Anna Netrebko / Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala / Riccardo Chailly AMATA DALLE TENEBRE

 

AMATA DALLE TENEBRE

 

Filarmonica della Scala / Riccardo Chailly RESPIGHI

RESPIGHI

 

Filarmonica della Scala / Riccardo Chailly CHERUBINI DISCOVERIES

                                                        CHERUBINI DISCOVERIES

Riccardo Chailly / Filarmonica della Scala THE FELLINI ALBUM

This is good! Eighty-one minutes of Nino Rota’s music for the films of Federico Fellini – played superbly by the La Scala Philharmonic, conducted with relish and affection by Riccardo Chailly (he first met the composer in 1974), and given vivid, up-front sound-quality, albeit with a resonant overhang in tow.

The film music of Rota (1911-79, he wrote for the concert-hall and opera-house, too), whatever its merits in complementing the moving image, transcends the silver-screen medium for listening pleasure on its own terms (although a caveat might be a certain sameness across the whole).

Amarcord opens the show, saxophones, brass, an accordion and a mandolin to the fore (Rota’s original orchestration is used) – smoochy (this is a La Scala love-in), marching-bands (La Scala players know how to swagger), popular-song a mainstay (Stormy Weather being one), and if your dance-card isn’t full, take your partners, for Rota can tango-hoof it with the best of them.

He can also be relied upon for description, atmosphere, tunefulness, foot-tapping rhythms and a palette of colour that is generously broad-brushed. Take 8½ (Otto e Mezzo), dripping in picturesque sentiment and electric emotions, tinged ethereally – music that rip-roars and seduces in equal measure – and with the purloining of another well-known ditty (The Sheik of Araby, from 1921, perchance?) and a movement that owes to Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance.

The score for La dolce vita (as arranged into Suite form by William Ross, who also upgrades Amarcord for the final track) is immensely stirring and powerful, lyrically entrancing too, not forgetting hot-swing (trumpet and sax). As for Fellini’s Casanova, the music for it is sometimes like the aural equivalent of a distorting mirror, aided by Bruno Moretti’s scoring which includes harpsichord and bass guitar; there’s an off-kilter waltz, and much that is whimsical and always attractive, edgy and confrontational too, a range of emotions and situations – makes me want to see the film!

Finally, The Clowns – if you like Shostakovich in Dance/Film/Jazz mode (Chailly already has a trio of such Albums available), then you are in business; the music tumbles along irresistibly along, with an element of exotic buffoonery, and introducing Fučík’s Entry of the Gladiators (circus music par excellence) – a bit of a Thieving Magpie was Rota, but not from Rossini (that I came across here). (Colin Anderson)

Coro e Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala / Riccardo Chailly MESSA PER ROSSINI

                                                                                                        Sant’Agata, 17 November 1868
Dear Ricordi, 

To honour the memory of Rossini I would like the most distinguished Italian composers (starting with Mercadante, even if it’s only for a few bars) to compose a Requiem Mass to be performed on the anniversary of his death. 

I would like not only the composers, but all the performing artists to make a contribution towards the costs incurred, as well as giving their services free of charge. I do not want any foreigner, any hand alien to our art, no matter how powerful, to help us. In that case, I would withdraw at once from the association. 

The Mass should be performed in San Petronio, in the city of Bologna, which was Rossini’s true musical home.

This Mass should not be an object of curiosity or of speculation; as soon as it has been performed, it should be sealed and placed in the archives of the city’s Liceo musicale and never removed again. Exception could perhaps be made for Rossini’s anniversaries, if posterity should decide to celebrate them. 

If I were in the good graces of the Holy Father, I would beg him to allow women to take part in the performance of this music, at least this once, but since I am not, it would be best to nd someone more suitable than me to achieve this end.

It would be good to set up a committee of intelligent men to take charge of the arrangements for this performance, and above all to choose the composers, assign the pieces, and oversee the general format of the work. 

This composition (however good the individual numbers may be) will necessarily lack musical unity; but if it is wanting in this respect, it will nevertheless demonstrate how much all of us venerate the man whose loss the whole world mourns. 

Goodbye, and believe me, 

Yours, 

G. VERDI

Riccardo Chailly / Lucerne Festival Orchestra STRAVINSKY Chant Funèbre - Le Sacre du Printemps

In 2015, an early piece by Stravinsky, lost for over a century, made headlines when it was rediscovered among a pile of manuscripts in the St Petersburg Conservatory. Chant Funèbre was composed in 1908, after the death of Stravinsky’s teacher Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and it received a single performance at a concert in the conservatory the following January. But then the score and parts disappeared, and though Stravinsky himself remembered it as one of the best of his early works, the assumption was that it had been destroyed during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution.

Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra gave the first modern performance of Chant Funèbre in St Petersburg in December 2016, and subsequently the piece has been performed around the world. Decca secured the rights to make the first commercial recording, however, and it features on Riccardo Chailly’s first disc with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, devoted to early Stravinsky.

What makes Chant Funèbre so fascinating is not that it illuminates more detail of Stravinsky’s journey towards the three ballet scores for Diaghilev that would make his name, but how it reveals a path he would not explore any further. In this steady processional, the highly coloured world inherited from Rimsky is replaced by something much darker and more Wagnerian; there are hints of Parsifal especially.

Chailly follows it with three other early pieces – Fireworks and the Scherzo Fantastique, and the tiny Pushkin settings of Le Faune et la Bergère (in which the mezzo Sophie Koch is the subtly nuanced soloist) – each of which hints at what was soon to come, while Chant Funèbre very definitely stands apart.

The whole sequence, brilliantly coloured and played with immaculate precision by the LFO, takes up half of this disc. It is followed by an equally brilliant account of The Rite of Spring, though one that takes a little while to catch fire. It’s more detailed, and more measured, than the version Chailly recorded in 1985 with the Cleveland Orchestra, but equally convincing in its own way. (Andrew Clements / The Guardian)

Ramin Bahrami / Gewandhausorchester / Riccardo Chailly BACH 5 Klavierkonzerte

Performed on piano in a mainstream performance style, the five keyboard concertos of J.S. Bach are given a robust treatment in this 2011 Decca release. Pianist Ramin Bahrami and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, led by Riccardo Chailly, make no concessions to period performance practice or historically informed scholarship, so there's no attempt to render the music in Baroque style. To early music connoisseurs, this disc may be dismissed out of hand for that reason, but listeners who are open to hearing Bach's concertos in modern instrumentation, with a minimum of ornamentation and a fairly straightforward execution, will be more favorably inclined to accept Bahrami's playing. This Iranian pianist specializes in Bach's keyboard music, and his interpretations stem from his intimate involvement with Bach's music from his teens. As a mature performer who plays with energy and assertiveness, Bahrami makes the concertos feel rather urgent in their fast outer movements and alert, if not also restless, in the slow middle movements, so an intense emotional feeling seems to underlie these performances. Yet unlike some modern recordings, where the concertos can sound like Romantic renditions with big expressions and thick, homogenized orchestral accompaniment, Bahrami and Chailly keep textures light and transparent, so something closer to a Classical sound is realized. Recorded live in 2009, the sound is clear and focused, with a bright keyboard tone and vibrant strings, though the orchestra seems mixed at a lower level than the piano. (Blair Sanderson)

Kavakos / Chailly / Gewandhausorchester BRAHMS Violin Concerto - Hungarian Dances BARTÓK Rhapsodies

To hear Leonidas Kavakos play the Brahms Violin Concerto is to be newly apprised of the work’s reputed difficulties. Not that Kavakos struggles with the solo part—far from it. But he presents the myriad double-stops, compound-chords, and wide leaps with such clarity and vividness that your ear is drawn to these effects more than usual. Yet for all this, Kavakos’ rendition is a thoroughly musical one, fully cognizant of Brahms’ structure and overall symphonic plan. Riccardo Chailly’s cleanly articulated, tersely-romantic accompaniment makes an apt foil for his soloist, as do the clear textures and lean string sound he evokes from the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.

That Kavakos would choose the warhorse Joachim cadenza at first seems at odds with his interpretive stance, but his fresh approach proves otherwise. By sculpting each phrase so inventively, Kavakos rivets your attention and at times gives the impression that he’s improvising. In the songful slow movement (which showcases beautiful playing by the Leipzig winds) Kavakos soothes without sounding saccharine, while the finale crackles with life, thanks in part to the violinist inserting a bit of gypsy flair into the famous “Hungarian” tune.

This Hungarian flavor, albeit of a more rustic variety, carries over to Bartók’s Rhapsodies for violin and piano, which Kavakos and pianist Péter Nagy dispatch with jaunty bravura and folksy style. These same characteristics lend the more cosmopolitan Brahms Hungarian Dances a certain authenticity that the orchestral versions lack.

The recording places the orchestra slightly to the rear in the acoustic, but produces a satisfying full sound in louder passages (although the violin is oddly more prominent when playing with the orchestra than with just the piano). This is a fine modern Brahms Violin Concerto that can hold its own in a crowded catalog. (Victor Carr Jr)

Riccardo Chailly / Gewandhausorchester BRAHMS Serenades

Riccardo Chailly and the Gewandhaus Orchestra take another significant step in an extraordinary musical journey with the release of the two Brahms Serenades. The Serenades have been unjustly neglected and are rarely heard in concert, making them perfect repertoire for Chailly’s enquiring mind. Widely respected as a conductor with a “rare talent for transforming music ripe for rediscovery” (Gramophone), his reading of the Serenades fits with his philosophy that “all music must aspire to be ‘new music’ again”. The recording follows Chailly’s multi-award-winning sets of the Brahms and Beethoven symphonies.

Chailly’s radical approach to the symphonies produced a recording of “trademark clarity” according to Gramophone, which made the set its “Record of the Year 2014”. It also won aBBC Music Magazine Award, the jury commenting: “Chailly combines fiery athleticism with the warmly blended tonalities of the wonderful Leipzig orchestra. The results tingle with immediacy and a pulsating sense of momentum.” Now Chailly brings the same questing spirit to the Serenades. The release highlights the importance of this repertoire in Brahms’s evolution as a composer and orchestrator, making a significant statement and allowing the Serenades to emerge from the shadow of the symphonies. Newly reassessed as substantial masterworks in their own right, they show Brahms in an unexpected light: the Op. 11 offering “a brightness, waggishness and humour that would later become rare in Brahms,” in the words of musicologist Peter Korfmacher, while the Op. 16 Serenade is exotically scored for just wind and lower strings, creating a sense of pleasant shade rather than darkness. With playing that is multifaceted, multi-coloured light and delicate. “The double-bass jokes can generate their wit, the music swings, and the colours glow,” says Chailly.

With his extraordinary attention to detail and keen ear for musical nuance, Riccardo Chailly really gets to the heart of this richly rewarding music. This is the first Decca recording of these works since István Kertész recorded them in 1968. It is a worthy successor to another great Brahmsian and a historic recording which will bring new life to concert-hall rarities that are ripe for rediscovery.

“For an orchestra as steeped in the Austro-German tradition as the Gewandhaus is, playing Brahms has always been part of its raison d’être. But Chailly brings a different perspective: as with Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Mahler, his approach is both mindful of the performing traditions and critical of them in the best, most constructive way. His Brahms is neither massive nor self-consciously sculpted, but still totally coherent.” (The Guardian)