Calefax - Romantic Kaleidoscope (2015) [Official Digital Download - DXD 24/352]

×

Calefax - Romantic Kaleidoscope (2015) [Official Digital Download - DXD 24/352]

Close

Calefax Reed Quintet - Romantic Kaleidoscope (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24-bit/352,8 kHz | Time - 75:06 minutes | 3,89 GB
or FLAC (tracks) 24-bit/96 kHz | Time - 75:06 minutes | 1,33 GB
Studio Master, Official Digital Download | Artwork: Front cover

In the first fifteen years of its existence Calefax performed just two works from the Romantic period: the brief and motoric, and as such rather un-Romantic Miniature Overture from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, and a suite of Franz Liszt’s late piano works. The latter typifies Calefax’s somewhat troubled relationship with Romanticism. While Liszt’s extremely sober late piano works are indeed rooted in the Romantic era, they were unmistakably ahead of their time, pointing to the twentieth-century quest for a way out of tonality’s stranglehold. For many years, music by exploratory composers and music from periods unfettered by fixed musical principles—newly written compositions, early twentieth-century works and pre-Baroque music—were Calefax’s mainstay. The motivation behind this goes beyond the fact that Calefax began as a bunch of gymnasium students fond of debating and philosophising. Calefax was also a child of its time: music had to be ‘groundbreaking’, or at least the fruits of profound artistic exploration. The enjoyment of sound and musical pathos were, to a certain extent, dirty words.

This zeitgeist began to shift with the approach of the new millennium. From the very beginning, Calefax had commissioned new works and in the musical material that trickled in one began to notice an unmistakable turnabout: tonality and unabashedly aesthetically-pleasing sounds manifested themselves. At the same time, in 1994, Calefax embarked on a new period with the entree of bass clarinetist Jelte Althuis. At a certain point Jelte—in true Calefax tradition—started arranging music he liked: Brahms, Granados, Mussorgsky, Scriabin’s early etudes. The first meaty Romantic work to garner a permanent place in Calefax’s programming was Ferruccio Busoni’s über-Romantic arrangement of Bach’s Chaconne for solo violin. Not surprising: this originally Baroque masterpiece provided the perfect ruse for sneaking unadulterated Romanticism into the group’s concert programmes. With the addition of Mendelssohn’s concert overture The Hebrides, the change of heart was complete: reworking a Romantic orchestral work for reed quintet, now that was something. And it sounded so good that it became a favourite concert opener. Since then, voluptuous nineteenth-century compositions have continued to find their way to our music stands, including works by Robert Schumann, Edvard Grieg, César Franck and Sergei Rachmaninoff. High time for a Romantic anthology!

Robert Schumann’s nine-movement piano cycle Waldszenen (‘Forest Scenes’) describes a walk in the woods. It is openly evocative music, its movements arranged in symmetrical mirror image with Freundliche Landschaft (‘Friendly Landscape’) at the hub. Eintritt (‘Entry’) mirrors Abschied (‘Farewell’), Jäger auf der Lauer (‘Hunters on the Lookout’) is placed opposite Jagdlied (‘Hunting Song’) and Einsame Blumen (‘Lonely Flowers’) is paired with Vogel als Prophet (‘Bird as Prophet’). The eerie Verrufene Stelle (‘Haunted Place’) is juxtaposed with the welcoming warmth of the Herberge (‘Wayside Inn’). Verrufene Stelle is preceded by a poem whose motto suggests that among the pale flowers there, one of them is deep red. It owes its colour not to the sun (for it does not shine there) but to the earth underneath it: earth that once drank human blood. Vogel als Prophet is a delusion we all recognize: does the songbird have something to tell us? In Waldszenen Schumann tests the boundaries of classical tonality. Might it be a foreboding of the psychological distress that would, in his last years, hinder his ability to compose? The characteristic opening measures of De Hebriden—later to become the famous orchestral overture—were penned on a postcard the young Felix Mendelssohn sent his parents from Scotland. During a concert tour he undertook a boat trip to the tourist attraction (still a sightseeing magnet to this day) of Fingal’s Cave on the island of Staffa. The cave is formed entirely by basalt columns in the form of an organ. To the notes on the postcard he added: ‘In order to make you understand how extraordinarily the Hebrides affected me, I send you the following, which came into my head there.’ This intense experience is perhaps augmented by the fact that Mendelssohn was violently seasick during the crossing. Like Mendelssohn, the pianist-composer Ferrucio Busoni was a child prodigy and traveled widely throughout Europe. Alongside many original compositions, Busoni’s oeuvre includes re-interpretations of works by other composers, translated into the Romantic style for his own instrument. In particular his transcriptions of the works of Johann Sebastian Bach were all the rage. ‘Bach/Busoni’ became a household name, so much so that Busoni’s wife, during a stay in New York, was mistakenly addressed as ‘Mrs. Bach-Busoni’. The Chaconne, originally from Bach’s second Partita for Solo Violin, is perhaps Busoni’s most famous work. Busoni explicitly fills in Bach’s implicit harmonies, expanding them to well-nigh orchestral proportions, while augmenting the intensity of the musical expression by taking liberties with articulation and tempi. The Calefax arrangement makes optimal use of the lyrical qualities of the instruments and the play of melodic lines among them. In the 1960s and ’70s, musical Europe was dominated by a style now referred to as ‘modern music’. Key practitioners of this current included Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio and Pierre Boulez. Music, they argued, must first and foremost have an investigative value, and must be able to be justified as though it were a science. Tristan Keuris (1946–1996), one of the Netherlands’ major composers, lived and worked during this period, and with his penchant for mellifluousness and the Romantic gesture must have often felt misunderstood. His most prominent pupil, Willem Jeths, seems to compose the music that Keuris was not ‘allowed’ to write, making Jeths’ music emblematic of a new current. Calefax had long hoped for a piece by Jeths, and the project, from preliminary talks to the 2014 premiere, took a good ten years to reach fruition. Calefax is proud to present it here, in an emotionally appropriate context. About his work Maktub the composer writes: ‘Maktub is an alchemy term, Arabic for “it is written”. From a mystic standpoint it means that everything is already known to the One (God), and therefore that destiny exists. Maktub can be heard as a mystic Adagio. The dynamic range, in general, moves between piano and pianissimo; the atmosphere is languid; the “tonality” is minor but contains a modal “Arabic touch”. Maktub is a reflection on the temporality of our earthly existence. I already addressed this theme, inspired by Goethe’s cycle of poems West-Östlicher Divan, in my first symphony: beginning (birth) and end (death) are the same (Goethe: “Anfang und Ende immer fort dasselbde”). But what comes in between is already known: Maktub.’ Edvard Grieg composed the piano suite ‘Aus Holberg’s Zeit’ in 1884 for the bicentenary of the Danish/Norwegian playwright Ludwig Holberg (1684–1754). The work follows the form of a French Baroque dance suite, but in the tonal language of Romanticism. The work later became wildly popular in Grieg’s arrangement for string orchestra. Both sources were used for the version for reed quintet; the sonority of the string orchestra is comparable to that of the reed quintet, while preference is occasionally given to the transparency of the original.