VERBIER FESTIVAL 25 Years of Excellence

This limited 4-CD edition of previously unreleased live recordings from the Verbier Festival celebrates the festival’s 25th anniversary.
Featuring admired DG artists as Martha Argerich, Yevgeny Kissin, Mikhail Pletnev, Bryn Terfel, Daniil Trifonov, Yuja Wang and conductors Valery Gergiev, Gustavo Dudamel, Kent Nagano and Kurt Masur in performances of both core classics and lesser-known works from the orchestral, concert, chamber and operatic repertoires.
Since 1994 the Verbier Festival has transformed a small Swiss Alpine resort into a unique hothouse for musicians to explore new repertoire and new partnerships, always with revelatory results. Founder Martin T:son Engström’s ambitious idea to create a summer festival in the Swiss Alps with a resident youth orchestra and an academy has for 25 years encouraged musical excellence and created a platform for young musicians to learn from the world’s finest artists, as well as offering audiences a dynamic, music-centered experience. A quarter century after the first festival, Verbier’s magic continues unabated and surely will do for years to come.

“I’ve been coming to Verbier since I was 21 and it was there that all these fantastic musicians who lived in my head became real. Verbier is so magical for me – it always feels like coming home, or a fun vacation with my closest friends.” Yuja Wang

Mikhail Pletnev / Russian National Orchestra SHCHEDRIN Carmen Suite - Naughty Limericks - The Chimes

By coincidence‚ just before hearing this disc I chanced upon Stan Kenton’s all­Wagner LP from the 1960s (STO2217). ‘File under jazz’ says Capitol’s spine‚ but Kenton’s evocative handling of Tristan’s Prelude is anything but ‘jazzed up’. In fact‚ if you take the OED’s secondary definition of jazz as ‘fantastic designs or vivid patterns’‚ Rodion Shchedrin’s 1967 Carmen Suite is a lot more jazzy than Kenton’s contemporaneous Tristan. It’s also brash‚ gimmicky and more obviously out for effect. And yet the formula sort­of works: strings (here spatially divided) and percussion shuffling hot­foot through some of Bizet’s best tunes.
The Introduction becomes a door chime of the ‘Habanera’‚ the ‘Boléro’ is L’Arlésienne’s ‘Farandole’ (truncated to fit a minute) and ‘Toréador’ brilliantly dispatches the skeleton of Bizet’s original among the pizzicatos‚ without quoting the top line. The eerie scene between the Toreador and Carmen – here Shchedrin’s transcription really does sound very Russian – is based on music from The Fair Maid of Perth‚ but brace your ears for the clatter of bells that follows with the Adagio. You also get the Card Scene‚ the Flower Song and the finale‚ which in this extremely dynamic new recording under Mikhail Pletnev makes a more dramatic impression than Gennady Rozhdestvensky’s good old Melodiya recording. The tempo is brisker‚ and the string choirs clearer‚ but elsewhere Rozhdestvensky’s performance has marginally more ‘umph’. It’s still the most exciting Shchedrin/Bizet on disc‚ though sound­wise‚ this latest recording presents the fuller sound frame.
The fill­ups are fun‚ or at least the ‘Naughty Limericks’ (or ‘Merry Ditties’ as they were once known here) are‚ pure slapstick‚ with rasping trombones and squeeze­box rhythms. The last version I heard was Leonard Bernstein’s in the New York Philharmonic’s newest bumper collection‚ a marvellous performance‚ but Pletnev’s dryer manner also works well. ‘The Chimes’ is less fervid than on Svetlanov’s famous live Melodiya account‚ where the ringing is wilder‚ but the closing pages are very atmospheric.
DG’s recordings (Moscow State Conservatory‚ spring 1998) are more obviously staged for the ‘hi­fi’ market than other Pletnev/Russian National Orchestra recordings from the same stable – especially in Carmen – but the engineering certainly suits the music. It’s worth a spin‚ but to my ears it all sounds terribly dated‚ a bit like one of those flashback TV shows that home in on some random decade from your distant past. The tricks don’t wear terribly well‚ and you can’t say that of Stan Kenton. (Gramophone)

Daniil Trifonov CHOPIN EVOCATIONS

Daniil Trifonov’s last release was an impressive and exhilarating two-disc programme of Liszt’s Studies (10/16). It was an Editor’s Choice and shortlisted for this year’s Gramophone Awards. The only prize his latest recording will win is an egg from a curate – and a fairly hard-boiled one at that. There are already commercial releases of Trifonov in both Chopin concertos (No 1 on Dux, No 2 on Medici TV) and goodness knows how many on the DG label alone, but of all the dozens of versions of Op 21 I have listened to over the years, this latest is one of the most lacklustre. Both the orchestral and piano expositions seem devoid of purpose. This, however, is not just any orchestral exposition. This is the world premiere of the re-orchestration of the concerto by Mikhail Pletnev, one of several who, over the years, have felt that young master Chopin needs a lesson in how to use the resources available to the best advantage.

Having raised an eyebrow to the clarinet (instead of strings) as the leading opening voice, the limp first movement crawls home at 15'41" (the average is between 13'00" and 13'30") with little acknowledgement of Chopin’s maestoso. This and several other moments make this performance hors de combat as a recommended recording. Listen to the horn note at 12'24" sounding like a bedside alarm clock, or the piano’s two bars of dolcissimo and legatissimo semiquavers in the slow movement (7'09") resembling the drips from a partially turned-off tap. The brillante passage after the cor de signal measures in the finale help redeem proceedings.

It is with this latter spirit that Trifonov approaches the Variations on ‘Là ci darem la mano’, a rare opportunity to hear this played as a solo and quite possibly the finest ever committed to disc. With the orchestral interludes played on the piano, it turns the piece into a kind of ‘Pictures at a Chopin Exhibition’. The way in which Trifonov executes Var 3 and the contrasting touch and dynamics he brings to the repeat is quite masterly. Some Chopin-inspired morceaux follow – inventive programming – but when you hear two of them (the Grieg and Tchaikovsky pieces) played by Jonathan Plowright on his ‘Hommage à Chopin’ disc (Hyperion, 4/10) you wonder who has the stronger affinity with this music.

On disc 2, after a tremendously vivacious account of the Rondo for two pianos with his erstwhile teacher Sergei Babayan, Trifonov is once more in thrall to Pletnev and his version of Chopin. The opening of the re-orchestrated E minor Concerto has all the energy of someone dragging themselves off the sofa after a heavy lunch. While there are passages thereafter where everything threatens to come to a standstill, things eventually pick up, just as they do in the F minor, and normal service is pretty much resumed. But then compare Trifonov’s reverential Romance (11'06", against Argerich’s 9'24" and Kissin’s 8'26"), in which every note is squeezed dry, with Josef Hofmann’s improvisatory ease and imagination (live in 1936). By and large, Pletnev’s scoring is unobtrusive and does not overly distract, though the woodwind ensemble at the opening of the finale sounds like Chopin hijacked by Tchaikovsky. One thing is constant throughout and that is the sublimely wonderful sound Trifonov produces right through the register. When allied to the clarity and evenness of his fast passagework (2'09" to 4'52" in the finale, for instance) it makes one regret even more the exaggerations and excesses heard elsewhere.

The programme ends in the more intimate world of Mompou’s Chopin Variations (the A major Prelude from Op 28), a consummate, unfussy reading, unlike the remarkably self-indulgent central section of the Fantaisie-impromptu (Op 66, not Op 6 as labelled) quoted in Mompou’s Var 10 and which concludes these evocations. (Gramophone)