Rapid hits: Part 2 of 3 --

(1) MEDIC NEEDED FOR VAUGHAN WILLIAMS'S LARK? [Oct. 9]
(2) ONE SOLOIST, MULTIPLE VIEWS OF VW'S LARK [Oct. 10]
(3) A WHOOSH OF MEMORY OF AN EPIC CLARINET GUY [Oct. 11]


(2) VW'S LARK: ONE SOLOIST, THREE VARIED VISIONS

Neville Marriner & Iona Brown: Collaborators from the time I.B. joined the violins of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields (1964) -- in time becoming concertmaster, frequent soloist and conductor, eventually director.

by Ken

It was yet another seemingly inescapable (try though a person might!) attention-diverter, but in this case a happy one. While playing with Vaughan Williams's musical lark, I kept being drawn back to one performance, liking it more and more: Iona Brown's 1983 Proms performance with conductor Elgar Howarth. I was responding to I.B.'s strikingly personal, boldly confident, even daredevilish playing, so different (my memory was telling me) from her decade-plus-earlier recording with Neville Marriner. Indeed, on rehearing, the 1971 performance seemed coolly, carefully poised -- the word "nocturnal" occurred to me. Listening to it more, I found it more and more fascinating in its own right, all the more intriguing for the contrast with the 1983 Royal Albert Hall performance.

The CD with the 1983 Lark (unfortunately not in general circulation)

THEN I REALIZED I HAVE A THIRD I.B. LARK

It's with Marriner again, and I'd kind of assumed it was a recoupling of assorted older Marriner recordings (the only other Vaughan Williams on the disc is the Thomas Tallis Fantasia) and safely shelved it away as a Marriner collection. But no, it's a 1982 recording -- a year before the Prom performance! It's not the 1983 performance, but it's not the 1971 either.

Let's listen to just the opening in all three I.B. Larks, featuring the grand, finger-twisting solo-violin cadenza.

Among others, some singing larks of the nonverbal kind are here to wish everyone: Happy New Year! (quick version)

HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM VIENNA -- FIRST BY WAY
OF NEW YORK -- AND, OH YES, FROM MUNICH TOO


[in English, lyrics by Howard Dietz] Lily Pons (s), Adele; Ljuba Welitsch (s), Rosalinde; Charles Kullman (t), Eisenstein; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded Dec. 24 & 29, 1950 & Jan. 7, 1951

[in English, lyrics by Howard Dietz] Patrice Munsel (s), Adele; Marguerite Piazza (s), Rosalinde; Charles Kullman (t), Eisenstein; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, cond. Live performance, Jan. 20, 1951

Edita Gruberová (s), Adele; Kiri Te Kanawa (s), Rosalinde; Wolfgang Brendel (b), Eisenstein; Vienna Philharmonic, André Previn, cond. Philips, recorded in the Musikverein, November 1990

Erika Köth (s), Adele; Hilde Gueden (s), Rosalinde; Waldemar Kmentt (t), Eisenstein; Vienna Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. Decca, recorded in the Sofiensaal, June 1960
And here's an actual New Year's Eve performance:

Carol Malone (s), Adele; Gundula Janowitz (s), Rosalinde; Eberhard Wächter (b), Eisenstein; Bavarian State Orchestra, Carlos Kleiber, cond. Live performance from the Bavarian State Opera (Munich), Dec. 31, 1974
[NOTE: More than a third of this clip is applause. I was all set to snip it out, but even 48 years after the fact I just couldn't strip away the performers' earned plaudits. -- Ed.]

[We'll be hearing the full version of this trio in the follow-up expanded-coverage version of this post scheduled for tomorrow. -- Ed.]

NOW, HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM HAYDN'S LARK

Fledermaus of course is meat-and-potatoes (or maybe we should say champagne-and-caviar?) New Year's material, and we've got more of it in tomorrow's expanded post, but it occurred to me that in a New Year's frame of mind we might finish up our business with at least the nonvocal contingent of the musical larks we've been pursuing, starting with Haydn's -- in two really lovely and interestingly different performances (one of which we're going to hear in its entirety in a moment). -- Ed.

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!

Taking our good old time withthe Gabrieli String Quartet

[STILL STITCHING THE THING TOGETHER, BUT THE MUSIC IS ALL IN PLACE (I THINK!)]

MONDAY MORNING UPDATE: I'm still stitching, and have to pause the effort. As it turned out, there was more music added, but I think now it's all here. (Further consideration of Schubert's song "Death and the Maiden," which we hear here, will come in a separate post.

The Gabrieli Quartet of the era 1969-86: violinists Kenneth Sillito and Brendan O'Reilly, cellist Keith Harvey, and violist Ian Jewel, whom we heard last week playing the first and second movements of . . .

BRAHMS: Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Op. 115:
ii. Adagio


Keith Puddy, clarinet; Gabrieli Quartet (Kenneth Sillito and Brendan O'Reilly, violins; Ian Jewel, viola; Keith Harvey, cello). Classics for Pleasure-EMI, released 1970

by Ken

It was over the identification of the players in this recording, for the EMI-affiliated budget-price Classics for Pleasure label, that I got bogged down in last week's "Do I hear a clarinet?" In the Gabrieli's early recordings, strangely, the individual musicians weren't identified, and even in a CD reissue still weren't. As regular readers know, in this department we like to know who the people are who are performing for us.

For three-fourths of the early Gabrieli String Quartet there's no problem. From its founding, in 1966 or 1967 (we'll come back to this in a moment), until the departure of its founding first violinist two decades later, there was only one change of personnel: Sometime in 1969 the original second violinist, Claire Simpson, gave way to Brendan O'Reilly. I don't know when in 1969, but I do know, at least according to the original Classics for Pleasure LP label (which we saw last week), that the Brahms Clarinet Quintet recording was published (I still don't know when it was made) sometime in 1970, the year Classics for Pleasure was born. Was there time for Brendan O. to take his place with the quartet in time for the recording? Or might Claire S. still have been in place?

Admittedly, I further confused the point by mis-associating an entirely other young violin-playing Claire Simpson, who suffered a gruesome fate at the knife-wielding hands of a jealous ex-boyfriend, with the Gabrieli's second violinist. I thought I knew why Claire S. had left the Gabrieli; now I have no idea, just that according to Wikipedia a Simpson-to-O'Reilly succession happened sometime in 1969. However . . . .


A NEW CONFUSION ARISES IN MY GABRIELI TIMELINE

It surprised me that one of the Gabrieli Quartet's earliest recordings should have been a quintet with a clarinet soloist. Now it appears that before they recorded the Brahms quintet -- as much as three years before -- they had recorded the Mozart Clarinet Quintet, also with Keith Puddy. And now I realize that the association with Keith P. actually predates the formation of the Gabrieli String Quartet. In a 2003 interview for the Internet Cello Society, Keith Harvey, speaking of his time as principal cello with the English Chamber Orchestra (after some five years as the very young principal cello of the London Philharmonic) recalled:

During my time in the English Chamber Orchestra, the co-leader Kenneth Sillito and I, together with the pianist John Streets and clarinettist Keith Puddy, formed the Gabrieli Ensemble, which later became the Gabrieli String Quartet. In the Ensemble, we performed Messaien's Quartet for the End of Time at least two hundred times. The composer was present at one of these performances and wrote a glowing appreciation.

Let's leave for another the alarming image of four people performing the Quartet for the End of Time, in a fairly short span of time, 200-plus times. (It's not a terribly long piece, really, but in performance it always seems to me to last for two or three weeks. It amazes me that a piece can be simultaneously so tedious and so repulsive.) So Keith P. was already partnering with Kenneth S. and Keith H. before there even was a Gabrieli String Quartet!

A theory about the quartet's origin date: Maybe 1966 is when the oddly configured quartet calling itself the Gabrieli Ensemble was born in 1966, and 1967 the Gabrieli String Quartet in 1967. Of course this doesn't leave an awful lot of time for those 200-plus performances of the Quartet for the End of Time. So all we can say for sure is that somewhere in there the transformation took place. And in any case, it's interesting that the year 1967 should have popped up. Because --


LET'S GET BACK TO THE MOZART CLARINET QUINTET

Gennady Rozhdestvensky (1931-2018)

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: Symphony No. 5 in D:
i. Preludio

BBC Symphony Orchestra, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, cond. BBC Radio Classics, recorded live in the Royal Festival Hall at the BBC Symphony Orchestra 50th Anniversary Concert of Oct. 22, 1980

by Ken

Goodness, we have so much work to do -- old business, specifically look-back business (hint: look again at just the opening images of last week's YouTube clips of performances of Mason Jones's woodwind-quintet arrangement of Ravel's Tombeau de Couperin suite and note the immediately visible difference you can see), new business, future business, business-in-progress) that it would be hard to know where to start, if we didn't have some already overdue business, dating back to June 16 and the passing of Gennady Rozhdestvensky, at the age of 87.

[For a quick and affectionate once-over of G.R.'s life and career, check out Chris O'Reilly's on the Presto Classical website. -- Ed.]

My first difficulty in memorializing G.R. is that from the time my musical awareness expanded beyond the borders of the continental U.S., he was always there, and I don't recall ever hearing a performance of his that seemed less than fully engaged, and I don't mean just in Russian repertory, of which he was, not surprisingly, a heroic proponent. (We'll come back to this point in a moment, in a number of ways, actually.) But it wouldn't hurt us to hear a sampling of that Russian repertory. Here's the glorious culmination of Part I of The Nutcracker, sounding as properly and organically magisterial as I've ever heard it.

TCHAIKOVSKY: The Nutcracker, Op. 71:
No. 8, Scene in the Pine Forest
No. 9, Scene and Waltz of the Snowflakes [at 3:39]

Bolshoi Theater Children's Chorus (in No. 9), Bolshoi Theater Orchestra, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, cond. Melodiya, recorded 1960


GEE, MOST OF MY G.R. HOLDINGS ARE ON LP,
AND IT'S SUCH A HASSLE MAKING AUDIO FILES