Gal’s music is offered here in polished, sensitive performances, well captured in Toccata’s top-notch recorded sound. The very useful annotations by Gal’s daughter Eva FoxGal are elegantly written and packed with astute observations about her father and the music on this very rewarding release. LEHMAN

GESUALDO: Sacrae Cantiones 1

Marian Consort/ Rory McCleery Delphian 34176—61 minutes

The Marian Consort’s six members (SACtTTB) sing with a fervent and devotional otherworldly quality that suits the music very well. Much is often made of how the salacious and madman details of Carlo Gesualdo’s life influenced his music, and that sometimes obscures our understanding of the ways that his music has a universality and significance well beyond any personal traits of its creator. Published in 1603, the motets in the Sacrae Cantiones Book 1 demonstrate Gesualdo’s deep understanding of the human condition. Several motets are on dark themes such as grief, fear of death, sorrow, and unrepentant sin—with music that has more than just a veneer of despair. Several texts are prayers for protection, for mercy, for strength again foes, for a cleansed heart. The Marian Consort captures this power and complexity with both a high level of skill and conviction. The network web of voices and calm pace of performance combine to create a sense of the music being suspended in the air. At first I found this a little disconcerting because the music seemed not to flow forward, but the more I listened the more the singers’ approach drew me in. There’s a lovely blend and profound reflection on the meaning of the texts. Notes, bios, texts, translations. C MOORE

GILBERT & SULLIVAN: HMS Pinafore

F Lawrence Ewing (Sir Joseph Porter), Jonathan Spencer (Captain Corcoran), Aaron Gallington (Ralph Rackstraw), Charles Martin (Dick Deadeye), Jennifer Ashworth (Josephine), Cabiria Jacobsen (Hebe), Sonja Gariaeff (Buttercup); Lamplighters Theater, San Francisco/ David Moschler Lamplighter 2015 [2CD] 86 minutes (469 Bryant St SF CA 94107)

HMS Pinafore has had an extraordinary run since 1878, and the performances keep coming. This excellent, complete recording is from

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a 2015 performance by the Lamplighters Music Theater in San Francisco. The production won several San Francisco Bay area awards including Outstanding Production of a Musical. Listening to these discs it’s easy to hear why. I’ve always considered the 1959 D’Oyly Carte recording on Decca definitive, but this new recording is as good. The English accents are perfect, the singing and characterizations are excellent, the dialog delivery is sincere, the voices match the character’s peculiarities, and the orchestra accompanies all this as if they had been performing the score for years. Most of all, this is such fun, with Gilbert’s matchless wit coming through. Standouts in this excellent cast include Sonja Gariaieff ’s Little Buttercup and F. Lawrence Ewing’s Sir Joseph Porter (played as both snide and effete). Of the many performances I have seen, Gilbert and Sullivan always work best when they are played straight. The show has had many director influenced productions, including updates, performances in warehouses and on ships, changes in location, changing the characters to gangsters, and other horrors inflicted to make it more accessible to modern audiences. But the best performances are true to the original. I only wish there was a video of this performance, as the few videos that have been produced have been mangled. My last review of Pinafore was of an abridged version on Linn 522 (S/O 2016) which I did not recommend. My top two picks would be this new Lamplighter recording and the 1959 Decca D’Oyly Carte recording with dialog. The 2013 complete Ohio Light Opera recording on Albany is also recommended (1459; M/A 2014). FISCH

GINASTERA: Orchestral Works 2

Xiayin Wang, p; BBC Philharmonic/ Juanjo Mena Chandos 10923—69 minutes

This is the second in a series of orchestral discs from Mena and the BBC Philharmonic. The first included the most popular of Ginastera’s works for orchestra, Estancia. Here we have Panambi, which is a “choreographic legend in one act”, and the Second Piano Concerto. The opening of Panambi manages to evoke both the beginning of the Rite of Spring (solo bassoon and contrabassoon, in the depths, rather than the heights) and the watery Rhine from Wagner’s Ring. The extended and atmospheric ballet is divided into 18 movements,

March/April 2017

with some percussive dances (‘The Tribe is Uneasy’), and closing with a French apotheosis with woman’s voices. The other work, the Second Piano Concerto (1972), is very much on the other side of the divide between nationalism and abstraction, part of the high tide for high modernism. One would certainly not imagine that this difficult and noisy abstraction is by the same composer, nor that it has anything to do with Latin culture. Pianistic it is, and how. Xiayin Wang brilliantly navigates the plethora of notes at high speed and high volume, particularly in the closing Prestissimo (the notes confess that she does use two hands for the scherzo for the left hand alone—II). T MOORE

GINASTERA: Harp Concerto; Pampeana 1; Guitar Sonata; Danzas Argentinas

Yolanda Kondonassis, hp; Gil Shaham, v; Orli Shaham, p; Jason Vieaux, g; Oberlin Orchestra/ Raphael Jimenez Oberlin 16-04—55 minutes

So that you won’t miss it, this is boldly titled “Ginastera : One Hundred”. For us lessinformed North Americans, Ginastera and Villa-Lobos stand in roughly the same position in their countries of Argentina and Brazil—the only composer we have heard of and heard any music by. But the major differences are age (Villa-Lobos, born in 1887, is a more than a full generation older), style (Villa-Lobos showed the influence of Paris and of Brazilian popular music), and Ginastera’s move to a much more abstract “neo-expressionism” when he abandoned nationalism. Oberlin’s selection of four works from 1937, 1947, 1956, and 1976 wisely avoids anything truly rebarbative; and the first two (the Danzas, Op. 2, and the Pampeana, Op. 16) are explicitly nationalist. Even the harp concerto and the quite late guitar sonata will certainly register as Latin American with most listeners, the former quite lyrical, the latter idiomatic for the guitar. Both the opening and closing movements of the sonata begin with a strummed chord of the open strings, and the dissonances are often built on fourths, rather than grinding seconds or tritones. The performances and the extremely clear recordings are absolutely first-rate. In a very difficult period for higher education in the USA, it is good to know that Oberlin continues to operate at this level. T MOORE

American Record Guide

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LASS: Mad Rush; Metamorphosis 2; 600 Lines; Sound of Silence Nicolas Horvath, p Grand Piano 745—73 minutes

Mr Horvath continues this fascinating survey of Glass’s piano music with performances that satisfy me completely. Mad Rush clocks in at 22 minutes, almost 10 minutes slower than Glass’s performance for Sony (Mar/Apr 1990). I’m not sure why it takes that long: the tempo isn’t that much slower, the rubato isn’t all that extreme. But never mind: the performance is beautiful in the traditional sense of that word and it sounds great. Horvath’s program includes another early work, 600 Lines, which I had never heard. The pitch choices recall the ones for Glass’s violin piece Strung Out but the rhythms are more incisive. And at 40 minutes, it’s hardly possible for me to criticize him for not giving the length of the piece its due (as I did in his too-brief account of Music in Fifths, Sept/Oct 2016). HASKINS

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LASS: Piano Etudes; Illusionist Suite; Wichita Vortex Sutra; Dreaming Awake; Metamorphosis 2 Bruce Levingston, p; Ethan Hawke, narr Sono Luminus 92205 [2CD] 110 minutes

I have enjoyed Bruce Levingston’s previous Glass release, but am even more excited about this one. It is a program centered around Glass’s remarkable etudes, adding in earlier pieces like ‘Metamorphosis 2’ and Wichita Vortex Sutra (beautifully narrated by Ethan Hawke). There are at present a number of fine interpreters of Glass’s piano music—among them Paul Barnes (Orange Mountain, July/Aug 2016) and Maki Namekawa (OM, Mar/Apr 2015). Levingston’s approach is more measured and often freer than either Barnes or Namekawa. The famous Etude 2, for instance, contains extreme rubato—possibly more than I think is appropriate, but musical and thought-provoking nevertheless. The perpetuum mobile of Etude 10 benefits from a tempo slightly slower than other performances, more nuanced phrasing, and great clarity of articulation. Sono Luminus’s production captures the piano (a Steinway D) perfectly. One of the best Glass piano programs I have ever heard. HASKINS

GLAZOUNOV: Violin Concerto; see KHACHATURIAN

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