In a normal September, we would be filling our weekends up with all kinds of premieres and recitals and shindigs and whatnot. Alas, this is not one of those, and we shall continue to stay, for the most part, put.
Johann Sebastian Bach, Goldberg Variations (Lang Lang)
No matter how many recordings of the Goldberg Variations you may already have on the shelf or the hard drive, you may want to make some room for this one — or two, actually. Pianist Lang Lang’s lifelong dream of realizing the Variations on record (he’s been playing them from memory since he was a teenager) comes in the form of two full accounts: a live take performed in front of an audience — and in view of Bach’s tomb — at the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, and a closer, more private-sounding studio recording made in Berlin “on the eve of the pandemic.”
The two performances don’t just reflect each other but seem to capture Lang’s own decades of devotion to (and discovery within) the work — itself a string of reflections. For a warm-up, check out Lang’s 35-minute walk-through of his interpretation, or any of the mini-docs he’s been uploading to YouTube, chronicling his first recital of the Variations in March and his first visit to the original Bach organ in Arnstadt. (And for a counterpart, have you read “Counterpoint”?) deutschegrammophon.com.
Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘Il Prigioniero’ (Gianandrea Noseda, Danish National Symphony Orchestra and the Danish National Concert Choir)
You may be missing Maestro Noseda’s presence in the pit with the National Symphony Orchestra, but that’s no reason to let the anniversary of your Gianandrea Noseda Day (declared by Mayor Muriel E. Bowser on Sept. 24, 2017) go uncelebrated. The chronically busy conductor has been keeping busy in Europe’s increasingly vibrant post-pandemic classical world — closing this summer’s installment of the Stresa Festival and hopping between podiums with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris and the Georgian Philharmonic Orchestra through the rest of September.
Meanwhile, he’s just as prolific on record with this most recent (and possibly final) installment of his Musica Italiana series for Chandos, which since 2004 has focused on less-acknowledged Italian composers including Casella, Respighi, Wolf-Ferrari and Mascagni. Among his favorite countrymen is the 20th century serialist-with-a-twist Luigi Dallapiccola, whose Op. 1 he included on the program of his first subscription concert with the NSO in 2017, and whose one-act 1949 opera “Il Prigioniero” he commands in this new recording with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and the Danish National Concert Choir. Baritone Michael Nagy leads this harrowing tale as the titular captive, mezzo-soprano Anna Maria Chiuri shines as the Mother, and tenor Stephan Rügamer imparts due chills as the deceitful Inquisitor. But Noseda’s ability to balance the cruel beauty of both the story and the score is a star performance all its own. chandos.net.
‘Wendy Carlos’ (Amanda Sewell)
It’s next to impossible to find the music of Wendy Carlos online, beyond a few rogue snatches posted to (and often promptly yanked from) YouTube. And even in the old-fashioned world of CDs and vinyl, her recordings remain notoriously hard (or pricey) to come by — despite the platinum status of her most influential work. When “Switched On Bach” was released in 1968, it introduced the sound of the Moog synthesizer into the mainstream, and awakened hundreds of thousands of listeners to the potential of electronic music. But for Carlos, its success also marked the start of a trajectory that would find curiosity about her music routinely eclipsed by questions over her identity as a transgender woman.
Amanda Sewell’s new biography does Carlos’s musical legacy belated justice, exploring the creation of her well-known works (“Switched On”; her collaboration with Rachel Elkind on music for Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” and “A Clockwork Orange”; her 1982 score for “TRON”) as well as her more esoteric projects — like the development of her own tuning systems, and her collaboration with “Weird Al” Yankovic to digitally reimagine Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” and Saint-Saëns’s “The Carnival of the Animals.” But even without the benefit of Carlos’s participation, Sewell’s narrative also strikes a skillful balance to reveal how a spectrum of biases shaped the course of her career, and just as unfairly shapes how listeners understand her music to this day. global.oup.com/academic.
‘Sounds of Hope and Harmony’
The only game in town for live classical music continues to be a winner, as the Alexandria-based classical touring company Classical Movements continues its “Sounds of Hope and Harmony” series with three more outdoor concerts in its aggressively pleasant “Secret Garden” at its rectory headquarters on Princess Street in Old Town.
On Saturday, they’ll present a program of choral works by Byrd, Britten, Panufnik, Coleridge-Taylor, Barnett and others, performed by the Choir of Hope & Harmony, an ad hoc assembly of a dozen singers including tenor Jacob Perry Jr., baritone James Mayo III, soprano Baajah Mohammed and alto Hannah Baslee, and led by conductor Anthony Blake Clark.
On Sept. 19, an evening of “novel ensembles” will feature NSO musicians taking on Prokofiev’s “Quintet for oboe, clarinet, violin, viola & double bass in G minor” (Op. 39), as well as a bass quartet taking unheard approaches to works by Gershwin, Bach, O’Connor, Bjork, the Beatles and … A-ha? And on Sept. 26, the duo of Awa Sal Secka and Christian Douglas present “Cabaret in the Twilight,” featuring pieces by Gershwin, Sondheim, Billy Joel and Sara Bareilles, as well as some original music. Each one-hour concert is presented in repeating programs at 6 and 7:30 p.m.; tickets cost $40-$45. classicalmovements.com/secretgardenconcerts.
‘Der Klang der Offenbarung des Göttlichen’ (Kjartan Sveinsson)
The erstwhile guitarist, keyboardist and arranger for stalwart Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Ros has made a rich post-Ros career for himself as a composer. In 2014, he collaborated with the artist Ragnar Kjartansson to create “Der Klang der Offenbarung des Göttlichen” (or “The Explosive Sonics of Divinity”), an opera in four acts inspired by the novel “World Light” by Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness. When the curtains parted at its Berlin’s Volksbühne Theatre — where Sveinsson was joined by the Film Orchestra Babelsberg and the Filmchor Berlin — it probably took a few contemplative-if-restless minutes for viewers to realize that no one was ever going to take the stage.
An “opera without divas,” “Der Klang” is instead realized as unpeopled pastoral landscapes, each designed and hand-painted by Kjartansson and “rooted in German romantic cliches” revived to create “a non-narrative of pure-hearted banality.” The only action onstage is the lapping of some illusory waves, the turning of synthetic twilight, the fall of fake snow; and yet Sveinsson’s soaring score tells a grand story — or lack thereof. Until now it’s only been available digitally and as a limited double gatefold 10-inch vinyl (via Kjartansson’s own Bel-Air Glamour Records), but Sono Luminus releases it for the first time on CD Sept. 25. sonoluminus.com.
