HOLLYWOOD SONGBOOK
Musica Viva Australia
Melbourne Recital Centre
Tuesday May 6, 2025
Signum Saxophone Quartet (L to R David Brand, Jacopo Taddei, Blaz Kemperle, Alan Luzar), Ali McGregor
First off, you would find it hard to fault the musicianship of the Signum Saxophone Quartet. When these players are handling music that fits their talents and performing environment, they demonstrate exceptional musicianship; on this night, for example, when they treated us to three excerpts from Copland's Rodeo ballet from 1942 arranged by Linda Waid, which brought us the brightest and most effective numbers on their program.
Three of the group's members survive from their last tour in November 2022: Blaz Kemperle (soprano), Jacopo Taddei (alto), and Alan Luzar (tenor). Guerino Bellarosa from that tour has been replaced in the baritone chair by David Brand, who was in fact a former Signum member. So the musicians have experience with one another, and it shows throughout their ensemble stints which covered a wealth of 20th century material.
The saxophone ensemble opened with Stravinsky's Circus Polka for a Young Elephant, written in 1942 for a troupe of gifted pachyderms. Here, the piece served as an establishment of sound level and timbre, the reading full-frontal with plenty of definition in the quick-march segments, if you missed the subtleties of the composer's orchestrated version which shows as more hefty than the strident approach of the Signum group. A deft bagatelle, the piece travelled past evenly enough, but you were impressed once again by how powerfully dynamic this quartet combination can be.
More of the same arrived a little later with Schulhoff's Five Pieces for String Quartet, from which collection we heard the final three: Alla Cseca, Alla Tango milonga, and Alla Tarantella. You missed the acerbity of the original's strings and the slightly abrasive 'wrong-note' language that the composer employed at this optimistic time (1923), compared to what was waiting in the historical wings. When you have four reeds in play, the harmonic shifts are more in-your-face and probably succeeded best in the tango where the ensemble devoted themselves to spun-out lines rather than short sharp ejaculations and taking the pages on at very rapid speed.
To end the program's first half, the Signum players gave us two well-known excerpts from Prokofiev's 1935 Romeo and Juliet: Juliet as a Young Girl, and Dance of the Knights. Taking on this kind of work presents several problems, the main one being the ensemble's monolithic timbre replacing one of the composer's more brilliantly scored works. For the ponderous Knights' Dance, the approach showed an awareness of the opening and closing strophes' ponderousness, although Brand's bass line came over as noticeably heavy; yet it is weighty in the original, if owning somehow less of an oompah deliberateness. On the other hand, you could admire Kemperle's top line right from the start of the skittering presentation of Juliet: excellently clear and precise in articulating a difficult sequence.
We heard an authentic suite in Bernstein's Three Dance Episodes from On the Town, extracted from the musical by the composer a year after the 1944 premiere for concert performance. By this stage, I suppose, most of us were hardened to the prevailing saxophone climate and, in any case, we were hearing a voice that spoke the instruments' language, particularly in the raucous concluding Times Square: 1944 with its continued references to New York, New York - the only song from the musical that remains in common parlance. It might be an early work, but On the Town established the Bernstein voice - well, the most recognizable one - with its spiky rhythmic jumps and a sugar-and-salt melancholy that owes more than a little to Gershwin, viz. the solid lyric at the heart of Lonely Town: Pas de deux which could be part of the appropriate melancholy stage at the middle of An American in Paris.
Once again, the group gave us a vital, exhilarating account of the last section, packed with energy and an impressive precision on Bernstein's stops and starts, with an attractive ebullience in their output that found the performers sharing the space like jazz artists, the middle voices of Taddei and Luzar taking the limelight with full-bodied ease, although that is probably due to the skill of arranger Izidor Leitinger who also arranged the Stravinsky and most of the songs.
As I said above, the Signum reading of Buckaroo Holiday, Corral Nocturne and Hoedown from Copland's brilliant portrait of an America that never was (see also Appalachian Spring) made a striking impact because the simple directness and charm of the composition found a sympathy in these performers that carried us through on their enthusiasm, even during the alarums and excursions of the final piece - which is the most good-natured expression of national colour you will find of the nation, and how many of us would like to believe in it, too.
But you could take pleasure in all three segments; the first for its balance of lines and coherence, the second for its finely-spun lines of melody. As with their Bernstein, the ensemble impressed for their crisp coherence, so much easier to achieve in small numbers as compared to the original orchestral sprawl. And I don't think any large body, no matter how well-coordinated, could have taken the Hoedown at the pace of these saxophonists, nor could they have achieved the same energetic bite in attack.
far as the vocal part of the night was concerned, I felt sympathetic but ambivalent. Ali McGregor is best known to me for her work in opera (The Magic Flute, Fidelio, Die Fledermaus) where she presented as a bright and polished soprano, informed by an infectious onstage sparkle. Most of this night's work proved to be brooding, melancholy, if not downright sad, starting with the traditional ballad I Am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger which McGregor turned into a sort of blues over a drone-like backing from the Signum players. This made for a sombre start, but no matter: an attractive melody if not part of what normally passes for membership in a Hollywood songbook.
A brace of songs by Friedrich Hollaender made for a welcome introduction to the real thing. First came Illusions from Billy Wilder's 1948 film A Foreign Affair which served to show (if you hadn't picked up on it already) how amplified the singer's voice had to be in order to cope with Leitinger's arrangement. More accessible to most of us was Falling in Love Again which distinguished Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel of 1930, helping to promote Marlene Dietrich. McGregor's version was notable for a security of pitch and articulation which betrays a voice that is properly trained; enjoyable to encounter this classic sung with musicianship allied to mild theatrics.
Kurt Weill was represented by that ode to the bright side, One Life to Live from Lady in the Dark of 1941 and, from two years later, the clever I'm a Stranger Here Myself that graced One Touch of Venus with Ogden Nash's words and a brilliantly meandering vocal line that found a responsive interpreter despite the often clamorous backing.
On the evening's second half, McGregor gave a typical chanteuse (chantoosie?) version of Irving Berlin's Let's Face the Music and Dance from the Follow the Fleet film of 1936 where Fred Astaire sang it and then danced it into the ground with Ginger Rogers: a memorable Hollywood song which here was given with more power and vim than Astaire could have managed, and rose to a fine peroration at its high-note climax.
We then arrived at the four excerpts from Hanns Eisler's The Hollywood Songbook of 1943 - the night's raison d'etre: Hollywood Elegy Nr. 7, To the Little Radio, Die Landscaft des Exils, and The Homecoming. All of the texts were written by Eisler's most famous collaborator, Brecht, but none of them lasted particularly long, although permeated with the composer's desolation in a necessary exile. McGregor sang in English, with the exception of her third offering, and all of them recalled the nervous sadness that permeates the between-wars period in German and Austrian cabaret music. But, in the end, there was precious little to get your teeth into, apart from a vague atmosphere of displacement and depression.
We ended the program with two Hollywood evergreens: So in Love by Cole Porter from his Kiss Me, Kate of 1942; and Somewhere Over the Rainbow - an essential for any compendium of Hollywood songs - taken from 1939's classic The Wizard of Oz film. Both of these succeeded largely through McGregor's sheer verve when faced with several passages of glutinous support from the Signum men, notably in the Porter lyric - thick and busy at the same time.
An odd juxtaposition, then. Nearly all of McGregor's material could claim to be Hollywood-bred, apart from the Dietrich reminder. But the saxophone quartet would have trouble finding a link for Schulhoff and Prokofiev; Bernstein's musical was originally a Broadway production, and Copland's ballet premiered at New York's Metropolitan Opera. So not much Hollywood from the visitors. But they're a smooth organization, experts in their craft, and watching high-quality musicians at work is always rewarding, no matter how haphazard the program's organizing principles.
No comments:
Post a Comment