10/10

After almost fifty years of listening to them, I would contend that three of the greatest works in all Western Classical Music are included in this new recital by Paul Lewis—Schubert’s great D.894 G Major Sonata, the D.899 Impromptus, and the D.946 Drei Klavierstücke—and in close to ideal performances. This is a mighty claim, of course, and I do not expect listeners to take it at face value—fortunately the proof is easily, and cheaply available.

I was never very convinced by Lewis’ Beethoven performances; I tried repeatedly to like his readings of both the solo and concertante works, but always came away feeling frustrated and underwhelmed. Admittedly, I have a temperamental disaffinity with Beethoven’s melodramatic psychology, but even so I find performances by Stephen Kovacevich, Andras Schiff, or particularly Ronald Brautigam far more engaging. For me to feel so positive about his Schubert, the nineteenth century composer closest to my heart, is therefore a strong endorsement. Even so, there are Schubertians and Schubertians: I never felt particularly touched by Lewis’ mentor, Alfred Brendel’s Schubert, and amazing though the notorious Richter überslow performances of the great G Major and C major Reliquie Sonatas are (4758616), his is not the Schubert I recognise. I grew up with the performances of Jörg Demus on Deutsche Grammophon, and it is to those that I would compare Lewis’ unaffected, masterly performances. His use of microrubato to colour phraseology while maintaining an unfluctuating main tempo is wonderfully effective; his ability to imbue the music with solemn beauty without pathos is outstanding.

The three Schubert Sonatas that everyone knows and loves are the final three, C minor D.958, A major, D.959, B flat major D.960. Lewis has, however, chosen to perform their precursors, the energetic D major D.850, sublime G major D.894, and the unfinished C Major Reliquie, D.840—he only plays the first two movements of this work, where Richter essayed the two unfinished final movements, ending heart-breakingly in mid-flow. I rather wish Lewis had done likewise, but one cannot have everything. Both D.840 and D.850 are emulations of Beethoven’s sonata approach—in fact, it is possible that Schubert abandoned the last two movements of D.840 as the thematic material was too redolent of Beethoven’s Op2/3 Sonata to be susceptible to true Schubertian shaping—but the sound world is entirely his own. Lewis clearly has a strong feeling for the logic of these pieces, and his ability to convey the architectural meaning while not losing an iota of expressivity is remarkable.

In contrast to the formal predeterminedness of the Sonatas, Schubert’s shorter pieces simply astonish. Often made out of deceptively simple component material, the eight misnamed Impromptus (there is not the slightest thing throwaway about these pieces) and the three Klavierstücke D.946 take the listener into a largely unprecedented realm of expressive possibility, and with an un-sonata-like compression of ideas. There are innumerable versions of these works on CD, but I have heard few performances as good as these—in fact, the Drei Klavierstücke as performed by Lewis are probably my single desert island disc. Consistent with his reading of the Unfinished D.840 Sonata, Lewis declines to play the second trio of the first of the D.946 pieces—Schubert put a line through that section in the manuscript. It seems a shame to be denied the pleasure, but it is true that doing so extends the length of the work sufficiently to cause an imbalance with the final, much briefer, Klavierstuck, with its single, extraordinary, trio.

Even legendary recordings have to be new at some point, and we may well collectively remember the release of this Schubert set as a special moment in early twenty-first century musicmaking. I certainly shall.

9/10

In the last few years there has been a laudable interest in revealing the wider scope of composers otherwise known for a narrow range of output. Tournemire’s eight symphonies, for example, or Vierne’s orchestral songs on Melba. The most recent addition to Hyperion’s Romantic Piano Concerto series is a disc entirely devoted to the piano and orchestra output of one-hit wonder, Charles-Marie Widor—known to the vast majority of us solely by his famous Toccata, and even beyond that only for his organ music. It comes therefore as something of a surprise that he wrote works in such mainstream genres as song and concerto forms. Unlike that other organist-composer Louis Vierne, who was a near-contemporary of Ravel, the clue to Widor’s music comes in his dates: 1844 to 1937; old enough to have heard Liszt play, yet long-lived enough to have witnessed the remarkable explosion of musical modernity in the first quarter of the 20^thcentury. As in Saint-Saëns’ work, there is little direct trace of the influence of such radicalism in Widor’s musical language, however, and while the two large-scale concertos sound more like Brahms than Franck, they exhibit a seriousness of approach that belies the light-weight reputation of late 19^thcentury French music, while remaining recognisably Gallic. Even the choice of keys, F minor and C minor respectively, speaks of brooding earnestness.

The First Concerto of 1876 stands in stark contrast to the roughly contemporary Piano Concerto of Benjamin Godard; there is none of the post-Felicién David exoticism, or the Berliozian picturesqueness. Apart from a whiff or the opera in the third movement, the concerto recalls Schumann above all, not just in Widor’s very accomplished piano writing, and the harmonic sense, but even in the orchestrations. This is a subtle, fluid, expansive and highly successful concerto that flatly contradicts the perception of Widor as a composer of brief, monolithic organ works. The second work on the CD, the Fantaisie in A flat major, announces its independence of the concertos both by its langorous opening and its use of a key traditionally expressive of reverie—Liszt’s famous Liebesträum for example (although, tellingly, it is still the relative major of the First Concerto’s F minor). This particular genre, the one-movement concertante Fantasy, is a particularly French idiom, similar works exist by Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Debussy, Koechlin, and even Ravel was contemplating a Basque Rhapsody. One would never pick the Second Concerto as a French work, with its ominously dark first movement—but then, it manages to be just a little too elegant to convince as Germanic—and the second movement is a marvellously limpid, almost Rachmaninovian Andante, with occasional hints that Widor had heard the emerging music of the Impresionists. Momentary colouristic touches of chromatic harmony in the final movement flag this as a 20^thcentury work, but on the whole none of Widor’s music as presented here would have caused any discomfort to a  late 19^thcentury listener.

These are truly magnificent concertos, and deserve a place in orchestral programs—it is scarcely credible that this CD offers the first recordings of the two concertos. The fleet-fingered Markus Becker makes light work of the pianistic difficulties, but one can tell just how challenging they really are; the BBC National Symphony of Wales under Thierry Fischer provide a full-blooded ripieno, and the recordings are impeccable. Until such time as these works appear in a concert hall near you, this excellent CD will have to do. Highly recommended.

The Impulse 2-for-1 series are single-CD amalgamations of two original LPs, one a major achievement of the artist, and the other a more minor release; in Alice Coltrane’s case the eponymous Universal Consciousness of 1971, and, from a year later, Lord of Lords: if Messiaen had been a jazz musician, perhaps this is what his music would have sounded like. This is not jazz for those as like to curl up with some heart-warming Coleman Hawkins, Ella Fitzgerald, or Tord Gustavsen—unless you already have some Sun Ra, or Evan Parker, or for that matter, Xenakis, on your shelf you may well hate this music. I for one love it, regarding it as the authentic expression of the collision of hardcore black jazz and the European avantgarde; perhaps even more so than Miles Davis “difficult” mid-70s albums like Dark Magus and Agharta/Pangaea. Alice Coltrane plays harp in the welter of orchestral sound that constitutes the opening track, and continues mainly on electric organ in music that travels from explosive hyperactivity to a reimagining of her late husband’s Love Supreme soundworld—this music was a big influence on both John McLaughlin and Carlos Santana, in their collaborations on Love, Devotion and Surrender, and Welcome (I also suspect Alice Coltrane’s ‘look’ was an influence on the Mighty Boosh’s Santana parody, "The Priest and the Beast"). Coltrane incorporates a range of non-Western approaches into her soundworld, from tambura drones to, in the Lord of Lords material, the mesmerically repetitive string orchestral sound of popular middle-eastern music; curiously, a strange, naïve, reworking of the opening and finale of Stravinsky’s Firebird provides aural variety, and the closing track, Going Home, unfolds ecstatically from the slow movement of Dvorak’s New World. The Lord of Lords track itself, a huge modal orchestral fresco with intermittent crazed soloing is simply astounding. Vilified when it first appeared by jazz purists for its unorthodoxy (and one suspects for the classical borrowings and notated-out string orchestra), this is certainly not easy music, but it is quintessentially of its time, and for my money, magnificent.

Other artists in the Impulse 2-for-1 series include Art Blakey, Mel Brown, Alice Coltrane, Curtis Fuller, Coleman Hawkins, Milt Jackson, Ahmad Jamal, Elvin Jones, Sonny Rollins, Pharoah Sanders, Shirley Scott, Archie Shepp, Gabor Szabo, and the McCoy Tyner Trio.

The Impulse 2-for-1 series are single-CD amalgamations of two original LPs, one a major achievement of the artist, and the other a more minor release; in Albert Ayler’s case the eponymous Love Cry, recorded in 1967/8 and released posthumously in 1971, and, from 1969, the Last Album. It is hard to know how to describe Ayler’s late music to those who haven’t heard it. Very little music is quite so exposed and apparently naïve, but the effect of unfettered joy and excited engagement is compelling. Nonetheless, these albums were made within three years of his presumed suicide. In his live concerts Ayler had been fêted, not least by John Coltrane, as one of the great free improvisers; his band, which included his brother Donald Ayler, would touch briefly on a tune and then erupt into extended frenetic improvisations that were usually beyond the point of having discernible pitch content. After some years of touring with this band, Ayler, perhaps frustrated by the limitedness of his soundworld, began to incorporate R&B elements into his music (a return to his roots, in fact), in the process alienating many of his fans. These two very late LPs have little of the free improvisation, but there is a deeply ceremonial, march-like, quality to the music—it has been described aptly as ‘Pentecostal’, but it is just as much a reflection of the New Orleans marching band traditions. The Last Album is a much stranger collection than Love Cry, opening with a haunting duet with Canned Heat guitarist Henry Vestine and Ayler on bagpipes, and continuing with a lovely track, Again comes the rising of the sun, with vocals both spoken and sung by Ayler’s partner, Mary Maria Parks. The remainder of the album has Ayler variously abandoning his notorious plastic reed and producing a genuinely beautiful sound not unlike that of Pharoah Sanders, playing more raucous R'n'B, and  more—who knows what he might have achieved had he lived longer?

Despite the rather arbitrary cult status that his music enjoys, it is unquestionably original and rewarding, unexpectedly thoughtful beneath the busy surface, and has a remarkable ability to tap into what critics have referred to as the ‘primal’—the infamous remark by John Litweiler that “never before or since has there been such naked aggression in jazz” being both unfair and misleading. Like all truly great music, Ayler’s work, for all its faults, aims to benefit and enrich the listener.

Other artists in the Impulse 2-for-1 series include Art Blakey, Mel Brown, Alice Coltrane, Curtis Fuller, Coleman Hawkins, Milt Jackson, Ahmad Jamal, Elvin Jones, Sonny Rollins, Pharoah Sanders, Shirley Scott, Archie Shepp, Gabor Szabo, and the McCoy Tyner Trio.