Search - Gyorgy Ligeti, Morton Feldman, New York Philharmonic :: Bernstein Century - Music of Our Time / New York PO

The Classic Performance of "TPL" back in print 30 years late

Avrohom Leichtling | Monsey, NY | 07/06/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Leonard Bernstein was not exactly enthusiastic about the music of what 30 years ago was known as "avant garde" although he did eventually produce a rather stunning serial work in "The Dybbuk." His recorded legacy here is slight. Four of the five works on this disc were originally released together in the mid-sixties. "Atmospheres" (Gyorgi Ligeti) will be familiar from its use in "2001 -A Space Odyssey" and is a stunning piece in its own right. Morton Feldman (American) and Edison Denisov (Russian) will be largely unknown to most audiences - and the pieces herein recorded are not among the better examples of their music. Gunther Schuller, however, is a major figure both in the world of the concert hall and jazz - having long experimented with third stream among other things. His "Triplum" is a solid orchestral work in the later serial mode. The CD also boasts of several less than significant improvisations by the orchestra.However, what redeems this disc absolutely is the incredible performance of one of the truly great works of the 20th century: Trois Petites Liturgies de la Presence Divine (1944) by the late Olivier Messiaen. This work, scored for string orchestra, piano, ondes martenot and women's chorus is Messiaen par excellence. Being a profoundly religious man with a concommitantly deep mysticism Messiaen frequently expresses his complex poetic theology in a correspondingly complex musical language. Don't be fooled by it, though, for his very clear debt to Dukas (Sorcerer's Apprentice), who was his teacher, Ravel and Debussy is apparent in every bar. This is exquisitely gorgeous music played for all it's worth by the Philharmonic. Bernstein never made a better recording. It's refreshing to hear the vibraphone played the way it was intended: with the fan motors on (i.e. "Vibra-phone"). The ondes martenot is also excellently integrated into the ensemble and NOT (for once) played by Jeanne Loriod.The highest recommendation for this performance. Get it and forget the others. This should have been out thirty years ago. For shame on Sony and Columbia for keeping this one in the vault for too long! And why are those program notes so condescending and bereft of real information? Duck the liner notes and revel in the Messiaen (puns intended)."

Warts and all, great to have these testimonies of Bernstein'

Discophage | France | 07/25/2010

(4 out of 5 stars)

"I tought Bernstein's Liturgies would be far worse than they actually are. Messiaen was not, after all, Bernstein's "natural" language (and I'm not just talking here of French versus American), and one could fear both an impossibly American accent from the woman's chorus, and garish colors from the orchestra.



Not all of this turns out to be wrong, but in fact there are a number of very fine things in this recording. The woman's chorus is not a model of angelic purity in this composition so fiendishly demanding for the voices, but their French accent, while certainly not perfect, is nothing to shame about. Anyway, even in the best versions the text is usually incomprehensible and drowned under the the instrumental ensemble, and with music and timbres so beautiful it is not really the words one concentrates upon; for all I care they could be singing an invented language, like the one Messiaen wrote in his song cycle Harawi. Yet I find it regrettable that the ladies from the Choral Arts Society should slightly roll their Rs as they do. It brings an unwelcome operatic and passé character to the music. In none of the composer-supervised versions (Marcel Couraud's two recordings from 1954, now on Rarissimes, and 1964, Messiaen: Trois Petites Liturgies De La Presence Divine, etc. / Couraud, Loriod, et al and Stephane Cardon's 1983 recording on Turangalila Symphony) did the French ladies roll them, so presumably that's the way Messiaen wanted it, and it sounds better. It is in the spoken and declamatory passages of the third movement that the delivery from Bernstein's ladies bothered me the most; there they sound more like the shouting Portorican girls of West Side Story than like Messiaen's mystical nuns.



The 1961 sonics are a model of vividness and clarity, letting you hear all the details of Messian's timbres (ondes, celesta, vibraphone). Never have I heard so distinctly piano and celesta at the beginning of the third movement. The downside is that it comes with with a bit of harshness also in Bernstein's high-strung and relentless second movment, and in the softer passages you can hear a background rumble which I think is the sound of traffic outside the recording venue. But top felicity here is pianist Paul Jacobs. For all the legitimacy and technical capabilities of Messiaen's wife Yvonne Loriod, I find Jacobs even more attentive and faithful to the details of articulation (great staccato playing in the first movement's bird songs) and dynamics.



Still, there are some questionable features. The clear and vivid sonics expose the fact that some of the instruments simply don't sound good. In the first movement the vibraphone is metallic and the Ondes Martenot sounds disagreeably pinched and without sensuousness. It also doesn't stand out enough in the middle section of that same movement, where Messiaen instructs to give it equal importance as the solo violin; here, it is somewhat covered by the piano. In the middle, slow section of the third movement the celesta stands out artificially and without much subtlety, and in the same movement, with the return of the fast section (at 9:45), the Ondes Martenot is so garishly spotlighted that the trills written by Messiaen sound dangerously close to the typical sound effect in the horror movies from the 1940s. I doubt that it was the intention.



Some of the questionable choices are not the sound engineer's but purely Lenny's doing I'm afraid, like the very deliberate and pedestrian tempo he adopts in the middle and fast section of the first movement, failing to bring forth the desired contrast. He also lacks the ecstatic quality of Couraud in the (very few) slow passages of the second movement and in the middle, slow section of the third movement (between 3:52 and 9:45) - probably because it would have required holding back the tempo more than his chorus could sustain (the good side of that is that with Couraud's tempos at least one of the piece should have been left out of the CD!). Maybe because of the sheer difficulty of those ever changing meters at a fast tempo, the second movement itself sounds almost grim and angry; go to Courand, and you will hear exultant joy. In the slow and "mystical" section of the third movement, the chorus is not entirely homogeneous (it is written unisono and should really sound like one angelic voice).



Nothing shameful, but still this is a recording for the fan and collector of Bernstein (which I am) rather than for the fan of Messiaen. The latter should go to Couraud's remake, a version that has the composer's imprimatur and hasn't been bettered.



I don't have the score of Ligeti's Atmospheres and haven't done the same kind of comparative listening. Anyway, what a great piece! Frightening. And if it sounds that way under Lenny's baton, then I'll assume that it is well conducted. No wonder Kubrick used the music in 2001. Amazon's limitations do not permit that I give detailed comments of the other compositions. They are very typical of the avant-garde of their days, but, unlike Ligeti, not the avant-garde's best output: they feature many sonic events, each possibly individually intriguing, but they don't coalesce into a convincing and gripping whole. The (untypical) Feldman and Denisov are the worst in this respect; I quite enjoyed Schuller's Triplum - not an "easy" composition, and I suspect it would have more impact in the concert hall. The orchestra's four improvisations aren't bad at all, with the last one sounding even impressive. It's really a case of the monkey painting a Picasso: call the improvisations a piece of Morton Feldman or Gunther Schuller, and nobody will question it, chances are they'll even clap at the end.



Anyway warts and all, it is great to have these testimonies of Bernstein's involvement with the most cutting-edge music of his time. There are 79 minutes of it on the disc, and it ain't enough. Three stars for interpretations and works, and a fourth star to the memory of Bernstein."

A modernist snapshot from 40 years ago

Santa Fe Listener | Santa Fe, NM USA | 01/13/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"When he was a few years into the conductorship of the NY Phil., Leonard Bernstein decided to educate his audience with a large dose of contemporary music. He had the clout and the charisma to carry it off--almost. Subscriptions faltered; audiences walked out in mid-performance. Today they wouldn't have, not in an era when tonality rules and the 'advanced' atonality of these old works has become passe. Proof of this lies in the fact that no one has recorded the Feldman, Denisov, and Schuller again. Liget's Atmospheres has survived, focourse, and he went on to join Messiaen in the pantheon of 20th-century masteres.



As a snapshot of modernism this is an eye-opening CD; the program has been described in detail by two reviewers already. I will jsut add that I enjoyed Bernstein's typically emotional, romantic style, which creeps into Feldman's twitterings and Ligeti's fearsomely atonal sound blocks. Having premiered the Turangalila Sym. at Tanglewood when he was very young, Bernstein could have made a great recording of it. He dropped the work, however, so we have to settle for his wonderful, impassioned 1961 account of the Trois Petites Liturgies. It and the Ligeti are the lasting works, at least right now."