Beethoven, Bach and Other Goodies

Forget all the talk about the classical music crises, about record company crises. Great stuff still gets released, and here is only the iceberg’s tip.

**** AN ITALIAN SONG BOOK, Cecilia Bartoli, London, ($15.98). If it makes you nervous that Bartoli’s latest recording is a too-obvious no-brainer gift suggestion, what with her Pavarotti-like mass-market popularity, not to worry. She happens to be everything she is cracked up to be: a mezzo-soprano with not only spectacular technique but also a spectacular sense of presence. And these songs by bel canto greats Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini are delivered as wondrous utterances of life around us. Just the right piano accompaniment is supplied by James Levine.

*** 1/2 THE ART OF THE TOY PIANO, Margaret Leng Tan, Point Music, ($15.98). There is nothing merrier for Christmas than the sound of the toy piano, and what a delight to get it without the nostalgia. Leng Tan, a priestess of modernism and minimalism as well as a pianist second to none in the depth and intensity of sound she gets from any keyboard, has created a disc that goes beyond mere novelty and into new realms. But it still has room for the childhood wonder that gives novelty a good name.

**** BACH, Brandenburg Concertos, Il Giardino Armonico, Teldec, ($31.96). How do they, the members of Il Giardino Armonico, do it? There are more versions of these Baroque hits than the world could possibly use, yet here is one as fresh and alert as nature herself, as full of new promise as a new year. These young Italian period-instrument players have a level of technical accomplishment and a sense of the theatricality of this showy music that is simply infectious, and it hardly hurts that the recorded sound is equally engrossing. Pounce!

*** 1/2 BEETHOVEN, Complete String Quartets, Emerson String Quartet, Deutsche Grammophon, ($111.96). If it is possible to distill the essence of Beethoven onto eight CDs, the composer’s 16 string quartets are the brew. Here is Beethoven from the extravagantly talented youth gleefully breaking down every barrier music had ever known, through his middle period of conquering mastery, up to the spiritually exalted works at the end of his life. Every generation needs to come to its own terms with this transformative music, and the Emerson Quartet’s traversal seems about right for our own. Performances are aggressive, virtuosic, probing.

**** DOWLAND, Complete Lute Music, Paul O’Dette, Harmonia Mundi, ($71.92). The five CDs of this set have been released individually over the last three years, and each has caused a small sensation in the early music community. But packaged together, they seem all the more exceptional, not just for the wonderful fluidly and musicality of O’Dette’s playing but also as a compendium of some of the finest, most melodic and elegant music the Renaissance ever produced.

**** MARSHALL, Evensongs, New Albion, ($15.98). After his years at CalArts and in San Francisco as a sidekick to John Adams, Marshall, a composer of powerfully affecting music that evokes some of the mysterious uncertainty of our age, has returned to his East Coast roots in the recent string quartet and piano quartet here. He quotes hymn tunes and the like, but the Bay Area moodiness and the drop-dead California gorgeousness of his music stand out even more under such Yankee circumstances and in pieces that can be downright addictive.

*** 1/2 SCHUMANN, “Genoveva,” Teldec ($31.96). Most music lovers are barely aware, if at all, that Schumann wrote an opera, and a mature one at that. Indeed, it is the work he lavished more energy on than any other. Yet it was a flop and pretty much deserved to be for its theatrical ineptitude and the naivete of the composer’s own libretto. Yet musically this is top-flight Schumann, and at last it has finally gotten a recording, conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt that does it justice. The cast is dazzling, including L.A.’s own Rodney Gilfrey and an especially exciting Ruth Ziesak in the title role.

**** REICH, Works, Nonesuch, ($99.90). This is the hip gift. A full-scale survey of the work of one of America’s most important composers in compelling performances, it comes packaged with the fetishistic artistry that has become a hallmark of Nonesuch. Here, in a glorious box, is housed at least part of the spirit of our times.

**** SILVESTROV, Dedication, Teldec, ($15.98). Valentin Silvestrov’s Dedication, a 1981 work for violin and orchestra recorded here by Gidon Kremer, is music that seems to keep its mouth wide open for a full 40 minutes. Silvestrov is a Russian composer we are just getting to know, and his extraordinary work is neo-Romantic but with a deep, penetrating sense of spiritual rigor. It grabs a listener almost immediately.

**** HANS ZENDER EDITION, CPO, ($103.87). OK, if you’ve gotten this far, here is your reward--a set of 17 CDs by a German conductor, Hans Zender, you’ve probably never heard of, conducting the Saarbrucken Radio Symphony Orchestra, which you’ve also probably not heard of. Zender, a conductor with the zeal and the laser-edge cutting style of a latter-day George Szell, led this state-supported German orchestra from 1971 to 1984, and here is a survey of what he accomplished. And what Zender accomplished are extraordinarily well-prepared performances of an astonishing range of repertory. Passionate Mozart, visceral Schumann, Mahler of startling forcefulness (including a riveting “Des Knaben Wunderhorn” with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Brigette Fassbaender) all the way up to Zender’s own modernist music. Of special value are four ground-breaking pieces for solo instrument and orchestra by Morton Feldman, never before recorded. The budget-priced discs are available individually, and at a steal, but splurge for the full set and you get one of the great bargains of recorded music.

*** 1/2 MURRAY PERAHIA, 25th Anniversary Edition, Sony, $47.96. Murray Perahia has always seemed a bit of an odd duck, a hypersensitive, introverted pianist who seems to play more for himself than the audience. But that also means that his recordings of MMozart piano concertos are played with an exquisitely sculpted phrasing and beautifully detailed tone that has practically become legendary. And he has proven far more than an ascetic Mozartean, as this four-CD retrospective of his quarter-century recording career reveals. There are, here new things and old. Mozart, of course, but also eloquent chamber music from Brahms and Beethoven, startlingly crisp Scarlatti, radiant Bartok, a Chopin First Piano Concerto fine as porcelain. There are surprises, too, including never-before-released a bell-clear reading of Berg’s Sonata and a beaming one of Michael Tippett’s irresistibly fresh and sparkling First Piano Sonata.

*** FAWKES. The History of Classical Music, Naxos, $25.98 (CD), $21.98 (cassette). Richard Fawkes’ 900 year potted, whirlwind tour of the history of Western classical music from Hildegard to right now takes only five hours, twelve minutes and 49 seconds. Consequently, these four ultra-budget priced CDs or cassettes can’t be expected to cover everything. But, despite a too-British emphasis, the survey does gets a surprisingly lot in, with admirable concision. Robert Powell, a British actor who played Mahler in Ken Russell’s outrageous film about the composer some years ago, reads the text engrossingly. And by including musical examples, the reading really does give the listener a sense of actually hearing music history fly by.

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Albums and other items in Gift Guide are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent).