Hatto tricks

There are two Joyce Hatto scandals: (1) The late pianist’s husband, sound engineer William Barrington-Coupe, inserted sections of other pianists’ recordings, or lifted whole performances from other sources, and issued them under Hatto’s name. (2) Supposedly discerning listeners didn't catch on.

Some influential U.S. and British critics raved over Barrington-Coupe’s discs of his wife, an English pianist whose concert career was cut short when she developed ovarian cancer in the 1970s. (She died last year.) In a letter to Robert von Bahr, some of whose BIS recordings were filched, Barrington-Coupe claimed he made the substitutions when he couldn’t satisfactorily transfer cassette tapes to compact discs or when Hatto’s grunts of pain spoiled her recordings.

Gramophone magazine obtained portions of the letter after breaking the story on Feb. 15. Its coverage is at: www.gramophone.co.uk

The deception was discovered when a Gramophone critic opened a computer file of a track supposedly by Hatto, only to find the playback program identifying it as the work of another artist. Engineers then began making side-by-side comparisons of Hatto discs and commercial recordings, turning up more miscredited performances.

There’s at least one famous non-piratical precedent for splicing one artist’s work into a recording issued under another artist’s name: the 1952 EMI recording of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler and featuring Kirsten Flagstad as Isolde (EMI Classics 67626, four discs). The aging soprano was unable to reach some high notes; so the producer, Walter Legge, “backed up” Flagstad with the voice of his wife-to-be, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. The ruse went unnoticed, or at least unmentioned, until a London newspaper exposed it two years after the release.

Splicing together bits of several performances by the same artist(s) has been commonplace ever since audio production moved from direct-to-disc 78s to tape recordings. The conductor Otto Klemperer, on first encountering these studio touch-ups, declared the practice “ein Schweinerei” (a dirty trick, in polite translation), Legge recalled in “On and Off the Record,” the memoir published after his death by Schwarzkopf.

Splicing remains standard practice in commercial recordings. Even “live” discs – audio and video – are commonly collations of the best bits from several performances.

Should the critics taken in by the Hatto discs be embarrassed? To a point: They should have been suspicious of the “miracle” of an elderly, infirm pianist playing finger-busters at the level of a Yefim Bronfman (one of the pianists whose work was purlioned), not to mention displaying radically different tone and technique from one recording to the next.

I wonder, though, how many critics – even piano mavens – hearing recordings of six pianists in the same repertory, could correctly identify just one? For that matter, how many pianists could do it?

Bulk filler

The Richmond Symphony’s Beethoven Festival series has now represented the composer twice in a row with hack work – first the "Egmont" incidental music (way downhill after the overture), then a set of German dances. The Fifth and Sixth symphonies bracket these bits of very minor Beethoven on the series' schedule, and the programs range pretty far afield besides. (Shostakovich’s 14th Symphony in a Beethoven festival?)

It suffices to observe that a great composer wrote disposable stuff for specific gigs. No need to actually perform the stuff.

This orchestra plays 12 classical subscription programs per season. On a schedule that limited, there’s no good reason to play bulk filler, certainly not 200-year-old bulk filler.

That’s not to say every selection must be a masterpiece. There’s plenty of less-than-monumental music, old and new, that’s well-crafted and stimulates the imagination and is audience-friendly – and that can fit within the budgetary and artistic constraints of an orchestra playing in church sanctuaries while it awaits reconstruction of a hall.

Mark Russell Smith, the symphony’s music director, has devised some fascinating thematic programs and repertory pairings (Wagner’s "Tristan und Isolde" Prelude and Debussy’s "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun," for example) for the full-symphony Masterworks series. More of that kind of thinking needs to go into programming the chamber-orchestra series.

For starters, let ensembles select and play chamber pieces within chamber-orchestra concerts, as they did a couple of seasons ago. The rep was interesting, the performances engaged and engaging, and the practice put the spotlight on the orchestra’s principal asset: its musicians.

Review: National Symphony

with composer Mason Bates, violinist Janine Jansen
Feb. 24, Kennedy Center, Washington

The couple settled into ninth-row seats and began reading their program books. A few minutes later:

Oh, a world premiere – a ‘water symphony’ with electronica. Mason Bates, composer and electronica.

Electronica . . .

That stuff they use in, you know, trance music.

Ah. Twenty-four minutes of trance music. And then the Mendelssohn.

* * *

Anticipatory exchanges like that are probably common when Mason Bates presents his music to a symphony audience. Loudspeakers are suspended on either side of the stage, rock-concert style. The program note mentions "techno" and "trip-hop," terms understood dimly at best by people over 30. (The couple I’ve quoted looked to be in their 40s.) An expectation forms, involving (1) loudness, (2) recollection of a scene from a cop show, with throbbing music, woozy lighting and kids overdosing on a bad batch of ecstasy, (3) "What is my kid doing right now?" and/or "I shouldn’t have used so much vinaigrette on the salad."

Bates defies that expectation, among others, in his "Liquid Interface," commissioned by the National Symphony and introduced over the weekend. (I heard the third of three performances.) In four movements, timed much like a classical symphony but scored for large modern orchestra augmented by electronic sounds from a computer and drum pad, the piece evokes water in its frozen, liquid and hazy states, and in its contrasting roles as life-sustainer and destructive force.

That’s a lot of evocation to pack into 24 minutes. No chance to trance. Bates adds to the perceptual mix specific visual references and recorded nature sounds – glaciers calving (first movement); a New Orleans jazz band playing, then scattering, as Katrina bears down on the city (third movement); a languid, humid afternoon on the Wannsee, Berlin’s great lake (fourth movement).

And this has what to do with techno? Not much, other than the hardware. Bates’ musical (as opposed to sound-effects) applications of electronica in this score are rhythmic and spatial. They are applied sparingly, and are almost always subsidiary to orchestral sound. The closest encounter between orchestra and electronica occurs as violins play portamento slides off a trip-hop (slowed-down hip-hop) beat, producing a horizontal, dipping rhythm akin to the "fatback" beat of 1960s rhythm and blues (in Wilson Pickett’s "Mustang Sally," for example). Curiously, this is in the Wannsee movement, not the New Orleans one, whose jazz band plays more metrically.

Bates inserts recorded natural sounds (glaciers breaking up, water lapping) much like other composers, from Respighi to Rautavaara; and like his predecessors, he doesn’t integrate them into the musical argument. Their effect is like that of images flashing in a slide show.

"Liquid Interface" makes its representations vividly – and rather tersely, since so much is represented. It’s tempting to describe the piece as "cinematic," although much of it is too aurally involving to accompany images without getting in their way.

In most of this orchestration, the higher the volume, the longer the notes (lots of whole notes for strings), which results in mostly unhurried tempos. The busy bits, orchestral and electronic, skitter rhythmically and spray tone color. The only big, loud, dense sounds are crashing-ice and thunder-and-wind effects.

The piece struck me as cautious (or judicious, if you prefer), as if the composer weren't yet sure how much, and what kind of, electronica an orchestration, and an orchestra, and a concert hall, can handle. Conductor Leonard Slatkin also seemed to concentrate on details of voicing, balance and articulation. With the grand scheme (if any) left unattended, the piece sounds more angular and episodic, less flowing or surging, than one would expect of water music.

Four works into his electro-orchestral endeavor, the 30-year-old composer is still getting the feel of an unfamiliar and still ungainly tool. Unbridled imagination and unchecked energy in conception, and spontaneity in performance, may be too much to ask for at this stage.

"Scherzo liquido," the second and least specifically representational movement, may have a future apart from "Liquid Interface." It’s as genuinely playful as the scherzo from Mendelssohn’s "Midsummer Night’s Dream" music, and it engages orchestral musicians – Slatkin and the NSO players visibly and audibly perked up when it came around. With some tweaking at the end, it could stand alone, and could become a frequently programmed miniature.

* * *

And then the Mendelssohn: Janine Jansen, the Dutch violinist – an eyeful, you'll notice – making debuts with a number of American orchestras (New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, as well as the NSO) this season after accumulating laurels in Europe, gave this overridden warhorse of violin concertos a treatment that could be described as probing or inquisitive. Or, just as easily, as indulgent.

Producing a smallish tone and (usually) tightly focused pitch on the "Barrere" Stradivarius (1727), Jansen caressed phrases and lingered over expressive details. While brilliant when brilliance was called for, she was most compelling in quiet and quicksilver passages, the softest of which were barely audible 15 feet away.

She’s masterful at the musical stage whisper. One wonders, though, how successfully she’ll employ it as a first-string virtuoso performing with major orchestras in big halls. In this performance, Slatkin reined in orchestral tutti, but the band still sounded like a freight train bearing down on a songbird.

* * *

The program concluded with Tchaikovsky’s "Pathètique" Symphony. Don’t like it, never have, never will, left early.

Review: Richmond Symphony

Richmond Symphony & Chorus
with baritone Richard Zeller, soprano Sarah Gartshore
Feb. 23, Second Baptist Church, Richmond

Brahms’ "A German Requiem" is an acquired taste that even James Erb had to acquire. The veteran Richmond chorusmaster didn’t care for the work as a young man – getting next to this music takes some living, and some exposure to the dying; but Erb clearly has embraced it in maturity.

This weekend the Brahms embraces him. Figuratively, as he prepares to take his leave after 36 years
as director of the Richmond Symphony Chorus. And literally, as he’s singing in the tenor section.

Erb founded the Symphony Chorus in 1971 – it made its debut in Beethoven’s "Missa Solemnis," led by Robert Shaw – and he continued to direct the ensemble after his retirement from the University of Richmond faculty and the disbanding of his community chorus, CAFUR, in 1994. He will prepare the women of the Symphony Chorus for Debussy’s Nocturnes at the end of this season; but this weekend’s Brahms is his last undertaking with the full ensemble.

The chorus and orchestra, conducted by Mark Russell Smith, give Erb a richly sonorous, audibly heartfelt premature sendoff. Rarely have these voices sounded as well-blended, rhythmically pointed or emotionally engaged. Their expressive warmth largely offset the starkly bright acoustic of the Second Baptist Church sanctuary in the Feb. 23 performance. They should sound sumptuous in the sonically mellower First Baptist Church on Feb. 24.

Brahms introduced a torso of the Requiem in 1867 in a Vienna concert hall, but its first success came the following year in the cathedral of Bremen in northern Germany. That lag in appreciation may not be coincidental. Much of this music speaks intimately, and even at its loudest and most dramatic a kind of resigned serenity lies not far beneath the surface. I first heard it in a church, and have always found it more satisfying musically and more potent spiritually in that setting. (The Fauré Requiem is similarly "churchy" in its intimacy and palpable reverence.)

These performances of the Brahms are greatly enhanced by Richard Zeller, a journeyman American baritone whose voice is both dark and penetrating, and whose German is so fluent and communicative that translation is almost superfluous. (He's no less impressive in Russian repertory, judging by his performance in the Shostakovich 14th Symphony with the Richmond Symphony in January.) Deeply contemplative in "Herr, lehre doch mich, dass ein Ende" ("Lord, make me to know mine end"), robust and emphatic in "Siehe, ich sage euch ein Geheimnis" ("Behold, I tell you a mystery"), Zeller delivers one of those performances that resonate in the mind’s ear long after they conclude.

Sarah Gartshore, in the soprano solo "Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit" ("You now have sorrow"), engages the listener with less tonal richness or volume but with a portrayal of human sorrow that neither holds back nor wallows in emotive excess.

The Brahms is preceded by four short instrumental evocations of the physical universe. The sequence begins with "Chaos" from the beginning of Haydn’s oratorio "The Creation," and continues with Judith Shatin’s "Piping the Earth" and the miniatures "Stars" and "Sand" by Mary Howe.

Shatin, a member of the University of Virginia music faculty, parlays an old Chinese proverb – the wind sounds different as it moves through one space or another, but nonetheless remains the wind – into an eventful tone poem, seemingly focused on the sounds of things set in motion by wind. The current itself is an almost subliminal presence.

Howe (1882-1964), born in Richmond, was a prominent musical figure in her adopted home, Washington, where she helped found the National Symphony, among other endeavors. Of greater interest to posterity, she was one of the pioneer American female composers. "Stars" and "Sand," both dating from the late 1920s, are her best-known orchestral works.

The two pieces, each lasting less than five minutes, are impressionistic treatments of their subjects. To today’s ears, they sound less like Debussy or Ravel, more like bits of a film score – well-wrought music, and well-mannered in that it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

In the first of three concerts of this program, Smith and the symphony delivered alert accounts, more refined than might have been expected as they had to balance rehearsal time between three unfamiliar pieces and a major choral-orchestral work.

The program repeats at 8 p.m. Feb. 24 at First Baptist Church, Boulevard at Monument Avenue in Richmond, and at 8 p.m. Feb. 26 at St. Michael Catholic Church, 4491 Springfield Road in Glen Allen. Tickets: $20-$60. Information: (804) 788-1212; www.richmondsymphony.com

The Feb. 26 concert will be broadcast live on Richmond’s public radio station, WCVE-FM (88.9).

Peter Ustinov in Bach

In your dreams, Bobby McFerrin . . .
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhcJPEPZrX4

Elsewhere

My profile of Mason Bates, the Richmond-bred composer whose "Liquid Interface" is being premiered this weekend by the National Symphony in Washington, is in print in Style Weekly and online at:
http://www.styleweekly.com/article.asp?idarticle=13884

Another look at Bates and his music, by Stephen Brookes in The Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/20/AR2007022001645.html

Also in Style Weekly, some background on Mary Howe, the Richmond-born composer of the early 20th century, whose tone poems "Stars" and "Sand" are being revived this weekend by the Richmond Symphony, online at:
http://www.styleweekly.com/article.asp?idarticle=13885

Review: eighth blackbird

eighth blackbird
with soprano Lucy Shelton
Feb. 21, Modlin Arts Center, University of Richmond

The sextet eighth blackbird, the reigning proponent of contemporary American chamber music, wrapped up this season's concerts in its ongoing residency at the University of Richmond with the second of its “strange imaginary animals” programs sampling works from the group's recent recording of that name (Cedille 094). Guest soprano Lucy Shelton was featured in two song cycles, not on the disc.

Shelton joined the ensemble two years ago in Richmond for the premiere of puppeteer Blair Thomas’ staged version of Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire,” since taken on the road to much acclaim. In this program, she displayed the same gift for dramatic vocalized narrative, and extraordinary emotive and tonal range, in Lukas Foss’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (1978) and Roberto Sierra’s “Cancionero Sefardi” (1999).

Foss’ song cycle on Wallace Stevens’ poem is perhaps the most durable of many musical settings of these verses. (eighth blackbird drew its name from the eighth stanza 18 years after this piece was introduced.) Foss' settings are busily colorful, with an elaborate palette of sound effects, the most novel of them produced by applying Japanese bowl gongs and other percussion to the strings of the piano.

Pianist Lucy Kaplan and percussionist Matthew Duvall played this variant of piano four-hands (“pianopercussion,” as the ’birds call it) for maximum timbral effect, but also with deference to Shelton’s treatment and projection of the text. Flute, played by Tim Munro, is more often a duet partner with the voice – almost an alter ego – than a vehicle for predictable bird calls. The singer is doubled, at a split-second's remove, in several key passages by an offstage voice – here, violinist Matt Albert singing in a fluent falsetto.

Sierra’s settings of seven Sephardic folk songs, sung in Ladino, the language of medieval Spanish Jewry, filter the vernacular tradition through a modern but not especially knotty harmonic language. Lute-like Moorish-Arabic effects produced by violin (Albert) and cello (Nicholas Photinos) in "Una matica de ruda” (“A little plant of rue”) and piano in in “El me querido bevio vino” (“My lover drank wine”) are the most immediately striking touches in Sierra’s instrumentation.

Shelton’s treatment of the words and tunes, from the exuberant to the plaintive, was both virtuosic and heartfelt. Her vocalise in "Dolores tiene la reina" ("The queen has pains") was especially bittersweet.

Of the program’s three instrumental pieces, the most emotionally potent was Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez’s “Luciérnagas” (1998), based on Carlos Henriques’ “Luciérnagas en El Mozote,” an account of a visit to a ruined village in El Salvador three years after its inhabitants were massacred by militiamen. Approaching the village, Henriques wrote, “thousands of little lights began to twinkle. The intermittent dance of fireflies illuminated the night, showing us the way to the town’s ruined church. ‘They are the souls of El Mozote!’ said Padre Rogelio Poncel,” the parish priest who survived the attack.

Sanchez-Gutierrez originally scored a ballet scenario based on the death squads that ravaged El Salvador during its civil war in the 1970s and ’80s, then was inspired by the story of El Mozote to write this more compact piece for piano, percussion, violin, cello and clarinet.

Its firefly effects – subtly pointed high-register figures darting among the instruments – give way to a flashback, representing the violence inflicted upon the villagers in harsh chords, slashing attacks and thunderous percussion interjections. Pianist Kaplan, percussionist Duvall, violinist Albert, cellist Photinos and clarinetist Michael J. Maccaferri rode the work’s sonic currents with requisite wildness but also with ears cocked for its rich atmospherics and emotions attuned to its tragic narrative.

David M. Gordon’s “Friction Systems” (2002/2005), the program’s sole item from the new album, is a tonal punch to the solar plexus, driven by a heavy, grinding, Jerry Lee Lewis-meets-musique concrète riff rooted in the piano and a broader motif for strings and winds recalling the Dies Irae, the medieval chant for the dead. Gordon supplements standard instruments with toy piano and exotica such as whirling musical tubes, and banishes string vibrato to maintain the music’s rawness.

The program’s opener, Franco Donatoni’s “Arpège” (1986), is a deconstruction of the arpeggio marked by sharp attacks, abrupt cutoffs and kaleidoscopic colors. A substantial cello cadenza, played almost romantically by Photinos, is a sensual interlude in an otherwise brainy, brittle opus.