Oregon Symphony / Carlos Kalmar ASPECTS OF AMERICA: PULITZER EDITION

                                      ASPECTS OF AMERICA: PULITZER EDITION

Sharon Kam / Gregor Bühl / London Symphony Orchestra AMERICAN CLASSICS

This is a unique collection of American works involving the clarinet‚ brilliantly performed‚ but sadly‚ it is a disc very hard to enjoy because of the unrelentingly aggressive quality of the recording. Most of this music is jazz­influenced‚ which may account for the balance of a recording‚ made in the Olympic Studios in London‚ which makes it feel as though you are shut up in a matchbox with very loud and persistent performers. Maybe that is the way some jazz­lovers want to hear their music‚ but these are works that‚ for all their brash qualities‚ demand the subtlety of light and shade‚ of dynamics less than fortissimo‚ and they hardly get that here. For all the virtuosity and feeling for idiom in Sharon Kam’s solo work‚ it sometimes feels as though one is actually inside the clarinet.
I remember feeling how unnecessarily dry and aggressive the recording was for Simon Rattle’s ‘Jazz Album’ – listed in selected comparisons above – which includes Bernstein’s Prelude‚ Fugue and Riffs in a superb performance with Michael Collins as soloist. But going back to that makes me realise how‚ close as the sound is‚ it has more air round it than this one‚ and reveals far greater subtlety of shading in Collins’s solo work than is revealed in Sharon Kam’s. As for Sabine Meyer’s performance on her ‘A Tribute to Benny Goodman’ album‚ it masterfully reveals the work as having far more qualities than surface brilliance.
When it comes to Copland’s Clarinet Concerto‚ the contrast between Meyer and Kam is even more marked. The wonderfully smoochy melody of the long opening section‚ which is so seductive with Meyer‚ is here made to sound sour and unpleasant‚ and for that I am not inclined to blame the soloist‚ but simply the recording. From their scrawny sound you would never recognise string­players from the LSO either. The second of the four movements of Morton Gould’s Derivations is a ‘slowly moving contrapuntal blues’‚ but it comes across as depressingly arid. Rhythmic control in the fast music here and throughout the disc cannot be faulted‚ but how wearing it all is.
The Gershwin songs are performed in free‚ jazz­elaborated arrangements by the conductor John Cameron and Gregor Bühl (Summertime)‚ and there you might argue that the close­up sound is more appropriate‚ but even in Artie Shaw’s Clarinet Concerto – by far the least adventurous music on the disc‚ yet a skilful mix of classical and jazz procedures – one craves for more subtlety in the sound. And how odd that no hint is given in the booklet of Kam’s background or achievements. (Gramophone)

Benjamin Grosvenor DANCES

Benjamin Grosvenor’s selection, simply entitled ‘Dances’, is lovingly planned rather than random. Ranging from Bach to Morton Gould, there are subtle reminders that, even if Chopin does not follow Bach ‘as the night the day’, you still recall Chopin’s love of Bach. Early Scriabin remembers Chopin, his Mazurkas written long before he developed or regressed into an obsessive mysticism. Chopin, too, was central to Granados’s inspiration (his Escenas románticas end with a graceful bow and tribute to Chopin called ‘Spianato’). Finally, the Schulz-Evler Arabesques on The Blue Danube, the Albeniz-Godowsky Tango and Morton Gould’s Boogie Woogie Etude – a free blossoming into a glorious liberation.

Having recently celebrated a disc largely devoted to one of Janáček’s darkest utterances, it is with a spirit of uplift that I now find myself listening to performances that are carried forwards on an irresistible tide of youthful exuberance. With no need of the international competition circuit to lift or lower his career, Grosvenor bypasses that ever-controversial arena to give performance after performance of a surpassing brilliance and character. However hard the slog in the practice room (such dazzle and re creation result from intense discipline), there is a sense of joyful release, of music-making free from all constraint.

Grosvenor’s Bach (the Fourth Partita, the most substantial item on the disc) is a vivid contradiction of a quaint, long-held view that Bach was essentially an academic, once unaffectionately known as ‘the old wig’, who provided useful contrapuntal fodder for exams. Such views long ago toppled into absurdity and like, say, Schiff and Perahia (though with an entirely fresh stance of his own), Grosvenor gives us Bach, our timeless contemporary. What drama and vitality he finds as he launches the Overture, what a spring – even swagger – in his step in the Courante, what unflagging but unforced brio in the final Gigue. And then you remember his Sarabande, where his pace and energy are resolved in a ‘still small voice of calm’. Dry-as-dusts may rattle their sabres but, like Horowitz, who confounded the pundits with his crystalline Scarlatti, Grosvenor creates his own authenticity, revelling in music of an eternal ebullience and inwardness, and erasing all notion of faceless sobriety.

This is followed by a wide but relevant leap to Chopin. The Op 22 Grande Polonaise may pay tribute to Chopin’s early concert-hall glitter (his opening salvo in the Etudes, Op 10, is a reworking of Bach’s first Prelude, also in C major, from his ‘48’) but even here Chopin can reflect his cherished memories. Grosvenor keeps everything smartly on the move (he is the least sentimental of pianists), spinning the composer’s vocal line in the introductory Andante spianato with rare translucency and with decorations cascading like stardust. There is never a question of attention-seeking, of ‘what can I do with this?’. Such things have no place in Grosvenor’s lexicon and everything is as natural as breathing. Textures, too, are as light as air, after a commanding summons to the dance floor, and both here and in the more mature Op 44 Polonaise there is an almost skittish erasing of all possible opacity. Again, detail is as acute as ever, with flashing octaves complemented by a magically sensitive central Mazurka and a sinister close, suggesting a dark undertow to Chopin’s all-Polish defiance (for Schumann the Polonaises were ‘cannons buried in flowers’).

Three Scriabin Mazurkas from his Op 3 remember Chopin with their characteristic major-minor alternations, the Sixth with its gazelle-like leaps followed by the Fourth and Ninth, alive with an already distinctive voice. In Grosvenor’s hands the A flat Valse becomes one of Scriabin’s most intoxicating creations and so, too, do Granados’s Valses poéticos. And while there is nothing so specific as the above-mentioned term ‘spianato’, there is still a sense of a distant relation to Chopin.

Finally, the Schulz-Evler Arabesques on The Blue Danube, once described as ‘sending fabulous spangles of sound spinning through the air’ in its introduction, followed by Grosvenor’s seemingly inborn elegance and sophistication in the waltz proper. The Albeniz-Godowsky Tango may be less sultry and insinuating than some (I have Cherkassky’s winking and teasing magic in mind) but Grosvenor’s cooler view is exquisite in its own entirely personal way. Then on to a fizzing finish in Morton Gould’s Boogie-Woogie Etude, and a headlong charge with still enough colour and variety to bring even the most staid audience to its feet.

Benjamin Grosvenor may well be the most remarkable young pianist of our time. And for him, choosing from his already extensive repertoire music for future recordings will surely be a labour of love. Decca’s sound is excellent and this is a disc to prompt wonder and delight in equal measure.(Gramophone)