ON THE LIGHTER SIDE – EASY TO ADVANCED
Orff, Carl/Keetman, Gunlid (arr Robert Schäfer)
Gassenhauer, nach Hans Neusiedler (1536)
Schott, piano solo (ED 22491; £8.50) or duet (ED 22492; £9.50)
Norton, Christopher, The Christopher Norton Latin Preludes Collection; The Christopher Norton Jazz Preludes Collection
BH 13538 (book and CD, £11.99); BH 13539 (book and CD, £11.99)
Richards, Tim, Jazz, Latin and Modern Collection
Schott ED 13970, £14.99
Various, selected by Gérard Pesson Musica Ficta, Volume 3
Lemoine HL 28950, £20.99
Jehl, Raoul, Echos
Lemoine 29 386, £10.99
Kapustin, Sonatina Op 100 (ED 22853, £7.50); Berceuse Op 65 (ED 22978, £9.50); Humoresque Op 75 (ED 22992, £11.99); Motive Force Op 45 (ED 22979, £8.50); Sonata No 6 Op 62 (ED 22919, £14.99)
All Schott
Neither the sheet music itself nor Schott's press release has any information on Gunlid Keetman (an Orff pupil, I learned elsewhere), nor Hans Neusiedler. The Gassenhauer tune originally appeared in Orff's Schulwerk (check on YouTube) and has featured in TV ads. Hans Zimmer ‘homaged’ the piece in the films Badlands and True Romance, calling it ‘You're So Cool’. The music itself is relatively easy to play and minimalist in style: the tempo (nowhere stated) is around 60 bars to the minute.
Christopher Norton's two new albums tread more sophisticated ground. Fans will recognise the style (comfortable, rewardingly playable, and set in a 1940s/60s time-warp); the ‘Mambo’ from the Latin collection is currently an ABRSM Grade 7 option. The general level is ‘intermediate’: in contrast, Tim Richards starts at ‘easy’ but systematic explorers (teachers included) will not only achieve ‘intermediacy’ by the end but also learn much jazz theory and practice, including modes and octatonic scales. There's a link to free audio files. Richards wrote all the tunes except ‘Well You Needn't’ (Thelonious Monk) and ‘Come Sunday’ (Duke Ellington). (Richards fans may also want to investigate the companion Blues, Boogie and Gospel Collection, reviewed in April 2017.)
I reviewed Gérard Pesson's Musica Ficta, Volumes 1 and 2, in June 2017. Vol. 3 is much more fun, comprising 25 pieces by 11 composers, avant-garde though nowhere very difficult. The jokey ones will appeal most: Frédéric Lagnau's ‘join the dots’ Bach prelude, for instance, and Pesson's own ‘Origami Chopin’ which superimposes Preludes 4 and 15. Raoul Jehl offers more of the same –harder to read than to play and less funny, but excellent mind-stretchers nonetheless. These 10 short Echos deliberately imitate – and open windows onto – Messiaen, Feldman, Kagel, Nono, Ligeti, Stockhausen, Grisey, Berio, Sciarrino and Cage.
Cult jazz-piano figure Nikolai Kapustin writes music faster than it takes most of us to learn it. The Sonatina, easiest by far, is familiar from Grade 8 exams and now comes in a pretty new cover. Of the others, Motive Force (dearest per page of this batch) looks reasonable until you see the metronome-mark; the Berceuse is manageable, its first half anyway; the Humoresque leaves Dvo?ák at the starting-post if not back in the changing-room; the three-movement Sonata No. 6 is best value per page but daunting right from the start. Production is handsome, with possibly more editorial fingerings than any player at this level will need.
STUDY SCORES
Korngold, Die tote Stadt (complete opera, with full score)
Eulenberg No 8113/Schott, £66.99
Vaughan Williams (orch Martin Yates) Fat Knight
Oxford University Press (OUP), £24.95
Vaughan Williams (ed Julian Rushton) Job, a Masque for Dancing
OUP, £19.95
Vaughan Williams (ed David Matthews) Symphony No 4 in F minor
OUP, £17.95
Vaughan Williams (reconstr & ed Martin Yates) Scott of the Antarctic
OUP, £24.95
Dvořák String Quartet in G, Op 106
Henle HN 7045, £11.50
Erich Korngold (1897–1957) started his opera Die tote Stadt (The Dead City, Op 12, 1916-19) at the ridiculously early age of 18, a fact to make non-prodigies weep with envy. Eulenberg/Schott's makeover of this 688-page masterpiece – immaculately laid out, hardback, and a pleasure to handle – reveals on every page Korngold's astounding fluency and confidence in handling ten principal roles, chorus and massive orchestras both on and off stage.
Extracts possibly familiar to listeners include Pierrot's Dance Song (also available in voice-and-piano form, Schott ED 09723, £5.50) and Marietta's Song (high voice and piano, BSS 30639-01 or medium voice and piano ED 09724 – both £6.99). Also available are Paul Schott's libretto (Schott BN 3480, also £6.99) and the complete vocal score (ED 3208, £40.99). Orchestrators will rush to the last page to analyse that gorgeously Straussian closing chord; nit-pickers should alter the English orchestra-list's ‘Rod’ to ‘Ruthe (switch)’, delete ‘Bell-drum’ (an alternative name for ‘tambourine’ never used outside Germany) and redescribe Korngold's ideal string section as ‘large’ as possible, not ‘broad’!
A ‘broad’ string section might be just the thing for the least familiar Vaughan Williams title here, the potentially non-PC Fat Knight – Falstaff, of course, from William's opera Sir John in Love (after The Merry Wives of Windsor), already responsible for spin-offs ‘Greensleeves’ and the cantata ‘In Windsor Forest’. A further orchestral suite never got beyond the two-piano stage but has now been lovingly reconstructed by Martin Yates – comprehensively so, too, at 255 pages and up to 50 minutes’ duration. This is a far more useful teaching aid than might at first appear: new listeners and those already knowing the original alike can debate (as with all opera transcriptions) how well the piece stands up without voices.
In later life, Williams used to hand each new score over to an assistant with a request to – editorially – ‘wash its face’. Following Symphony No. 8 and ‘A Road All Paved With Stars’ (both reviewed in August 2017), fresh wet-wipes have now been applied to classic masterworks Job: a Masque for Dancing and the rather harsh Symphony No 4. The remaining title gets not just its face washed, but a manicure, massage and possibly a colonic irrigation, too – for this is not a new edition of the Sinfonia Antarctica but the entire soundtrack of the 1948 film on which it was based, Scott of the Antarctic. Besides the 38 minutes of music actually used in the film, editor Martin Yates (again) adds practically every discarded fragment, a total of 40 items filling 231 large-format pages and providing excellent discussion material for screen-study students. OUP's presentation of all four scores is immaculate.
Dvořák completed 14 string quartets: anyone too busy to listen through the eight or more CDs they fill can deduce that this G major Op. 106 among the better ones simply by being chosen for fresh editing ahead of many of the others. Henle's new version picks carefully through Dvo?ák's habitual inconsistencies: a matching set of parts (HN 1045) is available for £17.99.
