Donald Runnicles Brings Mahler and Berg to SFS

I returned to the United States, after living in Singapore for about five years, to work in the new Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory on the northern edge of Silicon Valley. Unless I am mistaken, I purchased San Francisco Opera subscription tickets for my wife and I even before we left Singapore. We arrived in time for the beginning of the season in September of 1995, and we have been subscribers ever since then.

Readers probably know by now that, when I go to the War Memorial Opera House, I am as involved with what is happening in the orchestra pit as with what is happening on stage. As a result, it did not take me long to become acquainted with Donald Runnicles’ conducting technique; and I became more and more interested in his work the more I encountered it. Runnicles left his position at the San Francisco Opera in 2008, but he has made return visits since then. I have tried to keep up with them, and the most recent is currently taking place in Davies Symphony Hall.

For his visit to the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) this week, Runnicles prepared a program with Alban Berg in the first half and Gustav Mahler in the second. Both of the works represented the composers at the beginning of their respective careers. The earlier of these was Mahler’s first symphony in D major, composed in 1888 and revised in 1906. The first half of the program was devoted to Alban Berg’s Seven Early Songs, composed for piano and voice in 1908 and orchestrated in 1928. The vocalist for the performances was mezzo Irene Roberts.

Berg’s approach to orchestration was as rich as Mahler’s and decidedly more adventurous. The second of the songs was scored only for string quartet, harp, and bass, while instrumentation for the fifth song involved only winds. Since Runnicles is no stranger to vocalists, he knew exactly how to balance Roberts’ voice against the rich palette of sonorities in Berg’s score.

The songs themselves were originally composed for piano accompaniment when Berg was studying under Arnold Schoenberg in 1905. They were not orchestrated until after Berg had developed his own techniques for vocal composition in his Wozzeck opera. With those techniques under his belt, so to speak, he could find just the right instrumental coloration for each of the seven songs. Runnicles knew exactly how to elicit all of those colors from the SFS ensemble, always blending perfectly with the vast scope of dispositions in Roberts’ delivery of the texts.

Photograph of Gustav Mahler by Leonard Berlin (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

I found it interesting that the revised version of Mahler’s symphony should predate Berg’s undertaking by so few years. What makes this pairing interesting is that both compositions have prodigious rhetorical breadth. In Mahler’s case, however, it feels as if the rhetoric swings from one extreme to another. Furthermore, regardless of what any individual disposition may be, there is always a recognizable undercurrent of irony. Runnicles knew how to keep that undercurrent flowing, whether it involved a funeral march in a warped version of “Frére Jacques” or the thunder and lightning in the final (“Stürmisch”) movement.

Taken as a whole, this was a program that kept the conductor busy from beginning to end. It also called for expressiveness with operatic roots. (Remember, Mahler was Director of the Vienna Court Opera when he was working on his first symphony.) Who better to allow those roots to flourish in the concert hall than a conductor (like Mahler) with experience in performing opera? It may be early in the season, but I suspect that Runnicles’ visit will remain a memorable one.

SFS: September 2025 After the Festivities

Having accounted for the launch of the new San Francisco Symphony (SFS) season a little less than two months ago, it is now time to report on the two Orchestral Series programs that will be performed during the remainder of the month of September. As usual, each of the dates will be provided with a hyperlink to facilitate ticket purchases. Tickets may also be purchased at the Davies Symphony Hall Box Office, which is at the entrance on the south side of Grove Street, between Van Ness Avenue and Franklin Street.

Thursday, September 18, Friday, September 19, Saturday, September 20, 7:30 p.m.: James Gaffigan will conduct a program that will feature three composers influenced by Harlem. In fact, the final work on the program will be Duke Ellington’s orchestral suite “Harlem,” which was originally commissioned by Arturo Toscanini (who never conducted it). Pianist Hélène Grimaud will be the soloist in two of George Gershwin’s best-known works for piano and orchestra, his Concerto in F, which he composed after the success of “Rhapsody in Blue.” The program will begin with Carlos Simon’s “The Block,” whose Harlem influence was inspired by the works of African-American Romare Bearden, who was both a painter and a songwriter.

Conductor Donald Runnicles (from the SFS Web page for the concert he will lead)

Friday, September 26, and Saturday, September 27, 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, September 28, 2 p.m.: Donald Runnicles has prepared a program that will pair early works by Alban Berg and Gustav Mahler. Indeed, the title of the first offering is Seven Early Songs. Berg composed these during his studies with Arnold Schoenberg. The Wikipedia page for this composition suggests that Berg had a generous number of other influences beyond Schoenberg himself. These include Robert Schumann, Hugo Wolf, Richard Wagner, and Mahler himself. The vocalist will be mezzo Irene Roberts. The second half of the program will be devoted entirely to Gustav Mahler’s first symphony in D major.

A Memorable Evening with Salonen at SFS

As we approach the final month of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s tenure as Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS), it becomes more and more evident just what we shall be missing with his departure. The program he prepared for this week’s concert spans a century from the early twentieth century to the early 21st. The selections were presented in reverse chronological order, beginning with the first SFS performance of Magnus Lindberg’s “Chorale” (2002), followed by Alban Berg’s 1935 (only) violin concerto. The intermission was then followed by Igor Stravinsky’s first major undertaking for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the score for Michel Fokine’s “The Firebird,” a ballet in one act with two scenes.

Those familiar with Berg’s concerto quickly recognized how Lindberg’s selection served as an overture. This was his personal setting of the Lutheran chorale “Es its genug” (it is enough), the same chorale that Berg had previously deployed in his violin concerto as a reflection on the death of Manon Gropius. Lindberg did not deploy the fierce percussion expletives in Berg’s concerto. Instead, he relied on a rich choir of winds and brass to capture the poignancy of the full text. The solemnity of his rhetoric became the perfect “overture” for the Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) of the narrative behind Berg’s concerto.

The concerto soloist was Isabelle Faust. She is no stranger to San Francisco and has consistently taken fearless approaches to engaging undertakings in both concerto and recital settings. If Berg cast his concerto in the abstractions of atonality, Faust knew how to mine expressiveness out of every one of his phrases and cadences. One might think of the music as a contemplation on confronting death, which is not the sort of context one expects for a concerto. Nevertheless, Faust clearly commanded the rhetorical foundation and the wealth of “technical details” that Berg summoned for his memorial rhetoric. Having become quite familiar with this music through both recordings and performances, I came away from Faust’s partnership with Salonen with more appreciation of Berg’s music than I had previously imagined.

Set design for “The Firebird” by Aleksandr Golovin (public domain, from Wikimedia Commons)

There is, of course, a wide gulf between the orchestral rhetoric of Berg’s music and that of Stravinsky’s. Nevertheless, both of them were highly skilled in deploying large ensembles. The instrumentation for “The Firebird” is just as rich in diversity as Berg’s. Indeed, it is so rich, it is hard to imagine how it could be crammed into an orchestra pit for a ballet performance!

Fortunately, it was presented last night without a ballet setting. As a result, one could relish the sonorities of every instrument within eyesight, not to mention the menacing trumpets of the monstrous Koschei deployed on audience side. The program sheet provided the full episode-by-episode account of the narrative, and Salonen knew exactly how to manage the pace through those episodes. The triumphant chord progressions of the final “General Thanksgiving” episode provided just the right mood the conclude the evening that had previously confronted the darkness of death.

Taken as a whole, this was an evening of Salonen at his finest.

SFS 2025–26: Returning Conductors

Herbert Blomstedt taking a bow from the podium of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra (photograph by Amrei-Marie, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

It has taken more than a little time, but this morning I can continue examining the works that will be performed by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) for the Orchestral Series of the 2025–26 season. As readers can probably guess, there is some overlap with the programs listed in the first article, which accounted for performances of “Works by Living Composers.” Today I wish to examine the list of “Returning Conductors” in the Orchestral Series. Four of those conductors were involved with those “Works by Living Composers” programs. It is worth singling them out as follows:

1. September 18–20: James Gaffigan
2. October 3–5: Gustavo Gimeno
3. May 22–24: Cristian Măcelaru
4. June 25–27: Stéphane Denève

Gaffigan will then return at the end of the season to conduct performances of June 18, 20, and 21. The remaining returning conductors will be listed in alphabetical order as follows:

• Harry Bicket: February 5–7
• Herbert Blomstedt: May 15–17
• Karina Canellakis: November 6–8
• Edward Gardner: January 15–17
• Jane Glover: December 5–6
• Manfred Honeck: February 26 and 27 and March 1
• Philippe Jordan: March 26–28
• Bernard Labadie: April 9–11
• Andrés Orozco-Estrada: March 20–22
• Donald Runnicles: September 26–28
• Dima Slobodeniouk: May 8–9
• Jaap van Zweden: January 29–31 and February 19–21
• Simone Young: April 17–19

Many (most?) readers probably know that Blomstedt is the SFS Conductor Laureate, having previously served as Music Director from 1985 to 1995 (meaning that he left shortly before my wife and I made our move from Singapore to Palo Alto). My account of his last visit to SFS appeared on this site this past January 30; and, as usual, I could not have been more satisfied with the performance. He will not be returning until May of next year, when his entire program will be devoted to Gustav Mahler’s ninth symphony. I am already looking forward to the occasion!

I am also glad to see Runnicles’ return, having enjoyed him during his tenure with the San Francisco Opera. He has been keeping busy following his departure and is now Chief Conductor Designate of the Dresden Philharmonic, Music Director of Deutsche Oper Berlin, and Principal Guest Conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. He will also be performing Mahler during his SFS visit, accounting for “the other end of the time-line” with the first symphony. In this case, however, early Mahler will be coupled with one of the early efforts of Alban Berg. His Seven Early Songs set was composed when he was still studying under Arnold Schoenberg.

It should go without saying that all of these performances will take place in Davies Symphony Hall, which is located at 201 Van Ness Avenue and fills an entire city block. The other boundaries are Grove Street (north), Hayes Street (south), and Franklin Street (west). The main entrance (which is also the entrance to the Box Office) is on Grove Street, roughly halfway down the block. Tickets will go on sale on July 19, after which they should be available for purchase online, by calling 415-503-5351, or by visiting the Box Office in the Davies lobby.

CMSF: Leonkoro String Quartet Debuts in Herbst

Leonkoro Quartet members Jonathan Schwarz, Amelie Wallner, Mayu Konoe, and Lukas Schwarz (from their Web site)

Yesterday afternoon in Herbst Theatre, Chamber Music San Francisco presented the Bay Area debut of the Leonkoro Quartet. The group was founded in Berlin in 2019. The “outer voices” are performed by two brothers, Jonathan Schwarz on first violin and cellist Lukas. The second violinist is Amelie Wallner with Mayu Konoe on viola. They are on a tour of North America, which took them to the West Coast yesterday. Only the cellist was seated for the recital, while the other musicians performed standing.

The quartet prepared a “three centuries” program with the twentieth century at the “core.” This was Alban Berg’s six-movement “Lyric Suite,” which explored the twelve-tone technique developed by his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg. The music was dedicated to Alexander von Zemlinsky, probably with the latter’s “Lyric Symphony” in mind. This “core” was “framed” by the eighteenth century (Joseph Haydn) at the beginning and the nineteenth (Felix Mendelssohn) at the end.

George Perle claimed that the “Lyric Suite” had a “secret dedication” for a passionate (and probably erotic) “secret programme.” Whether or not this is the case, Berg was a stickler for elaborate structural details. The suite is in six movements. The odd-numbered movements keep getting faster, and the even-numbered ones keep getting slower. As a result, the fresh “gioviale” spirit of the opening ultimately descends into a despondent “desolato.” However, the alternation of these dispositions makes the overall listening experience a pretty wild ride. Yesterday afternoon’s performance could not have delivered a more solid account of that wild ride, making it the high point of the entire program.

Nevertheless, the Leonkoro approaches to both Haydn and Mendelssohn were solid and consistently satisfying. The former was the fifth in his Opus 50 collection (Hoboken III/48), composed in the key of F major and given the title “The Dream,” which refers to the serenity of the second movement. The program then concluded with the second of the three Opus 44 Mendelssohn quartets. The E minor rhetoric of this quartet complemented the major key at the beginning of the program. The composer seemed to be particularly attentive to the viola in this particular quartet, and Konoe could not have done better justice to that attention.

The encore selection was Giacomo Puccini’s “Crisantemi” (chrysanthemums). This is a relatively early work, which is basically a lament in the key of C-sharp minor. He composed it relatively early in his career. Nevertheless, I find that its capacity for melancholy rhetoric delivers a profound impact that rises above the many overwrought qualities found in the composer’s tragic operas. The Leonkoro players knew exactly how to capture that rhetoric, making for a thoroughly engaging conclusion to their first visit to San Francisco.

SFIPF: A Disappointing Program of Transcriptions

Late yesterday afternoon at Old First Presbyterian Church, the San Francisco International Piano Festival (SFIPF) continued with its second program, a solo recital by Asiya Korepanova entitled Transformations. That title was selected by Korepanova because all seven of the works she played were transcriptions of her own design. This would have been an impressive undertaking had it been successful. Sadly, Korepanova’s overly aggressive keyboard technique tended to undermine any suggestion of expressiveness in either the music itself or its realization through transcription.

Asiya Korepanova playing Chopin at SFIPF (screen shot from the video of the performance)

The program itself was framed by music for cello and piano. Korepanova began by coupling Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 3, a “Polonaise brillante,” with an extended introduction, with Gabriel Fauré’s Opus 24 “Élégie.” At “the other end” the program concluded with Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 19 sonata for cello and piano. All three of these offerings were overwhelmed with aggressive technique, which, in the case of Opus 19, obliterated any sense of coherent phrasing.

The “meat for the sandwich” consisted of four songs, each by a different composer of a different nationality. She began with Amy Beach’s setting of Victor Hugo”s “Extase,” the second of her three Opus 21 songs. This was followed by “Liebesode,” the sixth in Alban Berg’s Seven Early Songs collection. She then moved on to César Franck’s “Le mariage des roses,” and concluded with the complete four-song cycle of Modest Mussorgsky’s “Songs and Dances of Death.” These are all selections that deserve more attention in the current vocal repertoire; but, sadly, Korepanova did little, if anything, to make a convincing case for them.

Nevertheless, her audience demanded an encore. They got “Maria,” probably the best known tune from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. She managed to inject just about every well-known Lisztian trope into her arrangement. Perhaps she was thinking of the West Side of Budapest!

A Vocal Album of Many Colorful Contexts

Samuel Hasselhorn on the cover of his new album

Tomorrow harmonia mundi will release a new album of performances by baritone Samuel Hasselhorn accompanied by the Poznań Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Łukasz Borowicz. The full title of the album is Urlicht: Songs of Death and Resurrection; and, for those that really cannot wait, the Amazon.com Web page is currently processing pre-orders! For many readers, both the title and the subtitle are likely to invoke associations with Gustav Mahler; so it is no surprise that four of the ten selections on the album are Mahler compositions. Two of them are settings of poems from Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte deutsche Lieder (the boy’s magic horn: old German songs); and the other two draw upon poems by Friedrich Rückert, which Mahler had collected in a set of five given the title Rückert-Lieder. Woven among these selections are vocal settings by (in order of appearance) Engelbert Humperdinck, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Hans Pfitzner, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Walter Braunfels, and Alban Berg.

In the interest of “full disclaimer,” I should make it clear (to those that do not already know) that I am an unabashed sucker for the development of “new music” that took place during that transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in German-speaking countries. I find it a bit interesting that Friedrich Rückert received more attention than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. However, one of the surprises on this album comes from Pfitzner’s setting of “Herr Oluf” (Sir Oluf), a poem by Goethe’s contemporary, Johann Gottfried Herder, which may well have inspired Goethe’s “Erlkönig,” now best known for its vocal setting by Franz Schubert (D. 328).

Those familiar with the Mahler songs will most likely be satisfied with Hasselhorn’s approaches to them. Personally, however, I have to confess to a soft spot for the Korngold selection. This is the aria from Die tote Stadt (the dead city), which begins with the text “Mein Sehnen, mein Wähnen” (my yearning, my illusion), usually known as “Pierrot’s Tanzlied” (Pierrot’s dance-song). Those that have followed this site for some time probably know that I am a sucker to this opera and have been fortunate enough to see it twice (once on television and once on the stage). Indeed, I recalled those experiences a little less than a year ago, when violinist Bruno Monteiro included a chamber music version of it on one of his albums.

The order of the composers other than Mahler on this album is not a chronological one. However, there is still some sense of a “journey” from the “traditional” rhetoric of Humperdinck to the “adventurous” stance that permeates the entire score of Wozzeck. There is thus some sense of “progression” when one attentively follows how one track leads to another across the entire album. It is through that sense that the entire album transcends any sense of a business-as-usual experience.

Taken as a whole, the album left me thinking about what Hasselhorn’s next endeavor will be!

E4TT: A Disappointing Evening at SFCM

Last night in the Barbro Osher Recital Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), Ensemble for These Times (E4TT) presented its latest program, entitled Expression:Ism. The program was described as “a multimedia dialogue between music by the Second Viennese School triumvirate of Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, and Anton Webern and contemporary pieces by composers inspired by their groundbreaking work.” The evening was visual as well as auditory, working with the SFCM Technology and Applied Composition (TAC) Department to present images by Schoenberg himself and various Expressionist painters, along with videos by Stephanie Neumann, making for real-time processing of a rich “media mix.”

Lylia Guion, Dale Tsang, and Amy Brodo playing David Garner’s second piano trio, with projected “video enhancement” (screen shot from the video stream of last night’s performance)

At the end of the day, however, what mattered most was the music; and the music was at its best at the end of the program. Following the interleaving of Second Viennese School and contemporary programming, the evening concluded with the world premiere of the second piano trio composed by David Garner, a co-founder of E4TT. This was performed by three artists appearing as guests for E4TT, violinist Lylia Guion, Amy Brodo on cello, and pianist Dale Tsang (E4TT emerita). There was just the right blend of commitment and technical capabilities to bring this music to life with a spirit that was sorely lacking in all the preceding selections on the program.

Sadly, the Second Viennese School did not fare as well. Tsang seemed to be too preoccupied with getting all the notes in the Schoenberg solo piano pieces (from his Opus 11) in their proper place to endow the music with any expressiveness. Taylor Chan fared somewhat better with the rondo that Anton Webern composed for solo piano, given the title “Sonatensatz” and not published during his (short) lifetime. On the other hand, TJ Martin’s instrumental arrangement of Alban Berg’s Sieben Frühe Lieder, scored for cor anglais (Laura Reynolds), vibraphone (Elizabeth Clark Hall), and cello (Amy Brodo) muddled the interplay between voice and accompaniment, rather than enhancing it.

On the contemporary side, the “Mystic Trio” by SFCM graduate Valerie Liu, with Chan at the keyboard performing with Reynolds and Brodo, had little to offer other than tolerable brevity. Reynolds and Brodo performed in another trio with Guion, “unmute,” by Britney Dawn Do, which was similarly unimpressive. The program began with Chan playing “Olive Orchard,” one of the movements from Adam Schoenberg’s Picture Etudes, which seems to have been included for the composer’s name, even though (to the best of my knowledge) he is not related to the Second Viennese School composer!

I experienced this performance through the SFCM livestream. I have never found the Osher Recital Hall to be a particularly conducive setting for listening. However, readers know that many of the livestreams of Chamber Music Tuesday programs have been as satisfying for the video work as for the music. Sadly, last night’s video fell distressingly short of that previous high standard. This may have been due to the visual side of how the space was used, for which the video crew might have been unprepared. As a result, almost the entire evening was unsatisfying until the more straightforward presentation of Garner’s trio at the conclusion.

Rodziński and the Cleveland Orchestra

In April of 2021, I wrote about the Sony Classical release of sixteen CDs covering the complete recordings of Artur Rodziński leading the New York Philharmonic for Columbia Masterworks. Rodziński was appointed Music Director of the Philharmonic in 1943 and held that position for four years. Prior to that appointment he served as Music Director of the Cleveland Orchestra, beginning in 1933; and, during that tenure, he visited the Philharmonic podium on several occasions (one of which happened to be the date of the attack on Pearl Harbor).

Tomorrow Sony Classical will release the collection of recordings that Rodziński made in Cleveland (with one slight, but significant, exception). This is a box set of thirteen CDs; and, for those that cannot wait, Amazon.com has created the Web page for processing pre-orders. The parenthesis applies to the final CD in the collection, whose first three tracks do not involve Rodziński. They account for a recording of Arnold Schoenberg’s Opus 36 violin concerto with Louis Krasner as soloist. However, the performance is conducted by Dmitri Mitropoulos leading the New York Philharmonic.

When this recording was released as an LP, the “flip side” was of Krasner performing the Alban Berg violin concerto; and for that recording Rodziński conducted the Cleveland. Both of those recordings are on that final CD along with Rodziński conducting Nathan Milstein in a performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 64 violin concerto in E minor. I am not going to quibble with the content of this CD, since I enjoyed many hours of listening to the Schoenberg-Berg LP during my student days!

Sadly, Amazon did not take the trouble to provide the track listing for all thirteen of the CDs. Fortunately, the Presto Classical Limited Web page does account for all of the tracks; but it does not provide the “boundaries” that define which tracks are grouped on each of the thirteen CDs! For the most part the repertoire is familiar. Of greatest interest, however, is that the collection includes two symphonies by Dmitri Shostakovich, his Opus 10 (first) symphony in F minor, composed during his student days, and the Opus 47 (fifth) symphony in D minor, which was the one that received the most attention during my student days!

I was also pleasantly struck by the inclusion of Jean Sibelius’ Opus 82 (fifth) symphony in E-flat major. The coda of this symphony’s final movement is one of the great mind-benders in music history, significant enough that the Wikipedia page accounted for the piano reduction of those critical nine measures. In that context it is worth recalling that the Philharmonic collection includes the Opus 63 (fourth) symphony in A minor, which is another mind-bender.

Rather unique is the appearance of Jerome Kern. His “Show Boat: A Scenario for Orchestra” amounts to a “tone poem” based on the themes of the more familiar songs from the original musical. It is also worth noting that Show Boat was performed by the San Francisco Opera in June of 2014 with staging by Francesca Zambello and John DeMain as conductor. Thus, while, for the most part, Columbia wanted to take a “back to basics” approach in recording Rodziński’s work with the Cleveland Orchestra, the conductor still managed to provide listeners with several less-familiar compositions in his repertoire.

Another Single-Word-Title Album from Igor Levit

Igor Levit on the cover of his latest album (courtesy of Jensen Artists)

Those that have been familiar with this site for some time probably know that it has given a generous amount of attention to pianist Igor Levit. For the most part the articles have provided commentary for his recordings, most (if not all) of which have single-word titles. However, here in San Francisco this was a banner year for Levit, since he gave four performances in Davies Symphony in his capacity as Artist-in-Residence for the San Francisco Symphony (SFS).

From a personal point of view, I have to say that I took considerable satisfaction in having an opportunity to listen to a concert performance of Ferruccio Busoni’s Opus 39 piano concerto, which Levit performed with SFS. Those familiar with the work of pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk probably know of his reputation for presenting “monster” concerts, which featured outrageously flamboyant technical challenges. Busoni’s concerto is a “monster” in its own right; but it “goes to the next level,” framing all of that flamboyance in an overall architecture, which I had described as “symmetry within symmetry” when I wrote about the structure of the score.

One week from today Sony Classical will release its eighth album of solo piano performances by Levit. The title of the album is Fantasia; and, as in the past, Amazon.com has created a Web page to process pre-orders. Over the course of two CDs, Levit serves up fiery performances of three major virtuoso undertakings. The first of these was a keyboard composition by Johann Sebastian Bach, his BWV 903 “Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue.” This is given a “back-to-back” performance, coupled with Franz Liszt’s B minor piano sonata. However, the demands that must be met to provide convincing accounts of these two pieces are dwarfed by those of the “main event” on the second CD, Busoni’s “Fantasia contrappuntistica.” This was composed about six years after the piano concerto. While many will probably find it more accessible than the concerto, there is no questioning the magnitude of technical challenges posed by both compositions.

Too be fair, one must also take note of one more demanding composition on this new album. This is Alban Berg’s Opus 1, a single-movement piano sonata composed during his studies with Arnold Schoenberg. However, where technical challenges are concerned, the bar is relatively low. (I say this because I was able to get my own fingers around this piece, back in the days when they were more agile!) More significant are the ways in which Berg found his own path for working with the absence of a tonal center. Furthermore, it would be fair to characterize this as a “cerebral” composition, which can also be said of BWV 903 (Bach being the ultimate pedagogue of his day) but not of the flamboyant rhetorical turns found in both Liszt and Busoni.

It is also worth noting that my past recital encounters with “Fantasia contrappuntistica” have been performances by two pianists. As a result, Levit’s new solo recording deserves a special place in my catalog of recordings. Mind you, having experienced his solo work in the Opus 39 piano concerto, I cannot say that I was particularly surprised to find that the “Fantasia contrappuntistica” would also get solo treatment.

A New Profil Anthology of Violinist Ivry Gitlis

courtesy of Naxos of America

According to my records, the last time I wrote about a Profil anthology was in October of 2022, when I discussed the six-CD collection entitled The Young Friedrich Gulda. Those that have been following up on my work for some time probably know that I never pass up an opportunity to write about that pianist and his strikingly diverse repertoire. This Friday Profil will release its latest collection; and, once again, repertoire was the reason for drawing my attention. Ivry Gitlis: The Legend is a four-CD collection of recordings by a violinist with a command of the standard repertoire that preferred to focus his attention on works composed in the twentieth century. As usual, Amazon.com has created a Web page for pre-orders for those wishing to be “first in line” to appreciate this violinist’s legacy.

This is one of those anthologies that has autobiographical significance. As a freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, most of my extracurricular time was spend in the studios of the campus radio station (whose call letters then were WTBS), where I initiated a weekly program of music of the twentieth century. While the station had a moderately good library, I found that I could also draw upon the recordings in the Library building, which included an entire area for a Music Library (which happened to be almost adjacent to the building housing WTBS). It was through that Music Library that I first encountered Alban Berg’s violin concerto. There was only one recording, and the violinist on that recording was Ivry Gitlis.

A few years later I found myself dividing most of my spare time between WTBS and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, run by Marvin Minsky. Minsky had invited mathematician Seymour Papert to join his staff; and Papert, in turn, invited Gilbert Voyat, who had earned his doctorate at the University of Geneva and was working there as a research associate and instructor at the International Center for Genetic Epistemology. Because Voyat and I frequently talked about music, the Berg violin concerto showed up in our conversations sooner rather than later. When I mentioned that I knew of only one recording, I learned that Gitlis was one of Voyat’s friends!

In spite of my new “knowledge source,” I learned almost nothing about the scope of Gitlis’ repertoire. As a result, over half a century elapsed before I knew anything more about Gitlis or could listen to recordings to account for the rest of that repertoire. The scope of that repertoire in the Profil anthology is best approached by first identifying the selections that predate the twentieth century.

The most familiar of the “usual suspects” are included: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 35 violin concerto in D major and Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 64 in E minor. There are also two short “encore” pieces by Henryk Wieniawski and the version of Ernest Chausson’s Opus 25 “Poème” for violin and piano. Finally, there is Giuseppe Tartini’s G minor violin sonata best known as the “Devil’s Trill Sonata.” However, the version that Gitlis recorded was an arrangement by Fritz Kreisler (which probably “liberated” the accompanist from dealing with figured bass) that included a cadenza of Kreisler’s own invention.

Where the twentieth century is concerned, there was a generous assortment of conductors that worked with Gitlis. The conductor for the Berg concerto was William Strickland, an American whose primary focus was on American composers. The European conductors, on the other hand, included Hans Rosbaud, Heinrich Hollreiser, Hans Swarowsky, and (of particular interest to me) Jascha Horenstein. (Some readers may recall that I discussed Horenstein’s Profil collection in June of 2020. That article referenced an additional recording of a twenty-minute conversation with Horenstein conducted by Alan Blyth.)

In the context of the entire Gitlis collection, however, the Berg concerto continues to register the lion’s share of my attention. Mind you, where “historical authority” is concerned, there will probably never be a substitute for the recording that Louis Krasner made on May 1, 1936 with Anton Webern conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra. However, while Krasner clearly honored the spirit of Berg, I have been impressed over the years with the number of violinists I have encountered that have found their own approach to giving the concerto an expressive interpretation. Nevertheless, given how few of those recordings were available during the third quarter of the twentieth century, the significance of Gitlis’ recording cannot be denied.

Having listened to the entire Profil collection, I would say that such significance also applies to composers such as Paul Hindemith, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, and Jean Sibelius; this new collection is definitely “one for the books.”

Reflecting on the Young from an “Aged” Viewpoint

I never really thought very much about age until I hit the “three-quarters mark” of 75 in July of 2021. By that time I had invested fourteen years in writing regularly about the nature of music and the relationship between performance and marks on paper. Over the course of what is now closer to fifteen years, I have never given very much thought to the significance of age, whether it applies to composers or performers. Mind you, there are composers whose work often reflects explicitly on aging, Richard Strauss being one of the most familiar of them. However, perhaps because of my intellectual background in abstract mathematics, I find myself drawing upon biography only when discussing a relatively small number of composers and an even smaller number of performers.

Violinist María Dueñas (photograph probably taken in her teens, from an October 3, 2019 article on this site)

This morning I brought that context to bear while reading an article by Joshua Kosman entitled “Young musicians keep showing up on concert stages. It’s not clear they’re ready,” which was uploaded to the San Francisco Chronicle Web site yesterday and will probably not appear on a printed page prior to this coming Sunday’s “pink section” Datebook. That title serves as a thesis statement, which is defended through three “case studies.” The first of these is the 26-year-old Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä, followed by the Spanish violinist María Dueñas, who made her debut with the San Francisco Symphony at the age of sixteen in 2019. The final “case” was Alma Deutscher, who composed a full-length Cinderella opera at the age of ten (subsequently expanding and strengthening her work) and conducted its Bay Area premiere by Opera San José this past October.

As I worked my way through the article, I found myself consulting my own impressions of both Mäkelä and  Dueñas. (I neither experienced nor read about the Cinderella performance.) Where Dueñas was concerned, I did, indeed, mention her age in my first paragraph. However, I was less interested in her age and more focused on her partnership with her conductor, Marek Janowski; and my primary concern was the risk that the performance would invoke (as I put it) “a here-we-go-again reaction” from “listeners that could probably play back Mendelssohn’s score in their sleep.” The good news was that both conductor and soloist appreciated that risk and managed to convey what I called “a perspective of underlying tension” that brought stimulating freshness to the performance. This was clearly a joint effort, whose compelling results probably involved Janowski willing to respect and realize Dueñas’ point of view, thus spanning the separation between their respective ages.

Mäkelä, on the other hand, was about a decade younger than his concerto soloist, the violinist Vilde Frang. My guess is that he was less interested in her youth than in how the two of them could agree on how to perform Alban Berg’s violin concerto, providing a compelling account of both the narrative behind the dedication (“To the memory of an angel”) and the many technical challenges for both soloist and ensemble in the score. The result was that I came away with a more informed appreciation of the rich complexity of the score than I had managed to grasp through any previous concert performances or recordings. In other words I had invested so many cerebral cycles in negotiating the act of listening that I had none to spare for matters of age!

The same could be said of the rest of the program that Mäkelä had prepared. This began with Jimmy López Bellido’s “Perú negro,” which Mäkelä had performed with many other ensembles in the past. This was an SFS premiere offering that made for a highly imaginative listening experience. The program then concluded with Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 93 (tenth) symphony in E minor.

This was a “first contact” experience for me, having previously listened to this work only through recordings. Those familiar with the Shostakovich canon probably know his disposition for repetition as a source of tension. This figured significantly in his “rhetorical toolbox;” and Mäkelä knew how to deliver that rhetoric without succumbing to tedium. As was the case with the Berg concerto, that delivery left me with little attention to devote to the conductor’s age.

The crux of Kosman’s argument seems to hinge on the danger of “mistaking skill for understanding, especially when that skill is so wildly out of proportion to age.” On the basis of how I documented the performances by both Dueñas and Mäkelä, I would not accuse either of them of lacking understanding. Indeed, where the concertos were concerned, what was most important was the ability to establish a shared understanding. I would argue that this capacity for sharing signifies far more than what any calendar tells us about the performers.

Mitropoulos in Twentieth-Century Europe

To my surprise, the twentieth century provides the most generous selections of recordings in Sony Classical’s Dimitri Mitropoulos: The Complete RCA and Columbia Album Collection. Indeed, there are so many offerings in this category that I decided it would be worthwhile to separate the European selections from those composed in the United States. Furthermore, the European sector is, itself, highly extensive. However, because Columbia did not take a “historically informed” approach to sorting out the individual selections according to nationality, the categories themselves often overlap on single CDs.

Nevertheless, it would be fair to say that the most generous attention is given to the Russian composers, with the French composers taking a healthy second place. Then, as was already observed in my discussion of the Sony Classical anthology of soprano Eileen Farrell, the concert recording of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Mitropoulos in April of 1951 is probably the earliest recording of that opera in its entirety. As I observed in my Farrell article, this may not be an “authoritative” account of the music; but it would not surprise me to learn that any problems would have been due more to the musicians than to the conductor!

This sector of the anthology also presents Mitropoulos’ only opportunity to present music of his own nationality. On an album devoted primarily to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the conductor slipped in four dances composed by his fellow countryman Nikos Skalkottas. This was an album I had purchased in my high school days for the Russian content, but the Skalkottas tracks blew my mind with both intensity and raucous energy. (A few years later it also left me with the impression that the music for Zorba the Greek was downright boring!) I therefore have to stress the fact that, in the track listing in the book that accompanies this Sony release, those four Skalkottas tracks are mislabeled. (I was able to straighten things out thanks to the Melisma Skalkottas recording project, which was launched early in 2020.) The ordering on the Sony CD (which was not the ordering on the vinyl I had purchased) is as follows:

• Hostianos
• Kleftikos
• Peloponnisiakos
• Epirotkos

This may sound like nit-picking; but, given that there seems to be an emerging interest in this composer, his legacy deserves to have his recorded tracks properly labeled!

Farrell is not the only soloist to account for Mitropoulos in an earlier release. The recording of Aram Khachaturian’s Opus 38 piano concerto in D-flat major featured Oscar Levant as the soloist. As a result, it can also be found on the Levant anthology, A Rhapsody in Blue; the extraordinary life of Oscar Levant. The fact is that, while the content of the Mitropoulos anthology is more muddled than one would have wished it to be, there are any number of surprises in the repertoire that Mitropoulos accumulated. For my own listening, the most surprising offerings were the engaging account of Ralph Vaughan Williams fourth symphony in F minor, the album that includes Alexander Scriabin’s last two symphonies, the Opus 54 “Le Poème de l’extase” (the poem of ecstasy) and the Opus 60 “Prométhée, Le Poème du feu” (Prometheus, the poem of fire), and the recording of Francis Poulenc’s D minor concerto for two pianos and orchestra.

At this point I feel that, if I go on much longer, I shall lost the attention of most of my readers! What is most important is the diversity of the repertoire that Mitropoulos cultivated, first in Minnesota and then in New York. My guess is that anyone that decides to browse his anthology will find more surprises than (s)he/they anticipated.

Masur’s Twentieth-Century Repertoire

The final account of the recordings made by conductor Kurt Masur collected in a 70-CD box set released by Warner Classics will address his twentieth-century repertoire. There is far less completeness in this portion of the collection than had been encountered in his nineteenth-century recordings. The only commitment to thoroughness can be found in the five piano concertos by Sergei Prokofiev, recordings made with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra featuring piano soloist Michel Béroff.

This provides a somewhat limited perspective on the composer, particularly since the only symphony included in the collection is the Opus 100 (fifth) symphony in B-flat major. This selection was recorded with the New York Philharmonic on an album that also included a not-particularly-satisfying collection of excerpts from the music for the Romeo and Juliet ballet. Somewhat better was the CD with the concert version of the music composed for Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky film and the Opus 20 Scythian suite, originally conceived as a score for “Ala i Lolli,” a ballet commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev who rejected the music.

Mind you, there is a considerable diversity in nationalities among the other twentieth-century selections. Thus, Prokofiev’s symphony is complemented by two symphonies by Dmitri Shostakovich: the Opus 60 “Leningrad” in C major and the Opus 113 “Babi Yar” (setting poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko) in B-flat minor, which is framed by recordings of Yevtushenko reading two of his poems (in Russian). There is also a recording of Gustav Mahler’s ninth symphony in D major, which provides a potentially viable context for the symphonic efforts of both Prokofiev and Shostakovich.

The only other concerto offering is the Opus 47 violin concerto in D minor by Jean Sibelius on an album which is filled out by three shorter compositions. This is a Leipzig CD featuring Thomas Zehetmair as the violin soloist. Nationalism can also be found in the contributions by Leoš Janáček and Zoltán Kodály. Curiously, Béla Bartók is absent from this collection.

Another coupling involves familiar works by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel on a single volume. The one departure from “the usual” is Debussy’s L. 104 “Rapsodie,” scored for alto saxophone and piano and orchestrated by Jean Roger-Ducasse. A more interesting coupling is that of Kurt Weill with Alban Berg. The Weill selection is the score for the ballet “The Seven Deadly Sins” with a libretto by Bertolt Brecht. This is followed by the symphonic movements that Alban Berg extracted from his score for the opera Lulu (which is not quite as systematic in exploring the deadly sins).

The only other vocal offering is the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss. This is a New York Philharmonic recording featuring soprano Deborah Voigt. That performance is preceded by two familiar tone poems, “Don Juan” and “Death and Transfiguration.”

There is also a Philharmonic recording of Benjamin Britten’s Opus 66 War Requiem, featuring vocal soloists Carol Vaness (soprano), Jerry Hadley (tenor), and Thomas Hampson (baritone). Mind you, there will always be those that prefer the recording that Britten himself conducted with tenor Peter Pears and baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. While I am definitely hooked on both of those vocalists, I cannot say the same for the soprano that Britten conducted, Galina Vishnevskaya. Apparently, no one took the trouble to coach her on the proper pronunciation of the Latin Requiem texts; and her account of “Liber scriptus” verges on the downright painful. Vaness is much more at home with singing Latin.

Then there is an album that is not, strictly speaking, a Mazur album. It presents pianist Fazil Say playing the music of George Gershwin, providing his own arrangements where necessary. Masur and the Philharmonic appear only for Ferde Grofé’s arrangement of “Rhapsody in Blue” and the set of variations on “I Got Rhythm.”

That leaves only two offerings that can be classified as “bleeding edge” compositions. The older of them is the set of variations on “America” that Charles Ives composed for organ, which was then orchestrated by William Schumann. The more recent is the cello concerto by Alfred Schnittke, featuring cellist Natalia Gutman performing with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. This left me wishing that Masur had conducted more Schnittke selections and that there had been a recording of his performance of the music by Sofia Gubaidulina that he led with the San Francisco Symphony.

Frang Returns to Perform Berg Concerto with SFS

Violinist Vilde Frang (photograph by Marco Borggreve, courtesy of SFS)

Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang made her debut as soloist with the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) about three years ago. Performing under Polish conductor Krzysztof Urbański, she took on the many challenges of Edward Elgar’s Opus 61 concerto in B minor and triumphed over all of them. Last night she returned to Davies Symphony Hall for the first of this week’s three subscription concerts. Once again she took on a major challenge, this time the violin concerto that Alban Berg completed shortly before his death in 1935. The orchestra was led this week by Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä.

The partnership could not have been better. Mäkelä was completely at home with the many thematic complexities that Berg packed into his score, while Frang glided her way smoothly through the many imposing technical challenges demanded by all those marks on paper. For those do not know the story, Berg composed this concerto on a commission from the violinist Louis Krasner. Berg know that Krasner was a prodigious virtuoso, so Berg invited him to his house to improvise the performance of particularly technically demanding passages. Berg then went into an adjoining room, leaving Krasner to explore to his heart’s content. As Berg listened to Krasner’s skills, he documented them in notation, returning to those documents when he began work on the concerto.

The result turned out to be a reflection on tragic circumstances. Berg dedicated his concerto “To the memory of an angel.” The “angel” was Manon Gropius, the daughter of Alma Mahler (previously married to Gustav) and Walter Gropius. Manon contracted polio in her teens and died at the age of eighteen. Her death was woven into the conclusion of the concerto with a fantasia on the chorale theme “Es ist genug” (it is enough), which Berg may have selected for the chilling stepwise tritone that begins the first phrase. Ironically, Berg died on December 24, 1935, a few months after completing his violin concerto (leaving his Lulu opera unfinished) and about five months before Krasner first performed the concerto.

Krasner became its champion. There is even a 1936 recording of his performing the concerto with Anton Webern conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The performance took place only a few weeks after its premiere in Barcelona at the Palau de la Música Catalana, where it was conducted by Hermann Scherchen as part of an International Society for Contemporary Music Festival.

Frang rose to every challenge that Berg had summoned through his experiences with Krasner. There is a fierce cadenza that depicts Manon trying to fight off death and ultimately succumbing. Frang captured every detail of that cadenza with frightening intensity. For his part, Mäkelä teased out the many details in Berg’s rich instrumental fabric, plaintively contrasting the delights of Manon’s youth with her tragic end.

Intense expressiveness was equally present in the opening selection that preceded the concerto. This was the first SFS performance of “Perú negro,” composed by Jimmy López Bellido, who was inspired by Afro-Peruvian music. This genre grew out of the importation of Africans to serve as slaves after the Spanish had conquered Peru. Bellido scored his historical reflection for a very large ensemble with a diverse abundance of percussion. The score was only about a quarter of an hour in duration; but the listening experience was like a roller coaster ride, twisting and turning around any number of highly imaginative instrumental sonorities. Mäkelä has apparently performed this work many times with many different ensembles, and San Francisco was lucky to be part of his agenda.

The second half of the program was devoted entirely to Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 93 (tenth) symphony in E minor. This was composed in 1953 after the death of Joseph Stalin. By all rights that occasion should have been a relief, particularly among the many Stalin had persecuted (including Shostakovich). However, it was also a time of extreme anxiety, since the governmental bureaucracy was as uncertain as the general public as to what would happen next. That uncertainty spilled over into the Opus 93 symphony, whose overall architecture is disconcertingly uneven (perhaps to reflect the composer’s own uncertainties) and whose prevailing rhetoric culminates in an obsession with repetition that is likely to leave the attentive listener thoroughly exhausted.

From a strictly musical point of view, this is a score that comes very close to the edge of tedium, possibly crossing it every now and then; but Shostakovich’s techniques may well have been developed as an expression of that prevailing uncertainty, leaving the audience in a disturbed state that reflects the composer’s personal circumstances.

Kremer’s DG Chamber Music: 20th Century

Gidon Kremer performing at his 2008 Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival (photograph by Guus Krol, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

Readers may recall that, in the Deutsche Grammophon (DG) 22-CD box set of concerto recordings featuring violinist Gidon Kremer, the portion devoted to the twentieth-century repertoire was the largest. Mind you, not all of the compositions were concertos, but they were all concertante performances. In a sharp and unexpected contrast, the twentieth-century portion of the chamber music anthology was the smallest portion of the DG collection. It amounts to three and one-half discs with Alfred Schnittke sharing one of the discs with Carl Maria von Weber. Schnittke is one of the three composers found in the concerto anthology, the other two being Béla Bartók and Alban Berg.

The only composer to be allocated an entire CD is Sergei Prokofiev (both of whose concertos were absent from the DG concerto collection). The chamber music CD presents three of his compositions, the two sonatas, Opus 80 in F minor and Opus 94a in D major (reworking the Opus 94 flute sonata), and the Opus 35bis set of five “melodies.” Only the Opus 115 solo violin sonata is missing from this collection in representing Prokofiev.

The most interesting CD amounts to a “journey to the Second Viennese School.” It begins a quarter-century before the beginning of the twentieth century with the quartet for piano, violin, viola, and cello composed by a teenaged Gustav Mahler. This is followed by one of Arnold Schoenberg’s earliest compositions, simply called a “piece” in the key of D minor for violin and piano.

The remainder of the CD explores the ambiguities of atonality. Both Schoenberg and Berg share their offerings with Schoenberg’s other best-known pupil, Anton Webern. Webern begins the “set” with his Opus 7 collection of four pieces for violin and piano, composed in 1910. This is followed by a bit of an oddity. One of Alban Berg’s most sophisticated serial compositions is his “Kammerkonzert” (chamber concerto), scored for piano and violin soloists accompanied by an ensemble of thirteen wind instruments. By all rights this piece should have been recorded in its entirety. However, all that is included is an arrangement of the second of its three movements for piano, violin, and clarinet.

Even more disconcerting is the following account of Schoenberg’s Opus 45 1946 string trio. This is chillingly macabre music, which Schoenberg used to document the experience of his heart attack. I have had the good fortune to listen to recital performances of this music that have scared the living daylights out of me. (The older I get, the scarier the experience.) Kremer’s recorded performance with violist Veronika Hagen and cellist Clemens Hagen is, if you will pardon the expression, disconcertingly bloodless. The trio is followed by the Opus 47 “Phantasy” for violin and piano, another composition that I have rapturously enjoyed in a recital performance setting. Sadly, neither Kremer nor pianist Oleg Maisenberg come close to capturing a spirit that, as violinist György Pauk once observed, makes you want to dance.

The remaining CD provided an interesting (if not informative) perspective on the first half of the twentieth century. It begins with two sonatas, both of which were completed in 1921. The first of these is Bartók’s first violin sonata, followed by Leoš Janáček’s only sonata for that coupling of violin and piano. When I consulted Halsey Stevens’ biography of Bartók, I was not particularly surprised at the absence of Janáček from the index; but their respective sonatas definitely make for some interesting side-by-side listening. They are followed by Olivier Messiaen’s set of five variations of a theme, composed for violin and piano in 1932. This is before-Messiaen-became-Messiaen music, which definitely has a spirit of its own; but neither Kremer nor his accompanist, Martha Argerich, gave much evidence of grasping that spirit.

Personally, I am glad that ECM Records provided a platform after Kremer formed his Kremerata Baltica; and their recordings to date all feel like a breath of fresh air when compared with these DG offerings.

Gidon Kremer on Warner: Twentieth Century

As was observed at the beginning of this month, the lion’s share of performances offered in the Warner Classics release Gidon Kremer: The Warner Collection consists of works composed during the twentieth century. While this involves many of the “usual suspects,” such as Igor Stravinsky, Jean Sibelius, Béla Bartók, Paul Hindemith, Alban Berg, and Benjamin Britten, Kremer was far more interested in using the recording studio to bring attention to composers that were less known when he was preparing programs for his albums. This was a bold move, because much of this music challenged listeners with its thorny rhetoric, while other selections came off as decidedly remote from concert hall settings.

Original album cover showing Gidon Kremer, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Yuri Bashmet (from the Amazon.com Web page)

The largest share of those thorny offerings came from the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke. Like many, I was unaware of the composer until the emergence of compact discs and the release of The Alfred Schnittke Edition by BIS Records, based in Sweden. As previously observed, Kremer’s performances of Schnittke’s music can also be found in his albums for the Deutsche Grammophon (DG) 22-CD box set of concerto recordings; but the Warner collection offers a far more extensive and diverse account of that composer’s catalog. There is even an element of “star power” in the CD that has Kremer playing two Schnittke selections with violist Yuri Bashmet and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.

The other composer to receive generous attention is Astor Piazzolla. One might say that Rostropovich was responsible for bringing Piazzolla out of the Argentinian tango dance halls when the latter composed “Le Grand Tango” for the former. Rostropovich gave the work its first performance in 1990, and later in that decade Kremer would work with several arrangers to prepare “concert versions” of Piazzolla’s music.

Ironically, the most familiar of those undertakings, an arrangement by Leonid Desyatnikov best known as The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, is not included in the Warner anthology. Instead, Kremer was involved in a project to record far less familiar music by Piazzolla, the tango operita (tango opera) “María de Buenos Aires,” which was first performed in Buenos Aires on May 8, 1968. Readers may recall that a recording of this one-act opera was discussed on this site in March of 2019. The instrumentation followed that of Piazzolla’s quintet for the tango halls: bandoneon, violin, piano, guitar, and bass. Desyatnikov’s arrangement keeps the bandoneon, violin, piano, and bass but then adds flute, viola, cello, and percussion. Sadly, neither a libretto nor a synopsis is provided; and the titles of the tableaux (cuadros) are given only in Spanish.

The entire opera fills two CDs. There is then a third CD of Piazzolla compositions provided by three different arrangers. Desyatnikov’s contribution is a transcription for violin and string orchestra of “Tango Ballet,” which Piazzolla originally composed for string quartet. This is followed by “Concierto del Angel,” transcribed by Rolf Gupta for violin, bandoneon, bass, piano, and string orchestra. As was the case with Four Seasons, this is a compilation of four individual Piazzolla compositions. The final transcription is by José Bragato, who arranged Four Seasons for piano trio. “Tres piezas para orquesta de camera,” scored for piano and string orchestra, is an arrangement of three short pieces for cello and piano, which were collected and published as Piazzolla’s Opus 4.

Desyatnikov’s original music can be found on an album entitled Le Cinema. The album, as a whole, includes both original compositions and arrangements. Kremer performs with pianist Oleg Maisenberg, along with Andrey Boreyko conducting the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the orchestra originally founded in 1946 by American occupation forces. Piazzolla’s music can also be found on this album, along with two selections by Nino Rota (Federico Fellini’s preferred composer). This album also marks the only appearances of Dmitri Shostakovich, Darius Milhaud, and Toru Takemitsu.

The other “themed” album is entitled From my Home. “Home” refers not only to Latvia, where Kremer was born, but also to the other two Baltic states, Lithuania and Estonia. While Kremer would subsequently champion Arvo Pärt in recordings he released on ECM, this earlier album includes only the 1992 version of “Fratres,” scored for violin, string orchestra (the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie), and percussion. Pēteris Vasks (also Latvian) can be found on this album with his “Musica Dolorosa,” scored for string orchestra; but there is also an entire CD devoted to two Vasks compositions. This is the only CD in the collection in which Kremer is performing with his Kamerata Baltica.

Taken as a whole, this collection of twentieth-century music is a mixed bag. Some may find this frustrating for the unfamiliarity of much of the content.  Others will laud the opportunity to encounter unknown compositions by barely-known (if at all) composers. Such novelty is most accessible when useful background information has been provided, but the text of the accompanying booklet offers more information about Kremer than about his repertory choices. The good news is that there is much on the Internet to satisfy those more interested in the music itself.

Gidon Kremer on DG: Twentieth Century

My third and final account of the Deutsche Grammophon (DG) 22-CD box set of concerto recordings featuring violinist Gidon Kremer will focus on the twentieth-century repertoire. As I observed, the nineteenth-century share of the albums offered the fewest number of selections. In contrast the twentieth-century share is the largest by a long shot. Very few of the offerings can be classified as “usual suspects;” and some of them involve unexpected and eccentric shifts. In addition, there is a far more extensive account of “non-concerto” selections. Furthermore, in addition to “usual suspects” ensembles and conductors, the twentieth-century performances provide the first opportunities to listen to Kremer’s own chamber orchestra, Kremerata Baltica.

The fact is that, for most listeners, only the first CD in this section is likely to be familiar. It couples Béla Bartók’s first violin concerto with Alban Berg’s only violin concerto. The Bartók concerto is conducted by Pierre Boulez leading the Berlin Philharmonic. The Berg is performed by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Colin Davis.

“For the record” Kremer performed the Bartók with the San Francisco Symphony in October of 2015 under the baton of Andrey Boreyko. I had thought that he had played the Berg with Michael Tilson Thomas, but I was unable to confirm that proposition. As a more general fun fact: the Berg was recorded in 1985 and became one of the earliest “Digital Classics” releases on Philips.

Where the overall content of this category is concerned, it is clear that Kremer wanted to get on to more adventurous undertakings. Most important seems to have been his desire to promote the compositions of Alfred Schnittke coupled with a somewhat unconventional perspective on the music of Dmitri Shostakovich. What is interesting about the latter is that there is only one “straight” account of Shostakovich’s music. That is the recording of the Opus 129 (second) violin concerto, performed with Seiji Ozawa conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

This selection is coupled with Opus 125, whose recording is a curious hybrid. In the Shostakovich catalog, Opus 125 is a re-orchestration of Robert Schumann’s Opus 129 cello concerto in A minor. Ironically, Schumann himself had prepared the violin part that Kremer played for his recording. More idiosyncratic is the arrangement of Shostakovich’s Opus 134 violin sonata. This was reworked into a concertante performance with the solo violin accompanied by percussion and string orchestra. The arrangement was a joint effort by Michail Zinman and Andrei Pushkarev, the latter being the percussion soloist on the recording. This may also be the earliest recording of Kremerata Baltica.

Schnittke was a tough nut to crack when I first encountered him, primarily through BIS Records, based in Sweden. That was my own “first contact” with that composer’s 1966 (second), which violin concerto, which Kremer recorded with the Sinfonieorchester Basel conducted by Heinz Holliger. I had become curious about the BIS recordings after listening to performances of his string quartets by the Kronos Quartet. There was an almost violent aggression in Schnittke’s rhetoric, and I would later discover that even his capacity for wit often involved dangerously sharp edges. The good news is that Kremer never tries to smooth over any of those sharp edges.

I was struck that Schnittke’s fifth concerto grosso was released on an album with Philip Glass’ first violin concerto. On the DG album Christoph von Dohnányi conducts the Vienna Philharmonic; and placing Glass before Schnittke amounts to a chronological order of the compositions. I was also glad to see that the Kremerata Baltica discography included Glass’ second concerto, which was entitled “The American Four Seasons.”

Conductor Riccardo Chailly and violinist Gidon Kremer on the original vinyl cover of their performance of Darius Milhaud’s “Le Bœuf sur le toit” (from the Amazon.com Web page for this album)

One of the more unexpected offerings in this collection is a performance of Darius Milhaud’s “Le Bœuf sur le toit” (the ox on the roof), which the composer had envisaged as (in his words) “background to any Charlie Chaplin silent movie.” This was originally scored for small orchestra, but Milhaud subsequently arranged the score for both violin and orchestra and violin and piano. In addition Milhaud’s Les Six colleague Arthur Honegger provided a violin cadenza. Kremer recorded the violin/orchestra version (including the Honegger cadenza) with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Chailly. While I was impressed with how Kremer negotiated the Honegger cadenza, I felt that the departure from the original instrumentation diminished many of the amusingly sleazy qualities of the score.

The fact is that the wide diversity of content in this particular segment of the Kremer anthology is likely to evoke an equally wide diversity of reactions. Different listeners may react in different ways, but I doubt that many would buy into the repertoire in its entirety. On the other hand that broad extent says a lot about how music was being made over the last half-century. All of these recordings make for a valuable time-capsule, even if it is not necessarily a consistently engaging one.

Juilliard’s Second Viennese School Recordings

During my undergraduate years in the early Sixties, I discovered that, while there were any number of brilliant academics skilled at talking about the Second Viennese School composers (Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern), there were almost no opportunities to listen to the music being performed; and recordings tended to be in short supply. Such a situation reminds me of what I have long felt was the ultimate joke behind Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. The narrative is primarily about a monastic order formed not around religious conviction but the playing of a highly complex game. (I liked to think that Hesse had been inspired by the Japanese game of Go.) As the novel evolves, the reader discovers that this order is so devoted to analyzing the strategies of games played in the past that no one has time to play the game any more.

So it was that time spent poring over the scores of the Second Viennese School composers occupied far more attention than listening to the music or preparing a performance of that music. Schoenberg himself recognized that a preoccupation with “systems” had, for all intents and purposes, nothing to do with the music itself. In a caustic letter to René Leibowitz concerning his obsessions with such “systems,” Schoenberg wrote:

I do not compose principles, but music.

Like those monks obsessed with analyzing the games in Hesse’s narratives, Leibowitz had detached himself from anything having to do with composing or performing music.

In that context I approached the four CDs of Second Viennese School music in the new Sony Classical anthology, Juilliard String Quartet: The Early Columbia Recordings 1949–56 with some trepidation. The recordings account for the four numbered string quartets by Schoenberg, the two quartets by Berg (the Opus 3 quartet and the Lyric Suite), and Webern’s Opus 5 collection of five short “movements.” These were, without a doubt, performances of music. If the making of that music had been guided by “principles,” then that was strictly a matter of how the performers chose to interpret the complexities encountered on the score pages. Nevertheless, listening to that music was not without its challenges.

The succession of the four Schoenberg quartets provides the attentive listener with a path that basically traverses his departure from nineteenth century traditions to a world of “luft von anderem planeten” (air from another planet). That phrase comes from a poem entitled “Entrückung” (rapture) by Stefan George, which is sung by a soprano in the last movement of the Opus 10 (second) quartet in F-sharp minor. Indeed, the very structure of that quartet’s four movements is so remote from the structural foundations encountered in the quartets of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that Schoenberg had camped out on that “other planet” long before George’s words are sung.

In many respects the very idea of a four-movement structure seems to have provided Schoenberg with a framework that looks back on the eighteenth century while forging a new path through the immediate present. The Opus 7 (first) quartet in D minor consists of a single movement about 45 minutes in duration. However, there are a variety of ways to “parse” it into a sequence of four episodes, which amount to movements, even if there are no breaks separating them. The third (Opus 30) and fourth (Opus 37) quartets, on the other hand, are built on four-movement foundations; but both of them show Schoenberg advancing confidently on that “other planet,” having rejected the need for a tonal center.

The fact is that, whatever insights Heinrich Schenker may have brought to the analysis of tonal music, attentive listening has more to do with links between the recent past and the future-about-to-happen than with some grand design for the passing of 30 or more minutes of active listening. This past March I cited an observation by Virgil Thomson to the effect that “for all of Schoenberg’s efforts to transcend tonality, the rhythms of his music always seemed to revert to the late nineteenth-century traditions of Vienna.” Put another way, the phenomenology of listening to music is more likely to guided by rhythmic patterns than by progressions of pitch classes.

The “first generation” Juilliard Quartet musicians seemed to understand how to approach all four of the Schoenberg quartets through such rhythmic patterns. I would also conjecture that such an approach also guided them through their recording of Berg’s Opus 3 quartet. The Lyric Suite, on the other hand, poses a rather unique challenge in its approach to tempo. It has a six-movement structure consisting of three fast-slow pairings. However, in the overall architecture, the fast movements get progressively faster; and the slow movements get progressively slower. As a result, from a rhetorical point of view, the entire journey seems to expire with a “last gasp.”

Even if the listener is not explicitly aware of that interleaved structure, the desolation of the final movement (the tempo marking is Largo desolato) tends to be felt as an intense rhetoric of loss. That rhetoric can also be found in Berg’s preferences for opera narratives. As a result one can approach the overall architecture of the Lyric Suite in the context of the multilayered structural architecture for the unfolding of the narrative behind Berg’s Opus 7 Wozzeck opera. At the same time the Lyric Suite may have initiated similar multilayered techniques for the unfolding (and symmetries) of the Lulu narrative.

Webern is represented only by his Opus 5. In the context of Schoenberg and Berg, his scope of expression is uncannily microscopic. Indeed, his very approach to structure is in a class by itself. If Schoenberg could evoke rhythm to guide the ear through the absence of tonal progression, Webern’s abstractions of rhythm are as opaque as those of “harmonic progression.” Nevertheless, like Berg he has his own thoughts about overall design. These involve duration: The outer movements are the longest, and the movements get short as they converge on a center that is less than in minute in length.

In many respects the listener is left to contend with “it’s over before you know it” episodes. Nevertheless, since the entire composition is so short, one can benefit from multiple listening experiences. (There have been recital performances in which the entire piece is played a second time, right after listening to the first iteration has “sunk in.”) Personally, I spent a lot of time as a student listening to the Juilliard recording I had purchased; and the impact of that experience remains with me. Indeed, not too long ago I was delighted to encounter this music again in the repertoire of the Telegraph Quartet, first listening to them in recital and then through the recorded performance on their Into the Light album. I could not think of a better source of light to cast on those Juilliard recordings made back in the early Fifties.

SFS to Release All-Berg Album

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

One week from today SFS Media will release its latest album of concert recordings by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) led by its former Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT). All of the recordings were made during MTT’s tenure as Music Director, and the album is devoted entirely to the music of Alban Berg. This is the latest album to be released since this past July’s recording of two of MTT’s song cycles. As is usually the case, Amazon.com is currently processing pre-orders for this new release.

Berg’s life was relatively short (born on February 9, 1885 and died of sepsis, possibly induced by an insect sting, on December 24, 1935). Nevertheless, the selections for this album account for different stages of his career. The earliest of these is the so-called Seven Early Songs collection, which Berg composed while studying under Arnold Schoenberg. Written between 1905 and 1908, these songs were written for medium voice and piano, subsequently revised for high voice and orchestra in 1928. The vocalist for the SFS performances, which took place in November of 2018, was soprano Susanna Phillips.

Following his studies with Schoenberg, Berg composed three pieces for orchestra between 1913 and 1915. These were dedicated to Schoenberg and published as his Opus 6. To some extent these pieces may be viewed as Berg’s “laboratory notebook” prior to composing his first opera, Wozzeck, his Opus 7 completed in 1925. Each of the pieces has its own dark rhetoric, and the third of them climaxes in a blood-curdling explosion that portends the beatings and deaths that will subsequently be encountered in Wozzeck. These were performed in Davies Symphony Hall in January of 2015.

Berg’s last completed work was his violin concerto, composed in the year of his death. It was composed on a commission by Louis Krasner. However, it was inspired by the death of Manon Gropius, the daughter of Walter Gropius and Alma Mahler; and the concerto was dedicated “to the memory of an Angel.” The music can be taken as programmatic, beginning with her happy childhood in the first movement and then confronting her struggle with death and her ascent into Heaven in the second. Gil Shaham was soloist for the SFS performances, which took place in March of 2018.

All three of these selections are given perfectly satisfactory well-recorded accounts that reflect well on MTT’s talent for interpreting Berg’s music. That said, however, it is important to bear in mind that all of Berg’s orchestra music is richly textured. As a result, I do not think that I have yet encountered a recording of Berg’s music that lives up to the experience of listening the the selection in a concert performance. Thus, while there is more than enough to say about what MTT brings to his interpretations of Berg, comparatively little of those observations hold up very well under even the best of recording and playback conditions. At best these selections allow the attentive listener to become familiar with Berg’s scores as preparation for an opportunity to listen to the music in a concert setting.

The one possible exception to this assertion concerns the violin concerto. Only a few months after Berg’s death, Anton Webern conducted Krasner in an Alban Berg Memorial Concert with Section D of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. As was usually the case for any BBC concert offering, that performance was recorded; and that source material eventually found its way to a compact disc release by Continuum Records. While the audio quality clearly leaves much to be desired, the sympathetic listener should have no trouble attending to the signal with only minimal interference from the noise.