Three composers on one album? Not a good idea
Album Of The WeekFrom the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
Pick ‘n’ mix albums hardly ever work, and for the same reason that it’s unwise to get into a hotel lift with three composers. None of them will make way and the last one in will invariably come out first.
What we have here is three phenomenal composers whose common denominator is that they wrote hugely successful modern operas…
Continues here.
In The Critic here.
As a claim I suppose the attention-getting statement is a decent-enough hook on which to hang this particular review but as a matter of cold hard fact, there are boat-loads of wonderful albums/CDs that mix 3 (or more) composers, and often that is what makes them wonderful.
One modest example would be recordings of the Debussy Sonata for Violin and Piano. If the CD is to be generously filled, and features a major artist (so coupling it with Debussy’s two other sonatas is unlikely), there almost has to be 3 or more composers on it. Couple it with the Franck? Common enough in LP days, but not a competitive value on CD. Add the Ravel? Or the Fauré No. 1? Now we’re talking. Dmitry Sitkovetsky (with Pavel Gililov) had a lovely CD on Virgin Classics that mixed the Debussy with the sonatas of Janáček and Richard Strauss. An odd mix of composers to invite to a dinner party perhaps but of a type common enough in an actual recital where variety is the point. Another example was the memorable Anne Sophie Mutter/Lambert Orkis recital disc with Prokofiev, Respighi, and … Anton Webern! Almost as strange a social mix as Sitkovetsky’s, but it would work in live recital and worked wonderfully as a disc you wanted to listen to straight through.
And as I wrote recently in a different context, it is reviewers, not “normal” people, who listen to recordings, even boxed sets, straight through because the job demands it.
Sometimes the most problematic discs are those that feature just one composer. If you take, say, the Beethoven “Kreutzer” Sonata and want one or two more Beethoven sonatas to fill out the disc, almost by necessity those other sonatas, themselves masterworks, might seem a bit like warm beer to the listener who takes on the entire disc at a sitting. So … don’t do that.
The late Lukas Foss used to say that programming Beethoven’s 9th Symphony was such a challenge because even if the other work on the program was itself good music, it would be lost in the shuffle. He especially objected to the common concert coupling of the 9th with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 because that is too wonderful a work to play the role of mere filler. In concert Foss took to coupling the 9th with Wellington’s Victory because it was also by Beethoven but nobody cared that it could not stand comparison with the 9th.
A lot of SD commenters will approve that poster.
Footnote fodder: Krenek’s “Potpourri” had its premiere on November 15, 1927, by the Gürzenich Orchestra of Cologne, conducted by Walter Abendroth. The program included Erdmann’s First Symphony, Brahms’s D-minor Piano Concerto (with Elly Ney), and Schumann’s Overture to “Genoveva.”
I disagree. It’s a great way to find a composer you like, especially with “contemporary music.” And a good recital is naturally composed of several composers, so recordings should, as well. It is academic and very unnatural to have all works of one composer on a recording, and it’s a huge burden on the performer, who has to have a diet of all-one-composer for many months of preparation. And it’s more likely to become boring listening. VARIETY is the spice of culture!