CLASSICAL : Tradition Updated, Some Gaps Filled

It’s never easy to characterize a recording year such as the one almost past, when no major composer’s birth--or, as is becoming ghoulishly fashionable, death--was being celebrated.

Gregorian Chant, marketed as white noise, “for stress reduction,” as one CD cover sticker boldly put it, unquestionably continued to “happen,” as did other, more invasive medieval material. The recording companies gambled (but with little risk) by pitching mostly old recordings of “Chant” (as we now call it) not to the classical types who ignored them a few decades back, but to New Wave audiences, who embraced the style with quiet fervor. Which isn’t to say there won’t be a Chant entry here. Just wait!

People who listen to classical recordings for a living pay scant attention to what’s issued at holiday time, which tends to be repackaged or overexposed material. But there is a new, worthwhile “Messiah”--Handel’s that is--from the French group called Les Arts Florissant, whose orchestra and chorus are conducted by Les Arts’ American founder, William Christie: a superbly conceived period production, played and sung by small forces making a brave noise, as attentive to the bright colors and dancing rhythms of the score as to its majesty (Harmonia Mundi 901498/9, two CDs).

The vast B-minor Mass of Johann Sebastian Bach was likewise presented recently, not as embalmed ritual but as living music by the spectacularly accomplished Arnold Schoenberg Chorus of Vienna under its director, Erwin Ortner, who also knows how to handle his orchestra, the superb, period-instrument Salzburg Baroque Ensemble (Koch-Schwann 1251, two CDs).

Violinists reigned with the recording companies this year, led by Midori and her powerful, sensitive account of the Sibelius Concerto, with Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic (Sony 58967), and Kyoko Takezawa teamed with Colin Davis and the Bavarian Radio Symphony for a lithe, loving account of Elgar’s lumpy (in lesser hands) Violin Concerto (RCA Victor 61612).

Some of us were listening to pianists, too, not that it’s possible to avoid Jeno Jando, the Hungarian omnivore, who was at his most stimulated and stimulating in sonatas of Joseph Haydn (Naxos 550657), delivering the last four the composer wrote with fierce joyousness and optimum clarity of articulation. Imagine Sviatoslav Richter on uppers.

Regarding Richter, the ever-charismatic Russian master: By all means treat yourself to his dreamy and dramatic performance of the great Fantasy in C, part of a glorious Schumann reissue (EMI 64625).

There were so many superior releases in the chamber-music category this year that I’ll hawk only two: a coupling of the Piano Quartet, Opus 87, and the Piano Quintet, Opus 81, of Dvorak delivered with dancing vivacity and endless tonal resources by the Emerson String Quartet and the irrepressible Menahem Pressler (Deutsche Grammophon 439 868).

The second inspires nostalgia and renewed respect for the splendid quartet that was once L.A.’s own, the Hollywood String Quartet, who with sympathetic colleagues recorded Schubert’s sublime Quintet in C and Schoenberg’s “Verklarte Nacht” in the early 1950s--hugely affectionate, polished interpretations that can now be savored in excellent digital remasterings (Testament 1031).

In the art-song category, 1994 was likewise lavish in its rewards, among them the ageless Peter Schreier’s exquisitely urbane recital of lieder by Felix Mendelssohn (Berlin Classics 1107) and, in another of her excursions into treasurable, unhackneyed repertory, soprano Roberta Alexander gave us a generous helping of Heitor Villa-Lobos’ tangy Brazilian folk-song arrangements (Etcetera 1165).

Virtually buried by a deluge of orchestral music we didn’t need was a handful of releases that either added significantly to the catalogue or refreshed relatively familiar music. Among the former was an example of the successful partnership forged by Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Witold Lutoslawski by way of the work the late Polish composer wrote expressly for the Philharmonic, his Fourth Symphony. It’s heard (on Sony 66288) with reissues of recordings Salonen made here in 1985 of Lutos lawki’s Third Symphony and “Les Espaces du sommeil.” All are outstanding examples of Lutoslawski’s refined art and craft, at once elegant, tough-minded and accessible (Sony 66280).

Another orchestral winner was unexpected: the Seven Symphonies of Jean Sibelius, sumptuously recorded in the 1970s by Kurt Sanderling and his Berlin Symphony and so briefly available in the U.S. then that nobody noticed them. The deepest, darkest, north woods-mysterious interpretations of this music I have experienced (Berlin Classics 2059, four CDs).

This year has brought us at least two not merely enjoyable but downright necessary opera recordings: the first complete edition of Rossini’s inventive, exciting “Semiramide,” with a splendidly accomplished cast of American principals, Cheryl Studer, Jennifer Larmore, Samuel Ramey and Frank Lopardo, under conductor Ion Marin (Deutsche Grammophon 437 797, three CDs), and for the first time in a single package, all of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” i.e., both the original Prague and subsequent Vienna versions (EMI 54859, three CDs), with Roger Norrington leading with a combination of lightness and dramatic fervor his period-instrument London Classical Players and a cast dominated by the dashingly dangerous Don of Andreas Schmidt and Lynne Dawson’s sweetly smitten Donna Elvira.

OK, stuff your stockings (or whatever) with these bargains: the five Beethoven Cello Sonatas--the names of the performers say it all, Rostropovich and Richter (Philips 442 565, two CDs); the First Symphony of the all-but-forgotten Mily Balakirev, Russian Romanticism with all the implied fat tunes but without the breast-beating, and the same composer’s kitschy-colorful “Islamey,” delivered with raucous glee by the Russian State Symphony under Igor Golovschin (Naxos 550792), and a marvelous mixed bag called “The Spanish Harpsichord” in which Igor Kipnis plays Baroque solos by Domenico Scarlatti and Antonio Soler (his hair-raising “Fandango”) and Manuel de Falla’s spiky little Concerto, with Pierre Boulez conducting soloists of the New York Philharmonic (Sony Essential Classics 53264).

Not to forget Chant--specifically, “Chantmania,” as this brief, inexpensive collection (Rhino 76025) is called: The vocalists are the incomparable Benzedrine Monks of Santo Domonica--who, to quote Fr. Irwin’s helpful, even inspiring program notes, embark “each morning . . . on a soul-restoring sunrise pilgrimage through Venice Beach on holy-roller blades,” among other activities. The selections include such sure-fire chantchart toppers (reportedly being hummed around numerous refectory tables worldwide already) as “(Theme From) The MONKeeS” and, perhaps emblematic of the skills of these simple toilers in the fertile gardens of lowest-key homophony, the John Cage-inspired “Monks’ Vow of Silence.”*