Die Aufnahmen zeugen von der einzigartigen Qualität des Quartetts und bestätigen seinen singulären Ruf.

In den virtuosen Passagen unfehlbar, ist Bolet vor allem ein Magier der Übergänge, seine schwindelerregende Accelerando-, Stringendo- und Ritardando-Kunst zeugt von höchster musikalischer Intelligenz, und die macht ihm so schnell keiner nach. [...] Das Ergebnis ist faszinierend und unverzichtbar für alle, die hohe Klavierkunst schätzen.

This Audite set is invaluable, because it brings out for the first time on CD, recordings Bolet made in Berlin for German radio from the 1960s onwards.

There is real treasure trove here, and no pianophile should miss this set.

Franziska Pietsch avait signé une version stupéfiante des Sonates, la voici abordant les Concertos du même archet tranchant et plein, moins vert, moins âpre.

Mit berührender Intensität und im vollendeten Zusammenspiel mit dem Deutschen Symphonie-Orchester Berlin interpretiert Franziska Pietsch die beiden Violinkonzerte von Sergei Prokofiev.

Emigration und Heimweh

Die Konzerte von Sergei Prokofiev sind 1917 und 1935 entstanden. Kurz nach der Vollendung des ersten Konzertes hat der Komponist Russland verlassen, einige Zeit nach der Uraufführung des zweiten Werkes ist er nach langem Exil in sein Heimatland zurückgekehrt – wo ihn Stalin mit dem staatlich verordneten Konzept der „neuen Einfachheit“ zeitlebens drangsaliert hat. Im März 1953 sterben Komponist und Diktator am gleichen Tag – Ironie des Schicksals.

Lebenserfahrung

Franziska Pietsch spielt die Konzerte ohne süsslichen, sondern mit bewusst rauem Ton, der für eine enorme Expressivität sorgt. Zweifellos kommt darin auch die besondere Lebenserfahrung der Geigerin zum Ausdruck. Denn mehr als rau sind manche Einzelheiten in der Biografie der 1969 in Halle/Saale geborenen Solistin: als Wunderkind in jungen Jahren auf den Bühnen der DDR erfolgreich, wird Pietsch nach der sogenannten „Republikflucht“ ihres Vaters 1984 vom System fallengelassen, verliert ihren herausgehobenen Status und büßt auch den Studienplatz als hochbegabte Jungstudentin ein. Zwei Jahre später kann sie mit ihrer Mutter in den Westen ausreisen und den Neuanfang beginnen. Über viele Stationen hat sich Franziska Pietsch bis heute einen verdienten Spitzenplatz unter den deutschen Geigerinnen erarbeitet.

Zusammenspiel

Wer die in Köln lebende Geigerin bei den Aufnahmen für dieses Album in der Berliner Jesus-Christus-Kirche erlebt hat, ist von der überragenden Qualität dieser CD nicht überrascht. Mit höchster Konzentration gestaltet die Solistin den künstlerischen Austausch mit dem Orchester, hat dabei durchgängig das Ziel einer perfekten Interpretation im Blick. Der Dirigent Cristian Macelaru – selbst ein exzellenter Geiger – leitet das DSO souverän und arbeitet mit dem hervorragenden Rundfunkorchester durchaus überraschende Nuancen im Orchesterklang heraus, etwa die prächtigen Horn-Stimmen, die sich immer wieder mit dem Klang der Sologeige vereinigen.

Raumklang

Die Aufnahme präsentiert zwei Meisterwerke der Moderne in einem lebendigen Raumklang, in dem jedes einzelne Instrument differenziert wahrgenommen werden kann. Über allem schwebt dabei die Magie einer mit äußerster Hingabe gespielten Solo-Violine.

Unter den verschiedenen Neueinspielungen der Prokofiev-Konzerte gehört diese Aufnahme in der Rangfolge zweifellos nach ganz oben.

The fifth volume in Audite’s superbly refurbished boxed series covers a two-decade period from 1950-69 during which time the Amadeus Quartet set down numerous broadcast recordings at the Siemensvilla studios of RIAS. The fifth volume covers the Romantic period – from Mendelssohn and Schumann to Brahms, Bruckner, Grieg, Verdi and Dvořák. The great value – one of many, but the principal one nonetheless – is that several of the works are new to the quartet’s discography.

The first three CDs are largely given over to Brahms. In the case of the C minor Quartet, Op. 51 No. 1 the recording is slightly shrill in the strings’ upper register – this is something that is noticeable in a number of these earliest incarnations – though not enough to limit one’s enjoyment of the performances. What one may lose in this acidic quality is more than made up when the playing is so vitalised and dramatically purposeful. The tonal breadth of the Romanze survives any possible aural impediment. It’s the quality of refinement that demarcates the Op. 67 Quartet where one finds Norbert Brainin’s beautiful phrasing in the Andante one of the most distinguishing markers of excellence. The 1957 recording quality is decidedly warmer, aerating the ensemble’s textures to considerable advantage. A couple of days after the Op. 51 No. 1 performance the quartet returned to the radio studio to play the Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34 but not with one of their familiar colleagues, Clifford Curzon, but instead with Conrad Hansen. He is perfectly in tune with the conception, his own contribution being eminently well-balanced: playing of strong identity but selfless integration. Note his pizzicato-like paragraphs in the first movement, and the scaled question-and-response between the strings and piano, as well as the expressive inner voicings in the slow movement and the Scherzo’s sweep. In the beautifully phrased Clarinet Quintet, chronologically the last work in the box to have been composed, the Amadeus is joined by Heinrich Geuser. A distinguished orchestral principal, teacher and soloist he had a considerable influence on the succeeding generation of clarinets, one of whom – Karl Leister, the most famous German player of his generation – was later to record the Clarinet Quintet with the Amadeus.

For the String Quintet, Op. 111 they are joined by their violist of choice, Cecil Aronowitz, for a September 1953 performance of vivid communicative power where the rhythmic pointing in the finale is as persuasive as the elements of rusticity embedded in the music. The Bruckner Quartet is sonorously declaimed but they manage to locate the wit in the Scherzo that prefaces the sustained gravity of the Adagio. Though they performed Schumann’s chamber music in concert and for radio broadcast they never took any of the music into the studio, which makes the appearance of the Op.44 Piano Quintet and the A major Quartet, Op. 41 No. 3 so exciting. The former is again with Hansen in a performance dating from February 1962 notable for the flowing lyricism of the second movement and in the sensitive balance maintained in the finale. The A major’s fugal and rustic predilections are happily brought out, the country dance that courses through the finale being a particularly good example of the Amadeus’ art. The recording quality is generous enough to make the quartet sound more characteristically themselves here than in some of the earliest readings. Even in a box this fine, disc four is therefore particularly valuable for reasons of repertoire and interpretation.

But then so too are the final discs. The Amadeus never recorded Mendelssohn’s E flat major – listen to the lavishly applied tone in the Beethoven-inspired slow opening section of the first movement – but they certainly don’t stint the expressive intensity of the slow movement. They did record the Capriccio from the Op. 81 Quartet as a stand-alone, and reprise that here. Perhaps surprisingly they’d had the Verdi Quartet in their repertoire right from their 1948 Wigmore Hall debut so by November 1962 it had been under their fingers for a decade-and-a-half. They’d learnt to mitigate any inherent problems in the writing whilst remaining excitingly earthy in the Prestissimo third movement. It’s perhaps strange too to realise that they left behind only a single Dvořák work – inevitably, the American quartet – so the A major Piano Quintet, Op. 81 is another item new to their now-expanding discography. Hansen is again good in this 1950 reading – one can draw parallels between this interpretation and that of Curzon and the Vienna Philharmonic Quartet at around the same time, as well as on the wing with the Budapest Quartet. The Amadeus drive when required though their rhythms aren’t quite as pungent as the best Czech ensembles. Finally, there is yet another newbie, the Grieg Quartet. If your standard is the impossibly high pre-war 78rpm set by the Budapest, then you will find the Amadeus not too far behind in matters of tonal breadth. It’s a stylish reading and very communicatively presented.

The six CDs in this box offer great rewards for the Amadeus collector. The items new to their work list are clearly of the greatest interest and it’s doubly valuable that the performances of these are no less compelling than the companion works. It’s also good to hear from their collaborative artists – Aronowitz, the only violist they performed with, the great clarinetist Geuser and, of course, Hansen who makes a consistently fine impression. The original broadcast tapes have been outstandingly well realised: they’re all mono with the single exception of the Mendelssohn Op. 12. In short, exemplary presentation, and a richly valuable box.

Partnered by expressively sensitive orchestral playing from the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under Kirill Karabits, coupled with a beautifully clear resonant recording, there is simply everything to recommend in this performance. [...] This is undoubtedly one of the finest versions of this much-recorded work to date.

The standard repertoire for cello and orchestra doesn’t contain many French works, but the French performing style has a strong profile. I was reminded of this at the opening of Schelomo by the sweet, singing tone and refined phrasing of Strasbourg-born cellist Marc Coppey. Bloch’s Rhapsodie hébraïque from 1915–16 was the culmination of his Jewish Cycle, and by far the best known portion of it. Originally conceived as a vocal work set to texts from the Book of Ecclesiastes, Schelomo took final form with the cello standing in for King Solomon. Besides the title, there’s no Old Testament story to follow, and I tend to hear the music as a Romantic piece of Jewish musical nostalgia. (The work’s success seems to have gone to the composer’s head—Bloch came to see the music in psychoanalytic terms as an unconscious expression of the creative process.)

Because it borders on the fulsome, the music tempts cellists to overplay their part and sink into sentimentality or to sound rhetorically profound. Coppey avoids both pitfalls, finding genuine eloquence through a natural approach to the score’s emotionality. Not recognizing the cellist’s name, I looked online and found that Coppey was born in 1969, won a major Bach competition at 18, and soon found himself in the company of two luminaries, Yehudi Menuhin and Mstislav Rostropovich. His schooling took place in Strasbourg, Paris, and Bloomington. His biography mentions wider interests as a singer, pianist, and composer. Fanfare readers are most likely to associate Coppey’s name with the Ysaÿe Quartet, where he was a member from 1995 to 2000.

Being ubiquitous, the Dvořák Cello Concerto has been the vehicle for a kaleidoscope of styles; my taste runs to the grand, passionate, and personal style of Rostropovich and du Pré. The fairly low-key conducting of Kirill Karabits in the first-movement introduction makes clear that this isn’t his way, so Coppey’s first entrance, which is more florid and simply loud (thanks to very close miking) isn’t quite in sync. Using a focused and beautiful tone, especially in the upper register, the soloist grabs one’s attention as the dominant force in the performance. Conductor and cellist agree that the lyrical second theme in the first movement should be delicate and gentle. I was also impressed at how even Coppey’s tone is from top to bottom, and how good his intonation is. He doesn’t dig in for a big sound in his low notes but prefers a supple, uniform timbre.

There’s an impressive musicality about everything here. I was reminded of my most recent encounter with the Dvořák Concerto, from Christian Poltéra, Thomas Dausgaard, and the same Deutsches Symphony Berlin as on the present release (reviewed in Fanfare 40:1). That was a very memorable reading, but Coppey and Karabits give nothing away to it for vigor, expression, and musicality. The Adagio gains added eloquence by being a little quieter than usual, as in the Bloch. The finale is lean, propulsive, and exciting. What more can we ask?

As a filler we get Klid, a meditative piece for piano duet that Dvořák later arranged for cello and piano before orchestrating it. Better known as Silent Woods, it is the slow movement of a four-part suite titled From the Bohemian Forest. The music was new to me, but its six minutes is based on a lovely, flowing theme, as you’d expect from one of music’s great melodists. Coppey performs with rapt sensitivity.

Given so much to appreciate and nothing to criticize, this release deserves a warm welcome. I’m motivated to seek out everything this exceptional cellist has recorded previously, including the Bach suites from 2003.

Cellists come in three general varieties, I often think: lugubrious, slithery, or chaste. Lugubrious cellists wrestle their instruments with bear claws, heave about in bardic misery and adjust the weight of the world with pregnant pauses. Rostropovich comes to mind, and du Pré. Slithery cellists, on the other hand, are fleet and scrape-less, all about elision and dazzling uplift on glycerin-coated wings—think Heinrich Schiff or Christian Poltéra. Then we have the chaste: cellists pure-of-tone, reserved, smooth, aristocratic. János Starker comes to mind, and now the simply gorgeous playing of Strasbourg-born Marc Coppey, worthy successor to his teacher, who brings us the most enjoyable, quietly artful version of Schelomo I know.

It’s hard to recall Ernest Bloch was once a popular Swiss/American Jewish composer. Bloch held grandiose convictions about his talents and what we’d call his DNA, and thought himself the inner source of a future Hebraic musical style for Palestine. Later becoming an American immigrant, Bloch was convinced he could replace the U.S. national anthem with his rhapsody America. He failed to do either. But he did certainly anticipate Cecil B. DeMille.

These days we’re lucky to hear Baal Shem or run into a chamber orchestra performing one of the two concerti grossi. But listen with care to Schelomo, written in 1916, and you encounter influences others picked up from him, a sure sign of how seriously Bloch was once taken. In fact, ask me quickly what Schelomo sounds like, and I’m tempted to say “Jewish Respighi.” There’s an ostinato melody for two bassoons which Bloch uses as contrast in the middle of the piece. It’s a Jewish childhood tune his mother used to sing. Start humming and you can imagine how easily it might evoke a few years later the pulsating grandeur of catacombs in Respighi’s The Pines of Rome. There are several massive climaxes in Schelomo. One of them winds down in a manner suggestive of the first movement of the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony, written decades later. So everyone was certainly paying attention, it would seem.

And well they should, here. This is the first fully hysteria-free interpretation I’ve heard. Schelomo, the cello’s voice, represents biblical King Solomon, and Bloch’s music portrays the crashing of Solomon’s world through vanity. Bloch witnessed the same thing happening to the Europe he knew, then busy slaughtering itself in World War I—message enough. But ever since World War II, you get the impression that Schelomo must have been about the Holocaust (which it could not have anticipated), and it’s usually played for fingernail-edged intensity and glass-shattering anxiety. Munch and Piatigorsky nearly burn a hole in the stage with their classic 1950s rendition. Not here: This performance is so refined and beautiful, it could nearly be Fauré. Kirill Karabits and Marc Coppey are very much on the same page, with little agogic rubato and everything smoothly dovetailed. For the first time, I really like Schelomo as music, not message.

Coppey and Karabits’s refined approach leads to a different sort of Dvořák Cello Concerto than we often hear, of course, a touch understated. An interesting comparison is to be had with a CD released by the Deutsches SO three years ago for BIS, with cellist Christian Poltéra and Thomas Dausgaard conducting. Dausgaard is an original, intuitive musician who has a remarkable way of bouncing forward and finding flecks of light in inner voices. And Poltéra is an impassioned cellist who “slithers.” The Deutsches Symphony plays beautifully for both conductors, but you can guess I find Dausgaard more exciting. Nonetheless, Coppey keeps growing on one here. And Karabits achieves a kind of temperamental perfection. We have quite a wonderful release before us, when all is said and done, and the lyrical, gentle Silent Woods is just the right sort of complement from Dvořák’s pen to Marc Coppey’s more chaste instincts. Audite’s sound is as good as BIS’s, but with the cello presented slightly more forward. It amuses me to note what must be the principal French horn in both performances play his big first movement solo with very un-German vibrato, but with no harm done. Be sure to hear this.

New recordings of Dvořák’s B-Minor Cello Concerto continue apace, but it has been quite a while since a new recording of Bloch’s “Hebraic Rhapsody,” Schelomo, has come my way. The piece doesn’t seem to be as popular as it once was. In a not too distant review of Marc Coppey performing cellos concertos by Haydn and C. P. E. Bach (39:6), I suggested that the cellist’s manner of address might be better suited to repertoire of the Romantic period which he has recorded before, namely works by Grieg, Richard Strauss, Maurice Emmanuel, and Théodore Dubois. And as if right on cue, here Coppey is in two mainstream masterpieces of the Romantic cello literature.

I may have been a bit unkind to Bloch’s Schelomo in a performance by Truls Mørk in 28:6, when I referred to the “Ben-Hur, Hollywood kitsch” aspects of the score. It’s true—and the composer admitted as much—that the “Jewish character of the work was not achieved using ancient melodies.” Bloch was, however, deeply moved and inspired by the book of Ecclesiastes, authorship of which is attributed to the aged King Solomon, who, as an old and despairing man, had seen the follies of life and concluded, in pessimism and sorrow, that “All is vanity.”

According to Bloch, the idea for Schelomo actually had its beginnings in 1915 in sketches for a large choral-orchestral setting of the Ecclesiastes text. But he wasn’t fluent in Hebrew and the translations into German, French, and English just didn’t seem to work. It wasn’t until Bloch met the cellist Alexander Barjansky that his path forward became clear. Solomon would speak not in words but in a language more immediate, direct, and understandable by audiences of diverse languages and dialects. Schelomo would be a portrait of the ancient king—represented by the solo cello—recalling and commenting on the swirl of events and experiences—represented by the orchestra—that shaped his life and led him to his profound loss of faith in humanity.

As booklet note author Habakuk Traber points out, “Schelomo is the only piece in Bloch’s oeuvre to have a dark ending.” But Traber didn’t need to tell us that; Bloch tells us that himself: “Even the darkest of my works end with hope. This work alone concludes in a complete negation, but the subject demands it!” And no wonder. The work was completed in 1916 while the composer and his family were still in Geneva during some of the darkest days of World War I. By the following year, Bloch had emigrated to the U.S., and Schelomo received its first performance on May 3, 1917 in Carnegie Hall. The soloist was Hans Kindler, principal cellist of the Philadelphia Orchestra under Stokowski, and the concert was conducted by Artur Bodanzky.

Dvořák’s B-Minor Cello Concerto is so familiar on record and on concert stages across the globe that it needs no introduction. The album note does observe, however, that in at least one way Dvořák’s concerto is a mirror image of Bloch’s Schelomo. Where Bloch’s work was composed in Europe but premiered in the U.S., Dvořák’s score was composed mainly in New York during the composer’s time in America, but its ending was revised slightly when Dvořák returned home to Prague, and the work was premiered in London. Why that particular polarity of place of composition vs. place of first performance makes Bloch’s Schelomo and Dvořák’s concerto birds of a feather I’m not sure, but they do make satisfying discmates.

Unfortunately, I wish satisfying was a word I could use to describe the performances or say that they merit the excellent program note and recording afforded them, but compared to the many outstanding contenders in both works, these hardly rise above the mediocre. In much of the technically difficult passagework, cellist Marc Coppey sounds labored, and even in relaxed moments of lyrical calm his tone, which is a bit on the grainy side to begin with, is not the loveliest I’ve heard. But Coppey’s technical and tonal shortcomings are minor beside Kirill Karabits’s lackadaisical conducting and the German Symphony Orchestra Berlin’s lapses in good behavior. The orchestra’s horns, it seems, have a problem sustaining notes of any significant duration without wavering, and their intonation in places is suspect as well. On top of that, there’s some lack of coordination both between and within sections of the orchestra in all-out ensemble passages, as towards the end of the first movement of the Dvořák. It makes for a somewhat muddy-sounding melee, which I attribute to Karabits’s inattention to detail and discipline. These are not works that play themselves without strong leadership from the podium. Previous reviews of Karabits in these pages have been generally quite positive, but I notice that they are all with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, the ensemble he has led as principal conductor since 2009. This, as far as I know, is his first and only recording with the Berlin-based German Symphony Orchestra, so maybe this was a case of conductor and musicians getting to know each other.

Someone once quipped about lawyers that there are so many of them if you laid them out end to end it would be a good thing. I don’t know that it would necessarily be a good thing if you laid out all the recordings of Dvořák’s B-Minor Cello Concerto end to end, but I do know there are so many of them it would make for a fairly long walk to get to the front of the line. And who would you find when you got there? Well, that’s debatable, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be Coppey and Karabits.

As for Schelomo, the line isn’t nearly as long, so it’s a bit easier to pick a leader among the pack. Apart from Zara Nelsova’s classic efforts with Abravanel and Ansermet, I very much liked Truls Mørk’s performance when I reviewed it in 28:6. I felt that he gave us a portrait of an older and wiser Solomon than the one who had a youthful dalliance with the Queen of Sheba. But I also still find the version by Steven Isserlis with Richard Hickox and the London Symphony Orchestra compelling. I don’t think this effort by Marc Coppey and Kirill Karabits earns a place at the head of the line for either the Bloch or the Dvořák.