Fashions influence classical music as they do other kinds, and over the last year the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela has been a name on many enthusiasts’ lips. It’s the product of a program to educate young people, often from severely disadvantaged backgrounds, in classical music performance. A quarter of a million Venezuelan children have benefited from the scheme, known locally as the sistema, and this astonishing orchestra is one result.
Its conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, now 28, became its music director at the age of 17, and was subsequently appointed, not without controversy, by the Los Angeles Philharmonic as its director from 2009. And Deutsche Grammophon (DGM) has issued, among other items, highly praised recordings of Beethoven’s 5th and 7th Symphonies, and of Mahler’s 5th Symphony, with the Venezuelan under-25-year-olds under Dudamel’s baton.
I found their Mahler 5th riveting. They have the characteristic virtues of youth — enthusiasm, lack of embarrassment at delivering passionate and overtly “beautiful” renderings, but also a commitment in doing something — recording for an international label — for the first time. These qualities stand against the suave assurance and “professionalism” of the great established orchestras (the Vienna Philharmonic, for example, is said to be made up largely of professors of music).
If I preferred the Venezuelan Mahler to most existing versions, it’s partly because I’m not a natural Mahler-lover. I tend to prefer the confident mastery of Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, Bellini or Verdi to the contortions of early 20th century anguish. But in a sense these young Venezuelans converted me, and I have listened to this remarkable CD over and over again.
Some critics have questioned the acoustic quality of this recording, made in the Great Hall of the City University of Caracas. But I found it especially fine. There’s a very distinct rendering of instrumental tone (presumably the result of placing microphones close to the main instrumental groupings), and this combines with the dedicated abandon of the playing itself to marvelous effect. And the German names of the recording engineers show that DGM sent its own specialists to South America rather than relying on local technical talent.
The celebrated Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini paid the young Venezuelans the tribute of recording Beethoven’s Triple Concerto with them on his three-disc CD set of all Beethoven’s piano concertos (DGM 477 7244, released July 2008). DGM has made this artist central to its current catalog, and his new CD of Chopin is masterly indeed.
It contains the four mazurkas of Opus 33, the three waltzes of Opus 34, the ballade No. 2, the impromptu No. 2, and the famously problematic second sonata. Pollini has observed that Chopin was a composer who only wrote masterpieces, and who never wrote anything for purely lyrical effect. And the intellectual quality of his playing, not to mention the choice of items, is a major characteristic. Pollini is ascetic and muscular, and for many listeners this will bring out an unsuspected side of the great Polish composer.
There seems no end to the pleasure delivered by Taiwan’s Evergreen Symphony Orchestra. Though they have issued many DVDs of their concerts, there are also some CDs, and one I’ve listened to recently is of a concert devoted to Dvorak given in Taipei on Oct. 19, 2006.
It contains the work with which Dvorak made his breakthrough into recognition, his Serenade for Wind and Strings of 1878, plus his Violin Concerto and 8th Symphony. The violin soloist is China’s Siqing Lu (呂思清), who engenders such extrovert enthusiasm from audiences whenever he performs in Taiwan. It’s notable that the same freshness that marks the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra also characterizes these mostly very young Taiwanese musicians.
Lastly another pair of CDs that have astonished me this month — Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, recorded by Abbado and the Vienna Philharmonic, and released by DGM in 1995. If you associate Schoenberg only with the often dissonant and abrasive 12-tone system he took to in his later years, listen to this, a massive piece of late Romanticism that took audiences by storm in the Vienna of 1913.
It’s essentially an oratorio telling the legendary story of the love of King Waldemar IV of Denmark for the young girl Tovelille (“little dove”) who he visits secretly in her castle at Gurre (hence the title “Songs of Gurre”). Tove is killed by Waldemar’s jealous wife, and after his own death Waldemar hunts the landscape with his followers in search of her wandering ghost.
Siegfried Jerusalem sings Waldemar, Sharon Sweet is Tove, and Marjana Lipovsek is the Wood Dove, whose lament for the death of Waldemar ends the first CD. The spoken narrative against an orchestral background, originally intended for a man but here finely delivered by a woman, is by Barbara Sukowa.
Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder had an enormous effect when first unveiled. Audiences cried and ovations seemed unending. With its extensive nature-mysticism and lament for a fallible humanity, it was as if listeners had a premonition of the First World War that was soon to come, and to devastate all their lives.
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