Popular classics, it seems, are the name of the game at EMI this month, just in time for Christmas. Vivaldi's The Four Seasons has for a couple of decades held the crown as the world's most recorded classical work, and Carmen remains its most popular opera. Here we have new versions of both, a selection from Carmen, and Vivaldi's evergreen masterpiece sprouting some surprising new twigs.
VIVALDI
The Four Seasons; Concertos for Two Violins
Nigel Kennedy,
Daniel Stabrawa, Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
EMI CLASSICS 5 57647 2
In the photo on this CD cover Nigel Kennedy looks more like the composer Handel with his wig off than the punk rocker the young violinist once aspired to be. He soon returned to the classical fold, despite sarcastic headlines in the British press such as "Farewell to Brahms," but still draws the crowds with concerts where he appears with spiked hair and ripped jeans when all the other musicians, unnecessarily in the opinion of this reviewer, are in so-called evening dress. He's nonetheless a violinist of genius and what's more has done a lot to popularize the staccato, hyper-rhymic style pioneered in 18th century Venice by Antonio Vivaldi.
Vivaldi used girl foundlings, mostly the daughters of prostitutes and otherwise employed only in the laundries of their orphanage, training them up in string instrument-playing and making them eventually famous throughout Europe. His tuneful, manic music was not only written, most unusually for the time, for girl instrumentalists, but for girls widely considered to be the very lowest of the low.
Nigel Kennedy is undertaking a major Vivaldi Project with EMI and the Berlin Philharmonic to put more of the red-haired priest's music into circulation. There's a huge amount of it -- incredibly, three-quarters of it has never been recorded. (Perhaps not so incredibly -- much of what has been aired sounds predictable, and one hearing can be more than enough).
This is the opening CD of this project, and it unsurprisingly features Vivaldi's four violin concertos known collectively as The Four Seasons. Kennedy has recorded them before, but this time they sound sharply different. He now gives them very idiosyncratic treatment, making his instrument sound raucous, abrasive, silky and twangy by turns. He adds all kinds of improvised phrases, and all in all sounds more like Stefan Grapelli than an orchestral violinist. This is high praise -- if you think you've heard The Four Seasons one time too often, listen to this version and surprise yourself.
Nigel Kennedy has always personified the problem "What do you do when you just want to be an ordinary kid, but have been born a musical genius?" Perhaps this new venture is part if his answer -- promote the music of a man who long ago took a bunch of ordinary kids with little or no hope in life, and turned them into international celebrities.
Also on the CD are two concertos for two violins, with Daniel Stabrawa joining in the fun. A Kennedy fan-club makes the official credits this time, by the way. It's at www.nigelkennedy.com.
CARMEN (Highlights)
Gheorghiu, Alagna, Mula, Hampson Orchestre National du Capitol de Toulouse Conductor: Michel Plasson
EMI CLASSICS 5 57503 2
The most familiar parts of Carmen are rather silly, and so excessively well-known it's barely possible to listen to them again. Such good music as there is in this opera lies hidden away from the famous bits but unfortunately, as this is a CD of highlights, it's just these scarcely-listenable-to parts that we find we're landed with. It isn't at all rare for sopranos, rather than the mezzos it's written for, to take on Carmen. Even so Angela Gheorghiu, with her vocal flutterings, often sounds far too conventionally classical and correct for this originally taboo-breaking role. Her early Haberna sounds more like the broken-hearted Violetta in La Traviata than the carefree, cigarette-smoking Spanish gypsy. She warms up later, however, and the final scene is very strong. Her husband Roberto Algana, a specialist in French music, is invariably incisive. What we hear of Thomas Hampson as the toreador Escamillo is somewhat underwhelming, while Inver Mula as Micaela, the good girl in the story, is par for the course.
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