Spoleto Festival USA: the April Release

Cover of the album being discussed (from its Amazon.com Web page)

Some readers may recall that, a little over two weeks ago, I wrote my first article about the release of a series of recordings of performances that took place last year at the annual Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina. The full title of that album was Live from Spoleto 2025: Orchestra. This coming Friday will see the release of the second album: Live from Spoleto 2025: Chamber Music, Vol. 1. As of this writing, Amazon.com has created a Web page, which is processing pre-orders for MP3 downloads.

Each of the eight tracks on this album involves at least one composer and/or arranger. The oldest of those composers is Alexander Borodin, represented by the “Nocturne” movement from his second string quartet in D major, best known for having been transformed into a song (“And This Is My Beloved”) for the Broadway musical Kismet. “Ricercar” was composed jointly by Trollstilt, the partnership of Dan Trueman and Monica Mugan); and the vocal line for Caroline Shaw’s “Other Song” was arranged by Steven Banks for performance on saxophone. The penultimate track is an improvisation (spontaneous?) by Mahsa Vahdat. Sadly, my impression of this new release was no better than my account of the Orchestra album. My only real satisfaction came from the string quartet account of Terry Riley’s “G Song,” performed by Alexi Kenney, Geneva Lewis, Ayane Kozasa, and Paul Wiancko.

Guarneri Quartet: its 19th Century Comfort Zone

The above claim that the nineteenth century was the “comfort zone” of the Guarneri Quartet can be affirmed by the fact that the composers from that century account for the “lion’s share” of the 49 CDs in the Sony Masterworks box set, Guarneri Quartet: The Complete Recordings 1965–2005 (not including the previously reported releases of works by Franz Schubert). As might be guessed, primary attention goes to what may be called the “Schumann-Brahms axis,” given that some of the multiple-CD albums in the collection are devoted to “side-by-side” recordings of music by Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms. Brahms first met Robert and Clara Schumann in October of 1853, and he would maintain a relationship with Clara after Robert’s death. (Clara, in turn, would perform Brahms’ music in her recitals.)

Those “side-by-side” albums account for all of the quartets by both of the composers, as well as the album of the three Brahms piano quartets coupled with Schumann’s Opus 44 piano quintet. Many readers probably already know that Arnold Schoenberg was so taken with the first of these quartets, Opus 25 in G minor, that he orchestrated the score, hoping that the music would receive more attention. (That attention would benefit from George Balanchine decision to choreograph the Schoenberg version.) The pianist for these compositions is none other than Artur Rubinstein, who also joined the Guarneri in their recording of Brahms’ Opus 34 quintet in F minor. As far as the string quartets are concerned, it may will be the case that I have not encountered any of them since the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan celebrated the sesquicentenary of the birth of Johannes Brahms (born in 1833) with a marathon series of concerts covering all of his chamber music for piano and strings.

Photograph of Dvořák with his friends and family in New York (1893 photograph by unknown photographer, public domain, from Wikimedia Commons)

Antonín Dvořák receives just as much attention as Brahms in the Guarneri repertoire. Nevertheless, the account of string quartets is relatively sparse, perhaps under the assumption that only Opus 96 in F major, known as the “American” quartet, tended to draw audience enthusiasm. On the other hand, Rubinstein again appears as “guest artist for both the Opus 81 piano quintet in A major and the Opus 87 piano quartet in E-flat major. On the other hand, I have confess a fondness for the Opus 74 terzetto, which I came to know and love through another choreographer of Dvořák’s music, Antony Tudor. His use of Opus 74 near the beginning of Leaves are Fading was responsible for getting me hooked on future encounters with Dvořák’s chamber music for strings.

As might be guessed, the collection includes Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 20 octet in E-flat major, which was recorded during the Marlboro Music Festival. The Guarneri also recorded an early Mendelssohn quartet, Opus 13 in A minor, coupled with Edvard Grieg’s Opus 27 quartet in G minor. The only other composer to receive more than one CD is Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. His Opus 11 quartet is D major is coupled with Giuseppe Verdi’s E minor quartet. The other album is devoted entirely to the Opus 70 “Souvenir de Florence” sextet, which includes violist Boris Kroyt and Mischa Schneider on cello.

There is one more Rubinstein album. He joins the ensemble in performing Gabriel Fauré’s Opus 15 piano quartet in C minor. This early work in the Fauré canon is coupled with one of the latest, his Opus 121 string quartet. Finally, the quartet accounts for the latter end of the nineteenth century with an album that couples two “second quartets.” These are the D major quartet by Alexander Borodin and the Opus 15 (second) quartet by Ernst von Dohnányi, composed in the key of D-flat major.

Taken as a whole, Guarneri seems to have done a good job in embracing the rich breadth of the nineteenth century, providing an engaging diversity in the recordings they released for this period.

Back to the Dream-World

[updated 2/2/ 1:50 p.m.: Prior to the correction of a spelling error, this article first appeared in October of 2008.]

Today's performance by the Russian Chamber Orchestra under Alexander Vereshagin as part of the October Russian Music Festival organized by the Noontime Concerts™ series at Old St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco reminded me that Die Tote Stadt is not the only theatrical composition that spends the better part of its plot in the dream-world. Marius Petipa's ballet Raymonda, with music by Alexander Glazunov, goes into the dream-world in the second scene of its first act and remains there for all of its second act. Since this ballet was first presented in 1898, it predates The Interpretation of Dreams; and I doubt that Petipa would have had quite the analytic interest in dreams that occupied Sigmund Freud. Nevertheless, I once saw the Boston Ballet perform excerpts from Swan Lake as entertainment for a convention of the American Psychiatric Association, prefaced with remarks by dance critic Doris Hering to the effect that any prince who tells his mother that he wants to marry a swan must be ripe for analysis.

Similarly, one could approach Raymonda in terms of the psyche of its protagonist, who is basically a young woman who gets cold feet on her wedding night and dreams of being abducted by a Saracen chief who her betrothed had conquered in the Crusades. However, while both the music and the libretto of Die Tote Stadt delve deeply into the psyche of a man obsessed with his deceased wife, Raymonda is best known for the easily danceable music that Glazunov provided. Vereshagin presented a suite of four of those movements, all of which served primarily to revive memories of past ballet performances (in my case the American Ballet Theatre production staged by Rudolf Nureyev). Basically, this means that through Vereshagin the music conveyed its own sense of motion, sufficient to breath life into even the vaguest memories of a ballet company versed in the classical Russian style.

The rest of Vereshagin's program was also theatrical in nature, divided between opera and dance. While they were new to me, I suspect that the "Gavotte" and "Valse" that concluded the program were extracted from one (or two) of the "Ballet Suites" that Dmitri Shostakovich had composed for orchestra, not always with specific choreography in mind. I also suspect that the arrangement for chamber orchestra (strings and one percussion player) was Vereshagin's and was effective enough that one did not miss the usual lush orchestral sound characteristic of the composer.

On the opera side the program opened with the Polovtsian songs (rather than the more familiar dances) from the opera Prince Igor, by Alexander Borodin. Like the dances, these songs (again arranged for chamber orchestra without any vocalists) captured many of the idiomatic folk elements that can be found in the dances. Much of the rhetoric is similar, but there is a clear sense of a vocal line and accompaniment. The other operatic excerpt was the intermezzo from Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's The Tsar's Bride.

Given Vereshagin's tendency to go "pops" with an encore, I wondered whether or not this concert would end with an encore of the "Tahiti-Trot," Shostakovich's orchestration (and arrangement) of Vincent Youmans' "Tea for Two." Those unfamiliar with this side of Shostakovich will probably appreciate the Wikipedia entry for this work:

The "Tahiti Trot" is Shostakovich's 1927^[1] orchestration of "Tea for Two" from the musical No, No, Nanette by Vincent Youmans. Shostakovich wrote it in response to a challenge from conductor Nikolai Malko: after the two listened to the song on record, Malko bet 100 roubles that Shostakovich could not completely re-orchestrate the song from memory in under an hour. Shostakovich took him up and won, completing the orchestration in around 45 minutes. The "Tahiti Trot" was first performed in 1928^[2], and has been a popular encore ever since. It was used as an entr'acte for the ballet The Age of Gold at the suggestion of conductor Alexander Gauk^{[citation needed]}.

However, the joy of this work really lies in Shostakovich's use of his orchestral palette; and I doubt that Vereshagin would have been able to maintain the Shostakovich flavor in a chamber orchestra version!

LIEDER ALIVE!: Mezzo, Cello, Piano

LIEDER ALIVE! performers Kindra Scharich, Jeffrey LaDeur, and Jennifer Culp (from the LIEDER ALIVE! Web page for the 2023/24 season)

Early yesterday evening, LIEDER ALIVE! concluded its twelfth annual Liederabend season. The vocalist was mezzo Kindra Scharich, accompanied at the piano by Jeffrey LaDeur. However, for the most part, the program consisted of trio performances with the addition of cellist Jennifer Culp (who also gave two duo performances with LaDeur).

The first half of the program was framed by Franz Schubert (the D. 943 “Auf dem Strom”) and Johannes Brahms (the second of the two Opus 91 songs, “Geistliches Wiegenlied”). (The titles translate as “on the river” and “sacred cradle-song,” respectively.) Robert Schumann was represented by a cello-piano duo, the second of his Opus 94 pieces, entitled simply “Romanze.” These three leading figures were joined by Alexander Borodin’s three songs for piano, voice, and cello, which he composed in 1854.

The second half of the program took in a much wider extent. The earliest selections were by Hector Berlioz (“La Captive”) and César Franck (“Le Sylphe”). The most recent work on the program was “Dream with me,” one of the songs that Leonard Bernstein composed for the Peter Pan musical. Between these “bookends” were selections by Amy Beach (“Chanson d’amour”) and Edwin Greene (“Sing me to sleep”). The cello-piano duo for this half of the program was the third movement (Andante) from Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 19 cello sonata.

The entire offering proceeded at a fair clip, providing just enough time for the attentive listener to appreciate each selection and then compare it with what would follow. All three of the performers accounted for their parts with engaging clarity, and Scharich always captured just the right dispositions to frame the texts she was singing. I have been listening to Culp’s performances pretty much for as long as I have been doing my writing, and I have never been dissatisfied!

Taken as a whole, the program put the cap on an engaging season, leaving attentive listeners to look forward to the next season, which will establish a new “home” in the Old First Concerts series.

Simon Rattle in Berlin: Nineteenth Century

Having accounted for the First Viennese School, my second series about Simon Rattle’s recording history with the Berlin Philharmonic will examine the nineteenth century. This amounts to a blend of depth and breadth that is likely to influence serious listeners in different ways. The only composer that merits three CDs is Johannes Brahms with an account of all four of his symphonies. This makes Brahms the “leader of the pack,” reinforced with a CD of his Opus 45, entitled A German Requiem. Rattle delivers satisfying accounts of all five of these compositions; and I enjoyed listening to bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff, my first encounter in several years. Nevertheless, all of this music is so familiar to me that I never encountered an approach to interpretation that would make me sit up and take notice.

Sadly, I reacted about the same way to the two selections that were intended for staged performances but were recorded in concert. The earlier of these is the 2009 recording of the complete score for Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 71, his music for the two-act ballet The Nutcracker. The other was a complete studio recording of Georges Bizet’s Carmen, recorded in 2012. Perhaps I have just been saturated by too many encounters with both of these works in performance!

On a much more positive account, I welcomed the presence of the two CDs that account for the tone poems of Antonín Dvořák. My encounters with these pieces have been so few that I am not even sure I have heard all four of them in the past. However, because there are so few of them, I fear that, for many listeners, they may be dwarfed by all of the other selections in this collection. Nevertheless, these are likely to be the selections to which I shall be returning in the future!

The only other composer that is allocated more than one CD is Anton Bruckner. The collection includes the first recording to be made of a “completed” account of that composer’s final (ninth) symphony. The score for the fourth movement was “made whole” through the prodigious efforts of Nicola Samale, Giuseppe Mazzuca, Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs, and John Phillips. I wrote about the recording when it was first released, but that was back during my tenure with Examiner.com. So encountering it in this collection amounted to a “return visit.” The only other Bruckner CD is the fourth symphony. While Rattle had recorded a performance of this symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra based on subsequent scholarly efforts by Cohrs, his Berlin recording goes back to the 1886 version edited by Leopold Nowak.

Another performance that is seldom encountered is that of Franz Liszt’s “Faust Symphony.” This amounts to an imaginative extension of the tone poem. In his title Liszt explicitly described the composition as consisting of three character sketches, one for each movement. In “order of appearance” those characters are Faust, Gretchen, and Mephistopheles. While I appreciate having this recording in my collection, I fear that Liszt’s project looked better on paper than as a listening experience.

Where narrative is concerned, Hector Berlioz’ Opus 14 “Symphonie fantastique” and Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” (even with Maurice Ravel’s orchestration) are more convincing. Each of these pieces has a “partner” on its respective CD. The Berlioz album concludes with “La mort de Cléopâtre;” and “Pictures” is coupled with the second symphony (in B minor) by Alexander Borodin, followed by the “Polovtsian Dances” from his Prince Igor opera.

If my reaction to this side of Rattle’s repertoire tends to be somewhat lukewarm, I have not yet given up on him. The lion’s share of his attention is situated solidly in the twentieth century. In my plan it will take six articles to cover that content. Watch this space for further developments!

Mitropoulos in the Late Nineteenth Century

Having examined the recordings in Sony Classical’s Dimitri Mitropoulos: The Complete RCA and Columbia Album Collection that account for the early nineteenth century and the music of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, I found that the recordings of music from the remainder of the nineteenth century amounted to a rather mixed bag. For the most part, the recordings made with the Minnesota Orchestra outnumber those made with the New York Philharmonic. However, after Mitropoulos moved to New York, he also served as a conductor for the Metropolitan Opera; and, as a result, there are recordings of both Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Giuseppe Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera.

My guess is that Mitropoulos had more opportunities to be adventurous in Minneapolis. Thus, while we have a recording of the familiar D minor symphony by César Franck, we have less-encountered alternatives such as Ernest Chausson’s Opus 20 symphony in B-flat major and Alexander Borodin’s second symphony in B minor. There is also an opportunity to listen to the pianist Egon Petri as soloist in a performance of Ferruccio Busoni’s arrangement for piano and orchestra of Franz Liszt’s “Rhapsodie espagnole.” Somewhat ironically, while Gustav Mahler performed as a conductor in New York, the recording of Mitropoulos conducting his first symphony was made in Minneapolis, leading me to wonder whether this may have been a “first contact” experience for the Minnesotans.

The New York recordings are fewer in number and leave less of an impression, particularly when Mitropoulos revisits repertoire he had conducted in Minneapolis. While his approach to Boris seemed to be an attentive one, the Met recording was so abridged as to leave almost no sense of the narrative behind the opera. The recording was made at the Metropolitan Opera House in March of 1956, which seems to date from a period when knowledge of the Russian language was not prerequisite. Thus, the excerpts were sung in an English translation that never rises above the level of clunky.

Far more interesting is the Saturday afternoon radio broadcast of Giuseppe Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, which took place on December 10, 1955. This was the production at which, earlier in the year, Marian Anderson had made her Met debut in the role of Ulrica. Sony Classical’s Beyond the Music Anderson anthology included the CD of the RCA recording of excerpts from this production, but Anderson can only be heard on one track! That CD is also included in the Mitropoulos collection, but the last two CDs are devoted to reproducing that subsequent radio broadcast. This does far more justice to Anderson, not to mention her colleagues on the stage, which included Giorgio Tozzi, Roberta Peters, Jan Peerce, Robert Merrill, James McCracken, and Zinka Milanov!

If the overall scope of this portion of the Mitropoulos anthology is limited in its eyebrow-raising moments, it is worth noting that, in the overall catalog, his commitment to recording was much more concerned with the twentieth century. Indeed, I have decided that the repertoire is too extensive to be covered by a single article. Instead, I shall write separate articles about music composed in Europe and works that originated in the United States. Mitropoulos was serious about both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and I am hoping to do justice to his dedication to this repertoire.

Emerson Quartet Ends SFP Chamber Series

Emerson String Quartet players Paul Watkins, Eugene Drucker, Philip Setzer, and Lawrence Dutton (photograph by Jürgen Frank, courtesy of SFP)

Last night in Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Performances (SFP) concluded its Shenson Chamber Series with the return of the Emerson String Quartet for its seventh appearance under SFP auspices. Violinists Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer and violist Lawrence Dutton have been with the quartet since it was first formed in 1976. Cellist Paul Watkins replaced cellist David Finckel in 2013.

The program prepared for last night could be called “the other three B’s.” Since Johann Sebastian Bach predated the string quartet as we now know it (often credited to Joseph Haydn), Emerson offered an entirely different set of composers whose last names began with a B. In “order of appearance” these were Alexander Borodin, Samuel Barber, and Béla Bartók. (It may be worth noting in passing that, while the original three B’s spanned two centuries, eighteenth and nineteenth, last night’s set linked the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth in a much narrower window. Nevertheless, each of the offerings on last night’s program had its own unique voice.)

Sadly, performance technique tended to be uneven over the course of the program. The most satisfying of the offerings was the final selection, Bartók’s first quartet. This was the only offering of the evening led by Drucker. Under his leadership one could appreciate the long-time familiarity that the ensemble had with the six Bartók quartets. More importantly, one could relish the rich contributions of all four instruments, none of which are allowed very much time for “mere accompaniment.” Writing as one who internalized the Bartók quartets as an undergraduate, I have to say that Drucker’s leadership elicited a freshness of interpretation strong enough to register with me as a “first contact” experience.

Unfortunately, Setzer’s leadership of the first two offerings, Borodin’s second quartet in D major and Barber’s Opus 11 quartet in B minor, was disappointingly weaker. There was often something unsteady about his intonation that disoriented the entire ensemble. Furthermore, the interplay of the individual voices lacked the certainty that made the Bartók performance so satisfying.

Ironically, both of these quartets have “islands of familiarity” that would register with those that do not spend much time with the chamber music genre. Most importantly, the second movement of Barber’s quartet was subsequently repurposed for a string ensemble. In that form it became the “Adagio for Strings,” which now enjoys popular appeal (with a little help from Tinseltown).

However, long before Barber’s Adagio became an “overnight success,” Broadway turned Borodin’s music into a smash hit with a musical entitled Kismet. Two of the songs took their tunes from the Borodin quartet. “Baubles, Bangles and Beads” used the trio portion of the Scherzo (second) movement, while the primary theme of the Noctturno (third) movement became “And This is My Beloved.” Mind you, this show has probably faded into oblivion (the author of the program notes may never have heard of it), allowing the music as Borodin originally wrote it to thrive under more conducive circumstances!

The ensemble returned for an encore that turned out to be rather a surprise. Perhaps, having recognized that they had presented “three alternative B’s,” they saw it fitting to give Bach his due. As a result, they performed a piece of four-voice counterpoint that appeared in the first printed edition of The Art of Fugue but is identified on the music’s Wikipedia page as one of “three pieces of ostensibly spurious inclusion.”

The selection was “spurious” because it was not a fugue. Rather, it was a four-voice setting of an organ chorale prelude on "Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit" (“herewith I come before Thy throne"), a chorale prelude based on the BWV 668a setting for organ. Thus, while Bach pre-dated the very idea of a string quartet, Emerson was kind enough to give him the last word in their own “three B’s” program!

More Russians from Richter on Profil

courtesy of Naxos of America

At the beginning of this month Profil released its latest collection of performances by Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter. As I observed a little over a year ago, these releases have been organized around “composer pairings.” This new release departs from that convention; and I have been referring to the set of thirteen CDs as the “assorted Russians collection.” In “order of appearance” those Russians are Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Alexander Borodin, Anatoly Lyadov, Alexander Glazunov, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Alexander Scriabin, Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, Mikhail Glinka, and Alexander Dargomyzhsky. Chronology does not seem to matter very much in this release, nor does the fact that Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev were “paired” on the last release. Indeed, the selections on the new album overlap those of its predecessor, the only difference being that the recordings were made on different dates.

That said, there is much to admire in the diversity in this new collection. Much of the content is likely to be unfamiliar to most listeners, even when the composer is well-known. A primary example can be found on the second disc, which presents back-to-back recordings of two performances of Tchaikovsky’s Opus 37 (“Grand”) piano sonata in G major. The same can be said of The Nursery, Mussorgsky’s cycle of nine songs, only seven of which were published. Those seven songs are sung by soprano Nina Dorliak, who was Richter’s close companion from 1945 until his death in 1998. Where Mussorgsky is concerned, the opportunity to listen to a Richter performance (recorded at a concert in Kiev in November of 1958) of the Pictures at an Exhibition suite is most welcome.

On the other hand Richter tends to avoid performing or recording “comprehensive cycles.” I was particularly disappointed that he did not give a complete account of Shostakovich’s Opus 87 set of 24 preludes and fugues in all the major and minor keys, clearly inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. There is clearly a lot of thought behind the preludes and fugues that he did record; but it is hard to avoid feeling short-changed, particularly for the recordings made under studio conditions. Even more perplexing is his excerpting of Prokofiev’s Opus 22 Visions fugitives cycle of twenty miniatures, such a compelling overall model of brevity that one wonders why Richer resorted to “selections.”

The closest thing to a complete set can be found on the CD of the three Prokofiev “War” sonatas, Opus 82 in A major, Opus 83 in B-flat major, and Opus 84, also in B-flat major. These were not meant to be performed consecutively, and each of the three was recorded on a different date, two in concert settings and one in a studio. Unfortunately, around two or three minutes of the beginning of Opus 82, recorded at a concert in Kiev in July of 1960, are missing. This makes for a seriously impoverished listening experience, but invites gratitude for a movement structure with a recapitulation.

I would therefore suggest that this release will probably appeal to only the most enthusiastic listeners of Richter’s performances.

Jazzing the Classics with Sax and Bassoon

Frank Morelli and Keith Oxman (along with their instruments) on the cover of their new album

The last time I wrote about tenor saxophonist Keith Oxman was shortly after COVID-19 lockdown had been imposed at the end of March of 2020. Capri Records had recently released his latest album, Two Cigarettes in the Dark, which featured another tenor saxophonist, Houston Person, as “guest artist.” Tomorrow Capri will release another album, this one entitled The Ox-Mo Incident. For those that cannot wait, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for processing pre-orders.

For those of us with an appreciation of American literature and cinematic history, the album title may not be as playful as Oxman probably intended. The Ox-Bow Incident is a novel written in 1940 by Walter Van Tilburg Clark about mob rule that results in hanging three innocent men. It was turned into a film in 1943 and was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards but lost the prize to Casablanca.

Fortunately, The Ox-Mo Incident is “something completely different.” Like Two Cigarettes in the Dark, Oxman is one of two leaders and is the “Ox” in the album title. “Mo,” on the other hand, is bassoonist Frank Morelli. It is hard enough to encounter serious jazz for bassoon from any source other than Gil Evans, let alone crediting the bassoonist with both arrangements and solo leadership. This “duo of equals” is supported by a rhythm section that includes Jeff Jenkins on piano and Ken Walker on bass (both of whom provided rhythm for Two Cigarettes in the Dark), as well as Todd Reid on drums.

Most of the tracks on this album involve jazz reflections on classical sources. There is nothing new about efforts to popularize the classics. After all, all of the songs in the musical Kismet, first performed in 1953 on Broadway, are based on themes by Alexander Borodin; and two of those songs, “Baubles, Bangles and Beads” and “Stranger in Paradise,” are included on this album, arranged jointly by both Oxman and Morelli. However, the credits provided by the track listing are not always thorough. The best example of a “sin of omission” can be found on “Full Moon and Empty Arms,” whose theme comes from the third movement of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 18 (second) piano concerto in C minor; but at the very end of the track Oxman clearly cannot resist a distinct nod to the bassoon solo that opens Igor Stravinsky’s score for the ballet “The Rite of Spring.”

There is one connection that the track listing appears to have overlooked. “Three for five” (which definitely gets top marks for cleverness as a title), is based on the waltz-like theme (actually in 3/8 time) in the key of C minor from the third movement of Johannes Brahms’ Opus 90 (third) symphony in F major. This theme was sung by Diahann Carroll in the film Goodbye Again with lyrics by Dory Langdon (who would later become Dory Previn). In the European release, the title of the film was Aimez-vous Brahms? (do you love Brahms), since the script was based on a novel with that title by Françoise Sagan.

The album also includes two Oxman originals. One of these is the title track. The other is “A Wasp in Search of a Hart and Lung,” a title that demands a fair amount of personal information about Oxman before it can be unpacked. The performance, on the other hand. served as a welcome reminder of Oxman’s imaginative skills in a genre that may easily be called “latter-day bebop.” I would not even begin to guess what he has in mind for his next album.

Three Faces of Modernism at Davies This Week

Pianist Yefim Bronfman (from the event page for the concert being discussed)

Yesterday afternoon Joshua Gerson took the podium at Davies Symphony Hall to replace Michael Tilson Thomas in conducting the three San Francisco Symphony (SFS) subscription concerts for this week. The program was a bold one, organized around three selections, each of which serves as a representative of modernism for its time. The concerto soloist was pianist Yefim Bronfman, playing the oldest of those selections, Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 16 (second) piano concerto in G minor.

Of Prokofiev’s five piano concertos, the third (Opus 26 in C major) tends to be the most popular for its accessibility. Opus 16, on the other hand, probably counts as the most outrageous. While it gets off to a lyrical Andantino opening, it does not take long for the score to fire off massive salvos of dissonance at the listener. The concerto went through two versions, the first in 1913 and the one now played in 1924; and Prokofiev served as soloist for both premiere performances. Presumably, his performance made it clear how many different kinds of dissonance he had packed into the score (as much for the full-blooded orchestral writing as for the solo part); and Prokofiev probably made a case for the rhetorical significance of each of those dissonances.

All this tends to be a bit much for many listeners. Nevertheless, Bronfman played his part with just the right balance of technical precision and rhetorical impact. Gerson, in turn, complemented that rhetoric excellently, allowing the low brass to relish every roar that Prokofiev had scored for them without blowing the house down (probably just metaphorically).

This is a concerto best taken in occasional doses; and, according to my records, my last dose was at Davies at the end of October in 2012, when Yuja Wang was soloist for a concert previewing the music that SFS would play during their tour of Asia that was about to begin. Both Bronfman and Wang clearly knew the full extent of demands of precision, and both were equally focused in their respective executions. Nevertheless, there was a seasoned quality to Bronfman’s execution, almost as if he was reflecting back on the stir that Prokofiev must have (intentionally) caused. Thus, while Wang clearly had a solid command over all the notes, Bronfman had just as much command and an absorbing sense of personality to boot. His encore selection was a minor-key single-movement sonata by Domenico Scarlatti, whose Kirkpatrick number is not immediately at my disposal; I do know, however, that it was was favorite encore selection of Vladimir Horowitz!

At the other chronological extreme, Gerson conducted the first San Francisco performance of Steve Reich’s “Music for Ensemble and Orchestra,” a score that had been co-commissioned by SFS. (Susanna Mälkki conducted the world premiere, performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic on November 1, 2018.) So many Reich compositions have titles beginning with “Music for;” yet each of them has its own unique sonorities based not only on resources but also the structural and rhetorical stances that Reich decides to take.

On the other hand, one way or another, all of Reich’s work is based on establishing an underlying pulse and then elaborating upon it. The structure of “Music for Ensemble and Orchestra” takes an arch form to the management of that pulse, beginning with sixteenth notes coming from a piano, which then slow down to eighth notes, then quarter notes, and then the direction is reversed, returning through eighth and sixteenth notes, respectively. While this is a relatively straightforward “arch” approach (Reich has cited Béla Bartók as an admired predecessor), there is nothing straightforward about the textures that emerge through the juxtaposition of a chamber ensemble with an orchestra consisting of strings as trumpets. Furthermore, since the two groups are separated physically, the listener can enhance the impact of the sonorities with the visual experience of how the two groups engage with each other.

The program began with the version of “Fratres” that Arvo Pärt scored for strings and percussion. Percussion was deliberately minimal, and last night it consisted only of claves and bass drum played by a single percussionist (Raymond Froehlich, whose retirement was announced during last night’s event). “Fratres” is more of a chord progression than what might strictly be called a “composition.” It was first stated by the first and second violins, after which violas, cellos, and basses were added and then withdrawn in reverse order. The two cellists at the rearmost stand in the second played an open-fifth drone for the entire performance. The steadiness of their bowing was an impressive as Froehlich’s minimal percussion work.

(Fun fact of coincidence: I first became aware of Pärt during a lecture-demonstration that Reich gave at UCLA. This would have been about the time of the release of Pärt’s first ECM album. I shall always appreciate Reich’s advocacy of repertoires other than his own.)

The program concluded with the symphonic version of the “Polovtsian Dances” scene from Alexander Borodin’s four-act opera Prince Igor. (In the opera the orchestra is joined by a full chorus. I know, because I enjoyed singing the baritone line during a Pennsylvania All-State Chorus concert performance!) Gersen gave this music a rip-snorting account, which is exactly what it deserves. Borodin may not have been as adventurous as Prokofiev; but, for all we know, he was one of the sources to inspire Prokofiev when it came to unleashing mighty masses of sonorities.

First-Rate Account of “Controversial” Music

from this week’s SFS event page

The program for this week’s subscription concert by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS), given its first performance last night in Davies Symphony Hall, was afforded the luxury of an overall title: Banned and Boycotted: Music of Bartók and Shostakovich. These composers were distinguished by having written music that had run afoul of powerful authorities, political and clerical. Ironically, the symphony selection on the program was by Alexander Borodin; and it served as an “innocuous spacer” between the controversial offerings by the composers named in the program title.

To be fair, however, the opening selection, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 77 violin concerto in A minor was not intended to provoke controversy, nor, for that matter, was it given a chance to do so. Rather, it suffered a fate common to those bearing the brunt of Soviet authorities, that of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The time was 1946 the year in which the cultural doctrine developed by Central Committee secretary Andre Zhdanov was issued.

The conclusion of World War II had came as a great relief to all Russians. After having written a trilogy of symphonies reflecting the tribulations of wartime, with particular attention to the Siege of Leningrad, Shostakovich could finally write an upbeat symphony celebrating the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. This was his Opus 70 (ninth) symphony in E-flat major, first performed on November 3, 1945. Having been redeemed after denunciation and then sustained all the hardships of wartime, Shostakovich faced a prospect of recovering his status as a respected composer.

The Zhdanov Doctrine put an end to that. Some of the country’s finest artists from all disciplines suffered denunciation (if not worse), primarily for honoring influences that were not “purely Soviet.” Shostakovich was far from the only composer to be brought down by the Doctrine. Other familiar names from that period were Sergei Prokofiev and Aram Khachaturian. Shostakovich was working on the Opus 77 when he was felled by this second denunciation, and the score found its way to his notorious desk drawer. The music would not be performed until October of 1955, two years after the death of Joseph Stalin.

To be fair, Opus 77 is rife with the influences of Western music condemned by the Zhdanov Doctrine as perniciously decadent. The Wikipedia author for the concerto’s Web page describes the opening “Nocturne” movement as a “semi-homage” to Edward Elgar’s Opus 85 cello concerto in E minor; but I could not avoid thinking about ways in which some of Béla Bartók’s slow movements have often been described as “night music.” Similarly, while the Wikipedia author identifies the “fate motif” from Ludwig van Beethoven’s fifth (Opus 67 in C minor) symphony in the “Passacaglia” movement, my own thoughts turned to the grim passacaglia from Benjamin Britten’s Opus 33 opera Peter Grimes. (Britten and Shostakovich would not meet until 1960, after which they became close friends.)

Whether or not the music itself reverberated with political controversy, last night’s performance, conducted by Jakub Hrůša with violin soloist Karen Gomyo, was all about presenting the music with all of its rich technical details and intense expressiveness. Gomyo, who first performed with SFS in 2007, was thoroughly fearless in taking on the full spectrum of Shostakovich’s technical demands, always delivering her results with just the right rhetorical twists. Furthermore, her sense of rhetoric was perfectly matched by Hrůša, who consistently supported her every gesture with Shostakovich’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink demands for instrumentation.

Indeed, instrumentation was one of the most fascinating aspects of the composition. In that opening “Nocturne,” almost all of the orchestral resources are confined to the lower register. The solo violin rises up to higher pitches, but the instrument is almost never joined by any of the ensemble voices. Hrůša knew exactly how to balance the full scope of those resources, allowing all of those low-register murmurings to come through with bone-chilling clarity.

The same could be said for his approach to the suite that Bartók extracted from his Opus 19, the one-act pantomime entitled “The Miraculous Mandarin.” Based on a sordid libretto about low-life brutes and a predatory seductress, this was the music whose world premiere in Cologne so offended the clergy that all plans for subsequent performances were suspended. Mind you, the music was so rife with raucous dissonances that many “proper” members of the audience probably found the score as vulgar as the scenario.

Fortunately, we now live in an age in which it is perfectly acceptable to have fun with such dissonances. That seems to be the way in which Hrůša chose to conduct Bartók’s suite. This is not to say that he tried to whitewash connotations of the more lurid aspects of the scenario; but this was an interpretation of the score that thrived on sly smiles, frequently punctuated a generous number of barbaric yawps. If either Bartók or Hrůša offended any spirits, those offended parties would do better to learn how to enjoy a good ribald joke.

Between these two stormy offerings there was one particularly distinctive moment of calm. Gomyo chose Astor Piazzolla for her encore selection. Unless I am mistaken this was taken from a collection of six Tango Etudes composed for either flute or violin solo. My guess is that she performed the “Lento Meditativo” étude from this collection; but this is, at best, an educated guess. More important was the the quietude of the selection offered just the right amount of restorative calm after the frenetic Burlesque movement wrapped up the Shostakovich concerto.

The other “spacer” between Shostakovich and Bartók was Borodin’s second symphony in B minor. Borodin is still known for several admirable achievements during the nineteenth century, but this symphony is not one of them. Over the course of four movements, there is a decided paucity of thematic ideas with almost no effort to unfold any of those ideas through developmental techniques. Taken on its own terms, however, the music positively roars in asserting its themes; and Hrůša was totally unabashed when it came to unleashing all of those roars. It was as if the conductor felt that listeners needed a cold plunge in tonality at its most elementary before undertaking the roller coaster ride of Bartók’s dissonances.

Escher Gets by with a Little Help from a Friend

Escher String Quartet members Pierre Lapointe, Danbi Um, Adam Barnett-Hart, and Brook Speltz (photograph by Sarah Skinner, from the Escher Web site)

The Escher String Quartet was founded in 2005 by violist Pierre Lapointe, while he was a student at the Manhattan School of Music. He recruited violinists Adam Barnett-Hart and Wu Jie and cellist Andrew Janss, all of whom were fellow students. The group got off to a good start, since, by the following year, they were part of Chamber Music Society Two, the “farm team” for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. As might be guessed, the group has enjoyed the benefit of some pretty high-powered mentoring; and their relationship with David Finckel and Wu Han led to their being invited to perform out here in the Music@Menlo series.

Last night Escher closed out the Summer Series of Chamber Music San Francisco, giving the last of the series’ three concerts in the Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM). The group has undergone several personnel changes since its founding. As of last night, Wu Jie’s second violin chair has been taken over by Danbi Um; and Brook Speltz is now the group’s cellist. The major work on the program was Franz Schubert’s D. 956 quintet in C major with local cellist Jean-Michel Fonteneau taking the second cello chair.

Sadly, it was hard to avoid feeling that Escher is a group that still needs mentoring. Fortunately, Fonteneau was well-equipped for that task. Not only is he one of our city’s most skilled cellists but he is also a consummate pedagogue, both as a cello teacher and as a coach for chamber music students at SFCM. Even without noting that Fonteneau was situated in the middle of the group (violins to his right and the other low strings to his left), it was hard to avoid the feeling that he was leading the entire group from the bottom line of the score page, so to speak.

D. 956 is one of those pieces that is representative of what Robert Schumann called Schubert’s “heavenly length.” There are no end of arresting moments; and, if they do not literally bring the flow of the entire work to a halt, they certainly merit lingering. The problem, of course, is that inferior performances tend to linger too long; and “heavenly length” turns into “endless bore.” Having been fortunate enough to listen to Fonteneau play this work with other groups (including at least one other professional string quartet), I feel he has a scrupulous command when it comes to keeping the pace “heavenly.” Last night’s pacing could not have been better, and I am inclined to believe that Fonteneau was the “prime mover” of the overall pace.

I make this claim on the basis of the first half of the program, which consisted entirely of Alexander Borodin’s second string quartet in D major. This quartet is probably best known for themes that were subsequently turned into songs for the musical Kismet. The result is that, for many, the piece has a pleasant air of familiarity. Escher’s account, on the other hand, had little ring of familiarity and not much that was pleasant.

The overall experience was one of a group in which each individual was still trying to nail down command of his/her respective part. Moments when the ensemble summoned up a convincing group sound were few and far between, suggesting that the players were looking at their parts rather than listening to each other. Indeed, the intonation almost suggested that each player had internalized the pitches of the twelve chromatic notes on a piano keyboard and was summoning up the necessary pitches as the printed score pages dictated. Admittedly, Borodin’s quartet is not exactly an epitome of fine quartet composition; but it still allows for an account far more convincing than the one Escher summoned up last night.

My only previous account with Escher was with their recordings of the string quartets of Alexander von Zemlinsky, which were released by Naxos. At that time the only member of the group that was not a founder was cellist Dane Johansen. I was impressed with the recordings, but the impression had as much to do with listening to Zemlinsky’s music as to how it was being interpreted. Nevertheless, one might make a case that those recordings were of a group closer in spirit to Lapointe’s “founding vision.” The current membership runs the risk of a group that sounds more like four independent musicians than like a string quartet.

Chamber Music Masters of the Soviet Era on DOREMI

DOREMI is a label, distributed in the United States by Naxos of America, that specializes in the restoration and presentation of historic recordings. I recently encountered these efforts through a five-CD box set based primarily on trio performances by pianist Emil Gilels, violinist Leonid Kogan, and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, released as part of a series called Legendary Treasures:

from Amazon.com

These three musicians performed as a piano trio between 1949 and 1959, meaning that they predate the Beaux Arts Trio by about half a decade. The group disbanded in 1959 for “personal reasons” that may well have had more to do with Soviet reaction to Rostropovich’s political activities than with any personal disagreements among the trio members.

The recordings on this album were originally released as LPs by Melodiya. The recordings were made between 1950 and 1955; and, as might be guessed, they are all monaural. DOREMI has done an excellent job in remastering the sources. The only significant change in personnel comes with Gilels performing Alexander Borodin’s piano trio with violinist Dmitry Tzyganov and cellist Sergei Shirinsky (both founding members of the Beethoven Quartet), rather than Kogan and Rostropovich. This recording is on the final CD in the collection, which also includes violist Rudolf Barshai joining Gilels, Kogan, and Rostropovich for a performance of Gabriel Fauré’s Opus 15 (first) piano quartet in C minor and Yakov Shapiro playing horn with Gilels and Kogan in Johannes Brahms’ Opus 40 horn trio in D minor.

Most important is that the value of these recordings is definitely more than historical. Each of the selections allows the attentive listener to experience chamber music at its most intimate. This may even involve having new thoughts about how these three players approached performance. Thus, Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken XV/16 piano trio in D major (which is represented by two recordings) is impressively gracious and light in its rhetoric, attributes that are not always associated with Russian virtuoso musicians!

Mind you, Russian rhetoric is far from neglected in this collection. If the sound quality of the performance of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 50 trio in A minor is not “the highest fi of them all,” the rhetorical intensity of the three players more than makes up for any acoustic shortcomings. Indeed, that intensity is even stronger in their performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 67 (second) trio in E minor, probably because all three of them had lived through the same Second World War horrors that Shostakovich had endured.

Listen to the music, rather than the recording technology; and you will not fail to be well rewarded!