Busoni: Orchestral Suite No. 2. Clarinet Concertino. Tanzwalzer. Sarabande and Cortège. Berceuse Elégaique.
John Bradbury, clarinet; BBC Philharmonic, Neeme Järvi, conductor. Ralph Couzens, producer; Stephen Rinker, engineer. Chandos 9920

Precocious and prodigiously gifted, Ferruccio Busoni was one of the oddest composers who ever lived. Born in 1866 of Italian and German-Jewish parents, Busoni was a legendary pianist, a revered teacher (his students included Petri, Mitropoulos, Grainger, Weill, and Varèse), a philosopher who wrote grandiloquent artistic manifestos calling for a return to classic forms, a theorist who propounded a system of 113 heptatonic modes and proposed using exotic scales and subchromatic intervals, and an insatiable adopter of neglected or alien music who tossed off gothic transfigurations of Bach and wrote a fantasy on American Indian themes for piano and orchestra. He exuded an aura of high-minded Victorian idealism, prophetic aestheticism, nobility, and genius.

And yet, as with Liszt, there was a touch of the crude showman, even the unsavory charlatan in Busoni—and something else, darker and stranger. He could descend to kitschy operetta-tune pastiche and fey mockery in his salon pieces, and, more surprisingly, emanate an otherworldly eeriness of authentic menace, especially in his grand, creepy unfinished final masterpiece, Doktor Faust. There are spectral moments in that opera that positively tremble with metaphysical disquiet.

This new Chandos anthology of Busoni's orchestral works gives a good idea of his range, and includes two miraculously perfect and original creations: The visionary, death-haunted pairing of a slow, spooky Sarabande and restlessly driving Cortège (both were incorporated into Doktor Faust) and the séance-like, ineffably tender, and heartbreakingly beautiful Berceuse Elégaique that Busoni wrote after experiencing a dream-vision of his dead mother.

The remainder of the program makes no pretensions to profundity. The four-movement but compact Clarinet Concerto from 1918 adumbrates—in its own way—Stravinsky's neoclassicism, and very nicely combines melodious Mozart-ean fluency and elegance with solo display. Tanzwalzer and the 1903 Second Orchestral Suite (subtitled "Armor-Plated" and inspired by the days of chivalry) are ceremonial and conventional, respectively festive and martial in mood.

These performances are polished and convincing, though I've heard dreamier renditions of the Berceuse that bring out more of its seraphic mystery. Chandos' sound is typical of the label: Warm, detailed, and spacious, backed-off just far enough to give the sound a silky smoothness. I'd prefer a bit more "bite"—but then I grew up on vinyl.
- Mark Lehman

Kancheli: Styx, for Viola, Mixed Choir and Orchestra. Gubaidulina: Concerto for Viola and Orchestra.
Yuri Bashmet, viola; St. Petersburg Choir and Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre, Valery Gergiev, conductor. Sid McLauchlin, producer; Rainer Maillard, tonmeister; Jürgen Bulgrin and Vladimir Schuster, recording engineers. Deutsche Grammophon 289 471 494

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The program's bonding agents are, first and obviously, the superb violist, Yuri Bashmet; the other is Outlander Soul. Russian Soul would not do, since Giya Kancheli is Georgian and Sofia Gubaidulina, Tatar. Several living composers to the east of what used to be art-music's hub have risen to prominence via a fulsome expressivity peculiar to the former Soviet Bloc. Well and good, but I don't think DG quite had in mind a demonstration of art versus kitsch. Kancheli's rather manufactured gestures play to the gallery. Gubaidulina plays to the heart. The Viola Concerto tells a wordlessly pessimistic tale rising briefly to violence, from which it subsides into resignation, a four-note motif the music's forwarding force. The impassioned monologue, much of it whispered, wanders off into lengthy asides, its origins and motivation to be guessed at with a shudder. Gubaidulina's harmonic idiom is broadly consonant rather than narrowly dissonant, a valid link to the Romantic tradition's living core. The composer is so clearly sui generis that school labels cannot attach: neo-nothing, post-nothing, minimalist-maximalist-not. Nor is she a detached and rootless presence. This Concerto is in the form's most challenging incarnation, that of an extraordinary voyage.

Solo passages from gossamer to passionate attest to Bashmet's skills and musical intelligence. Gergiev's direction does the music proud. It's a beautifully detailed recording, and rare of this breed, the solo instrument sounds in scale with its fine orchestra. Congratulations to Bashmet for having himself miked as less than a Gulliver among Lilliputians.
- Mike Silverton

Furtwängler: Symphony No. 2.
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Daniel Barenboim, conductor. Tobias Lehman, producer; Eberhard Sengpiel, engineer. Teldec 43495 (2 CDs)

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Many of the great conductors were also composers. Klemperer, Walter, Szell, Weingartner, Scherchen, Markevitch, Koussevitzky, Mitropoulos, Paray, Dorati, Goossens, Kubelík, and Martinon all wrote music, however little-known most of their production remains today. Though the world saw it the other way around, Wilhelm Furtwängler considered himself primarily a composer, with conducting merely a sideline. His magnum opus, the 82-minute-long Symphony No.2, offers substantial if not entirely persuasive evidence for this claim.

Furtwängler wrote the Second Symphony during the desolate last years of the Second World War. Like all his music, it's defiantly oldfangled (albeit curiously eclectic) in style, its wide-spanning melodic arches and epic late-Romantic turbulence as much indebted to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff as to the Germanic lineage of Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler, and Pfitzner. The symphony's huge ambitions are most apparent in its outer movements—the opening moderato lasts 20 minutes and the at-last-triumphant finale clocks in at just over a half an hour. Between these massive, noble, solidly built (if somewhat overblown) structures are two more modest and appealing movements— a lovely andante semplice led off by a gloriously harmonized and unforgettable lyrical main theme, and a faintly exotic scherzo redolent of Borodin. There's surprising warmth and sweetness in this music, a humane approachability that stands in poignant contradiction to the bitterness the composer must have felt as everything precious in his once-proud German culture seemed to have been forever corrupted or tainted by National Socialism. It's for these two inner movements especially that I've come to love this symphony.

Earlier versions, including the archival recording by Furtwängler himself and the murky and rambling Marco Polo CD, are now firmly superseded by this new Teldec release. Daniel Barenboim, who met Furtwängler as an 11-year-old prodigy and conducted the Second Symphony's American premiere, is evidently deeply committed to the work. The performance is shapely, assured, and impassioned, and this "in concert" recording before a politely quiet audience is immediate and powerfully dynamic, with a spacious and convincing sense of hall ambiance. All sorts of felicitous details obscured in previous recordings now come through cleanly and effectively. Notice, for instance, the lilting pizzicatos that accompany the beautiful opening melody in the andante. Fitting this slightly-too-long symphony onto polycarbonate requires two discs. As William Walton once lamented (while laboring on his opera Troilus and Cressida): "Too many notes, too many notes."
- ML

Enescu: Octet, op. 7; Quintet, op. 29.
Kremerata Baltica, Gidon Kremer, violin and artistic director; Andrius Zlabys, piano. Helmut Mühle, Gidon Kremer, producers; Philipp Nedel and Niels Müller, engineers. Nonesuch CD 79682

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A delight and an education! It seems that George Enescu (in France, Georges Enesco) composed more of interest than his two Romanian Rhapsodies, the popularity of which he grew to resent, as something of a parallel to Ravel's Boléro. Enescu's present-day obscurity beyond these morceaux probably connects to his having been criticized in his lifetime as derivative, quaint, and old-fashioned. While it's certainly true that Enescu was no innovator, it's also true that he wrote some wonderful music, witness the present release's two remarkably different works. As to that difference, the 1900 Octet and 1940 Quintet might as well be by different men. The latter, for piano, two violins, viola and cello, draws its nourishment from styles by then passé. We need think only of the kind of thing Rachmaninoff and Richard Strauss did at around this time to understand that a studied disdain of the cutting edge was far from isolated behavior. The intensely Francophile Piano Quintet exhales the spirit of Chausson, Fauré, and Debussy more out of love than thievery. (The excellent annotator hears Scriabin, Ravel, and a dash of Prokofiev. Between us, I'd call that a good day's worth of name-dropping.) Under the spell of Enescu's harmonic language, one soon overlooks the music's anachronicity, or from which family trees he plucked his fruits. The booklet claims this to be the quintet's first recording. If so, bravo!

My New Grove suggests that the Octet's backup strings are Gidon Kremer's idea. Anyone immodest enough to pun on camerata by naming his ensemble Kremerata Baltica probably isn't above such tampering. Be that as it may, we can hear the music's strands easily enough. Even at 19, the composer exhibits a mastery of expressivity and a gift for unpredictable melody. The Octet precedes the Rhapsodies by a year or so and shares in their rich flavor, albeit less forwardly. Ever the conservative vis-à-vis his period's adventurers, Enescu's octet plays as a rather more buttoned entity than his free-form rhapsodies. While good enough, the Octet's recording strikes me as unnecessarily reverberant. The handsomely recorded Quintet sounds to me a more honest piece of engineering.
- MS

David Daniels: Handel Oratorio Arias.
Ensemble Orchestral de Paris, John Nelson, conductor. Etienne Collard, producer and editor; Alain Lanceron, executive producer; Hugues Deschaux, balance engineer. Virgin Veritas 5454972

Praise for countertenor David Daniels' artistry has become commonplace. What remains singular, however, is the sheer beauty of his voice, the wide range of emotional expression, and the extraordinary facility with which he negotiates and embellishes the florid filigree of baroque composition. Daniels' voice is not particularly large—ideal for the more intimate venues in which baroque repertoire was originally performed, it lacks the weight and volume produced by other countertenors. Happily, thanks to the lighter instrumentation of authentic accompaniment, Daniels' artistry consistently shines on disc.

Following up two recitals of Handel opera arias, Daniels here rejoins conductor John Nelson and Ensemble Orchestral de Paris for 13 arias drawn from six English oratorios: Belshazzar, Semele, Theodora, Saul, Jephta, and Messiah. The earliest of these, Saul, was composed when Handel was 54 years old; the others were written after completion of Handel's final Italian opera, Deidamia. Most of the arias, including Messiah's well-known "He was despised," were written for countertenor; only Didymus' arias from Theodora were intended for castrato.

Although Daniels' execution of rapid coloratura runs and trills is remarkable, his tone shines most in legato passages that call for soft, suspended singing and introverted, heartfelt expression. Happily, these less virtuosic oratorio arias contain abundant opportunities for Daniels to float tones in his middle range, where the voice seems happiest. Recorded in Eglise Notre-Dame du Liban, with engineering and orchestral forces identical to those credited on the recently released recital, the disc thankfully eschews the excessive albeit inoffensive church-like reverb frequently used to beef up Daniels' modest sound.

In a recent interview, Daniels told me that what excites him about Handel's writing is the composer's ability to "both dramatically and musically evolve a character into a deeper person with deeper emotions. He's a master at this. There's a very distinctive journey for every single character; the music becomes more complex as the character's psyche becomes more complex."

Handel's mastery of character painting is apparent in the four arias from Theodora, which Daniels included because the oratorio played such a key role in his career. He calls himself "incredibly fortunate" to have sung Didymus in a 1996 summer Glyndebourne production, staged by Peter Sellars, whose cast included Lorraine Hunt, Lieberson, Dawn Upshaw, and Richard Croft. "To live with that piece for twelve weeks—six weeks of rehearsal, and performances over six more weeks—made a huge change in my career. Besides pushing me to a different level in Europe because people began to know who I was, it touched me. The spirituality of the piece, and the belief of everyone from Peter to [my fellow singers] and the stagehands in what we were doing, came across in that theater every night."

A comparison of Daniels' performances of Didymus' arias to those of countertenor Robin Blaze's on Paul McCreesh's recent complete recording of Theodora is enlightening. Blaze has a lovely voice, distinguished by a pearly, sweet innocence and fetching purity. But when he sings "The Raptured Soul," his less-refined technique cannot segue from the perfectly poised, floated trill that Daniels achieves on the opening words, "The raptured soul," to the emphatic, biting delivery of Daniels' subsequent "defies the sword." Nor can Blaze, or perhaps any other living countertenor, offer Daniels' stunningly large, open sound on interpolated high notes.

With "Kind Heaven" (again from Theodora), Handel underscores changing emotion by moving from a slow introduction to animated coloratura. Daniels' shifts are effortless, the tempos perfectly judged. What is especially remarkable is that after his deeply affecting opening phrases and the faster section that follows, he manages a recapitulation of the legato "Kind Heaven" even more ravishing in tone.

Daniels says: "I can't help but think that I'm a much better artist and singer than I was ten years ago. I was always pretty good at coloring words to get across the emotion of the piece I'm singing. Now I'm learning to speak and tell a story, to really portray an emotion rather than just worrying about a beautiful legato line. I'm learning my timing onstage—how to bring a character onto the stage, and portray him/her as a real, natural human being rather than a caricature of what an opera singer should be and look like on the stage." Jason Serinus

Kurka: The Good Soldier Schweik.
Jason Collins (Schweik); Chicago Opera Theater, Alexander Platt, conductor. James Ginsburg, producer; Bill Maylone, engineer. Cedille Records 90000 062 (2 CDs)

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The Good Soldier Schweik was first produced by the New York City Opera in April, 1958, less than six months after the premature death of its young composer, Robert Kurka (1921-1957), an American of Czech descent. Based on a comic novel by Jaroslav Hasek, this tale of political expediency and the horrors of war comes to us through the eyes of the main character, a canny survivor who often controls his destiny by playing the fool. The astringent commentary of a small orchestra composed only of wind and percussion instruments, lacking the smooth lushness of strings, provides the perfect backdrop.

Despite an utter lack of sentiment and the absence of hummable melodies, Kurka's approach nevertheless owes much to the musical theater tradition, as evidenced by the succession of easily comprehended recitatives interspersed with more song-like passages. And although they have impeccable operatic credentials, the "singing actors" from the Chicago Opera Theater production of 2001, happily preserved here in the work's world premiere recording, sound anything but operatic. With its angularity and frequent discord, Schweik resembles the alienated style of Schoenberg's Erwartung. Some passages employ more conventional harmonies and rhythms, suggesting Kurt Weill, though there is nothing reminiscent of Weill's songwriting style—no "Pirate Jenny" or "Moon of Alabama" interludes here.

But this is by no means thin gruel. There is much to admire in the piece itself and in this recording. The cast, obviously motivated by the brilliantly wrought satiric treatment of authority figures in both libretto and score, deliver powerful and involving performances. Jason Collins is particularly strong in the central role of Schweik, skillfully using his voice to signal the character's shifts between honesty and self-interested deception. And although this kind of work can be difficult to absorb from a recording, Cedille helpfully provides a booklet with a color photograph of every scene. The action has been blocked to resemble the stage production, giving a powerful sense of an actual performance, assisted by the exceptional quality of the recording, which presents a wide, deep, and detailed soundstage. The instrumentalists and vocal soloists almost seem to be in the room with us.

Despite enjoying almost a hundred productions since it first appeared, Schweik retains an undeserved obscurity. I hope that this vivid, inspired reading will change that.
- John Higgins

Jason Robert Brown: The Last Five Years. Norbert Leo Butz (Jamie); Sherie René Scott (Catherine); Thomas Murray, musical director. Jeffrey Lester, producer and chief engineer; Ricardo Fernandez and Anthony Ruotolo, assistant engineers. Sh-K-Boom 4001

With music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown, the Tony Award-winning composer of Parade, The Last Five Years opened off-Broadway in March 2002. It received two Drama Desk Awards, for outstanding music and lyrics, and each of its stars were also nominated for honors. It is a chamber show—a one-act, two-character production. This recording was made during the first month of production.

Anyone who has ever fallen in or out of love will relate to this witty, pungent drama. It stars Norbert Leo Butz and Sherie René Scott as Jamie and Catherine, a couple that is divorcing after an up-and-down five-year marriage. The bloom of first love, the hopes of marriage, the doubts afterward, and the sadness of parting are all addressed with rapid-fire insight, poignant wit, and compassion. The structure is interesting and worth noting: In flashback, Catherine tells the story from the end to the beginning, while Jamie starts at the beginning and goes to the end. The threads of the saga weave in and out with great ingenuity. Almost any adult listener will relate to the on-the-mark lyrics. Music is tuneful and fresh, reminiscent at times of Stephen Schwartz and Marvin Hamlisch. The scoring, for a small ensemble made up of piano, violin, cellos, acoustic guitar, bass, and percussion, is colorful and effective. Scott and Butz are brilliant, possessing two of the best young voices currently around, each with enough vocal technique to allow for character development.

The generously filled CD includes almost the entire show. The recording is up close; there isn't much stage depth, but there is ample left-to-right imaging, and the voices work in good partnership with the instrumentalists. Though a complete libretto is included, every word can be understood without referring to it. All in all, this is a definitive performance of a bright, entertaining, and relevant work that should, thanks to its modest scoring and small cast, find a happy home in dinner and community theaters.
- Rad Bennett

Goldsmith: The Ballad of Cable Hogue.
Original Soundtrack Recording. Robert Townson, producer; Erick Labson, remastering engineer. Varese Sarabande VCL 0502 1007

Starting in 1967, Sam Peckinpah made two movies back to back. The first was The Wild Bunch, one of the greatest films ever made, a violent, heroic, ultimately transcendent epic about a band of outlaws embroiled in the Mexican Revolution. The second, no less masterly, was its antithesis, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, a small-scaled character piece about a down-on-his-luck prospector betrayed by his partners and left to die in the desert. Part comedy, part romance, part revenge story, and even part musical, John Huston affectionately called it "the most wayward movie I've ever seen." But the studio executives hated it so much they dumped it in the summer of 1970 with almost no first-run bookings. Its only effective theatrical life came later in double billings and revival houses, typically on the coattails of The Wild Bunch, a pairing not so much unintelligent as ineffectual (who can watch anything immediately after that masterpiece?). Although Warner once had a nicely transferred (if panned-and-scanned) laserdisc, at present there is only a dreary VHS tape and, disgracefully, no DVD.

Not least of the unhappy by-products of The Ballad's commercial failure was that it killed any afterlife for Jerry Goldsmith's lovely score, with songs by Richard Gillis. This was the sole collaboration between Goldsmith and Peckinpah, but it was a beautiful one, perhaps the composer's most lyrical music, with some of the most sensitively pointed underscoring I know. The instrumentation is predominantly spare, almost chamberlike, with an appropriately folksy "Western" flavor that periodically expands into a string-drenched romanticism, and so evocative that only a few notes are necessary before moments and whole scenes are vividly recalled. At one point, when the title character and his lady sing of their love for one another, the music so elegantly goes from underscore to the song that the movie becomes a musical for one scene, and then just as seamlessly, returns to its more naturalistic mode.

A simple thanks to Varese Sarabande and producer Robert Townson for releasing this long-neglected soundtrack—absolutely complete, plus a bonus cut—all superbly remastered by Erick Labson from analog originals in excellent stereo, with an exceptionally informative essay by music archivist Nick Redman. I've heard this score referred to as "minor" Goldsmith. Disregard. It is no more minor Goldsmith than the movie is minor Peckinpah. As releases this specialized usually don't last long, I'd not dally in acquiring it.
- Paul Seydor