Brahms' Symphonies with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe

I have just finished listening to the 4 Brahms Symphonies played the the Chamber Orchestra of Europe conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. I accomplished this over 4 mornings while practising Yoga. I have been taking a couple of classes each week at a seniors centre with an excellent instructor who, being herself a senior, is sensitive to the needs and individual limitation of her students. In any event, I’ve discovered (duh) that my progress is greater when I practice daily at home. I listen on bluetooth in-the-ear headphones, not Air Pods but like that.  We encountered these versions of the Brahms Symphonies on the Mezzo Channel of which I wrote in my last post. It was a video version of the 3rd Symphony and it was marvellous. The Chamber Orchestra of Europe is a kind of fancy pick-up orchestra run by its members. It doesn’t have a regular conductor or venue but is based in the UK. It does make recordings for Deutsche Grammophon, a very prestigious company. The video is available on YouTube although the audio is compressed so not as good as what we heard. 

I’ve been listening on YouTube Music which has better audio quality than their video channel. 

Music types will know that the 4 Brahms symphonies are among the cornerstones of the Romantic orchestra’s repertoire with, for example Beethoven’s 3rd through 9th or the 6 symphonies Tchaikovsky. (Some will recoil at my mentioning of those two composers in the same metaphorical breath.)

As a youngster, from what I had heard of Brahms’ music, I thought it heavy and stodgy. My understanding of Brahms’ range as a composer came when I performed, with the Tudor Singers of Montréal, both sets of Liebeslieder Waltzer (Love Song Waltzes) and the Ziegeurner Lieder (Gypsy Songs). I got to sing the solos in the latter. These works, for SATB (choir or quartet) are anything but heavy and stodgy and established the composer’s fame and reputation in 19C Vienna.

The Chamber Orchestra of Europe, in this incarnation, is not a small group. There are 8 first violins and the appropriate corresponding number in the other string sections. The winds and percussion are dictated by the score so they’d be the same with more string players but this would, obviously, effect the balance. 

Yannick Nézet-Séguin

The audio take is very, very clear, and not muddied at all by the reverb of the hall, the Festspielhaus in Baden-Baden. Moreover, under Maestro Nézet-Séguin’s direction, the music is presented in extraordinary detail. I’ll have to listen again with the score in front of me to understand how much of what one hears is Brahms’ markings and how much of it is the conductor’s interpretation. The music is alive in a way I’ve rarely heard in listening to recordings of orchestral music.

I wouldn’t recommend Brahms’ symphonies to a novice classical music listener (I’m working on An Intelligent Person’s Reintroduction to Classical Music). Something more straightforward would be more appropriate but I recommend these recordings to anybody, anyway. They really are something special.

Opera on Mezzo Channel

I'm shocked! Shocked to find gambling if going on in here! 

No, wait, sorry. I'm shocked that I haven't written a new post in more than a year. Here goes...

Some time ago we were getting free weeks of the Mezzo Channel on Bell Fibe and recorded some of the things that were interesting to us. I found my way around the Bell site and discovered we could, in fact, subscribe for $5 a month! (Crave would cost us more than $20/month.)

For those interested in concert music, opera, dance and/or jazz it's a great deal.

There are downsides to watching the operas because there are rarely subtitles attached from the original recordings and, when you us the Fibe subtitle feature (which works perfectly well on other channels) the order of words is so garbled it can be hard to make sense of them. Otherwise, full length recordings of opera production from major European opera houses. What's not to like?

We watched Die Fledermaus on 2 consecutive evenings from Opéra Royal de Wallonie-Liège. It was sung in German. There were English subtitles attached from the original recording and singers with substantial European careers in a contemporary setting. A dozen dancers turned up, sometimes as real characters, sometimes as fantasy ones commenting on the text. It was funny. It was the most entertaining Fledermaus I've seen.

We also watched Act 1 of Queen of Spades, an opera with which I was not familiar. The chorus makes it clear that the scene is a park. It's a beautiful day. Toward the end of the scene a storm comes up and everyone runs for shelter. 

In this production there's a dark stage and 6 tables in what is clearly a downmarket casino. That's where the principals play out the act. The chorus appear from the back of the stage and then disappear the way they came. Why would the director of the opera ignore the obvious setting described in the score? It's hardly the first time a stage director has put his/her concept above that of the librettist and composer.

Turandot, from the Vienna State Opera was worse. Aside from four principals everyone, soloists, dancers, supers and chorus, was dressed in identical contemporary suits with silly wigs. I have no idea what the setting was. The stage was often empty. Characters entered and exited through locker doors, a kind of vomitorium and an upstage door to the executioner. Turandot was accompanied by four dancers with huge doll masks. Supers paraded around with, eventually, dozens of boxes containing the heads of decapitated suitors.

The singing was sensational. Asmik Grigorian sang a wonderful Turandot (she also sang in the Queen of Spades, above, from Munich). Jonas Kaufmann was Calaf. Kristine Mkhitaryan was Líu. The Ping, Pang and Pong were great and executed some complex choreography while singing their scenes.

But, again, what was the stage director thinking when it's clear that the opera is set in a timeless ancient China and that it is a kind of fable.