Zlatomir Fung: Fantasies (Cello Transcriptions) (Signum Classics)
Stephen Sondheim: New Chamber Music Preparations (Bridge)
★★★★☆ / ★★☆☆☆
I like artists who try the inconceivable. Inside cause, that’s. I’d draw the road at somebody enjoying the 32 Beethoven sonatas one-handed, or the 15 Shostakovich quartets and not using a toilet break.
However, any artist who takes a chunk of music past the bounds of what I’d heard in it earlier than will get my vote.
The American cellist Zlatomir Fung has composed a fantasy on Janacek’s opera Jenufa, a feat that defies credibility. The tunes and rhythms of Jenufa are rooted in Czech speech patterns. Erase the voice, and what’s left? An X-ray.
Fung and his pianist Richard Fu current quarter-hour of skeletal examination through which not solely the sounds however the tensions of Janacek’s masterpiece are grippingly realised. I can hardly consider that what they’ve completed right here is doable. I would like to listen to it stay.
The opposite transcriptions on the album — Fille du Regiment, William Inform, Meistersinger and Onegin — are a number of levels much less astonishing, and the Carmen is a car-crash.
However, simply take heed to that Jenufa.
For a person so exact in his intentions, Stephen Sondheim was open to having his works rearranged for smaller teams. The best discount was Sweeney Todd, performed and sung by simply 9 musicians on a pocket-handkerchief stage.
What Eric Stern has completed on this reset is to shrink key works to violin and piano, with occasional cello and two voices. A Little Evening Music works finest on this kind, adopted by ‘Each Day a Little Dying’ and ‘Not Whereas I’m Round’.
William Terwilliger (violin) and Andrew Cooperstock (piano) of Opus Two have excellent pitch in Sondheim idiom, however the singers lack whimsy, and the ear cries out for higher selection.
String quartet, possibly? I’m ready to be astonished.
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Norman Lebrecht is without doubt one of the most widely-read commentators on music, tradition and cultural politics. He’s an everyday presenter on BBC Radio 3 and a contributor to the Wall Road Journal, Bloomberg, Standpoint, Sinfini and different publications. His weblog, Slipped Disc, is among the many most generally learn cultural websites on-line, breaking unique tales and campaigning towards human abuse and acts of injustice within the cultural industries.
