I’m taking a break from my records-that-mattered-with-reminiscences series, and talking a bit about present, rather than past, listening.
Recently ricocheting around the living room courtesy of Fasolt and Fafner, the twin B&W 803Ds: two Passion settings and one Broadway musical. Both passion settings are relatively contemporary (at least compared to Bach’s St. Matthew, grandaddy of all Passion settings), while the Broadway musical is an oldie that has faded away to a sepia-tinted whisper.
Osvaldo Golijov: La Pasión Según San Marcos
María Guinand conducts members of the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, with vocal soloists, percussionists and chorus
Here’s a new 2010 performance of Golijov’s 2000 blockbuster, until recently available only on the premiere 2001 recording on Hänssler. Now comes this studio rendition, incorporating some recent revisions, on Deutsche Grammophon, combined with a DVD that gives us a live performance from Amsterdam conducted by Robert Spano. That makes for three commercial recordings of the work available, and the more the merrier as far as I’m concerned.
Golijov’s St. Mark setting is, in a word, flabbergasting. Instead of being a stately march through chorales and choruses and recitative and arias, as in the old European style, or a prickly screech-fest from some smug academic atonalist, this St. Mark takes its inspiration from the streets of Latin America, from Afro-Cuban drumming, from rhumbas and tribal chanting and sizzling nightclub music. Stuffiness is banished and the whole pulsates with excitement, power, unabashed emotion and—hell, why not say it—passion. Just as the heart of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion occurs with "Ebarme dich", Peter’s lament over having denied Jesus, Golijov provides a hushed moment of tenderness with Lúa descolorida, the corresponding passage in his St. Mark setting.
But Golijov has access to a multiculturalism beyond Bach’s wildest imagination, and he uses that flexibility brilliantly. Although most of the St. Mark is in Spanish, it contains moments in Latin and, most significantly, the final paragraph is in the language Jesus actually spoke, Aramaic. Throughout the 90-minute work a dizzying collection of wildly disparate elements—as in plainchant rubbing shoulders with flamenco and African tribal chanting and silky harmonized choruses and minimalism and wall-rattling drumming and soprano lullabies and rhumbas and post-modernist romanticism and accordion solos (!!) and Latin hip-hop—blend into a compelling whole. There isn’t a dull moment to be found, nor any discernible flagging in inspiration. It rolls onwards irresistably, sometimes blasting, sometimes caressing, sometimes dancelike, sometimes dreamlike.
This one is an absolute must. Be sure to listen to it all the way through, preferably in a setting where you can crank up the volume and let all that Afro-Cuban drumming do its thing. My jaw more or less hit the floor and stayed there with "Morning: Before Pilate" as the choir goes suddenly African on its way through the text "Art Thou He? Art thou the King of the Jews?" — followed by an unbuttoned instrumental flamenco accompanied by the entire company stamping their feet in complex cross-rhythms, as a representation of (believe it or not) Jesus’s silence before Pilate. Just a bit later, the crowd blasts its way through Baja Jesus! Baja de la Cruz para que Israel pueda creer! (Descend, Jesus! Descend from the cross so that Israel may believe) in some of the most gut-wrenching and powerful writing I’ve heard in years.
Save up. Get it. Drench yourself in it. You’ll thank me.
Online sources:
- Amazon ($35.98): http://www.amazon.com/Golijov-Pasi%C3%B3n-seg%C3%BAn-Marcos-Deluxe/dp/B0036OC9ME/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1272249868&sr=8-1
- ArkivMusic ($32.99): http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/album.jsp?album_id=225423
- Passionato, as a FLAC download (for only $18.99! — but no DVD): http://www.passionato.com/album-detail/AY4bcd74e80e66f/
****
Frank Martin: Golgotha
Daniel Reuss conducts the Capella Amsterdam, Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, and the Estonian National Symphony
Another Passion setting, but flipped a full 180 degrees from Golijov’s testosterone-injected witches’ brew. Here is a single voice in a single language from a single culture, everything fussed and spiffed to the last jot and tittle and absolutely nothing even remotely resembling impropriety allowed into the proceedings. We’re talking serious anal-retention here, severe constipation even.
Martin’s Golgotha is reverent almost to mysticism, introverted almost to frigidity, restrained almost to immobility. Lacquered, coiffed, and girdled, it glides serenely along its two-hour duration without so much as a gesture of acknowledgment to anything so vulgar as an audience, and in fact Martin never intended it to be heard in a concert setting. Golgotha is truly liturgical music, in the same sense as those extended organa of Perotin during the late Notre Dame period, in the same sense as the liber usualis, in the same sense as all-day-long Tibetan temple chants.
Which means that it’s…well…pretty damn boring. Certainly there are some gorgeous moments, in particular the opening movement (which makes more than a bow in the direction of Bach’s St. John Passion), as well as the passages concerning Jesus before the Sanhedrin and Caiaphas. Martin’s Francophonic harmonic language is always a pleasure. But overall it’s the musical equivalent of an Avedon model: utterly polished, utterly varnished, utterly lifeless despite a certain abstract beauty. Furthermore, long passages of static recitative combined with all that musty churchy reticence guarantee that sustained listening will pose a challenge.
It’s probably best suited to dedicated Catholics (not me) and/or Frank Martin devotées (not me, either.) I kept nodding off and tuning out. The audio, however, is stellar, vintage Harmonia Mundi opulence, and the packaging/documentation is absolutely first-rate.
- $28.78 on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Martin-Golgotha-Judith-Gauthier/dp/B003064CXC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1272250970&sr=1-1
****
Jerome Kern, P.G. Wodehouse, and Guy Bolton: Sitting Pretty
John McGlinn conducts the Princess Theater Orchestra with a cast including Judy Blazer, Davis Gaines, and Roberta Peters
This 2-CD set has been around for twenty years, but I never wanted to bother with it as long as it cost upstairs of $30.00—way too pricey for flimsy piffle. However, a decent used copy for under $10 popped up at Streetlight Records on Market, so I decided to give it a whirl.
In case you’re not up on early Broadway: Sitting Pretty is the last collaboration between Kern, Wodehouse, and Bolton in the so-called "Princess Theater" musicals. These were not-quite-fish-nor-fowl jobs—think of them as the missing link between operetta and the American musical. By the time of Sitting Pretty (1924) the series had overstayed its welcome; Broadway was exploding with jazz-soaked scores from the likes of Cole Porter and the Gershwins, and Kern’s fluffy romps with their pretty tunes and tea-sipping ingenues had become faded, if charming, anachronisms.
I’ll put my cards on the table here and state that the Princess Theater musicals aren’t worth reviving, unless you’re just nuts about quaint, foolish, and fundamentally incoherent musical shows. Nor has the music held up all that well, especially not compared to Kern’s later achievements (which include Show Boat, remember.)
That said, Sitting Pretty is worth hearing—once. It’s a sweet little puppy for the most part, but the sweetness becomes cloying after a while. I made it all the way to the end, but I was gritting my teeth after the first hour. God almighty: the banality, the predictability, the tedium. From time to time a bit of sparkle would emerge, in particular an adorable romp called Bongo on the Congo, in which three chipper guys sing something like 25 ever-so-slightly risqué verses about the lovely and willing ladies of said Bongo on said Congo. Unfortunately, Bongo on the Congo was Disc 1, Track 5—and I had to make it all the way to Disc 2, Track 10.
The male lead’s stentorian hamminess didn’t help matters much, either—a classic example of an operatic singer trying to "go pop". All in all, he came across as Wotan wandering into a production of The Merry Widow, trying desperately to fit in, and failing miserably.
****
Finally: the title of today’s article ends with "One Passionato." What’s that about?
It’s about the new classical-only download site Passionato, that’s what. Go here. A rich new source for classical downloads is pretty cool all by itself, but here’s even better news: the lion’s share of Passionato’s downloads are available in FLAC format! That’s stellar—because FLAC is a "lossless" format (like Apple Lossless) that will play back identically to the original CD. No mp3 compression, hallelujiah.