For a languid summer: Delicious discoveries

SUMMER, traditional thinking in India suggests, is the season of preservation, following spring’s creation. Warm weather slows down brains and bodies.

But summer also offers liberation. Clothes loosen. Inhibitions lessen. Minds open. If holidays are meant for recharging batteries, they also invite exploration.

Summertime music, as practiced at the Hollywood Bowl, the great lawn of Central Park and hundreds of other pleasant settings, remains mainly in the lazy-day mold. Those ready for adventure, with a few free hours to hear something new and possibly revelatory, must look elsewhere.

They needn’t look far. Whether the record industry is in its last throes I can’t say. It does keep on recording Beethoven symphonies and Mozart piano sonatas and Shostakovich concertos with abandon, ever adding to the already dizzying array of alternatives.

Yet it just as happily keeps coming up with other options, including works by composers you probably have never heard of and others, by composers you have heard of, that you probably had no idea existed. A lot of this is, at best, third-rate, lost to history for perfectly good reasons. The Hyperion label’s Romantic Piano Series is up to Vol. 40 with the release of three inoffensive Liszt-lite piano concertos by Henri Herz.

But there are genuine delights to be discovered, and every so often something comes along to blow your mind. John Foulds just blew mine.

I knew of Foulds as one of those early 20th century British composers of jaunty light music that I think you have to be English and born no later than 1920 to appreciate. But Sakari Oramo, the young Finnish conductor who succeeded Simon Rattle as music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, has made it a cause to reveal to the world a forgotten original.

Orami has just released his second all-Foulds CD on Warner Classics. It begins with “Dynamic Triptych,” which was written while the peripatetic composer lived in Paris in the late ‘20s and which happens to be one of the more astonishing piano concertos of the first half of the 20th century.

It is hard to believe that this piece or other similarly gripping scores by Foulds could have been overlooked for so long. He was anything but unknown in his day. His light music, with which he earned his living, was daily fare on the BBC in the 1920s. Performances of his “World Requiem,” involving more than 1,000 performers, were mounted each Armistice Day between 1923 and 1926. He was a mystic and inventor -- one of the first Western musicians to take an interest in Indian music and to use its instruments in Western work. In 1898, when he was 18, he began experimenting with microtonality, long before anyone else in Europe. Some of his more adventurous works display crashing dissonances, vibrant rhythmic energy and even proto-Minimalist tendencies. He had a gift for sweet melody and took pleasure in orgiastic climaxes.

A singular sensation

THINK of Scriabin, Stravinsky, Gershwin, Percy Grainger, Lou Harrison and Terry Riley rolled into one and you might have an idea of what the “Dynamic Triptych,” with Peter Donohoe as the excellent piano soloist, sounds like. But not really, because Foulds had a voice all his own.

In the exotically lush and tuneful slow movement, for instance, Foulds lowers the boom by having the strings make weird, wondrous quarter-tone shifts. As during an airplane’s sudden shift in altitude, your stomach needs a startling second to catch up with the rest of you.

The CD also offers the gorgeous, Delius-like “April-England,” the atmospheric renderings of paintings in “Music-Pictures Group III,” the lightweight “Keltic Lament” and the numinous “The Song of Ram Dass.” After Paris, Foulds moved to India to immerse himself in raga, but he contracted cholera and died in Calcutta in 1939 at age 58.

Nearly everyone knows Foulds’ near contemporary and friend in Paris, Paul Dukas. He wrote the symphonic poem “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” and Mickey Mouse passed it on to the world. The problem is that Dukas wrote far too little else. There is a single, large-scale symphony, which is occasionally recorded; an opera; and another exceptional ballet, “La Peri.” And there is a single, big-boned Piano Sonata, premiered in 1901, four years after “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

It is a beast of a work. Debussy disliked it; Ravel stole from it. The slow movement is of heart-stopping beauty. It has been recorded before, but without attracting attention. That should change after the breathtaking new recording by Marc-Andre Hamelin.

Two other early 20th century composers awaiting their moments are the Pole Karol Szymanowski and the Romanian George Enescu. Advocates of Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No. 1 include Rattle, who recorded it 10 years ago with the superb German violinist Thomas Zehetmair and who will be opening his 2006-07 Berlin Philharmonic season with it in August, with Frank Peter Zimmermann as soloist. If that doesn’t work to get a lush, sensually spellbinding score back on the map, two young violinists have also offered their services.

Szymanowski’s concerto is the featured work on Nicola Benedetti’s first CD. Deutsche Grammophon is hoping to make a splash playing up the looks of this sultry, pouty-lipped 19-year-old British violinist. She is someone to be watched, but she does Szymanowski no favors in her bland performance, with too fussy accompaniment by Daniel Harding leading the London Symphony. She is, thus far, better suited for the bonbons that complete her disc, but she includes a short new piece, “Fragment for the Virgin” by John Tavener, that she plays with buzzing brilliance.

Jennifer Koh’s recording of the Szymanowski is not nearly so glamorous. She is accompanied by Chicago’s Grant Park Orchestra, conducted by Carlos Kalmar, and the CD is released on a boutique label, Cedille. But if you are looking to go off the beaten path, then go off it. Koh brings fresh rapture to the concerto, Kalmar is a sympathetic accompanist, and the superior recording of a live performance makes even the Grant Park band preferable to a canned London Symphony. The CD’s interest, moreover, doesn’t stop with the Szymanowski. Koh follows it with Martinu’s supple Second Violin Concerto and Bartok’s “Two Portraits” -- more potential discoveries.

Szymanowski was sometimes called the Polish Bartok, and Enescu was the Romanian Bartok because of his populist, folk-inspired scores. Folk music also entered into his abstract scores, including his long-forgotten piano sonatas, two of which have surfaced on the second volume of Luiza Borac’s series of Enescu recordings on Avie. She offers, on this two-CD set, the First Sonata, from 1924, and the Third, written 10 years later, along with an earlier prelude and fugue and a remarkable 20-minute Nocturne.

Enescu’s piano music is full of glitter, be it that of the starry night in the Nocturne or the manic energy of the Third Sonata. He was a master of counterpoint and melodic lines that are ever intersecting in complex ways, and he had a way of making plush chords seem composed of stardust. These recordings are spectacularly played and recorded.

Viva Vivaldi

AND talk about coming upon glitter you didn’t know existed: There is new Vivaldi. Given how much Vivaldi wrote and how active the Vivaldi revival is, it seems as though practically every recording of his work that isn’t of “The Four Seasons” is a discovery. But the choral piece “Dixit Dominus” and the opera “Montezuma” are real finds. Both have just been recorded for the first time on Archiv, and both are being hailed as the most important Vivaldi discoveries in 75 years.

In the case of “Dixit Dominus,” there is truth in the hype. The 23-minute score had been lying around in a Dresden, Germany, archive attracting dust because it was attributed to Baldassare Galuppi thanks to a deceitful publisher (at one time Galuppi was the bigger name). But it takes all of five seconds to recognize Vivaldi’s unmistakable vibrancy in this setting of the 110th Psalm, more famously put to music by Handel.

Peter Koop’s strikingly effective performance leading the Kornerscher Sing-Verein and the Dresden Instrument-Concert of original instruments, along with pairs of solo sopranos, altos and tenors, sells the dazzling score. They also do a fine job with some contrasting choral works of Galuppi, a not-bad transitional figure between the Baroque and Classical periods, but no Vivaldi.

“Dixit Dominus” was found intact; “Montezuma” was not. New recitatives had to be written and many arias fleshed out. One wonders if it was worth the effort, given how few of Vivaldi’s dozens of extant operas are much known.

Still, a lot of genuine Vivaldi finds its way into the opera, and the performance led by Alan Curtis makes it all worthwhile. I wouldn’t miss losing some of the fake recitative -- there is far too much of it. But the arias are pure pleasure.

If summer is the season of preservation, this restored “Montezuma” makes a certain sense as a seasonal release. And for those who don’t want their summer opera too “out there,” “Montezuma” provides an amusingly fanciful take on a Mexico that never remotely was, making it a Baroque equivalent of many a summer movie.