A tribute to Frans Brüggen

Even when taking into account the departures of some incredibly high profile names from the creative world this week – Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall in particular – classical music is still having a rough time of it. Claudio Abbado, Peter Sculthorpe and Lorin Maazel are just three of highly respected artists who have recently departed, and to that list can sadly be added the name of Frans Brüggen, whose death at the age of 79 was revealed yesterday.

We can be grateful this quartet lived long and extremely fruitful lives, but I wanted to focus on Brüggen this time as I absolutely love his recordings. In fact I hold him pretty much responsible for helping my initial aversion to what we awkwardly term 'period instrument' recordings, and I think he brought so much character to his interpretations he made me realise it was possible to use instruments of the time, with the sound to which we were unaccustomed, and still build cultured and individual interpretations.

The first disc of his I remember hearing was Rameau – a sparkling and colourful account of the suite Les Indes Galantes. Yet the one that made even more impact was a Philips disc bringing together middle period Mozart symphonies – the celebrated Symphony no.29 in A major, K201 and the much less known – but equally inspired – Symphony no.33 in B flat major, K319. Brüggen and his charges, the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, bring a freshness to this piece, but importantly for me the orchestra still pack enough heft in the bigger chords, together with a string sound that is positively luxurious for a period band.

This is only the tip of the iceberg where Brüggen is concerned, however. With his orchestra he completed a very fine cycle of Beethoven symphonies, which Universal are helpfully making available again this month, as well as an extremely enjoyable Schubert canon, featuring among other things a Symphony no.5 in B flat major that preserves the composer's fresh inspiration.

This is before we even get to his Haydn – for it's this area of Brüggen's output that appeals to me most. To me he understands Haydn's wit and good humour, but also his craft, and there is always an elegance to Brüggen's interpretations that makes the next note in each phrase so inevitable. In Haydn that helps an awful lot – and yet the surprise element of some of the symphonies is also retained. Brüggen’s music making in the London and Paris symphonies in particular has given hours of pleasure, and I would urge you to listen if you haven't before.
And how could I almost have forgotten his Rameau? Two discs leap out at me that Brüggen recorded for Philips – the highly characterful live recording of the suite for Les indes galantes, and an equally invigorating version of a suite from the opera Dardanus.

Even before his successes as a conductor Brüggen had shown unusual ability as a flautist and recorder player. In the 1960s he recorded a sizeable amount of Baroque music for Teldec's Das Alte Werk imprint, producing some ground breaking discs of Telemann, J.S. Bach and Handel – as well as exploring some of the lesser known corners of Baroque chamber repertoire.

Even in the last years of his life, when he clearly wasn't as sprightly as he used to be, Brüggen continued to conduct from a seating position – which was the case on the only occasion I encountered him in concert, where he and his guest charges, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, gave a typically inspiring performance of Mozart's Paris symphony.

Despite his less than ideal health, Brüggen continued to record to great effect, with recent releases bringing Mendelssohn's Italian and Scottish symphonies to life, not to mention another visit to Mozart's last three works in the form. There is quite literally never a dull note in Brüggen's recorded work – and it deserves to live on long after the sad passing of its creator.

A Frans Brüggen miscellany be found on Spotify by clicking here , including Les Indes Galantes, Beethoven's Eroica symphony, a fantasia by Telemann and symphonies by Schubert (no.5), Haydn (no.102) and Mozart (no.39).

Claudio Abbado - some favourite recordings

The death of Claudio Abbado, announced on January 20, 2014, robbed classical music of one of its very finest living conductors – perhaps even the finest.

His recorded legacy, principally for Deutsche Grammophon, Decca and Sony, is far too large to do justice to in the course of a single article, but I wanted to pay some thanks to this wonderful conductor for leaving with us some very special music making indeed. The records chosen below are not necessarily his best loved, but they have stayed with me for a number of years now.

Haydn

Haydn was not necessarily one of Abbado's premier disciplines, but if my memory serves me right the first recording of his I ever heard was the Clock symphony, no.101, made with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. This is a wonderful recording that enjoys Haydn's pithy humour in the second movement, the tick-tock of the clock beautifully done.

Another recording I remember well is the Symphony no.102 in B flat major, another of the London symphonies, which is brisk and purposeful in the Minuet, like throwing open the curtains on a bright spring morning. It is a shame DG didn’t manage to get all twelve of the London symphonies recorded in time, but the seven completed have some extremely enjoyable music making.

Schubert

Abbado's Schubert has exceptional clarity and, in the case of the Symphony no.9 – the Great – a deeply impressive symphonic breadth. The Symphony no.5 in B flat I found to be absolutely charming, but one of the jewels in Abbado's crown where Schubert is concerned is a rare recording of the complete music for the ballet Rosamunde, with a couple of crisply sung choruses – for shepherds, spirits and huntsmen alike – that go with some utterly charming ballet music numbers.

Mendelssohn

In his time at the helm of the London Symphony Orchestra from 1979 until 1987, one of Abbado's greatest achievements was a cycle of Mendelssohn symphonies and overtures. Players from the orchestra speak in hushed tones of the results they achieved together on those recordings, and listening to the evergreen accounts it is easy to hear why. The overtures have a particular sparkle, with Ruy Blas and The Hebrides particularly masterful offerings of light and shade.
Even better for me are Abbado's recordings of the Scottish and Reformation symphonies, both very good examples of 'Sturm und Drang' in Mendelssohn. The rustic second movement of the Scottish is an absolute delight, while the Reformation simmers a tension that is joyously released in the major key chorale at the end.

Brahms

Several commentators have – somewhat unkindly – poured scorn on Abbado's time with the Berlin Philharmoniker. Although it may not have yielded one benchmark recording after another, I have never found his recordings less than enjoyable. In the case of his Brahms, though, I return again and again to his direction.

I should stress this is not Brahms for the purist, necessarily, but I personally love the sheer refinement of these performances, the sleek approach to orchestral texture that makes the Berliners purr like a luxury German saloon car. There are rough edges when needed, but Abbado tends to take a long term structural view of the symphonies, presenting them in one long, unbroken phrase. In the introduction to the First this is consistently rewarding, but the lilting subjects of the Second benefit from this treatment just as well. The 'fillers' are excellent as well, the substantial choral pieces that are all too rarely heard, and a taut performance of the Tragic Overture that is especially strong.

Mahler

Abbado enjoyed a special relationship with Mahler's music that carried right through to his time with the Lucerne Festival, and some unforgettable live performances of the Second (Resurrection) and Third symphonies.

My abiding memory of his discs for Deutsche Grammophon is a live recording of the Symphony no.1, a relatively early outing on the label with the Berliner Philharmoniker, made in the Philharmonie in 1989. For me this piece in particular works best live, and the emerging dawn of the first movement is a wonderful experience, as is the high spirited outdoors music on offer elsewhere. As far as I can tell this was Abbado's first Mahler for DG, the start of an extremely auspicious discography for the composer.

Prokofiev

Abbado's earlier recordings find him enjoying more twentieth-century repertoire, and it is perhaps a regret that he did not spend more time with modern composers.

A couple of DG discs – of Kurtág, Stockhausen and Sciarrino among others – reveal what he could do in this field, but it is in the earlier giants of the twentieth-century that he really excelled in the 1960s and 1970s. This Prokofiev disc, made with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, is highly revered, for it contains a Scythian Suite of formidable power, a demonstrative Lieutenant Kijé and a very deep performance of the cantata Alexander Nevsky.

Even now I feel as though I have just touched the tip of the iceberg when it comes to looking at Claudio Abbado's recorded output, for there are many more gems – especially operatic – that I look forward to exploring further. For now, though, it is time to thank him for the music!

On the Spirit of Schubert

BBC Radio 3 have just completed another of their music marathons, where they concentrate on the output of one composer alone for a week, maybe more. Previously I have blogged about the 'Genius of Mozart', but now Franz Schubert has had his ten days in the spotlight, with 'The Spirit of Schubert' showing precisely why he is an ideal figure to put under the spotlight.

It bears repeating that Schubert seems to have lived several musical lives in one. His published catalogue by Otto Deutsch runs to nearly a thousand, and the mature examples could almost have been written by a 70-year old, not one who died at the tragically young age of 31 as Schubert did.

Perhaps Schubert's biggest contribution to classical music lies in the world of song, or 'Lied', to name it correctly – yet that is not the focus of this blog, for those works received great advocacy morning, noon and night on the radio. Nor will this piece focus on other hugely important canons such as the symphonies, the string quartets and the choral music – again, music bordering on the revolutionary. No, for me at least, the works making most impact over the ten days were those for piano.

Even within that illustrious list the stars were not the acknowledged mature masterworks, though the last three sonatas once again made their case for being the equal of any Beethoven wrote in the genre. No, the surprise elements were those 'middle' piano sonatas, not often performed in the concert hall, but revealed in the ten days as works possessing great emotion, invention and often humour.

They also showed Schubert's harmonic cunning. Never has a composer shown the aptitude for blurring the distinction between major and minor keys as much as him. A great example can be found not just in the piano sonatas but in the first of the 'Moments Musicaux', a strange utterance that daydreams in its opening melody in C major, but adds a darker afterthought in the minor key, unable to decide which one is the more conclusive. It's that sort of writing that kept Schubert as a composer capable of both darkness and light in the same sentence, leading sometimes to contradiction but often to incisive and balanced thought.

In the later works these thoughts become more outlandish and manic, perhaps nowhere more so than in the second movement of the penultimate piano sonata in A major D959. It helped that BBC Radio 3 had such distinguished pianists as Imogen Cooper and Paul Lewis to help illustrate these points in live events, but the studio recordings were equally well chosen, communicating just what a remarkable composer for the piano Schubert was. Those are the overwhelming memories I shall take with me from the ten day festival, following which I have visited a number of these works again. And who next for Radio 3? Might I suggest a trio of English composers who died in the same year, namely Elgar, Delius and Holst?

A Schubert Spotify playlist, with my highlights from a week's listening, can be found here: