BERNSTEIN: Wonderful Town.
Kim Caswell (Ruth Sherwood/Violet); Audra McDonald (Eileen Sherwood); Thomas
Hampson (Robert Baker); Brent Barrett (Wreck/Guide/First Editor/Frank
Lippincott); Karl Daymond (Second Editor/Chick Clark); Timothy Robinson
(Officer Lonigan); Richard Burkhard (First Cop); Pau Bradley (Second
Cop/Second Man); Michael Dore (Third Cop/First Man/Cadet/Villager); Simone
Sauphanor (First Woman); Frances Bourne (Second Woman); European Voices;
Raschèr Saxophone Quartet; Berlin Philharmonic Orch/Simon Rattle, cond.
EUROARTS DVD VIDEO 2052298 TT: 76 min.
"Orchestral Music in the 20th Century" Volume I: Dancing on a Volcano,
with music by Wagner, Schoenberg, Mahler, Strauss, Webern and Berg.
Felicity Palmer, mezzo-soprano; Gidon Kremer, violinist; City of Birmingham
Symphony Orch/Simon Rattle, cond.
ARTHAUS DVD VIDEO 102033 TT: 50 min.
You have to love Simon Rattle’s fondness for Wonderful Town,
the 1953 Broadway musical that included some of the best ever of Betty
Comden-Adolph Green lyrics and Leonard Bernstein’s second-best
score after Candide (see my REVIEW of Rattle’s disc version from
June 1998, which featured several of the same cast members in this
December 30-31, 2002 Berlin production for a gala audience in Neue
Philharmonie). Here he eliminated the drugstore clerk as well as the “Conversation
Piece” quintet, with its droll story of a man who ordered a banana
split but left the banana uneaten, and Ruth’s synopsis of Moby
Dick (“It’s about this...whale”). Brent Barnett,
who sang the clerk’s role in Rattle’s Abbey Road recording
appears in Berlin as Wreck, the football quarterback (as well as a
Greenwich Village guide and the First Editor later on – but EuroArts’ program
book still lists him as the drug store’s Frank Lippencott! Did
they excise the scene for DVD, which only ran 3:48 in 1998 and 3:20
in the original cast recording?). The Berlin Philharmonic plays with
obvious gusto and increasing relish, using Don Walker’s original
Broadway orchestration – aggrandized, however, so everyone could
take part including the Raschér Saxophone Quartet and at least
four trumpets. I don’t have Surround Sound but found the audio
excellent in TV-stereo, even though the Christopher Street tourists
are virtually inaudible in the first scene.
Aber...and this is a Big But: Greenwich Village of seven decades ago
surely needed more help than surtitles briefly glimpsed behind the
singers, given a patois that would have bewildered me if I hadn’t
already been eight years old in 1935, plus period-lyrics that often
go at the speed of the Daytona 500. All this is accompanied by shifting
laser beams from above and the sides. Yet this remains a concert in
concert dress for an audience with a lot of bewildered faces (middle-aged
or elderly many seemed, but then you can guess what a ticket must have
cost). Rattle’s head-full of curls is now almost entirely white,
but dressed in an oversized, unpressed, black button-up jacket and
outsize black trousers, he looks like a kid who is having a simply
marvelous time playing grown-up. Tempos are roughly the same as in
his 1998 recording. to which an extra 10 minutes on DVD can be charged
to applause and a 6-1/2 minute reprise of “Conga” at the
end, onstage and in the aisle down front by audience members as well
as the cast. This is the high point, even more fun than Kim Criswell’s
version (as sister Ruth) in-context earlier on. Audra McDonald’s
Eileen is oddly subdued and again quasi-operatic, while Thomas Hampson’s
editor (in a maroon sheared velvet jacket) sounds more pompous than
before. For someone who has never seen Wonderful Town, the Berlin concert
version could be as confusing as it surely was to many in the Neue
Philharmonie. But the best of its music and lyrics, until things run
down near the end without choreography or scenery to buttress them,
are timeless (if no longer timely, and in some cases simply archaic).
With a $25 price-tag, the decision is yours. The 1990, remastered MCA-Classics
CD of the 1953 mono original is still my first choice if you can find
a copy anywhere. Otherwise, Rattle’s EMI studio version with
the “Birmingham Contemporary Music Group” and “London
Voices” gives you more of the score, plenty of spirit, and some
captivating camp by Kim Criswell.
The DVD from Arthaus Musik is Volume One of a seven-disc series (available
singly or as a boxed set) devoted to “Orchestral Music in the
20th Century” – a.k.a. “Leaving Home/Die Revolution
der Klänge” – and is called “Dancing on a Volcano.” It
takes its cue from Wagner’s “Tristan Chord,” which
Rattle explains from the piano as he plays it, and then is heard in
its original orchestral form. The sections that follow, with photographs
of the period and its dramatis personae as well as print background,
cut to Rattle – not yet “Sir Simon” – who speaks
very clearly, very slowly, and not quite as enrapturingly as Leonard
Bernstein, who obviously inspired this series. It dates from 1996 and
has been around for almost a decade, when Rattle’s hair was still
brown, and his face less creased at the corners. But none of his Wonderful
Town fun-time will you find here. The subsections are, following an
introduction and “The Tristan Chord,” “Vienna 1900”; “Arnold
Schoenberg – Leaving Tonality Behind”; “Gustav Mahler – Precursor
of Modernity”; “Richard Strauss – Progressive or
Reactionary?”; “Schoenberg again: Developing the Twelve-tone
Technique”; “Anton Webern – Master of the Small Form,” and
finally “Alban Berg – Requiem for a Fallen Culture.” All
of this in PCM Stereo with a playing time of 50 minutes. The recordings,
and we do see sections of the City of Birmingham SO playing in rich
color, were less persuasive heard through TV-stereo but should sound
better in a multi-channel setup.
There’s an anomaly, however. While we hear the Wagner, the scherzo
from Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, four of Schoenberg’s Five
Pieces, Op. 16, in their revised version, several of Webern’s
wisps, and Felicity Palmer singing Klytemnestra’s self-loathing
monolog from Strauss’ Elektra, Arthaus has a footnote saying
that “unfortunately there are no recordings available with...Rattle
conducting the complete works of Schoenberg’s Transfigured
Night and Berg’s Violin Concerto with the CBSO. We would like to thank
Naxos for the licensing of their recordings.” But which ones?
Gidon Kremer is the video violinist in part of the Berg, but he didn’t
record it for Naxos; Rebecca Hirsch was their violinist with Eri Klas
and the Netherlands Radio Orchestra, recorded in 1999 (three years
after “Dancing on a Volcano). As for Transfigured Night, Naxos
lists a 1998 recording by Takuo Yuasa and the Ulster Orchestra – two
years later than “Dancing on a Volcano.” We see the violins
playing excerpts but no faces, and playing very well in sound that
could be the CBSO’s. It does seem that the buyer deserves a more
complete explanation. Jiggery-pokery?
The Dvorák tone poems, composed in 1896 on Grimm-type folk fables
by Karel Jaromír Erben – the kind created to scare the
hell out of children – are missing several choice versions in
the current catalog, although one outlet still sells the Zdenek Chalabala
version of 1961 with the Czech Phil on Supraphon as well as Vaclác
Neumann’s 1976 remake on the same label. To get Rafael Kubelik’s
DGG readings with the Bavarian Radio SO, one needs to buy a 10-disc
volume with several Berlin Phil performances of the symphonies that
are almost manic in mood. The non-symphonic content, however, deserves
to be reissued as an “Original.” And why hasn’t Supraphon
engaged Sir Charles Mackerras to do new versions of all four tone poems,
plus the composer’s last purely orchestral work, Heroic Poem,
Op. 111, composed a year later? He is the world’s current leading
Czech conductor, despite birthing in New York state and an Australian
upbringing; he was a pupil of the storied Vacláv Talich, has
conducted definitive modern recordings of several Czech operas, and
corrected a ream of published errors in the scores of Czech and Moravian
composers.
For that matter, Rattle could have recorded Heroic Poem since
his tempos in the four Erben tone poems are just slow enough to necessitate
a
second disc (at no extra charge) – overall, six minutes longer
than Neumann’s
still-vivid-sounding versions, despite the chronic lack of bass in
so many Supraphon recordings from the Rudolphinum at Prague. I’ll
venture on the basis of this disc alone that Sir Simon is bringing
back the saturated string sound of Karajan’s years in Berlin,
which Claudio Abbado needed 12 years of hard work to balance out. In
the event, these all are glossy performances full of details that,
in themselves, can be interesting once or twice, but detract from the
gusto of Dvorák’s writing, not to mention momentum, or
the sheer eerieness in spooky pieces like The Wild Dove (which
has somehow come to be called “The Wood Dove”), The
Water Goblin or The Midday Witch. Even the jaunty
main theme of The
Golden Spinning Wheel has a Buckingham Palace cadence at odds
with the march music of a Czech monarch. One comes away feeling that
Rattle may have mastered
Moravian (he is acclaimed for his Janácek performances although
not by me) but Czech seems a foreign language musically. The closest
he comes is a Frenchfied accent, as in Ravel or Dukas. That said, “live
performance” sound from March and June of 2004 is the sweetest
and most substantial yet that EMI has captured in Berlin’s Neue
Philharmonie. As for the performances, not bad mind you; just not idiomatic
or spirited enough to charm this rabid fan of Dvorák’s
orchestral swan songs.
R.D. (August 2005)
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