Review: John Eliot Gardiner's Intriguing Erato Box
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- čas přidán 15. 05. 2023
- Now that Erato and DG/Archiv have weighed in, we're only lacking a big Philips/Decca box to complete Gardiner's imposing major-label discography. This particular 64-CD set has many attractions, mainly owing to the fact that it features a relatively youthful Gardiner in lots of unusual repertoire.
- Hudba
I remember the good old days when a "big box" was a 5-CD set of the Beethoven symphonies.
And sometimes they were in a tin.
Ditto! 😅
Boxed sets are cool, but they can be very overwhelming. I would only recommend them, to superfans of a specific conductor, orchestra, or soloist. After mentioning this, I have purchased Brilliant Classics boxes. Even, when purchasing these, I keep an eye on the performance, the composer, and the orchestra.
Such a great job maintaining audience interest over a 64-CD review. Thanks for all the insights.
What a coincidence! This evening in Gothenburg, Sweden, Sir JEG is going to conduct. The program is really exiting: Ginastera’s Harp Concerto, Sibelius 5th and a short suite by Rameau. Fascinating! It shows he’s willing to explore new territories.
On selecting the right big box: outstanding sonics really help me to enjoy a vast collection in such a box. Just a few examples: Suzuki’s Bach cantates are well paced and recorded properly, Warner’s Gidon Kremer box is surprising throughout and all its recordings sound terrific, and more surprises you find in the Royal Concertgebouw Anthology boxes: great music and from the late seventies onwards these radio recordings sound like no other: lush, full bodied, good dynamics - just wonderful.
I was quite pleased to get this box, as most of the repertoire is new to me. Glad to hear it’s pretty good, too!
Thanks for reviewing this box. I remember when I was at Tower and most of these were first released and how we sold a good number of them. Like you said, many of them were quite 'new' in terms of being on period instruments and repertoire that was never done. I need to go through my library to see how many I already have and whether I really need the box or not. Speaking of more new boxes, I do hope you'll be reviewing 1) the new 99 cd Trevor Pinnock coming out (I always thought his recordings were very good and will probably get that one), 2) the new studio recording 117 cd box of Bernard Haitink and 3) the new 36cd box of classical and romantic recordings of Michel Corboz. He did some good recordings too in his time (I don't recall whether you ever reviewed the renaissance and baroque box of his that's already out). I am hoping that this sudden glut of box sets coming out will lead to some releases we REALLY need (stereo Ormandy boxes, Fiedler box, complete Colin Davis Phillips box, etc).
Your phone interview story reminded me of a story told in college by Professor Bergan Evans (long since dead but was a nationally known English prof. in his day). Wordsworth was one of the greatest poets of all time, but mostly in his youthful works. As time and honors were heaped upon him, his sense of self-importance increased exponentially. And, the quality of his art decreased. As an example, he was walking along one day in his old age, and his cape fell off his shoulders. A man behind him ran up, picked it up, and brought it back to the aged poet, who then said: "Wordsworth thanks you.". Dr. Evans opined that when you refer to yourself in the third person, it seems that loss of humility and perspective can tank the actual artistic work done. Seems Gardiner is proof of that in conducting as well...
Bergen Evans was the English expert on Password
@@jaykauffman4775 No, tho' he did appear on What's My Line and some other radio/tv shows. I forget the man's name who was Password's English expert, but I remember he was an editor of one of the dictionaries at the time...
@@jaykauffman4775 Just found the one I remember as a kid, World Book Encyclopedia Dictionary editor Dr. Reason A. Goodwin. There were others, but not actually Dr. Evans.
@@bloodgrss oh that’s right
@@jaykauffman4775 OK; but how could I have forgotten that name!😀
This was very helpful. I like this box as something to stretch my baroque collection beyond its more traditional limits (basically I have tons of Bach and only a little of Purcell)
Q: How many period instrument people does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Seven: One to do it, and six to claim the rest of us have been doing it wrong all along.
Really an interesting set - Gardiner at his best. We are Drowning indeed! Coming on the heels of Corboz’s big baroque set Erato just released a more modern set - which I imagine will last about 6 months…Plus the huge Pinnock and the Abbado….
That's a great blast of the trumpet about mega boxes. I'm allergic to performer big boxes for a variety of reasons. These reasons include duplication of recordings already in my collection, works not well suited to the performer's talents, absence of texts of vocal music (a recurrent bugbear for me!), lack of space for storing them and especially lack of time to listen to them.......... AFAIK I only have two, an EMI Callas box (bearing an ugly portrait of the singer which I have turned towards the wall so as to avoid scaring people) and a 41 CD Abbado box called The Symphony Edition (duplicating his more manageable Brahms and Mendelssohn boxes already in my collection, which have the added advantage of including the texts of the vocal music!).
Composer boxes (especially less familiar composers) are another matter because they give an unending opportunity for discovery. I have Stravinsky, Roussel, Pierné and Webern boxes through which I am still wading and savour the prospect of hearing everything in them (with again a gripe about lack of vocal texts!). The Poulenc box is next on my list.
Gardiner seems to have quite a fan club here in France. Music magazines Diapason and Classica have both devoted long articles to him very recently. Perhaps the French are less disconcerted by intellectual arrogance (except from their current President) and the fact that Gardiner speaks good French certainly helps. I agree that his Purcell and Handel performances are mostly very good but I am much less convinced by his incursions into the Romantic repertoire, though they are much better than Norrington's, not a high bar to surmount however.
The t-shirt should read...that loves you Bach.
I have to give a plug for the Carissimi Jephtha. It has an absolutely beautiful and gorgeous finale and is really worth hearing
Thank you for that. It's not my cup of tea, and I'm glad you put in a plug for it.
Funny you mentioned the Coronation - Prince Charles (as then was) picked Gardiner's recording of Leclair's Scylla et Glaucus as one of his favourite pieces of Classical Music back in 2019 - which shows some discernment I guess...
Here I am at
Camp Granada
Listenin’ to
A Bach cantatah
It’s conducted, by
John Eliot Gadnah
It’s ok but
some utha’s dey are bettuh
Too much box! But for common listener, what to choose for baroque repertoire (if i only can choose one box of ... )? goebel, i musici, corboz, pinnock, gardiner, naxos baroque box ???? If Szell box for standard classic repertoire, Arrau for piano (hope for a m-a Hamelin for non-standard), Grumiaux for violin (with Gil Shaham because is so great), do we have, in your point of view, one or two box for common dude to cover greatly the baroque repertoire ?
I think I’d choose pinnock if could only pick a single box to cover baroque. Would get lots of Vivaldi, Handel, Bach, good Corelli, Boyce, Purcell, and you’d also get great Haydn, some CPE and JC Bach and a Mozart symphony cycle. Would go searching for more Telemann and get Bach passions from Netherlands Bach Society’s recent box (could also need French baroque things and Bach cantatas elsewhere too) if I were buying it all now.
Pinnock is known for dependability, Goebel for slashing accents. For “common listener” and hearing for a huge amount of mainstream stuff in very good or great performances I honestly think Pinnock is the obvious best choice if you could only have one and didn’t know the music yet. I learned a lot of music from pinnock recordings and am glad I did!
For Bach cantata selections and passions you also could try to buy Philippe Herreweghe harmonia Mundi years. I don’t have any idea about his Schumann, Mahler, Bruckner, but his baroque is great and more beautiful than normal.
I agree that Gardiner did some of his best work during this early period with Erato--before the "brisk efficiency" took over. Gardiner was not always humorless, though. The humor certainly comes out in his recordings of Mozart's da Ponte operas, and also in Purcell. By an odd circumstance, I had just ordered the DG/Archiv Gardiner box from Amazon (an incredible deal, in pure economic terms) a few hours before I viewed this current review. I decided to o back and retrieve your review of the DG/Archiv box. My, my! Such critical opprobrium deceding upon the majority of recordings in that box. Quite a disincentive for many viewers. For me, at least when I get in a certain rebellious mood, critical opprobrium just makes me want to hear the contents of the box all the more. I know all of the Bach, Mozart, and Purcell recordings in that box, and they are uniformly excellent. It will be interesting to see whether I come around to agreement with you when it comes to the others. But the Erato box is the one to get for anyone who wants to get to know the best of JEG. Can't wait for the Decca/Phillips box, though.
@@bigalfactotum9935 Thanks for your feedback, bot or not. To hear JEG's Beethoven was one of the principal reasons I ordered this set (the other being that I can never resist a bargain). I was already familiar with his Mozart operas, and all of the Bach, and I used to collect the Bilson/Gardiner Mozart Concertos way back when. I enjoyed them then, but got rid of them during one of my annual downsizings. I'm also fascinated by the prospect of hearing Gardiner direct a "conventional" symphony orchestra. All of what I have heard of his discography consists of period-instrument performances.
@@bigalfactotum9935 Thanks so much for your extended reply. On the basis of what I have heard of Gardiner in Baroque repertoire, I can imagine he would be an exciting Beethoven conductor. But the ears wiill tell the tale. I agree that there is a pernicious "historicism" in some quarters of the HIP movement, Gardiner included. As for Beethoven, I grew up on Toscanini, so early on I grew used to fast Tempos and blazing excitement in his symphonies. Later I learned to appreciate the likes of Walter and Klemperer, among many others who present a very different approach to the composer. When it comes to matters of style and interpretation I have to say I;m something of a pluralist. Thanks again for taking the trouble to comment at length; I appreciate it.
Wife: "Big package on the porch. Did you order one of those big box sets again, huhhhhh?"
Husband: "Uh, no, I don't know what you're talking about."
Wife: "Open it up then and let's see."
Husband: "Uh, I have to make an important business phone call right now."
Perhaps Uncle Davey should consider boxing up his tens of thousands of discs and marketing it as a mega box set. I bet somebody will pay over asking! Maestro Gardiner sounds like a rather pompous sort, so I’ll forego any interviews he’s given and stick to the music. His Bizet Symphony in C in Erato is very nice, although that’s probably a hard work to totally botch.
His de haut en bas manner and rehearsal rages are legendary. I remember a world-class soloist telling me that Gardiner "stared through me like a parlourmaid" a few years ago. However, he is by all accounts a model of self-effacing charm when dealing with his "fellow organic farmer", our new King. You wonder: no one doubts JEG's extraordinary talent, just as no one doubted Reiner's. Why run the risk of becoming more famous for your rudeness than for your musical legacy?
Because no one cares about rudeness? Think: Wagner.
@@DavesClassicalGuide Well, now he's got his King Ludwig, whom he dutifully addresses as "Sir" every five seconds despite running a Revolutionary (but Romantic) orchestra... whose royal funding is absolutely crucial ever since DG/Archiv decided they'd had enough of JEG. I love it when you let slip that a certain musician behaves like a prick: classic story about Henze! Easier to get away with in the 1990s than it is now...
@@DavesClassicalGuide The pure autocratic conductor may be a thing of the past, but I think the arts, in general, will always be open by unspoken rule to enormous egos, snide remarks, sarcastic jealousies, and personal and critical rudeness. Wagner was a master of it as you indicate, but I have always loved a story of witty rudeness (since I seem not to be a chord or a line-man, but a story-man) that Wagner himself tells about Spontini conducting. The Dresden orchestra had some aged and fading skill string players Wagner disparaged. But they must have been truly inadequate to have caused the Italian composer/conductor to stop the rehearsal, turn his head, and say in a sepulchral voice: "Are the viola's dying?"
Gotta disagree with you about the "really stupid poems" by John Milton. L'Allegro and Il Penseroso are famous--and justly so. However, I haven't heard Handel's setting of them, and I'm intrigued.
That's OK. I know it's me. I had a bad "Paradise Lost" experience in high school and I've had problems with Milton ever since.
@@DavesClassicalGuide Dear me, Dave, there is a subject for someday dissertation; how many artistic 'masterpieces' and 'geniuses' were tanked in young brains by their fractured and forced exposure to them in high school!!! I have a few of those myself...
@@DavesClassicalGuide I'm not surprised. It's a pretty typical experience, but, when I was teaching, I dealt with upper division English majors who took Milton by choice. On that subject--I mean, Milton and music--Finzi's setting of Milton's "When I consider how my light is spent" is wonderful, especially when sung by Ian Partridge. Beautiful stuff.
Mein Herz schwimmt in blut cantata with Magdalena Kozena if it’s on there, is amazing, and very dramatic, rather unlike him. He tends to do Bach rather light with the bigger works such as the B minor mass compared to my favorite choral Bach conductor (Karl Richter) but I think his light touch and purist style lends itself well to the Cantatas and Kozena operatizes it without injecting vibrato and very much keeping with the style in her ornamentation vocal quality and inflection.
"Chapel royal emasculata"🤣