance of that wonderful conductor Eugen Jochum (1902-1987) -- wearing his concert hat in Part 1 and Part 2 (devoted to his Haydn and Bruckner) and now his opera conductor's chapeau in Part 3 (snatches of Weber's Der Freiscütz and Beethoven's Fidelio) and today's installment -- and we still haven't gotten to his Mozart, which is where I was trying to get us. I thought maybe we'd throw in a little Boris Godunov too. But not today; we have too much to do. (And as usual it will look like we're doing more than we actually are, because the texts consume so much space relative to the amount of music they cover.)

One of the recordings I acquired recently -- one of the sources of the "archival" recordings we're featuring in these "chronicles" posts -- wasn't actually new to me. I just didn't have it on CD. It's Jochum's 1954 Bayreuth Lohengrin. (He actually made a studio recording of the opera around the same time, but it's not one of his happiest achievements. Perhaps even he, who often coaxed surprisingly successful results from dubious-looking casts, could do much with that one.)

In a late decision, we're not even going to get to our other Wagnerian destination: Jochum's extraordinarily beautiful 1971 Bayreuth Parsifal, which we sampled in the March 2010 post "Good Wagner conductors find what inside the music makes it move." I'd rather do that another time.

I'm calling these posts "Overtures Plus" because we're hearing a number of overtures and preludes that -- like the two we heard Friday night -- are also familiar as concert pieces. And I thought we'd start by hearing the Lohengrin Act I and Act III Preludes performed as concert pieces. While I actually do have Jochum studio versions, they're mono, so I thought we'd bring in some ringers.

We already heard this performance of the exhilarating Act III Prelude -- in the "Good Wagner conductors post.

WAGNER: Lohengrin:
Prelude to Act III

Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. EMI, recorded February-March 1960

That's quite a "wow" piece, but if we go back to the start of the opera, to "the Prelude to Lohengrin, we encounter something even more astonishing, not least for those ethereally shimmering strings. (This is a performance we haven't heard before, from the remarkably beautiful series of Wagner orchestral LPs Sir Adrian Boult recorded in the early '70s. We already heard the Siegfried Idyll from this series in a March 2011 post on the piece.)