courtesy of Naxos of America
Towards the end of this past January, BIS Records released its fifth album of solo performances by British pianist Clare Hammond. The title of the album is Variations, which seems to follow up on her previous genre-based album Etude. Each of these releases explores how a familiar form was realized from novel points of view since the beginning of the twentieth century.
Variations surveys seven different works, each by a different composer. Five of them were completed in the twentieth century by Karol Szymanowski (1904), Aaron Copland (1930), Paul Hindemith (1936), Helmut Lachenmann (1956), and Sofia Gubaidulina (1931). The remaining two were composed in the last decade by Harrison Birtwistle (2014) and John Adams (2017). In many ways the chronological journey begins with flamboyant virtuosity, epitomized, perhaps, by the excessive elaborations found in much of the piano music of Ferruccio Busoni (consider the “Fantasia contrappuntistica” discussed on this site this past November); and it concludes with the shortest of the seven selections, engaging the listener with understated wit, rather than overstated technical dexterity.
Indeed, from my own perspective as a listener who still tries to spend some time at a piano keyboard every day, there was something irresistibly engaging about Adams’ “I Still Play,” beginning with the title itself. Adams is a little less than a year younger than I am; so it would not surprise me to learn that, like myself, he approaches a piano keyboard with less dexterity than he used to command. (At least that was the connotation that I personally extracted from the title of his composition!) Hammond’s booklet notes explicitly cited that Adams expected that “an accomplished amateur pianist” could take on “I Still Play;” and, after listening to Hammond’s recording, I found myself thinking about getting a copy of the score.
In that respect “I Still Play” was a welcome relief from the abundant excesses of Szymanowski’s Opus 10 set of variations on a Polish theme, in which the theme tends to be more and more obscured as the variations get more and more embellished. In the context of that composition, one can appreciate why a new generation of composers would emerge to rally under the banner reading “Enough of all that!” Copland’s set of variations accounts for that motto with the boldest strokes imaginable, and I am afraid that I was more than a little disappointed that Hammond’s strokes were not bold enough. Mind you, my own listening experience with this set was significantly influenced by listening to Simone Dinnerstein playing it with much more visceral rhetoric in a recital given in Herbst Theatre back in April of 2010.
Personal encounters also figured in listening to Gubaidulina’s chaconne. By a happy accident, I was asked to turn pages for Sarah Cahill when she played this piece in December of 2016 for a program she had entitled Chaconnes, Revisited. The opportunity to read while listening led me to conjecture that Gubaidulina had been influenced by Busoni’s over-the-top solo piano arrangement of the chaconne movement that concludes Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1004 solo violin partita. Indeed, I described the influence as leading to “the product of a rambunctious student who had had enough of what Busoni had done to Bach.” I elaborated on this proposition as follows:
While her music never explicitly points to Busoni, the score abounds with tropes that have strong family resemblance to techniques of elaboration encountered in his rethinking of Bach’s chaconne. In other words Gubaidulina set herself to do unto Busoni what Busoni had done unto Bach, and one gets the impression that she did so with gleeful prankishness. To be fair, much of that prankishness amounts to a relatively arcane in-joke; and I shall be the first to admit that I did not “get the joke” after my first encounter with the piece. However, I am now pretty confident that the joke really is there and would be only too happy to hear more pianists play Gubaidulina’s chaconne more often.
In that context, Hammond’s recording left me with the impression that she did not get the joke. (To be fair, Cahill also questioned my thoughts about any prankishness.) That said, I still tend to favor gestures of playfulness found in both the composer and the performer. Where Hammond’s recording is concerned, that playfulness is given its best account in the approaches to Hindemith and Lachenmann, while I feel that there is too much virtuosic seriousness in the Birtwistle offering. Thus, taken as a whole, the selections are somewhat mixed; but the encounters with both Hindemith and Adams made the overall listening experience worth while.
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