Felix Mendelssohn: Complete Piano Music

Why the great Felix Mendelssohn has not been featured here before is an unfortunate oversight because, despite his tragically brief life, he amassed an incredible body of work, so we'll make up for lost time by highlighting this amazing six-disc box set issued by the remarkable Nimbus Records comprising all of the music written for piano by this sublime composer.

Performed by the brilliant Martin Jones, who has recorded an enormous amount for the label, the recordings entail over six hours and it has never been a problem to sit down for a work day at the computer and listen to this uniformly excellent music all the way through or over a couple of days.  Especially during these troubled times, when a respite is often needed to refresh the mind, listening to Mendelssohn's diverse array of piano works is a necessary and appreciated balm.

More impressive is that much of this work was done while the composer was a teen, including his sonatas, which as the liners note, hardly sound like they were juvenile works.  The beautiful preludes and fugues were produced during his late teens through late twenties.  At twenty, Mendelssohn visited Wales and three fantasies came out of that, including a remarkble one in F-sharp minor.

His best known piano pieces include the Rondo Capriccioso, the Variations Sérieuses, and the Songs Without Words, the latter intended for those to play at home in their parlor and often thought of as "piano fodder for the multitude," but highly popular when performing music was common in many households long before, of course, the phonograph, radio and television.  "Sweet Remembrance," the first of those songs without words, has great personal meaning as it was the march used for my own wedding nearly a quarter century ago.

Raajeswari Padmanabhan: Music of the Veena II

Music is generally a male-dominated profession worldwide, but this remarkable album, released in 1989 by JVC as part of its World Sound series, is an example of a woman master musician in the Carnatic tradition of South India, Raajeswati Padmanabhan (1939-2008), performing on the veena, said in the brief English portion of the liners to be the oldest (other sources suggest among the oldest) of instruments in the sub-continent.

A large plucked string instrument with the large curved resonator on the right side of the performer and the tuning box at the left.  The notes point out that, of the seven strings, four are above the frets, while the other are open and serve to provide drones as well as the indicate the bears of the tala, rhythm, utilized in a piece.  

The liners also offer that "the main attraction of the veena is the meditative atmosphere which its sound evokes" because of ongoing droning, the use of microtones and "subtle melodic inflections."  It adds that "listeners experience moments of ecstasy when the highly individual and unique sound of the veena is handled by a master of improvisation within the format of a raga."  

The masterful playing is expressed through four pieces, with the first being a brief, by Indian standards, six-minute one, and the second twice as long.  The fuller experience of the raga is found, however, in the last two pieces, with running times of 23 and 24 minutes.  While Padmanabhan performs on the featured instrument, her daughter Shreevidhya Chandramouli provides a drone but also duets with her mother, while Tanjore Upendran plays the mridangam drum.  Given the horrible surge in COVID-19 cases in India, there is an especially poignant context listening to this amazing music now.

Marvin Gaye: Every Great Motown Hit

Watching the recent CNN special on the 50th anniversary of the release of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On album was a revelation, given the troubled upbringing, turmoil and triumph of his remarkable career and his tragic end that the documentary ably reviewed.  The film was well-produced, featured great interviews with family, friends and others who knew and worked with Gaye, and put into excellent perspective the immense accomplishment of that recording.

Not having the album, however, meant that it was time to fish out a compilation purchased many years ago, this being the Every Great Motown Hit, although this is a misleading title because it has fifteen choice Gaye pieces, but certainly not every hit song.  In any case, it is a fine survey of his career from his breakout years with Motown in the early to mid Sixties, his remarkable collaboration with the sadly short-lived and brilliant singer Tammi Terrell, and his amazing transformation in the early Seventies with albums like What's Going On and Let's Get It On.

It is never easy to make a market stylistic change musically, particularly as tastes change, but Gaye, like James Brown and others, found a way to do so while releasing an album with pointed social commentary, of which he was warned to avoid as not marketable.  He persisted, though, and delivered with a recording that is not only sonically still fresh and impressive, but with messaging that is, obviously, still very relevant and timely.

This is one of the most important points raised in the documentary; that Gaye's achievement was both to create incredible music and powerful statements and, with all that has been "going on" recently in American society with regard to race and social justice, his work very much matters.  There are very few artists who can have that be said about them a half-century later.

Sam Rivers: Contrasts

This great Sam Rivers album from 1979 has an apt title, for sure, and this adventurous (which is self-evident with ever-exploratory multi-instrumentalist) recording is also a contrast for the ECM label, not best known for its free jazz catalog.  

It is also brimming with sonic contrasts that are highly complementary thanks to the interplay between the leader and the remarkable George Lewis on trombone.  Meanwhile, the rhythm section is as tight and inventive as the horn players, with Dave Holland always superlative on bass and the totally underappreciated Thurman Barker on drums (love that solo on "Zip," for example).

The pieces themselves have a broad range of sounds, tempos, and structures with some being more ambient and amorphous and others really hitting hard and swinging.  So the transition from "Zip" to "Solace" is a perfect embodiment of the former being an up-tempo, fairly straight-ahead romp and the latter a beautiful and contemplative work, including Barker's excellent marimba work behind Rivers' sinuous soprano and Lewis' sympathetic trombone work.

Then, it's to "Verve" and Rivers playing a gorgeous flute with the rhythm team right there in perfect synchronicity, while Lewis, always mindful of mood and where bandmates are, does great work after the leader's turn.  "Dazzle" takes off from Rivers' tenor and Barker's rapid cymbal work and, indeed, dazzles when the others join in to display great inter-group dynamics.  Really, though, all of the seven tunes are superlative and Contrasts one of the many highlights in Rivers' lengthy and fascinating discography.