Originally posted by Pulcinella
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Thanks, I will. -
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It is a shame the Jarvi cycle comes up all the time, the ubiquitous recycled cycle, because it's dull dull DULL. Lacking real rhythmic life or truly telling inner-voice detail. The players don't respond to each other much, as so often with Jarvi the Elder in charge. For more detailed comments on symphony recordings see my posts on the BaL about the 6th that Caliban linked to...
(And it just happens that many of the best Martinu orchestral recordings aren't to be found in boxes, budget or otherwise...)
Deaf ears, stony ground etc., but I can only say it again one more time.... THIS...https://www.amazon.co.uk/MARTINU-COM...eumann+martinu
...is the only set I've found to be consistently great, both in its performances and - above all - SQ. Martinu's coloristic orchestral effects, especially in Nos. 1 and 6, really need refinement of sound to make their effect and the wide-open soundstage, freshness and dynamic range of the Rudolphinum sound better on the Columbia MS than any other I've heard. Those later Supraphon Belohlaveks are very well recorded, but suffer musical inconsistencies - a fine live 5th is c/w a remote and uneventful 6th. The 3 & 4 coupling is pretty good though, Belohlavek inspiring - at last - real urgency and passion in the Czech Phil's delivery. His best single-issue along with the earlier Chandos of No.1 with the Double Concerto* (one of the best of all Martinu releases, vast swirling Spanish-Hall acoustic resonances notwithstanding).
A few single-issue gems from recent delvings...
http://www.qobuz.com/gb-en/album/mar.../0095115895023*
Back in the Gramophone day, ES felt that the Prague Castle resonances did impair clarity of line and rhythm, for him rather damagingly. But RL, in his QR survey, found much to be impressed by and seemingly had no difficulty with textural clarity (but listening, one suspects, on his ESL-63s, why would he?
). A significant release especially for the stunning account of the 1st Symphony, one of Martinu's most inspired, most tragically heartfelt pieces.
It's quite difficult to find truly impressive recordings of Les Fresques, (the classic Ancerl shows its age a little even on the Gold remaster), but this Ashkenazy Ondine one is highly inspired, tonally warm and radiant, just lacking the last ounce of inner part precision perhaps, but for me is at least on a par with Mackerras musically, or the little-known Jiri Kout (Arte Nova with No.6, a great CD), has better sound than either...AND it has really wonderful performances of Piano Concertos 2 and 4 (Robert Kolinsky) as an extra treat. Live performance does seem to have made the difference here, so for once I don't feel like saying, "oh, you've got to have a Czech orchestra in Martinu." Only this once, mind... (well, until the next time...)...Last edited by jayne lee wilson; 25-05-16, 20:22.Comment
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But I’ve enjoyed those BIS discs for quarter of a century! Have I wasted 25 years on the wrong CDs?Originally posted by jayne lee wilson View Post
Seriously, if Martinu was a ‘core’ composer for me, I’d follow your and others' leads (as I did recently with Venzago, Skrowaczewski, et al). But we can’t be so fastidious with every composer’s work, can we?Comment
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But all is not lost - type this into the search box on the river people, B0000262OH and an excellent set pops up; Czech PO, Belohlavek conducting, Emil Leichner (piano)Originally posted by Barbirollians View Post
I spotted this in Gramex a few years ago - no idea what it would be like in any aspect, but it turned out to be a couple of quid well-spent!
... and for your shekels you the 5 concertos plus the concertino - bargain stuff!
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This is simply not true IMO. Detail is exactly what these recordings have. I wonder how you can hear them so differently...Originally posted by jayne lee wilson View PostComment
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I second that excellent Hyperion Dyad twofer. Worth mentioning also are his song settings: 12 very pleasant ones to enjoy discovering on Magdalena Kožená's Czech Love Song disc with Graham Johnson and a few more on her Songs My Mother Taught Me.Comment
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Oh Gawd... er, a little close reading please? Operative words "real", telling" etc?......Originally posted by Richard Barrett View Post
.... trying not to repeat myself too much here, please see #49 on the Martinu 6th BaL thread... as I said there , it's not that the detail isn't clear on the BIS set, just that Jarvi too often fails to either animate it or colour it vividly enough, compared to Thomson in one type of presentation, Neumann-JP in another, more vivid and intense manner...etc. etc...... I find similar problems with some of Jarvi's Sibelius and Nielsen recordings - well, most of the ones I've wasted my time listening to......
Y'know, YMMV, you either respond to these things or you don't... you might call it "musicality", that "sense of timing" beyond mere notated beats....
OK!
Compare the joyful, languidly-swinging, easy-sunday-morning opening of the 4th symphony in the Bamberg SO/Jarvi and the SNO/Thomson recordings. Jarvi sounds tonally "grey", dynamically unsubtle (i.e. - lacking much shading between very soft, soft, bit louder, very loud, etc. bloody etc.). The rhythms aren't making you smile or your foot tap - why? Well, go on to the allegro vivo 2nd movement, where the difference is even more obvious: because Jarvi's rhythms are noticably flat, the phrases slightly rushed, no lift or emphasis anywhere in the three-note motif which drives the movement. Thomson is just perceptibly slower, but note how he also just perceptibly hangs on to the first note of the phrase, separates it from the succeeding two, to give that extra lift and swing. The whole movement succeeds or fails on the articulation, repeated and varied, of those three notes (Neumann on Mastersonics is spikily & insistently brilliant here). And how much more colourful Thomson's wind soloists are, how that tonal brilliance in the SNO's brass and winds, and how that extra rhythmic schwung tells upon the musically-familiar ear. The orchestra SOUND LIKE THEY'RE ACTUALLY ENJOYING IT, as opposed to Jarvi's wet-Tuesday afternoon, going-through-the-motions, "well we might play it better if we knew it better or had an inspiring leader" session band.
(Perhaps some of the Bambergers were looking forward to their starring role in Bayreuth...)
There are dozens of such instances across these recordings, go make your own comparisons. And if anyone takes the trouble to seek out Turnovsky's 4th (or Belohlavek's very first 1979 Prague SO one on Panton(**), on balance his best 4th out of...was it 4 at the last count
? Keep trying, JB!), the difference will probably be more obvious still - Thomson holding up heroically well (and probably bettering even Turnovsky for rhythmic subtlety), but Jarvi - utterly put to shame. It's a big, well, bleedin-obvious point, really: the winds just after the introductory start of the 4th, when they get into their swinging thematic stride (the main 3-note melodic driver of the movement) need to sing out heartily, full and clear as a leading line, joyful-yet-relaxed (no easy mood for a conductor to bring out) against their accompaniments (it's important that those little runs across the string sections aren't too prominent; you can have too much detail, in the wrong place). If the winds are too tonally blended with the orchestra, spatially or texturally recessed, too coloristically "grey", dynamically unsubtle or lack - that word again, you feel it or you don't - schwung - (which is often created by an extra stress or tenuto on a given note or a barely perceptibly pause before one, as detailed above) - the music doesn't work anything like as well, and you may find yourself losing interest, moving on, or back, to some other composer instead...
Music is about so much more than the score... . Clarity or "detail" is only the beginning. The beginning of the Martinu 4th isn't just some interplay of rhythms or textures is it? Of course it isn't, any musically-sensitive listener gets that, surely: the winds should bubble and gurgle, the strings sing their hearts out - and then open the orchestral floodgates to sheer momentum, and let the horns build the drama to the wildly triumphant coda!
Quite some musical journey over a mere 6 or 7 minutes...
(**)https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/...?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Sparkly and spiritlifting as a youthful Prosecco. If just a shade lightweight-throwaway in the finale. So it goes. Funiculi, funicula...
(Looks like I bought the last cheap one. Thanks, Polar Bear.)Last edited by jayne lee wilson; 26-05-16, 06:49.Comment
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Marvellous - thank you all for the myriad suggestions, much to explore.....Comment
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There is an interesting (well, I think it is!) observation about Martinu's scoring in Michael Steinberg's The Symphony
(Steinberg was one of Martinu's 'students' at Princeton):
He used to say that the reason he started using the piano in his orchestral scores was that he had not learned to figure out the complicated transpositions that writing for the harp required.
The Fantasies symphoniques is the only smphony without a piano in the orchestra.
Is the harp really that difficult to notate? I know its natural key is C flat major (the key of the Interlude in Britten's A ceremony of carols, for example), but surely the 'rules' for what you can do are quite straightforward.Comment
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It doesn't become you to be so patronising. I read every word of your post and still you and I are hearing different things. Same goes for your post quoted here. One person's sense of "musicality" or lack thereof doesn't necessarily transfer to another person. No doubt you find your own flowery and feverish verbosity totally convincing, but pompous condescension on the level of "Music is about so much more than the score... . Clarity or "detail" is only the beginning" is really no more than laughable in this context.Originally posted by jayne lee wilson View PostLast edited by Richard Barrett; 26-05-16, 10:29.Comment
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No it isn't, and Martinu was surely being facetious when he said that, maybe in response to being asked for the umpteenth time why he used the piano so often as an orchestral instrument and not the harp, more apposite answers being perhaps (a) that it's one of the most attractive and original aspects of his orchestral sound, developed through the course of a great deal of thought and experience, (b) that a piano can cut through orchestral textures with much more presence than a harp, particularly in lower-middle registers where his piano parts often occur and where the sound of the harp is relatively weak, and (c) his orchestral piano writing is just that: idiomatic piano writing in an orchestral context, not harp writing transferred to a different instrument. The harp is a problematic instrument to write for in the orchestra for two main reasons: firstly, its restricted dynamic range means it's going to be inaudible unless the scoring around it is done very carefully (in Bolero for example the harpist might as well stop playing after the first couple of minutes); secondly, the fact that it only has seven strings per octave and the way that they're set up means that it "naturally" inclines towards straightforwardly tonal music (even Bach can be very awkward to manage), with the result that for example Messiaen, with his frequent use of eight-note scales, never wrote for it at all, although this problem can be mitigated by composing for two harps in the orchestra instead of one.Originally posted by Pulcinella View PostComment
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I think we could perhaps do without some of the rudeness to each other creeping into these discussions .Comment
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Thanks, Richard.
He'd obviously got the hang of it by 1959: a harp is included in the list of players in Les fêtes nocturnes (Chamber Music No 1) on this CD, which I bought for the harpsichord concerto (and the complete La revue de cuisine):
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