BEETHOVEN
Piano Sonatas Nos.30-32
GLENN
GOULD, Piano
It was well-known that the great Canadian
pianist Glenn Gould (1932-1982) had a “blind spot that spanned from Bach to
Schoenberg”. He was out of sympathy with much of classical and Romantic
repertoire, and it was said that he recorded pieces he disliked in order to
show how bad they were. Gould recorded Beethoven’s final Sonata trilogy in 1956, as his second commercial release for
Columbia Masterworks, following the resounding critical and commercial success
of his Bach Goldberg Variations. This
was unequivocally panned by critics as a dud.
He took an unorthodox view of Beethoven, a
composer less amenable to variation than Bach. His tempos tended to extremes,
mainly ridiculously fast. The final Theme
and Variations of Sonata Op.109
runs under 8 minutes (compared with Schnabel’s 14 or Arrau’s 16 minutes), and
the whole work is over in 13 minutes. Repeats were shunned, and the inherent
beauty and nobility stripped and spat out wholesale. Sonata Op.110 comes off unscathed but the final Sonata Op.111 suffers greater
indignities. The first movement introduction is taken too leisurely and the
ensuing Allegro Con Brio is a muddled
blur in neck-breaking velocity. Why should we listen to these wrong-headed and
misguided interpretations? Because Gould was a genius, and savants often have
something valid to offer, no matter how wayward. In Gould’s own words, this was
not his “most convincing recording”, but “is the most convinced”. Go figure.
BE MY LOVE
A TRIBUTE TO MARIO LANZA
JOSEPH CALLEJA, Tenor
BBC Concert Orchestra /
Steven Mercurio
Decca 478 3531 / ****1/2
Almost every great tenor will cite the legacy of
Mario Lanza (1921-1959) as a major influence on their singing careers. He was
the most popular operatic voice of the late 1940s and 1950s, his fame coming primarily
from best-selling movies with MGM rather than the opera stage. His only the
major role onstage was Pinkerton from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, which he sung just twice in 1948. He mostly specialised
in short scenes and arias, as seen in the 1951 movie The Great Caruso, where he portrays the great Italian tenor Enrico
Caruso. This hour-long anthology sees the Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja sing
both operatic arias and popular songs that Lanza made his own.
Among the former include Nessun dorma (Puccini’s Turandot),
Cielo e mar! (Ponchielli’s La Gioconda), Amor ti vieta (Giordano’s Fedora)
and Vesti la giubba (Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci). The last impressively
showcases his clear, ringing tone and dramatic intensity that matches the best
from The Three Tenors. The popular songs are in Italian (Arrivederci, Roma and La
Danza), Spanish (Granada Philadelphia
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