ARTS

Pomp and circumstance

Anthony Burgess

Schoenberg Violin Concerto Op. 36/Piano Concerto Op. 42 (DG 2543 801) Schumann Piano Concerto in A minor/ Vivaldi The Four Seasons (Archiv 2534 003)

Deutsche Grammophon is producing a Collector's Series (fur den Sarnmler) of recordings which, one presumes, did not go down with the public as well as they ought to have done when first presented anything from ten to twenty years ago -

and deserve a re-airing under a more elitist

aegis. Franz Liszt's Ungarische ronungsmesse, for instance, done authoritatively by the Chorus and Or- chestra of the Coronation Church in Budapest, under Janos Ferencsik. Here the secular and sacred meet in a manner not ac- ceptable to all tastes: in Protestant cultures, Particularly, the lovers of romantic Liszt are unhappy with the Abbe. The work, be- ing designed for Franz Josef I's coronation

as King of Hungary, is self-confessedly na- tionalistic which has to mean high-

coloured, even occasionally folky, with sometimes a solo violin soaring above its zigeuner connotations. But Liszt, the unex- pected scholar of plainsong, invokes also the supranational Church of the Middle Ages. It is a remarkable work which only

Partly conduces to an operatic,

kind of feigned, n- of devoutness: the timeless ceremony of the mass yields to the exigencies of im- perial pomp, and Hungarian pomp at that. ,.The Orchestre National de l'Opera de transports Carlo, under Louis Fremaux, transports us a world away with a very well- realised Parade and Carnaval d'Aix — the tirst, of course, Satie and the other Darius Milhaud. Ah, those great days of musical scandal, when ragtime, tango, circus polka

and orchestral typewriters could, cleansing the symphony orchestra of its too opulent

Wagnerian associations, outrage Parisians In evening dress. One must beware of metaphor, but the image of Provencal sunlight that Milhaud always unleashes is ,mast blinding'here. On the other side the Orchestre Lamoureux, with Igor markevitch, gives the second Bacchus et Ariane suite of Albert Roussel, a work always relegated to flipsides but deserving primary celebration for melodic inven- tiveness and orchestral panache. The ballet has always seemed to too many Ravel- lovers to be a kind of epigone of Daphnis and Chloe. Think, because of the subject- matter, of a kind of Gallicised Strauss and we are ready to take Roussel on his own terms. Both Ravel and Roussel end with a classical bacchanal (Roussel with more nominal justification), but the two are very different. This is a fine recording. It is just a hundred years since Edouard Lalo's ballet Namouna was presented at the Paris Opera. The music was too Wagnerian and 'symphonic' for the prima ballerina Rita Sangalli and her admirers, and the au- dience was loud in its resentment, but the 17-year-old Debussy applauded so vigorously that he had to be thrown out. We know Lalo chiefly for his Spanish pastiches, written for Sarasate, and here we get the piquant combination of exotic pastiche (the setting of the ballet is Corfu) with Wagnerian sonorities. The recording of the Orchestre National de l'ORTF, under Jean Martinon, is as good as you will get. The interest of the work is, alas, mainly historical: here was a composer daring to modify traditional balletic rum-tum-tum in the direction of richness, complexity and subtlety. The six-and-a-half-minute Prelude gives us a bizarre impression of the Rhine flowing into the Mediterranean.

Rafael Kubelik conducts the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in two concer- tos of Schoenberg — the Violinkonzert played by Zvi Zeitlin and the Klavierkonzert by Alfred Brendel. These are both works of extreme difficulty for the performers (did not the original violin soloist tell the composer that six fingers were needed, and Schoenberg reply: 'I can wait'?). They are not, 50 and 40 years respectively after, all that difficult for the listener, who recognises a relaxation of strict atonalism and a unity of rhythm in the romantic and classical traditions. Both works show Schoenberg at his most elo- quently tender as well as, in odd brass snarls and drum thumps, ferocious. The emo- tional range can never be wide: there can never, for instance, be an expression of ex- trovert vivacity or triumph, which are still, so long after the birth of the atonal systems, tied to tonality. But the marriage of the new sonorities and the old forms is perfect, and the playing superb.

The London Symphony Orchestra, with Claudio Abbio, presents a companion disc of Alban Berg — the Lulu Suite, the Altenberg Lieder (affectingly sung by Margaret Price) and the classic Three Pieces for Orchestra. Whoever said that Berg was Schoenberg's best work meant that Berg had a more empirical grasp of the possibilities of the I2-tone system, which fitted the dramatic symbolisation of 20th- century neurosis. With Berg we usually know that tonality is somewhere in the background, ready to be drawn on as an emblem of stability (as in the last movement of the Violin Concerto), but the total atonalism of the songs — settings of Peter Altenberg's 'picture postcard texts' works in a context of straight lyricism. The third act Variationen from Lulu, which we knew till very recently without its enacted referent, and the final Adagio also, take on a new poignancy now that we have been permitted to hear and see the whole opera.

If Berg was not a 'pure' musician — in the sense that he needed an extra-musical programme — so Arthur Honegger too used music as a means of unknotting specific conflicts, private and public. I mean that the Second and Third Sym- phonies (the second is termed Symphonie Liturgique) — performed by the Berlin Philharmonic under Karajan — are meant to be heard in metaphysical contexts. Honegger, composing the Third at the end of the war, said that it was about man's protest against 'the torrent of barbarism, stupidity, suffering, mechanisation and the bureaucracy which has beat against us in re- cent years'. And still beats. Honegger's case is a sad one. He was falsely regarded as one of Les Six, with whom he had little in corn- mon, and he remains best known for his Pacific 231 — which sounds like social realism in the manner of the Soviet com- poser Mossolov — and for the light-hearted Rugby (which is about the game, not the school). His later, more introspective, work is too little known. This disc is very welcome.

Two Deutsche Grammophon issues nicht, apparently, fur den Sammler present two piano warhorses — the Schumann and the Grieg, played by Krystian Zimerman under Karajan — and the great Elgar Violin Concerto played by Itzhak Perlman with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Daniel Barenboim. This last can never, in my view, surpass a Menuhin interpretation, man or boy, but this may be a matter of extra-musical association. Barenboim, who is a kind of Englishman, understands the work well. Perlman understands the notes.

Finally, I was not at first pleased to meet yet another version of Vivaldi's Le Quattro Stagioni, but this is digitally recorded and played on baroque instruments. It is also a text from the Henry Watson Library in Manchester (I patriotically hail it), correct where the Le Cene text frequently errs. This recording ought to obviate the need for others for at least a few years. The English Concert, under Trevor Pinnock at the harp- sichord with Simon Standage on violin, have cause to be satisfied, even proud.

© Anthony Burgess 1982