CDs: soundtrack to The War: A Ken Burns Film, multiple CDs, including Songs without Words

A lifetime ago my father and I got into the car for a very long drive to the airport. On the way we played tapes of music from the big band era and Second World War, things like "Ole Buttermilk Sky" and "Bell Bottom Trousers," even "He Wears a Pair of Silver Wings" and "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition." My father was more of a Glenn Miller fan than a Sammy Kaye buff, but I think he enjoyed that musical road trip, and I suspect he hadn't heard most of that stuff in years.

During my university years I had warmed to '30s and '40s music, thanks in part to a roommate who played the local big band radio show every night in our dorm room. The music's essential optimism and innocence appealed to me -- this was before I saw that footage of Betty Hutton belting out "Murder, He Says" -- and it cast something of a rosy glow on my father's youth during the Depression and service in World War II. We didn't use the term "Greatest Generation" then.

Six years ago, on the weekend after September 11th, I took out my John McDermott CD and played his version of Eric Bogle's "The Green Fields of France" again and again. The song, also known as "No Man's Land," is an address to a fallen soldier of the First World War, the sort of material that invites maudlin interpretations. I'd first heard it from Annette Condon, my Irish neighbor in Germany (!), who sang Bogle's words to "young Willie McBride" with a mournful gentleness. I've since come to embrace the song's essential anger.

Did you really believe that this war would end wars?

The Great War didn't end anything, of course, nor did the Second World War, as each morning's headlines and the images displayed in "Faces of the Fallen" prove.

Given those considerations, I can understand if you find yourself resistant to watching PBS's The War, the new Ken Burns documentary, particularly one on such a painful subject. Nevertheless, I hope you will take the time to catch some episodes over the next few days on MPT or WETA, or WETA's encore presentation on Wednesdays from October through mid-November. The DVD is due early next month as well.

I'm watching the series with my heart in my mouth. It's a humbling and overwhelming experience to hear the testimony from living witnesses, both veterans and those from the home front. I'm left with a sense of what dread and exhilaration might have filled their lives. As the playwright Claudia Shear observed, "Everybody has a story. Everybody has at least one story that will stop your heart."

And in an age when the twin demands of partisanship and consumerism battle for our attention, The War provides a tutorial on the apparently lost art of frugality, with a generous dollop of national unity. The seven-day wartime work week gets its due, as does "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without."

This is not to say that Burns pays no attention to human nature, societal failings, and the limits of leadership. Both internment camps and the segregated military are touched upon, as are strategic errors within the war itself.

Burns doesn't skimp on the letters, the personal accounts, the newsreels and other footage. It's powerful stuff, and I'm only part of the way through it.

And as is usual with a Ken Burns film, the music enhances the story. You won't be surprised to hear he's made extensive use of the jazz, pop vocals, and dance music of the era, juxtaposing it both with recent compositions and judiciously chosen classical pieces. Several of the latter come directly from the era.

It takes several discs to contain all of the highlights. The lead disc, The War: A Ken Burns Film, provides an overview of the music by mixing up the genres: wartime jukebox favorites cheek by jowl with jazz and classical. That means both Bing Crosby's mellow reading of "It's Been a Long, Long Time" (with Les Paul on guitar!) and the London Philharmonic's performance of Walton's "The Death of Falstaff" from his Henry V Suite. The disc opens and closes with interpretations of the moving "American Anthem," first by Norah Jones and then by Amanda Forsyth and Bill Charlap.

That is followed by three separate discs: two compilations of big band treasures, Sentimental Journey and I'm Beginning to See the Light, and a classical CD, Songs without Words.

On the Songs without Words disc for the series, you'll find "Nimrod," the adagio from Elgar's Enigma Variations. This is the piece of music invariably chosen to accompany the dramatic readings at the National Memorial Day Concert each May, and those of you from the U.K. will perhaps have heard it on Remembrance Sunday. "Nimrod" wasn't composed to commemorate the war dead, but it seems infused with both melancholy and hope, as well as a quiet dignity.

It's possible you'll also recognize the wistful and tender "The Story of Grover's Corners" from Aaron Copland. Can anything quite evoke American small-town life as well?

The disc is rounded out with chamber and orchestral pieces from Copland, Dvorak, Faure, Ligeti, Mendelssohn, and, most appropriately, Olivier Messiaen, who composed and performed his Quartet for the End of Time in a prison camp. Walton's "Death of Falstaff" is heard here as well. The arrangements and performances make Songs without Words both haunting and moving.

I might add that the performers include Yo-Yo Ma, Steven Isserlis, Richard Stoltzman, and of course Benny Goodman.

Sentimental Journey and I'm Beginning to See the Light take a completely different approach and telegraph their intentions just by the titles. These are the tracks for dancing and flirting and waiting for that next trip home.

I don't care if you're more into e-mail than V-mail, or too young to remember the Reagan administration, let alone FDR's fireside chats. You owe it to yourself to listen to greats on Sentimental Journey and I'm Beginning to See the Light. The veterans and ex-riveters among you have already figured out the play list, but I'll just note that Burns has rounded up the usual suspects: Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Harry James, Gene Krupa, and many more of the whole wonderful gang, vocalists and all.

If you crave more of the play list for the home front and the GI, you can also check out Rhino's wonderful Songs That Got Us Through World War II, a CD that invariably had customers asking, "What are you playing?" every time I had it on at Olsson's Bethesda. The disc includes Johnny Mercer's infectious "Ac-Cen-Tchu-Ate the Positive" and Vaughn Monroe's "When the Lights Go On Again All Over the World." The real test of its appeal is that it both draws you back into a moment in time and yet possesses an enduring relevance.

CD:

• Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazon with Nicola Luisotti/Staatskapelle Dresden: Duets

It's been a difficult year for opera fans. In a relatively short period of time we lost Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Jerry Hadley, Regine Crespin, Beverly Sills, and Luciano Pavarotti. Sopranos Ruth Ann Swenson and Dawn Upshaw battled serious illnesses -- both ladies, happily, have returned to performing -- and vocal problems have kept a few of our favorites off the stage and out of the concert hall.

Still, classical music returned to WETA FM, PBS ran five evenings of opera performances recently (Hooray, Gianni Schicchi!), and of course there were always YouTube and Classic Arts Showcase for vintage and current performances if you were feeling particularly bereft. And as far as I know, that multitasking tenor Placido Domingo has remained as indefatigable as he is ubiquitous.

And if it's been a rough year for soprano Anna Netrebko and tenor Rolando Villazon, both of whom are taking a few months off from performing, those crazy kids have left us a sexy little CD called Duets to remind us what they they've been up to the past few years. In case you've missed all the press accounts, performances, videos, and CDs, these two are magic together, both onstage and in the recording studio.

Villazon's voice has that lovely burnished quality I so admire, and the emotional shadings that belong to tenor leads. He's masterful, ardent, imploring by turns.

Netrebko possesses a thrilling coloratura soprano, youthful and sweet, yes, but by no means without consequence. Listen with care to the lower, darker register of that voice of hers. I can only imagine that her repertoire and characterizations will expand as the years pass.

Is there any pastime more respectable and genteel than listening to opera on a weekend afternoon? Well, decide if you still believe that after listening to the pairings on this disc. Expect passion, desperation, ecstasy, and a few other things I'll leave you to find in the liner notes. What will Mrs. Grundy say?

You won't be surprised to learn that Netrebko and Villazon have included the rapturous "O soave fanciulla" from La Boheme, as well as some passionate moments from The Pearl Fishers, Romeo et Juliette, Lucia di Lammermoor, Rigoletto, and Massenet's Manon. Their unique vocal chemistry and emotional investment in the material hint at why they have proven such a remarkable team onstage.

Perhaps the biggest surprises on the disc are the inclusion of a zarzuela duet, from Federico Moreno Torroba's Luisa Fernanda (Yes, the same work Domingo performed at the Washington National Opera several years back), and the selection from Tchaikovsky's short lyric opera Iolanta. These latter two choices will be unfamiliar to most listeners but prove especially moving.

Nicola Luisotti conducts the Staatskapelle Dresden in a performance that enhances and complements the beauty of the two voices.

• CD: Herbert von Karajan/Mirella Freni and Luciano Pavarotti: Puccini: La Boheme
• DVD: The Original Three Tenors Concert

Autumn is bittersweet, forever associated with both new prospects -- the beginning of the school year, opera season -- and with reminders of the brevity of life. I had some sense of both beauty and loss on Sunday as I joined the peaceful army of marchers on the annual Unity Walk, an interfaith commemoration of 9/11 and a call to community. The participants progressed from the Washington Hebrew Congregation to the National Cathedral, past other houses of worship, on to the Islamic Center, and finally to the statue of Gandhi on Massachusetts Avenue. Along the way there was music and conversation, sometimes silence, and always someone ready to welcome us with bottles of water or other refreshment.

It seemed there was a similarly peaceful though not understated exodus to the cathedral in Modena, Italy, on Saturday as the world bid a formal goodbye to tenor Luciano Pavarotti. I found it strange to see footage of U2's Bono and former secretary-general of the United Nation Kofi Annan arriving at the funeral, but I had forgotten Pavarotti's various public service efforts, notably concerts to raise money for refugees. How could the world's most famous tenor not lend his voice to a good cause?

But if we can make the case for various rival tenors (and their careers), there is no arguing with the natural beauty of Pavarotti's voice and what that meant to the world of classical music.

Somewhere in my packrat existence I had a program from Lincoln Center, a souvenir of childhood, likely from one of those matinées where I saw my first operas. Among the articles about current productions and singers was a brief reference to a promising tenor named Luciano Pavarotti -- a respectable evaluation, as I recall, not an ecstatic one.

The program is long gone, but you still have your pick of recordings to prove to yourself just how wonderful Pavarotti sounded in his prime. And among the obvious choices is Herbert von Karajan's classic recording of Puccini's La Boheme, featuring Mirella Freni and Luciano Pavarotti in an artistically and emotionally satisfying pairing. The curmudgeons among us will complain that these voices sound too rich and healthy to belong to, respectively, a consumptive seamstress and a starving poet. But this is opera, people, where singers sound gorgeous no matter what dreadful things happen to them.

This is one of Pavarotti's great recordings, well worth a place in your collection. That distinctive voice is youthful and ardent, and the duets with Freni have an ineffable loveliness. There's also a good sense of atmosphere, which provides immediacy to the whole recording, and there's great work from the whole ensemble.

If you are looking for the Pavarotti of the popular imagination, mixing up classical and popular material, preferably with those two other guys, remember that the 1990 Three Tenors concert has now been reissued on DVD, this time packaged as a special deluxe edition called The Original Three Tenors Concert. There are almost 90 minutes of solos, trios, and rivalries from Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, and Jose Carreras, with conductor Zubin Mehta keeping an eye on the lot of them, and on top of that there's a documentary film, The Impossible Dream, karaoke(!), and other features. Who knows? Maybe it'll inspire the budding opera star at your house.

CD:

• Jonathan Biss: Schumann: Fantasie in C, Kreisleriana, Arabeske in C (EMI 65391)

To the soft swoosh of the washing machine and the warm, dusky tones of Alfred Drake singing "Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life" on Classic Arts Showcase, I sat down to read pianist Jonathan Biss's blog and was promptly besotted. The guy writes with heart and self-deprecating humor, so much so that quite apart from what he does with a piano, he's an engaging figure.

This month young Mr. Biss turns 27, and it's entirely possible that this Bloomington, Indiana, native has completely escaped your notice.

Jonathan Biss comes from a musical family, and the joke -- evidently true -- is that he was already on the concert stage while in the womb. His parents, Miriam Fried and Paul Biss, are both classical violinists, and Grandmother was not only a cellist but the cellist for whom Samuel Barber composed his Cello Concerto. Young Jonathan studied with Evelyne Brancart and Leon Fleisher (check out the amusing account of the latter experience on Biss's website, www.jonathanbiss.com), and has been touring his native country and the world, collecting prizes and glowing reviews.

He is, however, only at the beginning of his recording career, which has thus far been devoted to Beethoven and Schumann. The latest album, comprised of solo piano works from Schumann's earlier compositions, is a particularly welcome arrival and shows his technique to great advantage.

With these Schumann works, Biss is assertive and sensitive at once, a romantic with backbone. He approaches the material both with an open heart and great intelligence, with passion and maturity. It's not so much that the music is laid out for our enjoyment, like a piece of jewelry in a case, but that it's an organic, living being.

These solo works allow you to grasp the young Biss in his purest form. You'll have to wait for a concert (or perhaps another recording) to catch him with an orchestra.

His concert schedule has him roaming the Middle East and Europe, as well as snaking his way across the other States, and we don't get to see him in the DC area until May 2008, when he's scheduled for a Kennedy Center concert featuring Bartok, Brahms, and Janacek. Yes, the man's repertoire is growing in interesting directions, quite apart from his obvious affinity for the Romantic era.