A Life in Music. - sound recording reviews

National Review, July 15, 1996 by Ralph De Toledano

THE oboe, some frustrated commentator once remarked, is "an ill wind that nobody blows good." But the lively baroque oboe is different from the hauntingly mournful instrument you hear, let us say, in Mahler's works. Six Vivaldi oboe concertos, beautifully played for Sony by Hansjorg Schellenberger and the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra, are evidence of this, for they swing beyond the contemporary instrument's lonesome tones. The baroque, which for all too many listeners is associated solely with Johann Sebastian Bach, was a music of high optimism, even at its most solemn.

Gateway to Classical Music, a valuable eight-disc survey issued by EMI Classics, focuses in its Baroque Era disc not only on Bach but on Corelli, Purcell, Scarlatti, and Vivaldi. This disc offers a brief anthology of the music of that period, performed by a variety of musicians and singers out of EMI's extensive archives. Meanwhile the survey's Early Music disc presents selections from a period in music and in history, the Renaissance, which is too often approached in superficial terms. The Dark Ages were hardly as dark as pop history tells us, but the Renaissance was an unparalleled burst of intellectual energy and a liberation of the human spirit.

In music, the great flowering came from the Church, which brought religious passion and ecstasy to the contemplative chant named after Pope Gregory -- and this musical heightening moved from the sacred to the secular. This is a truly superlative collection, including Tomas Luis de Victoria's O Magnum mysterium, Palestrina's Hodie Christus natus est, liturgical works by Machaut and Dufay, and non-religious works including those of Gabrieli, Monteverdi, and Frescobaldi, the great organist and improviser. Utopia Triumphans: The Great Polyphony of the Renaissance, sensitively performed by Paul Van Nevel and the excellent Huelgas Ensemble, is Sony's contribution to the unbuttoning of this great period in liturgical music, including Gabrieli's Exaudim Domine, Josquin De Pres's Qui habitat, and works by other composers.

It is hardly necessary to note that composers and musicians do not, at a specific date, change from one style to another. One period blends into the next; but the delimitation has its uses. Mozart and Haydn are "classical" -- and Beethoven is a bridge from the "classical" to the "romantic." That Beethoven pushed musical expression beyond that of the classicists is a fact, and his Symphony No. 9 in D Minor presents a case in point. The choral section is what future critics would call a genre tranche, forging the post-classical symphony into the post-classical cantata. But Beethoven's massive conjugation of a host of orchestral musicians -- the largest up to his time -- added little to the literature of developing music. It is hardly my favorite Beethoven work. But you can have it resplendently recorded on an EMI VHS video cassette, as performed by Otto Klemperer and the New Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus.

Klemperer was not physically up to par at the recording of the Ninth for EMI, sitting throughout the session, but as always his conducting was faithful and foursquare, with no vapors about it --an approach that looked to the composer's intent and not to the baton waver's vagaries.

A Life in Music, Sony has entitled its great series of Isaac Stern reissues on CD. And this is as it should be. Stern is the greatest violinist of our time, in technique and in musical understanding. During his career he has played all manner of music with all manner of musical groups. Now Sony brings us Isaac Stern with Eugene Ormandy, the great conductor of the great Philadelphia Orchestra, in a traversal of the Tchaikovsky Concerto in D Major and the Sibelius Concerto in D Minor. Stern can be as gloriously romantic with Tchaikovsky as he is rigorous with Bach. He can also lift Sibelius out of the tundra and give the score a shot of adrenalin.

Gottse danken, as they used to say in New York's Yiddish agora, jazz remains with us -- and those who love and believe in it continue to draw from its great storehouse. And so I call to your attention two new CDs issued by Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab. First and foremost, there is Ella and Louis Again, a two-record set which brings together Louis Armstrong -- along with Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet a major contributor to the development of jazz -- and the recently departed Ella Fitzgerald, among the best of jazz singers. Armstrong's trumpet is little in evidence on these recordings -- but then, his singing always reflected the phrasing and intonation of his horn. Miss Fitzgerald's clean and lyric voice brought emotion and artistry into the traversal of the songs that were drawn into jazz -- and here you can rejoice in the nostalgia of such melodies as "These Foolish Things," "Ill Wind," "Love Is Here to Stay," "Autumn in New York," "I've Got My Love," and others that once nourished us.

Also among these Mobile Fidelity reissues we have Billie Holiday and Body and Soul. Some of us heard her, standing before the baby spots at Cafe Society, where she gave us "Strange Fruit," "Billie's Blues," and some of the great songs she had been recording with Teddy Wilson. Miss Holiday was a great talent, with a voice and delivery that, like Bessie Smith's, reflected the joy and anguish of her heritage. In the end, drugs and the ministrations of her political friends got her down -- but she was one of the originals of jazz. On this recording, she was relaxed and borne by her artistry. It is worth more than the price of admission.