The Berlin Philharmonic’s tour to Japan in 1994 was an important event for both parties, and Kultur in the US has finally got round to issuing the DVD of the concert in Tokyo’s Suntory Hall on Oct. 14 on its popular label.
In an all-Russian program the orchestra, under its then-music director Claudio Abbado, delivers a series of renditions that carefully balance sensitivity with power. This is appropriate enough for most Russian music, avoiding as it does the more intellectual development sections of the Viennese tradition and going instead for color, melody and effect. After Mussorgsky’s flamboyant Night on the Bare Mountain and Stravinsky’s subtle Firebird Suite, the Berliners launch into Tchaikovsky’s noble Fifth Symphony, a perfect vehicle, with its somber mood and magnificent sonorities, for all the emphases outlined above.
It comes off to perfection, and the Tokyo audience — who you’d assume to be highly discriminating, and in no way there just to get a look at some foreign celebrities — reacts with great enthusiasm. Abbado is also visibly pleased. There is no encore.
Most non-Germans know of Joseph Eichendorff as the author of the words for the last of Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs — In Abendrot (“At Dusk”); the remaining three are to words by the much better-known Hermann Hesse. But Eichendorff was a major Romantic poet, as well as a prose writer, and Robert Schumann set a cycle of his poems to music.
Hanssler Classic has just released a recording of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau performing the cycle in Baden-Baden in 1987, together with Schumann’s settings of songs by Justinus Kerner, plus other miscellaneous items. Aged 62 at the time, Fischer-Dieskau effortlessly brings out the great variety of the songs — every mood is there, it seems, from dramatic surprise to youthful excitement.
Eichendorff was a great believer in the power of nature and the poems, mostly very short, are tributes to such things as moonlit nights and spring days. As for Schumann, he’d taken to composing after permanently damaging one of his hands in a device intended to stretch it and so increase his range as a pianist. There are no subtitles, but you get a bonus CD of more Fischer-Dieskau performances. There is much historical Fischer-Dieskau material available from Hanssler, including some wonderful Bach arrangements from the 1950s.
But the most enjoyable DVDs this month were, as so often, stumbled on by chance. Astor Piazzolla is an Argentinean musician and contemporary composer who has spent the best part of a lifetime trying to promote the idea of the tango in other than its traditional form. He’s met huge resistance from those who want the tango unchanged, and faithful to its underworld, brothel-going origins.
Piazzolla, by contrast, has sought to make it the basis for concert hall performances in which its strident rhythm, while still present, is subsumed into a more aesthetic ambiance. In Deutsche Grammophon’s The Next Tango he talks at length about the dance form’s history, and how the bandoneon (on which Piazzolla is a virtuoso) came to be so inextricably associated with it. The accordion-like instrument originated in Germany where it was often used in small churches that didn’t have an organ. In the late 19th century a specimen happened to be taken to Buenos Aires, where its suitability for nightclub use was quickly realized. Before long a factory back in Germany was producing bandoneons as fast as it was able, exclusively for the Argentinean market. Piazzolla, meanwhile, has not been wholly unsuccessful in his campaign, and is felt in some quarters at least to embody the very spirit of the Argentine capital.
The traditional tango, meanwhile, continues utterly unchanged. So you shouldn’t look for the normal face-to-face, quasi-sexual confrontation here. Instead the music is atmospheric and distinctly laid-back. The long film (by Jose Mantes-Raquei) itself contains many musical episodes, and in addition there are performances of two concertos featuring Piazzolla as bonus items.
All in all, the DVD as a whole makes you think again about the possibilities and direction of “contemporary music.” Abstraction and minimalism may rule in the north and in Europe, but South America is surging ahead with a different, far more accessible, feel. This DVD is worth watching just to help you entertain that possibility.
Lastly, a historical DVD from Video Artists International — Sir Thomas Beecham conducting Mozart (plus a little Handel) in Canada in 1956. It’s in black-and-white, of course, and taken from a Canadian TV broadcast. Naturally the sound isn’t ideal, but the performances are a revelation. Mozart’s Prague symphony in particular shows exactly why Beecham managed almost single-handedly to restore Mozart’s reputation in the 1950s — previously he’d been patronizingly seen as a child prodigy, but not to be compared to Bach, Beethoven or Brahms, with the great pianist Artur Schnabel once saying as a youth that he didn’t know there were any Mozart piano concertos. By contrast, Beecham’s reading here of Mozart’s three-movement symphony is quite possibly the most stylish that exists anywhere.
The canonical shot of an East Asian city is a night skyline studded with towering apartment and office buildings, bright with neon and plastic signage, a landscape of energy and modernity. Another classic image is the same city seen from above, in which identical apartment towers march across the city, spilling out over nearby geography, like stylized soldiers colonizing new territory in a board game. Densely populated dynamic conurbations of money, technological innovation and convenience, it is hard to see the cities of East Asia as what they truly are: necropolises. Why is this? The East Asian development model, with
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