Brittens Music - Articles and Reviews: The Want List 1999


ARTICLES AND REVIEWS	Brittens Music Eastbourne

The Want List 1999

Adrian Corleonis records his 1999 Want List for the leading American magazine for serious record collectors Fanfare (reproduced by kind permission of the Editor, Joel Flegler)

So much classic material has been reissued recently that this year's Want List is wholly retrospective.

PETER WARLOCK: Songs, Ballads and Sacred Songs Norman Bailey/Geoffrey Parsons Belart 461 6082 (no longer available but replaced by Decca 4701992 - GB pounds 9.99)
"Bright is the ring of words when the right singer sings them..." The opening of Robert Louis Stevenson's To the Memory of a Great Singer could hardly be more appropriate to Norman Bailey's account of it in this wonderfully full and revealing disc, originally issued in 1977 as a L'Oiseau-lyre LP (DSLO 19) to loom as the single best Warlock collection, ever. Best, rather than finest, for the alternations of rollicking ribaldry (Pretty Ring Time, Sigh no more, The Droll Lover, Roister Doister) and the most exquisite poetry (Yarmouth Fair, Sleep, Fair and True, Romance - another blithely moving Stevenson setting), the elegiac (The Fox, The Frostbound Wood, or those otherworldly Belloc settings, Ha'nacker Mill, My Own Country, The Birds) and richly spirited (Twelve Oxen and The Cricketers of Hambledon with their male chorus complements) demand something more and other than the sort of art song prissiness currently visited upon them to come wholly into their own.	Norman Bailey - an awesome Wotan, a great Hans Sachs - with his Falstaffian swagger and virile tenderness, animates them with larger-than-life charisma. And Geoffrey Parsons, hand-in-glove with the frolic and fantasy, spirits up the accompaniments with unique effervescence. The twentysix Warlock numbers are joined by the exquisitely turned vulgarity of On the Road to Mandelay and items by Vaughan Williams, Ireland, Stanford, and Frederick Keel. This indispensable album, by the way, has been released in Decca's Belart series, which is being withheld from domestic (USA) distribution.

RAYMOND LEWENTHAL: THE CONCERTO RECORDINGS - Rubinstein, Henselt, Liszt, Scharwenka, solo works of Alkan Raymond Lewenthal (piano); Mackerras/Carvalho conducting the London Symphony Orchestra Elan CD 82284 (2 CDs - GB pounds 25.00)
GREAT PIANISTS OF THE 20th CENTURY: JOHN OGDON I - ALKAN Solo Piano Concerto. BUSONI Piano Concerto. RACHMANINOV Piano Sonata No. 2 John Ogdon (piano); Daniel Revenaugh conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Philips 456 913-2 (2 CDs - no longer available)
Before there was Marc-Andre Hamelin triumphantly cresting the apocalyptic drive to record everything, in those dim, far-off days when anything beyond the pale of the standard repertoire was viewed with intense suspicion, and clueless critics cautiously hedged their bets with terms such as "neglected" or "obscure", there were solitary giants in the earth beguiling the air with the eldritch (the obligatory word) fantasy of Alkan and Busoni. Yes, where there are comparisons to be made, Hamelin plays with greater fluency, often more rifely dimpled with nuance, than either Lewenthal or Ogdon. Still, it's awesome to be able to retire the worn vinyl and relive from silver discs the thrill of discovering the Henselt and Rubinstein concertos, while Lewenthal's string of Alkan miniatures, or "grotesqueries", has yet to be surpassed and thus looms as an indispensable item in any Alkan collection, and Ogdon's titanic account of Alkan's Concerto for Solo Piano remains the only real rival to Hamelin's.	Coupled with Ogdon's nonpareil account of the Busoni Piano Concerto and an electrically bristling Rachmaninov Second Piano Sonata - easily surpassing Horowitz's supposedly proprietary grasp - Philips' first Great Pianists of the 20th Century tribute to Ogdon is an absolute must-have. (And so, too, is the second, featuring Ogdon's fabled tilt at Balakirev's Islamey and works by Liszt and Rachmaninov - Philips 456 916-2.) The Lewenthal set, by the way, has been only AAD remastered and thus comes off a bit clangy, and it's a pity that Elan did not see fit to reprint his liner copy, which was always as flamboyant as it was richly informed, so the greybeards among us will be holding on to those old LP productions, after all. But, no matter-there's relief in hearing these grandeurs taking a new lease, so to speak.
NICOLAS FLAGELLO: Piano Concertos: Nos. 2; 3. Credendum for Violin and orchestra. A Goldoni Overture Tatjana Rankovich (piano); Elmar Oliveira (violin); David Amos conducting Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra Artek AR-0002-2 (GB pounds 15.99)
Since its original 1996 issue as Vox 7521, this coup de theatre Nicolas Flagello collection has become something of an obsession, luring one away from music more seductively beguiling and with richer associations by its sheer pith deftly worked by a manic master hand. Unaccountably, Vox dropped the album just as word was beginning to percolate that it had a tiger by the tail. The piano concertos are among the most compelling post-Rachmaninov essays in the genre, and more deeply engaging for eschewing facile optimism to reflect the often frantic dynamism of a life recognizably our own.	Set off by two brief, scintillantly overflowing overtures flanking a mantic Credendum for violin and orchestra, this superbly balanced program - knowingly "composed", so to speak, of disc premieres by Fanfare's Walter Simmons - touches one's often abraded urban sensibility with dramatic composure. Which is to say that there is more real voltage in these ostensibly conventional works than in many "technically advanced", would-be "shockers". Kudos to small but adventurous Artek for making this classic album available again.
HARRY PARTCH: King Oedipus. The Bewitched. Ulysses Departs from the Edge of the World Harry Partch; Ensemble of Unique Instruments Innova 405 (3 CDs - GB pounds 33.99)
HARRY PARTCH: A Biography. By Bob Gilmore. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. 468pp. 30 b/w illustrations (GB pounds 20.00)
In Bob Gilmore's recent fine biography of Harry Partch (soon to be reviewed), one follows in detail the microtonal patriarch's attempts to define and give voice to an elusive speech music - "impressing the intangible beauty of tone into the vital power of the spoken word" - of which King Oedipus was his first extended essay. Innova gives us the original version, set to Yeats's translation, taken from passable tapes of the 1952 Mills College premiere. The upshot is an horripilating rendition of Sophocles garlanded with some of the most eerily expressive music Partch ever set to paper, beset by moments of occasional bathetic miscalculation. Alan Shaw, the distinguished NYC-based poet, dramatist, and essayist, who probably has a keener grasp of speech music, ancient and modern, than any man living, tells me that the 1954 Gate 5 studio recording of the revised "King Oedipus" - made necessary by copyright restrictions on using Yeats's text - realizes Partch's "intoned speech" ideal more closely than the Mills College production, and there has been some talk at Innova of releasing this as well.	But this initial version of King Oedipus is of considerably more than merely documentary interest, while Innova's generous three-CD set includes not only the Gate 5 excerpts from Revelation in the Courthouse Park, By the Rivers of Babylon, Ulysses Departs from the Edge of the World (with Jack Logan on trumpet, originally issued on LP Orion 7294), Come Away, Death, and the complete 1980 Cologne knockout performance of The Bewitched, but Partch's spoken introductions to King Oedipus and The Bewitched. And almost certainly by the time you're reading this, Partch's coronat opus, Delusion of the Fury (), will be available on CDs from Innova (including, it's to be hoped, Partch's demonstrations of his instruments, originally issued as a bonus disc with the classic early-70s LP Columbia set). Finally, anyone curious about Partch or wishing to keep tabs on the Partch revival should dally a bit in Corporeal Meadows: The Online Home of Harry Partch (www:corporeal.com/cm_main.html) colorfully maintained by old Partch hand, Jon Szanto. () Delusion of the Fury is now available on Innova 406.

© Adrian Corleonis

Adrian Corleonis is a freelance writer living in Klamath Falls, Oregon, USA. He has been a regular contributor to Fanfare ("the magazine for serious record collectors") since 1979, writing extensively about - among many others - Berlioz, Liszt, Franck and his circle, Alkan, Busoni, Faure, Weill, and composers with reputations in-the-making such as Godowsky, Sorabji, and Harry Partch. He has written biographies of d'Indy, Sorabji, and Coleridge-Taylor for All-Media Guides, notices for the Musical Heritage Society, and liner notes for numerous CDs (including Marc-Andre Hamelin's recording of Alkan's Concerto for Solo Piano on the Music & Arts label).

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