Une Symphonie Imaginaire by Jean-Philippe RameauReview by: Rick AndersonNotes, Second Series, Vol. 62, No. 2 (Dec., 2005), pp. 473-474Published by: Music Library AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4487603 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 14:20

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Music Library Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Notes.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.78.108.40 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 14:20:45 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Sound Recording Reviews 473

placed at the beginning of the program). Many of the choral works are accompanied by an organ part, and the program is inter- spersed with lovely instrumental pieces per- formed by organist Richard Pinel and the recorder consort Byrde; these interludes are jewels of musical grace in a program that is not, unfortunately, otherwise wholly satisfying. The Choir of Magdalen College, Oxford is not in top form on this record- ing. The treble voices, in particular, are almost shrill at times and strain to reach some of the higher pitches. Even with their audibly heroic efforts, there are moments (notably about one third of the way through Peccavinus cum patribus nostris) when their intonation is distractingly less than perfect. This is both unfortunate and surprising, given the quality of the group's most recent recording, a very winning ac- count of church music by Orlando Gibbons (With a Merrie Noyse: Second Service and Consort Anthems, Harmonia Mundi HMU 907337 [2004]). This disc will be of solid academic interest, but is not as pleasurable a listening experience as it should have been.

Antonia Padoani Bembo. The Seven Psalms of David, Vol. 1. La Donna Musicale. [self-released], 2004.

While Antonia Padoani was not born into nobility, she was certainly a child of privilege-the daughter of a prominent Venetian physician, she had private music lessons from no less a teacher than Francesco Cavalli, then the maestro di cap- pella of the cathedral of San Marco. While some of the details of her subsequent musi- cal career remain unclear, what is known indicates that her comfortable childhood gave way to a difficult adulthood: she mar- ried a Venetian noble and gave birth to three children, but she later filed for di- vorce and was left with little financial sup- port. She left her daughter in the care of a local abbess (and her sons, presumably, with her ex-husband), and went to live in a "women's community" in Paris, under the sponsorship of King Louis XIV, for whom she wrote a number of motets and other sa- cred and secular vocal works, including one opera. Her work is rarely recorded today, which, as this lovely disc demonstrates, is a great shame. This program includes four of

Bembo's seven psalm settings (along with a violin sonata by Bembo's French contem- porary, Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, per- formed here by the fine baroque flutist Na'ama Lion). Bembo's vocal writing is de- manding and complex, and her particular take on the fusion of French and Italian styles that was popular at the time is idio- syncratic without being particularly revo- lutionary. The Boston-based La Donna Musicale performs these works with warmth and impeccable accuracy, and the recorded sound is excellent. Highly recommended to all classical collections. (To order the CD, contact La Donna Musicale at laury@ ladm.org.)

Jean-Philiipe Rameau. Une Sym- phonie Imaginaire. Les Musiciens du Louvre / Marc Minkowski. Archiv B0004478-02, 2005.

The claims made for Rameau have been rather grandiose at times. Writing shortly after the composer's death, the critic Michel-Guy de Chabanon asserted that "as a writer of operatic symphonies, Rameau never had a model or a rival." In his notes to the present recording Marc Minkowski, conductor of Les Musiciens du Louvre and compiler of this unique selection of brief snippets from some of Rameau's large- scale works, boldly asserts that "if no one to- day would question the claim that Rameau was the greatest orchestral genius in France before Berlioz, no one questioned it in the composer's lifetime either." (A very possi- bly apocryphal story has Claude Debussy, at one point, crying "Long live Rameau, down with Gluck!") No model or rival? Greatest orchestral genius before Berlioz? These are not modest claims, but it has to be said that the music presented here tends to bear them out. As Minkowski explains, Rameau never wrote for the orchestra alone; his or- chestral scores exist only in the context of his operas and ballets. Since he had never written the true symphonie that Minkowski wished he had, Minkowski took it upon himself to create one. This he did by care- fully selecting bits and pieces from Rameau's large theatrical oeuvre-first the rich and brilliant overture to Zais, then a string of airs and dance interludes from Dardanus, Platie, Les Indes galantes and other works, along with a transcription for orchestra of

This content downloaded from 195.78.108.40 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 14:20:45 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

474 NOTES, December 2005

one selection from one of the composer's keyboard suites. There is no academic argu- ment to be made here-Minkowski is not claiming that his program represents a re- construction of some long-ago musical evening, or even that there is any formal or spiritual connection between the pieces presented. This means that the recording really can be judged solely on its merits as a delightful listening experience, and on that basis it succeeds spectacularly. Minkowski luxuriates in the boldness and expansive- ness of the more dramatic piece and teases sweet, sensuous pleasure from the quieter ones. His group plays with effortless virtuos- ity and obvious joy, and could hardly have been more sympathetically or expertly recorded. Very highly recommended to all libraries.

Ludwig van Beethoven. Sonatas. Henryk Szeryng; Gary Graffman. Bridge 9165, 2005.

Violinist Henryk Szeryng and pianist Gary Graffman were something of a match made in heaven. Both understood Beetho- ven's sonatas for violin and piano in accor- dance with what seem to have been the in- tentions of the composer himself-as duets between two equal instruments rather than as a speech by the violin with self-effacing accompaniment by the piano. (Indeed, Beethoven's notes in early editions of the works seem to indicate that he actually saw the violin as the secondary instrument, an attitude shared by Mozart in regard to his own sonatas for piano and violin.) That both Szeryng and Graffman were respectful and insightful interpreters of Beethoven in general made their pairing even more felic- itous, of course. These recordings date from December 1970, when the two per- formers met in a series of recitals in the Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress. The sound quality is acceptable if not stellar, but the playing sparkles with wit and passion. The three sonatas presented are numbers 1 (in D major) and 3 (in E flat major) from opus 12, along with the Kreutzer (opus 47, in A major). Through- out the program, Szeryng and Graffman play with admirable respect for the music's pulse and rhythmic integrity without sacri- ficing any of its emotional energy. The mu-

sicians play as if they share a single brain, hesitating and surging forward together in perfect synchrony while never giving in to the temptation to turn their performances into showcases for their own intelligence and virtuosity. Beethoven has had a great many brilliant interpreters, but few have matched the sensitivity and insight that Szeryng and Graffman brought to bear on these works during this pair of recitals.

Thomas Ades; Franz Schubert. Piano Quintet; Piano Quintet in A, D667 ("The Trout"). Arditti Quartet; Belcea Quartet; Corin Long; Thomas Ades. EMI Classics5 57664 2, 2005.

Here is an interesting pairing. The young British composer Thomas Adds wrote his one-movement piano quintet for a festival performance by himself and the Arditti Quartet. It is a modernistic piece, con- structed out of tonal building blocks which are disassembled and rearranged into a dizzying array of harmonic pieces and rhythmic disjunctions. The overall result is disorienting, though not exactly forbid- ding-at times it actually brings to mind the work of Carl Stalling, whose scores for animated cartoons were often organized around the similar cutting-and-pasting of straightforward tonal elements. By pairing this work with Schubert's "Trout" quintet, arguably the most well-known and beloved composition in the piano quintet reper- toire and one of the most immediately ac- cessible of Schubert's chamber works, Adds seems to be encouraging a reconsideration of both pieces. The listener is naturally led to regard each of the two compositions in a new light: does the one help us think very differently of the other, perhaps (as Tom Service's liner notes suggest) leading us to recognize an underlying strangeness in Schubert's composition that is not other- wise immediately obvious, or bringing out the conventional beauty that lies beneath the fragmented surface of the Adds piece? Ultimately, the answer is no. What makes these two ambitious compositions a good match for each other is not so much a deep structural similarity, but rather the simple fact that each is so clearly a product of its time: Schubert's of the period when classi-

This content downloaded from 195.78.108.40 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 14:20:45 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions