Wordability

Yes, it’s time again for the Wordability highlights of the year, that consoling list which doesn’t include anything too recent.  The music award this year has been easy: Rossini’s Il Viaggio di Reims on DGG, Claudio Abbado, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the Prague Philharmonic Chorus and a cast like a fleet of Rolls-Royces.

Rossini wrote it for Paris to celebrate the coronation of Charles X in 1825. It was given four times, then withdrawn. For 150 years it was thought the complete score had been lost. (About half the music was re-purposed for  Le Comte Ory.) But three separate manuscript discoveries and some careful editing restored the whole. This 1985 recording, based on performances at Pesaro, is the work’s first. Charles X, by the way, was a reactionary so boneheaded that he brought on the 1830 revolution.

It’s first-rate Rossini. There are samples of the work on YouTube, from both the 1984 Pesaro performances, a 1992 performance again conducted by Abbado with much the same cast. and an Opus Arte video of another production.

Here’s the Pesaro version of the incomparable Sextet (the tenor who leads off is Franco Araiza).

This is the encore of the finale, this time from Berlin 1992. Watch ten virtuosi deliberately skating on thin ice.

And if you want more of Silvia McNair (who doesn’t?)

Works of music that even when I admired them once seemed very long (Mahler #3) now are compassable – I hear them, however imperfectly, as wholes. On the other hand, there are times when just one piece – recently it was a Chopin Ballade – is such an intense experience that it suffices for a day.

Quality versus quantity. The marathons of youth . . . I remember one blissful salad day afternoon spent with a cellist who introduced me to a couple of Boccherini quintets, all six Bach cello suites and for an encore, the Kodaly sonata for unaccompanied cello.

Is it worth spending 2 1/2 hours on a Bellini opera for about 30 minutes of first-rate music? Excerpts don’t carry anything like the full import of that thirty minutes music, because opera, like the novel, is the art of preparation. But really – all that noisy bustle, those indifferent arias for comprimarii, those choruses (Ho ho, let’s drink, whatever). Taking it a step further, why not just listen to some Chopin, where Bellini’s melody is distilled and refined?

Gilbert and Sullivan operas all the way through? Why not just Mackerras’s brilliant ballet suite, Pineapple Poll?

I once had a student who announced rather proudly that she could no longer listen to Mozart. Her ears had been re-configured by Webern, whose Four Pieces for Cello and Piano last about five minutes total. Every phrase unique, no repetition. That was the ideal, she thought.

OK yes, there’s obviously something screwy about an ideal that confines music to Webern.