With each
successive release by Hector Olivera I find it increasingly
difficult to describe it in superlatives that I haven’t used
before. Once again this is the situation with the release
of ‘WITH PASSION’ performed, as the title rightly states, by
this amazing keyboard virtuoso, on an un-specified model from
the Roland Atelier organ range. Several of the items I can
directly associate with the many years that I spent in the
cinema world, so for me they bring back happy memories of epic
productions such as SPARTACUS, SCHINDLER’S LIST, CINEMA PARADISO,
and Dudley Moore’s ‘10’ which features Ravel’s BOLERO. So if
for nothing else these items are special to me. The
performances throughout this 9 track CD are so
orchestrally perfect that I’d bet if any were played on a
Classical radio station, without prior mention being made of the
artist or instrument, there would be many music lovers and
aficionados, who would find it impossible to say that they were
not listening to a real orchestra.
Is it any
wonder that musicians and TV Producers the World over shy away
from featuring such incredible instruments as those produced by
Roland and Rodgers, for whom Hector works, tours and records.
They have good cause to be concerned! As Hector well knows, one
of my favourite film music composers is Ennio Morricone, he of
‘Once upon a time in America’ fame, and so I particularly
enjoyed the hauntingly beautiful CINEMA PARADISO theme track
because I too, was a young ‘Toto’ eager to learn everything
about the movies from my projectionist ‘masters’. It is nigh on
impossible to pick out the track that isn’t my favourite, but
believe me I doubt there is a better version of Ravel’s BOLERO
on any other keyboard recording. Other organists seem to
believe that all they have to do is select a commencing
registration and slowly and methodically build on it. In fact
it should be possible, as Hector demonstrates, to hear many
instruments: flutes, bassoons, trumpets, oboes and clarinets
individually adding their respective contributions in order to
vary the texture and to create a gradual crescendo, leading to
the cataclysmic ending. The result? A performance here, of what
is reputed to be one of the World’s most oft played pieces of
music, which is over 11 minutes of sheer magical artistry. The
stirring CD opener is Khachaturian’s music for the 1960 four
times Award winning ‘sword & sandal’ film SPARTACUS, which
boasted a star studded cast with Kirk Douglas in the lead roll.
I suspect the next track, the main theme from FURINKAZAN, a
story set in the time of the Civil War in the 16th
Century, will be new to most people, myself included, but the
music however is alternately stirring and beautiful.
The theme
from SCHINDLERS LIST, a brilliantly realized true story set
amongst the destruction and loss of life in the Holocaust, has
proved to be popular concert item amongst many organists, and
rightly so. Hector succeeds in capturing the poignancy of this
movie so beautifully. Reviving his own childhood memories of
the days when he, aged only 5 five years, played before Eva
Peron in his hometown of Buenos Aires, Hector has included the
broad and emotional theme DON’T CRY FOR ME ARGENTINA which Eva
delivers from the balcony of the Casa Rosada to the assembled
crowd. I must confess, until now, to not liking the composition,
born out of the fact that I’ve heard so many organ recordings,
which lacked the required interpretation to make it all come
alive. Again, this is an exercise in how this Andrew Lloyd
Webber’s composition should be musically portrayed.
DANCE MACABRE is a programmatic work: an orchestral tone poem if
you like, where the musical events follow a specific narrative
idea which in turn set up images in your mind. Hector sets the
scene with the bell tolling the customary 12 times, thus by
doing so summons the ‘dead’ skeletons from their graves to dance
to the sound of a solo violin, which they do until break of
dawn, when they return to their graves until next Halloween.
This item is one of two in which we get to hear Hector featuring
a new violin stop on the Roland Atelier: the other being a very
exciting, and somewhat slightly different version of Monti’s
famous CZARDAS, beloved by almost every ‘gypsy orchestra’ and
written back around 1904. It seems there is some uncertainty as
to this being a work for solo violin or mandolin, so what does
Hector do but to delightfully pair them up. All too soon
listeners come to the finale on this latest offering by the
keyboard maestro …and what a finale it turns out to be.
It’s the last complete Symphony, the No 9 by Beethoven, of which
the poem ODE TO JOY forms part, and is that which most of us
will instantly recognize. It’s a 12-minute tour de force, which
combines the organ design and talents of both Atelier and Hector
Olivera. The only thing missing is the customary standing
ovation and applause, but it doesn’t take much to imagine that!
Keen Olivera collectors will note that three items have been
recorded before on an earlier CD, but suffice it to say a decade
has passed and both ‘man & machine’ have come a long way.
Alan
Ashton. |
