Theodorakis
Zorba - Suite-ballet (a). Carnaval (b) – Danse des hommes; Danse de la jeune fille; Danse d'amour. Adagio (c). (a) loanna Forti (soprano); (c) Kenneth Smith (flute); (a) Montreal Choir and Symphony Orchestra, (bc) Philharmonia Orchestra/Charles Dutoit.
Decca 475 6130 (full price, 50 minutes). Website www.decca.co.uk, Producer Andrew Cornall. Engineer John Dunkerley. Dares (a) October 12th, 2000, (bc) February 4th, 2004.
This is Charles Dutoit's last recording with the Montreal Svmphony Orchestra, and nobody can say that he isn't going out with a bang. Mikis Theodorakis (b. 1925) has been something of a cause for Dutoit, so it's fitting that Decca has preserved something of the collaboration for posterity.
There is some joyous, exuberant playing here: the contained, somehow elegant, joy of 'Zorba's Return', placed at the beginning of the Suite, sets the tone for the rest, ranging comfortably from the songs, performed superbly by the dusky, folk-inflected voice of soprano Ioanna Forti (I defy anyone with an ounce of feeling for things Greek to remain dry-eyed listening to 'Marina'), to the bombastic Theodorakis. He relies unashamedly on Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich but without ever losing his highly distinctive melodic idiom – stunningly effective in many of the purely orchestral moments of the Suite — and that unforgettable dance: as Georgios Malouchos observes in his notes, 'Even today, almost half a century after the music was first heard in the film ... people all over the world feel that they are hearing Greece when they hear those first two notes.'
Indeed, but I'm glad that the rather less well-known Adagio for solo flute, strings and percussion and the three pieces from Carnaval were also included. These are played by the Philharmonia Orchestra, which responds just as much to the Dutoit touch as the Montreal musicians.
Theodorakis's world is vast and very varied, as Dutoit has plainly realized, and it is perhaps in Zorba that the worlds of the tragoudista and the synthetis — the chansonnier and the composer, to the Greek either mutually exclusive or different facets of the same thing, according to where you stand on the matter aesthetically — are melded most fully together. There's a feeling of familiarity here, of a close and comfortable relationship that gives the Montreal orchestra, and the splendid choir, a certain authority in the way they perform this music.
The end result is a worthy tribute indeed, both to composer and conductor: an outstanding release.
Ivan Moody
International Record Review – September 2004
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