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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 November 2009
Holloway's Third Concerto for Orchestra John Pickard
James Wood: ‘Two Men meet …’ Guy Rickards
Colin Matthews David Denton
Markevitch orchestral music Calum MacDonald
Dave Heath David Denton
Takemitsu piano music Mike Seabrook
Recent Schnittke discs Calum MacDonald
Italian Chamber Music (I) Robin Freeman
Kernis and McKinley Michael Oliver
page 31 note * As Tempo went to press. Volume 3 of this series, containing Rébus and Hymnes, was released, and will be reviewed in a forthcoming issue.
page 32 note * It makes a fascinating comparison with the version for 2 pianos and percussion, as interpreted by Lyndon-Gee (who edited it for performance) and Kolja Lessing on Largo 5127, a stimulating Markevitch chamber-music anthology issued in 1995 but unfortunately not reviewed by Tempo at the time.
page 35 note * Some writers infer that the Requiem was the entire incidental music, but Schnittke has also released a set of songs from the play.
page 36 note * Let me mention here Teldec 0630-13597-2, in which Kremer, partnered by Oleg Maisenberg, plays not only sonatas by Bartók and Schulhoff, and two trifles by Peteris Plakidis, but the only current CD version of Enescu's great suite Impressions d'enfance.
page 36 note † Lourié's opera must be based on the same Pushkin story as the Soviet film How Tsar Peter Got the Black Man Married, for which Schnittke wrote a celebrated film score.
page 37 note 1 In the essay ‘Con lievi mani’ from Il flauto e il tappeto (Milan, 1971). One of the lexical definitions of sprezzatura she approved of was that of Petrocchi: ‘maniera piena di trascuranza maestra’ - an artful show of negligence like that praised by Herrick in ‘Delight in Disorder’, for this is an aristrocratic not a romantic pastime.
page 37 note 2 Hoffmann brings off unerringly his tales set in Italy, a country he never visited, which is something that cannot be said for those set in France. He knew Italian well enough to write canzonetta texts he then set to music.
page 38 note 3 A note on the Ex Novo Ensemble: this was founded in 1979 by Claudio Ambrosini, primarily to serve as a laboratory for his own creative work at a time when it had become increasingly difficult in Italy for composers who had chosen not to tie themselves to a major publishing house to secure performances of their music. Much of his music has been written in a sense with the ensemble, which accounts for what Ambrosini likes to think of as its almost ‘manual’ exuberance. A speciality of the group right from the beginning is the music of another Venetian composer, Bruno Maderna. Their accounts of Sonata per un Satellite in Ambrosini's performing edition are now classic. With time Ex Novo has extended its repertoire to include other Italian composers of instrumental music, to Martucci of course, early Busoni and the Venetians Wolf-Ferrari and Malipiero. In many cases they have not only revived neglected or forgotten works but have taken care to correct the existing material on the basis of surviving manuscripts which gives these recordings added interest. The Malipiero Sonata a tre, for instance [On a Dischi Ricordi release to be covered in Part 2 of this review - Ed.], was re-edited thanks to material kept by the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice. Recordings and performances are up to a high standard, with the one exception dealt with below, but, all the same, there are three things I want to mention now so as not to have to refer to them again later. One is the indefensible omission of sonata movement repeats. Another is the inappropriate choice of piano, especially for the two turn-of-the-century works by Wolf-Ferrari, though it is only truly suitable for the Malipiero pieces. Finally there are the booklet notes by a certain Edward Neill totally lacking in insight, written with a florid vacuousness that puts even natives to shame and which the English translations only succeed in disfiguring with errors. As for the music itself not one of the pieces recorded here (aside from two or three of the Respighi miniatures) has anything like repertory status in Italy. Few if any of them are known even casually to the average Italian music (as opposed to opera) lover and in the case of the Martucci Quintet even the name of the composer would be unfamiliar. Chamber music still has a very small following in Italy and the notion that only Germans and a handful of Frenchmen ever composed any worth listening to has blocked the way for the native product. All that will change the day foreign chamber groups arrive in Italian cities with these pieces and other like them on their programmes. Which is one of the reasons I chose to write these reviews.
page 39 note 4 A more recent (German) disc of Busoni's early clarinet chamber music (CPO 999 252-2, Dieter Klöcker and Werner Cenuit with the Consortium Classicum) lumps in the Solo dramatique - better performed - with the clarinet suite, adds two further movements, an Andantino and Serenade, and presents the result as ‘8 Character Pieces’. This useful collection also contains presumable first recordings of a substantial Suite for clarinet and string quartet, a Clarinet Sonata in D, and a Duo for 2 flutes and piano. – Ed.
page 40 note 5 On Opus III OPS44-9202, a disc of Italian violin music otherwise discussed in the second half of this review. – Ed.