Mozart: Great Mass in C Minor. - Christopher Hogwood, Academy of Ancient Music, Winchester College Quiristers, Winchester Cathedral Choir - sound recording reviews

National Review, Oct 1, 1990 by Ralph De Toledano

I HAVE ALWAYS believed that considerations of time and place, of a composer's life and arts musica are secondary. The music and how it reaches us come first-unless we are musicologists or historians. That Mozart was occasionally foulmouthed, that Debussy was a boor and Brahms sexually twisted, that Beethoven in pique changed the dedication of the Eroica-these have little to do with what was set down on paper or how it is brought to us. That plain-chant preceded bel canto does not qualify my response to the Gregorian. This is patently true but bears occasional repetition.

Take, for example, the fact that Arnold Schoenberg's music leaves me cold. It is necessary to note that he was as much the prisoner of his 12tone syntax" as its master-and that his theories were a Procrustean bed, limiting him to a combination of Germanic didacticism and Talmudic rigidity. But what the 12-tone cluster and the determined atonality that robs dissonance of its meaning and pleasure do to the specific compositions is there in the score and its rendition. Schoenberg's Serenade Op. 24 and his Chamber Symphony Op. 9, as they were respectfully played and recorded at the fortieth Marlboro Music Festival, of which Rudolf Serkin was director, adumbrate a paradox: that to get anything out of the music, you must listen so tensely that you are robbed of any enjoyment. Its harsh and unyielding measures may say something to technocrats with slide rules-but I would hate to be one of the performers. In the Serenade, the essence of Schoenberg is distilled by a basso coping with a setting of a Petrarch sonnet translated, of all things, into German! (Sony Classical SMK 45894.)

What delight then in turning to Bela Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra-according to Serge Koussevitsky, who commissioned and premiered it in 1944, "the best work of the last 25 years." It is a work of brilliance and color, of warmth and harmonic generosity, of what in another genre we would call swing-and let us not forget that Bartok wrote a clarinet trio for Benny Goodman. The "modern" elements are here-but not as exercises in torture. The dissonance is warranted and graceful, and, miracle dictu, the final movement includes a fugue. This is Bartok's finest work and explains why since his death in 1946 his compositions have been heard increasingly in the concert hall and his reputation among musicians and the public has been steadily rising. Coupled with the concerto is a suite based on his The Miraculous Mandarin, a powerful and sardonic work which had a succes de scandale because of what was considered a too sexually explicit libretto in the 1920s, though pallid by today's standards. The performance by Zubin Mehta and the Berlin Philharmonic is both solid and exciting. (Sony Classical SK 45748.)

In his lifetime, Bartok was criticized for an alleged lack of technical originality. Gabriel Faure, a post-Romantic rather than a modern," was sometimes patronized as an "unconventional traditionalist" who did not break with the past but built on it. You will find in him an extraordinary, and extraordinarily beautiful, melodic sense, and a subtlety of rhythm (and cross-rhythms), derived from the French tradition, which softened the downbeat of the measure and lengthened the phrase. But above all there is a quality of grace and sincerity, and a lack of that assertiveness which led Berlioz at times to take the listener by the scruff and shake him. A new recording of Faure's Piano Quartet Op. 15 and the Trio Op. 120, written two years before his death, bears all these qualities. The Beaux Arts Trio, performing with skill and sensitivity, is particularly felicitous in the adagio of the piano quartet (in which it is augmented by pianist Menahem Pressler)-the strings speaking separately to each other and to the rich harmonies of the piano, with strength, serenity, and the otherworldliness of Fauere's Requiem. (Philips 422 350-2.)

Is it true that Bruckner's symphonies were intended, as Virgil Thomson once remarked, to "open up the heavens and bring down the house"? Is the religiosity of his music comparable to that of an Easter service at Radio City Music Hall? Is he nothing more than an amalgam of the more soothing elements in Brahms and Wagner? To all three questions I would answer emphatically in the negative. True, he can be downgraded for the ease of his melodic and harmonic structures. True, he must bear the stigma of appealing largely to audiences rather than musicologists. And true, there is none of the self-torture of Mahler in his religiosity. You have only to listen to the opening of his Symphony No. 4 and its haunting horn theme to be convinced of the merits of this peasant turned composer and to the richness of his talents-and, as the symphony progresses, of the validity of his achievement. Of all his symphonies, I prefer No. 4, and this preference is heightened by the reading it gets from Riceardo Chailly and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, who drive the score to its majestic coda. (London 425 613-2.)