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Saint-Saens: Violin Sonata No. 2; Suite In D Minor; The Swan / Clamagirand, Cohen
Naxos · Sep 2013CD$19.99 -
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SaleKrenek, Vol. 1: George Washington Variations, Sonata No. 4; Schubert/Krenek: Reliquie
Toccata · Jul 2015CD$20.99$10.49 -
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Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Nos. 24, 28 & 32
Beethoven: The Last Three Sonatas
Géza Anda plays Solo Recitals, 1950-1955
REVIEW:
Hungarian virtuoso Géza Anda (1921-1976) opens a recital derived from radio broadcasts from SWR Stuttgart with Haydn’s perky F Major Sonata (17 April 1950), given a sparkling bravura rendition. Anda’s pearly play and deft touch make themselves felt in every concerted bar, and the runaway Presto finale might be a minor meteor. Schumann ever maintained Anda’s devotion, and he often programmed Symphonic Etudes, including the free interpolation of the five posthumous variations. The rendition included here (2 October 1951) includes two of the posthumous etudes, nos. 4 and 5, inserted after the sixth and eighth of the traditional studies. The first exploits sweeping arpeggios and glissandi techniques; the latter opens a jeweled music-box filled with nectar crystals. The serenity yields to the following Etude, a staccato study in syncopations that becomes quite frantic. Etude X, for want of a better term, has always struck me as “Brahmsian” for its double octaves. The agitato mysteries of Etude XI have rarely been so rarified in their mist contours, except perhaps from Cherkassky. The Etude XII finale, besides its obvious, heroic bravura, exudes the Innigkeit requisite...
The Ravel waltzes, in their sturdy percussion, date from 19 May 1951. Anda does not spare the fortissimos nor the pedal, moving to extremes in the first two waltzes, from aggression to erotic insinuation. The dance marked “Presque lent--dans un sentiment intime” has its perfect executor in Anda, which rivals the classically-chiseled entry by Robert Casadesus. Lithe and sensuously nimble, the last two waltzes--Moins vif et Epilogue--combine Vienna glitter and Schubert’s intimate suggestiveness in Ravel’s idiosyncratic kaleidoscopic panoply. Rolf Liebermann’s 1951 Sonata (2 October 1951) marks one of the few pieces Anda programmed that post-date World War II. His “modern” repertory ceased, for the most part, with the 1945 Third Concerto of Bartok. Liebermann (1910-1999) begins his nine-minute work with a toccata-style Vivace with periodic moments of pointillist staccati. The heart of the piece is the Andante espessivo, rather angular and reminiscent of Ravel, Gershwin, and modal Poulenc.
The second disc is devoted to the 1955 (May 21) recital at Ludwigsburg, a venue frequented by Anda’s esteemed colleague, Clara Haskil. Anda opens with the First Ballade of Chopin, a reading of balanced intensities, gothic and introspective at once. The music’s fierce Neapolitan harmonies and inner tumult manage to find a noble repose in the course of its poetic declamation mid-way, only to yield to the Dionysiac dramaturgy of its late pages with a passionate abandon that belies Anda’s repute for “objectivity.”
Anda recorded the Op. 25 set of Chopin Etudes for EMI, and he often featured the complete ensemble as a concert staple. He plays the A-flat Major for its serene beauty, and thus sets the tone for the remainder, to be played in the classic style of Backhaus, for poetry and strength of form.
The Brahms E-flat Major intermezzo, a simple, nostalgic folk song evocation, makes the perfect commentary to all of the “learned” counterpoint of this evening’s colossal recital at Ludwigsburg, where the spirit of colleague Clara Haskil must have lingered nigh.
-- Audiophile Edition
Chanter avec les doigts
Schubert + Schoenberg / Can Çakmur
Three years after recording Franz Schubert’s Schwanengesang (arranged by Liszt), pianist Can Çakmur launches a new series called Schubert. Describing the Viennese composer as “a constant companion” in his life, Çakmur’s aim here is to juxtapose his complete major piano solo compositions with works by other composers that were inspired by his music, thus providing the opportunity to see these works in a new light. While making up a near complete anthology of Schubert’s completed major piano music, each disc is also intended as a self-sufficient recital. In this first instalment, two sonatas by Schubert, respectively D 537 and D 959, are juxtaposed with Arnold Schoenberg’s Three Pieces op. 11. The reason for this combination is that, firstly, the same theme is shared but treated differently in Schubert’s sonatas, and secondly, Schubert and Schoenberg seemingly sharing the same conception where the natural flow and direction of the music appear consciously deconstructed. With different means and a hundred years apart, both Schubert and Schoenberg, the former with his aversion to formal boundaries, the latter with his efforts against the natural tendencies of Western harmony, managed to strengthen the subjective expression of their music.
Saint-Saens: Violin Sonata No. 2; Suite In D Minor; The Swan / Clamagirand, Cohen
-- James Manheim, All Music Guide
Furtwängler & Beethoven: Sonatas for Violin & Piano / Moser, Huhn
Sophie Moser and Katja Huhn have chosen an absorbing programme of two contrasting violin sonatas. Firstly there’s a rarely-heard score byf Wilhelm Furtwängler: his difficult and serious Second Sonata. The coupling is Beethoven’s optimistic Sonata No. 8 in G major, much better known but often overshadowed by the composer’s more famous Spring and Kreutzer sonatas.
The first thing that I noticed was the attractive presentation. Full of interesting information the booklet includes fascinating reproductions of a 1940 recital programme of Furtwängler’s D major Sonata with descriptions in German.
It may come as a surprise to some readers that in addition to the demands of a heavy conducting schedule Furtwängler found time to compose. Furtwängler was fifty-two when he completed his Violin Sonata No.2 in 1939. Cast in three movements it is a long work lasting over forty minutes. At times it reminded me of the chamber music of Reger and Hindemith. I found the sound quality excellent being especially clear and well balanced.
Marked Allegro moderato the opening movement has a sunny disposition with a tinge of mystery. Soon developing into a fierce storm the forceful music surges over the listener like a torrent. Much of Moser’s violin part is for its highest register. Thankfully Huhn’s piano is never allowed to dominate. An uneasy calm pervades the Lento. Although the piano textures are heavy the lyricism is predominantly passionate. There are passages of greater weight and angst but this soon diminishes. A curious short passage for pizzicato at 8:53-9:08 is impassive and characterless. Moser and Huhn drive the pace of the Finale: Presto like a gale-force wind. Here Furtwängler’s writing encompasses dramatic emotional contrasts with extremely wide dynamics. Short passages of relative calm provide only a brief respite from the near frenetic writing. Rather abruptly the score ends with a sudden outburst of energy.
Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 8, sometimes known as the ‘ little G major’, is the last in a set of three sonatas. Published as op. 30 in Vienna in 1803 the set bears a dedication to the monarch Tsar Alexander I of Russia. With regard to the sound quality I found Huhn’s piano placed too far forward in the balance which creates an unappealing bright metallic resonance when played with force.
The playing here is assured with plenty of zest in the uplifting and joyous opening Allegro assai. Contrasting starkly with the outer movements the central movement is more relaxed and features light Viennese rhythms. A temperament of childlike simplicity makes few demands on the listener. Briskly taken by Moser and Huhn the lyrical Finale: Allegro vivace just bounces along with playing that feels fresh and buoyant.
The Beethoven and Furtwängler violin sonatas are an uncommon paring on disc. Furtwängler’s D major score is well worth hearing and makes this a fascinating release.
-- Michael Cookson, MusicWeb International
SCHUBERT
Mascitti: Sonate a Tre - Opera Prima
Fourth release by Matteo Cicchitti and his Ensemble Elegentia on Challenge Classics. World premiere recording of Triosonatas op.1 by Michele Mascitti. The work was published in Paris in 1704. In his time Mascitti was particularly esteemed and rightly considered a major testimonial of Italian instrumental music in France in the 18th century. In this oeuvre, which is for once a real discovery, Mascitti tries to combine the tradition of the Corellian sonata with the French 'gout' of the dedicatee, the Duke d'Orléans.
Chopin / Ivo Pogorelich
Ivo Pogorelich has a special relationship with the piano music of the Polish Romantic composer Frédéric Chopin. It is Chopin, after all, whom he has to thank for his international breakthrough. When, at the age of 22, Pogorelich took part in the 1980 Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, his exceptional playing caused an immediate sensation. Martha Argerich, who was on the jury, described him as a “genius”. Since that time, Pogorelich has been increasingly committed, on recording and in concert, to an image of Chopin that is far from the commonplace cliché of the brilliant and pleasing composer of salon music. Now Pogorelich once again offers completely new insights into Chopin’s world and the soul within the sound in what is in fact his fifth Chopin album, but the first for more than twenty years. He has selected works from the 1840s, the last decade of the Polish master’s life. These include the Nocturnes op. 48 no. 1 and op. 62 no. 2, the Fantasy op. 49 and Chopin’s third and last Piano Sonata, op. 58.
What Pogorelich admires in these works is Chopin’s ability to make the piano a gateway to the soul: “Chopin delivers an open invitation to penetrate human psychology. It’s a specific invitation to continually seek out and explore every possibility that the piano has to offer. That’s a never-ending process, and it will continue to challenge new generations of artists in the future too.”
The Croatian-born pianist traces a path in this recital that starts with the small form, continues by way of the brilliant Fantasy and finally reaches the large-scale, four-movement sonata form. In Pogorelich’s hands, despite their magical lyricism, the two Nocturnes have a gripping sense of tension and drama. The Fantasy in F minor, op. 49 is marked by a sombre mood of conflict, yet at the same time it reflects the improvisational skill for which Chopin was celebrated. With the Piano Sonata No. 3 in B minor, op. 58, the composer not merely bids farewell to this genre, with all its rich tradition. The work also demonstrates his efforts to create a new kind of sonata. And with Ivo Pogorelich this much-performed and popular piano work is transformed into an exciting new encounter with Frédéric Chopin.
REVIEW:
After a 20-year hiatus from the recording studio as regards Chopin, Croatian pianist Ivo Pogorelich (b. 1958) returns with an hour of deeply-thought, if eternally controversial, interpretations of some standard, late-Chopin repertory.
Pogorelich claims that “art is cruel,” that it often violently confronts our conventions and our complacency. Even if one does not subscribe to Antonin Artaud’s credo of art’s “theater of cruelty,” we must acknowledge that Pogorelich softens the blows with a wonderfully warm sonority and clarity of line.
If one is willing to concede that “depth of expression” compensates for or justifies hyperbolic slowness, then Pogorelich’s Fantasy in F Minor (1841) will appear a miracle of sustained intimacy, given its full three-minutes’ length beyond that of Claudio Arrau. The grim, martial opening will soon cede to national, Polish impulses in aristocratic contours, in mazurka and polonaise rhythms. Pogorelich becomes mesmerized by his own poetic filigree, so the musical thread loses a sense of dramatic continuity. Again, the luxury of the arpeggios and runs, high and low, mixed together with declamatory bass chords, proves haunting. In the middle section, Lento sostenuto, Pogorelich finds a drawn-out, poetic balance of improvisatory and ballade-like narrative. The last pages become a postlude or epilogue, very slow and deliberate, strumming their way into a vaporous coda.
Pogorelich’s way with Chopin last, published Nocturne in E (1846) feels better suited to his grand leisure: marked Lento, dolce sostenuto, the melodic line can bear the stretched, serpentine extension it receives, more like Berlioz than Chopin. The secondary theme in ascending, bass runs achieves C-sharp Minor and a series of syncopations that articulate Chopin’s advanced sense of polyphony. Pogorelich makes these rhythmic impulses more lyrical than their accustomed wont. We feel significantly alerted to Chopin’s trills and moving bass line, as the piece eventually assumes a modified rondo format. The music ends, or rather collapses, into the tonic and evaporates.
The last of Chopin’s three piano sonatas, this in B Minor (1844), receives the most improvisatory treatment in the program. The opening, Allegro maestoso, acquires a searching gravitas, alternately martial and nostalgic. Pogorelich milks the secondary theme in D, breaking its dreamy phrases to contrast with the quicksilver runs that provide a coda to the disparate fragments. That the movement ends in the tonic major seems artificial here, another spliced-on, poetic shard.
So far as improvisation occurs, the Scherzo: Molto vivace in E-flat Major from Pogorelich really proves the berries. He invests a liquid urgency into its eighth-note runs, while the chordal, B Major section projects reflective poise. Doubtless, all of Pogorelich’s slow tempos have been awaiting the B Major Largo movement, which now drags out a long, chain-link series of nocturnal thoughts in E Major. If the playing were not so intrinsically lyric, the progress would resemble a sweet dirge with tolling bells. The last movement, Finale: Presto non tanto, assuming the listener’s patience has endured, moves with a hard-won (after a lingering, high dominant 7th chord) gallop, a bit marcato for my taste, but at least moving with decisiveness, especially in the brilliant runs. The secondary theme in the relative B Major, hurls a sense of national pride at us, its left hand’s singing in the manner of a liberated etude. Pogorelich’s sonority gains the heroic high ground at last, thundering to a firm, B Major coda.
-- Audaud.com (Gary Lemco)
Krenek, Vol. 1: George Washington Variations, Sonata No. 4; Schubert/Krenek: Reliquie
The George Washington Variations, Op.120 followed two years later, the result of a commission from a wealthy Los Angeles businessman for his daughter. This genial and clever set of variations takes in the ballroom and subjects its material to deconstruction and reconstruction, as the notes suggest, with much playfulness. Washington’s Grand March is a central focus, and subject to pithy and witty examples of lightly applied atonalism, jazz-hinting rhythms and much more. Playfully ironic in places it in no way outstays its thirteen-minute length. The brief two-minute Prelude packs quite a punch for so short a piece. As Peter Tregear notes in his excellent booklet, the application of twelve-tone is accomplished here with the utmost of lyricism.
The final piece is Krenek’s completion of Schubert’s Sonata in C major, D840, which he wrote in 1921, just less than a century after Schubert had left it a torso. The first two movements had been completed as had the trio of the Menuetto and the first 272 bars of the finale. It was the pianist Eduard Erdmann, a prominent musician then and later, who encouraged Krenek to take Schubert more seriously. In time he came to understand and share Erdmann’s enthusiasm and undertook a study of the composer’s work. His completion of the sonata is a valuable sidelight to his interests at the time and also of his application of compositional process. As Krenek wrote: ‘in both unfinished movements the thematic material was completely established…so Schubert was [not] still composing by proxy, as it were, but I had only to use my knowledge of, and feeling form Schubert’s style and technique in order to supply what he might have done. I think I did a fairly creditable job.’ He noted that the finale might have been longer had Schubert actually gone through with it.
Given the quality of this inaugural volume we can look forward to the second volume with confidence.
– MusicWeb International (Jonathan Woolf)
Leon McCawley: Piano Recital
Genius Beethoven - Piano Works by Ludwig van Beethoven
Hughes: Opere per flauto e pianoforte
D'Albert: Symphony in F / Markl, MDR SO
D’ALBERT Tiefland: Symphonic Prologue. Symphony in F, Op. 4 • Jun Märkl, cond; MDR Leipzig RSO • NAXOS 8.572805 (62:40)
A recording of Eugen d’Albert’s early Symphony in F Major appeared on CPO three years ago and was reviewed by James A. Altena in 33:6. That version was conducted by Herman Bäumer leading the Osnabrücker Symphony Orchestra. D’Albert’s life story is reasonably well known, so it needn’t be recapped at length. In short, he was born in Glasgow, studied in London, and at 17 won a scholarship to study in Austria. There he was so taken with Austro-German music and culture that he repudiated his English training as worthless and from that day forward considered himself a right and proper German. He studied with Liszt, met Brahms, and built a career as one of the foremost piano virtuosos of his day. Between 1904 and 1905, d’Albert toured the U.S., and in 1907 succeeded Joseph Joachim as director of Berlin’s Hochschulefür Musik. D’Albert counted among his circle of associates and friends, Richard Strauss, who dedicated his Burleske to him, Hans Pfitzner, Engelbert Humperdinck, and Ignatz Waghalter (see the interview with Irmina Trynkos in 36:3). D’Albert’s personal life was a bit of a mess. Like Henry VIII, he married and divorced six times, though as far as we know, all of d’Albert’s wives kept their heads. When connubial contentment eluded him, he comforted himself in the arms of a mistress. His love of Germany and all things German must have soured when the First World War broke out, for in 1914, he moved to Zurich and became a Swiss citizen. He died, however, in Riga, Latvia, where he’d traveled to secure a divorce from his sixth wife.
Little by little d’Albert’s interest in composing began to overtake his career as a pianist. His output is not insignificant. It includes 21 operas, of which the seventh, Tiefland , first staged in 1903, was a major success, playing in houses around the world. It still holds the boards today, though mainly in Austria and Germany. Other works include a Cello Concerto, two piano concertos (available on Volume 9 of Hyperion’s “Romantic Piano Concerto” series), a couple of string quartets, an overture to Grillparzer’s Esther , a Piano Sonata, a handful of solo piano pieces, and lots and lots of songs.
Note: d’Albert composed the overture to Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience in 1881, just prior to his departure for Austria. Except for the cello concerto, the two piano concertos, the symphony on this disc, and his opera, Tiefland , plus several recordings of excerpts therefrom, not a lot else by d’Albert has found its way onto disc.
Another note: if you’re searching ArkivMusic for d’Albert, you’ll find him listed under the letter “A,” as Albert, Eugène d’—odd, since the site lists D’Indy as D’Indy, Vincent. Maybe it has something to do with the lowercase “d” vs. the uppercase “D.” Amazon and the Fanfare Archive put d’Albert under “D,” but the Archive purges the apostrophe, giving his name as dAlbert. How many ways can you spell “dog?” How about “dawg?”
I concur in the opinion of others that d’Albert’s compositional strength lies mainly in his mastery of the craft; his thematic ideas lend themselves well to development and he knows his way around the orchestra. I find it a bit more difficult, however, to concur with colleague Altena that Brahms and Schumann are ever-present in d’Albert’s 1886 symphony. If you’ve not heard the piece before, my guess is you would find its soundscape rather generic, as if fashioned from some factory-made, synthetic, wash-and-wear fabric. The garment fits the style of the day, but the pants are somehow baggy and nondescript. Granted, d’Albert was only 22 when he composed his one and only symphony, but attractive as it is in the moment, it’s not the sort of work whose melodies or other features linger.
If the opening strains of the Symphonic Prologue to Tiefland recall the opening of the Scène aux champs movement from Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique , it’s with good reason. D’Albert is painting a similar pastoral scene in which two shepherds are heard calling to each other on their pipes. Following that, the music seems to meander along a path on which it first meets, greets, and passes Wagner, only to encounter Debussy around the next bend walking his poodles, Pelléas et Mélisande . I confess to never having heard d’Albert’s opera, Tiefland , but if the rest of it is anything like the Prologue, I can understand the work’s success; it’s actually quite alluring, more so I would say than the symphony. But then the symphony is one of the composer’s earliest orchestral efforts—only the Piano Concerto No. 1 of 1884 predates it—whereas Tiefland came after d’Albert’s self-styled conversion to German-hood, and is a mature work by a composer already seasoned in writing for the stage by six previous operas.
I’m unfortunately not familiar with the CPO recording Altena reviewed, but this current release by Jun Märkl and the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra strikes me as eminently satisfactory. Playing and recording are both topnotch, and if you’re not acquainted with d’Albert’s music, this disc, at Naxos’s budget price, is an excellent way to gain some familiarity with it—enough, at least, to know whether you might care to explore further. On those grounds, recommended.
FANFARE: Jerry Dubins
