SHOSTAKOVICH Fantastic Dances . Piano Sonata No. 2. Preludes, op. 34 • Lilia Boyadjieva (pn) • ARTEK AR-0048-2 (66: 19)


The Bulgarian-born pianist Lilia Boyadjieva has been praised in these pages by Walter Simmons and Peter Burwasser for her “power and delicacy” performing the music of Samuel Barber ( Fanfare 20:4) and “intensity of purpose and bold dynamic command” in a program of fugues ranging from Bach to Shchedrin ( Fanfare 30:6), respectively—attributes that are certainly in evidence in this program of somewhat more varied and challenging music. Boyadjieva having graduated from the Moscow Conservatory, Shostakovich’s music was likely an important part of her studies, and she sounds especially comfortable with the stylistic quirks of the youthful dances (composed when he was 16) and the preludes (from 1932–33, probably as a warm-up for his First Piano Concerto and after he had completed the shocking opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk ). With crisp, clear phrasing, Boyadjieva is able to draw out the significant details in Shostakovich’s concise essays; she balances the many contrasting tempos without exaggerating them, and avoids placing undue emphasis on the music’s more exotic characteristics. Thus, for example, she can suggest lyrical echoes of Chopin (and, naturally, Chopin’s Russian heir, Scriabin) in the filigree of Prelude No. 2, expose the melancholy drama so typical of Shostakovich in No. 20, achieve a whispery delicacy in No. 17, and toss off the dazzling No. 5 with equal aplomb.


The Second Piano Sonata offers a different set of challenges to the performer. It was composed in 1942, between the Seventh and Eighth symphonies, possibly the bleakest period of the composer’s life, and following a somewhat turbulent opening movement, Shostakovich relates feelings of an almost incapacitating depression in the slow second movement, concluding the sonata with an extended sequence of variations of symphonic breadth, a gradual dramatic crescendo that dissolves into introspective secrecy. The same sense of proportion and balance that Boyadjieva brings to the preludes, while musically convincing, does not in this case fully account for the extreme emotional distress the music portrays. Her slow movement, though sensitive to the music’s hushed tone and arid texture, does not reach the level of breathtaking bitterness and shattered anguish conveyed by Boris Petrushansky on a 1989 MCA Classics disc. Likewise, Tatiana Nikolayeva, on Hyperion, despite a few missteps and rough spots, offers a palpable sense of gravity and stark expressionism. Her piano tone is powerful (bass notes thunder like cannon) and her slower pace in the opening and closing movements has a sardonic edge that’s missing in other accounts.


Still, though without the overt emotionalism others have brought to it, Boyadjieva has a good grasp of the sonata, and combined with her appealing performance of the 24 Preludes, this is a disc worth hearing.


FANFARE: Art Lange

SYMPHONY NO. 8 IN C MINOR, OP.

BARTÓK String Quartets: No. 1; No. 3; No. 5 • Euclid Qrt • ARTEK 0060 (77:24)


Here is the awaited follow-up and completion to the Euclid Quartet’s Bartók string quartet cycle. The first installment, containing the Second, Fourth, and Sixth Quartets received my very strong recommendation in issue 34:4. Hard to believe though, that was two-and-a-half years ago. What’s odd is that this second volume was recorded in July of 2011, but apparently has only now been released.


Noted at the time of the previous review was that the Euclid Quartet was the quartet-in-residence at Indiana University South Bend and, as far as I know, it still is. Also expressed previously was my opinion that the Euclid Quartet runs the Emerson Quartet a close race when it comes to precision of ensemble and clarity of texture, but that the Euclid doesn’t quite match the Emerson in making the execution of these hair-raisingly difficult scores sound easy. But perhaps, I mused, that’s a plus rather than a minus in music which is often fierce and feral.


Bartók’s String Quartet No. 1 is not exactly a product of the composer’s youth; he was 28 in 1909 when he wrote it, and like Janá?ek’s “Intimate Letters” Quartet, Bartók’s score was also prompted by an unrequited love, namely, for Hungarian violinist Stefi Geyer, with whom the composer had a brief and apparently stormy fling.


While Bartók’s official String Quartet No. 1 is neither his earliest effort in the medium—two earlier quartets from 1896, one in B Major, the other in C Minor, are lost—nor the most barbed and untamed of the six numbered quartets, not a few of its passages foreshadow the sharply dissonant harmonies and irregular stamping rhythms suggested by the Hungarian, Romanian, and Bulgarian folk music Bartók collected and studied.


Seventeen years elapsed between the writing of the First Quartet and the Third, a work Bartók composed in 1926. Not surprisingly, the score is now more daring in terms of its harmonic and rhythmic content, not to mention in its use of techniques that identify the composer as surely as fingerprints. Listen, for example, to the sul ponticello bowing and the slithering glissandos at the beginning of the section marked “Coda: Allegro molto .” Formally, however, the Third Quartet is also the most tightly organized of Bartók’s six quartets, and the shortest. Though it’s usually banded in four tracks on record and CD, Bartók conceived the quartet as a single-movement work, with the first section, marked “Prima parte” serving as exposition; the second section, marked “Seconda parte,” serving as development; the third section, marked “Ricapitulazione della prima parte,” being self-explanatory; and the fourth and final section, marked “Coda,” serving as a brief closing. The entire quartet (in this performance) takes just 15:16.


The Fifth Quartet, composed in 1934 on commission from Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, is as spacious as the Third Quartet is compact; and it finds Bartók once again exploring one of his favorite structural devices, a five-movement arch form in which recapitulating sections are presented in reverse mirroring melodic motion and/or key sequence within one or more movements, while movements 4 and 5 in their entirety reflect back upon movements 1 and 2, with the middle movement, 3, functioning as the arch’s keystone. In this case, the keystone movement is a rhythmically complex “Scherzo: Alla bulgarese,” in which 10 eighth-notes per bar are grouped as follows: 5+2+3.


Having now heard the Euclid Quartet’s second and concluding volume in its Bartók quartet cycle, I remain as favorably impressed as I was after hearing the ensemble’s first installment containing the Second, Fourth, and Sixth Quartets. The Euclid’s website lists these Bartók albums, in addition to a disc of quartets by Beethoven and Mendelssohn, and a disc of quartets by Austrian composer Hugo Kauder (1888–1972), but Amazon lists only the Bartók and Kauder entries. I haven’t been able to find the Beethoven and Mendelssohn album.


It is hoped that the Euclid Quartet’s players will record more extensively, for based on their performances in these Bartók quartets, they are as fine an American string quartet ensemble as any on the scene today, among which I would count the Emerson, Pacifica, Alexander, Fine Arts, Cypress, Arianna, and Jupiter Quartets. Any ensemble that can more than hold its own in Bartók’s string quartets with recordings by the Emerson and Juilliard Quartets and, in some cases, surpass them in expressivity and points of interpretation, deserves our serious attention.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

BEETHOVEN: Piano Trios Nos. 5 ("Ghost") and 6, Op. 70

20th century concertos presented with great accomplishment and inspiration.

Right from track 1 – the first movement of the Ernest Bloch Concerto – it becomes apparent that these sessions were captured in a really resonant acoustic. It’s a deeply impressive hall conveyed through a warm yet unclouded and analytical sound-image. This suits well the hoarse primitive fanfares that launch the Bloch Concerto in what is a very likeable and strong performance. The conductor tells me that rather than attempt a martial sound in the beginning fanfare he thought he would try to make it sound more like a shofar: “for me it is more a call to worship or ritual than to arms”.

It had me engaging emotionally with a work which previously I have found only intermittently enthralling. The EMI Menuhin recording never really won me over and at one stage it was the only choice. It left me remembering only those “Ancient of Days” fanfares. Oliveira, John McLaughlin Williams, the Ukrainian orchestra and audio engineers have turned that around. This the best recorded version I have heard and the performance matches its technical excellence. The tenderness of the Bloch never becomes effusive or sentimental. There is austerity too but this asserts itself through economy of emotional expression. It is a fascinating account of a romantic concerto that lacks a really big tune. Its palette is capacious and its sense of fantasy does not tip over into luxuriance. At various times this tonal work might recall the contemporaneous Bax concerto or the much later Bliss. It makes a very satisfying impression. This is emotionally nourishing music played to the hilt by a violinist whose exalted credentials were always clear from his classic Barber (EMI – recently reissued), Achron and Flagello’s Credendum and Violin Concerto.

Benjamin Lees was born in China of Russian parentage. He held various academic posts at the Juilliard, Peabody, Baltimore, Queen's College, New York and Manhattan School of Music. Ruggiero Ricci recorded his Violin Concerto for Vox (see review) and this is a sure indication of the high regard in which he is held by the musical establishment. Many his works have been recorded and are accessible to the listening public. His symphonies 2, 3 and 5 were issued by Albany in a very fine twin CD set (see review). Naxos issued his moving Symphony No. 4 Memorial Candles in its American Classics series (see review). He was first non-British composer to be awarded the Sir Arnold Bax Society Medal (London 1958).

The Lees Violin Concerto was written in 1958 while Lees was in France. It was premiered by Henryk Szeryng in Boston in 1963. A traditional work, it inventively deploys a tonal palette and treatment across three movements: two slow and one quick. It is mercurial with chameleon-mood changes and is neither as scarifying nor as hyper-tensile as the Schuman concerto which it occasionally echoes as in the emphatically punched out passage at 2.12 in the slalom swaying finale. There are three movements of which the Andante makes determined and angular play with intriguing rhythmic devices. It sometimes recalls the fragrance and fantasy of the Bax Violin Concerto of 1937. Its finely honed melodies and some of the treatments are tugged between the tropics of Walton and Prokofiev (1). The Adagio is characterised by some pristinely calculated effects: part balm, part threat (6:31). If the finale seems to have more action than substance it is an example of the perennial problem of how to write a conclusion.

Two 20th century concertos, presented with great commitment, accomplishment and inspiration as well as being well documented. Can we hope for other American violin concertos, I wonder: the concertos by Edward Burlinghame Hill and Frederick Converse should also be worth discovering. I am also fairly sure that there are several works for violin and orchestra by Charles Martin Loeffler.

-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

Recording information: D-Leutkirch/Allgäu, Festhalle (09/2007).

BEETHOVEN Piano Trios: No 1 in E?; No 3 in c • Peabody Tr • ARTEK 38 (64:12)


For those unfamiliar with this fine group (formed in 1989), it should be noted that it is currently the “resident ensemble” at the Peabody Institute. This CD marks its second in what apparently is to be a cycle of these trios, the previous one, which I have not heard, being devoted to the op. 70 pair. In the main, the Peabodys are very much attuned to the spirit of these bold assertive scores that suggest the young lion composer flexing his muscles and asserting himself with a freshness that, for all its individuality, never turns its back on tradition. Outer movements crackle with energy, slow movements are never unduly expansive, and the ensemble, as one would expect, is technically adroit. Refreshing, too is Seth Knopp’s Hamburg Steinway, a less brilliant and brittle instrument than its American counterparts, yet one that, owing to the pianist perhaps, seems a tad closer to the piano of Beethoven’s day. The only trait one might object to consists of a few instances of breath pauses—perfectly appropriate in the hall, to be sure—but possibly wearisome when heard repeatedly. In this regard, the accounts of the Parnassus Trio, often similar to these in many respects, may, in their freedom from such features, have more staying power. Both versions are first-rate. Like the Parnassus, the Peabody observes all exposition repeats. Incidentally this release benefits from one of Manhattan’s better kept secrets, the superb acoustics of the auditorium of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a favorite venue of the widely respected producer Judith Sherman, who oversaw this release.


FANFARE: Mortimer H. Frank

BRAHMS Violin Concerto. MENDELSSOHN Violin Concerto • Andrés Cárdenes (vn); Ian Hobson, cond; Sinf Varsovia • ARTEK 0039 (67:30)


Andrés Cárdenes, a former student of Joseph Gingold at Indiana University, prize-winner in the 1982 Tchaikovsky Competition, and distinguished professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, plays Brahms’s Violin Concerto with undeniable technical and musical command. Passage after double-stopped passage rings out with the clarity and assurance of a string quartet. Rising so authoritatively above the orchestra in the first movement of this massive work—with what seem to be reserves of tonal strength—can’t be so easy as Cárdenes makes it sound. Ian Hobson makes of the Sinfonia Varsovia a tautly rhythmic juggernaut, matching but never overpowering his soloist. Their white heat in the first movement reminds me of Leonid Kogan’s performance with Kiril Kondrashin and the Philharmonia Orchestra, a barnburner among barnburners (Kogan especially prized Brahms’s Concerto and Mozart’s Third). Cárdenes’s lyricism in the second movement proves that, pace Sarasate, the oboe doesn’t have the piece’s only good tune; his tone, as in the first movement, sounds thick as molasses in its lower registers and tensile and strong in the upper ones. He never spoils a line by lingering, never spoils passagework by rushing. Accordingly, the finale is perhaps more massive and deliberate than ethnically colorful or giocoso. But this movement’s performance fits with that of the Concerto’s other two movements. As in the case of Oistrakh, nobody should be tempted to accuse the soloist (as they had Heifetz) of superficial brilliance. The recorded sound represents Brahms’s rugged acoustic landscapes with stirring fidelity and the soloist with breathtaking presence.


Cárdenes and the orchestra seem to have a special affinity for the stormiest passages in Mendelssohn’s first movement, which they lace with heart-pounding adrenaline. For Cárdenes, the recitative-like sections that lead to the cadenza represent a dramatic climax, which he mounts with such affirmative power that even the most authoritative passages in the cadenza might seem anticlimactic. Once again, Hobson and the orchestra provide a sonorous, rhythmically bracing, accompaniment. The slow movement’s darker middle section and the finale’s episodes provide the kind of dramatic moments in which Cárdenes and the orchestra can revel. His may not be elfin Mendelssohn, such as that in which Heifetz or the less driving but nevertheless cracklingly electric Francescatti could dazzle listeners, but its dramatic outbursts offer a complementary, more histrionic, and equally idiomatic view of the Concerto.


Cárdenes’s two committed performances, in recorded sound of elemental strength and definition (befitting the soloist’s large-scale conception and the orchestra’s Gibraltar-like accompaniment), deserve a strong recommendation, even for those who believe their collection of the violin’s central literature needs little augmentation.


FANFARE: Robert Maxham

SHOSTAKOVICH: Symphony No. 5 / The Golden Age Suite

Mahler: Symphony No. 3 - Symphony No. 10: Adagio

With composer Leslie Bassett and guitarist Alejandro Saladin Cote, Artek presents this release of all premier performances.

Sitkovetsky, Yulian: Art of Yulian Sitkovetsky (The), Vol. 5

CORIGLIANO / COPLAND: Violin Sonatas / DELLO JOIO, N.: Varia

Includes work(s) for piano by various composers. Soloist: Lilia Boyadjieva.

MOZART Violin Sonatas: in G, K 301 (293a); in B?, K 378; in E?, K 380; in A, K 526 • Ani Kavafian (vn); Jorge Federico Osorio (pn) • ARTEK 32 (73:55)


The strong-minded insights of Ani Kavafian and Jorge Federico Osorio become apparent in the very first measures of their reading of Mozart’s Sonata in G Major, K 301; their irrepressible high spirits emerge in the second movement (high enough to lend plausibility to Bruce Adolphe’s suggestion in the notes that Mozart had, with this Sonata, entered the world of “operatic comedy.” It’s not as though Kavafian’s tone on her 1736 Muir McKenzie Stradivari sounds beguiling or even altogether pleasant; in fact, many listeners may find that it sounds reedy and sinewy. But that hardly matters, in view of her compelling musicianship and the duo’s joint forward thrust. They impart a bracing vitality to rhythmic figures in the first movement of the Sonata in B? Major, and Osorio crashes to rest in cadences with a finality that brooks no opposition. There’s thesis for your arsis. I’ve always taken Arthur Grumiaux’s performances, either with Clara Haskil or with Walter Klein as models of galant expressivity, but Kavafian and Osorio match them and add a kind of expectant vibrancy that leads from enjoying one measure to anticipating the next (so that sudden changes of direction, as in the finale of K 378, take on an additional element of surprise and delight), and that eagerness won’t be a delight reserved only for those who don’t really know the music. That kind of straining toward the next measure lay under performances of the great artists of earlier generations; it is present in almost superabundant measure here. And it comes in the slow movement of K 378 as well as in the fast ones.


Osorio’s figuration in the thematic measures of the E?-Major Sonata sounds downright tantalizing—it’s a matter of the performers sharing a sense of irresistible rhythmic élan. Yet when the music turns pathetic, as it does in that Sonata’s slow movement, Kavafian and Osorio’s collaboration shifts appropriately to match it; and the Finale’s a whirlwind.


The Sonata in A Major, composed almost a decade later than the earlier works on the program, takes a deeper, more serious look into its musical materials, but Kavafian and Osorio’s approach hardly seems inadequate in this more developed work—for example, in the philosophically laden slow movement, during which they make time stand almost still, or in the finale, with its dramatic shifts.


Hardly a perfunctory or obligatory entry in the Mozart celebrations, Kavafian and Osorio’s makes a more lasting impression—not through research but through intensive personal exploration of the music’s possibilities. Not perhaps perfect performances (Kavafian occasionally swallows a note in rapid figuration), these nevertheless rise easily to the top of what I’ve heard during this anniversary period, appealing more viscerally than Mutter and Orkis (on DVD, Deutsche Grammophon 4213, 31:4). Recently, Mark Steinberg and Mitsuko Uchida (Philips 80004115, 29:1) took a comparably individual look at Mozart’s sonatas (though, in their case, one for a dark and stormy night); and Hilary Hahn’s readings with Natalie Zhu (Deutsche Grammophon 477 5572, 29:3) also made a very deep impression of strong-mindedness. But Kavafian’s and Osorio’s performances belong on a Want List, and maybe even on a desert isle; and the recorded sound matches them.


FANFARE: Robert Maxham