Topic: Reynaldo (Hahn's) jet d'eau

[pjme]

REYNALDO HAHN : L’île du rêve, 1898. 1 LIVRE DISQUE, 1 cd, 127 pages. Enregistrement réalisé au Prinzregententheater, Munich, les 24 et 26 janvier 2020.

The French press is happy to have this work in good sound. Alas, not all the singers get favorable comments..
http://www.classiquenews.com/cd-evenement-reynaldo-hahn-lile-du-reve-dubois-sargsyan-niquet-2020-1-cd-opera-francais-pal-bru-zane/

"L’Île du rêve condenses into an hour of music all the charms of French Romantic opera. The youthful Reynaldo Hahn – just seventeen at the time – reveals colouristic talents inherited from Bizet, a prosodic originality anticipating Debussy, and above all the passionate outpourings he learnt from his teacher Jules Massenet. On reading through the score of L’Île du rêve, Massenet told Hahn: ‘To have written that, you must be a poet.’ The plot recounts a French naval officer’s love affair with a young Polynesian girl he is forced to abandon. This subject – also treated musically by Puccini (Madama Butterfly) and Delibes (Lakmé) – is approached in an almost Symbolist style: the Romanticism of the music contrasts with a contemplative, introspective treatment of the narration."

You can hear a teaser at:
https://bru-zane.com/en/pubblicazione/lile-du-reve/

[ritter]

Cross-posted from the New Releases thread:

A new recording of chamber music by Reynaldo Hahn (the two String Quartets, and the Romance in A major for violin and piano):



This is the link to Amazon France.

The artists and the label are unknown to me. The CD is released “with the support of the Palazzetto Bru Zane“.

Release date is October 23rd.

[kyjo]

I’ll have to investigate his SQs. I can’t emphasize enough what a great work his Piano Quintet is! Truly first-rate stuff. I also greatly enjoy his Violin Concerto and Sonata.

[Florestan]

I’ll have to investigate his SQs. I can’t emphasize enough what a great work his Piano Quintet is! Truly first-rate stuff. I also greatly enjoy his Violin Concerto and Sonata.

Don't forget Le rossignol eperdu, 4 books of charming piano pieces.

[ritter]

I’ll have to investigate his SQs. I can’t emphasize enough what a great work his Piano Quintet is! Truly first-rate stuff. I also greatly enjoy his Violin Concerto and Sonata.

IMHO, the two SQs are Reynaldo at his very best (especially SQ No. 2). They have a nostalgic grace, a  certain calssical purity, whcih makes them disarming to me, and they are far removed from the salon-music quasi-kitsch atmosphere that e.g. some of the piano pieces almost (but not quite) inhabit.

Do give the SQs a try.

[Florestan]

IMHO, the two SQs are Reynaldo at his very best (especially SQ No. 2). They have a nostalgic grace, a  certain calssical purity, whcih makes them disarming to me,

In short, they are Mozartian. 

and they are far removed from the salon-music quasi-kitsch atmosphere that e.g. some of the piano pieces almost (but not quite) inhabit.

If I were a musicologist-cum-cultural-historian the first book I'd write were titled In Praise of Salon Music: From Mozart to Rachmaninoff. This best seller mops the floor with any preconceived notions about salon music being kitschy and shallow. 

Muy buenas tardes, Rafael. Tienes correos, desde algunos dias.

[ritter]

A major new biography of Reynaldo Hahn will be released next week by Fayard (the French publishing house with a most impressive series of books on music):



The author, Philippe Blay, is widely considered as the leading living authority on Hahn. He’s already published to books on the composer: Marcel Proust et Reynaldo Hahn - une creation à quatre mains and—as editor— Reynaldo Hahn: un eclectique en musique (the latter being probably the most important addition to the bibliography on Hahn of recent years).

[Stürmisch Bewegt]

Thanks for alerting us to that biography, ritter.  Most interesting.  I love his mélodies, though I find them best appreciated in small batches, amuse-bouches, if you will.  And of course his Ciboulette, which is both witty and endearing as well as loads of fun, worthy of any music fan's attention. 

[ritter]

Cross-posted from the opera sub-forum:

Revisiting Reynaldo Hahn’s Le marchand de Venise, while reading the chapter dedicated to this work in Philippe Blay’s biography of the composer.


This is the only recording of the work circulating on CD, made live in 1978 at the Salle Favart with the forces of the Paris Opéra (where the work was first performed in 1935). It’s conducted by Manuel Rosenthal, and has  Michèle Command, Annick Dutertre, Éliane Lublin, Christian Pouliac, Armand Arabian, Marc Vento, Léonard Pezzino, Tibère Raffali et al. as soloists. The sound of the broadcast (only available from “private”  sources) is perfectly acceptable.

What a lovely and peculiar work this is! It takes the focus away from Shylock’s tragedy, and instead puts the love stories of the three couples at the centre. All this in Mozartian structure (a sort of The Rake’s Progress avant la lettre?), but with Hahn’s hyper-conservative, yet simultaneously highly personal, musical style (and great melodic invention). The work clearly places the singing in the forefront (no symphonic music drama this), but the discreet orchestral tapestry is very effective and delicately scored.

Interesting to read (in Blay’s book) the reactions of critics at the time of the premiere, ranging from “absolute masterpiece” to “boring, boring, boring” and “a bloated operetta”. I personally love the piece and, particularly, some of its set numbers (the quartet “L’amour, qui pourtant n’est pas bête” and the closing, Don Giovanni-like septet “Car il faut, que l’amour ait le dernier mot”) and it certainly is Hahn’s magnum opus. A work that deserves wider circulation, and should receive a modern, studio recording (Bru Zane, are you there?  ).

[ritter]

Pianist Shani Diluka will release a Proust-themed album in late October, with an eclectic program, the centrepiece of which is a new recording of Hahn’s Piano Concerto, with the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris conducted  by Hervé Niquet:


The fact the Hahn’s concerto was composed almost a decade after Proust’s death IMHO does not detract interest from this release, particularly since we get a new recording of the rather beautiful concerto.