Varèse reviews

Varèse reviews

A New Century

Paul Jacobs (organ); The Cleveland Orchestra/Franz Welser-Möst (Cleveland Orchestra)
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Solo – Telemann: Fantasias for Solo Flute, Nos 1-12; plus solo flute works by Takemitsu, Karg-Elert, Widmann et al

Emmanuel Pahud (Warner)
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Dvorák • Varèse

French-born, British-trained Ludovic Morlot is one to watch: he’s the dedicatee of Elliott Carter’s final work, Instances, no less. This programme, though, is better in theory than practice: two responses to the new world, indeed, but musically indigestible.

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Berlioz • Varese

New recordings of Berlioz’s neurotic self-exploration are coming thick and fast, but this one doesn’t need its unusual coupling to stand out. Mariss Jansons’s interpretation is distinctive enough to stand alone on this disc, which captures the immediacy of a live performance by the excellent Munich orchestra in vividly recorded sound. This is a big reading, spacious and detailed, but one that emphasises the unease underlying even the most lyrical passages.

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Berlioz • Varèse

Mariss Jansons conducts the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra
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Varese/Kraft

William Kraft’s Percussion Concerto and Contextures make a provocative coupling with three major scores by Edgard Varèse. Dedicated to Varèse himself, the Concerto sounds endearingly simple alongside the percussion and siren effects of Ionisation. Historically, Contextures: Riots – Decade ’60 is a memento of exciting times, though you’ll hardly be rushing to the barricades in consequence.
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Varese: Déserts; Ecuatorial; Nocturnal; Intégrales; Densité 21.5; Ionisation

As in his previous Varèse collection, Nagano overplays the Gallic finesse – a real and neglected aspect of the music, but not one that should neutralise its visionary viscerality. Combined with Erato’s admirably clear recording the result is sometimes lightweight, but Intégrales emerges as a score of positively Mozartian Classicism. The triumphs, though, are the compellingly nightmarish Nocturnal, far outclassing the only previous version (Abravanel’s 1968 Vanguard recording) and a superbly plangent Déserts, the best yet on disc.

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Varèse: Déserts; Ecuatorial; Nocturnal; Intégrales; Densité 21.5; Ionisation

As in his previous Varèse collection, Nagano overplays the Gallic finesse – a real and neglected aspect of the music, but not one that should neutralise its visionary viscerality. Combined with Erato’s admirably clear recording the result is sometimes lightweight, but Intégrales emerges as a score of positively Mozartian Classicism. The triumphs, though, are the compellingly nightmarish Nocturnal, far outclassing the only previous version (Abravanel’s 1968 Vanguard recording) and a superbly plangent Déserts, the best yet on disc.

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Varese: Amériques; Offrandes; Hyperprism; Octandre; Arcana

Nagano is the ideal Varèse conductor, able to combine a wonderful rhythmic and structural precision with sensual treatment of melodic line and orchestral colour. This disc is the first of a complete survey of Varèse’s work which looks all set to be definitive.
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Varèse: Complete works

With his 1994 recording of Arcana, Chailly established his credentials as a doughty champion of Varèse. He now emerges as the foremost interpreter with this ‘complete works’, bringing together that performance with brand new ones of the rest of his output. It lacks Étude pour espace, unheard since 1947, and the electronic film score, Verges, but it’s still the ‘most complete’ ever.

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Prokofiev/Varese/Mosolov

Heavy metal was all downhill after this. Alexander Mosolov’s brief Iron Foundry (1928), originally part of a ballet celebrating Soviet industrialisation, kicks off a fascinating survey of Twenties musical brutalism, a general trend that owed as much to the primitivism of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring as to a reflection of the harshness of early 20th-century life. Prokofiev reworked his Third Symphony (1928) from the music for his opera The Fiery Angel. It only really takes a breather in its slow movement – the rest is powerful, motoric and rhythmical.
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Varese/Ives

Although composed over 70 years ago, Edgard Varèse’s large-scale orchestral work Amériques still has the capacity to astonish the listener who is well versed in the most recent contemporary music. A daring portrayal of ‘new worlds on earth, in the sky, or in the minds of men’, it explores a whole gamut of striking sonorities, in particular the mesmeric tones of the siren.
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Varese: Amériques; Arcana; Déserts; Ionisation

The whole of Varèse’s surviving output can be comfortably accommodated on a pair of CDs, as it is in Riccardo Chailly’s superlative survey on Decca, but Pierre Boulez’s single disc concentrates on the two orchestral works that Varèse wrote in the years after he emigrated to the United States in 1915, Amériques and Arcana.

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Varèse: Arcana; Octandre; Offrandes; Intégrales, Déserts

The whole of Varèse’s surviving output can be comfortably accommodated on a pair of CDs, as it is in Riccardo Chailly’s superlative survey on Decca, but Pierre Boulez’s single disc concentrates on the two orchestral works that Varèse wrote in the years after he emigrated to the United States in 1915, Amériques and Arcana.

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