Janina Fialkowska is a Canadian pianist whose name was familiar to me from her winning the first Arthur Rubinstein competition in 1974. But until recently I had never heard her perform either live or on record. Then last year I got her Chopin solo disc Chopin Recital and was mightily impressed, especially with its poetic qualities. So it was a no-brainer to get this new disc of her playing the Chopin piano concertos. (It appears she has been recording a lot of Chopin recently, most likely because this is the composer's 200th birthday year. She has also recorded the Etudes, Sonatas and Impromptus on a 2CD set Etudes Sonatas & Impromptus, which I have not heard.)

This disc is a real winner. Just listen to the clips from the middle movements of the two concertos to hear what I've described as poetic playing. Her unfailingly gorgeous tone is wedded to an ability to mold each phrase beautifully. As a pianist I am in awe of her seemingly effortless but special pedaling. Her legatos are silken. The technique heard in the display passages in the outer movements is breathtaking. (I will need to get her recording of the Etudes to hear more of this.)

She is sensitively accompanied by the fine Vancouver Symphony conducted by their long-time music director, Bramwell Tovey. Chopin's sometimes muddy orchestration is clarified in these performances.

Fialkowska has recorded the Concertos before in the unusual transcriptions for string quintet of the orchestral accompaniment. Piano Concertos 1 & 2 I have not heard those performances.

Scott Morrison

[This is a review I wrote 18 months ago for the American Amazon site.]

Janina Fialkowska is a Canadian pianist who was born in Montréal in 1951. She studied in Montréal with Yvonne Hubert (who also taught Marc-André Hamelin and Louis Lortie) before going to Paris to work with Yvonne Lefébure and then to New York with Sasha Gorodnitzki. In the early 1970s she won first prize in the first International Arthur Rubinstein Competition whereupon she became a protégée of Rubinstein. Although she is highly regarded in the rather hermetic world of devoted piano fanciers, she has never had the widest possible exposure in her career, which is a shame because she is a marvelously equipped pianist who also has very clear and poetic ideas about how the music she plays should sound. This recital disc of Chopin works certainly supports that assessment. Unfortunately Amazon has not yet listed the CD's contents, but if you go to the picture of the CD's reverse side, click on it, and then on ZOOM, you will be able to make out the disc's list of contents, albeit in French.

As to technique, just listen to the frantic whirlwind in the Grande Valse Brillante in F Major, Op. 34, No. 3. It is clean as a whistle and exciting as can be. As for poetry, one could not do better than hear her performance of the Barcarolle in F-Sharp Minor, Op. 60; both delicacy and drama with tonal finesse and visceral excitement. Yet her playing always has the last measure of grace and at times is more reticent than one is used to hearing. For me this almost always sounds right. She also has an infallible sense of each work's architecture, marshaling the climaxes with precision and inevitability.

One remarkable thing about Fialkowska is that in the early 2000s she developed a tumor on her left arm which ultimately was removed and the resulting muscular defect repaired by a delicate muscle transplant. After a period where she could only play with her right hand (and during which she transcribed and performed some left-hand pieces for right hand alone) she was finally able, with diligent rehabilitation, to resume her two-handed career and this disc is a result of that. Hurray for her!

Scott Morrison

The headliner on this disc is the String Quartet of Glenn Gould, his Opus 1, his only numbered opus and his only major work, written in the early 1950s just before his meteoric rise as a wildly popular and wholly original pianist. It is a thirty-three minute-long single movement that partakes of the compositional style of such post-romantic composers as the early Schoenberg whose string sextet, Verklärte Nacht, is clearly its model. There is dense counterpoint with constantly evolving harmonies which while based clearly in F Minor have a tendency to wander far afield. It is in roughly five parts: introduction and exposition, development (a fugue in the quite distant key of B Minor), altered introduction and exposition, and a final fugue with a huge 300-measure coda. The work is filled with intriguing ideas cheek-by-jowl with almost laughable young-composer 'mistakes' including unidiomatic string writing, awkward transitions and a seeming inability to bring the thing to a close. For all that, though, it is at times hypnotic and certainly a fascinating view into the mind of one of the great musicians of his age. It is played in slightly underpowered style by the Quatuor Alcan, a group made up of the principals of the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean Symphony Orchestra, a regional orchestra based in Chicoutimi in the rather remote area due north of Québec City.

There was a recording of the Gould Quartet, made under the composer's supervision, back in the early 1960s by the Symphonia Quartet. I think it is still available. I haven't heard it in years, but my recollection is that it makes the quartet seem more, how shall I say, coherent than the Alcan's version. Still, I think one can get a feeling for what Gould intended from the present recording.

The remaining works on this disc are the String Quartet in C Minor (1914, rev. 1921) and Two Sketches for String Quartet based on French Canadian Airs (1927) by the important and revered Canadian composer/conductor Sir Ernest MacMillan, conductor for more than thirty years of the Toronto Symphony. The Quartet, written by MacMillan at age twenty-one while studying in Germany, is an interesting mix of French impressionist and early twentieth-century British styles, the latter reminiscent of early Frank Bridge or even Edward Elgar. The Two Sketches, based on songs collected by two Canadian anthropologists, is perhaps better known in its orchestral version.

Scott Morrison

There are two operas which always leave me in tears at the end: La Bohème and Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmèlites. And surely Dialogues has the most effective final coup de théâtre of any in the repertoire. I have never seen or heard a bad production of it. This DVD of the 2004 production from La Scala is no exception. It is simply magnificent. Begin with the performance by Anja Silja of the old and ailing Madame de Croissy, whose death in Act I sets the plot in motion. Silja was 64 when she sang in this production and her acting, as always, is riveting. Even the threadbare quality of her voice is apt for the dying prioress. She is surrounded by singers who are also marvelous. Although I'd only ever heard of one of them -- Dagmar Schellenberger making her acclaimed La Scala début as Blanche de la Force; vocally she is superb, dramatically she makes the growth of her character believable -- there is not a weak member of the cast. American soprano Gwynne Geyer makes a strong and touching Madame Lidoine, the new prioress. American contralto Barbara Dever is an equally effective Mère Marie. Soeur Constance, the young novice who enters the convent at the same time as Soeur Blanche, is sung by American coloratura Laura Aikin. She does not have quite the chatty insouciance the part requires but her singing, particularly in Acts II and III, is spot on. Blanche's brother, the Chevalier de la Force, is sung effectively by baritone Gordon Gietz, as is Blanche's father by bass Christopher Robertson. Mario Bolognesi as the Father Confessor is fine. He's not only the only tenor in the cast, but also the only Italian singer in an important role, surely an oddity at La Scala.

This production of Dialogues originated at the Netherlands Opera, staged by the brilliant minimalist director Robert Carsen. Onstage action is often hieratic, quite appropriately so, and is particularly effective in the final scene -- where the nuns go one after the other to their death by guillotine -- which is staged differently than I've ever seen it. I won't ruin it by saying more than that; you must see it for yourself. Stage design is minimalist, with only monochromatic backdrops, spare furniture and props downstage, and Wieland Wagner-like lighting, stunningly effective. Costumes by Falk Bauer are primarily in black and white except for the splashes of color in the clothes of the Marquis and the Chevalier. The mob is entirely in black, the nuns in typical black-and-white until the very end.

In this production Riccardo Muti's musical direction reminds us what a superb musician he is. One could not have asked for better playing from the La Scala orchestra, nor for better musical support of the singers.

All in all, this is an extraordinarily effective production and, true to form, I was dissolved in tears at the end. Once again I aver that 'Dialogues des Carmélites' is one of the greatest of twentieth-century operas and this production helps to cement that opinion.

Sound: DD 5.1, LPCM Stereo; Picture format: 16:9 NTSC; Subtitles in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish; Liner notes in English, German, French; Region 0 (worldwide); Disc Format: DVD 9; Total time: 149mins.

Urgently recommended.

Scott Morrison

After more than 100 years of recordings there are literally uncountable numbers of recordings of the Brahms First Symphony and of the Variations on a Theme of Haydn. In my own collection I was able to find fourteen versions of the First Symphony ranging from Weingartner's 1938 account to Marin Alsop's 2006 recording with the Bournemouth Symphony. So the question is, why do we need a new recording? Well, there are a few reasons one might want another, e.g., a fresh perspective that brings a view to the music that no one else does and a recording that uses cutting edge technology and gives the music a more lifelike sound. These qualities are present in this recording by Marek Janowski leading the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Also, I tend to prefer the excitement of live recordings and this CD was indeed recorded live in concert in Pittsburgh's Heinz Hall. (Parenthetically, let me say it is a delight to find the Pittsburgh -- and indeed any American orchestra -- recording again. It has been almost ten years since the PSO made a recording.)

In all fairness, I had some real doubts about this performance of the symphony the first time I listened to it. It seemed too fast in spots; I found myself wondering what the rush was and thus found myself resisting the sweep that this approach gives the music. But on rehearing it seemed more and more appropriate to the kind of playing the PSO brought to it. This is partly a function of the clear recorded sound. One gets the luxuriance of Brahms's orchestral textures coupled with such clarity that inner voices are heard in a way that is unusual, something that really grew on me. Somehow Janowski and the PSO convey the music's blended richness while also exposing its inner details. The Pittsburgh is an orchestra in great shape, and there are marvelous touches from the its several departments, e.g., concertmaster Andrés Cárdenes's gorgeous solo violin in the second theme and at the close of the slow movement, the buttery blend of the horns and other brass throughout as well as the solo horn call in the finale and the flute solo that follows its first appearance, the piquant oboe solos, the solo clarinet in the scherzo, the velvety strings, the imperative sonic presence of the important timpani part.

As for the Haydn Variations, this too is a bit faster in spots that one might expect, but the clarity of textures is not only acceptable but makes it seem right, even inevitable. I particularly loved the spirit and lightness of Variation V and the weightiness of the Finale.

I listened to the CD in both plain stereo and SACD sound and found them to be roughly similar. There is, of course, greater presence in the SACD version but the plain CD sound is demonstration quality as well.

I hope what I've said gives readers enough of a feel for what this performance (and recording) is like to help them make a decision about whether this is worth buying. I for one am very glad I have this CD.

Scott Morrison

Like many conductors -- e.g., Mahler, Weingartner, Furtwängler, Salonen, Maazel -- Georg Tintner (1917-1999) preferred to think of himself as a composer who conducts. This is the first recording of any of his music that has come my way, and it is my sad duty to report that it is not very impressive. Much of the music was written when he was very young, still a student in Vienna, but even the works written much later show little more than clever construction. The booklet notes, written by his widow, Tanya Tintner, are understandably positive about the music, but they cannot erase the impression that these are not deathless works. Probably the most sophisticated work here is the Violin Sonata, written in 1944 in New Zealand. It is a hyperchromatic four movement sonata whose movements, we are told, represent Love, Defiance, Sorrow and Triumph. I frankly cannot hear those moods in the work, but perhaps that is my tone-deafness as regards Tintner's musical style. There are some serial passages which do, as much serial music does, limn angst. But I must say that I have little interest in rehearing this music after a couple of times through it. It is played with obvious commitment by Cho-Liang Lin, violin, and Helen Huang, piano.

The rest of the disc comprises solo piano pieces, played nicely by Ms Huang. 'Variations on a Theme of Chopin', based on the familiar A Major Prelude, is pleasant, written in a style reminiscent of Scriabin's Chopinesque early works. 'Prelude - Sehnsucht' was written when the composer was seventeen and memorializes the loss of a first love; it, too, is Scriabinesque, but reminiscent more of that composers later style. 'An den Tod eines Freundes' ('On the death of a friend') and the one-movement 'Sonata in F Minor', written while Tintner was still a student in Vienna, remind one of Grieg and Korngold respectively; obvious Tintner was trying on different styles in a search for his own. Neither work is particularly memorable.

'Two Fugues', written in 1939 after Tintner had fled Austria, are actually quite nicely done and of the works here are the ones I'd most like to hear again. The first is a two-voice perpetuum mobile in free counterpoint, the second Bachian in its gravity. The CD concludes with 'Trauermusic (Music Tragica), also written in 1939. It is a six-and-a-half minute outpouring of grief -- one can imagine it was inspired by the horrors of Nazism -- and its at times tenuous hold on tonality could be seen as an appropriate mode in which to convey such a reaction.

Helen Huang is a young (23) and very talented pianist whose performances here are unexceptionable. I'd like to hear her in more substantial fare. She is given slightly reverberant, but not bothersome, recorded sound.

Scott Morrison

This CD is labeled 'Volume 1' and so we can assume that it is the first in a series that will comprise all the symphonies of Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924), in direct competition when completed with the fine set of the symphonies done by Vernon Handley and the Ulster Symphony on the Chandos label. One advantage of the present Naxos recording and its anticipated companions is that they are a bit less costly and a good deal more recent than the Chandos set. Beyond that, though, this recording of Stanford's Fourth and Seventh Symphonies bodes well for the complete set to follow because these are beautifully performed and recorded by the Bournemouth Symphony under David Lloyd-Jones.

Stanford's Fourth Symphony is a large 40+ minute four-movement work that is brilliantly scored -- lightly and transparently, making it sound at times more like Mendelssohn than Brahms -- and cogently constructed. It is melodious, even folksy in spots, but has its moments -- especially in the slow movement -- of real depth of feeling. There is no question but what Stanford sounds more German than British, but of course that is not all bad. Yes, it is conservative for its time, but that makes little difference to a listener 120 years after its composition. The Seventh Symphony, Stanford's last, was written in 1911 and it is hard to imagine that it came into the world at almost precisely the same time as Elgar's Second Symphony or, even more, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. But it is a beautiful thing nonetheless. Clearly Stanford had not changed much with the times and thus he wrote this even more Mendelssohnian work with hardly a trace of anything that couldn't have been written fifty years earlier. The first movement has that fairy lightness so associated with Mendelssohn and if nothing else it reminds us of the enormous influence the immigrant German had on the music of the imperial isle. The symphony continues in this genial manner through four movements lasting less than thirty minutes. The only thing remotely English about it is that it does seem pastoral like much English music of its era.

David Lloyd-Jones is a conductor who has proven his abilities over the years with treasurable recordings of music by such early twentieth-century British composers as Delius, Bax, Moeran and Alwyn. The Bournemouth Symphony clearly have the measure of these two symphonies and perform them eloquently and with conviction of their worth.

This recording is for those who like music of the Brahms/Schumann/Mendelssohn ambit and are interested in branching out a bit. They will not be disappointed.

Scott Morrison

Unlike Beethoven's middle-period piano trios, the trios from Op. 1, two of the three of them presented here, are very early Beethoven and sound almost more like Haydn or one of his imitators than Beethoven. Not that that's a bad thing. It's just that they don't sound much like the Beethoven with whom we are most familiar. I reviewed an earlier volume in this series in which the Trios Nos. 5 & 6 were played by the Xyrion Trio -- it bugs me that I don't know the origin of the group's odd name -- and gave it a rave. Individually the players -- Nina Tichman, piano; Ida Bieler, violin; Maria Kliegel, cello -- have had sterling solo careers but since its formation in 2001 the Trio has forged an enviable reputation for exuberant, musical, technically secure performances and recordings. There is no exception to that in the present recording. The only relatively minor let-down, dare I say it, is with the music itself. Let's face it, the Beethoven of 1795 was still something of an apprentice, or at least he had not forged his recognizable style. For instance, the Op. 1, No. 1 Trio sounds like it could have come from someone like Stamitz or Eybler; indeed it starts with one of those clichéd 'Mannheim rockets' for which Stamitz was famous. Still, if one weren't expecting 'Beethoven' one could easily be pleased with these works on their own merits. So perhaps I'm being a bit harsh. It's a little like asking Verdi to have composed 'Falstaff' when he was twenty-five.

Those trivial caveats out of the way, the performances of these pieces are delightful. The First Trio, like the Second unusually in four rather than the common three movements, contains a sparkling finale with delightful skips in the piano part. The Second Trio opens with a Haydnesque slow introduction but when the main section arrives it is clear that Beethoven gives each of the three instruments more individual music to make than Haydn ever did in his numerous piano trios which were rightly considered to be piano sonatas with violin and cello accompaniment. The second movement, Largo con expressione, is a mostly serene set of variations; here the piano writing begins to sound more like the Beethoven of the early sonatas.

The CD is filled out with the Allegretto in B Flat, WoO* 39, a five-minute piece written in 1812 for the young daughter of Antonie Brentano, the latter quite possibly Beethoven's 'immortal beloved.' It is a pleasant sonata-allegro in which the piano part dominates.

*Werke ohne Opus (Works without Opus Number which, amusingly, are numbered anyway!)

Scott Morrison

I have rarely been so touched at a deep emotional level as I have been by this collection of five songs written as a passionate gift of love by composer Peter Lieberson for his wife, the mezzo Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, a transcendent artist. Everything about the work -- from the outpouring of glorious sound and passion from Ms Lieberson to the texts by Pablo Neruda to the rich sounds of the Boston Symphony under James Levine playing Lieberson's richly romantic music -- adds to the emotional power of the performance. If one then understands that this music was written during a time when Ms Hunt Lieberson was struggling with the cancer that ultimately killed her, that the recording was made not out of desperation but out of hope during one of her periods of modest remission, and that she died not long afterwards, it makes the experience all the more powerful.

One must add that there are two other similarly nonpareil recordings -- eerily enough with singers who were either mezzo-soprano or contralto -- that are classics at least partly because they were made just before the singers died: Jan de Gaetani's recording of her husband's chamber orchestrations of songs by Mahler and Berlioz (including a heartbreaking 'Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen') and, of course, Kathleen Ferrier's 'Das Lied von der Erde' with the touching dying-away of her last words 'Ewig ... ewig ... ewig'.

One can only hope that Hunt Lieberson, Ferrier and de Gaetani are singing together in Heaven. Ave atque vale.

Scott Morrison

For many years the piano compositions of Polish-American pianist/composer Leopold Godowsky (1870-1938) languished in obscurity, rarely played or recorded. There was always interest among cognoscenti and among pianists who loved exploring corners of the modern piano repertoire. But there it remained until an upsurge of recordings and performances began perhaps fifteen or twenty years ago. There are now three recordings of his Chopin etude recompositions (and that's what they are: recompositions), prime among which is that of Marc-André Hamelin. And his superb Passacaglia and the Sonata have also been recorded. Rather quietly Naxos's house virtuoso, Konstantin Scherbakov, has been recording what appears to be a complete traversal of the piano works; this CD is Volume 8. And it contains some of the most interesting music to date: the Java Suite (originally entitled 'Phonorama: Tonal Journey for the Pianoforte') and the delectable 'Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Johann Strauss II -- No. 3: Wine, Women and Song'. The latter has been recorded a number of times, the former has only been recorded once, as far as I know, by Esther Budiardjo on ProPiano, a recording I've not heard.

For me by far the most interesting thing here is the Java Suite, an almost 50 minute set of twelve short character pieces whose inspiration was that of the music of the Indonesian island, Java. Written in 1925, Godowsky's suite must have seemed exotic to early listeners. The first piece 'Gamelan' may very well have introduced that word and the sound of gamelan-style music to many westerners. (Of course, French composers in particular had been influenced by this sort of music back in 1889 when a Javanese gamelan played at the Paris World's Fair, and indeed it is notable that much of Godowsky's music necessarily sounds like similar works by Debussy.) Technically much of Godowsky's Java Suite makes use of both whole-tone and pentatonic scales. Thus, even to the untrained ear, the music sounds Eastern.

Among the more striking effects in the Java Suite are the heavily perfumed atmosphere of 'The Gardens of Buitenzorg' ('Buitenzorg' means 'Sans Souci'), the quick repeated-note fourths and fifths of 'Chattering Monkeys at the Sacred Lake of Wendit', the use of Debussyan chords of the ninth in 'Boro Budur in Moonlight' and the stylized gestures of 'A Court Pageant in Solo'. I found myself going back again and again to hear this suite.

Godowsky's delightfully lilting pianistic transformation of Johann Strauss II's 'Wine, Women and Song' is virtuosic in the extreme. Scherbakov tosses it off as if it weren't and stylishly at that. Lucky us.

For anyone even more than a little interested in Godowsky's music, this release is a must. And for those who enjoy exploring unfamiliar 20th-century piano music but who don't cotton to extreme modernism, this release is self-recommending. It should be noted that the formerly full-price Marco Polo label is now selling its new releases at budget price.

Scott Morrison