Key Releases | September 2012

2012 Naxos Rights International Limited Key Releases | 1

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Claude DEBUSSY (1862-1918)24 Prludes (orch. Peter Breiner)Royal Scottish National Orchestra Jun Mrkl

Debussy completed his two books of Prludes in 1910 and 1913 respectively, and they contain some of his most visionary and poetic writing for piano. There are evocations of calm seascapes, delicate wind tracery, and snow-covered landscapes. Some moments are steeped in antiquity, such as La cathdrale engloutie, others in expressive portraiture, as in La fille aux cheveux de lin. There is even a cake-walk. The Prludes are performed here in the subtle and colouristic orchestrations of much-admired Slovak-born composer Peter Breiner.

Booklet notes in English

Catalogue No: 8.572584

Total Playing Time: 01:16:30

Listen on www.naxos.com 7 47313 25847 5

About Jun Mrkl Jun Mrkl was Music Director of the Orchestre National de Lyon from 2005 to 2011 and Principal Conductor/Artistic Advisor of the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony to 2012. He has appeared as a guest conductor with the orchestras of Philadelphia, Cleveland, NHK Symphony, Tonhalle Zurich, and the Munich, Oslo and Czech Philharmonics among others, and at the Met, Covent Garden, Vienna State and Dresden Semper Operas. He also enjoys a close relationship with the NHK Symphony with which he conducted the first Japanese Ring cycle in Tokyo. Born in Munich, Mrkl studied initially with Sergiu Celibidache and Gustav Meier, then at Tanglewood with Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa. His first music directorships were at the Staatstheater in Saarbrcken and at the Mannheim Nationaltheater. He went on to become Permanent Conductor of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, a position he held until 2006.

PETER BREiNEROrchestrates Debussys 24 Prludes

Listen to an excerpt from La fille aux cheveux de lin: PLAY

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Peter Breiners memory goes back a long way, but music in his life goes further still. Best known as a brilliant and prolific arranger, he is also a composer, conductor, pianist, percussionist (for many years a professional) and voracious musician. For all his instrumental skills, he is first, last and always a man of the orchestra. That conversion, unsurprisingly, came early, though not quite as early as one might imagine. And the day he lost his heart to the orchestra the day the world changed before him he remembers with crystal clarity.

I was around 10 or 11 when for the first time I saw an orchestral score. I recall it as though it were yesterday. It was Smetana: Vltava from M Vlast. I was absolutely fascinated by having the option of reading not two lines but thirty-five or forty at the same time. It was quite a shock, actually! Almost immediately I tried to do the same thing, to write for orchestra. Of course at ten your plans are not small, so I started with an opera! I still have the score, which is quite funny, of course. But I was growing up in a very small town Humenn, in Slovakia where orchestral concerts were either non-existent or very scarce. All my options, therefore, were really rather theoretical reading scores and writing them, with little or no guidance. Later, however, I went to the conservatory in Koice, where there was a symphony orchestra and an opera in the town. More importantly still, the school had an orchestra! Immediately, and from then on, I immersed myself in all things orchestral. When I was 14, I found in the school library a piano score of Gershwins Porgy and Bess. There was no full score, just this piano reduction, so I made my own orchestration of the overture. I wrote all the score, all the parts, over a few nights, and put it on the stands for the school orchestra. At that time, Gershwin and jazz were almost illegal to play in a Communist conservatory, but after the regular orchestral lesson I persuaded all 70 people in the orchestra to stay on for another half-hour and try to play this overture, because it was such a fascinating piece of music. Of course it was a disaster, but that was my first experience with transcription and conducting at the same time.

The first step on a road which would stretch farther than he could have imagined. But by what procedures does Breiner so impressively translate one tonal world into another? Actually, this is something I do rather instinctively. I had the rare luck to go through an enormous amount of scores, closely analysing them as I went, during my university years, when I also worked full time as a radio producer. For four or five years, on a daily basis, I was recording new works with a full symphony orchestra, so I got to know many

scores in quite considerable detail, and thereby absorbed the styles of many different composers. Later, when I began to emulate styles with which I was already familiar, it all came quite naturally to me. And in time I came to do this without much effort, without having to analyse the style in great detail, because somehow I already owned it.Citing one of Mr Breiners most renowned predecessors, I remarked that Leopold Stokowskis famous orchestrations, for all their brilliance, often sound like orchestrations, while Breiners tend to sound remarkably like originals. How does he manage to transform the sound world of a piece while still preserving its original spirit and character? Well to begin with, I never set out to make it sound different. My goal is to make it sound as close to the original composer as I can manage. Stokowskis case was exactly the opposite. He wanted everything to sound like Stokowski! I work as a composer as well, so thats part of my need to emulate the original, to sound as though the composer Im transcribing had done the job himself. Only in my own music do I set out to sound like myself. Elsewhere my aim is to make Debussy sound like Debussy, Janek like Janek, Tchaikovsky like Tchaikovsky and so on. If I manage that then Ive reached my goal.

But what of lesser composers? In his ground-breaking orchestrations of all the worlds national anthems, did Breiner follow any guiding principles? Did he set out to reflect the characteristic sound worlds (and emulate the musical styles) of the various different countries? Well, to tell the truth, that was one of my original intentions, but as soon as I started working on the anthems, I discovered that most of them are really very bad music! So my main effort was not to emulate a style, because its very rare that a national anthem expresses anything about the country or culture concerned. For example, we would probably expect something exotic or colourful in anthems from Africa, but most of them are actually the works of colonial brass band leaders, dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when former colonies became independent states and its really just bad European music; nothing to do with Africa at all. So all I could to do was to improve many of these as best I could to come up with some better solution in harmonies, for instance, than the original composers had done. There are only a handful of anthems by real composers, like Haydn or Mozart or Gounod and maybe three or four more. All I could do with the rest was to make them sound as good as possible and hope for the best.

Returning to the upper end of the spectrum, I asked if there were certain works that had proved especially challenging. One where I did encounter major problems was Albnizs Iberia. That really took

2012 Naxos Rights International Limited

Key Releases | September 2012

PETER BREiNER Talks to Jeremy Siepmann

Peter Breiner Talks to Jeremy Siepmann | 2

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some time and effort, and it was one of the very few pieces that I did a rewrite of. The first result just wasnt what I really desired. That was one case where my percussionists background was a hindrance. The simple fact is, I over-percussioned it. Though I obviously didnt realise it at the time that I did it, it was simply too much. As a percussionist myself, I knew all about sitting there for lots of time doing nothing except counting. So I wanted to give them something to do. But I simply overdid it. To the point of ridiculousness! Really! So I scrapped the entire first version and began again. But it taught me well. Because ever since then Ive been watching myself very carefully on that front!Do some composers, I wondered, lend themselves to transcription better than others? Oh definitely. There are composers who think orchestrally and there are others who didnt write for the orchestra so much in Chopins case, hardly anything and it shows even in their piano pieces. And we can go back to Albniz again, who wasnt essentially an orchestral composer. His writing for piano alone is already very difficult and one might think it would lend itself naturally to orchestration, but quite the reverse is true. And there are a few composers who are so pianistic that its difficult to imagine any transcription really working. This applies to most of Chopin, and a lot of Liszt, too. The virtuoso pianism is often untranslatable, it seems to me.

And is there any music that he would very much not want to transcribe? Quite a lot, actually. And high on the list, rather surprisingly, is the piano music of Beethoven, pretty well wholesale. That was actually one of the first things I had to do when I started composition at high school. My instrumentation teacher gave us Beethoven sonatas to transcribe. He told us it would be difficult but he felt that wed get a lot out of trying. I still have the transcriptions I did, but I really have to say, I think, that in general Beethoven sonatas definitely dont lend themselves to orchestral translation. Somehow the losses are always too great. This, of course, is very ironic, since were always hearing about how orchestral Beethovens piano writing is. But for reasons too subtle and technical to go into here, orchestral transcriptions of it never sound like Beethovens orchestral music. An interesting case, though, is the Sonata in E, Op. 14 No. 1, which he himself transcribed for string quartet. But a quartet, of course, is not an orchestra.

Does Breiner feel that there is, or has been, a good deal of snobbery when it comes to the subject of arrangement/transcription? Oh absolutely! Theres a great deal of snobbery in classical music generally. In some circles, to touch anything commonly regarded as sacrosanct is considered a sin (yet Bach was a prolific arranger of other peoples music. So was Handel. So were many great composers). Inevitably, when my Janek orchestral suites came out basically six operas without singing it was quite controversial. There was a big article in Gramophone magazine, about how that particular critic loved it. He admitted it was a guilty pleasure to approach Janeks music without all that dreadful singing in Czech! He admitted that for him that was a real obstacle, that he couldnt help himself. So there are some people who really appreciated hearing Janek music which was never actually written by Janek (whose actual orchestral output isnt all that big). These suites were a welcome addition to his orchestral catalogue, the critic wrote. On the other hand, predictably, there were purists opposed to the very idea, including some of my conducting colleagues, especially those whove specialised in Janek. But my aim was simply to help outsiders discover what a fantastic composer Janek was. Its a plain fact that many people just dont like operatic singing. Why not allow them to discover the beauties of Janeks music? I think this kind of snobbery does much more harm than good to classical music these days. Weve been accused so many times of

elitism and snobbery already, and to add to it just diminishes the not huge and evidently shrinking audience anyway.

Looking back over his tremendously varied projects for Naxos, now numbering nearly nine hundred, does Breiner have any favourites? Oh, many! Too many to remember. Ive always had particular pleasure working on Tchaikovsky, because I think Ive come pretty close in mimicking his orchestration. I feel a great affinity with his music and I hugely enjoyed transcribing Tchaikovsky songs for orchestra, or violin and orchestra, likewise The Seasons and lately Ive started doing the same kind of thing we did with Janek, making opera suites. I discovered for myself his early opera The Voyevode, which I have to admit I didnt know well at all. The suite, which we recorded with the New Zealand Symphony two or three months ago, sounds almost like another Nutcracker Suite so enjoyable and fun and full of wonderful music. Thats certainly been one of my very good experiences. And then there was the project where I took a lot of Christmas songs and treated them in a Baroque style. That was really a lot of fun.

And what of the present? And the future. What lies ahead? Well I just wrote two chamber pieces, very recently, and theyll be premiered in May here in New York. And Im really looking forward to the release of the Mussorgsky Pictures, for which, as a filler, I also orchestrated two of his song cycles, the Songs and Dances of Death, and The Nursery. And then theres more Tchaikovsky, two operas (Naxos would like to continue doing other Tchaikovsky opera suites), plus Im about to finish my own orchestral piece, that I hope will confirm that I have my own orchestral style as well. Im also just finishing a big, ninety-minute cycle of dances, in the tradition of Brahmss Hungarian Dances and Dvoks Slavonic Dances and English dances and Cuban dances and whatever. Theres a long tradition of writing dances and dance cycles, of course, so I also decided to write a cycle of sixteen Slovak dances, based on Slovak folksongs; then I have some Handel transcriptions to do, some Chinese music (thats all for Naxos) so, as you can see, Im quite booked!

Which is very gratifying of course. And unsurprising. Mr Breiner is a professional to his well-honed fingertips, and an uncommonly gifted one to boot. But its hard to listen to many of his arrangements and transcriptions without having a sense that this is a man who clearly enjoys himself. Surely a stroke of genius like his brilliant blending of Irving Berlins White Christmas and Bachs Air on the G String must have given him a lot of pleasure! Oh yes! But I get a tremendous joy out of the whole business. I simply love what I do. As you know, Ive had this orchestral obsession since I cant remember when, but to have been able to devote my whole life to my hobby to my passion is a rare pleasure. A rare privilege. I dont think theres anything luckier than to have a job, to do work, which one hugely enjoys almost every moment of.

A lucky man indeed. But however controversial his chosen path, the beneficiaries of his self-acknowledged luck are far beyond counting, and are to be found all over the world. For those averse to the operatic voice he is little short of a hero. Would Tchaikovsky forgive him? (Tchaikovsky, who orchestrated Mozart in the style of Tchaikovsky? Mozart, who orchestrated Handel in the style of Mozart, who arranged Bach fugues and provided his own preludes? Bach, who arranged all and sundry?) Would all of them forgive him? The evidence speaks for itself.

Jeremy Siepmann is an internationally acclaimed writer, musician, teacher, broadcaster and editor.

2012 Naxos Rights International Limited

Key Releases | September 2012

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Key Releases | September 2012

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Highlight Releases Featuring Peter Breiner

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ALBNIZ Iberia (orch. Breiner) BIZET-BREINER Carmen Concerto

BRAHMS Hungarian Dances Nos. 2, 4-9 (orch. Breiner)

GRANADOS Twelve Spanish Dances

JANEK Orchestral Suites from the Operas, Vol. 1

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BEATLES GO BAROQUE A CHRISTMAS CHORAL SPECTACULAR

CHRISTMAS GOES BAROQUE

CHRISTMAS GOES BAROQUE II

NATIONAL ANTHEMS OF THE WORLD

About Peter Breiner Peter Breiner is one of the worlds most recorded musicians, with over 150 CDs released and record numbers sold both as albums or online streams. Known as a conductor, pianist, arranger and composer he has conducted, often doubling as a pianist, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, Vienna Mozart Orchestra, Hungarian State Radio Orchestra, Nicolaus Esterhazy Orchestra Budapest, Polish Radio and TV Symphony Orchestra, Ukrainian State Symphony Orchestra, Moscow Symphony Orchestra, Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra, Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, Capella istropolitana, Queensland Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra National de Lille, France, and Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, among many others.

Some of his most acclaimed recordings include Beatles Go Baroque and Elvis Goes Baroque representing the collections of his commercially most successful Baroque arrangements together with Christmas Goes Baroque i and ii. His arrangements of national anthems of all participating countries were used during the Olympic Games in Athens in 2004.

More recently, the world premire recording for Naxos of his own arrangements of Janeks Six Operatic Suites with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and himself conducting earned tremendous acclaim, Gramophone stating Splendid discconducted with passion and sympathetic understanding the Chicago Tribune adding Breiner fills the void with beautifully crafted symphonic suites based on the music of Jenfa.

Breiners compositions and arrangements have been played in concerts worldwide. Films that include his musical scores have enjoyed very wide international exposure (such as Anne of Green Gables, Timothy Findleys Piano Mans Daughter, produced by Whoopi Goldberg, and The Magic Flute ) and his music has been featured many times on the most popular TV shows ( including CBC television show Wind at My Back and Seasons of Love)

Breiner began to study piano in his early childhood in 1961 and his exceptional artistry led to his early acceptance at the Conservatory in Koice in 1971. He studied piano (L. Kojanova), composition (J. Podprocky), conducting and percussion. in 19751981 he studied composition at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava (former Czechoslovakia) with Professor Alexander Moyzes, one of the most significant figures in modern Slovak music. Peter Breiner lived in Toronto, Canada since 1992 till 2007 when he moved to New York.

He is proficient in seven languages. He has hosted various TV and radio programs about music, in 1993, was a co-host and music director of the most popular TV talk show in Slovakia, attracting over 2 million viewers, has his own column in one of Slovakias most influential weekly newspapers, and published his first book Maple Leaves in April 1998.

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JANEK Orchestral Suites from the Operas, Vol. 2

JANEK Orchestral Suites from the Operas, Vol. 3

POPPER Romantic Cello Showpieces

TCHAIKOVSKY None but the Lonely Heart

TCHAIKOVSKY The Seasons (arr. Breiner)

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