Christopher Greenleaf photo

This past Saturday evening, at the Cambridge Society of Friends, the perennially enterprising Sarasa Ensemble teamed up with Les Sirènes, a vocal duo, to afford a modest, appreciative audience a vivid look at “Roman Handel” — quite the popular theme of late — and at the enduring Italian light illuminating the composer’s later London œuvre.

Halfway into the first, fresh decade of the eighteenth century, young Handel, newly arrived in Rome, speedily garnered esteem of a sort the cultured natives rarely conferred on their own, let alone on a 20-year-old just down from the central German duchies. In the opulent city of Cardinal Pamphili, arts patron extraordinaire, and of the comet-like, masterful figure of Corelli, a youthful and tireless composer blessed with such extraordinary gifts could go far indeed.

Sarasa and Les Sirènes did full honor to Italianate Handel, the glorious, unifying thread. In each half, vocal chamber works for one or two sopranos, with two violins and continuo (cello and harpsichord) or continuo alone, flanked a sonata for two violins and continuo. We heard brilliant cantatas and opera excerpts from 1707-09 (Roma bellissima), 1711 (momentary Hanover), and 1735-41 (London), contrasted to great effect with one overtly Corellian, overtly Italianate, two-violin sonata, published in London in 1730, and another such, dancing structurally Italian steps draped in the Parisian hues of the day that was published in London nine years later.

Quel bel labbro, drawn from the early opera, Berenice, regina d’Egitto, HWV 38, opened the concert. Soprano roles of the era having been so gratifyingly parceled out among female and male singers of this same range, quipped soprano Kathryn Mueller — one half of Les Sirènes — that she and colleague Kristen Watson could legitimately tackle a love duet together, an uncommon pleasure. Their exquisitely matched style and phrasing, commented upon and supported by Sarasa’s supple instrumental tutti, commanded our undivided attention.

The conventional slow-fast-slow-fast movements of the Sonata in g, Op. 2, No. 2, HWV 387, brought out every device of the Italian continuo sonata, with superbly worked out, yet truly fresh-sounding ornamentation by the two violinists. In the initial Andante, the second, lower fiddle part led, an enjoyable reversal of form. Adriane Post and Beth Wenstrom shone with polish, magical tonal variety, and fleet cascades of perfectly placed notes. This “old-style” Corellian sonata, despite its nascent Handelian plumage in places, showcased Sarasa’s ability to transform the work’s prosaically straightforward continuo task into multi-hued tonal tapestry. Here commanding, there commenting, always flexibly imparting the harmonic roadmap, the continuo abounded in wonderful small dodgings-out-of-the-way to allow the violin parts to waft, unchallenged, through the night air.

A trio of diverse vocal chamber pieces concluded the first half. The latest composed work of the concert, Non di voi non vo fidarmi, Cantata XVI, HWV 189 (London, 1741), was contemporary with the composing of The Messiah. Singers and players put this cantata’s partly familiar sections across briskly and with bright relish. A September opportunity to anticipate familiar nativity duets! This work and the next recalled the easily forgotten lesson that Handel is never to be underestimated as a crafter of gorgeous, touching phrases. We may be familiar with a given aria, as in Tornami a vagheggiar, from Alcina, yet it is possible that our minds may reference (way) back to, for example, Joan Sutherland, rather than to the quicksilver and lightly textured ether of contemporary early music practice. As Kathryn Mueller, who sang Tornami, noted, Dame Joan was hardly an admirer of authentic performance. This circumstance may have planted our first impressions of this touching aria in a more sober, less polychromatic landscape. Saturday’s joyous and unaffectedly direct performance appropriately presented it as a fey creature, verging on fragile, thriving in its ensemble language rather than as a solo with deferential accompaniment. Miss Mueller and her four colleagues succeeded through simplicity and shared attention to small moments of collaborative phrasing and dynamics.  Mio bel’ tesoro, the third piece of the group, from Giustino, was another of those ripping, quick tutti duets that so delighted London’s fickle audiences, at least until Italian opera and its proponents lost favor. Saturday’s appreciative listeners applauded this vocal threesome and the glowing musicians with warmth.

As the second half kicked off, Cantata V, HWV 199, Va speme infida, showed two disdainful furies in top form sweeping all before them. Familiar solos and virtuosic duets are engaging, but the combined force and decibels of two wrathful sopranos, here pelting rapidly along in common cause and not spitting venom at one another, does get one’s attention. Sarasa tore through the busy bars and systems alongside Les Sirènes, producing a fine roar of sound, always refined and expressive even at a high rate of knots. The corruscating final section of the cantata provided a fine contrast with the evening’s other instrumental work, the [Trio] Sonata in G, Op. 5, No. 4, HWV 399. Corelli was little in evidence here, though shades of color and the spirit of the composer’s beloved Boot pervade the five movements. While the continuo of the earlier sonata strode almost stolidly along, a mere bass underpinning, the “Bc” has become less tethered here. Especially in the three quite contrasting sections of the third movement (A tempo ordinario – Allegro, non presto – Adagio), the Sarasa cello and cembalo — played with incomparable sensitivity and sureness by Timothy Merton and Charles Sherman — elevated the free, sometimes ebullient low voice to suggest a lithe, conversational counter-message to the violins’ untrammeled brilliance above. The following Passacaille, certainly as Sarasa elected to launch it forth, exuded such a cheerful French quality that, for once, we sniffed in vain for southern garlic. The breathing suppleness Sarasa brought to each of the five movements, with unaffected and graciously executed ornamentation throughout, made this sonata one of the program’s highlights.

Lascia la spina, from Berenice, regina d’Egitto, HWV 38 offered Kristen Watson the opportunity to create surging waves of powerful, straightforward passion, the familiar melody rocking atop gentle triple-meter string support. In such a calm and pause-filled soundscape, a sense of quiet motion washed through even the constant small silences. It was not difficult to conjure up the novel notion of a tranquil Roman night, two centuries before nocturnal stillness succumbed to Vespas and buses

The last work of the evening proclaimed that “constancy is a strong shield, and so is the valour of fidelity” with good licks for all the performers. As the vocal portions of the concert flowed past, Kathryn Mueller and Kristen Watson exchanged glances and smiles as they approached passages for which timing was important. An almost theatrical toss of hair and radiant grins launched them into an extremely beautifully done joint trill, one of those lovely accelerando rampings-up of energy that brought a surge of applause as the duet ended. This was a beautifully sung and played evening, further demonstration of Sarasa’s ongoing ability to do what they do very, very well.

The Friends Meeting House is a pleasurable place to drink in an evening of chamber music. Its gratifyingly neutral acoustic is supportive, with but little congestion in high vocal fortes. Nuance, dynamic expressivity, and tonal beauty come through clearly. The excellent imported halogen lamps did wonders for the otherwise under-lit room, and the ensemble’s usual exhaustive program booklet gave those so inclined plenty to read before the music began. The tail of the fine double-manual John Phillips harpsichord was angled boldly downstage, with the welcome result that even those in the left-hand seats could appreciate its reticent, refined continuo presence. This seemingly small detail is often overlooked, so it’s worth mentioning here.

Veteran recording engineer Christopher Greenleaf collaborates with chamber, early, and keyboard musicians in natural acoustic venues on both sides of the Atlantic. His principal work is recording surviving historic instruments and their successful copies in supportive, affectively engaging acoustics.

The Great Hall of the Breakers (Christopher Greenleaf photo)

The durable Newport Music Festival, now in its forty-third season, is halfway through a rich offering of some fifty-seven concerts over two-and-a-half weeks. Some of these are in settings of architectural opulence that only Newport, among North American urban places, can offer in such richness and brick-cheek-by-marble-jowl proximity. The most prodigious and grandiosely appointed of these mansions, The Breakers (designed by Richard Morris Hunt in 1895 for the  short-lived mogul Cornelius Vanderbilt, was where we came to hear Brahms on a blessedly breezy, almost cool weekend night.

In the vast building’s Great Hall, on a stage at the foot of the grand staircase, waited a Yamaha concert grand. Open doors and some of the great windows admitted welcome fresh air to an extent I had never before encountered at this festival. The sizable audience made their accustomed leisurely appearance, and the final concert of four on July16 began not long after the unusual hour of 9 p.m.

Russian-American violoncellist Sergey Antonov and Ontario-born pianist Bernadene Blaha sailed into one of Johannes Brahms’s incomparable masterpieces, his second-movement contribution to the famed “F.A.E.” Sonata in a. Robert Schumann, Brahms, and Schumann pupil Albert Dietrich composed one movement each of this violin sonata in 1853 as a gift for Joseph Joachim, for the already acclaimed violinist’s twenty-second birthday. The letters stand for “frei aber einsam,” a phrase closely associated with the circle around Schumann. It proclaims the Romantic artist’s “free but lonesome” status, if I may filch Dolly Parton’s charming idiom. As this is originally a work for violin and piano, we heard a transcription of the Scherzo in c (Allegro – Trio: Più moderato) by Antonov. So fervid and intense was the energy the duo brought to bear on this full-blooded miniature that they left little room for the listener to relax into the intricate Brahmsian cross-rhythms and usually light-footed lyrical hand-offs. The reception was enthusiastic, but I felt that the score had suffered a mauling.

The same intensity — in fact, precisely the same intensity — settled over the three  movements of the Violoncello Sonata No. 1 in e, Op. 38, composed in 1862-65.  Antonov’s exceptionally centered, beautiful, and focused sound is undeniably fetching, and his musical intentions are invariably clearly defined. He calls on the dark power of the lower reaches of his (unfortunately unnamed) instrument to splendid effect and does so with subtle variations of color and horsepower, not to mention the supreme ease with which he entices tone of from all of this lovely cello’s regions. Blaha, a secure and dynamically uninhibited player, provided both a balanced piano counterfoil to the cello part and the kind of flexible but structurally rock-solid meter that makes Brahms’s extraordinary compositional architecture vibrate and connect. She was, however, poorly served by the piano, as was the composer, about which more. A highlight of the performance was the finely judged and passionately prosecuted piercing of the cello part through urgent, full-voiced broken piano chords in the second movement, Allegretto quasi menuetto – Trio.

After the lengthy Newport pause, cellist and pianist returned for the Violoncello Sonata No. 2 in F, Op. 99 (1886), one of those magical chamber works whose palpable ties to an earlier German Romantic idiom infuse it with a warmth and sweetness more characteristic of 1860s Brahms. In the joyous first movement, the two instruments’ impassioned surgings among keys related to the work’s nominal tonality (A, f#) set the listener up — barely — for the startling F# tonality of the second movement (Adagio affetuoso). After this soundscape subsided briefly into calm f-minor regions, we heard the striking quasi-scherzo, also in f. And so back to the comparative leggerezza of the key of F in the shortish conclusion. Throughout the four movements, I vainly awaited emotive, expressive evolution of Antonov’s beautiful but unwaveringly intense projection. Blaha’s deft, tasteful playing at times verged on the loud, but it must have been challenging for her to do battle with this particular piano.

I have encountered musically satisfying concert grands by Yamaha. This particular gleaming brute, however, was no pleasure to listen to, especially in scores that require subtlety, color, variety of sound, and transparency. Its chill, colorless clangor was apparent even in pp moments. When asked, as it rather too frequently was, to produce forte dynamics, its already white-hard ugliness grew constricted and harmonically confusing. Antonov’s considerable presence and easy power managed to slice through nearly all of the painful din of the piano, but the composer’s vibrant harmonic language crumpled before the chordal onslaught. The appearance of nine-foot concert grands on stage is de rigeur today, especially for highly visible events, yet we would do well to keep in mind Brahms’s gentle insistence, in his lifetime, on slightly less imposing pianos for all of his piano scores except the two solo concerti. For the cello, the composer-sanctioned instrumental balance is magic, though this goes against the spirit of our less subtle, willfully grandiloquent age.

This, then, was an evening overflowing with intensity. For those attuned to the wide range of instrumental possibilities, it was deeply frustrating to hear three beloved scores compromised by the timbral monochromaticism and arctic din of the brutal piano. There were memorable Brahmsian moments, great sweeping collaborative arches within movements, but I have too many well-balanced, tonally magnificent performances of these two heavenly sonatas in my inner ear, on disc and live, not to have actively and ceaselessly wished that the fine, enduring Newport Music Festival had contracted for a piano capable of doing well by these scores. I would gladly hear Bernadene Blaha and Sergey Antonov play together once more, under kinder circumstances.

A final note, if I may. Compendious though the 140-plus pages of the Festival book, accomodating all fifth-seven  concert programs, there is next to no information about the works performed. Even or especially with familiar scores like those above, it is a bit puzzling not to have at least a loose sheet with modest annotations. That’s unfortunate additional work for a small, hard-pressed staff, but without the intellectual welcome extended by such notes, how do we invite those hovering on the edge of an active interest in classical music to hop firmly on board?

Veteran recording engineer Christopher Greenleaf collaborates with chamber, early, and keyboard musicians in natural acoustic venues on both sides of the Atlantic. His principal mission is recording surviving historic instruments and their successful copies in supportive, affectively engaging acoustics. He is active as a writer, translator, photographer, and acoustic consultant.

Nameplate of a source for Rodney Regier’s reproduction

Christopher Greenleaf, with Sylvia Berry, Clara Rottsolk, and Stephen Porter, are the main participants in “Schubert & the (forte)piano, the performer’s perspective.” The symposium and two concerts, a BEMF Fringe Event, will be held from 9 am to noon on Thursday morning, June 16, at First Lutheran Church, Boston. The following is excerpted from the program notes.

The piano repertoire of the 19th century performed on period originals or on their increasingly convincing replicas has long figured in early-music festivals around the world. We in the States, though, have not yet moved in this direction on a broad enough front to unleash a staying trend.

Thus Schubert & the Piano. Our concert-symposium-recital sandwich is unlikely to change our views on the matter but is among the initiatives cheerfully exploring the possibilities. Imagine a festival able to “dish up” (thank you, Percy Grainger) the Schütz Exequien, 14th-century Aquitanian lais, Homilus’s glorious little 1750s  Motetten…. and Chopin Nocturnes on a seductive 1840s Pleyel, this composer’s preferred model!

Detail from"Schubertiade" by Moritz von Schwind (1869)

Sylvia appears as a fortepianist, a specialist breed championing the questing, eagerly explorative encounter between highly gifted musicians, the very keyboard instruments that first launched the repertoire, and a public who always wind up being pleasantly blown away by the breathtaking beauty and untrammeled expressivity brought to bear on music they are quite startled to realize they didn’t know well enough at all.

To afford our argument something resembling fair-mindedness toward the dominant piano of our day — the modern concert grand, pianist Stephen Porter confronts the task of presenting Schubert credibly and with convincing effect on an “ancestor” instrument, for this concert, Rodney Regier’s “Grafendorfer” piano, modeled after Viennese originals by Conrad Graf and Ignaz Bösendorfer. Both he and Berry bring compelling musical personalities and abilities to the fray, making less for comparisons between them (certainly not my goal in getting this BEMF Fringe event off the ground) than for manifest proof of the fact that exceptional musicians make exceptional music — though so much more enjoyably on the right instruments.

To muster what a Schubert-era piano can or cannot do with the Lied, as compared with today’s less poetic, three-legged behemoths, will be demonstrated by Clara Rottsolk’s fine way with Lieder, for which the music-loving heart harbors such powerful affection.

Veteran recording engineer Christopher Greenleaf collaborates with chamber, early, and keyboard musicians in natural acoustic venues on both sides of the Atlantic. His principal mission is recording surviving historic instruments and their successful copies in supportive, affectively engaging acoustics. He is active as a writer, translator, photographer, and acoustic consultant.

Christoph Wolff and Laurenece Lesser (Christopher Greenleaf photo)

Eminent cellist Laurence Lesser’s truly august performance of all six Bach cello suites, BWV 1007-1012, this last Monday evening in March in NEC’s Jordan Hall, was a marathon. A marathon? Absolutely. To the familiar concept of Sitzfleisch we must stitch the six expressive syllables of  Durchstehungsfähigkeit, an ability to staunchly stay the course for a very good while. Lesser began shortly after 7:30, inserted moderate pauses between each grouping of two suites, and raised his bow for the last time at 10:50.

Rarely in this life does one have the opportunity to encompass all of a signal landmark in music, performed to dizzingly high standards. This past Monday offered just that. During the course of a concise, insightful late-afternoon discussion in the conservatory’s tightly packed Williams Hall, thoughtful Bach scholar Christoph Wolff, Adams University Professor at Harvard University, prepared his intent listeners to grapple with the simple fact that Bach’s six Suites à Violoncello Solo senza Basso mightily surpass our ability to take them all in at once. Confronting these lengthy, beloved, extraordinary suites avec prélude engages the score reader and listener in an intellectual marathon on a vast scale. Parsing, or trying to delve understandingly into, the transcendent changes Bach rang on ostensibly well-worn period danse forms strains our analytical powers to the very brink. Listening to these related but deeply individual works is also unforgettably satisfying in ways that make the writer settle only for words that equal “transcendent” in power and sense.

Throughout, Professor Wolff hitched wonderful mnemonics to his salient points. His straightforward comments first scanned the overall topography of Bach’s many sets of suites, illuminating them with few and clear cross references. He then quickly settled onto an overview of the cello suites, limning the whole and looking more intimately into one of them. He chronicled our frustratingly incomplete access to primary sources, a revealing look into the scholar’s options, but also into his responsibilities. We heard, for instance, how extant autographs tally — and don’t — with their contemporary copies, and how later manuscripts incorporate corruptions and mistakes but also afford researchers indispensable glimpses of vanished originals, alternate versions, fleeting clues to ornamentation, and useful vectors on mystifying harmonic indications. We today derive great joy from the cello suites, and yet Wolff emphasized the composer’s likely didactical purpose in writing them. After all, he noted, when Bach wrote them — almost surely in Cöthen/Anhalt, ca. 1720 — he had been contracted as concertmaster and head of an orchestra, through whose excellent players he enjoyed daily contact with remarkable fellow string players. Can you imagine a more exacting and thorough teacher than thirty-five-year-old Bach, a performer and composer wholly aware of his abilities, and of his own potential for — pardon my modern phrase — raising the bar? Thanks be that the Cello Suites have survived the savage, random erosion of three centuries.

In describing Lesser’s performance, I consciously wrote “august.” As his students and colleagues know, he plays with a sureness of intonation and unerring forward motion that flies in the face of the long line of decades behind him. Applying the writer’s bow-by-bow scalpel to how each of those forty-two longish movements came off is pointless here, and it would also take a very long time. I will try, then, to communicate some of what happened and how it felt, using just a few signal examples to illustrate what was, after all, an extremely rich and stimulating evening for the large number of music lovers who were there. A quartet of high-end microphones was suspended above the stage lip in an effective array, so it is to be hoped that radio listeners will soon be able to enjoy individual suites selected from this Gesamtausführung of the six.

No other instrument calls for such sheer physicality as does the violoncello. For it to project musical ideas without the distraction of visibly effortful playing, the player must own such wholeness of purpose and mastery of the considerable mechanics involved that the intended ideas appear to emerge from a unified entirety, not from a hard-working person wrapped around a large instrument. Some of my awe at witnessing so integrated a unit as Lesser and his modestly scaled 1622 fratelli Amati this Monday evening admittedly stems from my lack of exposure to players on his particular level. As well, there is the matter of coming to terms with the actual sound of this specific instrument as played by this man. The sound we heard was full and rich, but it was not so much imbued with power as it was possessed of a tremendous integration of the all-important fundamentals with their attendant, utterly critical, lower overtones. Treble overtones were there, to unambiguously define pitch and attack, and to breathe a great array of tone color into the ample space of Jordan Hall, but this instrument, as played that evening, did not broadcast brilliance or sear the air with keenness. I have seldom experienced so balanced a cello sound, whose gently dark cast projected especially rich harmonies and favored the splendid dominion of fundamentals, rather than the dazzle of exciting but affectively impotent high harmonics. We absorbed burnished, deep bronze, rather than the glister of silver. Such sound, of course, reveals rhetoric and gesture with great directness and simplicity.

Lesser’s brief annotations state that he played the suites in published order “because I feel that shows not only the growth and mastery Bach achieved as he virtually created a new medium — solo cello — but also gives a dramatic entity to the group.” Each suite avec prélude expresses related metrical and harmonic language among its seven movements. As Prof. Wolff commented in the afternoon, the suites aren’t about melody per se.

To hear the directness of Lesser’s bowed statements was, for this listener, a commanding challenge to confront the pure score, to attempt to listen with minimal awareness of the performer’s persona. Quite the gauntlet to take up, this, for Laurence Lesser has presence. All of him was at the service of the music, though. We had to be there, on a similarly high level, too.

In the course of a recital, a range of dynamics can come to mean very little if it is either constantly too great or not big enough. Lesser never failed to communicate a consistent overall sense of a given suite’s dynamics, often using much the same playing level for most of the seven movements. His deliberate, unfussy departures from each suite’s central dynamic range thus acquired meaning. They signaled something. When they inhabited one extreme of volume for a longer time, they did so in the connotation of a powerful message as to Lesser’s idea of the intensity of what he was saying. His piano passages, especially, and the occasional lightning sallies he made down to minute but entirely audible details at ultra-quiet levels, caused visible frissons among all who were listening. His rare fortes, notably in parts of the fifth suite and the concluding sixth, were that much more gripping.

The notated double stops in the six suites are architectonic columns and firm architraves, solid iterations of what is hinted at in passagework or in adjacent, fast notes. Lesser’s unerring intonation and the great care he took to distance the big technical hurdles from his straightforward projection of musical thought permitted the countless double stops to evolve as part of the language of the evening, absolutely sidestepping display and flash.

Two moments stand in memory, searingly. These are the fourth movements of suites five and six, two of Bach’s greatest and most otherworldly Sarabandes. That of Suite No. 5 in c is undeniably fantastical on the page, a skeletal esquisse of rarified, transported strangeness. It harrowingly evokes Egon Schiele’s emotional palette, two centuries on in history, rather than any feelings with which we think the European mind of the Baroque era grappled. Lesser’s great spareness of execution afforded listeners an unfiltered look into a chill, edgy affect that nonetheless radiated keen emotionality — and great, mesmerizing beauty. The febrile, tender sarabande of the Suite No. 6 in D had a similar emotional intensity, but it hugged close the shadow of a surpassing warmth, almost tearful in its power. Lesser brought a gentle fierceness to it that was moving beyond words.

Our long, special evening, punctuated by its short and desperately necessary Sitzfleisch renewal, left me drained. Neighboring listeners confessed that they, too, had drained the wells of feeling and concentration completely. We were left with the awareness of a statement made by a musician of exceptional insight about six works that mean the earth to him, and whose incomparable worth is now yet more indelible for those who were there. Decades of listening down the different cello paths walked by the disparate likes of Casals, Bijlsma, Feuermann, Casadó, and others may prepare us to listen to the cello with some understanding. Laurence Lesser’s traversal of Bach’s six Suites à Violoncello Solo senza Basso, however, required this listener’s wholesale reinvention of the scale of expressivity and — do you know this word? — Nüchternheit (soberness, roughly) possible on the cello. A lifetime experience.

May the eventual broadcasts spread understanding of how wonderful and thoroughgoing this view of the Bach cello suites was.

Veteran recording engineer Christopher Greenleaf collaborates with chamber, early, and keyboard musicians in natural acoustic venues on both sides of the Atlantic. His principal mission is recording surviving historic instruments and their successful copies in supportive, affectively engaging acoustics. He is active as a writer, translator, photographer, and acoustic consultant.

Sir Mark Elder with Lars-Vogt (Stu Rosner photo)

The Boston Symphony Orchestra often succeeds in giving us gifts we appreciate deeply only in the course of later reflection. This was very much the case with this weekend’s three-concert density. At first glance, one must wonder what’s going to pull concertgoers into an apparently unrelated sammelsurium of works, led by a conductor still largely unfamiliar on these shores. The answer can best be found in the BSO program one is handed on entering Symphony Hall, or online among the BSO’s increasingly complete and satisfying annotations, bios, and so on.

The specific evening in question was this past Thursday, January 13, when our rigorous winter was in fine, blustery form, and our streets and sidewalks were memorably uninviting. The sizable audience showed up mostly on time, which is enjoyably typical of the orchestra’s loyal, diverse live listenership. Our culture today requires more social interfacing than diving into the program book front to back, but there were still a fair number of bent heads to be observed as the folks on stage played in before they tuned.

My own experience with the concert, once asked to write it up, began with a good read online, a casual reacquaintance with the Delius (BBC Symphony/Andrew Davis), and some surfing (via research-friendly Google.de) among the early-20th-century press clippings that chronicle how three of the four pieces were originally received. A glimmer of a reason for the unusually heterodox programming came out of this reading before the evening of the concert. I think this worth sharing, naturally with the proviso that a spokesperson for orchestra or conductor may be sufficiently amused or annoyed to point out the error of my conclusions.

The four scores have in common that each of them appeared early enough in American concert life to significantly broaden, inform, and perhaps even change the way our ancestors, and therefore those whose perceptions kindled and directed our own early on, took in new music. I find this fact intriguing and challenging.

For instance, we heard two of Debussy’s twenty-four piano Préludes — “Feuilles mortes,” Livre 2 (1912-13) and “Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest”, Livre 1 (1909-10) — played first as written, by Eifel-born pianist Lars Vogt, then attacca in brand-new, sumptuous orchestrations by British composer/arranger Colin Matthews. The original scores crossed to North America immediately on publication and, given their startlingly otherworldly timbral and harmonic language, instantly posed questions whose answers powerfully define points of departure for modern music. The full, darkly luminous orchestrations were irresistible. They cannot possibly top the piano scores, of course. Their manifest perfection and star-grasping sonic vocabulary came through even via the medium of the bland, cold Hamburg Steinway D grand Mr. Vogt played. I don’t imagine that either Matthews or conductor Sir Mark Elder (Hallé Orchestra, Manchester, UK) would have attempted this lovely juxtaposition if they’d felt there was the slightest chance that the might of brass, woodwinds, and percussion would “beat up on” the piano originals. Spanking new transcriptions of this delicacy and richness are uncommon. I could not help but float a mind’s-eye sketch of the two-hand skeleton on which they are based through the great, towering structure of each orchestrated Prélude as it swept slowly through Symphony Hall. The Matthews transcriptions are magnificent new gems. They also hew closely and with audible deference to the architecture and affect of their models. I can’t wait to encounter the remaining twenty-two of them. If the piano itself was unengaging, at least the soloist’s polished pianism managed to draw from it what was needed, while sinewy small ensembles within the band entrusted with orchestral lines and harmonic commentaries always knitted themselves into impeccable, deftly unified brush strokes that truly added up to the Picture.

Turning the page to Delius, conductor and orchestra revived a work scarcely heard in Boston for a century, even though the BSO premiered it in North America in 1909. Paris: A Nocturne — The Song of a Great City (1899) did not particularly appeal to busy, businesslike Richard Strauss when the composer sent it to him for commentary, but it has enjoyed scattered popularity since its 1901 premiere by German conductor Hans Haym, the score’s dedicatee. In the big score, Delius, the perfect English expatriate, fondly remembers the Paris of his youth, a city whose youthful heart was consumed by the vibrant, frenetic Montmartre nightlife. Its newly cosmopolitan social climate (1890s) thrummed on for decades but was summarily snuffed out by the 1940 occupation. It’s a picture of what once was, back then, as we experience it now, but the old context of the great city remains clear and communicative. Elder delivered it to us with such deference to the admittedly superb overall ensemble effect that one could complain that nuance, lyricism, even finesse were left by the wayside.

A Mozart piano concerto as a defining modern work? But of course. Whether one encountered the Emperor concerto in a matinée concert or one of those sparks-flying Anton Rubinstein concerti in an evening series concert, the format of the piano concerto was so well known by the building of Symphony Hall that it may have appeared incapable of returning or revision. What a surprise, then when the Theodore Thomas Orchestra and William Mason (not Lowell or Henry, of Mason & Hamlin fame) gave the first US reading of the Concerto in C, K.467, in 1876. They presumably offered mid-Romantic Boston a flower-fresh, urbanely conversational piece that eschewed the bombast often served up in concerto repertoire of that era. Herr Vogt speedily demonstrated both his elegant tone production and an irritatingly predictable habit of pouncing on phrase endings. The smaller orchestra onstage made for fine, appropriate balances, but the chill clangor of the nine-foot solo instrument now and again obscured delicate wind band comments or important lower string detail. The overall feel was of warmth and orchestral precision, though the smaller bits were unable to assert their intimate magic. Vogt played outer movement cadenzas whose brevity, sharp wit, and harmonic freedom were refreshing.

Mr. Elder swaddled the first bars of Till Eulenspiegel’s lustige Streiche (“Merry Pranks”), Op. 29 (1895), in expansive, gentle layers of developing motives. His calm entry into the piece afforded an authentically Straussian launchpad for the ensuing high jinx and myriad of lyric episodes in the brief life of the eponymous scamp. The score’s printed title continues, “nach alter Schelmenweise in Rondeauform; für großes Orchester gesetzt” or, pretty freely, “a setting for large orchestra, in rondo form, of an old tale about a naughty lad.” Written programs for this tone poem and others of the ilk have whizzed in and out of fashion, but Michael Steinberg’s economical, informative notes give ample historical grounding for us to tack on what images and period-appropriate social commentary we wish. Yes, indeed, it does help to have these slightly firmer bits of rigging among which to clamber as the big, at times unwieldy vessel of the work makes its extremely charming way through brilliant waters teeming with brass reefs, hard-driven spray from the high woodwinds, and gentle zephyrs amongst the high and low strings. The BSO sounded simply superb, as did that ever-amazing hall.

Veteran recording engineer Christopher Greenleaf collaborates with chamber, early, and keyboard musicians in natural acoustic venues on both sides of the Atlantic. He is active as a writer, translator, photographer, and acoustic consultant.

Canto Armonico in C.P.E. Bach’s Magnificat in D (Hendrik Broekman photo)

Among the normal aspects of attending concerts in Back Bay’s busy, cherished First Lutheran Church is the generally cohesive, thematically intriguing programming by the groups and soloists who reach their appreciative publics there.

Magnificat, the Song of Mary is a title to whisk one right into the spirit of half a millennium of European music evoking the praise, sorrows, and glorification encompassed by the composers’ evocations of Marian legend. The implicit poetry in the name serves as an accurate guide to the seriousness of approach Canto Armonico Boston and their frequent conductor, Simon Carrington, bring to programming and performances. The unflagging sense of commitment the group emanates in person heightens this promise.

No more joyous and affirmative English setting of a Marian text is to be found anywhere than the extraordinarily beautiful, technically exacting Magnificat by a partially known late-15th-century figure we today are pleased to call William Cornysh. The score of his big, thirteen-minute Magnificat somehow survived into our time and has grown to be as justly famous as any of the later tour-de-force vocal works of the following century.

In two precious surviving sources chronicling the English a cappella tradition, the Eton Choirbook and the Caius Choirbook, we are afforded tantalizing glimpses of a virtuosic and incomparably sophisticated musical culture that, through casual cultural vandalism, was extinguished in nearly its entirety. We moderns need only recall the disdain with which we discard our own just-past vogues to understand the thoroughness with which most traces of choral repertoire heard during the reigns of Edwards IV & V, Richard III, and Henry VII were obliterated from cathedral and chapel. Not surprisingly, that time’s custom of recycling parchment and paper, whether by vigorous bouts of palimpsest or by the simple gluing of old pages into new tomes, probably accounts for as much of the loss as does the destruction of the tumultuous age of Henry VIII and, to a lesser extent, that of Roundhead forces a hundred years later.

Canto and Carrington gave us a rousing, dynamically vital interpretation in which the expressive character of the all-important chant between sections lent just as much to the piece’s terrific thrust as did the massed, full-throated parts. Canto’s choral tuning and intonation were a delight, as was their brilliant power in the final bars.

There followed an a cappella motet by expatriate Fleming Philippe Rogier, Sancta Maria, succurre miseris, which painted a still, deeply resigned Marian soundscape. At a young age, Rogier was recruited for the Madrid court. So talented was this singer and composer that he was appointed mæstro di cappella to the king at 25, serving in this position until his death just ten years on. Most of Rogier’s music vanished in the unimaginably disastrous Lisbon earthquake of 1755. The 18th century’s worst European earthquake smashed a still-felt broad swath through Iberian cultural documents. The complete works, or nearly, of numerous Spanish and Portuguese composers disappeared, together with whole styles of architecture and early literature. In Rogier’s case, a few tempting, representative masses and motets are left to tell us that his was an individualistic, innovative compositional voice. Simon Carrington’s evocative shaping of the motet’s subtle flow, with the choir’s obvious ease in bringing out small, telling details, lent the course of the short work – under six minutes – a special, time-suspended feel.

The premiere of a new work can, as some concert veterans dread, be the time out when one reads all the annotations or quietly updates addresses in a carefully masked cell phone. Not so in this case. First Lutheran’s young music director, Bálint Karosi, still fresh from glowing things at Oberlin and with a prestigious First at the 2009 Leipzig Bach Competition, is active as an organist, harpsichordist, and period clarinetist. He’s also been writing a string of diverse new works, from an organ concerto to solo organ repertoire and choral pieces. He, Carrington, and Canto trouped up to First Lutheran Church’s balcony to give the world premiere of his Ne timeas, Maria, for basses (chant), organ, and SSAT choir. Karosi’s program notes credit the second movement of Liszt’s Symphony to Dante’s Commedia (1855-56), titled “Purgatorio e Magnificat,” as the inspiration for his “Fear not, Maria.” Karosi audibly tips a bit of Bartók into the highly effective ostinati and quick motivic reiterations that propel the music from its gentle opening minutes into an upward arching central section — vibrant among the high voices and now and again full-throated, but not loud — that imperceptibly slides back toward somber textures, more drawn-out motifs, and, at last, through high Alellujas, toward a darkly placid resolution. The customarily slightly vague presence of voices below soprano from this particular balcony was not an issue. The organ, beautifully played by the composer, occupied a central role in introducing and elaborating upon rhythmic seeds and hinting at home tonality, as well as asserting a deft freedom from key-edness. The audience reaction was very enthusiastic, as was the performers.’ Ne timeas, Maria is moving ten-minute work, well worth revisiting.

On returning to the bench, Karosi called upon First Lutheran’s splendid Richards, Fowkes organ for the sole instrumental work of the afternoon, Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach’s Organ Sonata “senza pedale” in A, Wq 70/4 (1755). Bach fils was a praiseworthy organist — his dad said so repeatedly, after all — but his large keyboard output includes few compositions for the instrument. Seven or so solo sonatas (four without pedal parts, for a modestly gifted patron, Princess Anna-Amalia, sister to C.P.E.’s employer, Frederick the Great), organ concerti in Eb and G, and a lonely Präludium. Et voilà, c’en est tout. The spritely Allegro assai of this sonata’s opening movement is pure C.P.E. in its changeful progressions and the constant picking out of extreme intervals and quick dalliances with cantilena or cadential moments. The fast, vocal speech of the organ’s flues made for a degree of clarity and articulation that Karosi exploited fully. Through the middle Adagio, a tremulant floated beneath quiet flutes in a reduced-energy reflection of the first movement, with small, rapid-fire ornaments that had the charming effect of sprinkling tiny chipotles among songful lines. The concluding Allegro, registered just that much more fully than the beginning of the piece (though still without reeds and mixtures), wove little micro-dramas among the movement’s songful, warm passagework. This is a slight piece, and yet it was a jewel in Bálint Karosi’s expressive hands.

Simon Carrington conducting the premiere of Bálint Karosi’s Ne timeas, Maria (Hendrik Broekman photo)

The second half of this Canto Armonico Sunday afternoon was as rewarding as it was unusual. We North Americans have as little regular access to the choral and vocal music of C.P.E. Bach as we do to that of Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and the incomparable Dieterich Buxtehude. Strange, this, for Bach the Younger is very much his father’s son, even as he stretches purposefully past the transitional horizon into a dawning Classical idiom. A case of no doubt understandable neglect, but nonetheless puzzling, as Canto, the Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra, and Carrington demonstrated over the forty minutes of the Magnificat in D, Wq 215 (1749). Two each of horns, oboes, and flutes joined an almost sensual quartet of continuo instruments (theorbo, 18th-century guitar, chamber organ, violone) in imparting variety, color, and stylistic zip to the small string ensemble, with vocal soli emerging from the twenty-eight-strong chorus. The grander parts were big, bold, and spankingly quick-tempoed. The solo and duet arie sprinkled among the choral sections showcased the 35-year-old composer’s effortless mastery of form, of vocal line, and of wide-ranging accompanimental textures. While I would not be among those to characterize C.P.E.’s melodic gifts as being on the level of his parent’s, or of Mendelssohn’s, his settings invariably suited the range and agility of the vocal soli, and the choral passages betrayed similar ease in marrying orchestral and voice sectional lines to fine effect. Among the soli, alto Heather Gallagher and baritone Bradford Gleim, with agile tenor Charles Blandy, distinguished themselves by the care and sweetness they brought to bear on their texts. The entirely professional continuo (Catherine Liddell, Salome Sandoval, Bálint Karosi, Mai-Lan Brœkman) were exemplary, but the upper strings of the Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra now and again betrayed unequal intonation, with some puzzlingly thin tone. Simon Carrington, now active in this country for a good few years, was that unusual conducting presence, the modest member of the ensemble who, through expressive, spare gesture, commands the entire attention of the ensemble he leads. His tempi, brisk in the quick places, possessed of sure but unhurried momentum elsewhere, were absolutely right. The exciting end of the work could not have been more enjoyable. Canto Armonico always appears to have potent reserves of brilliance and verve, upping the emotional ante satisfyingly.

Not only was this concert a rare chance to hear the C.P.E. Bach Magnificat, it was a demonstration of Canto Armonico’s organizational ability to mount a logistics-rich, financially demanding program to laudable standards. Among the group’s achievements must be counted the extensive, beautifully done program, in which articles by leading figures here and in the UK said rather more about the composers and their works than even Boston audiences may be accustomed to reading.

Veteran recording engineer Christopher Greenleaf collaborates with chamber, early, and keyboard musicians in natural acoustic venues on both sides of the Atlantic. He is active as a writer, translator, photographer, and acoustic consultant.

A New Stop for FLC (BMInt Staff Photo)

The Mystery Gift with a penny for scale (BMInt Staff photo)

The Prelude will begin with a majestic Präambulum in D by 17th-c. Hamburg organist Heinrich Scheidemann, display the darker moods of Buxtehude with the solo organ version of a haunting commemorative cantata, and finish up with many sides of J.S. Bach, including two contrasting settings of his signature Allein Gott in der Höh’ sei Ehr. Should you go, you will decidedly experience a different organ than you have heard at FLC before. The three new reeds are truly something to write home about.

(The music of the Präludium and service were to have been played by celebrated Frisian organist/improviser Sietze de Vries, but the vagaries of obtaining American visas for visiting artists put an unexpected end to this plan.)

The program got under way with Stravinsky’s caustic, feisty, and quite brief Fanfare for a New Theatre (1964) for two unaccompanied trumpets. Veteran trumpeters Paul Perfetti and Bruce Hall, who would not be heard from again for over an hour, shattered the humming quiet of the full church with spare cascades of seconds and sevenths, and then yielded the spotlight to Emmanuel Music’s new president, Kate Kush. She welcomed all and introduced the organization’s new music director in a very few words — long-of-wind board speechmakers, kindly take note!

Sizable Handel choral pieces begin with overtures, the one for Alexander’s Feast being both typical and charming. We immediately had a good idea of Ryan Turner’s sure, communicative style at the helm, which made use of finely chosen tempi, sensible bowings, deft relative weighting of orchestral sections, and thoroughly enjoyable attacca bridges to project a clear sense of pace and a greater architecture. The central event, though more alluded to than specifically sketched, is conquering Alexander’s torching of “the most beautiful city in the world”, defeated Darius’s Persepolis, at the mad urging of his daughter, Thais. Vocal soli — accompagnati, in recitativo, and in arias or duos — succeeded one another, telling the classic tale of Alexander’s succumbing first to the temptress, then to her disturbed and destructive whim, and finally (this being a literary era detached from inconvenient realities) to the sweet, all-conqu’ring essence of the blessed muse, St. Cecilia. At signal thresholds, as in all such Handel works, the choir bursts forth in proclamation. What better formula could there be for enjoyment, success, and service of the original than John Dryden’s text of 1697? On his decades-long, businesslike way from Italian opera endeavors to the full-blown English oratorio, adoptive Londoner Handel suffused a breathtaking number of musical forms with his living breath of brilliant melody and deeply touching writing for strings and obligati. No finer example of the composer’s fascinating musical peregrination has persisted in concert than Alexander’s Feast. Called an ode, it is essentially an oratorio with a trim anatomy.

Ryan Turner’s supple, even liquid shaping of phrase was the most remarkable part of the evening. Superb singing by bass Dana Whiteside, soprano Kendra Colton, peripatetically busy tenor Jason McStoots, and bass Donald Wilkinson stood out as much through Mr. Turner’s molding as through these singers’ always delightful talents. Cellist Rafael Popper-Keiser is incapable of playing without fervor, spot-on intonation, and a heavenly projection of the affect his solos and occasional continuo highlights bring to the fore. He is among Boston’s distinguished instrumentalists, and for good reason. Vividly rhetorical harpsichordist Michael Beattie, sometimes audible through the familiarly muzzy Emmanuel acoustic, always brought off his continuo and obligato statements with panache and sparkle. As Donald Teeters quipped in his entertaining pre-concert lecture, Handel is prone to dotting beautiful obligato writing among his scores, requiring pairs of winds to sit for eons through the production, deliver their exquisite sunbursts in a single movement, and resubmerge. The rich horn parts and the paired trumpet writing were marvelous — and so was the playing.

Donald Teeters declared that “authentic” is a terrible word in music. He cited the almost unguided ease with which the instruments of Handel’s day balance within an ensemble, with and without voices, but he cannily dodged the small matter of Emmanuel’s four decades of success with modern instrumentation. A thrust of his illuminating, entertaining comments was that Handel’s intrinsic mastery of the score assures that the minor figurations and structures of each movement add up to a terrific vehicle for the all-important text, and that this particular ode, graciously included by most Handelians under the broader wings of the big oratorios that preceded and followed it, is a stellar example of the format.

In Ryan Turner’s debut performance for Emanuel Music, we were never left in doubt of the overarching shape and great beauty of Alexander’s Feast. His impeccable technique in leading the band and singers, and in communicating clearly with soli, came in part out of unequivocal starts for all, with brief, clear advance telegraphing of the pace and a truly refreshing communication of the intimacy of his concept of ensemble playing. Mr. Turner moves vigorously and tosses out straightforward emotional cues when the affect requires these, but the comfort of singers and players, at least in this performance, obviously came from detailed and ample rehearsal among musicians sharing a common musical language. As I mentioned earlier, Mr. Turner’s preferred attacca transitions, never edging toward the abrupt, maintain energy and focus well. This deeply enjoyable Alexander’s Feast augurs well for Boston, as it does for Emmanuel Music.

Alas, I must close in saying that Emmanuel Church’s stuffy, tired air must be original to the building, or perhaps to the time of the post-fire renovations. This historic Anglican congregation and its ecumenical colleague groups are no doubt accustomed to the unchanging fug in the sanctuary. But over the many years of Emmanuel, the Boston Early Music Festival, and other major city music events, audiences have sweltered and perspiringly endured. This is not a call for noisy, costly air conditioning, please note, but for regular, no-cost ventilation to take daily advantage of the cooler night air. It’s just outside, sealed out.

Veteran recording engineer Christopher Greenleaf collaborates with chamber, early, and keyboard musicians in natural acoustic venues on both sides of the Atlantic. He is active as a writer, translator, photographer, and acoustic consultant.

Some few years back, Suisse-Romande pianist Pierre Goy set about crafting an international setting for a spirited exchange of ideas, informed opinions, and in-depth information touching on music for and with keyboards. Each even year since 2002, his Rencontres harmoniques have conferred total immersion in the theme at hand on performers, professionals in the field, and a growing public. This being the big Chopin year of our era, M. Goy assembled an astutely chosen firmament of specialists at the International Colloquy in Lausanne from Thursday through Sunday, September 9 to 13. They shared their thoughts on the interpretation and parsing of the composer’s musical milieu and cast light from many vantage points on the instruments, original scores, living performance heritage, and original paysage sonore — the very soundscape — germane to Parisian music between the just-post-Napoleonic age and the rich dawning of the Deuxième Empire.

The site for most of this early-September gathering was the lovely and pleasingly stylish interior of Lausanne’s Conservatoire de Musique. Without the firing off of authentic performance rockets and the hoisting of banners to announce pure early-music probity, all present simply assumed, with cosmopolitan and welcome maturity, that the subject was Chopin and his contemporaries as conjecturally heard in their time, et voilà.

Grands by the three major Parisian builders of Chopin’s day. L-R: an 1842 Pape, an 1839 Pleyel, and an 1850 Erard (Christopher Greenleaf photo)

The dialing-in started from this rather sophisticated place, and so no one bothered to waste energy asserting the validity of what was, to those who came, self-evident. Modern pianos thus did not figure on stage, as their advent postdated the focal era by more than a generation. We heard the models of Pleyel and Erard grands known to have been favored by Chopin, and we had the great privilege of encountering rare and unusual music on some striking square grands — carrés — from the same makers.

The presence of celebrated modern makers who build carefully researched and musically satisfying copies of historic keyboard instruments was among the prime attractions of this Rencontre, as it has been in the four previous colloquies on the steep north shore of Lac Léman/Lake Geneva. In haring about North America and all over Europe to attend and sometimes collaborate in festivals and symposia over two and some decades, I have never yet encountered as high a standard of technical polish as we experienced from all of the many pianos we milling, critical attendees heard in Lausanne. Hats off to M. Goy for setting the standards, and heartfelt thanks to the Swiss, French, German, Czech, and American builders who swarmed around the pianos to bring them to such an unheard-of level of tuning and voicing. Hearteningly, two of the performers demanded acclaim for the staunch and semperternally anonymous tuners. This was provided, as a grinning British colleague quipped, “with bells on..

The playing in the concerts was on a uniformly high level, as was the choice of repertoire to illustrate and bring to life Chopin and his time. The opening pair of concerts, back-to-back in the Grande Salle du Conservatoire, recreated the enormously long first Chopin program in Paris, on February 25, 1832. A lovely, just-restored 1839 Pleyel held the place of honor. Perhaps in uneasy emulation of the at times notoriously under-ventilated salons of mid-19th-century Paris, the temperature and humidity were unfortunately high enough to sap already tired travelers from four continents of what energy they had left.

‘Twas a long, blessedly worthwhile evening! A Beethoven string quintet (not the official one, but a contemporary diminution of forces for the Septet, op. 20), chamber reductions of arias by Meyerbeer, Donizetti, Bellini, and Rossini, chamber versions of movements from Chopin’s e-minor concerto, Op. 11, and his Grandes variations brillantes, Op. 2, on La ci darem. Fine German Lieder pianist Sonja Lohmüller somehow managed to infuse the dreadfully clunky aria accompaniments with interest. Pierre Goy, in his one substantial presence on stage during the Rencontres, acquitted himself ably in the concerto movements. One of the eminent names of French music today, Alain Planès, held forth in an almost entirely unknown Introduction, Grande Marche et Grande Polonaise by Friedrich (or Frédéric) Kalkbrenner, with string quintet accompaniment, and the Chopin Mozart variations. Just how, you ask — at least, I hope you wonder about this — does a man whose numerous recordings stem largely from sessions with modern grands go about adjusting his technical and artistic æsthetic so as to do justice to a 171-year-old “ancestor piano”? In a word, brilliantly. Mid-19th-century instruments are responsive and timbrally multihued in ways to which we’re no longer accustomed. These pianos are capable of an astonishing dynamic range: absolutely gossamer pppp textures and a powerful but memorably clean roar when called upon to provide one. M. Planès simply assumed that all that was on tap within the 1839 Pleyel and called it forth, with especially lovely results in combination with the accompanying string instruments.

Alain Planès’ solo recital the following evening, in the other Rencontres venue, the Salle Paderewski in the nearby Casino de Montbenon, was on the same Pleyel grand. He delved into fairly unfamiliar works, as well some of the famous ones, and managed to evoke a great deal of the paysage sonore around which this colloquy was centered. A moment of sorcery, in which we were bathed in the evanescent, quiet treble of the instrument and its warm, imposing bass, enwrapped the two central Nocturnes of the evening, Op. 9, No. 2 in Eb, and Op. 27, No. 2 in Db. The celebrated “Aéoline” étude accounted for a good many sighs and murmurs, too, as M. Planès drew painterly, deft swathes of sound from an instrument that, for all its horsepower in grander passages, appeared most at home when asked to sidle off in fey, mystic directions.

Among the impressive events during Chopin et son temps was a mid-day demo-cum-recital by glowing pianist Jean-Jacques Dünki, who is on the faculty of the Musik-Akademie der Stadt Basel. He titled his program “The Three Great Parisian Piano Makers.” Arrayed on stage were a substantial 1842 grand by “the other” Parisian maker of the day, Pape, and standard, modest grands by Pleyel (the familiar 1839 instrument) and Erard (1850, verging on modern). As was the peculiar though consistent custom of the Rencontres stage set-up, all instruments were arrayed with their tails upstage, away from the audience; as you may imagine, this occasioned interesting seating gyrations by those members of the audience, myself among them, who prefer the more balanced sound of the full instrument, which one would normally hear by being right of center. The arrangement was a visual success, however, and one at least heard all three pianos in reasonably equal balance. M. Dünki entertained his largely francophone listenership with amusingly delivered period quotes and with repertoire drawn primarily from Viennese and Central German composers, always filtered through the highly distinctive Parisian pianistic soundscape. Rarely do members of an audience have the benefit of so eloquent, engaging, and informative a guide in erring down unexplored byways, in our present terms, that were once the stuff of mainstream concert life. Jean-Jacques Dünki, an irrepressible teacher and musical co-conspirator, returned to his post-concert stage in shirtsleeves to trot out further unusual and intellectually challenging scores to illustrate not only the striking differences to be discerned among the pianos, but also to quietly underscore their common French national characteristics of clarity, transparency, and finely judged note attack.

The other solo recital that, for a good many who were present, completely redefined perceptions of Chopin’s long-gone age was given by fine Munich pianist Christine Schornsheim. As did M. Dünki, Mlle. Schornsheim turned to three extravagantly different instruments to afford her program a degree of tonal and dynamic variety unheard of in conventional concerts. She drew our gaze, once again, to the message the Rencontres programs broadcast to all participants: “Ears wide open, eyes ditto. And again!” The music for this concert, played without commentary from Mlle. Schornsheim, was an arresting panoply of scores that have vanished from our modern awareness. Ferdinand Hérold (1791-1833) contributed three of six movements in his 1811 Sonata in A, Op. 3, No. 1, heard in ravishing detail on an 1801 Parisian Erard carré. On the same fragile, plangent instrument, we heard six German-influenced Caprices, Op. 2 (1816) by Alexandre Pierre Fr. Boëly (1785-1858). Moving three decades into the 19th century, and therefore firmly into the Romantic mould, was the warm, sweetly powerful voice of an 1835 Pleyel carré, the outstanding instrumental star of the evening, with an Air écossais varié in Bb (1810) by once-quite-influential Georges Onslow (1784-1853), some of whose wind music is known in North America. Unusual on many levels was the performance of the concluding work in the formal program, Boëly’s Sonata in c, Op. 1, No. 1 (1810). The 1802 Broadwood grand Mlle. Schornsheim played was tuned in a strong temperament that lent vim and character to the remoter reaches of the score (again, three of six movements in a longer work), and that also pointed out the sheer splendor of this very poetic musician’s technique at the keyboard. She is among the subtlest and most effective users of period pedal techniques you’ll find on either side of the Atlantic, and I pray fervently that her brilliantly detailed, always elegant touch will soon become familiar in American cities. Her encore, a zippy and eccentric Scherzo from another Boëly sonata, rounded out a diverting and informative evening. In best Rencontres style, a number of her colleagues whizzed backstage to a) congratulate her on a remarkable accomplishment in this program; b) call her seriously to task for interpretive choices “which I’d have gone at markedly differently, you know!”; and c) see about obtaining some of those rare scores.

*   *   *

The language at the Rencontres harmoniques is, of course, French. In the Suisse Romande, one hears “huitante” in counting, rather than the French “quatre-vingts”, which brings about the gritting of linguistically orthodox Parisian molars. One hears the full gamut of German and sprinklings of Ticino (Swiss) Italian, leavened by all the accents of the Boot. The English in the halls wanders between mild Edinburgh burrs and Oxbridge flutings to the down-home tones of us visiting Americans. The lectures — les colloques — tend to be given en français, though a few given by anglophones are in English. Questions are in any of the main languages, answers either in the same or in French. The spirit throughout is of conviviality and exploration.

A few colloque titles will give you an idea of the range of subjects explored. “Chopin, or the work in progress, from improvisation to teaching”; “Late style, last style”; “The piano works of Frédéric Kalkbrenner and his connection with Chopin”; “The English & Viennese Schools and their Instruments”; “Transmission and Tradition in the Interpretation of Chopin, 1 & 2”; “Chopin’s Pianos Once and Now”; and “Affect in Action: Hammer Design in French Romantic Pianos.” The presentations were stimulating, well attended, and lively in their at-times feisty Q&As. The Rencontres public were numerous enough to fill the concerts and keep the Conservatoire’s popular rooftop Café Mozart hopping. (I’ve never been in a European music school without a decent, heavily patronized café inside or at least within fiddle toss.) But there were always times when one could slip into the sous-sol exhibition of instruments and first editions and have the room to one’s self, or when it was possible to slide into an extended and nearly uninterrupted conversation with one of the nine keyboard instrument makers in their individual studios. Some of the makers, notably Christopher Clarke (Burgundy, FR), Paul McNulty (Czech Republic), and Gérald Cattin (Jura, FR), have a degree of presence in the US, mostly through their late-18th- and early-19th-century copies. Many attendees had looked forward to the ever-stimulating presence of noted builder Chris Maene (Ruislede, BE), but he ultimately could not come to Lausanne.

An extraordinarily effective and hard-working team supported Pierre Goy, founder and director of Rencontres harmoniques, in keeping the dense, complex schedule over four days from imploding. This is no mean feat, as both tuners and performers required extended access to around a dozen period pianos and a few modern copies outside of the demonstrations and the ten full-length concerts. The few delays were short in duration, and the universally patient attendees often expressed their appreciation for the remarkable state of tuning and voicing of so many veteran instruments of grand kilométrage. The Rencontres harmoniques will gather again in Lausanne in 2012. See what’s coming here.

For prospective travelers: Prices in Switzerland range from numbingly expensive to bold robbery, as exemplified by the price of single CDs — CHF 36. A Swiss franc is close to $1; you get the picture.

Veteran recording engineer Christopher Greenleaf collaborates with chamber, early, and keyboard musicians in natural acoustic venues on both sides of the Atlantic. He is active as a writer, translator, photographer, and acoustic consultant for music spaces.

The late Richard Shirk, his Frederick Collection audience, and the 1877 Erard “grand modèle de concert” (Christopher Greenleaf photo)

The venue for this first public encounter of interpreter and composer-era instrument will be the uncarpeted, resonant Ashburnham Community Church in the north-central Massachusetts town of the same name. Patricia and Edmund Michael Frederick are the owners and co-curators of the three dozen or so grand pianos their exceptional collection has grown to include. Back in October of 1981, they first furnished a restored historic piano for a concert and related symposium at Kenyon College in Gambier, OH. Mike Frederick poured through organological publications and sale catalogues here and overseas, slowly accruing instruments in original condition, to afford unambiguous, incontrovertible information on the exact soundscapes composers had in mind when they conceived their scores for solo, chamber, vocal, and concerted music. In 1985, 25 years ago, the Fredericks mustered the financial resources to announce a modest first season of Historical Piano Concerts in Ashburnham.

Since then, Music from the Frederick Collection, the name the series has borne on its public radio airings, has expanded to five fall and five spring concerts each year. This will be the 25th anniversary spring season. These Sunday afternoons offer chamber, vocal, and solo programs. The Fredericks present both modern pianists intrigued by the interpretational challenge of playing composer-era original instruments, and musicians whose careers regularly encompass performance on modern fortepiano copies and on the rare surviving period grands made available by museums, conservatories, and private collectors. The Collection is virtually unique among global historical piano resources in that musicians of all stripes are encouraged, not merely permitted, to try out the full range of old and new repertoire, with and without chamber and vocal colleagues, and to spend extended time at the keyboards of the two dozen or so instruments in the Piano Study Center, also in Ashburnham. With  a common-sense curatorial approach, the earliest Collection instruments are not subjected to unlimited playing, of course. A no-velvet-ropes treasure house of original instruments to play? Yes, indeed.

Keywell and pedal lyre of the 1846 Streicher grand (Vienna) to be played this Sunday (Christopher Greenleaf photo)

What instruments does one find there? They range from an anonymous Austro-German piano built from the expanded, exquisitely veneered, carcase of a Bavarian harpsichord, up through period models from Vienna, London, Paris, Leipzig, Boston, and New York. There are modern, early-20th-century instruments by Blüthner and Erard. The Frederick Collection website has information on each piano, from images and dates to keyboard compass, pitch, and other technical data. The roots of the piano as an instrument predate the oldest Ashburnham examples by a century, but surviving playable pianos by its Florentine inventor, Bartolomeo Cristofori, its first significant Northern European developer, Gottfried Silbermann, and such celebrated Viennese and German geniuses as Anton Walter, Nanette Streicher, and Joh. Andreas Stein are rare as hen’s teeth. You will have to look at them (and definitely not be permitted to touch, let alone play them) in the great art museums of Rome, Vienna, London, New York, Paris, Munich, and Nürnberg. Still, it is primarily the astonishing diversity and superb condition of the Fredericks’ selection of 19th-century pianos that continues to draw pianists and their collaborative colleagues to make the short journey to Ashburnham. There they encounter fellow musicians from around the world, similarly intrigued at the thought of rediscovering music on the actual instruments for which it was written.

Emma Tahmiziàn muses that “encountering this collection has put me in mind of succumbing yet more wholly to my native inquisitiveness.” She continues, “each piano spoke to me of a different, specific piece. Remarkable. As a pianist, I have here a precious opportunity to get in touch with the actual sonorities with which the composers dealt. This is moving, enormously so. I am in awe of what this dedicated couple are doing and feel deep gratitude toward them.”

The late Richard Shirk, winner of the 1981 Leschetizky Prize, was a special pianist who, out of considerable experience, appreciated the enormous capabilities of the modern Steinway grand. It was a good many years before he “reluctantly caved in,” as he wryly quipped, to mounting pressure from friends and colleagues to at last undertake a pèlerinage to Ashburnham. Confronted with the seductive possibility of bringing familiar scores to life on instruments exactly contemporary with those for which the great composers had conceived them, he arrived at a substantial personal epiphany. On returning to New York from his first Frederick Collection visit, Mr. Shirk called me in what was, for him, an unusual state of excitement, enthusing “I just can’t unhear what those instruments have to tell me!” Pat and Mike Frederick asked him to play on the Collection series. He did so in successive seasons, each concert being recorded for the Fredericks’ extensive archive and for NPR broadcast. In our final conversation before his death a few years ago, Shirk said that, no, these were not instruments on which he would often have the opportunity of performing. They had so changed what he expected of modern pianos, however, that he was no longer prepared to play instruments he found to be brutal, excessively loud, or incapable of a respectable range of piano dynamics. That decision, he noted, was quite a leap.

The elegant, sweeping bentside of the 1845 Pleyel (Christopher Greenleraf photo)

Other modern pianists have described the start of private artistic journeys after playing in Ashburnham. They have often been startled to find themselves reevaluating the expressive possibilities of the piano as a whole, with predictably interesting results as they adjust upward their standards for timbre production, dynamic shading, and transparency.  Out in the contemporary piano world, applying elevated expectations in the face of concert-hall reality can be sobering and, not a few pianist colleagues report, distressing. But if more practicing musicians, pianists obviously first among them, become aware of the sheer wealth of tonal variety prevalent among forerunner pianos, even among instruments that were made as recently as during the early careers of their teachers, they cannot help but learn to require greater subtlety from pianos in conservatories and concert halls, even at homes.

From Boston: Allow for outbound Sunday afternoon traffic! Drive an hour west on Rte. 2, past Fitchburg. Seven miles or so later, turn north (right) onto Rte. 140 and, after two miles, right again on Rte. 101. Six miles later, after passing through So. Ashburnham, you will reach a T with Rte. 12 in Ashburnham. Turn left and head uphill for under 1/8 mile, then either turn onto Chapel St. or, just past it, into the parking lot of the Ashburnham Community Church. The doors (upper level, in back) open at 3:30. Admission is $10; children and students are free.

See related review here.

Veteran recording engineer Christopher Greenleaf collaborates with chamber, early, and keyboard musicians in natural acoustic venues on both sides of the Atlantic. He is active as a writer, translator, photographer, and acoustic consultant.

C. B Fisk (company archive)

When Harvard University Organist, Christian Lane, lifts his hands from the four well used manuals of the 1967 C. B. Fisk opus 46 organ in Appleton Chapel for the final time, at 7:30 P.M., on Monday, May 3, [reviewed here] staff from the firm that built the instrument will be ready with tools, crating, and pipe trays. Dismantling and preparing it for a second stage of life in a reverberant new Presbyterian church in Austin, Texas, will be a brief interim chapter in a remarkable, and at times briskly controversial, experiment begun by the University in the 1960s.

A beautiful D.A. Flentrop organ across the way, in what was then Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger Museum for Germanic art, had been dedicated in 1958 and was immediately propelled into national fame by organist E. Power Biggs and his high-profile series of recitals, Columbia LPs, and radio broadcasts. This Dutch organ benefited from the supportive, clear acoustic of a massive masonry structure with neither carpeting nor permanent furniture. The questing, experiment-ready University, encouraged by the Flentrop’s musical and social success, was next interested in seeking an American solution to its local acoustical challenge. All resoundingly agreed that providing a new organ for Memorial Church would present potent technical and æsthetic hurdles along the way. They entrusted the design, construction, and voicing to one of their own, Charles Brenton Fisk, ‘45.

Æolian-Skinner Organ from 1932 (Harvard Archives)

During the late 1950s, Charles Fisk experienced a fair dollop of the civil but increasingly frantic dissatisfaction clerics and musicians had expressed with the state of organ music in Appleton Chapel, the chancel to larger Memorial Church. Fisk had lent his considerable intellect and the organ builder’s practical mindset to improvements to the four-manual, 43-rank E. M. Skinner organ (Op. 197, 1909). The steps forward were noticeable, but they were patently inadequate. What sounded balanced and rich in the small chancel became scrawny and lacking in bass on scraping past the high rood screen into larger Memorial Church. A stop or division voiced for the remote main space was killing in the chancel. Not surprisingly, an American late-1890s architectural innovation, the buried chancel or crossing organ chamber, was effective only in spacious, high, uncarpeted rooms fashioned of hard, inflexible materials (masonry, heavy plaster, massive and carefully joined wood). The Chancel’s small volume and its weak acoustic marriage with the broad, minimally reverberant, and relatively low-ceilinged main church presented the organ team with a stiff dilemma, as did one or two decisions that  would eventually come down from the office of the University president. By the formal commissioning of a big mechanical action instrument, the first American four-manual tracker since the 19th century, it was clear that the instrument, which had to be built in the Chancel rather than on the balcony in the markedly more open and uncolored acoustics of the Church, would tread a difficult path.

Those present during the installation of the big organ and Charles Fisk’s Herculean voicing process in 1967, will, I trust, come forward to share their insight into these intriguing and exasperating, daunting years. Between the start of discussion of a new Harvard instrument and the crisis-driven acoustic evaluation by the prominent Cambridge firm of Bolt, Beranek, and Newman in 1981, dozens of articles and critiques in organ-world and lay publications savaged the organ, the University, and the builder. In once more reading through the low-pH verbiage expended on the subject, I am saddened by the lack of communal sense within the organ world of that time, and I am reminded that, now as then, a wide gap separates two mutually inimical camps in this field.

Screen Separates Organ from Nave (Christopher Greenleaf phot)

On the one side, we have early, brilliant American innovation and the necessarily radical technical solutions required by our national penchant for building and remodeling the non-reverberant, sonically unsupportive rooms in which we place organs. Out of this climate of chameleon adaptation to national architectural realities came consoles of tremendous sophistication, radiating and curved pedal-boards to enable easy playing of complex chromatic music, and electro-pneumatic wind-chests and registrational devices to afford the organist precise, flexible control over substantial tonal resources. Exactly as happened in the piano world, the high wind pressures enabled by these technical innovations so transformed the task of organ pipe voicing that even the most sophisticated organ builders could no longer deliver principals and flutes with easy, articulate speech. Reeds, as well, became difficult to voice for richness and blend, becoming instead fast-speaking, stable ranks of pipes to complement or contrast with the diapasons, flutes, strings, and mixtures. Electro-pneumatic swell shutters across the fronts of masonry chambers or heavily built free-standing divisional chambers allowed nearly seamless control over relative divisional volumes, and the very fast valves in the wind-chests admitted air to all pipes, regardless of their possibly remote locations, at the same time.

The tracker action is the original mechanical system whereby wind from wind-chests is admitted to those stops chosen for playing. The action of a good tracker organ is very responsive, but it can also be dismayingly revealing of a player’s technique and his expressive wherewithal. Good mechanical-action organs are capable of a degree of registrational and touch expressivity that take years to hone. The generally low wind pressure encourages sensitive, vocal tonal design. Manuals can be coupled to other manuals and down to the pedals. The mid-19th century saw the introduction of high-pressure pneumatic levers to assist the organist in playing an action rendered heavier by increased organ sizes and by composers’ ever more frequent call for couplers, octave couplers, and sudden registrational adjustments. Most original trackers were not particularly large, of course, so the radical mechanical solutions necessitated by symphonic organ repertoire and high-pressure winding were a trying factor in organ design between 1840 and the demise of the market for mechanical actions as the 20th century loomed. Large, modern trackers call on advanced software for stop choice and fast registration, but each key is still physically linked to the pipes whose sounds it causes.

Opus 46 before its Dedication (company image)

Historically, neither side of this organ world divide has had much sympathy for, or interest in, what the other has to say; and no discussion of organs, here or in Europe, has quite rivaled the roiling controversy surrounding the success or otherwise of Charles Fisk’s instrument in Appleton Chapel for sheer bile, leveled accusations, and confused æsthetics. Suffice it to say that, merely by coming into existence, a four-manual mechanical action instrument in a prominent venue, badly crippled by both location and comparison with the nearby Flentrop organ on the same campus, became a lightning rod for invective. It also afforded Charles Fisk and those who were sufficiently mature (there, I’ve said it) a floodlit forum for the opening, the mere beginning, of a conversation about beauty, architectural integrity, and a performer’s needs that continues into our time.

Neither the first version of the Harvard Fisk nor its 1983 reworking created an entirely successful organ, nor did its placement in Memorial Church’s Chancel —Appleton Chapel — augur well for its effectiveness. And yet the conversation was begun, a wealth of solutions evaluated, tried, discarded, and — importantly — instructive. This has been a national forum. The amazing integrity and intellect Charles Fisk focused upon the process extended to involve E. Power Biggs, Daniel Pinkham, the towering figure of Anton Heiller, and others in the who’s who catalogue of the best musicians.

So, off goes the Harvard Fisk organ, its first 43 years rewarded with a suitcase full of press-inflicted and highly publicized Purple Hearts. It has been, and will continue to be, a vital partner in a conversation without end, in which we learn humility in the face of the perspective of centuries of shared, not easily parsed history. Its two successors, a Hartford E. M. Skinner electro-pneumatic in the old chambers and a sizable, eclectic Fisk tracker in the rear balcony, will go their own ways down the path of musical evolution. This they could not have done without the vision of a nuclear physicist (and fanatical Mahler adorer) who exchanged a film badge for an organ voicer’s hand tools. Hats off to Charles Fisk for the vision and persistence to have given us the Appleton Chapel organ, and the profoundly illuminating discussion that came with it.

Bon voyage to you both.

* According to C.B. Fisk President, Steven Dieck, “When Charlie started C. B. Fisk, Inc. in 1961, he continued the Andover Opus list numbering.  Mt. Calvary in Baltimore was Andover’s Opus 35 and Charlie continued the C. B. Fisk list from that point.  So you can see that Opus 46 was less than a dozen organs after his start.”

Eight other sizable Fisk organs in diverse academic settings, each with its own highly individualistic character, are at:

• North Carolina School for the Arts, Winston-Salem, NC, Op. 75 (1977)

Fisk's early sketch for console (company archives)

• Houghton Chapel, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, Op. 72 (1981)

• Memorial Church, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, Op. 85 (1984)

• Abbey Chapel, Mt. Holyoke Chapel, So. Hadley, MA Op. 84 (1986)

• Finney Chapel, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH, Op. 116 (2001)

• Auer Hall at Indiana University will dedicate Opus 135 presently

• Opus 121  Furman University

• Opus 117 at Pomona College

An interesting video excerpt of a new film on Charles Brenton Fisk is here.

More on opus 46 is here.

More on its Memorial Church successor is here.

Veteran recording engineer Christopher Greenleaf collaborates with chamber, early, and keyboard musicians in natural acoustic venues on both sides of the Atlantic. He is active as a writer, translator, photographer, and acoustic consultant.

But first, what goes into the production of a Hamburg Steinway-Fabbrini concert grand? Italian piano technician and entrepreneur Angelo Fabbrini, from Pescara, Abruzzo, purchases new Steinways from that firm’s celebrated Hamburg atelier and subjects them to minute technical fine-tuning, replaces or substantially rebuilds numerous crucial action components, and reworks the interaction between strings, bridges, and soundboard. The sound of the rebuilt instruments reminds one of the finest surviving pre-1912 Blüthner concert grands (from Leipzig) and of 19th-century concert instruments by Mason & Hamlin, the 19th-century Boston firm whose pianos were, by a comfortable margin, the highest-priced in this country.

The Fabbrini design does not sustain tone for quite as long as these older pianos and the treble is gleamingly dark rather than the ethereal shimmering silver of the Blüthner Aliquot design. Unlike a standard New York Steinway, in which shadings under mezzo-forte can be difficult to control, sometimes even to produce, the Fabbrini Steinways offer the easy, wide dynamic range typical of pre-1920 pianos by the great German, American, and Austrian builders. The Fabbrini fortissimo is magnificent, but it is not as loud as the brash New York roar. Its top dynamic reaches are capable of considerable variation, and the tone production can be built up to near-orchestral volume without strain. In the course of the Celebrity Series of Boston concert at Symphony Hall on April 25, [reviewed here] Maurizio Pollini time and again called forth ppp and fff trills in the bottom two octaves, as effortlessly and clearly as at middle dynamic levels. Forte in the right hand against piano and mezzo-piano in the left became part of this recital’s wide dynamic vocabulary.

Once an expressive norm for concert instruments, this clear-as-a-bell opposition of dynamic levels is heard infrequently these days. From a purely piano technical perspective, an occasion like this recital lodges in lifelong memory. Mr. Pollini travels worldwide with his Steinway-Fabbrini. Other Fabbrini artists have been Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Sviatoslav Richter, and András Schiff.

The pieces played by Mr. Pollini in the Celebrity Series concert at Symphony Hall on April 25, as I mention in my review, here,exhibited the many superb characteristics of this piano. To wit:

“The unusually clear and rich piano tone, as well as the astonishing speed of effect of the brilliantly regulated dampers (genuinely rare), only augmented the powerful impression of the four terse Mazurkas, Op. 30. …

“Such explicit and colorful layerings of sound as Mr. Pollini brought to bear in the Sonata No. 2 in B-flat, Op. 35 (1837-39) would not have been possible on most concert grands. The very fast tempi in some places, such as the concluding fourth movement, Finale: Presto, were entirely devoid of piano clatter, nor did the concluding bedlam of triplets devolve into misting blurs. …

“One third of the way into the first of Two Nocturnes, Op. 48 (1841), a C-minor study in contrast and overt effect, a Lisztian gout of troubled, rearing waters erupted even more vehemently than in the boldest pages of the Sonata. It was a deep pleasure to hear an instrument that could do this without a hint of strain. Thanks to Mr. Pollini’s minute management of dynamics, timbre, and the piano’s advanced damping abilities, the stillest moments got that way instantly. This is magic. The largest sonic excursion came in the tempestuous Polonaise in F-sharp minor, Op. 44 (1840-41). This is a famous work, yet it was still something of a revelation to experience the extreme clarity of this piano and its player’s ultra-precise elicitation of fine nuance, even at levels of sound that, on many a conventional concert D, sound coarse or brutal….”

Now I’ll attempt an answer to the question in the first paragraph of this article, knowing that this is actually a rather involved subject. I can’t do it proper justice here, but the conversation wants a beginning. Please note that I write this not in the intention of damning or embarrassing any of the few remaining players in today’s shrunken concert grand market. The factors leading to the present odd state of tonal production by pianos chosen for public pianistic statement are complex. These factors are historic as well. They took firm root at about the time that the connotations surrounding the notion “public performance” ceased to imply a gathering of up to a few hundred souls wearing the same select cloth and arriving by hansom, probably not on foot or in a packed char à banc. When concerts truly went public, concert venues began to grow in size. With the arrival of iron girders and suspended metal trusses in the late 1860s and early 1870s, it became practical to span ceilings like that of the Gewandhaus Leipzig, Boston Symphony Hall, and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw without inordinate expense. Gas, then electric lighting technology kicked in to illuminate the new cultural colossi (as, eventually, did fire codes), and these vast new spaces became viable for frequent music productions. With a penalty.

Small hammers, modest string tensions, and bridges with minimal down- or up-bearing by the strings were no longer deemed able to meet the demands of hall managers, impresarios, and the newly itinerant titans who tried out, endorsed, and rejected concert pianos by the many aspiring makers of that busy industrial era. There was money to be made from titan-ism. It is rare today that a performer travels with his own instrument. At one time, though, this was almost standard practice for pianists of a certain eminence. Louis Moreau Gottschalk lived to be just 40, but when this caustic, flamboyant voyager died in 1869, he had already traveled tens of thousands of miles with concert instruments. Chickering, Bechstein, Steinway & Sons, Mason & Hamlin, Bösendorfer, Streicher, and Erard all sent their largest models out by rail, following the likes of Anton Rubinstein, the young Jan Paderewski, and Isaac Albéniz around from city to province to backwater to triumphant, telegraph-proclaimed acclaim in the major capitols. Rachmaninov, who died when Maurizio Pollini was one year old, was certainly not the last to travel with his own instrument, but the disappearance of his generation was essentially the end of this 80-year phenomenon.

What did these musical giants require of a piano? They were renowned poets of the keyboard, of course, and they demanded unlimited control over tonal color, exactingly voiced response to una corda and sostenuto pedaling, an impeccably regulated moderator (on Viennese instruments up to ca. 1870), and a spectacular, unforced dynamic range. But — there is always a but — they also needed to be heard clearly and sometimes shatteringly all the way back to the dim under-balcony reaches, all the way up to the dim, well-populated, unwashed upper balcony. The ability to generate sheer volume of sound became critical in selling concert grands, if not yet in populating coal-heated parlors with their modest siblings. Hammer size and soundboard configuration were modified to accommodate grand pianistic statements, often at the audible cost of the delicacy and the once-common broad palette of colors once touted by the same makers. It did not take many generations of instrument models for this æsthetic to become pervasive, to displace the former hallmarks of transparency and shading in favor of the “real piano sound” accepted by pianists and listeners today.

In the 1970s, certain makers attempted moves away from the bold, unsubtle, harsh tonal production that pervaded post-war pianomaking from living room and practice cubicle to the concert stages of the world. Under new management, the venerable firm of Bösendorfer embarked upon a well-conceived push to join top-of-the-heap Steinway on stage and in recordings. Certain famous names became official Bösendorfer artists or attempted to add pianos by this maker to their discographies and concert appearances. But in many instances they found themselves struck from the Steinway artists list, with predictable logistical and financial consequences.

In the interim decades, matters have loosened somewhat. We regularly encounter recordings on new pianos by Fazioli (of Friuli Giulia, Italy), Steinway-Fabbrini (Pescara, Abruzzo, Italy), Bösendorfer (Vienna), Yamaha (Nagoya, Japan), and Bechstein (formerly Berlin; now Saxony, Germany, and Hradec Králové, Czech Republic), as well as a welcome flood of albums made on restored or beautifully maintained historic instruments selected for their suitability to given repertoires. Among these, I must mention the many faces of pre-1950 New York and Hamburg Steinways, whose dramatic reappearance on disc and sometimes on stage has slowly, powerfully reintroduced modern audiences to the once customary breadth of expressivity for which the company, then still privately held, was justly renowned.

Of late, since about 1995, some very fine and nuanced concert grands have emerged from the Astoria and Hamburg workshops, pianos once more capable of delicacy, reliable repetition at low dynamics and in the sepulchral bass region, and a newly broadened spectrum of forte power devoid of clangor. The modern reintroduction of a range of piano sound, however, has been slow. This evolution — please, let’s steer clear of that horrid word, “retro” — has been hindered by the fact that, for the best part of a century, conservatories have not had the means to expose their student bodies to sufficiently varied piano sound and mechanics to instill an awareness, let alone even moderate tolerance, of the breathtaking diversity of piano sound for which the great composers crafted their solo, chamber, and concerted scores.

One often hears pianists say “It doesn’t sound like a real piano” when confronted with an 1870s Blüthner, a 2009 Steinway-Fabbrini, or that Rolls-Royce of the early 20th century, big Mason & Hamlin concert grands and their heavyweight but light-on-their-three-feet domestic versions. What they mean, alas, is that they haven’t had the luxury of experiencing the extended tonal, expressive, and dynamic language of a range of pianos. They judge instruments — boy, do they judge them — based upon a tragically narrow selection of piano characteristics institutionalized by three quarters of a century of monochrome piano manufacturing, predicated on sound volume, rigorously homogenized timbre throughout the octaves, and a devaluation of dynamics below mezzo-forte, fully half of the instrument’s former dynamic range.

However greatly pianos by historic makers differed from each other, they had one characteristic in common. Each octave, sometimes even smaller ranges of notes, had an individual tone color. This imparted clarity to complex music, and it magnificently enriched the harmonic soundscape in dense chordal passages. (So did the interesting temperaments once used by tuners, but that’s another football to kick around.) The advent of powerful sound pressures inevitably did away with individual timbres up and down the keyboard. High string tensions, stiffly crowned soundboards, and large, sturdy hammers made this facet of voicing technically impossible, or at least difficult.

A bleak future? Not necessarily. It will take a while, but I sense that both the piano-playing world and a music-hungry public are welcoming their discovery of a new breadth of expressive possibilities. This is, if you will, a return to some very fine musical values that endured until the end of the steam era. I have been fortunate to live long enough to have acquired that perspective naturally. This “movement” is hardly a revolution. Rather, it is a resurgence of common sense and a hunger for heightened expressivity. Our recent experimentation with the piano as a truly flexible, poetic instrument, helped enormously by high-profile events like Maurizio Pollini’s Symphony Hall appearance with his Hamburg Steinway-Fabbrini, has legs. For a quarter century, the 10 concerts presented each year, in fall and spring, by Music from the Frederick Collection have been drawing Bostonians and many others to hear the great composers’ scores on the pianos for which they originally wrote them, sometimes with life-changing results for the listeners.

The evolution of this marvellous instrument has been lengthy. It began in Florence at the close of the 17th century, and the inexorable press of musical and technical innovation persisted in the piano world until, arguably, the First World War. I hope fervently that we can continue to include early pianos and the wide spectrum of early-modern piano æsthetics in our everyday musical vocabulary. It’s liberating to abandon terms like fortepiano and pianoforte, to call upon 1910s and 1930s grands for a part of our musical nourishment. This does not devalue the modern grand in the slightest. It allows us a contextually informed perspective on our present-day instruments, which we have the option of using when they are the best vehicles for the repertoire at hand. We now have the possibility of embracing the lengthy historic fabric of the piano as a living part of the concert scene and on recordings. We ought to be unabashedly vocal in demanding that the variety we once had, we can have again.

See related review here.

Veteran recording engineer Christopher Greenleaf collaborates with chamber, early, and keyboard musicians in natural acoustic venues on both sides of the Atlantic. He is active as a writer, translator, photographer, and acoustic consultant.

The guiding lights for the 72-year-old Celebrity Series of Boston were no doubt aware that, in presenting Maurizio Pollini, a Chopin interpreter whose legendary stature is firmly established, they were confronting young music lovers and those enamored of applying the label “definitive” with strong, perhaps indelible impressions. Listeners with a good recall of exceptional historic and modern performances may have been puzzled, now and then, by the absence of affective aspects of Chopin playing they had hoped to take in. Sunday afternoon’s Symphony Hall audience, enjoyably abuzz and looking as sold-out as it was, welcomed this astonishing pianist with enthusiasm and palpable warmth. In the businesslike manner for which he has been known since his early appearances in the late 1950s, he sat down and established an intense, austerely focused atmosphere in which the boundless inventiveness and sheer brilliance of Frédéric Chopin, not of his interpreter, were ravishingly, often pointedly on display. Mr. Pollini’s supreme economy of movement and slight, sure gestures make one think, obviously, of the word “patrician.”

There is indeed Chopin one doesn’t know, unless one is an encyclopedically inclined pianist. Still, a new Chopin soundscape is always more than just recognizable in its sweep, harmonic vigor, and glittering figurations.  Mr. Pollini’s beautifully processional opening of the Fantasie in F minor, Op. 49 (1841) gave attention-getting notice of the rigor and precision with which he would play the music. It also established such seriousness and severity of approach that it verged on dearth of heart. To offset this layer of chill, ears soon confirmed what binoculars had promised — the exceptionally ravishing tonal and technical characteristics of a piano well outside our modern norm, Mr. Pollini’s touring Hamburg Steinway-Fabbrini concert grand. Of this instrument, more shortly.

One does not encounter the four terse Mazurkas, Op. 30 (1836-37) all that often as a group. They remind one of Chopin’s incomparable ability to fashion very complete, magically self-contained small worlds. As they emerged, the roiling darkness and compact harmonic events of each were heightened by their closely gathered keys — C, B, D-flat, C-sharp — an effect intensified by Mr. Pollini’s enormous precision in letting every note, every thrust of smaller and larger harmonic evolution, be heard with complete lack of ambiguity. The unusually clear and rich piano tone, as well as the astonishing speed of effect of the brilliantly regulated dampers (genuinely rare), only augmented the powerful impression these Mazurkas left.

When the swirling, strange Sonata No. 2 in B-flat, Op. 35 (1837-39) first appeared, its odd shape and the restlessness of three of the four movements attracted a great deal of contemporary comment. Mark Thaddeus Willams’s fine program notes quoted Schumann’s review of the newly published sonata, in which the four movements, puzzlingly bearing the title of Sonata, struck him as “four of [Chopin’s] most reckless children.” In this work of difficult technical execution and concept, Mr. Pollini brought such distinct shadings of forte dynamics to bear that these gradations became an independent expressive element within his taut, magisterial unfolding of the dense few pages of the work. Could a lesser musician have achieved this? Absolutely not, nor would such explicit and colorful layerings of sound have been possible on most concert grands. The very fast tempi in some places, such as the concluding fourth movement, Finale: Presto, were entirely devoid of piano clatter, nor did the concluding bedlam of triplets devolve into misting blurs.

Mr. Pollini’s return to the stage for the second half brought big pianism. He unveiled an entire new quiver of powerful bass textures, sounds he had not yet called upon. This pianist’s honoring of Chopin the innovator continued almost as a tour of austerely renovated rooms in which familiar elements were newly, and usually fairly dryly, lit. One third of the way into the first of Two Nocturnes, Op. 48 (1841), a C-minor study in contrast and overt effect, a Lisztian gout of troubled, rearing waters erupted even more vehemently than the boldest pages of the Sonata. It was a deep pleasure to hear an instrument that could do this without a hint of strain. Thanks to Mr. Pollini’s minute management of dynamics, timbre, and the piano’s advanced damping abilities, the stillest moments got that way instantly, which is magic. The largest sonic excursion came in the tempestuous Polonaise in F-sharp minor, Op. 44 (1840-41). This is a famous work, yet it was still something of a revelation to experience the extreme clarity of this piano and its player’s ultra-precise elicitation of fine nuance, even at levels of sound that, on many a conventional concert D, sound coarse or brutal.

The Ballade No. 4 in F minor, Op. 52 (1842) moved too quickly for any of its potential for languor or lyricism to emerge. Mr. Pollini cast remarkably cool light on the piece’s overall architecture, making splendid sense of its unity and wonderful cohesion, but he side-stepped moments of songfulness, or of momentary relenting, in favor of uncomfortably forward-pushing motion. The tempo-compressed end, robbed of the possibility of broadening even minutely, felt harried. Concluding the formal concert program, Mr. Pollini tossed off a very big and, to these ears, overblown Polonaise in Ab, Op. 53 “l’Héroique” (1842). The beautiful dynamic control and the exquisite smaller passages aside, this truly came off as a public sporting event. It was cheered as such.

A pianist can make no more generous a gesture than to extend his time with an appreciative, supportive audience. The two marvellously contrasting encores reestablished some of what the final two scheduled works had drifted away from. They proclaimed Maurizio Pollini’s after-hours delight in sharing a final few glimpses of Chopin, the incomparable and still unsurpassed pianistic innovator, with his listeners. In the suddenly quieted hall, Mr. Pollini returned to the spirit of the recital’s first half with the titanic Scherzo No. 2 in B-flat, Op. 31 “La Méditation” (1837). This is no small work. Its grandeur and spaciousness completely banished the rustle of poised-to-dash Bostonians. After a good deal more applause, Mr. Pollini strode briskly back to the keyboard and evoked the most beautiful, transparent sounds of the day, with the haunting, ephemeral Berceuse in D-flat, Op. 57 (1843). You will have to live a long life to hear Chopin of such delicate, jeweled transparency in concert.

See related article here.

Veteran recording engineer Christopher Greenleaf collaborates with chamber, early, and keyboard musicians in natural acoustic venues on both sides of the Atlantic. He is active as a writer, translator, photographer, and acoustic consultant.

Hugh Wolff, Roger Norrington and Tony Woodcock (Andrew Hurlbut photo)

On Friday evening, 9 April, at Symphony Hall, venerable Handel and Haydn gave the first of two identical Beethoven orchestral concerts over the weekend. To mark the very high esteem in which this early music-friendly town holds the conductor, Sir Roger Norrington, the New England Conservatory conferred an honorary doctorate on him at the start of the second half. In best modern Boston style, conductor, NEC President Tony Woodcock, and Chair of Orchestral Conducting Hugh Wolff strode out from backstage in the Conservatory’s doctoral garb — black flashed with soft pink — and tempered the formality of the occasion with grins and modest hi-jinx. As always, Mr. Norrington’s stage presence during his entrances and in short waits for silence in the hall was sunny. He reacted to the customary, eternally distracting applause between movements uncritically, establishing a light but manifestly serious demeanor for the performances.

At some time early in our musical educations, we were surprised and perhaps taken aback to learn that Beethoven sketched and finished the Third, Fourth, and Fifth symphonies at the same time. These three are not, we discovered, successive growth spurts, but three contemporaneous facets of a composer boldly taking wing, a decade and a half into his residence in Vienna. Those years were also the outset of the shattering Napoleonic subjugation of Austria, a complex and fraught imperial sea change. In my teens, learning about this greater historical picture startled me and brought on my first fledgling reassessment of the composer. One or two friends relate a similarly bouleversant epiphany with Beethoven. They, too, were struck by this striking synchronicity and have since been alive to the latent horsepower in the Fourth Symphony in Bb, Op. 60 (1806).

The conscientiously pan-European vision in Robert Schumann’s writings furnishes us with a balanced, vivid glimpse of composing, music making, and literate activity going into the second third of the 19th century. This busy Biedermeier chronicler characterized the Beethoven Fourth as “eine griechisch schlanke Maid zwischen zwei Nordlandriesen” — a slim Greek maid twixt two Nordic colossi. The big Eb Third and c-minor Fifth, of course, are the thick flanking slabs of wholegrain to which he refers.

It was evident from the opening Adagio, so crucial and oft-times treacherous a passage for establishing pace and emotional balance, that we were to have a wonderfully clear-eyed and loving Fourth. The emergence of each new section, of each new or recast tempo, within Mr. Norrington’s overarching schema was logical and rhetorically concise. The architectonics were as unambiguous as they could have been. Wind and brass lines were never cast in solo garb. Rather, each single-strand instrumental utterance emerged as a trimmed-down continuance of what the ensemble as a whole was declaiming. There were prime example of this. The quickish Adagio wasn’t unsettled at all, but neither did it inhabit a customary plane of repose, or of relaxation. Without being overcharged, it proclaimed a detailed and defined forward motion that was surprisingly refreshing and unfamiliar in Symphony Hall performances. Next, the transition into and out of the Trio between the two halves of the Menuetto, which in a year or two would no doubt have borne the label Scherzo. Rather than proclaiming the sometimes in-your-face tempo change that some favor, or preserving the precise pace of the outer sections, Mr. Norrington subtly put on the brakes, inviting the band to treat the score espressivissamente (with occasional peccati d’intonazione among the winds) and with audible relish in their unanimity and crystalline filigree. The fourth movement, at times revisiting the climate of the first movement in uncanny ways, was not a familiar Beethoven (or Mozart) summation, but the fashioning of a new soundscape with simple, sometimes downright straightforward lines by smaller forces building toward great drama and those wonderfully-hued fortes this composer made so varied and satisfying.

Though it is beloved and usually feels comfortingly familiar in live performance, the Symphony No. 6 in F, Op. 68 “Pastorale” (1807-08) presents conductor and colleagues with interesting hurdles of organization and inflection. Mr. Norrington’s entire lack of self-important gesture or willfulness was yet more convincing in the Pastorale Symphony than in the Fourth. Beethoven, an urbanite by choice, visited the country often, but viewed it through the lens of late Classical composition and nascent, Goethe-inspired Romanticism. From the composer’s opening chapter in his unusual rustic tone painting, Allegro, ma non troppo – Erwachen heiterer Gefühle bei der Ankunft auf dem Lande (“Awakening of happy feelings upon reaching the countryside”), the conductor unified the considerable number of solo instrumental commentaries with the greater orchestral passages, making more of the travelogue character of the piece than I’m used to hearing. With fine success, let it be said. The next section — “movement” is not quite what these are — Andante molto mosso - Szene am Bach (“Brookside scene”) strode down bosky bridle-paths that, for this listener, directly evoked both the character of the Boccherini Ritirada Militar Nocturna de Madrid (final movement of the Guitar Quintet No. 6 in C, G.453) and that of a couple of the more evocative Quattro Stagioni by Vivaldi. It was no different in the middle Allegro – Lustiges Zusammensein der Landleute (“Cheerful gathering of the country folk”) and the Stokowski-famous Allegro – Gewitter und Sturm (“Cloudburst and tempest”), in which conductor and band carried on a logical evolution of both Beethoven’s subtly linked motifs and memorable tunes and of, not strange to say, the more colorful symphonic directions embarked upon within that same decade by aging Haydn. The conclusion of it all, as we know, resembles none of the directions taken by Beethoven or his contemporaries, and the Allegretto – Hirtengesang – Frohe und dankbare Gefühle nach dem Sturm (“Shepherd’s song – Cheerful, grateful feelings after the storm”) concentrates the rustic charm lodged within the exquisite little melodies, repeating them to heighten, not cheapen, their appeal, and — surprise! — emerges at a drama-rich, near-formal coda. Mr. Norrington established such a sweeping, strong line from beginning to end of the symphony that one could relax into the little details, always pulled surely along in the ensemble’s unambiguous wake.

In the decades since Handel & Haydn’s founding in March of 1815, this choral and symphonic entity has enriched Boston’s musical life in ways attuned to the musical intelligence and taste of quite a variety of music directors, board members, and major contributors. That’s about ten generations of service, and consequently of (mostly) secure employment for musicians. Commitment to early instruments and performance practice are still a fairly new facet of H&H’s presence in the city’s music scene, dating from only 1986, when Christopher Hogwood took the tiller. Now under Harry Christophers — yes, we here do delight in our benign infestation of frighteningly gifted Brits — the band’s future seasons look as appealing as they’ve ever been. If we are favored with more Beethoven (and Schubert, and Schumann, and so on) of the caliber heard on this early April evening, Boston will continue to have not a salient reason to abandon conventional, modern instrumentation and choral singing, but excellent grounds to so broaden the city’s taste for variety and informed rethinking of chestnuts and partitions inédites that drab or unimpassioned music-making will be darned hard to sell. Good-o!

Veteran recording engineer Christopher Greenleaf collaborates with chamber, early, and keyboard musicians in natural acoustic venues on both sides of the Atlantic. He is active as a writer, translator, photographer, and acoustic consultant.

The Celebrity Series of Boston, founded by impresario Aaron Richmond in 1938, lives on very much in the musical present, and the organization patently eyes the far horizon. As  active New England presenters of solo and small ensemble concerts, not to mention of larger orchestral and ballet events, they’ve burgeoned through their seven decades and kept up a long-term mission of placing the day’s most visible performers before greater Boston audiences. This past Friday evening, March 26, listeners in sold-out Symphony Hall welcomed one of the planet’s best-known music figures, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and his frequent concert and album duo partner, excellent UK pianist Kathryn Stott. The word “accompanist” tends not to figure when mention of the two appears in print, for reasons that became clear. Ma’s exceptional collaborative energy and his unfailing acknowledgment of those with whom he plays is as attractive as his proven musicianship. Stott’s and Ma’s joint presence on stage offered the thousand some listeners an unaccustomed opportunity to set aside oft times distracting star parameters and simply witness shared music-making. Exemplary concert energy like this is as seductive as it is uncommon.

Were the stone memorializing the shade of a vanished string instrument to bear a single, non-Ozymandian epitaph, having Schubert as its author guarantees that the few remaining examples of said evolutionary cul de sac will be warmed by music lovers’ fond gazes through the museum glass. Johann Georg Staufer placed ads in Viennese journals for his six-stringed  “guitarre d’amour” in 1823, reports informative annotator Steven Ledbetter, then had colleague Vinzenz Schuster write and publish a mode d’emploi for it. Herr Schuster took the one step that guaranteed immortality, and great affection, for Staufer’s genetic sport. He asked a 26-year-old native of the same city, one Franz Peter Schubert, who enjoyed renown in salons and among younger musicians, to write a demonstration piece. The result, of course, was the heavenly Sonata in A, D. 821, for arpeggione and piano. Four modern recordings of the sonata pair the delicate original string with beautiful, transparent Viennese grands of Schubert’s time. Two of these are Klaus Stork & Alfons Kontarsky, DGG Archiv, 1974, and Nicolas Deletaille & Paul Badura Skoda, Fuga Libera, 2006. If you wish to see this strikingly lovely instrument, it is well worth going to here, where enterprising Belgian cellist Nicolas Deletaille has posted good photos of his own modern arpeggione.

Today we hear the Schubert on viola and, much more often, on cello. It lies high on the latter, which suited Mr. Ma’s always marvelous ease in the cellistic stratosphere, and visited lower reaches, generally chordally, often enough to signal the latent power of the modern cello. The relatively spare piano part has always come off less successfully on today’s big, tonally unsubtle concert grands. It was thanks to Ms. Stott’s remarkably delicate, subtle touch that the nine-foot Steinway D edged toward clangor in just a few big moments. The two performers’ sheer collaborative melding, perhaps more overt on Mr. Ma’s part, made for a seamless and decidedly inward-looking unfolding of this favorite chamber work. So much so that, to this listener, the effect was effete, or precious. We heard every line, played with care and commitment, yet the sum left me with the fast-vanishing taste of ladyfingers, not of the richness of Guglhupf.

Things changed dramatically when the duo threw themselves wholly and grippingly into Dmitri Shostakovich’s 1934 Sonata in D, Op. 40. The instruments, for one thing, are more naturally matched in this kaleidoscopic, sometimes mordent fling with the vanished Romantic and the craggy Modern. Ms. Stott, who is as close to a note-perfect performer as one is likely to hear today, focused remarkably on the sheer clarity of the score, somehow casting the patrician, sometimes downright lyrical utterances of the cello in a revealing yet cosseting light. The titanic and quixotic, then minuscule statements outthrust by the piano left the keening agonies and rhetorical asides of the cello plenty of room to be felt and heard. No other composer could have created four such emphatic, wrenchingly evocative movements. The utter investment of cellist and pianist came through magnificently. Especially touching, perhaps as in the caressing of raw nerves, were the tragically opposed instrumental personas cohabiting the third movement, a wintry and plaintive Largo. The brilliant and taxing final Allegro at last permitted Ma and Stott to assemble, masterfully, all the contrasting elements into vertically powerful sweep and irresistible momentum.

We should mention that the duo stayed in the music to an unusual extent. Movements were begun attacca or close to it. This largely preempted catarrhal interjections and posterior adjustments out where all sat, with the exception of ill-timed coughs in a few final sustains. To keep everyone involved in the music making is a special gift, one for which Mr. Ma has often, and justly, been praised. Pianist and cellist stayed on stage between pieces, too, permitting the listeners to linger in impressions of the piece just ended while preparing for the new soundscape about to emerge. For this rare blessing, profound and cordial thanks.

Astor Piazzola defined new and far-off possibilities for Argentina’s national dance form, flew toward them with elegance and elegiac lyricism, and periodically swept past his own newly sketched modernisms to declaim further, seemingly inevitable expressive solutions for the tango. Heavens, how could the century-and-a-half-old dance wither with such a pathbreaker proclaiming its vigorous survival and self-reinvention?! Now thoroughly warmed up, along with their keenly participatory audience, Ma and Stott whipped into a virtuosic but also delightfully relaxed evocation of Piazzola’s twelve-minute Le Grand Tango. It was written in 1982 for the late Rostropovich. The duo encouraged this parfois introvert, at times rough and street-wise score to flare into life. A tour de force from the two on stage, candy for the audience.

The Ma-Stott Arpeggione Sonata may have been overly pastel, but the next work was a compact and enchanting visit to colors from cities where snow is but a poetic construct. They lavished the same delicate shadings as in the Schubert on Egberto Gismonti’s Bodas de Prata (Silver Weddings) and his Quatro Cantos, which he wrote in collaboration with fellow Brazilian Geraldo Carneiro, a highly regarded lyricist and writer.  Once again, Ms. Stott withdrew into gossamer textures, punctuated them with percussive episodes, and came tantalizingly close to matching Mr. Ma’s sinewy cantando and bar-erasing rubato. Audience excitement made itself felt in the final pages of the music, erupting afterward into noisy acclaim.

The concert proper concluded with a work that, since its publication in 1886, has been even more popular and beloved, if that’s possible, than the Schubert. César Franck, the Belgian pianist and organist who marshaled about him the figures who would sculpt France’s unrivaled musical richness in the first half of the 20th century, wrote some of the most effective concert music for organ ever penned. He left piano pieces, a few famous orchestral works, and not too many chamber scores. Among the last, the Piano Quintet and String Quartet show up in scattered ensemble programs, while one just does not come across his five (five!) piano trios outside of Belgium and francophone conservatories. Of all of Franck’s music, his Sonata in A, FWV 8, is our one commanding reminder of the man’s greatness. Yo-Yo Ma played the transcription by Jules Delsart, a renowned cellist of the composer’s generation. With Ms. Stott, he lovingly bridged the few odd places where the piano part strives to partner the cello in a complementary register. The duo’s attacca course through the four movements made them into a single, passionate statement. Listeners of our generation would no doubt give a great deal to have experienced the still talked-about performances by the violin sonata’s dedicatee, Eugène Ysaÿe, but the great warmth and rapt weaving of melodic line coming from the stage left us in no doubt of the success of this score as adoptive cello music. Ms. Stott’s aura of focus and her consummate keyboard sorcery offered a visual contrast to Mr. Ma’s mobile torso, head, and arms, a study in sensitivity and collaborative communication. Many pages of this score invite big pianism, a sort of hyper-dynamic forte, that leads my inner eye to populate mythic emergency rooms with the ravaged string parts of imbalanced performances. In Ms. Stott’s hands, the piano part never scarred the sometimes submissive, now and again heroic cello lines, played by Mr. Ma with refinement and full commitment. This was a masterfully poised and moving performance.

The duo gave two encores, one an unabashed orgy of piano licks with amusing, semi-audible violoncello commentary, the other a famous Ma solo. Cesar Camargo Mariano (b. 1943), a Brasilian who has made his home here since 1994, is a national treasure at home. His catchy and ostinato-driven little Cristal is rhythmically treacherous, for the piano and for any accompanying instrument emboldened to join in, and detonates small, entertaining “Ah!!” moments amid devilish, rhetorical modulations and mini-episodes. Kathryn Stott ended it in a chamber firestorm, with Mr. Ma self-effacingly handing off all kudos in her direction, not without impish glee. Mr. Ma concluded the evening with a piece he has always played with delicacy and enfolding warmth, the third movement in St.-Saëns’s Carnaval des Animaux, from the same year as the Franck. His Le Cygne left listeners with a fine sense of Yo-Yo Ma the incomparable soloist, so discriminatingly supported by Ms. Stott that, indeed, we glimpsed orchestral tapestry.

• • •

It is normal to place performers in the center of the stage, the long tail of the piano extending well to house right of them. This, and our modern-era custom of orienting grands for visual alignment, rather than to best suit their acoustic nature, imparts a distant and often shallow character to piano sound. The middle, especially, can be hard and dimensionless, while the great depth and richness emanating from the bottom two octaves cannot be appreciated by anyone not seated in the right third of the hall. It would fly very much in the face of custom to position an instrument with the tail somewhat more downstage, of course. The striking sonic results, though, permit listeners throughout the entire hall to experience the full beauty and subtlety of outstanding playing like Ms. Stott’s. In my experience as a location (non-studio) recording engineer, angled placement of the piano fully engages the instrument’s sound production in stage, proscenium, and hall acoustics, to an extent that succeeds in astonishing experienced musicians. Listening in my left-hand Symphony Hall seat yet again confirmed my strong preference for being on the right, where I can hear the full range of what the pianist’s after. After all, this is about taking in and enjoying the totality of the music, rather than a primarily visual experience. But, I acknowledge, mine may be a minority view

Veteran recording engineer Christopher Greenleaf collaborates with chamber, early, and keyboard musicians in natural acoustic venues on both sides of the Atlantic. He is active as a writer, translator, photographer, and acoustic consultant.

First Lutheran audience watching Italian organist Luca Massaglia on screen (Chritopher Greenleaf photo)

From 10:30 that Saturday morning, about 100 kiddies and parents sat backward in the pews, facing the splendid organ on its balcony and a projection screen. Sharp-witted French organist Guy Bovet wrote “Peep the Piper,” a 30-minute multi-media presentation for children from age six on up. It uses CD-ROM projection of Bovet’s amusing drawings, a narrator, and a wide-ranging score demonstrating what the organ can do. Twelve-year-old Oliver Jay narrated from above, standing not far from First Lutheran music director Bálint Karosi at his console. No child was left uninformed, to paraphrase a former fearless leader, and FLC parishioners handed out little wooden recorders to all the children as they were leaving. The same large screen traveled to the front of the church, where it allowed the audience a view of the organists at work. This has been among the successful innovations at First Lutheran, as in a few other churches around the land. The video camera and screen personalize musicians who formerly played in visual anonymity.

Mr. Karosi, who was the motive spring behind the day’s well-organized succession of events, opened the all-Bach concerts proper with a sonorous and finely paced presentation of the Fantasia & Fuga in g, BWV 542, following this big statement with two of the poetic Schübler-Choräle: Meine Seele erhebt den Herren, BWV 648, and Ach, bleib bei uns, Herr Jesu Christ, BWV 649. These performances convincingly demonstrated just a couple of Bálint Karosi’s sides. He is a highly accomplished clarinetist, harpsichordist, and composer whose many activities in Boston have already made him one of the city’s most effective audience builders and performers. His recital came to an end with a dancing and finely architectural flight through the normally rather massive Passacaglia in c, BWV 582. It left the big audience entertained and audibly anticipating whatever portions of the ensuing seven recitals they would attend.

Bálint Karosi and children at the organ (Christopher Muskopf photo)

But first, at noon, First Church’s cheerful noontime lunch below-decks (lasagna, salad, a Baroque-decorated German chocolate cake) fed a nearly full house. Afterward, Emmanuel Music’s brilliant Nancy Granert extracted enchantment and jeweled detail from the spare, bardic pages of the Canzona in d, BWV 588, then lavished the same loving attention on the longer and more extrovert 6 Partite sopra O Gott, du frommer Gott, BWV 767. In closing, she thrust the arpeggioed opening flourishes of the Pièce d’orgue in G out into First Lutheran’s airy, resonant nave with a special metrical clarity that lent the lyrical middle voices a gratifying declamatory vigor.

The quick speech of this instrument’s Pedal and of the lower manual pipework could be said to be among the nicer hallmarks of mechanical-action organs in general, but voicer and co-owner of the firm Bruce Fowkes has demonstrated stand-out ability at pulling off this technically quite difficult feat. This holds not only for the big reeds, but also for the Prinzipal and Flöte (Bourdon) ranks. All speak together and crisply, without the unwanted artifacts of forced attacks. A long column of air extends from the windchest through a pipe’s foot, past the languid (comparable to a recorder’s sound-producing lip and airway), and up into the vibrating length of the pipe. When this column is greater than about 2 meters in length, there can be a delay until all of the carefully controlled volume of air begins to vibrate in a stable, musically useful way. The Richards, Fowkes organ’s astonishingly articulate speech in the lower ranges, despite low wind pressure, challenges organists to phrase with a lucidity of gesture and voice definition that are not at home on electric-action instruments.

Saturday lunch was in a comfortable state of digestion when Worcester-based Frank Corbin demonstrated yet more facets of the Richards, Fowkes. His Prelude & Fugue in c, BWV 546, evinced joy in the big, minor-key sweep of a Bach statement in large format. His resigned, gentle O Mensch, bewein’ dein’ Sünde groß, BWV 622 (Orgelbüchlein) unfolded with measured gravity. Two of the famous group of Leipzig-Choräle – Von Gott will ich nicht lassen, BWV 658, and O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig, BWV 656 – reveled in the contrast possible within the modest but ample registrational palette of the organ. The close of the latter chorale transitions into a bold 6/8 burst of full-throated majesty, which Mr. Corbin pulled off to good effect.

Next to ascend to the organ balcony was Christian Lane, who sports many an organ-world hat in Boston and at Harvard. In his businesslike Prelude & Fugue in C, BWV 545, the generous, ever-changing audience took in yet another of the many flavors of “full organ.” He observed a modern-era Bach performance tradition in pairing, and allowing the audience to savor in comparison, Allein Gott in der Höh’ sei Ehr’, BWV 662, and the Trio super Allein Gott in der Höh’ sei Ehr’, BWV 664 (both Leipzig-Choräle). In early recordings, German organists such as Hans Ander Donath (1941 Reichsfunk tapes, Frauenkirche, Dresden) and Helmuth Walcha (early stereo, Alkmaar, NL) delighted in contrasting Bach’s exquisite, very diverse settings of this chorale. Mr. Lane’s grand, masterful approach to the Prelude & Fugue in a, BWV 543, ended this half hour. Not many of the big concert works feature so active and wide-ranging a pedal part from one end to the other. When the Pedal does fall briefly silent, it is only to tease listeners with the effective tension of its absence. Mr. Lane’s registration favored dark hues that, in another musical context and on an organ that enunciates less unambiguously, would have descended into stentorian murk. His sure pacing and care in minutely aligning Pedal speech with that of the manuals — quite a stretch, if you’ve never tried this! — were unalloyed delight.

The well-traveled organ shoes of Church of the Advent head of music Mark Dwyer must no doubt often make the change from 20th-c. American-Guild-of-Organists’ concave-radiating pedalboards to their flat, straight predecessors. At First Lutheran, the Pedal has today’s full compass of notes, but it is as flat as the Borgia popes’ terra nostra. Mr. Dwyer stepped surely and vigorously into Hermann Keller’s effective and vigorous completion of the fragmentary Bach Fantasie in C, BWV 573. This concert movement, if you don’t yet have it in your ear, is a gem, and it is still fairly unknown to performers. In writing it, Bach appears to have glimpsed the same post-Corellian horizons as his cousin and contemporary, Joh. Gottfried Walther, not to mention gifted Unico Willem, Graf van Wassenær (author of a glorious set of concerti grossi). Each composer crafted a select body of worldly works radiant with Italian light, typically well suited for keyboard transcription. The Trio super Herr Jesu Christ, dich zu uns wend’,  BWV 655, and Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele, BWV 654, are two more Leipzig-Choräle. Some of the emotional power of the latter derives from an extraordinarily tight fabric enmeshing harmonic lines and the low-lying lead voice; one absolutely could not recast a single note. Mr. Dwyer’s pedestrian tempo in the first half of his closing Präludium & Fuga in C, BWV 547, ceded to a brisk lively engagement with the counterpoint of the fugue.

Gusts of brisk Piemonte air blew in with Torino organist Luca Massaglia, who provocatively re-registered familiar Bach — to an enthusiastic reception, let it be said. From its propulsive opening, the full-textured declamations of his kinetic “Dorian” Toccata & Fugue in d, BWV 538, seized the full attention of the numerous concertgoers. Why on earth is it that Italian organists (and cembalists) often impart such vocal freedom, within strikingly disciplined rhythmic bounds, to music that originated on the frosty side of the Alps? We continued to witness this in Mr. Massaglia’s masterful songfulness and emotional profundity in two Kirnberger-Choräle – Wer nur den lieben Gott läßt walten, BWV 690, and Wer nur den lieben Gott läßt walten, BWV 691. His ingenious, heartfelt registrations offered fresh looks at these old friends. His Herzlich tut mich verlangen, BWV 727, Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier, BWV 731, and the prayerful Vater unser im Himmelreich, BWV 737, were likewise invitations to peer into new and different sides of the Richards, Fowkes organ. As he began his last piece, Mr. Massaglia beckoned to an Italian imp, ed eccola!, we had a dramatically effective ripieno introduction to the entire rest of the titanic, BWV 533. Hearty and prolonged applause followed the end of this Fuga.

Stop knobs, manuals, and pedal of the Richards, Fowkes organ (ded. 2000) (Christopher Greenleaf photo)

College of the Holy Cross senior Jacob Street played another of the large-scale non-liturgical works, the intense and challenging Prelude & Fugue in b, BWV 544, to begin his half-hour.  In offering the Trio Sonata No. 4 in e, BWV 528 (Adagio-Vivace; Andante; Un poco allegro), he explored every possibility of the quieter end of stop choices, though perhaps with less cantabile than one could have wished for. His In dir ist Freude, BWV 615 (Orgelbüchlein) was, alas, ineffectively fast. He activated the whirling small bells of the Zimbelstern, which increased the festive feel of the work.

James David Christie, long familiar to Boston audiences for his BSO roles now and again and for his presence as teacher and performer at Wellesley College, is among the most influential and prolific teachers on his instrument. Since taking on the punishing regular commute between Oberlin and Holy Cross, his most active posts in recent years, he has maintained the celebrated Chapel Artists Series at the latter at a high level. These concerts showcase the College’s important four-manual Taylor & Boody organ and a fine roster of the world’s best organists. Somehow, Mr. Christie also finds time for concertizing, organ and improvisation competition juries, and master classes on all the continents. Mr. Karosi was fortunate in securing him for the final recital of this splendid Bach celebration at First Lutheran. [Ed.: see review, "James David Christie in Bach Birthday Celebration."] The earliest Bach music we have is the collection of around 38 Neumeister-Choräle whose discovery at Yale Christoph Wolff announced in 1985. Mr. Christie gave us four of these, and what a treat each of these youthful pieces is. Note the high Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis numbers! They show a certain delight at virtuosity, but always in the service of a powerful dramatic end. The big, declamatory Jesu, meine Freude, BWV 1105, and the more intimate Allein zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, BWV 1100, were as attention-getting as they are unfamiliar. Further surprises came with Herzlich lieb hab ich dich, o Herr, BWV 1115, performed with the brightly present Zimbelstern, and the contemplative Wenn dich Unglück tut greifen an, BWV 1104, both of which illustrated the young Bach’s awareness of the compositional elements in his predecessors’ styles. Similarly, the 11 Partite diverse sopra Sei gegrüßet, Jesu gütig, BWV 768, was a kaleidoscope of registrational color and beautifully interrelated tempi. Prof. Christie has been heard to comment that the sometimes banal, always requested Toccata & Fugue in d, BWV 565, has appeared but a handful of times on his recitals over the decades. In his tempestuous interpretation at First Lutheran, with ornamentation and improvisational harmonic commentaries slipped into the time-worn folds of the piece, this was a gripping, one might say new score. Even if, as Mr. Christie’s notes for his Bach 325th Birthday concert (at Holy Cross, Worcester), held the following day said, “some musicians feel that BWV 565…may very well not have been written by Bach” and that it “is perhaps a transcription for organ of a lost violin work. …if it is not an original Bach work, I would still play it!

Veteran recording engineer Christopher Greenleaf collaborates with chamber, early, and keyboard musicians in natural acoustic venues on both sides of the Atlantic. He is active as a writer, translator, photographer, and acoustic consultant.

Blue Heron’s twelve singers, with bajón, arpa doble, and chamber organ (photo by Christopher Greenleaf)

Carlos 1, Holy Roman Emperor and grandson of Fernando y Isabella, ruled a passionately conflicted, church-obsessed land. Iberia’s artistically and scientifically advanced Moors had just been comprehensively crushed, and a terrible forced exodus of the formerly well integrated Sephardim was in full flood. Both of these human losses were to tragically smother Spanish learning, theology, culture, Mediterranean trade, the land’s infant postal service, and a former near-universal tolerance. Still, this Spain was musically and artistically fecund to an extent that took the breath away from the necessarily hardy visitors of that distant, turbulent era. Culture, notably music, flourished and took on great depth of expression. Music went its own way, too, for Castilian Iberia, though in constant mercantile and churchly contact with Italy and elsewhere, was unquenchably proud of national musical style and custom.

The evening delved into two essentially opposed aspects of Spanish attitude and mores. That hauntingly evocative late arrival in the Old Testament, the “Song of Songs” — Shira Shirim — always incited an uneasy spiritual fervor among church folk, no doubt contributing a controversial quaver to the authoritatively disciplined voices of Iberian coros. The other facet of Blue Heron’s happily contrasting program, worldly Golden Age song, communicated forbidden sensuality and straightforward sexuality in the pages of numerous Italian-printed cancioneros and large circulating MS collections of villancicos. The evening’s themes, then, were ensemble declamations of enchantment, adoration of a womanly and yet ideal Virgen, and innocently immoderate admiration of fleshly charms.

All three instrumentalists joined Blue Heron for big, opulent Latin Song of Song settings by Francisco Guerrero, Sebastián de Vivanco, and Tomás Luis de Victoria. Elsewhere in western Europe, this period and style were the uncontested domain of a cappella ensembles. The ravishing subtlety and clarity of the distinctively Spanish Renaissance practice of choral accompaniment are seductive. Not surprisingly, the instruments were as notable in their absences as in their playing. The arpa doble, for instance, imparted a distinctive, yet consciously unassertive ictus to the starts of lines and of certain vertical moments. This served their clarity and forward rhythmic motion admirably.

Peter Sykes’s masterful playing of one of the well-traveled chamber organs by Bennett & Giuttari (Westerly, RI) was entirely at the service of score and choir and never strayed from his role of adding gentle weight and occasional upsurging ensemble dynamics. In much the same vein, ever-admirable bassoonist Marilyn Boenau lavished her hallmark precision and refinement upon her reticent part in some scores, subjugating her presence to an overall choral context. Her bajón, a smallish Renaissance double reed that physically resembles the other low-pitched members of this family, offered pointed commentary, alla Dulzian, only once, in Francisco Guerrero’s swirling evocation of Trahe me post te, virgo Maria (“Draw me in your wake, Virgin Maria”). Otherwise, like Mr. Sykes, Ms. Boenau offered only as a completion — a firming up, if you will — of text and choral line. To complete this supportive triumvirate in best Spanish fashion, harpist Becky Baxter brought delicacy to her four too-brief solos and to her presence within reduced vocal ensembles and a few larger choral works. She played the arpa doble, a visually commanding instrument whose extensive repertoire and potent expressivity Andrew Lawrence-King made famous in the ‘90s on a couple of striking Hyperion albums. Two ranks of gut strings march up the instrument’s frame in near-parallel planes, enabling the player to deftly access accidentals, and thus enjoy virtually chromatic harmonic freedom. (The more familiar Italian Renaissance arpa doppia is essentially the same instrument; on it, too, Mr. Lawrence-King has issued authoritative recordings.)

As I mentioned, the Guerrero Trahe me was an expressive high point of a very fine concert. What few solos soared briefly out of the often tight ensemble writing fell to Daniela Tosic, whose sonorous and effortlessly agile alto is an adornment all over Boston, and to the immaculate tone production and textual projection of tenor Jason McStoots. A choice handful of villancicos, the Spanish madrigal of the 16th through early 18th centuries, for three, four, and five singers were brilliant, sinewy silver marquetry gleaming among a rich-hued mahogany expanse of the formal Latin art music. We heard enough of Juan Vásquez’s sizable output (on both faces of the passion coin) to take careful note of him and to look for his music in the future. Two gorgeous and quite unalike motets by Tomás Luis de Victoria, in shoulder-rubbing proximity with sensual villancicos à 4, made strong impressions.

No Blue Heron, or Convivium Musicum, program booklet fails to inform the reader fully and engagingly. Scott Metcalfe’s meticulously researched and referenced annotations provide not just the nuts and bolts of full scholarship but also a genuinely readable, literate evocation of the music’s milieu and spirit. The writing initially demands that a reader invest his full attention. Once well begun, Mr. Metcalfe’s heartfelt notes simply pull one along. They’ve become as much a part of the rich Blue Heron experience as the ensemble’s impeccable musicianship.

The acoustics of First Church support middle and upper ranges of sound well, but this generous room doesn’t propagate bass and lower middle pitches (8’ and 16’, in organ terms) effectively. One can indeed hear the bottom ranges, but they come across at a lower level than upper pitches do. To be visceral in this enjoyable and beautifully lit concert venue, bass must essentially be over-produced, and this was simply not possible for Blue Heron’s concert. Once I had dialed in my ears, often a longish process in that room, the full spectrum of sound was indeed there to be heard.

The same windy demons that were busily headlining in Rhode Island and New York that evening thoroughly doused the audience and blew them about as they struggled to arrive. I suspect, though, that when listeners and musicians alike re-emerged into those broomstick-upending elements, all were still warmed by the incomparably seductive sun of Blue Heron’s Golden Age Spain.

Veteran recording engineer Christopher Greenleaf collaborates with chamber, early, and keyboard musicians in natural acoustic venues on both sides of the Atlantic. He is active as a writer, translator, photographer, and acoustic consultant.

Cellist Sebastian Baverstam; Japanese Counsul General, Masaru Tsujiww; and Benjamin Zander (NEC Photo)

English composer Benjamin Britten lived in New York from 1939 to 1942. He returned home as a conscientious objector, a rough row to hoe at that time. His life-long pacifism found small acceptance in the embattled wartime UK. Isolated England feared military engulfment and civil destruction. The terrible devastation of Europe’s “war to end all wars” was a mere 22 years in the past. In Brooklyn Heights, in 1940, through the mediation of his government, the 26-year-old Britten accepted a commission from Japan to write a festive work to mark the 2600^th anniversary of the Japanese Empire. Japan was itself engaged in the middle years of its extensive war in China. Britten, young and undeflectably principled, submitted a compact, emotionally charged Sinfonia da Requiem, whose three movements bore solemn titles from the Requiem Mass. On the score’s arrival in Japan, that nation’s then hyper-acute sensibilities found the overtly Christian section labels insulting. It was felt that such a work could in no way celebrate the Emperor, the incarnate symbol of national unity and the clerical head of his island empire’s Shinto religion. The foreign ministry in Tokyo fired off to the foreign office in London a stern official protest, rejecting the score. John Barbirolli and the New York Philharmonic premiered the work, Britten’s Op. 20, on 29 March 1941. Japan, England, and the US were still at peace. In 1956 the Sinfonia da Requiem was at last heard in Japan, with the composer conducting the NHK Symphony, and it has been performed there numerous times since.

On entering the hall, Benjamin Zander announced from the stage that he, the NEC Philharmonia, and the government of Japan would undertake a final healing of this seven-decade cultural and political rift between two nations that have long been firm and cordial allies. As the applause following the intensely charged performance rolled on, Mr. Zander collected a copy of the Britten score from the podium and invited Masaru Tsuji, the Japanese Consul General in Boston, to step forward. Mr. Tsuji accepted the score on behalf of his nation, then spoke briefly of the appropriateness of this musical occasion to further his people’s desire to knit strong ties among friends. (For the text of Mr. Zander’s letter of invitation to Mr. Tsuji, please see the BMInt Staff article, “Japan to Accept Britten Score, 70 Years after its Commission. “)

In modern string configuration — left-to-right: violins 1, violins 2, violas, violincellos, contrabass — the orchestra stormed into the first section, Lacrymosa (Andante ben misurato). They established a high-energy climate in which insistent, short rhythmic motifs have much of the say, handed from string groups to brass to winds, commented upon noisily by the sizable percussion battery and its allied piano part. Melodic development is not the point; the tight metrical motifs, rising and tumbling in both pitch and power, soon threw out swelling laments and the direct emotional punches of orchestrated wails. As the evocations of pain swelled, the acid brass commentary strove for attention. Brief, relenting bars ceded, attacca, to the central death’s dance, Britten’s yet more intent Dies iræ (Allegro con fuoco). Every member of the band played with utter conviction and, when urged by the conductor to deliver their all, ferocity. This was electric musicianship, a statement of such seriousness of approach and commitment that the third section, Requiem æternam (Andante molto tranquillo) retained the impetus and intensity of the preceding quarter of an hour of voltage. Even as plangent decibels gave way to an ashen, drained stasis, recurrences of the despairing howls jostled, unsettled, against a disparate new seeking after renewal and comfort. Then, listeners and players still internally thrumming with the effect of all this, it just ended.

Now and again, this publication has been a platform for somewhat divergent commentaries, as side remarks or in lengthier writings, on what is pleasurably audible in halls, what comes through clearly, and what factors may account for acoustic difficulties. The second half of this concert put Jordan Hall, as a symphonic venue, to test by permitting young conservatory musicians and the experienced audience to take in and evaluate the great changes wrought by moving the string divisions and some other instrumental groups around. A standard US orchestral layout for the Britten favored massed, fairly centered sound at almost all dynamic levels, while the late Romantic Germanic set-up adopted for the vast Bruckner Symphony No. 5 in Bb (original version, 1875-76; ed. 1939 by Robert Haas; with a later tuba part) milked the antiphonal nature of the divisi violins, contrasted violins 1 to the immediately adjacent celli and basses, and placed the violas where they spoke as much up as out, to fine effect. From their house right placement on the stage, the violins 2 section projected a veiled, dusky timbral sheen in any but ff and greater passages, delivering attention-getting power in section solo lines. Where the Britten had presented a concentrated, unified wall of sound, especially in fuller passages, the Bruckner called effectively upon the revelatory geography of its component instrumental sections to give listeners a transparent, sonically comprehensible overview of all the strands, nearly all the time. The high, hard-surfaced stage house and its hall served both of these sonic æsthetics effectively, communicating their differences while always supporting ensemble sound.

The effect of the orchestra’s exceptionally spaciously and majestically bowed Adagio opening of the first movement, Introduction (Adagio – Allegro), was curiously negated when Mr. Zander’s uneasily quick and rhythmically uncommitted Allegro toppled what had begun as an almost religious firmament of possibilities. The tempi were unrelated, a curious gesture with which to get a massive form like the Fifth underway. I should add, just to house all quibbles in one paragraph, that the bumptious, one could say raucous nature of the bold outer Scherzo wrapping insisted on frequent, brutal distensions of the sweet, Ländler-like Trio, often with such powerful distortion of forward motion and the usual relief brought by a Trio, that the movement became disjointed. The Zander approach to this was, to my ear, just that much too manic. The hyper-dramatic transitions side-swiped the ripe, difficult rhetoric of the movement. I should note, though, that I have never succeeded in coming to terms with the organization of this one movement among all the symphonies, which no doubt reveals a large gap in my understanding of what Bruckner, that marvelously odd genius, was about. Even the beautifully written characterizations of the composer’s aims by modern Brucknerians fail to convince me of this movement’s effectiveness in the hands of most conductors.

This was still an evening to remember with pleasure, and certainly with admiration for what Benjamin Zander and his brilliant, deeply committed NEC band brought off in handing listeners so eminently worthwhile an experience. Both on the part of the conductor, a Grammy nominee for his recent release of this same work, and on the part of sections and some decidedly contract-worthy wind soli, this was deeply enjoyable, moving Bruckner playing. Among the excellent winds, Pamela Daniels, first flute, and  first oboist Amanda Hardy stood out. They held aloft their extended, exposed, and pace-critical parts, especially in the second movement, Adagio (Sehr langsam). Amanda Hardy earned a warm reception for her faultless double-reed presence in and among the other complex lines of this movement and in the difficult Scherzo. It is uncommon to hear oboe tone this poised, so wonderfully fat (praise!), and sweet in North American orchestras, as we’ve almost entirely gone over to a hard, thin, edgy oboe sound that, yes, cuts, but simply cannot blend, even with the clarinets.

With the blessing (yon lovely Irish phrase), December 7 will eventually be just another twelfth-month day. Reaching out, publicly and personally, as Benjamin Zander did in extending an inviting hand to a cultured individual who happens to be his government’s voice in Boston, is one of the ways this will happen.

Editor’s note: Bill Carragan, whose comments follow, undertook what some feel is the most successful completion of the Bruckner Ninth Symphony, which has been performed and recorded a number of times. His Bruckner scholarship is thorough, constantly aware of the not always linear historical evolutions in the field, and typified by a score-based concern for the composer’s original and, inevitably, reconsidered intentions. These remarks have been added to this review at the request of the author.

“The version Ben used is that of 1878. An earlier 1876 version can only be teased out of the sources here and there, notably for the last 150 or so measures, but not for the symphony as a whole. That is because there is only one composition score, and the many over-writings in it cannot be correlated without much conjecture. Go to <www.abruckner.com> and read the essay I wrote on the Fifth to help Ben prepare for his Philharmonia recording.

The flute and oboe were lovely, and the strings, in the only legitimate seating for an orchestra, were the soul of transparency. When I was a child, all orchestras were seated with the second violins on the right. Putting the cellos on the right is cowardly, a concession to string-quartet seating, where the violins work together quite differently from what they do in the orchestra. There is no justification except fear of failure for always placing the cellos on the right. Audiophiles, especially, should resist a scheme where all the treble sound comes from the left channel and all the bass from the right.

You and I agreed on the positive aspects, not so much on the negative ones. The performance itself stemmed from a very deep understanding by Ben of the layered tempos, more complex and demanding than in any other Bruckner symphony. Nonetheless, the performance was most spontaneous and full of surprising excitement and vigor, animated perhaps by a certain sense of destiny coming from the gracious presence of the Japanese Consul General and the very heartwarming act of reconciliation by all concerned. With respect to your criticisms, the trio was actually very steady, and the violent tempo changes in the scherzo, which are present in full detail in the source, were carried out with much more integrity and success than is usually encountered. As for the beginning of the allegro, he let it grow directly from the preceding adagio, then moved it up to the regular tempo by the time of the loud statement. This was done so smoothly that I could not have any complaint.”

Veteran recording engineer Christopher Greenleaf collaborates with chamber, early, and keyboard musicians in natural acoustic venues on both sides of the Atlantic. He is active as a writer, translator, photographer, and acoustic consultant.

Conductor Benjamin Zander (Andrew Hurlbut photo)

And so I felt moderately well boosted toward the musical stratosphere where this encounter was to take place, in the company of the usual diverse and engaged audience who attend these eagerly awaited Boston Philharmonic programs. Please pardon my verbal build-up. It truly is a far stretch from the quotidian, regardless of the extent of a listener’s musically active life, to confront, take in, and duly absorb what that immensely positive force of nature, Benjamin Zander, has to offer in his customary talks preceding performances and in the playing itself.

The setting is familiar to all. As the smaller of the two big rooms in Harvard’s Memorial Hall, Jahrgang 1876, Sanders Theatre is that rara avis, a successful multi-purpose space. It is moderately resonant. Reverberance exists in rehearsal, gently and flatteringly, but is largely absent when the hall acquires a two-thirds-size audience, as on this evening. It is an exciting acoustic in which to let nuances of musicianly effort sift into one’s awareness, always in score-appropriate context, through the full dynamic range of even vast late-Romantic soundscapes like the Mahler Ninth.

It was a dark and stormy night! The Cambridge firmament without was determined to have its say during Mr. Zander’s extensive spoken introduction and whenever the orchestral sound inhabited lower dynamic reaches. Mahler might’ve scrawled draußen äußerst böig (darned gusty out there) in one of his string section drafts. Shrieks and enharmonic wind chords swelled and deflated themselves all evening long. The effect was atmospheric and, somehow, rather fitting.

Mr. Zander’s long pre-concert introduction to the Ninth paralleled and drew upon the contents of the explanatory discs the labels include with his orchestral releases. His verbal and physical language invited in everyone in a big way. Visiting musicians and school groups from overseas and from around North America, seated in blocks in the balcony and elsewhere, found themselves singled out and welcomed, with up-front credit to the corporations that have sponsored their tickets. Every member of the waiting orchestra was perched to pounce on a rehearsal number or quickly limned passage at a sudden wave of the whirling Zander baton. This led to moments of merriment as all watched the ensuing scramble among sections, but it also kept everyone rapt and deepened the audience’s investment in what, revealingly sketched in generous advance detail, awaited revelation in the performance proper. The one intermission followed this introduction. Then the Ninth soared into being.

Boston Philharmonic concertmistress Joanna Kurkowicz and standmate Jae-Young Cosmos Lee during the Mahler Ninth (Andrew Hurlbut photo)

The four movements of Gustav Mahler’s final completed symphony demand a great deal of orchestral players. There were hauntingly lovely moments in which the entire moving fabric of the music settled like gossamer along delicate, fey lines entrusted to the Boston Philharmonic’s fine section leaders. Two players familiar to Emmanuel Music concertgoers, first oboist Peggy Pearson and cello leader Rafael Popper-Keizer, delivered the famous solo passages for their instruments in the second movement (Im Tempo eines gemächlichen Ländlers. Etwas täppisch und sehr derb. Scherzo in C) and, notably, in the closing quarter of the expansive D-flat fourth movement (Adagio. Sehr langsam und noch zurückhaltend.) with surpassing warmth, precision, and tonal focus. Though this symphony owes little to Czech music per se, its orchestration now and then evinces instrumentation made familiar by the symphonic tapestries of Bohemians Viteszlav Novák, Josef Foerster, and Leos Janácek. Thus the piccolo often completes the bright, penetrating moments Mahler projects, even in quieter places, over profound, chordal, and wondrously clear bass textures. Piccolo player Lisa Hennessey swept into her often brief and always scarily exposed flights above other lines with a silvery, round sound so ravishing, and so patently secure, that a listener could always shelve the small prickle of apprehension that usually precedes such mercilessly spotlit passages. Concertmistress Joanna Kurkowicz spun lovely violin solos, the bottom range of her fine, rich instrument carrying through underlying strings and winds with power and elegance, never with that nervous solo vibratissimo one encounters a little too often. All four horns, first trumpet Eric Berlin, and the five hard-worked clarinetists were sheer delight to hear. Bass trombone Mark Rohr and tuba Donal Rankin, whose written parts tackle every dynamic and inhabit the full ranges of their instruments, underlaid great sweeps of the overall score with meticulous ensemble entries, tonal beauty, and firmly sustained pppp lines.

What can one say about any Benjamin Zander performance? Certainly, a catalogue of one’s preferences, likes, and “I’d’ve done this elsewise” enumerations is irrelevant when one is favored with so completely prepared a reading of a big, sprawling, and – superficially — barely unified work like the Mahler Ninth. In a sense, I have never heard a Zander/BPO iteration of one of the big concert staples, or rarities, from which I did not learn a great deal. I suppose I go to these focal cultural events to plunge into the score, to benefit from a committed and often satisfyingly high-charged unpeeling of the many and subtle layers that make up a symphony on this order. I truly enjoyed and liked what I heard at clear-as-a-bronze-bell Sanders Theatre last Thursday evening, and I was once again humbled by the sheer investment orchestra, conductor, and the effective BPO organization make in what they do. I have not often heard a Mahler symphony performance, on record or in the flesh, in which so much shared commitment was brought to bear, and in which I felt my own presence to be that of an active participant. Evenings like this one unavoidably raise a listener’s standards for the performance of orchestral music to…. you get the point.

Veteran recording engineer Christopher Greenleaf collaborates with chamber, early, and keyboard musicians in natural acoustic venues on both sides of the Atlantic. He is active as a writer, translator, photographer, and acoustic consultant.

These two well-traveled musicians are convincing, entertaining ambassadors for the wide-ranging facets of early music, music of the Canadian Maritimes, and traditional Scottish music they played. Chris Norman’s deft and seamless flute playing in Weston was familiar to audience members who know his recordings with Helicon, the Baltimore Consort, and his own ensembles on Dorian Records. (To confuse our geography a mite, this son of Halifax now makes his home in Baltimore.) Once violinist David Greenberg had soared out of advanced study at Indiana University straight into steady work for Tafelmusik (Toronto), he settled in Ontario. He and two colleagues founded Puirt a Baroque (said: poorsht-a-ba-Roke) in 1994, with the intriguing goal of “connecting Cape Breton music with its roots in the Baroque era.” They’ve stirred up a fair bit of interest in this violin style not impossibly far removed from the Prince Edward Isle tradition made visible by Natalie MacMaster since the late 1990s.

Octave Fiddle by Shep Jones, Fiddarci Lutherie (Christopher Greenleaf photo)

The CSEM program, entitled “Let Me In This Ae Night,” established the powerful ties between Scots tunes and songs a century either side of the 1746 Battle of Colloden (“The Forty-Five”) and their angular, rhythmically incisive cousins in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and eastern reaches of New Brunswick. Among the “old” Scots tunes were Thomas Moore’s mid-19th-c. “The Last Rose of Summer” and a traditional hit, “Bonnocks of Beer Meal.” Chris Norman sang the songs with easily parsed diction, often in variants that pointed out the rough use to which melodies were subjected as they were shared across oceans and borders. A fine, free sense of improvisation permeated each set of pieces. Listening to the duo’s new album release of this same program, one could not help but be struck by the consistency between their recorded harmonizations and those of this CSEM concert, which explained the remarkable fluidity of their exchanges. The audience were treated to sinewy weaving accompaniments, small, quick ornamentations, and melodic interplay that bespoke a good deal of hard work.

To further entwine the Maritimes, Scotland, and the Baroque, Norman and Greenberg dropped in two movements from a Telemann Duo in E and two movements each from Bach solo partitas for their instruments. The Telemann was sheerest pleasure, with its effortless tunefulness and sparely, brilliantly sketched harmonic framework. I must confess that none of the four Bach solos succeeded in defining a metrical home pulse; each player approached his chosen movements with a freedom that felt casual or willful, rather than concerned with the overall architecture and onward motion of the score.

One of the joys of the rekindling of interest in early music is instrument makers’ energy in rediscovering, copying, expanding on, and brilliantly departing from historic models. Much less visible has been the re-arrival of alternative, lost, and odd experimental instruments on the world folk scene. David Greenberg whisked his round-bouts octave violin, by present day Alabama luthier Shep Jones, off the table where it lay tuned to sail into a set of strathspeys and reels from Scotland and the Canadian Maritimes. Only after listener curiosity had been raised to the bursting point did he display all sides of this strange-sounding fiddle and explain its origins. Some 16 decades ago, William Sidney Mount, a New York Yankee with an irrepressible urge to improve on what 17th-c. Cremona had just plain failed to get right, unveiled his Cradle of Harmony, a baritone violin, now known as the octave violin. He waited for applause that never manifested itself. To a roughly conventional fiddle body add “fat” strings that play an octave lower than those of the violin. Curve a flattish belly and back markedly (see the photo), eliminate those pesky-to-craft bouts (the sharp-pointed violin waist), have at the thing with a bow of sufficient muscularity to excite it into coarse life, and you have an unforgettable instrument whose range lies between those of the cello and the viola. Such sound might erupt from a professionally executed cigar box fiddle. There is neither power nor depth, and yet the effect within an ensemble is a delight. The octave fiddle speaks quickly, so David Greenberg’s agile partnering of Chris Norman and his various sizes of flute left listeners with the impression of two lithely vocal lines with sweetly complimentary harmonics and interlocking, subtle fundamentals. This was magical, in fact.

David Greenberg (v), Chris Norman (fl), and their Estey pump organ (Christpoher Greenleaf photo)

The other pleasantly spry survivor of an eclipsed era was the small, portable 1950s melodeon by the once furiously busy Brattleboro organ firm of Estey. Norman and Greenberg alternated at it, pumping cheerfully away, sliding its almost attackless harmonic and rhythmic part of the conversation beneath the melody instruments. Organologically inclined readers may know that our American pump organ, the melodeon, is a quiet, self-effacing keyboard instrument whose pedals operate twin bellows evacuating a lightly sprung reservoir (for vacuum winding), while the European harmonium uses much the same mechanism to pressurize a (usually exterior-sprung) reservoir. As bold a sound as it had, the 19th-c. harmonium enjoyed the attention of few composers: Rossini (Petite messe solennelle, 1869) and Dvorák (Five Bagatelles with 2v, vlc, Op. 47, 1878) being the best known. [In addition to Rossini and Dvorák, the French Orgue Expressif and German Kunstharmonium attracted the interest of a large number of composers, including Fauré, Vierne, Widor, Saint-Saens, Franck, Strauss, Mahler, and Schoenberg, to name a few. Indeed the first 12-tone composition was written for harmonium by Schoenberg's rival Josef Matthias Hauer. (FLE)]

Today, JPP and other Scandinavian crossover string bands use the harmonium to devastating ensemble effect, as dozens of arresting CDs attest. The North American church melodeon, however, was little more than a cheap stand-in for the organ a congregation couldn’t afford. This particular type of pump organ attracted few composers, and only the thousands of them made by Estey and Mason & Hamlin, among others, for the roving missionary market and overseas military chaplancies kept the genus somewhat alive into the 1950s. As owners of copies of Greenberg’s and Norman’s spanking new album bearing this concert’s title have been hearing, the little instrument records well.

Veteran recording engineer Christopher Greenleaf collaborates with chamber, early, and keyboard musicians in natural acoustic venues on both sides of the Atlantic. He is active as a writer, translator, photographer, and acoustic consultant.

It’s logical, then, that this still rather new ensemble’s astonishingly extensive 2009-2010 season— seven programs in multiple venues — should present the greater Boston public with four revealing overviews of church music from great German centers of the Baroque. These are Hamburg, Dresden, Darmstadt, and — on Sunday, February 21 — Leipzig.

Boston’s great German Baroque organ, the famous two-manual instrument by Richards, Fowkes & Co., opened the concert. With his customary flair and ease, First Lutheran music director Bálint Karosi launched Johann Sebastian Bach’s festive Präludium & Fuge in C, BWV 545, on its propulsive way through an intertwined pedal and manual fabric that drew overt sighs of pleasure from the listeners.

Historic coat of arms of the city of Leipzig

The half-century of music Exsultemus elected to present begins in the relative obscurity of the second city of Sachsen some two musical generations after the death of Monteverdi. Leipzig was a prosperous princely town of regional importance, with powerful commercial aspirations and a nascent cultural life that would, by the second quarter of the 18th century, be on a par with that of Hamburg. The Stadrath, Leipzig’s town councilors, were famous throughout the many German lands of that era for their control, disapproval, and intricate meddling in artistic matters. The integration of city affairs and Protestant church authorities was so intimate that no appointment of a musician could be made on a purely æsthetic and liturgical basis, as one promising applicant, a native of Eisenach in the neighboring state of Thüringen, was to discover during a chill winter in early 1723.

Before thirty-eight year-old Bach’s successful application for the position of Thomaskantor, there were others of great ability, who managed to endure the at times oppressive commercial and church establishment uneasily supporting Leipzig’s blossoming musical diversity. Among these was Johann Schelle (1648-1701). He completed a full academic and musical Laufbahn at the prestigious Thomsasschule, then at the Universität Leipzig. His few years in Eilenburg ended in a peaceful transition into his teacher’s position as Leipziger Kantor. Official duties among German Kantoren required diligent supervision of education in church and town, the fashioning of state and liturgical occasional scores on demand and by contract, and such performance activity as the Stadtrath deemed to be part of the job. Schelle was evidently able to satisfy the often challenging demands, with their implicit conflicts across churchly turf lines and amongst the politically, not to mention socially, spiky fiefdoms fiercely asserted by individual Rathsherren and their peppery claques. Exsultemus chose his tuneful chamber cantata, Dazu ist erschienen der Sohn Gottes, for bass soloist, two violins, and basso continuo (cello & chamber organ) to represent the man and his stint as Stadtkantor (1677-1701). Well-regarded bass Ulysses Thomas lofted his darkly present and enjoyable voice amid elegantly sinewy violin parts. Violinists Laura Gulley and Jesse Irons played with sweetness and unanimity. They breathed dynamic life into string writing that was at one time commonly played with an affectively flat, thin fiddle sound that turned audiences away from this now familiar corner of early music.

Polychrome vaulting in the restored Thomaskirche, Leipzig (Christopher Greenleaf photo)

There followed two notably different sides of Johann Kuhnau, who had an impressive run as Thomaskantor, from 1684 until his death in 1721. Each of the works is cast as a chamber cantata, one proclaiming the New Testament in modern German, the other harkening back to a superseded æsthetic as a Latin motet sporting a contemporary wig. Soprano Teresa Wakim proclaimed her crunchy German text with aplomb, beautifully commented upon by Jesse Irons’s expressive, polished violin solo. The evening’s loveliest vocal moments came when brilliant tenor Jason McStoots soared into the florid sonorities of Kuhnau’s Laudate pueri Dominum, with an instrumental backing of two violins, Posaune, and marvelously deft cello-cum-organ continuo. The ever-mobile continuo department has to establish clear forward motion above which the upper voices, especially the very difficult trombone part, can pull off their detailed statements. Audrey Cienniwa and Bálint Karosi rose to the highest standard. Few musicians could have presented the high-speed road test of the full-range obligato Posaune part as nimbly, and with such able preservation of its chamber character, as musical polymath Tom Zajac. (To see this man’s name on a concert program is to attempt to smilingly guess which and how many instruments he will be playing.)

The concluding piece was one of Bach’s trial compositions for his Leipzig position, his Jesus nahm zu sich die Zwölfe, BWV 22. It was also the one chance to hear the familiar Exsultemus ensemble singing, which is always pleasurable. In its efficient five movements, this small-scale New Testament cantata recombines two violins, viola, and oboe enchantingly to showcase tenor, bass, coro, alto, bass, and tenor before culminating in a (frustratingly short) chorale in which the soprano finally joins in. Lovely double-reed lines from Graham St.-Laurent (placed nearly antiphonally, at the far side of the basso continuo lot) shot the filigreed upper string textures through with exquisite small collisions of harmony and color. Fine violist Joy Grimes was in the band just this once, as well.

This was a lovely program, beautifully conceived and brought to life. Three more Exsultemus concerts this season will present adventurous, rewarding repertoire, including the final in the ensemble’s quartet of German focal concerts: Dresden (Schütz, Heinichen & the irreverent Herr Zelenka) on Sunday, 14 March, at First Lutheran.

Exsultemus performing Bach's Cantata, BWV 22, at First Lutheran, Boston (Christopher Greenleaf photo)

As so often, First Lutheran Church was the magnet for this special concert. The welcoming parish and its music-friendly space have come to be associated with performances by a broad range of musicians seeking direct engagement with audiences that show up, then return in sufficient numbers for future programs to make the fiscal reality of programs something other than scary. This church has become home to a number of soli and ensembles, both in the public eye and for that tougher thing for musicians to arrange on an ongoing basis — rehearsals through successive years. Willing, supportive hosts for this less visible aspect of a great city’s music life are scarce.

Christopher Greenleaf is a veteran recording engineer who collaborates with chamber, early, and keyboard musicians in natural acoustic venues on both sides of the Atlantic. He is active as a writer, translator, photographer, and acoustic consultant.

The second of a pair of concerts Sarasa gave on the last weekend in January wrapped a comfortably familiar Bach cembalo concerto in La Primavera and L’Estate, the usual first two of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, then spun L’Autunno and L’Inverno around a little tour-de-force by Telemann, a late-Baroque concerted miniature without continuo. The Parish Hall in Concord’s First Parish Church is intimate and flatteringly resonant, since all surfaces are of hard plaster or firmly supported wood. There was not a deadening carpet to be seen. Adding the audience tunes the reverberance of the empty space to manageable proportions, and there does not appear to be a bad seat in the room. The one distraction is the powerful rumble and growl of a big heating system right under the Parish Hall. A familiar New England state of things, to be sure, but a dreadful underpinning for music. Still, one could hear, and hear pleasantly.

Christopher Greenleaf photo

Basso continuo is the foundation and living pulse of what we now call Baroque music. Modern players who have made the olden style their own embrace playing Bc, and playing comfortably atop Bc, with a fervent delight that banishes popular mid-20^th-century deprecations of the Baroque as simple-minded stuff. Even when it is self-effacing, skilled, committed continuo playing is responsible for much of our enduring fascination with this music. Sarasa’s founder, cellist Timothy Merton, and harpsichordist, Charles Sherman established detailed, rhythmically impeccable, and harmonically adventurous bedrock or occasional interweaving filigree above which the mercurial upper strings soared.

Elizabeth Blumenstock, as her big public across the time zones knows, is a good deal more than just a very fine fiddler. She provided, in no uncertain terms, the verbal clock spring for the spring-fresh recasting of the music heard that Sunday evening in Concord. Her commentary held out an inviting hand to an audience whose interest and engagement mounted as the program progressed. If you can comfortably combine comedic zaps with informed stylistic commentary, why ever not do so?! As each composition was about to be played, Sarasa’s spokesmensch (forgive me, Ms. Blumenstock) tallied important thematic and coloristic events with her own instrument or nodded to colleagues to provide a brief snippet, her eyes merrily snapping back and forth between listeners and fellow players. She has the ability to sum up ephemeral things in earthy or picturesque terms that, when said, sound just right, and her words paint complete pictures.

Sarasa’s major programming innovation was to use the Quattro Stagioni as glorious, polychrome bookends of decided individuality and charm encasing one contrasting work on each half of the show. Heard alone, each Season takes on a surprising new life. When we encounter them as a suite of four packets of quick-slow-quick vignettes, they usually astound. But to hear them separately is to experience and savor them to an extent that places the skill and polish of the players, I must say, firmly at the focal point of things. No room for glossings over or for slip-ups here. The Red Priest’s sheer audacity and wholly radical departure from standard late-17^th-c. writing for solo or concerted forces, as roughly codified by Corelli and resoundingly canonized the length of the Italian boot, would have brought about a trial and a brisk public burning, had he undertaken revolutionary steps of this sort in theology, democratic politics, or astronomy. What confronts us in these wild and gleefully colorful concerti is a wild departure from convention. It is a new definition of the possible.

This unbridled leap into unflown, spacious skies is what we experienced with the ensemble as they genuinely reinvented le Quattro Stagioni. This was not newness for the sake of the change, but a finely thought-through sharing of the dramatic strands of these amazing scores among first-rank professionals, fleet-footed collaborators in reinvention. The two busy Signore of the Bc chipped in with quick, un-continuo commentaries when the very precise scoring left room for them. The allegro tempi were quick without frenzy. Largos and lentos didn’t suffer from the langour or self-consciousness that so often cloy them or wrap them in Romantic cloth. Rapid, angular passages, smoothly sewn among the many charming lyrical moments, clad each movement in bright-hued silks. Carnival of Venice, in January?! This was beautiful playing and an invigorating reassessment of very familiar scores.

Bach’s Cembalo Concerto in E, BWV 1053 (1733-46) is among his lengthiest statements in the genre, which poses not inconsiderable challenges of variety and phrase-shaping. Charles Sherman, playing his own exquisite John Phillips double, pursued the intricate melodic line in each of the three expansive movements, threading supple harmonic commentaries around the main thrust and playing wonderfully with or against the string ensemble scoring. Harpsichords that sustain well across throughout their range, top to bottom, are uncommon. The Flemish original on which this instrument is based (Andreas Ruckers, 1646) underwent enlargement (called a petit or a grand ravalement) by Blanchet (1756) and a final reworking, very late in harpsichord terms, by brilliant Pascal Taskin (1780). Charles Sherman’s modern instrument displays an expert, ear-opening implementation of what the old craftsmen did at their considerable best. The effect of this in the Bach was to bring the sometimes apologetic texture of the harpsichord to a volume level and sustaining power that genuinely did justice to the score. Let’s not forget the superb string playing, which alternated between full-out orchestral sonics and wispy threads of part playing that accorded the cembalo its important, but still always collaborative role in this bracing, sumptuous piece.

The penultimate work was a jewel. In his awesome bursts of creativity through some six decades, Georg Phillip Telemann often revisited unusual forms and Besetzungen, the instrumental forces for which he scored. This was the case when he dashed off four little concerti for four solo violins senza basso continuo. Elizabeth Blumenstock quipped that, just as the band had gotten down to rehearsing one of them in C, the notion began to dawn among the four of them that, really, the Four-Violin Concerto in D, TWV 40:202 (not reliably dated) was the winner. She and her three coconspirators once more teased the crowd with melodic amuse-gueules to introduce the piece. Violist Jenny Stirling quietly returned to the stage front with her violin and a smile, to amusement all around, and they tore into the concerto. The four violins handed off will-o’-the-wisp (thanks to EB for this characterization) fragments of melody and harmony in the two quick movements, sharing breathtakingly subtle transitions between instruments in the slow pair. How clearly one heard the nearly unplayed bass line! The Concord audience couldn’t have applauded more heartily.

Christopher Greenleaf is a veteran recording engineer who collaborates with chamber, early, and keyboard musicians in natural acoustic venues on both sides of the Atlantic. He is active as a writer, translator, photographer, and acoustic consultant.

Final bows by members of the Concord Chamber Music Society (Christorpher Greenleaf photo)

For a good few presenters of classical music these days, pre-concert talks are an important element of programming. When well done, such discussions draw the audience closer to a broad range of scores and assure comprehension and engagement for the performance to follow. Veteran annotator and musicologist Steven Ledbetter, in his ninth season of prefacing CCMS Sunday afternoons with concise and entertaining commentary, established historical place and time for the three very different German 19^th-century scores on the announced portion of the program. He sparked amusement, interest, and anticipation among his numerous listeners.

No busier modern pianist strides from airport to hall to conservatory than Austrian native Anton Kuerti, who spent close to four decades in this country and has been a Canadian citizen for 26 years. His aura of intensity, a probing musical intelligence, and utter disdain for theatrics makes him among the most enjoyable of serious musicians before today’s public. Throughout his exceptionally productive career, he has been vocal in urging his colleagues to gauge their performance fees so as to reach the greatest number of appreciative listeners, rather than to price a sizable percentage of the public out of the concert hall. He has been an active composer, teacher, and performer.

Kuerti’s playing of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 26 in Eb, Op. 81a, “Les Adieux” (1809-10), went down songful paths, leaving mannerisms to one side. He let the mechanically challenging express-speed passages serve the rhetorical sweep of the piece without once tempting listeners to be distracted by pianistic considerations. There was power aplenty, but also lyricism. It was a great pleasure, by the way, to hear this sonata on a Steinway B, not on the usual concert D. The weight and timbre accorded each octave by this less stentorian model (210cm in length, rather than the D’s imposing 275cm) noticeably favor transparency over massiveness. In the busy, at times dense Beethoven, this was a decided plus. Anton Kuerti showed wonderful control of tone and dynamics, though the instrument’s cold, somewhat shallow tone production often seemed to get in the way of beauty. This is probably not due to this B’s age—a century and some—but to unsympathetic voicing and, no doubt, the heavy use to which cultural life at the Concord Academy must subject it. Many pianos built in the five or six decades before the First World War are doing fine service today. They may, however, have rather better care lavished on them than this once-fine instrument has had of late. The piano’s tuning and action were fine.

The other well-known performer on the program was British Columbia native Corey Cerovsek, who has become nearly as peripatetic and in demand as Mr. Kuerti. With good reason, too. His approach to the music is sure, unmannered, and winning to behold. In the Schumann Violin Sonata No. 1 in a, Op. 105 (1851), violinist and pianist demonstrated a seamless ensemble consciousness that imbued this by turns intimate and at times briefly extrovert sonata with wonderful unity. The unmistakable shade of Johannes Brahms permeates whole pages of the score, especially where harmonic and thematic density, warmly brush-stroked with lilting affect, lead Schumann to the deeper expression that characterizes his last music. “Ah, the Brahms “Zero”-th Sonata”, quipped a violinist afterward. Cerovsek, who studied with Josef Gingold, evokes the spirit of his teacher uncannily. When I was an undergraduate at Indiana University, I had weekly opportunities to take in Gingold’s delightfully easy portamento and his joy in silken, energetic, unforced sound. Corey Cerovsek exudes his own distinctive personality, of course, and yet a number of listeners commented on his evocation of Josef Gingold. The presence of the late artist-teacher was downright eery. In Crovsek’s hands, his full-throated 1728 Stradivarius, once played by Ferras, Viotti, and Paganini, bolstered this impression, with its sweetly potent and strikingly centered tone.

Following the pause, the stage was not set for the promised piano quartet. Instead, Corey Cervosek and Wendy Putnam sped out, parts in hand, to laughingly explain that this wasn’t an opportunity they were going to let slip by. Off they dashed into two charming violin duos by Haydn, two of three movements in a Bb duo sonata, puzzlingly labeled Op. 99 in the 1952 Peters score. In the exuberant opening Allegro spirtuoso, the two violins breathed the same heady air of parry, exchange, counter-lunge, and affirmative co-arrival at richly chordal resolutions. The concluding Andante con variazione evoked chuckles as the humorously apportioned dialogue of parts whizzed over the full range of each violin.

The largest and least familiar of the works ended the program.

When I work in the eastern reaches of Germany, I seek out chamber concerts with repertoire unlikely to be presented elsewhere. Getting to know a sampling of the Lieder, piano music, and chamber works of Hermann Goetz (spelled without an Umlaut) has been among the rewards of evenings at liberty in Sachsen, Vorpommern, and Thüringen. What does he sound like? Overlay a transparent Dvorákian fabric of deft melodic mobility on a harmonic language not unrelated to Brahms, toss in Ernö Dohnányi’s unfettered keyboard bravura, and spin more or less conventionally cast movements out until the thematic and motivic reiterations swirl to vigorous conclusions, and you’re on the way to a fair idea of Goetz.

The shaky health of this composer, born in 1840 in Königsberg (Kalingrad), contrasts with his furiously busy compositional activity from a young age. He succumbed early to tuberculosis, having left behind enough finished music to keep his name before the German-language public ever since. And what music! Over the course of its four extended movements, Goetz’s Piano Quartet in E, Op. 6 (1867) leads the listener down almost-familiar Lindenallées and Gäßchen, ruling their unerring way through musical neighborhoods of an unknown but not wholly foreign Central European cityscape. Yes, the streets do cross a comfortable Brahmsstraße here and a well-defined Schumann-Weg there, but Goetz’s idiom is his own.

Violinist Wendy Putnam, violist Steve Ansell, cellist Micahel Reynolds, and pianist Anton Kuerti chose effective tempi for this long and rewarding chamber work. As Steven Ledbetter remarked in his program notes, Goetz made certain that the pianist had plenty to do, but he also bestowed luminous and interesting writing on each the string players. Now do let us hear the Piano Quintet and Piano Trio in North America, please!

Many thanks to the Wendy Putnam and the Concord Chamber Music Society for a varied and satisfying afternoon with known and, on these American shores, still unknown milestones of 19^th-century German chamber writin

Veteran recording engineer Christopher Greenleaf collaborates with chamber, early, and keyboard musicians in natural acoustic venues on both sides of the Atlantic. He is active as a writer, translator, photographer, and acoustic consultant.

The Lamentations settings with which the 16^th century Catholic lands were so enamored are music of profound introspection and unrelievedly heartbreaking tone. They are tough to interpret with consistent engagement and challenge an ensemble’s variety of approach. The scores’ sustained somberness paints from the darkest emotional palette in music. Infrequent quicker passages now and again relieve the affective torpor permeating these most earnest texts in the Roman liturgical year. The Biblical passages are an extended invocation of the destruction visited upon the first Temple by Nebuchadnezzar in his taking of Jerusalem. At the same time, they’re a darkly keening evocation of the dire Paschal tragedy, a presage of crucifixion and torment. No D-major Resurrection crooks a finger, tendering hope of honeyed eternity. This is dour sacred material. The music mirrors the subdued, painful tone of the Biblical texts.

The Lamentations genre sparked some of the most ethereal choral tone painting to come out of the late 15th century. The next century embraced this tradition with its own brand of fervor, especially once the Counter-Reformation took well-funded wing. Exsultemus’s substantial program opened with one of the most beautiful, and one of the least static, settings, Heth, cogitavit Dominus by the brilliant Antoine Brumel, an incomparable colorist and weaver of vibrant harmonic tapestries, here for four male voices. On its heels was an intensely beautiful six-voice (mixed) Lamentations by Robert White. It became clear what narrow emotional bounds the evening would explore and what this would ask of the singers.

Christopher Greenleaf photo

The opulent eight-voice scoring of Pierre de la Rue’s Considera Isræl promised a degree of richness; instead, it introduced a quiet severity early in this evening, with held-back harmonic clashes and touching emotional intimacy as the text depicted grief-laden vignettes in the fatal Philistine visitations upon Israel. De la Rue, a cherished contemporary of Josquin, made every brush stroke on the canvas of this anguished motet visible, touching. Exsultemus’s otherwise exemplary focus and intensity elsewhere in the concert faded somewhat in bringing this demanding work to life, then surged back to infuse the powerfully shifting harmonic soundscape of Incipit Lamentatione Jeremiæ Prophetæ (III) by adoptive Briton Alfonso Ferrabosco. A Bolognese native who ricocheted between Roman, London, and Lorraine employments, he owned an exceptionally distinctive compositional voice that embraced grating textures when they mirrored the text, fleetingly caressed the sweetness of a momentary clean resolution, then hurried on in impassioned, entwined sweeps of choral sound. Exsultemus’s fine reading of this extrovert evocation of official churchly grief concluded the first half.

At this point, it is appropriate to comment that our native habit of carpeting—heavily carpeting—churches is among our most anti-musical traits as a people. In the Union Church of Waban, the ensemble’s beautiful tuning and ensemble entrances, its well-judged dynamics and finishes at the ends of phrases, were exposed to the acoustic equivalent of actinic prison lights. Entirely dead acoustics cannot flatter music making, though wall-to-wall Burgundy and sumptuous cushions may impart a sense of lounge-like comfort to congregations. Exsultemus merits applause for its effective battle to be heard in beauty. Its professionalism and rigorous preparation allowed not a crack in ensemble.

The concluding three works, bearing in mind the narrowness of affect the

lamentations as a type imply, thrice surprised listeners. One of Spain’s itinerant a cappella masters, Pablo Bermúdez, left both complete and partial motets and settings in cities as far from each other as Málaga, Puebla, Guatemala, and Granada. His incomplete Incipit Lamentatione Jeremiæ Prophetæ, in which multi-voice blocks of homophony within the erring polyphonic strands impart a sustained state of reflection, offered moments of luminosity and painterly meticulous evocation of the text. No greater contrast with the Bermúdez can be imagined than the penultimate, madrigalesque  secular Venetian lament by Andrea Gabrieli, papa to Domenico. Sassi, palæ, sabbion is a brief, exquisite jewel, the cheeriest evocation of the departed —much-loved San Marco mæstro di cappella Adrian Willært – of the evening, and perhaps of all 16^th-c. polyphony. Exsultemus’s quintet launched into this grechesca with mild abandon, lavishing care and expression on the sonorous, gently swirling Venetian dialect, no doubt enjoying relief from the grays and shadows of the rest of the program.

Who but Palestrina could wash a final setting of Incipit Lamentatione Jeremiæ Prophetæ in luminance and radiance? The stylistic intensity of the preceding Lamentations faded away with the first filigrees of this 8-voice jewel of the genre, a view of the text that allows for, even summons, the notion of hope amid the bleak linguistic pedestals upon which perch all the tragedies implicit in the Jeremiads.

Exsultemus, undeterred by the unfortunate acoustics in which it sang, simply glowed throughout this difficult and demanding program. The group’s comfort in the music and its delight in its unfolding was communicated to the audience, who rather liked what they heard.

Veteran recording engineer Christopher Greenleaf collaborates with chamber, early, and keyboard musicians in natural acoustic venues on both sides of the Atlantic. He is active as a writer, translator, photographer, and acoustic consultant.

The Carthage Consort of Viols, formed by popular area performers Jane Hershey, Laura Jeppeson, and Emily Walhout in 2005, made the first of their five performances for this program at Carlisle’s First Religious Society, on Thursday, 14 January.

Laura Jeppeson, Jane Hershey, Emily Walhout- The Carthage Consort of Viols in rehearsal (Christopher Greenleaf photo)

They set about the intriguing task of presenting a healthy sampling of the first body of English viol consort music with conviction and sureness. We today are unavoidably ignorant of the social and linguistic fabric out of which these many styles arose, of course. The Carthage Consort invested these diverse approaches to writing for the early but already full-fledged viola da gamba with elegance and dynamic nuance that irresistibly invited listeners to soar over opulent, complex, sometimes severely restrained soundscapes that are otherwise but faded ink on yellowed paper and parchment.

Scott Metcalfe’s exceptionally fine notes unfolded for program readers the transition from Moorish Spain’s vihuela de mano, an ancestor/cousin of the early guitar, to the upright and bowed vihuela de arco. This metamorphosis is likely to have taken place in Italy around the mid-15th century. The new instrument, initially in just one size, quickly evolved into a family of three principal sizes—treble, tenor, bass— that persisted until the viol’s ultimate decline in the middle decades of the 18th century. The princely wedding that brought Catalina de Aragón y Castilla to Tudor England in 1501 may have caused or coincided with the arrival of the first viols, or at least the introduction of the first highly visible ones, in a land on the verge of a veritable explosion of sumptuous musical activities at court and in noble households. An overview of the astonishing richness of this first burgeoning of English string consorts has been wonderfully frozen in time in a large assemblage of manuscripts known as Henry’s Book. When Catherine, first and highest-born of the celebrated six wives, was still young and at court, would she have not heard those parts of this collection already extant by then? Glorious, poignant solace for her following quarter-century of kingly disfavor!

The treasure trove in the Book encompasses music from geographically diverse sources by great musical minds of two centuries. Some of the works are likely to have been text-based originally, others are clearly adaptations of music for other instruments, and a good many of the later additions are original compositions for viol consort. Wealth!

The first masters to write extensively for the viol drew on an impressive range of styles with individualistic textures, at times idiosyncratic elective ornament, delicate internal tempo relationships, and consciously anachronistic borrows from older repertoire. The earliest composer on the program, John Dunstable, was born (ca. 1390) while a generation who knew Crown defender Owen Tudor, founder of what became the successor royal dynasty, was still alive. Song transcriptions, Netherlandish-Flemish imports, and chapel polyphony that took wing into profane environs sounded forth, explaining vividly why the likes of Agricola, Isaac, Ockeghem, and Obrecht (with the irrepressibly fruitful “anonymous”) remained big names in later generations. Among the most heartfelt and appealing pieces of the first half was William Cornysh’s Fa-la-sol. Sure-fingered, beautiful phrasing by the players conferred a memorable glow on this extended work by a supreme polyphonic master. The Carthage Consort again demonstrated the exquisite refinement and polish of musical minds in the 15th century with a work hesitantly ascribed to the shadowy late-15th-c. French or Walloon figure, Malcort, his haunting Malor me bat.

In this concert, duos for two tenors or for tenor and treble leavened the predominant threesome textures, which were similarly varied. To follow two tenor viols dancing among changeful tessituras while a treble soars above them, or as the keening high instrument plunges to intertwine almost lasciviously with them is to be challenged, as a listener, to participate in the unfolding of the score in ways exactly comparable with the mingled coursing of voices in the polyphonic choral music of that age. This is rewarding in the extreme. It also leads one to quick realization of the investment in stylistic fluency, mechanical agility, and matching of interpretive approaches necessary to pull off what is, after all, music of sustained virtuosity. It is not the virtuosity of cascading 32nds, but the skill required when bow and string weave strands whose every note must match the gesture, the precise contextual tuning of the moment, the fey hand-off of leading or commenting voices. This the mesdames Walhout, Jeppeson, and Hershey did with visible ease. Their deft, subtle playing spread smiles and shared delight among the audience.

The very different and, to the modern ear, easily accessible tone of the 16th century asserted itself in the second half. Purely instrumental Fantasias (Byrd, Holborne, Blankes, Bull) and Duos (Ferrabosco, Harding) counterweighted the numerous songs and borrowed dance tunes. A passionately personal voice predominated, a romantic self-awareness that was comfortable pining—always in good company, of course—for the sweet death of love, and of sustaining literary states of longing that bore no resemblance to the dire, poignant wasting away of love-struck 13th-century trouvères.

Christopher Greenleaf photo

Most of the program’s final third was much later than the music preserved in Henry’s Book. These near-modern settings completed the Carthage Consort’s overview of the viol’s beginnings in Henry’s and Elizabeth’s days, which were also the instrument’s glorious apogee. Henry VII himself was the author of the evening’s bookend pieces, indeed of some 33 scores in his Book. As the performers remarked during one of their amusing and informative introductions, this king of England made a tremendous impression on all who knew him. He was a good deal more intelligent than crowned heads are wont to be, announced a number of contemporary accounts, and his musical skills of execution were apparently on a par with those of many a professional.

Think on this: The composers of the first half were the last generations to guarantee their fleeting musical thought a degree of permanence by committing it to parchment, the finely scraped skin that had borne England’s famed medieval wool. The new and still rather costly, not to mention socially revolutionary, medium of paper began to serve Henry’s generation and was universal by the death of his feisty daughter Elizabeth in 1602. Henry’s Book and the viol consort scores of the Elizabethans hold more than just a snapshot of a suite of musical ages.

The English instrumental voice, a cautious and slow thing to develop in the early to mid-16th century, swelled into a richness and vibrancy capable of touching 21^st-century listeners directly and powerfully. The viol consort was at the very heart of this upward surge. This was a splendidly researched and played program, a credit to the Carthage Consort of Viols and to the Cambridge Society for Early Music.

Veteran recording engineer Christopher Greenleaf collaborates with chamber, early, and keyboard musicians in natural acoustic venues on both sides of the Atlantic. He is active as a writer, translator, photographer, and acoustic consultant.