Clare Hammond Explores Variations on Variations

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.

Inna Faliks: Pianist More Important than Story

from Amazon.com

Not too long ago the mail brought me a Delos CD entitled Polonaise-fantaisie: The Story of a Pianist. This amounts to an audio document of a recital-monologue conceived by the Odessa-born pianist Inna Faliks. The monologue itself was autobiographical, with selections of solo piano music serving to separate the episodes of the narrative. On the recording Faliks only plays the piano, and the text is narrated by the actress Rebecca Mozo, currently based in Los Angeles.

I have to confess that I am skeptical about musicians who choose to talk about themselves. I suspect that my proclivities date all the way back to the eve of my high school graduation, when I cancelled all other plans in order to stay home to watch the CBS broadcast of the ballet “The Flood,” choreographed by George Balanchine to an original score by Igor Stravinsky. It was the first time I ever heard Stravinsky speak. My guess is that anyone who saw that broadcast still remembers what he said:

I don’t want to tell you more; I only want to play you more.

Decades (and no end of unkind biographical accounts) later, I still feel that the only way a musician (composer or performer) can express himself/herself is through making music.

To be fair, the Amazon.com Web page of Faliks’ album bears the “Amazon’s Choice” seal of approval. My guess is that this acknowledgement comes from having received only five-star customer reviews. Unfortunately, glowing as those reviews were, they came from only five customers! Even a college freshman squeaking by with a “gentleman’s C” in statistics would probably recognize the lack of mathematical significance in this evaluation.

Normally, I would just let an album like this slide, falling back on that classic quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln:

People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.

Nevertheless, listening to this album left me with another one of those Stravinsky moments: I really wish she had played more and told less. This was because the playing on the album included Elliot Carter’s “Retrouvailles” and two short pieces by Harrison Birtwistle, “Ookooing Bird” and “Living with Music” (the former, unfortunately, consigned to the background behind Mozo’s narration). There is even a creditable account of George Gershwin’s three piano preludes.

Faliks deserves more time devoted to listening her be a pianist, and those interested in her background would probably be just as satisfied with a printed version of her text.

From the Folks Who Made an Opera of Jerry Springer

Whatever the opinions of Richard Faiman may be, apparently it is not all bread-and-butter at the Royal Opera House. Shortly after reading his review of their current production of Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto, I encountered this report by Alastair Jamieson on the London Telegraph Web site regarding plans for a new opera about Anna Nicole Smith:

Her controversial relationships, court battles over the paternity of her children and the sudden death of her 20-year-old son will among the dramatic twists in a libretto written by the co-creator of Jerry Springer The Opera.

The anti-heroine is considered by artistic directors at the Covent Garden venue to be a relevant character in a tale of modern times. The project is part of the Royal Opera House policy of staging a new opera on the main stage approximately every two years, with recent premieres including Harrison Birtwistle's Minotaur, and Thomas Adès' The Tempest.

Elaine Padmore, Covent Garden's director of opera told The Guardian. "It is not going to be tawdry; it is going to be witty, clever, thoughtful and sad. In broad outline, it will tell the story of her life, the people who influenced her, her progress ... Clearly the story is about a woman who met an ancient gentleman in a wheelchair, but it's not going to be a straight narrative; choices have been made about significant moments, selecting which incidents in her life are to be built up."

The opera will be written by Mark-Anthony Turnage, one of the most celebrated names of British contemporary music, with the libretto provided by Richard Thomas.

Ms Padmore added: "It is not just a documentary about her, but a parable about celebrity and what it does to people. It can be moving, it can be funny and it tells universal truths about human frailty.

"It is a very sad story - a larger-than-life American story, as was Puccini's Girl of the Golden West. It will be a slice of our times - of America in the pre-Obama days."

Needless to say, this will be a big gamble that will probably derive more from the apparent success of Jerry Springer The Opera than from any connection to any of the other operas named in this account. San Francisco probably knows Turnage best from the end of the last season of the San Francisco Symphony, when Benjamin Shwartz conducted his Three Asteroids, which I described in terms of "the world of Hollywood vulgarity" and the slogan for the Godzilla remake: SIZE MATTERS. Far be it from me to play up the extent to which this slogan may be applied to Anna Nicole (not to mention that The Fugs might have provided a more appropriate score for an opera project)!

A Serial-Killer Opera

I found Rupert Christiansen's Telegraph review of the new English National Opera production of Harrison Birtwistle's Punch and Judy a fascinating read. I once used the CD of the performance of this work by The London Sinfonietta to push the envelope with one of my research groups in Singapore and would like nothing more than to see a staging of this work here in San Francisco. In his limited column space Christiansen did an excellent job of setting context before undertaking critical assessment:

But the more I get to know Punch and Judy, the more powerful and fascinating it becomes.

Perhaps the best way to approach it is as a primitivist opera, born before the genre became noble, romantic and refined.

Critics have noted that Birtwistle and his librettist Stephen Pruslin draw on the conventions of Bach's Passions and Greek drama, but even deeper is the influence of pantomime and puppet-show theatricality and anonymous urban folk traditions - playground games, crude ditties, tavern rounds, the clang and clatter of street and fairground.

Stravinsky's Petrushka comes to mind, too, refracted in its abruptly episodic structure - the score is composed of more than 100 tiny units, few more than a minute long - and the bright, hard orchestral colours and relish in dissonance.

I like the reference to Igor Stravinsky and certainly understand it; but, when you take in all the factors that Christiansen enumerated and then add in the fact that Punch is, in modern language, a psychotic serial killer, then I suspect that any acknowledgement of Stravinsky should also include "Renard," which casts brutal murder into the framework of a clown-show portrayal of barnyard animals. Anyone fortunate enough to have seen the video of this work that The London Sinfonietta made under Paul Crossley along with a choreographed troupe of acrobats will immediately see the relevance of this connection.

Christiansen began last week's review of the Covent Garden premier of Birtwistle's The Minotaur by recalling when "the story went round that Benjamin Britten had stormed out of the premiere of his first opera, Punch and Judy." Birtwistle's worldview is a radical departure from Britten's in terms of both opera subject matter and musical language, and it is not hard to appreciate the way in which the former was pushing the wrong buttons for the latter. Since the opera had its first performance at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1968, it would be interesting to see whether, in retrospect, Birtwistle would now confess to having had some trepidations about bringing such raw stuff to Britten's "turf." Forty years on, however, the media have done a good job of shifting the bar for what constitutes "raw;" and it is hard to imagine a San Francisco audience finding this work "too much," just as, for the most part, they had no trouble getting into the extremes of the San Francisco Opera production of György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre (which I would be delighted to see revived). To the best of my knowledge San Francisco Opera has not mounted any of Birtwistle's works; so, in light of the recent elevation of interest in London, now might be a good time to start thinking about doing so! "Right tol de riddle doll!"