South American Getaway

About a generation ago I encountered a recording of Ravel's Boléro performed (I hazily remember) by the Dresdner Staatskapelle. If ever one needed unassailable evidence that music is not an international language, that was it. Ravel's at once suavely sophisticated and primordially libidinous rhythms had been reduced to a clunky clog dance served up by an oom-pah band. The result was tantamount to taking an XXX-rated movie, video, or CD-ROM, and excising all of its explicit (indeed, and more to the point, even its implicit) parts. Both the repertoire and its realization on this disc are a far cry from that of an echt German orchestra drilled to a fare-thee-well in standard rep by Karajan, and then largely blanded out to the internationally accepted vanishing point by Abbado. Upon receipt of this offering, my hopes were not particularly high. And then I played it and found that the current Berlin Philharmonic's apparent eclecticism (or at least that of 12 of its current players) is of a transcendent quality. These 12 cellists' conductorless rendering of Villa-Lobos's Bachianas brasileiras No. 1 goes right to the top of my shortlist. In its verve, piquancy, and overall schwung it easily the equals Villa-Lobos's own seminal recording with a cello ensemble culled from the French National Radio Symphony Orchestra, still available on EMI's "Great Recordings of the Century" series (EMI 66964). It also outclasses that authoritative effort on both purely technical grounds and in the quality of its recorded sound. The selection of two of Piazzolla's most choice and representative tangos (featuring the largely unheard Chiquilin de Bachin) along with Fuga y mysterio is equally telling and rewarding. In these three performances, the Twelve Cellists of the Berlin Philharmonic form an effectively affective bridge between the quasipop (as seen from the American perspective) origins of much of Piazzolla's music, and the rigorous and profoundly hothouse European technique that underlies it. The balance of this release, with one exception, is dedicated to unknown composers (at least, they're unknown as purveyors of so-called classical music). Wilhelm Kaiser- Lindemann's (b. 1940) "Die 12" in bossa-nova (Variaçoes brasileiras), like Piazzolla's music, bridges that same gap, but outwardly exploits the performers' expertiss—and not merely technically. Peruvian composer Chabuca Granda, aka Isabel Granda (1920-63), in her sweetly disarming little waltz La flor de la caneda recalls the waltzes and gavottes of the late-19th-century Brazilian composer Ernest Nazareth. Jorge Ben's (b. 1940; nationality not given) Más que nada is disarmingly direct—decidedly bereft of European complications, and delicious. Horacio Salgan's (b. 1916) A fuego lento throws into relief this unremittingly pop composer's desire to study fugue and counterpoint. The inclusion of Burt Bacharach (b. 1928) may well raise a few eyebrows. Bear in mind, however, that he studied under Darius Milhaud, Bohuslav Martin?, and Henry Cowell. His South American Gateway provides a fine capstone to the release. And so it goes, until the clincher: Villa-Lobos's Bachianas brasileiras No. 5, a piece often recorded by some of the finest sopranos and instrumentalists of our current age. To me, the real test is: Can Juliane Banse sound as profoundly innocent and passionate as Victoria de Los Angeles or Anna Moffo? The answer: Yes, she can. -- William Zagorski, FANFARE