Godard 2013

A fun disc and nearly – but not quite – a terrific one. The Philharmonics are an instrumental ensemble (not the African American vocal quintet of the 1950s and ’60s) – a string quintet with clarinet and piano. Four members are from the Vienna Philharmonic, one from the Berlin Philharmonic…

Howard Shelley directs the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra from the piano in this latest volume of The Romantic Piano Concerto series. As ever, they perform unknown music with consummate style and deep understanding, making the best possible case for the works. We have reached Volume 63 and the works of French composer Benjamin Godard, a figure who is almost totally forgotten today. He is described by Jeremy Nicholas in his booklet note as ‘a composer who combines the sentimental melodic appeal of Massenet with the fecundity and technical facility of Saint-Saëns’.

The tuba, alas, has a reputation of being the least cool and most cumbersome of the family of brass instruments - until the album Tuba Tuba, that is. A quartet of two tubas, accordion, and drums, Tuba is the vehicle for American Dave Bargeron (Blood Sweat & Tears, many big bands) and Michel Godard (French National Orchestra, Ray Anderson). Each fellow endows his tuba with exhilarating swing, grace, and (of course) humor on classics by Charlie Parker and John Coltrane.

Barcarole: Favourite Orchestral Pieces is a generous collection of Romantic gems performed by Neville Marriner and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, including popular selections by Georges Bizet, Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky, Jacques Offenbach, Jules Massenet, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Charles Gounod, and Benjamin Godard. Because the music is mostly taken from famous operas and ballets, the album offers a mix of highly colorful and serenely beautiful pieces, though all of them are extremely tuneful and memorable.

Commissioned by the Molde International Jazz Festival and recorded live at the Norwegian festival in 2010, “La notte” is a salute to Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, whom Ketil Bjørnstad counts amongst his formative influences. “At the same time that I discovered what jazz could be, after listening to Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way, I also saw the films by Godard, Bresson and Antonioni. Perhaps it was the slow, rhythmic authority in the films by Michelangelo Antonioni that made me think of music… As long as visual art creates music in our minds, and music creates pictures and visual expressions with the same intensity, the two are deeply and profoundly interdependent”. This album, then, can be considered “the soundtrack to an inner film”, in which Antonioni’s images and atmospheres are translated and transformed through personal moods and memories.