1869 saw the birth of the future priest Komitas (Soghomon Soghomonian in the world), a man who is hailed as an Armenian national hero, yet is also a man of enormous complexities. His early life was training for the priesthood in Etchmiadzin, the seat of the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, the oldest national church in history, dating from the early fourth century. He accepted ordination, perhaps precipitously, as early as 1893, and was given the name Komitas after a seventh-century saint who was both Catholicos (head of the Church) and a musician of great import. Early in his life, Komitas was a favorite of the Catholicos, but when he died and a series of successors took over, this favor turned to disdain, and Komitas was to have a difficult relationship with the official church authorities for the rest of his life.

Though profoundly religious, he was also haunted by his early ordination. (Armenian priests, like most Eastern priests, are allowed to marry before ordination, but not after.) He was enamored of one of his favorite singers and biggest supporters, Marguerite Babayan, who was to turn up at varying points in his life, and the question remains open as to the depth of his relationship with her, though he did continue to dress in clerical clothing his whole life. He was a profoundly sensitive and rather ill man, whose last years were plagued by what some have described as mental illness, others by what we today would call “post-traumatic stress syndrome.”

Komitas certainly had reason for this. In 1915, after years of established fame, he was arrested in Constantinople—where he was one of a number of noted Armenian intellectuals residing in the city at that time—and deported by the Turks. What he witnessed was no less than the now-infamous Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks, where some two million people perished. When he was brought back in 1916, his life was never quite the same, and many years were spent in various psychiatric institutions and programs for treatment. He died 20 years later, in 1935.

This tragic yet brilliant story, along with the mysteries surrounding different incidences in his life, only adds to the aura of the man who is called the “Armenian Bartók”; indeed, he is rightly recognized as the “Father of Armenian classical music.” Music in Armenia up to that time had been exclusively religious, but as in so many other countries a vast amount of secular and non-religious music existed among the people in the guise of folk music. Komitas traveled the land and wrote down thousands of these melodies, and incorporated them into his own music. For this he incurred the wrath of the ecclesiastical authorities and fought a constant battle against them, often having to take secondary positions in the church since they were so against him. But his music, both secular and sacred, gained enormous popularity, and the composer’s standing with the people was never in question. Today he is regarded as perhaps the greatest cultural hero the country has ever known—quite a feat for this unassuming little priest with the golden voice that so enchanted people in his youth, who sang praises to God in middle age, and persuaded a whole generation of countrymen of the value of art and the Armenian soul found in it.

This album, “Hommage à Komitas,” is a collection of his Armenian songs and a world premiere of his German songs, set earlier in life, by two of the leading artists of the country today. The Armenian songs are all of a piece, lonely, meditative, stoically bittersweet, and haunting, though many might find them easier to digest in smaller portions. They are not unlike the religious music of Armenia, but the texts betray their secular inspiration, suitable for any romantic composer. The German songs have hints of Wolf and early Strauss, and while not as good as the works of those masters, still maintain a distinct flavor about them. I am unsure as to whether I can agree with Debussy, whose opinion of Komitas was of the highest regard when he said “Brilliant Father Komitas! I bow before your musical genius!” But it does show that the devout little man attracted the attention of some major players in the classical world, and as such deserves an honest evaluation from all of us.

The sound is spectacular. This is the first SACD issue of piano and voice that I have ever heard, and the results are most gratifying, with excellent balance distributed among the five speakers. Komitas may not be for everyone, but if the hints given above attract you at all, you will not be disappointed.

Arnold Kats, now in his early eighties, has been the conductor of the Novosibirsk Academic Symphony Orchestra since it was founded half a century ago—and, on the evidence here, he has built an assured ensemble palpably comfortable with the music at hand. Comfort, however, can easily skid into routine—and for all its merits, this performance of the Rachmaninoff Second sounds very much like business as usual. On the positive side, the rich sound of the strings is appropriate for the repertoire—and where they’re given the main material, the performance can glow (try, as but one example, the cellos at rehearsal 10 in the first movement’s transition into the development). Solo winds are often laudable, too—expressive, but judiciously avoiding schmaltz.

But these virtues are undermined by a blowzy and reticent brass contingent (there’s no solidity to the climaxes) and, even more serious, by a lack of rhythmic point (the orchestra, for instance, doesn’t generate much energy from the syncopations and rhythmic clashes in the second movement). In the end, more often than not it seems as if we’re skimming over the music. With competition from conductors ranging, in interpretive viewpoint, from Golovanov through Stokowski on to Ashkenazy, Previn, and Slatkin, this performance simply doesn’t make it.

Kats, by the way, drops the first movement repeat—which is nothing compared to the editorial hanky-panky in the rarely heard Capriccio, which is not only cut but also re-ordered. If only there were a little interpretive hanky-panky as well. But no, this is well-mannered to a fault. For those to whom such details matter, the recording was made in PCM 44.1 kHz/24 bit, and later converted to DSD; in 5.0 surround, there’s a good sense of space, but there’s not much detail to the timbres. A disappointment.

This is the first release in a new series featuring the Mandelring Quartet, a relatively young ensemble that has already recorded extensively. I can’t say that I’ve sampled their Schubert series or Brahms, but their Onslow (cpo 777 151) displays great energy and precision. It brings out the contrapuntal character that is so important an element in the composer’s music, and I relish the give and take of these four performers who clearly enjoy the refined art of the chamber ensemble.

But I really don’t think they have the measure of Shostakovich, here. This isn’t 19th-century chamber music, music-making for music’s sake. The Shostakovich quartets, with very few exceptions, perform the role of private diary to the composer’s emotions. It’s no secret that they reveal the pain of friends and lovers dying, the unremitting hatred of a stupid, dictatorial regime, or the anguish over personal treatment and universal suffering. While the First Quartet is something of an exercise in form and the lightest of the group, the Second is already a work that gets into the grit of torment; not surprisingly, considering the level of misery that Shostakovich saw everywhere after the German invasion. The String Quartet No. 4 was one of several works the composer left “in the drawer” after his second major run-in with the authorities led to loss of employment, prestige, and funds. It wasn’t performed publicly until nine months after Stalin’s death, and showed an uncompromisingly angry, bleak vision of life.

You won’t get anger, bleakness, ridicule, or anguish out of these performances, however. They are beautiful of their kind, being well played, varied in tone, and exceptionally effective in bringing out inner voices. But that’s the limit of their efforts. These performances might as well be of any Classical period composer as of Shostakovich, for all the emotional weight they bear.

Consider the songful Andantino of the Quartet No. 4, referred to in the Manderling’s liner notes as a “broken-winged waltz à la Tchaikovsky.” Not by half, it isn’t. The piece is one of those despairing, lost soul movements that Shostakovich placed in several of his symphonies; and this is the most songful and heartrending of them all. The Shostakovich Quartet (on Regis 5001) gives its bleak lyricism full value, moving from full chords treated richly à la Borodin Quartet, to a wan, vibrato-drained sound. The Mandelrings here are considerably faster than the tempo marking, and restrained to the point of removing much of the piece’s emotional arch. Timings can’t tell all, but they tell us something: the Shostakovich Quartet takes 7:16, the Mandelring Quartet requires only 5:33.

The contrast is greater still in the Scherzo movement that follows. The Mandelrings chug along at a moderately slow clip, with little attempt to reproduce the hushed eeriness of the work. The oppressive march section is—well, the only word I can find to describe their efforts would be polite. It sounds tuneful, even jolly. The Shostakovich musicians take matters at an energetic allegretto as marked, and make much more of both the expressive violin passages and the subsequent march. The latter sounds properly grotesque, with the trumpet-like motif smartly rapped out. Dynamics are more hushed throughout, and although the ambience is overly dry, the overall results are more effective in creating the kind of impression Shostakovich desired.

There is certainly room for interpretative difference in these quartets, as the recordings of the Fitzwilliam (Decca 455776), Borodin (Chandos 10064), Rubio (Brilliant Classics 6898), and Brodsky (Warner 60867) Quartets reveal. But throughout the Fourth String Quartet and to a lesser extent in the Second, the Mandelring Quartet gives us the notes, all the notes, and nothing but the notes. No, that’s not quite right: they give us the notes in an 18th-century context when for the most part, Haydn-influenced chamber music was about courteous musical interplay, and not the details of personal emotional upheaval. This, then, is Shostakovich as Haydn.

The sound is as beautiful a thing as I could wish on a string quartet, suave and balanced in stereo, with a reasonable degree of added hall spaciousness in surround sound. Too bad it isn’t put to better use, for the Mandelrings are out of their element, here.

The Mandelring Quartet, three siblings and a friend, are renowned for their exceptional coordination—a virtue evident on this, the third volume of their Schubert cycle for Audite. They’re not a hyperkinetic group in the manner of the early Juilliard—nor do they offer the intellectual focus of the Pacifica, much less the conversational heat of the Vermeer. But they compensate with an enviable balance—both in terms of their vertical sensitivity and in terms of their emotional stability. I found the first installment of their Shostakovich series too temperate and underinflected for the repertoire; but their poise is better suited to Schubert.

Granted, their occasional tendency to focus on details at the expense of line and their intermittent lack of spring (try the finale of the G Major) gives their performances an expansive atmosphere, making the tempos seem slower than they are. Especially given their inclusion of first-movement exposition repeats, this is not the group to disguise Schubert’s sometimes-garrulous nature. Nor is it the group to disguise the sense of rhythmic redundancy that can infect his music. But listeners with the requisite patience will find a great deal to appreciate here: in the magical shading of the tremolos toward the beginning of the G Major, in the aplomb of the Andantino of the G Minor, in the clarity and sense of control throughout. And while the emotional temperature tends to be low, there’s a fair amount of Schubertian grit where required (try, for instance, the more dynamic passages in the first movement of the G Major).

In sum, hardly the last word in these scores, especially the familiar G Major. But those attracted to the interpretive vision should find this a welcome release, especially given the solid engineering.

La majesté des grandes orgues est l'expression de la splendeur de la...

Brahms’s four works for clarinet—the trio and two sonatas recorded here, plus the Quintet, op. 115—were all products of the composer’s late years, and byproducts of his relationship with the virtuoso clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld. The sonatas, in both their originally conceived versions for clarinet and their composer-sanctioned versions for viola, along with the trio and quintet, have been covered in these pages a number of times; so brevity is in order.

Canadian-born clarinetist Arthur Campbell, now a US resident, received his degrees from Northwestern University, earning his doctorate as a student of renowned clarinetist Robert Marcellus. Pianist Frances Renzi, who partners Campbell in the sonatas, graduated from the University of North Texas, and then pursued graduate studies at Juilliard under Rosina Lhevinne and Beveridge Webster. French pianist Jean Pascal-Meyer, heard here in the trio, studied with, among others, Gabriel Tacchino and Gaby Casadesus. Cellist Daniel Raclot studied at the Limoges Conservatory in France, and took further training under André Navarra and Genevieve Joy.

One would be hard-pressed to find a recording of these works poorly played on today’s modern clarinet, (Campbell plays Leblanc, Opus II models). And therein is the dilemma, for there are so many recordings to choose from. What it comes down to in the end, I think, is one’s preference for the style or school of playing. There’s the English school, represented by artists past and present, such as Reginald Kell, Jack Brymer, Janet Hilton, and Thea King. The approach, not unlike that of a certain school of English singing, emphasizes a “white” sound that is light on vibrato, pure of tone, precise in pitch, and smoothly regulated or modulated between the instrument’s register breaks.

The French school, of which Gervase de Peyer is probably the most famous exponent, tends to cultivate a somewhat less focused sound in favor of a richer color palette and a more pronounced vibrato. Between the two—English and French—my personal taste leans towards the former. I’ve long had de Peyer’s Angel/EMI LP of the Mozart and Brahms clarinet quintets with the Melos Ensemble in my collection, though I’ve never much cared for the performances.

That brings us to the American school, which has managed to produce, in my opinion, the finest clarinetists of all—Stanley Drucker, David Shifrin, Richard Stoltzman, Harold Wright, and let us not forget Benny Goodman; and now Arthur Campbell can be added to this prestigious list. The American approach is one that adopts the best attributes of the English style, (the purity of tone and pitch and well-balanced registration) while eschewing the bland “white” sound in favor of the richer color palette and vibrato of the French school, but without the flaw of flabby focus.

This latest entry then into a highly crowded field is highly recommended for exquisite playing, enhanced by a wonderfully warm and perfectly balanced recording. The hybrid SACD will play on all CD players; and, of course, when played on a system equipped for full surround sound will add an extra degree of dimensionality.

The Brahms chamber works featuring clarinet are magnificently played by...

The two Audite SACDS are welcome additions to the catalog. The organ disk...

No slight is intended to the composers of the works on this disc or to the playing of Bernhard Leonardy in suggesting that the main attraction here is the magnificent Klais/Mayer organ of St. Johann’s Basilica in Saarbrücken, Germany. Restored by organ manufacturer Mayer in 1999, the instrument is made up of 64 ranks of 99 pipes each, allowing for a combination of 6,336 stops—not the largest organ in the world, but judging from the sound on this disc, certainly one of the more impressive. And an interesting addendum to the enclosed booklet note is a description of the mix of stops deployed in each of the works on the program.

Speaking of the program, I must confess to being unfamiliar with all of the music on this CD, and with all but two of its composers. Heino Schubert (b. 1928) was, for many years, cathedral organist at the Münsterkirche in Essen. Currently retired, Schubert has won a number of prestigious composition prizes for his sacred and instrumental works. His Magnificat: A Triptych on the Melody of the 8th Tone (Hypomyxolidian for the modally minded), is a meditation on the Trinity. Beginning and ending with chimes, the 1963 piece is in a vein that will not be foreign to listeners who know their Hindemith.

Julius Reubke (1834–1858) will probably be the most recognized name among the five composers here. He was a student of Franz Liszt who, in the brief 24 years allotted to him, distinguished himself as a brilliant pianist and organist. His fiendishly difficult B♭-Minor Piano Sonata (with which I am familiar) has had a number of recordings. His 94th Psalm recorded here is in fact a three-movement organ sonata in C Minor, the musical intent of its content being elucidated by scriptural quotations. Though it is not likely to be mistaken for any of Brahms’s organ pieces, its vocabulary and manner of speech do fall within that general style of expression.

About Fred M. Bauersachs, alas, I am able to tell you zilch, other than the fact that he was born in 1930. The booklet note gives no biographical information about him, and a Google search on his name returned nothing useful. Unfortunately, I do not have access to the specialist organ journals that might shed further light. Die Bergpredigt crams a great deal of theological symbolism and teaching into its seven short sections. In their combined total of less than 12 minutes, Bauersachs manages to offer musical allusions to Jesus’s “Sermon on the Mount,” “Sermon on a Level Place,” and the “Magnificat,” Mary’s song of praise taken from the Gospel According to St. Luke. The spiritual mysticism and musical vocabulary of the piece tend unavoidably to evoke comparisons with Messiaen.

Kurt Hessenberg (1908–1994) is the only other composer on this program with whom I have some familiarity, but not through his Fantasia über Sonne der Gerechtigkeit (“Sun of Justice”). A Cassandra Records CD of his Second Symphony and Concerto for Orchestra offers but two of his major works from among a catalog of some 135 opus numbers in all genres, including opera. His organ compositions—18 in all—are to his overall output, in terms of relative importance, approximately equal in significance to the organ works of Brahms. Hessenberg’s Fantasia is based on a text woven together from three sources that venerate the sun as a symbol of God’s goodness, magnificence, and justice. The music’s toccata-like style distantly echoes Bach, but Hessenberg’s harmonic adventurism leads him to places Bach would have found strange. The piece is quite beautiful in a Poulenc-like way, with familiar and predictable chord progressions in sudden juxtaposition to dissonantly deformed harmonies for the sake of shock.

The program ends with our organ player’s own Improvisation on “Nun jauchzt dem Herren, alle Welt.” Also in a free toccata-like style, the piece is a kaleidoscope of colors and sonorities that serves well its subject of jubilation, as well as being a virtuosic display piece that puts the Klais/Mayer organ front and center.

This is a wonderful disc for any organ music-lover. One can revel in these works if one wishes for the sheer beauty of their sound, without having to relate to their theological foundations. Plaudits to Bernhard Leonardy and Audite’s fine recording.

Soon after the review of the above cited Audite disc appeared, a reader wrote privately to ask if the album number were correct—the distributor claimed it was "nonexistent." He was, apparently, entering the jungle for the first time. . . .

By chance, one hears something haunting. The composer may have been encountered in footnotes but had remained innocent of auditory associations. Small and not very representative pieces may be available as filler and one collects them, becoming more intrigued—as shelf space disappears beneath umpteen mediocre performances of the basic repertoire items one endures for the privilege. Reference books serve mainly to tantalize, the best of them with complete catalogs and tidings of large, rarely performed works marking grand syntheses. Descended from these, album copy tends to be a circus of undigested (mis-)information, dutifully parroted by reviewers to create an odd consensus about a body of music which only a very few people could know at first hand; though, occasionally (notably, on early LP jackets), gracefully revealing notes by uncelebrated, even anonymous, writers will prompt the ear and prime the spirit with a loving erudition surpassing anything in scholarly sources. Slowly, the picture fills in as stalking the elusive forgotten master becomes a passion. One searches old and foreign catalogs, canvasses out-of-print dealers, turns up antique vinyl and ancient monographs in languages in which one is not fluent, and scarce, expensive sheet music which remains impervious to the assaults of one's musicianship. The large, epochal works receive once-in-a-decade (or two, or three) performances and circulate on tape, pirate recordings, or short-lived commercial issues. Reputations shift a bit as dissertation topics thin, and the picture takes on overwhelming, highly specific detail. One is graying now and you take the elevator for anything over a couple of flights when, with disconcerting suddenness, the forgotten master arrives—as Koechlin seems to have done. But such arrivals are more likely deceptive than decisive and, in the press of business (e.g., those "nonexistent" stock numbers), the collapse of empires, ozone depletion, oil crises, and the simultaneous crowding in of an incredible and bewildering number of other forgotten masters—to say nothing of the quick and neglected—the newly revealed master may suffer eclipse, occultation even, and depart as suddenly as he came. Which is to say that, if Kocchlin's varieties of luminosity have settled on your ear, you are best advised to grab these fast.

It is, perhaps, because Koechlin is so much the musician's musician that he attracts first-rate, adventurous, virtuosic musicians and draws from them such exquisite care. The song and flute albums, for instance, are as composed as the music, offering works representative of the vastness and extremities of his oeuvre, of its charms and challenges, its miniatures and monstrosities, that is—within the compass of single programs—its staggering variety, through which one is led with rare and radiant assurance. A not intentionally invidious comparison—in his generous offering of horn pieces, Barry Tuckwell Plays Koechlin (ASV CD DCA 716), Tuckwell is no less accomplished than the artists cited above, and no one who cares for Koechlin will willingly be without it, but the inevitable monotony of seventy-eight minutes of music for one instrument, a good bit of it unaccompanied (though, by overdubbing, we have pieces for two, three, and four horns), makes it an album to be sampled piecemeal, where the fantastically shifting soundscapes of the song program, and the deft alternation of brightly brief and pithily extended flute works with pieces offering the relief of vocal obbligato, carry one deliciously and irresistibly to the end. On a smaller scale, the same is true of Lajos Lencsés's collection—though the works are fewer, and cover less ground chronologically and stylistically, their timbrai variety is greater. Finally, Herbert Henck's masterly reading of the suite Les Heures persanes follows the subtly shifting refractions of Koechlin's light-obsessed imagination through one of his most ambitious works.

Sound for these albums is generally optimum, and the accompanying materials range from well done (from Audite) to superb. The song album and sung portions of the flute program are matched with texts and translations. Nor should one underestimate the virtue of informed, lucid annotation in prompting the ear to assimilate novelty to pleasure, in point of which these albums excel.

The liner notes for the song album, by the way, are by none other than Dr. Robert Orledge, author of Charles Koechlin (1867-1950): His Life and Works. Following its subject, this is a large and labyrinthine book. As his dates remind us, Koechlin enjoyed a long and amazingly productive life, his works running to 226 opus numbers, many of which (as in Reger's catalog) cover a surprising number of independent works. Self-borrowing, the assembly of multi-movement works from older pieces, several scorings of individual works (e.g., the Symphony No. 1 and the String Quartet No. 2 are the "same" works, Les Heures persanes was orchestrated, while the orchestral tone poem Au loin exists in an arrangement for harp and English horn), and the like, afford rich complications which the body of the book is occupied in tracing.

Along the way, Orledge describes Koechlin's working methods, and renders a painstaking account of his technical resourcefulness through all its unfoldings, pointed by over a hundred music quotations (many quite extensive), and laced with revealing references to the aesthetic crosscurrents—literary, pictorial, cinematic, and, of course, musical—in the heady swirl of which his own oeuvre rose imperturbably and majestically. This awareness of complex interrelationships is evident on every page—Inseparable from their poly tonal support are Koechlin's long sinuous melodic lines, which at times recall art nouveau arabesques and at others suggest the suppleness of plainsong, especially when they are accompanied by parallel chords in organum. In Le Chant du chevrier [from the piano suite Paysages et marines] Koechlin deliberately keeps the line of the French goatherd's pipe separate from the glowing, wide-spaced chords which support but never overbalance it, creating a perspective of distance and open spaces. . . . The free, fluid melody of the final Poème virgilien again makes little use of exact repetition, and in the suite as as a whole diverse elements combine to create an overall equilibrium—just like that of Nature herself.

Suggestive as this may be—and valuable in its fluent demonstration that Koechlin's language assumes the entire musical past to be contemporary and expressive—it stops short of genuine helpfulness before the sensuously appealing yet bewildering strangeness of hearing Koechlin's longer works. One wants to know how the music works—or is intended to work—since this is not always evident even to close, repeated attention. Certainly, as Koechlin tells us, his music "demands a certain degree of concentration," but the balance from effort to pleasure—and this music affords pleasures like no other—might be achieved more readily through a detailed examination of the ways by which "diverse elements combine to create an overall equilibrium." Indeed, the more ambitious the work, the more necessary this becomes. In this instance, as throughout the book, Paysages et marines and Les Heures persanes are dispatched in passing with tidy generalizations establishing some "truth" about Koechlin sub specie aetemitatis. The listener ungifted with an eternity for this sort of contemplation and who wishes to make aural sense, say, of the seemingly chaotic events of La Course de printemps, which, as the title suggests, sweeps and twists like a force of nature for over half an hour, and who turns to Dr. Orledge for help, will not find it. Some of Koechlin's works, in fact—e.g., the Sept Chansons pour Gladys and parts, at least, of Les Heures persanes—seem to demand new modes of auditory relation touching the penumbra of consciousness, and of this there is no word.

The reader will, however, find here a concise biography; an account of the vicissitudes of Koechlin's reputation; a close and admiring look at his theoretical works and compendious Traité de l'orchestration; teasing descriptions of and quotations from unpublished and unrecorded works in the course of a remarkably wide-ranging survey; a fascinating narrative of Koechlin's infatuation with Lillian Harvey and other stars of the silent screen—and of the music they inspired; a translation of Koechlin's own self-aware—if occasionally also self-justifying—self-assessment; a number of revealing side-glances at composers as diverse as Franck and Chabrier (who were still at work while Koechlin was a young man), his master, Faúré, Debussy (whose Khamma he orchestrated), friends such as Ravel, Sauguet, and Milhaud, and reactions to Schoenberg, Berg, and Cole Porter—for starters; a complete catalog of the works running to some ninety pages; an extensive bibliography; a thorough, useful—indeed necessary—index to discussions of the works; and thirty-seven photographs. No doubt, this volume will prompt specialized studies bringing greater scrutiny to bear upon smaller segments of Koechlin's oeuvre, and from these, eventually, an informed literature for the non-specialist, non-academic listener will develop. Meanwhile, it is unlikely that such largesse—so comprehensive yet keenly detailed an account—will appear again in the forseeable future.

Here, then, is a richly colored topographical map to the dark continent of Koechlin's music, lighted by four exemplary collections of representative works. Taken with recent issues of the great orchestral poems, The Jungle Book (Cybelia CY 679/680, two black discs—long overdue for CD issue—Fanfare 10:1) and Le Buisson ardent (Cybelia CY 812, Fanfare 11:3) it is possible now to get to the radiant heart of "le cas Koechlin." Seldom has a forgotten master arrived so splendidly— though, as noted, the station is crowded and there are frequent departures.