The journey starts in the Austrian region of Muhlviertel, shows the Lippizaner horses of Piber in Styria and the storks and vineyards of Rust by the Neusiedlersee. The music of the tour consists of two of Beethoven's best known sonatas for violin and piano, the Spring Sonata and the Kreutzer Sonata.

KUHLAU Piano Sonatas, op. 59: in A; in F; in C. Sonatinas, op. 20: in C; in G; in F • Jen? Jandó (pn) • NAXOS 8.570709 (59:07)


Ill-fated Friedrich Kuhlau (1786–1832) suffered a number of life’s mishaps. The first, at age seven, was the loss of his right eye in a street accident. The second, many years later, was the loss of all his unpublished manuscripts in a fire that burned his house to the ground. But perhaps the greatest misfortune of all to befall him was Beethoven, or, more specifically, to have been born and lived in Beethoven’s shadow. Born in Germany, Kuhlau fled to Copenhagen in 1810 to avoid conscription in the Napoleonic Army. What? No 4-F exemptions for one-eyed musicians? He remained in Denmark for the rest of his life, never gaining much traction as a composer except for his Danish opera, Elverhøj ( Elf Mound ). He did, however, achieve some recognition as a concert pianist; as a great admirer of Beethoven, Kuhlau introduced a number of Beethoven’s works to Copenhagen audiences. Of Kuhlau’s manuscripts that escaped the flames and made it to publication, there are approximately 200, consisting mainly of chamber works, solo piano pieces, and enough pieces for flute to have earned him the nickname “the Beethoven of the flute.”


Kuhlau is said to have been most heavily influenced by Beethoven, and as one listens to these sonatas and sonatinas, it’s clear that he had at least the more superficial aspects of Beethoven’s early style down pat. I’m speaking here of the keyboard figurations, the harmonic progressions, and the gestural articulation. A perfect example is the Adagio e sostenuto movement of the G-Major Sonatina, op. 20/2. But here the comparison ends. Kuhlau is but a dinghy caught in the wake of an aircraft carrier. Had he lived 25 years earlier, these mostly slight works might have been seen as a significant advance in keyboard style, but he didn’t; and this is what I meant above when I said that Kuhlau’s greatest misfortune was to have been born and lived in the shadow of Beethoven. Consider that the op. 20 sonatinas on this disc are dated 1820; the op. 59 sonatas, 1824. By this late date, Beethoven was done with the piano sonata as a vehicle for expressing his musical ideas. The “Hammerklavier” and the three last sonatas were behind him.


The taxonomic division of the works on this disc into sonatas and sonatinas is a bit of a puzzler. Keith Anderson’s booklet note homes in on this very point, informing us that the three op. 59 works are often published as sonatinas rather than sonatas. The crux of the matter is that in musical lexicography a sonatina refers either to a small-scaled, modest sonata or, more properly, to a sonata-allegro movement without a development section. The op. 59 set on the disc does feature the requisite first-movement development sections to qualify as sonatas, but oddly, they are all relatively brief works and in only two movements. The op. 20 set, though called “sonatinas,” are all more extended three-movement works and, at least in one case—the F-Major—there is a short development section.


It is likely that most, if not all, of these pieces were written for students, as Kuhlau earned no small amount of his income teaching and publishing just such sonatas and sonatinas intended for young fingers. In a 2006 New York Times article I came across on the Internet (http: //www.nytimes.com/2006/07/02/arts/music/02holl.html), Bernard Holland acknowledges that “none of these sonatinas prepare the student for Beethoven at his most ornery,” and asks “Why play Kuhlau in the first place?” He answers his own question thus: “It is easy to dismiss this annoyingly perfect music as a product of mindless rote or a series of bad habits having outlived their time. But the sonatinas have their uses.” What they are, according to Holland, strike me as a bit misguided. “Really interesting composers like Haydn and Beethoven” he continues ( leaving Mozart and Schubert out of the equation —my italics), “violated the unwritten road maps with glee; but fully to understand the originality of the violators, it is nice to have a Kuhlau or a Muzio Clementi to show you just what is being violated.” Apart from the fact that the road maps of harmonic progression and sonata form were hardly unwritten by the late 18th century, what Holland seems to be saying is that Kuhlau’s only purpose is to provide us with a sextant by which to measure the degrees of deviation from true north practiced by the “really interesting composers.”


I have a rather different take on it. In the grander scheme of things, which we cannot know, it may be that neither Kuhlau nor any of the “really interesting composers” has any purpose at all, other than to afford us some pleasure and comfort while we wait to shuck off this mortal coil. Kuhlau is never less than harmonious, pleasing to the ear, attractive, and entertaining. As music, it’s a vacant sand lot, but one I’d rather trudge through than the barren dunes of some of what passes for music today.


Jen? Jandó is one of Naxos’s “house” pianists. He plays everything they throw at him smartly and stylishly. These pieces, of course, make no technical demands that a polished professional such as Jandó isn’t up to. The recording was made in 2007 with Jandó playing a modern grand piano. While recordings of Kuhlau’s keyboard works abound, the current CD appears to be the only one currently available containing these specific opus numbers. Buy, enjoy, and be happy.

FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

Jenó Jandó's Naxos survey of Beethoven's Bagatelles and dances for solo piano reaches Volume 3. Jandó's adroit and stylish readings have much to commend them, especially in their technical agility and clarity of execution. The greater part of this release is given over to the 12 Minuets--not normally the kind of music that lends itself usefully to cyclical hearing. But in these performances Jandó manages to get away from any repetitiveness and predictability, a potential danger in genre pieces, particularly when heard en masse. That he characterises each so effectively comes down to taut rhythms and clinical exactitude in matters of dynamics and articulation.



The disc opens with six more substantial items, including the two Op. 51 Rondos, the A major Rondo WoO 49, the so-called "Andante favori" (Andante in F WoO 57), and the famous "Rage over a lost penny", otherwise the Rondo a Capriccio in G Op. 129. Again, Jandó's performances are enjoyable and illuminating. Note for example how he highlights contrasts of mood and dynamics so effectively in the last of these works, sharpening the acerbity of its more fevered passages through a clarity of attack that owes more to keyboard articulation than to the pedal--commendable, given his brisk tempo. The two Op. 51 Rondos are also more tersely etched and rigorous than you'll often hear, so I'm inclined to rate Jandó's accounts more highly than Brendel's here. Another welcome addition to a useful budget series.
--Michael Jameson, ClassicsToday.com

This programme is probably catchy enough to get the young listener off to an enthusiastic start.

This is one of a batch of CDs in the Naxos 'My First Album' series which founder Klaus Heymann declares "one of our most important projects with music for children". Each comrpises around 15 to 25 pieces of music selected as a gentle but inspiring introduction to the subject matter: in this case the violin repertory. Other volumes showcase Tchaikovsky, the lullaby, ballet, ‘classical music’ and so on. Virtually all the music consists of single movements drawn from larger works, with the average timing here just under the five-minute mark.
 
The CD booklets are attractively designed with youngsters in mind, with a fairy-tale-style pencil/pastel drawing on the cover and many smaller colourful ones on every page - violins feature prominently in this volume. Inside, after a brief introduction to the subject - "The violin is one of the most popular instruments the world over" and so on - each item on the disc is allotted a 'Keyword', ranging from the obvious to the odd, such as 'Thrilling', 'Dance', 'Goblins', 'Film' and 'Sting', and there follows a descriptive/explanatory paragraph, in straightforward language that should be intelligible to children as young as five or six, and unpatronising up to about ten or eleven. The texts enlarge on some of the things going on in the music, either as heard in the instruments or, if the work is programmatic, in the story itself, generally with a mention of the mood of the piece and usually alerting the child to some detail or other.
 
The blurb states that the booklet "is full of information on every piece of music", but that is a bit of an exaggeration. For a start, only the composer's surname is given in the main text, whereas first names - likely to be of interest to younger children - and dates of birth and death are relegated to the small print at the back of the booklet. Unfortunately, there is not even the most cursory of biographical note on any of the composers - this seems an odd omission when the texts talk freely about them as if they were old friends to the reader. Such detail is certainly more relevant than the titles in their original languages, such as 'Danza Española' or 'Souvenir d'un Lieu Cher' - only some of which have in any case been supplied.
 
For an important project, there is some surprising inconsistency or rashness in the language used in the notes. It is no good a child knowing that "Carmen is the world's most famous opera" or that a cor anglais "sounds like a dark oboe" if (s)he has no idea what an opera is or an oboe sounds like. "Can you hear the birds fluttering on the violin?" is likely to be understood literally by younger children. To describe the cimbalom as an instrument that "sounds a bit like a very old piano" is facile. The remark that "Schindler's List [...] is about the story of the Jews in World War II" is crass, inaccurate and semi-literate. As for that film's title theme - "incredibly sad music"? Nostalgic, touching, introspective - but surely not "incredibly sad", except perhaps for those who have seen the film.
 
The back of the booklet is the place to go for details of performers, rightly judged this time to be of little importance to nascent listeners, but a necessary reference for parents wishing to delve further into the music, whether on their child's behalf or perhaps - why not - for themselves. Yet the recordings drawn on for these compilations are not really the best ones to look out for, nor even the cheapest anymore. For the first batch of discs at least Naxos have drawn widely on their back catalogue bargain basement, meaning that performances tend to be rarely more than fair-to-middling, whilst the recordings themselves, some over twenty years old, can show their age in their thin or tinny quality, always most noticeable in the orchestral tracks.
 
That said, this CD is the best of the bunch so far - most of the performances are perfectly serviceable and the chamber recordings, of which there are many on this album, sound decidedly less lossy. Moreover, it is also true that the intended audiences are neither hardcore audiophiles nor zealous collectors but ordinary children, who will probably not notice anyway! Still, there seems no obvious reason why Naxos did not use newer, better recordings across the board.

Asking a six-year-old to sit through seventy-five minutes of any music is a tall order. Even a few minutes of less immediate material might induce premature boredom, in which case other or at least shorter Mozart and Beethoven might have been included instead, and a different Tchaikovsky melody. In smaller servings, this programme is probably catchy enough to get the young listener off to an enthusiastic start, yet it is difficult to discount the idea that those selecting the music and writing the notes could have thought a bit harder.
 
-- Byzantion, MusicWeb International

Given the popularity of Schumann’s A-Minor Piano Concerto, I’d be willing to wager there are readers out there who have amassed recordings of it in double-digit numbers. If you are one of them, you may already have this one in an earlier incarnation, for the performances on this disc are not new. The concerto comes from a 1988 Budapest production; the Introduction and Allegro appassionato, from a 1992 Belgian production; and the Introduction and Allegro, from a 1996 Polish production.

The current release, however, can be recommended for joining this trilogy of Schumann’s concerted works for piano and orchestra on a single disc. In fact, it is the identical program I praised to the heavens in a review of an MDG DVD-A with Christian Zacharias. If you heeded my advice and acquired that disc, the present Naxos recording, and all others, for that matter, are superfluous. Nonetheless, Jenö Jandó, who has become a well-known Naxos commodity, is a very fine pianist whose playing here is technically flawless and interpretively orthodox. Translation? You can’t go wrong.

One minor editorial correction: the note states that Schumann’s two single-movement concert pieces for piano and orchestra, coupled here with the concerto, are his only other works for this combination. Not so. In 1839, he wrote a Konzertsatz in D Minor for piano and orchestra that predates the works on this program. There is a recording of it on a Koch International Classics CD.

Jerry Dubins, FANFARE

Some delightful piano works in the spirit of Haydn and Mozart.

This release marks another disc in the lengthening series of Kuhlau’s compositions on Naxos.

Kuhlau, born in 1786 to a musician with the German Army, began his musical education in Lüneburg with piano, and also began to compose at that time. Around 1800 he studied with C. F. G. Schwenke, the man who succeeded C. P. E. Bach in the position as Hamburg Stadtkantor. By 1804, Kuhlau was in the process of launching his career as a pianist in earnest. Blind in one eye since childhood, Kuhlau fled to Copenhagen under an alias to avoid mandatory military service; his half-blindness evidently did not compel the authorities to exempt him. He eventually became a naturalised citizen of Denmark and established his base there for the rest of his life.

Known to this reviewer primarily for his compositions for flute — various discs have been released recently of his flute sonatas and trios on Naxos and other labels. Kuhlau also produced a number of other pieces, primarily for chamber ensembles.

The works on offer on the present disc are short and charming, with most movements lasting no longer than three minutes. Jandó does right, I think, in keeping the performances simple and straightforward. The object of these pieces is not to impress or give a listener a good deal of food for thought. These are meant primarily to entertain. They are likely to be familiar to piano students worldwide. There isn’t much here that would surprise the listener, but there are a few moments of particular interest, such as the unexpected similarity of the opening movement of the Sonatina in A minor, Op. 88 No. 3 to Beethoven’s 1810 Für Elise. Another standout is the opening Allegro maestoso of the Op. 55 No. 6 Sonatina in C which, with its length of just over seven minutes, allows for a bit more mulling over of its thematic material.

The recording aesthetic for this disc is just what one would expect from Naxos: warm ambience without losing presence or definition. Jandó gives these pieces a clean and clear performance. Quite a pleasant disc for casual listening.

-- David Blomenberg, MusicWeb International

The request for Haydn to write The Seven Last Words came from a priest in Cádiz to mark Good Friday. + Setting the words of Christ gave Haydn the basis for the construction of seven slow and meditative movements to be played by the orchestra as the Bishop descended from the pulpit to pray. + The following year Haydn arranged the work for string quartet and a version for keyboard was prepared. + To this version, which he did not prepare himself, Haydn gave his wholehearted approval noting that it was ‘very good and made with particular care’. + Hungarian pianist and Liszt Academy, Budapest professor Jenő Jandó has recorded for Naxos all the piano concertos and sonatas of Mozart. + Other recordings for the label include the concertos of Grieg and Schumann as well as Rachmaninov’s Second Concerto and Paganini Rhapsody and the complete piano sonatas of Haydn and Beethoven. + He has performed and recorded a wide repertoire of chamber music, in addition to his recording of the complete piano music of Bartók.