Current Reviews

        by Jon Yungkans

Sergei Prokofiev
Piano Concerto No. 1-3

Martha Argerich, piano
Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor



Samuel Barber
Orchestral Works and Concertos
Leonard Slatkin, Charles Munch



Rimsky-Korsakov
Evgeny Svetlanov


Beethoven
Symphony No.9
Piano Transcription by Franz Liszt
Konstantin Scherbakov, Piano



Kronos Caravan

Dear Mother: I have written to tell you my worrying secret. Now don’t cry when you read it because it is neither yours nor my fault. I suppose I will have to tell it now, without any nonsense. To begin with I was not meant to be an athlet[e] [sic]. I was meant to be a composer, and will be I’m sure. I’ll ask you one more thing .—Don’t ask me to try to forget this unpleasant thing and go play football.—Please—Sometimes I’ve been worrying about this so much that it makes me mad (not very).

-- Samuel Barber, Age 9

In one of life’s crueler ironies, child and composer intersected to birth a masterpiece. As Samuel Barber read through James Agee’s prose poem, “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” family lay foremost on his mind. His father was dying, his mother was under a terrific strain, and his beloved Aunt Louise was also gravely ill. Aunt Louise – Louise Homer – had been one of the glories of the Metropolitan Opera House and her husband, Sidney Homer, was a song composer well known in the United States during his lifetime. So the crises that lay at Barber’s feet reached deep into his musical roots as well as to the heart of his family tree.

Normally a time when a son would look back on his childhood, Barber was especially attuned to Agee’s text, which describes a summer day in a child’s words and observations. Those words drew from Barber a music that hovered between tenderness and anguish, innocence and foresight, waking and dreaming – child’s music for child’s words. Knoxville became an extremely personal work, not just for Barber but also for all who were connected directly with the composer in its performance.

“That was exactly my childhood in Wheeling, West Virginia,” said soprano Eleanor Steber, who commissioned and premièred Knoxville with Serge Koussevitsky and the Boston Symphony. After Barber died in 1981, Leontyne Price, who collaborated with the composer on several occasions, reminisced, “As a southerner, it expresses everything I know about my roots and about my mama and father … my home town … You could smell the south in it.” And as Barber himself recalled,

Agee’s poem was vivid and moved me deeply, and my musical response was immediate and intense … The evening he describes … reminded me so much of similar evenings when I was a child at home … It expresses a child’s feeling of loneliness, wonder, and lack of identity in that marginal world between twilight and sleep.

Knoxville has had its share of recordings, surpassed in number only by the ubiquitous and perennial Adagio for Strings. Steber, Price, Dawn Upshaw and Kathleen Battle have all turned in exceptional performances, taken directly from the heart. Steber tops the list; her ringing, bell-like tone, crystal-clear diction, and intimate connection with the work combine for an aristocratic reading. Price’s voice – darker, more velvety and rural-sounding – bathes the music in shimmering stars and twilight. In comparison, Karina Gauvin’s voice is clothed in a haze. Her voice is rich but syrupy, her diction veiled. Fortunately, Naxos includes Agee’s poem in the liner notes to make following along easier.

The orchestra bears as much weight as the soloist in this opus. Marin Alsop wins hands down over William Strictland (Steber) and Thomas Schippers (Price), despite the latter’s close association with Barber’s music. Alsop’s traversal feels and sounds more natural than the others. As in her other performances of Barber’s music, she places the lyricism above the drama, focusing on legato, breadth of phrase and subtle but incisive inflection. Both revelatory and paramount to Barber’s compositions is the necessity of highlighting the song in the music instead of conducting the song into music. Alsop has shown herself a past master of the former, continuing here to extraordinary effect.

The same natural flow and breadth of phrase infuses the other works on this disc – one well known and the others welcome rarities. Some might argue that Alsop’s reading of the Second Essay is too broad and doesn’t sustain the necessary tension to pull it off. To me, her approach gives it a befittingly epic grandeur and scope, and her nimbleness in the fleeter sections balances everything beautifully.

It is also good to hear the Third Essay shoulder-to-shoulder with its more famous sibling. One of Barber’s final works, less concentrated on lyricism and more on rhythmic contrast, the Third Essay deserves to be heard much more. Alsop saunters along the moonlit cliff’s edge more daringly here than in the Second and the slackness of her opening almost causes her to fall. But as she moves along, her broader approach allows her to bring to light the Third’s true expressive complexity beneath its melancholy surface, showing it to be one of Barber’s most heartfelt and, ultimately, tragic scores.
From the pitch-black night of the soul on which the Third Essay sets, the Toccata Festiva rises in a sunrise of power and multihued glory. Written to dedicate the organ donated to the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Toccata showcases itself as one of Barber’s most virtuosic creations. Virtually every aspect of organ playing is exploited, from the blazing fanfare of the opening to a dazzling cadenza using only the instrument’s pedals. The piece never feels like empty display. Barber harnesses all the organ’s technical wizardry to a tremendously varied expressive and musical content, giving one of his most heroic utterances – at once lushly romantic, melodically and bracingly modern in its harmonic angularity.

From twilight to first light, Alsop, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Naxos have produced another evening of true artistry.
 

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