Beethoven makes the running this month with a Japanese-led line-up for a wonderful Choral Symphony on DVD and an astonishingly fine CD of the first three piano sonatas from Stephen Kovacevich, one of the most enjoyable discs I've encountered for a long time. Roman Catholicism, on the other hand, is caught in a strong searchlight, first with its pants down as we join the naughty monks portrayed by Carl Orff, and then with its mysteries over-brightly exposed in a species of costume drama in Vienna's St. Stephen's Cathedral.
The DVDs first. Universal Music has decided to issue a 3-DVD box compilation called Great Choral Classics and it's absolutely stunning. It contains a new DVD of Seiji Ozawa conducting Beethoven's last symphony a couple of years ago at the Saito Kinen Festival in Matsumoto, Japan, plus, on the same disc, Ozawa's rendition of Orff's Carmina Burana filmed with the Berlin Philharmonic 15 years ago. To this new DVD has been added two older classics, Georg Solti conducting Mozart's Requiem in1991 in Vienna to mark the 200th anniversary of Mozart's death, and Handel's Messiah in a 1992 performance in Dublin's Point Theater to mark the 250th anniversary of the work's premiere in 1742 in the same city. Considering that the new Ozawa DVD is selling for some NT$900, this three-DVD box, priced at around NT$1,400, represents a considerable
bargain.
Of the four items, the Mozart Requiem with the Vienna Philharmonic under the late Georg Solti is certainly the most bizarre. On the grounds that the piece was composed as a liturgical item, the performance, in Vienna's St. Stephen's Cathedral, is broken up with a mass, celebrated by a cardinal in Latin and German. Stranger still are the antics of Solti, by this time a revered veteran, who beams, bops around and nods excitedly through music he clearly loved, most notably in the parts that Mozart didn't write, and just after the start of the "Agnus Dei" he appears to wave to a friend. Perhaps he was high on an anti-depression drug? The music is, needless to say, sublime. The soloists are Arleen Auger, Cecilia Bartoli, Vinson Cole and Rene Pape. The score used was a version devised by the great scholar and writer H.C. Robbins Landon.
Handel's Messiah is on an altogether different level. Neville Marriner aimed to produce a version far from the Victorian habit of using casts quite literally of thousands, and instead offers the work as close as possible to the way it was first performed. Handel himself used some 50 people, so forces are small, and there's even a counter-tenor soloist (Michael Chance) in the 18th century manner in some numbers. Chance and the other soloists (Sylvia McNair, Anne Sofie von Otter, Jerry Handley and Robert Lloyd) are all outstanding. Especially fine is a 22-minute bonus item featuring -- wonder of wonders! -- the great Robbins Landon in person, evoking in exuberant and illuminating mode Handel's lifestyle, together with Marriner leafing through Handel's original manuscript and describing his approach. When Robbins Landon describes Handel shouting to his servant "Smith -- food!" you just know Handel's servant really was named Smith -- this is Robbins Landon, after all. Of the aria, "He was despised and rejected of men," he remarks, "If you don't love that, then you just don't love music. It's that simple." My glass kettle boiled dry and broke into pieces because I forgot all about it while engrossed in this marvelous DVD.
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