Up to 84% in savings when you subscribe to The Absolute Sound
Logo Close Icon

Begin typing your search above and press return to search. Press Esc to cancel.

Box-Set Bonanza

Box-Set Bonanza

If the compact disc is (as some say) dying out as a storage medium, it’s going out with a bang, at least as far as great recordings of classical music go. For the past dozen years or so, and at an accelerating pace, venerable major classical-music labels like Columbia/Sony, Deutsche Grammophon, London/Decca, EMI, and Philips/Mercury have been issuing box sets (often dozens of CDs) at bargain per-disc prices of recordings that collectors have sought out and enjoyed for decades.

Sony, for example, has recently released boxes with the complete recordings (from LPs going back to the mono era up through recent CDs issues) of such superb pianists as Leon Fleisher, Gary Graffman, Charles Rosen, Byron Janis, and William Kapell. Other similar sets offer Glenn Gould’s complete Bach performances, Sviatoslav Richter’s Philips recordings, and Murray Perahia’s complete recordings from the first 40 years of his career. Violinists from Heifetz to Szigeti and cellists from Casals to Starker are also collected in box sets, as are conductors from Stokowski and Walter to Bernstein and Boulez, singers from Callas to Pavarotti, and ensembles from the Vienna Philharmonic and Budapest Quartet to the Chicago Symphony and Kronos. Also on offer are anthologies of great vintage audiophile recordings on Mercury, Decca, and EMI (many of these reviewed in past issues TAS). Indeed it’s hard to find any major classical artist or performing group of the past century not represented by at least one substantial box set of recordings.

Musical treasures of such quality and plenitude won’t be coming out on downloads any time soon, and when (or if) they do they’ll cost a lot more. How long they’ll be offered, and at such low prices, is anyone’s guess, but if the twilight of the format has in fact arrived, you’d be advised to grab those that interest you quickly. To give an idea of what these box sets are like I’ve chosen two of them to describe in some detail, one dedicated to an American pianist, one to a French conductor. Together they total about 70 hours of music.

Charles Rosen: The Complete Columbia and Epic Album Collection
Unusual if not unique among modern-era pianists, Charles Rosen (1927-2012) is better known for his musicological studies (The Classical Style, Sonata Forms, The Romantic Generation, Schoenberg) than for his pianistic abilities. Yet, as the 21 discs in this collection of his Columbia and Epic LPs demonstrate, he was a supreme virtuoso and astute interpreter of the piano repertoire ranging from Bach to Boulez. Reissued here in their original LP programs and miniaturized album covers, these recordings date from 1959 to 1972, all but one of them stereo. Sound quality varies; the earliest are clean but somewhat lacking in presence, the later ones (which are the majority of them) excellent: sparkling clear, richly sonorous, and immediate. Original liner notes are also used on most of the jackets, most of them written by Rosen himself and offering a splendid display of his magisterial abilities as a scholarly describer and explainer of historical context, musical architecture, and pianistic devices.

Rosen’s demeanor as a performer combines stunning technical finesse, crisp tempos, and sharp-focused clarity with a coolness and reserve often described as Gallic, though Rosen, more analytical than the typical Francophile, has little interest in sensuous color. Brooding and Teutonic he is most certainly not. Given his classic sensibility and aesthetics, it’s perhaps not surprising that he’s generally more persuasive in his performances of Debussy and Stravinsky at their most neoclassic—as well as in Schoenberg, Webern, Elliott Carter, Leon Kirchner, and Boulez—than he is in Schubert, Chopin, or Liszt. Still his Bach is immaculate, his Beethoven sculptured, his Haydn both vivacious and poetic.

Some highlights—and a few lowlights—will illustrate what I mean. Rosen’s renderings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Art of Fugue, for example, avoid any attempt to recapture “period” authenticity; but neither do they impose any personal eccentricities on the music. The result is a pellucid clarity and calm, secure logic that let Bach’s brightness, gaiety, contrapuntal ingenuity, concentration, and, when it is there—as in the sublime 25th variation of the Goldbergs—intensity and expressive eloquence come through strongly but without distortion or exaggeration. There are no Gouldian peculiarities, no Romantic pseudo-profundities, in Rosen’s Bach, and these remain for me (I’ve listened to them for decades) among the most transparent and rewarding Bach performances I know of.

In the last six of Beethoven’s 32 sonatas, Rosen is brisk (quite fast but in complete control in Sonata 29’s demanding allegros) and straightforward; there’s no lingering over phrases, no caressing of details. Clarity (especially in bringing out contrapuntal voices), precision, and proportion are ideally balanced with the taut muscularity that Beethoven’s brusque, sometimes jagged figuration requires; but of mystery, exquisite nuance, or visionary rapture, there is little. One comes away feeling that Rosen’s understanding of this music is profound, but his attachment to it more cerebral than adoring. Of course this is difficult, at times forbidding music that requires much from both performer and listener. As such it rewards many approaches, and Rosen’s is unquestionably one of the most noble, thought-through, and pianistically accomplished on record.

 

Rosen is consistently superb in modern-era repertoire. His traversal of Debussy’s 1915 Etudes is one of the cycle’s first recordings, and remains a benchmark for how this work—the composer’s late venture into a kind of proto-neoclassicism drier and harder-edged than his dreamier Impressionist pastels—should be played, no doubt partly because of Rosen’s predilection for purity and clarity over sensuous allure. In the final etude, with its bounding rhythms and rapidly punched-out chords, Rosen is supreme: no one has ever matched him here, though by now there are dozens of competing recordings. He is equally exemplary in Stravinsky’s neoclassic mid-1920s Sonata and Serenade in A. These marvelous works, so original in their use of the instrument, with their sec articulations and oddly disjunct arpeggios, have never been better served. Here, as in the Debussy Etudes, Rosen sets the standard by which all future recordings must be measured.

Rosen’s ventures into more adventurous territory are also boldly explorative and again standard-setting. In Elliott Carter’s powerful 1945 Piano Sonata, in Anton Webern’s gem-like Piano Variations, in the prismatic intricacies of Pierre Boulez’s First and Third Piano Sonatas, Rosen is superlative. Schubert, Chopin, and Schumann, however, reveal his limitations. Lacking a natural sympathy for Romantic effusion, his imposing intellect and pristine technique aren’t enough to get inside this music. His perfunctory and ruthlessly rushed playing of Schubert’s late A Major Piano Sonata, for example, has merely to be heard after the immeasurably superior contemporaneous recording by Rudolf Serkin to disqualify it. But what artist is convincing in everything he attempts? Rosen does so very much so very well that we can easily disregard his lesser efforts while delighting in his many superlative ones. 

Pierre Boulez: 20th Century
This compendium of Boulez’s recordings of the past three decades (from Deutsche Grammophon plus a few from Decca) celebrates his achievement as an exceptionally gifted conductor of modern music (including his own). Its 44 CDs encompass 154 works (three of them complete operas) by 13 composers performed by great orchestras (and some smaller ensembles) around the world, and such is its scope, its sonic superiority, the polish and penetration of its performances, and the centrality of the composers on it, that Pierre Boulez: 20th Century offers a plausible conspectus of the entire modern-era orchestral repertoire.

Boulez repeatedly elicits wondrous clarity and precision as well as ravishing beauty of sound from his players. He’s been criticized for a certain emotional detachment from and disinterest in the drama or mystery that his meticulous accuracy and focus on detail are said to result in, but this defect is only occasionally in evidence. Indeed he can be quite fierce in the energies he releases in his players, though he is always “in control.” Again and again his intelligence, scrupulous fidelity to the score, and judicious shaping and clarifying of the most intricate and exploratory modern music elucidate the most bewildering complexities, while at the same time adding a freshness and excitement both inviting and revelatory.

Box-Set Bonanza

There are a multitude of magnificent performances on this set. Two are seldom-performed early works of Bela Bartok: the one-act opera, Bluebeard’s Castle, and the 1912 Four Pieces for Orchestra. Boulez revels in their sumptuous and brilliantly inventive orchestral panoply, their forlorn grandeur, their mystery and (in Bluebeard) the music’s darkness and despair. He’s equally probing and dramatic in his (first-ever complete) recording of Alban Berg’s lurid Lulu as well as the separate orchestral suite drawn from the opera. His tempos in the suite are brisk but he makes this chromatic, tormented, expressionist lament as bleak, sad, tender, and haunting as a graveyard of murdered children. And in his premiere recording of Harrison Birtwistle’s 1972 orchestral masterpiece, The Triumph of Time, he is flat-out stupendous. Unrelentingly dark, this dense, granitic, implacable, slow-moving processional, from which primal musical ideas emerge and subside, grinds on and on, enacting the path of all-destroying Time. Boulez finds the emotional meaning in its tectonic violence and responds accordingly: nothing “detached” or merely “analytical” here!

As you’d expect, Boulez is superb with his French heritage—Debussy, Ravel, Messiaen, Varese—and brings unmatched authority to his own music. As a composer Boulez has been called abstruse and recondite, but these recordings reveal just the opposite: his infatuation with gorgeous timbral combinations, some with the spare textures and entranced suggestiveness of Japanese line drawings, others profusely elaborated with prismatic glitterings, maze-like superimpositions, dragonfly-darting inflections, florid vocal lines, a whole gamelan of percussive plinkings and clatterings.

Schoenberg marks a strong contrast with the hedonic French tradition, but here too Boulez is supreme. No one matches him in Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, a cycle of 21 brief, garish, moon-drunk, self-mocking poems, with a five-instrument chamber group accompanying the half-sung, half-spoken text. The recording is preternaturally clear and immediate; every subtlety and shading of phrase, filigree, or attack comes through with you-are-there vividness.

Boulez and Stravinsky are also a good match. Both men combine exalted craftsmanship with bold invention, color, and intense but highly stylized (or “ritualized”) emotion that shuns overt sentiment and masks rather than reveals intimacy or personal feeling. As many times as the hugely popular early ballets have been preserved in recordings, those by Boulez yet stand out as among the best. Even better are his readings of the Messiaen-ish 1920 Symphonies of Winds, the 1930 Symphony of Psalms, and the 1945 Symphony in Three Movements, the last with its spiky rhythms articulated with cut-glass perfection.

One last example: the ideal match-up of Boulez conducting Webern. Never have the austerity and concentration of these reticent sonic ideographs been more scrupulously or lovingly realized.

Read Next From Blog

See all

Adblocker Detected

"Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit..."

"There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain..."