SFS 2025–26: Great Performers Series

The reason for the above scare quotes is that, traditionally, performances in the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Great Performers Series are limited to a single evening, usually on a weekend so as not to conflict with SFS performances in the Orchestral Series. However, in the coming season there will be one “outlier” that will be given three performances on the weekend before Thanksgiving. As was reported a little over a month ago, the program will begin with the second nonet scored for string orchestra by Olli Mustonen, led by violinist Alexi Kenney. After that, the repertoire will take “a great leap backward.”

Kenney will continue to lead, but he will also be one of the three soloists in Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1050 “Brandenburg” concerto in D major, joined by flutist Yubeen Kim with Jonathan Dimmock at the harpsichord. This will be given three performances at 2 p.m. on Thursday, November 20, and 7:30 p.m. on Friday, November 21, and Saturday, November 22. This will be preceded by Kenney’s instrumental arrangement of one of Barbara Strozzi’s earliest madrigals and followed by the much more familiar Four Seasons cycle of concertos by Antonio Vivaldi.

George Balanchine’s choreography for “The Four Temperaments” performed by the Kansas City Ballet (photograph by Steve Wilson, courtesy of KCBalletMedia, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)

There will be one other orchestral performance in the Series, taking place on Sunday, April 26. The Mahler Chamber Orchestra will present a program of music by Paul Hindemith flanked on either side by Sergei Prokofiev, beginning with his first (“Classical”) symphony and concluding with his second piano concerto. Yuja Wang will be both soloist and director, with Matthew Truscott leading from the concertmaster’s chair when necessary. The Hindemith selection will be “The Four Temperaments,” originally conceived for choreographer Léonide Massine but ultimately completed on a commission for George Balanchine, who created the dance for the Ballet Society, which premiered it in 1946.

February 8 will see a rather unique duo recital. Violinist Nicola Benedetti will be accompanied on guitar by Plínio Fernandes. There will also be a violin recital by Itzhak Perlman on November 4, followed on November 16 by cello recitalist Gautier Capuçon. The two solo piano recitalists will be Marc-André Hamelin on October 19 and Yefim Bronfman on February 8.

David Oistrakh’s “Concertos++” Recordings

David Oistrakh (photograph taken at a 1954 performance in Dresden, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license)

In continuing my examination of the 31 CDs classified as Premières, Rarities & Live Performances in the Warner Remastered Edition box set collection of recordings of performances by Russian violinist David Oistrakh, the above “Concerto++” was conceived to account for not only the concerto genre but also chamber music with piano. (String quartets will be examined in the next article.) This accounts for seven CDs, three for chamber music and the other four for the concertante genre. The timeline is a wide one, with Johann Sebastian Bach at one end and Paul Hindemith at the other. As with my previous account of the “Rarities” category, I shall try to account for this one through categories, all of which are relatively modest in size.

The largest of those categories accounts for performances of music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. This consists of one album of sonatas (with two different accompanists, Lev Oborin and Vladimir Yampolsky), a “concertante and chamber music” album, and one that couples a concerto (K. 218 in D major) with concertos of Jean Sibelius and Henri Vieuxtemps, all with piano accompaniment. Personally, I was satisfied with the light touch that Oistrakh takes to Mozart, particularly when performing with his two accompanists, Lev Oborin and Vladimir Yampolsky. He clearly had a playful side, which is less evident in the more “serious” performances in this collection.

His Bach repertoire consists of four duo sonatas (BWV 1015 in A major, BWV 1016 in E major, BWV 1018 in F minor, and BWV 1019 in G major) and two concertos (BWV 1041 in A minor and the “Brandenburg” BWV 1049 in G major). These may not be “historically informed;” but they are given clear and expressive accounts that would have satisfied listeners in the Fifties. Where the nineteenth century is concerned, I was particularly glad to encounter Ernest Chausson’s Opus 21, his “Concert” scored for violin, piano, and string quartet. I also appreciated Oistrakh’s interest in Claude Debussy, even if he could only approach his music through violin-piano arrangements by Alexandre Roelens.

In many respects, this is a “usual suspects” collection with a certain nineteenth-century bias towards Max Bruch, represented by both his Opus 26 (first) concerto in G minor and his more familiar Opus 46 “Scottish Fantasy” in E-flat major. With the notable exception of Hindemith, many listeners will associate this collection with the repertoire of Jascha Heifetz; but that should be no surprise. The two of them were contemporaries born in Russia; but Oistrakh remained in Russia, eventually to be honored as a People’s Artist of the USSR  in 1953. Heifetz may have the broader recording legacy, but there is still much to be gained in examining Oistrakh’s “alternative” perspective on repertoire.

Paul Hindemith: “Complete” Works for Flute

The current decade seems to be emerging as one of a revived interest in the composer Paul Hindemith. The composer died in 1963, which is the year in which I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a freshman. (I had also applied to Yale University, primarily because I knew that Hindemith was on the faculty of the Music Department.) When I launched a Music of the Twentieth Century program on the MIT campus radio station (whose call-letters at the time were WTBS), I was not shy in presenting Hindemith’s compositions. Nevertheless, as Pierre Boulez began to ascend into the position of “global authority,” Hindemith’s star quickly faded; and his “Germanic playfulness” succumbed to the rigid discipline of “French intellect.” (Historians of World War II will probably appreciate the irony of that transition.)

So it was that Hindemith did not surface on this site until September of 2007, when I wrote about Charlie Parker’s interest in the composer. (Mind you, by that time I would guess that there were many readers asking themselves, “Who is Charlie Parker?”) However, by March of 2020, I found myself writing about Ondine launching a project to record Hindemith’s chamber music. This would be a major undertaking, because Hindemith was so involved in writing works for just about every instrument or combination of instruments that his chamber repertoire was sure to be prolific. As a result, I was glad to see that Ondine is still at it, having recently released an album with the title Complete Works for Flute.

Now, to be fair, where Hindemith is concerned, “complete” is a dangerous adjective. I would say that his List of compositions Web page on Wikipedia amounts to an honest effort but not necessarily a thorough one. The three works listed under “Flute” in the “Solo (and chamber music sonatas with piano)” category can all be found on this new recording. In chronological order (as opposed to track order) these are the 1923 “Canonic sonatina for two Flutes,” the 1927 set of eight pieces for solo flute, and the 1936 flute and piano sonata. On the concertante site, there is the 1949 concerto for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, harp and orchestra. Ironically, what is missing is one of Hindemith’s best-known compositions, his 1922 “Kleine Kammermusik” for wind quintet.

On the other hand, the album has three selections that cannot be found on the Wikipedia list. The earliest of these is the second “Abendkonzert,” composed in 1932 and scored for solo flute and strings. (The “Abendkonzert” for three recorders is the only item in that category on the Wikipedia list.) “Enthusiasm” is a duo composed for flute and viola in 1942, and it is given its world premiere on the Ondine album. The third selection is “Echo,” composed for flute and piano in 1944.

Flutist Stathis Karapanos on the cover of his Ondine album (courtesy of Crossover Media)

The flutist on all the tracks of this Complete Works album is Stathis Karapanos. He clearly has a solid command of his instrument and can definitely be credited for “playing well with others.” Taken as a whole, the album is consistently engaging; so I see no need to pick nits with him over “missing content!” Instead, I am glad to see that a revived interest in Hindemith’s music is still rolling along over the course of this decade.

Anna Gourari Links Schnittke to Hindemith

Cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of Jensen Artists)

Around the middle of this month, ECM New Series released its first album of pianist Anna Gourari performing with an orchestra. She had previously released three solo albums, so this new release offered a new perspective for those following her work. She performed two twentieth-century compositions with the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana conducted by Markus Poschner. As of this writing, the album is available for MP3 download from an Amazon.com Web page; and the Web page for the CD is taking pre-orders for a release date of August 2.

The album begins with the more recent of these works, Alfred Schnittke’s 1979 concerto for piano and string orchestra, a single track with a duration somewhat short of 25 minutes. It concludes with “The Four Temperaments,” a composition by Paul Hindemith given also the more abstract title “Theme and Four Variations.” The music was commissioned by George Balanchine, and the resulting ballet is known only by the “Four Temperaments” title. Between these two performances is an orchestral account of Hindemith’s “Symphony: Mathis der Maler.” The subtitle is that of an opera Hindemith had been planning about the painter Matthias Grünewald, and thematic material from the symphony eventually found its way into that opera.

There is an old joke about the monorail being an idea of the future whose time had passed. In his youth Hindemith was an adventurous (and occasionally raucous) composer. As might be guessed, the Nazis dismissed his work as “degenerate;” and he was wise enough to leave Germany before it was too late. He eventually found his way to the United States, where he became a member of the Music faculty at Yale University. By that time his interest in the past seemed to have taken the lead over his more adventurous side. However, that shift had already begun when he was working on his symphony in 1934 and was just as evident in the ballet score. (Where Balanchine was concerned, Hindemith’s music was a far cry from what Igor Stravinsky was providing him.)

In that context, anyone listening to this new album is likely to find the Hindemith selections to be a trip down memory lane. For my part, those are good memories; but I doubt that I shall visit them very frequently! Schnittke, on the other hand, first became an “item” during the last quarter of the last century, due primarily to a generous number of releases of his music by BIS. Most of these were ambitiously thorny, interspersed, occasionally, with ironic (if not sarcastic) reflections on the “old style.” If Noël Coward was best known for his “talent to amuse,” Schnittke seemed determined to establish a talent to provoke; and there is no shortage of provocations in his concerto. One might even think of the “Concerto for Piano vs. Orchestra;” but P. D. Q. Bach was definitely funnier!

Some readers may recall my fondness for the joke that the monorail was “an idea of the future whose time had passed;” and, while I cannot argue with the skilled techniques of the performers on this new album, I fear that both Hindemith and Schnittke have become targets of that joke.

Klemperer Conducts Klemperer (and others)!

My final article about the Warner Classics Remastered Edition of recordings of the conductor Otto Klemperer will account for twentieth-century works by composers other than Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler. Ironically, the composer that receives the most attention is Klemperer himself! This did not come as a particularly big surprise to me, since I remember that, during my student days, classical music stations took a liking to his “Merry Waltz.”

However, two of the three “bonus” CDs are devoted entirely to his compositions, most of which are multimovement works. These include a second recording of his second symphony (the first having been on a CD that did not have “bonus” status), along with recordings of his third and fourth symphonies. In addition, there are recordings of the “Philharmonia String Quartet” (presumably members of the New Philharmonia Orchestra) playing Klemperer’s third and seventh quartets. That makes for a fair amount of Klemperer. I must confess that I am still getting my head around these recordings; and I am not surprised that I never encountered any of them on the radio, let alone in a concert hall!

On the other hand, I was glad to have my memory of “Merry Waltz” revived. It took a bit of chutzpah to assign it to the final track of a CD that began with three of the best-known compositions by Johann Strauss. However, these selections were separated by Kurt Weill’s Kleine Dreigroschenmusik, the instrumental suite of music from The Threepenny Opera. Apparently, Klemperer got along very well with Weill and his wife Lotte Lenya. I remember reading an article by Lenya about the two of them encountering Klemperer in a hotel lobby, asking (at the top of his voice) “Is here no telephone?” (a quotation from the libretto for Weill’s opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, which involved one of two texts written to be sung in English).

Only one other twentieth-century composer receives more than a single CD. Like Weill, Igor Stravinsky found his way to the United States; but they ended up on opposite sides of the continent. While Weill continued his career in New York, both Klemperer and Stravinsky escaped from the Nazis and World War II by going to Los Angeles. Klemperer’s Stravinsky recordings consist of the complete 1947 score for the ballet “Petrushka,” the suite extracted from the ballet “Pulcinella,” and the “Symphony in Three Movements.” (This was Stravinsky’s last symphony, and he provided the title.)`

The only other composer in this collection is Paul Hindemith, who also had to flee from the Nazis. (His wife was part-Jewish.) He is accounted for through “Nobilissima Visione,” a three-movement suite extracted from his score for the ballet “Saint Francis.” The CD also includes a previously unreleased recording of the first movement of the 1949 horn concerto with the solo taken by Dennis Brain.

This amounts to a rather modest account of the twentieth-century repertoire, but one can still appreciate the effort that Klemperer summoned to make sure that each of selections is worthy of attention.

The Mathematician’s Ballet

After having kept the book on a shelf for far too long, over the last several months I have been working my way through Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet by Jennifer Homans. This effort was probably motivated by the recent appearance of Homans’ second book, which is devoted entirely to George Balanchine. It would be fair to cite Balanchine as the  pioneering force in the development of American ballet, distinguishing it clearly from much of European ballet tradition. For the most part, Apollo’s Angels has made for a consistently enjoyable reading experience; but things became interesting for me when the timeline arrived at Balanchine’s achievements. Reading Homans evoked distant memories of the period when I took out my first subscription to New York City Ballet (NYCB) performances in Lincoln Center.

At that time I was an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, majoring in mathematics and taking as many electives as I could manage in music courses. As I have previously observed on this site, my spare time (such as its was) was spent working at the campus radio station, devoting much of my time to programming twentieth-century music. As might be guessed, the mathematician in me was particularly drawn to techniques pursued by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern that involved permutations of pitch classes, leading eventually to what became known as the twelve-tone technique.

In that context I became totally hooked on Igor Stravinsky’s “Agon,” which he composed for a Balanchine ballet with the same title. For the better part of his life, Stravinsky wanted nothing to do with Schoenberg. However, after Schoenberg’s death, Stravinsky took an interest in atonal technique, possibly as a result of the influences of Robert Craft.

“Agon” fascinated me for the ways in which atonality rubbed shoulders with tonal traditions, traditions that, in this case, reflected back to the seventeenth century of René Descartes, Étienne Pascal, and particularly Marin Mersenne, whose Harmonie universelle treatise was published in 1636. It was the bold rhetoric of “Agon” than convinced me that I had to see how Balanchine had created a ballet for it. So it was that I began following Balanchine’s choreography both at Lincoln Center and in works that were performed by the Boston Ballet.

Thus, after about 500 pages of reading, I found myself scribbling no end of marginal notes when Homans wrote about “Agon.” She cited the ballet as the third part of a “Greek trilogy” of Balanchine working with Stravinsky’s music. The first two ballets, “Apollo” and “Orpheus,” were grounded in familiar narratives. In sharp contrast, “Agon” was inspired by a seventeenth-century treatise on the dance. What was important, however, was that such dances were intended for “recreational activities” taking place in the setting of a royal court; they were not created to present narratives.

In that context “Agon” had less to do with ancient myths and drew, instead, upon Balanchine’s abstract approach to Paul Hindemith’s composition for piano and strings involving a theme with four variations, given the subtitle “The Four Temperaments.” Balanchine’s choreography realized each of the dispositions associated with those variations (melancholy, sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric). However, there was also an underlying “vocabulary” for the entire ballet; and all of the elements of that vocabulary were assembled into the choreographic interpretation of Hindemith’s coda. As a result, it was no surprise to me to observe that the choreography for “Agon” also wraps up with a coda that reflects on the opening measures of Stravinsky’s score.

All this should reflect back on the thoughts about “Agon” that I documented back in June of 2020 when, due to pandemic conditions, I had turned to YouTube when I was unable to attend “physical” performances. At that time I had discovered that John Clifford had uploaded digitizations of films of NYCB performances. The “Agon” film had no end of technical shortcomings; but I made it a point to cite “the rich interplay of abstraction and expressiveness.”

Because of the close partnership between Balanchine and Stravinsky, one could appreciate the many intricacies of abstraction based on how Balanchine chose to interpret Stravinsky’s music. At the same time there is an underlying foundation of expressiveness coming from all of the dancers, reflecting not so much on Stravinsky’s music as on a rich understanding of what it means to bring Balanchine’s choreography to life through the act of performance. From my own point of view, I feel that mathematics provided me with a platform on which I could grasp the elements of of abstraction; and those elements, in turn, provided a second platform from which I could view the “parallel” elements of expressiveness.

This may well be the only setting in which mathematics can serve as a prerequisite for appreciating a ballet!

Karl Böhm’s Remastered SWR Recordings

courtesy of Naxos of America

At the end of this past February, SWR Classic released a six-CD collection of performances of Karl Böhm conducting the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, primarily in their preferred venue, the Liederhalle concert hall. Of the ten compositions performed in this collection, only one, Johannes Brahms’ Opus 68 (first) symphony in C minor, is a studio recording. All the others are recorded documents of “live” performances.

As might be guessed, six CDs account for a relatively limited repertoire. Furthermore, that repertoire is not particularly balanced, since two and a half of the CDs are devoted to three symphonies by Ludwig van Beethoven (Opus 26, the second, in D major, Opus 92, the seventh, in A major, and Opus 125, the ninth, in D minor), along with one piano concerto, Opus 58, the fourth in G major. Neither the vocal soloists nor the pianist are likely to be familiar to most readers; but, fortunately, the accompanying booklet provides brief introductions to all of them. The pianist (Branka Musulin) is also soloist in a recording of Robert Schumann’s Opus 54 concerto in A minor, taken from a performance at Waldheim in Degerloch, an outer district of Stuttgart.

Here in the United States Böhm is best known for his performances with the Metropolitan Opera. He made his debut in 1957 and conducted 262 performances there. Most important were the premiere performances of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck and two Richard Strauss operas, Ariadne auf Naxos and Die Frau ohne Schatten. He was also a leading figure at the Salzburg Festival, where he first appeared in 1938, after which he became a permanent conductor. Since all this happened when Adolf Hitler was in charge, Böhm had to complete a two-year denazification process after the end of World War II; and I suspect there are still a few that lift their eyebrows over his association with The Met.

That said, it is worth noting that one of the selections in the SWR collection is Paul Hindemith’s “Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber.” Given that he was included in the Nazi’s 1938 Entartete Musik (degenerate music) exhibition in Düsseldorf, it is clear that the Nazis were far less sympathetic to Hindemith than they were to Böhm. Nevertheless, this particular recording captures all of the wit behind Hindemith’s approach to metamorphosis. Whether is makes the entire collection “worth the price of admission” is left for the attentive listener to decide!

The Hindemith selection is the penultimate one in this collection. It is followed by a live recording of Anton Bruckner’s seventh symphony in E major. This is the one in which the second (Adagio) movement depicts the soul of Richard Wagner entering Heaven. Regardless of any opinions about Nazi influences, Böhm’s interpretation of that movement is likely to make any seriously attentive listener kvell, particularly when the climax involves the only use of cymbals and timpani in the entire symphony! That is reason enough for any serious listener to get to know this recent collection.

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.”

BBC Legends 3: Conductor Eugen Jochum

Conductor Eugen Jochum (1961 photograph by Jack de Nijs, from Wikimedia Commons, made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication)

Eugen Jochum was one of those conductors talked about at moderate length among the classical music announcers at WTBS back when it was the call letters for the campus radio station at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ironically, we did not give his recordings much exposure, because we did not have any of them! According to his Wikipedia page, his “strong suit” was the symphonies of Anton Bruckner with the orchestra music of Ludwig van Beethoven and Johannes Brahms tied for second place. In an unexpected vein, he was also the conductor on the first recording of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana cantata.

Jochum is the featured artist on the twelfth CD in the latest BBC Legends release. Given the context of the preceding paragraph, the “program” for this album is “something completely different.” There are three selections, the first two of which are late symphonies by Joseph Haydn: Hoboken I/100 in G major and Hoboken I/101 in D major. These have both been given titles: “Military” and “The Clock,” respectively. The final selection is Paul Hindemith’s “Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber.” The recordings for these performances were all made at the Royal Festival Hall. The Haydn symphonies were recorded with the London Philharmonic Orchestra on January 30, 1973, followed by the Hindemith performance with the London Symphony Orchestra on June 23, 1977.

Given the seriousness of Bruckner’s music, what may be most important about this album is that it has the most generous offering of wit (not to mention belly laughs) that I have encountered since I began my journey through this 20-CD collection. Of the two composers, Haydn is probably better known for his sense of humor; however, Hindemith’s approach to metamorphosis engaged a wit that was probably absent in his Weber sources. Nevertheless, it is important to observe that Jochum never tries to overplay any of the gags. His approach seems to be to grasp the dispositions of the two composers and then make sure that his ensemble accounted those dispositions in ways that would allow the audience to have reactions ranging from polite chuckles to overt belly laughs.

An Imaginative Karl Böhm at Lucerne Festivals

courtesy of Naxos of America

Where new recordings are concerned, the year got off to an unexpectedly imaginative start with the latest release by AUDITE Musikproduktion of live concert recordings from the Lucerne Festival. The album features Karl Böhm conducting the Vienna Philharmonic (VPO) in repertoire that departs significantly from what we tend to expect of him, either operas or the familiar symphonic repertoire of composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, and Johannes Brahms. Ironically, the two selections on the album were both recorded at performances on September 6; but they are six years apart. The earlier recording was made in 1964, a performance of Anton Bruckner’s seventh symphony. This is preceded on the album by the recording made in 1970 of Paul Hindemith’s concerto for woodwinds, harp, and orchestra.

The Hindemith concerto is likely to strike many as the bigger surprise. However, the composer and the conductor were very close contemporaries by birth; and, given how much attention Böhm gave to the operas of Alban Berg, his interest in Hindemith, albeit for symphonic music rather than opera, should not be too surprising. My guess is that Böhm’s interest was piqued by the instrumentation; or possibly he was persuaded by the VPO musicians who had few efforts to shine as soloists. The “beneficiaries” of this concerto were flutist Werner Tripp, oboist Gerhard Turetschek, clarinetist Alfred Prinz, bassoonist Ernst Pamperl, and harpist Hubert Jelinek. What may have “sealed the deal,” though, may well have been the raucous sense of humor that rules over the final (third) movement of this composition. Hindemith composed this music at the time of his silver wedding anniversary, and he seems to have decided to celebrate with an over-the-top loopy mashup of the themes from the wedding music that Felix Mendelssohn composed as incidental music for William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Nothing could be more different in spirit than the Bruckner symphony that follows. For those unfamiliar with this music, it is probably best known for the second movement, which is the longest of the four. Bruckner began work on this movement knowing that Richard Wagner was in poor health and would probably not live much longer. As a result, the instrumentation for this movement includes four Wagner tubas. It also includes cymbals and triangle, more than a little surprising for a composer whose interest in percussion rarely extended beyond the timpani. Those instruments appear at the movement’s climax, supposedly reflecting the fact that Bruckner had just learned of Wagner’s death and chose to depict his “heroic” entry into heaven. (The percussion instruments were actually suggested by Arthur Nikisch, who conducted the premiere performance by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra on December 30, 1884.)

The score that Nikisch used was never published. The first publication was prepared by Albert J. Gutmann in 1885, probably serving as the best possible document of the music as Nikisch had conducted it (including the “extended” percussion parts). However, it also reflected influences by Franz Schalk and Ferdinand Löwe.

By the time that Böhm conducted this music, two further editions had been published. The first of these appeared in 1944, prepared by Robert Haas, who was determined to work from the one autograph copy dating from 1883 and to eliminate all influences due to Nikisch, Schalk, and Löwe. The Haas edition is best recognized for the absence of all percussion in that second movement. Ten years later (in 1954), however, Leopold Nowak published a new edition that basically reversed all of Haas’ “improvements.” His only real change to the Gutmann edition was to put any changes in tempo from the version that was premiered in brackets. For his Lucerne performance Böhm went back to the Gutmann edition.

Many tend to shy away from Bruckner’s symphonies, complaining that his extended durations for most of the movements are excessive. Having listened to this particular symphony both in performance and on recording, I have to say that Böhm seems to have found the “sweet spot” that avoids just about any sense of excess. Mind you, 1964 was when Böhm was closely associated with the Metropolitan Opera’s performances of works by both Wagner and Richard Strauss. The conductor clearly knew how to manage the subjective reaction to extended durations, and his “tool kit” would have served him equally well in managing those durations in Bruckner.

To be fair, however, it is hard to avoiding thinking of Hindemith and Bruckner as “strange bedfellows” on this album; but what is more important is Böhm’s ability to guide the attentive listener through these decidedly different offerings without showing any sign of preferring one over the other.

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.

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.

Biddulph’s Uneven Survey of Primrose

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

According to its Wikipedia page, Biddulph Recordings was declared by Musical America to be “the best historical CD label in the world.” The organization was founded in 1989, and that undated quote may have been valid during at least the first half of the final decade of the twentieth century. However, there was a significant sea change during the second half of that decade, which saw the first signs of complete anthologies based on the historically significant archives dating back to the earliest recording sessions provided by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). (As some readers may recall, those sessions involved not only soloists but also orchestras led by conductor Arturo Toscanini.)

That “sea change” led to complete anthologies of violinist Jascha Heifetz, pianist William Kapell, and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. Even though there are overlaps among these three collections, I still value all of them equally enthusiastically. The one major RCA artist of the twentieth century that has not yet been anthologized is the violist William Primrose, who makes significant appearances in all three of those previously released anthologies. So it was that, this past November, I first became aware of Biddulph Recordings and decided to sample its treatment of Primrose through its recently released three-CD set entitled William Primrose: Critics’ Choices for Viola.

My initial reaction was one of wondering just who those critics were and why they made the choices they did. The booklet essay by Tully Potter did not address this issue; and no information was provided by Eric Wen, who produced the album. There were three overlaps with the RCA anthologies:

1. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 424 duo in B-flat major performed with Heifetz
2. Ernst von Dohnányi C major serenade performed with Heifetz and cellist Emanuel Feuermann
3. The viola version of the first of Johannes Brahms’ Opus 120 sonatas (originally composed for clarinet) in F minor with pianist Kapell

In all three of these cases the remastering by Mark Obert-Thorn was neither better or worse than the tracks in those earlier anthologies.

The remainder of the Biddulph collection is, at best, uneven. Several of the earlier offerings involve mistaken attributions and arrangements of variable quality. These occurred frequently when the recording industry was still coming up to speed; but it is hard to imagine the pastiche by Henri Casadesus, which he called a “Handel” concerto, being on any critic’s list of choices. Far more significant are the recordings of two twentieth-century sonatas, one by Arnold Bax in G major and the other by Paul Hindemith in F major, the fourth composition in his Opus 11 collection. Also of interest is that the offering of two short movements by Roy Harris entitled “Soliloquy” and “Dance” was performed by Primrose accompanied by Harris’ wife Johana (whom I had the good fortune to know when I was living in Los Angeles in the Eighties). The other major treasure in this collection is the performance of Brahms’ Opus 91, the so-called “alto songs,” featuring contralto Marian Anderson.

Nevertheless, as much as I wish to learn more about Primrose’s recording legacy, I would prefer to wait patiently until Sony decides to release a complete anthology of his RCA and Columbia recordings.

Ondine Completes “Kammermusik” Series

At the beginning of this month, Ondine released the second and final volume of the eight compositions that Paul Hindemith called “Kammermusik” (chamber music). Each of the four compositions is basically a concerto for a solo instrument and small ensemble. The fourth “Kammermusik” features the violin, the fifth is for viola, the sixth is for viola d’amore, and the seventh (and last) is for organ. The count of eight includes the “Kleine Kammermusik” (little chamber music) for wind quintet, which was included on the first volume.

Readers may recall that the first volume was released as initiating “a series dedicated to Paul Hindemith’s (1895–1963) chamber works.” Whether or not the series will now continue with the prodigious number of sonatas that Hindemith composed for a prolific number of instruments remains to be seen. The soloists on this second volume are, in “order of appearance,” Stephen Waarts (familiar to the Bay Area from his days as a child prodigy), Timothy Ridout, Ziyu Shen, and Christian Schmitt.

Photograph showing the sympathetic strings of a viola d'amore (uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Aviad2001, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

As was the case on the first volume, all four of the concertos sparkle with upbeat rhetoric. The virtuoso writing for the solo violin is finger-busting unto an extreme. However, the flood of technical challenges never seems to dampen Waarts’ high spirits. Nevertheless, the “main attraction” would have to be the viola d’amore concerto. This instrument dates from the baroque period and can be found in the scores of Johann Sebastian Bach. Somewhat in the spirit of a viol, it had six or seven strings for bowing. However, below those strings was a rank of “sympathetic” strings, tuned to reverberate with the bowed pitches. The result is a haunting sonority that served Bach particularly well in his BWV 245 setting of the Passion text from St. John.

Hindemith was passionate about this instrument and delighted in playing it himself. It should therefore be no surprise that he composed for it. For that matter, Hindemith also felt strongly about the viola; so both the fifth and sixth “Kammermusik” compositions are very much labors of love. However, spirits are consistently high across the entire album, suggesting that each of the compositions provides the opportunity for collegiality among its particular array of instrumentalists in complementing the energetic romps composed for the soloist. Once again, those instrumentalists are members of the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival Orchestra, led by conductor Christoph Eschenbach.

Ballet at its Most Structurally Sophisticated

Ever since my disappointment that the “Digital Spring Season” of the New York City Ballet (NYCB) accounted for George Balanchine’s “The Four Temperaments” by performing only the “Phlegmatic” movement, I have been craving to account for this ballet in its entirety. A month and a half later I have finally found the opportunity to do so. Now my problem is one of offering a viable report without devolving into excessive enthusiasm. Thus, I would like to begin by setting context with an old joke I picked up in my student days:

An elementary school teacher decided that it was time for her pupils to try writing book reports. Each pupil was given different book. The assignment was to read the book and then write a paper that summarized the pupil’s thoughts about the book. One pupil handed in a sheet of paper on which only a single sentence was written:

This book told me more about penguins than I would ever want to know.

The joke actually has a parallel in higher mathematics. During my studies as a mathematics major at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it seems as if every bookshelf I encountered had a copy of the Princeton University Press monograph Symmetry by Hermann Weyl. I thought it might be a fun read, particularly since it had a gallery of photographs illustrating different types of symmetry. Instead, it was a deep dive into Weyl’s specialty, abstract group theory; and it turned out to be one of the most challenging volumes I ever encountered. It did not take me long to avoid feeling that Weyl was telling me more about symmetry than I would ever want to know!

My guess is that Balanchine never heard of either Weyl or group theory as a branch of mathematics. Since “The Four Temperaments” was created in 1946, he certainly did not know about Weyl’s book, which was not published until 1952. Nevertheless, one might say that, in creating “The Four Temperaments,” Balanchine took his own deep dive into the many varieties of symmetry. Furthermore, the music he commissioned from Paul Hindemith, consisting of a theme and four variations for piano and string orchestra, served up its own elaborately interwoven structures and reflections.

Indeed, the structures in Balanchine’s choreography are best appreciated by first recognizing the musical structures that Hindemith provided him. To call this simply a “Theme and Four Variations” (which appears on the title page of the score) is to ignore how much more there is to the music’s structure. The theme itself is in three sections, each with its own distinctive melodic content. The first section is played by the strings, the second taken as a piano solo, and the third bringing together the full ensemble. That tripartite structure is then reflected in each of the “temperaments” variations: melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic, and choleric.

This symmetry of structure within structure is then reflected in the resources Balanchine assigns to the individual elements. Each of the three sections of the theme features duo work by a female and a male dancer. The second of the temperaments (sanguine) features a similar coupling. The other three involve solos, male for melancholic and phlegmatic and female for choleric. These solo and duo performances are then embedded into a wide variety of different approaches to establishing context with different combinations of corps dancers.

Readers may now see why I chose to begin with that penguin anecdote. I suspect that, by this time, many readers may feel that, in “The Four Temperaments,” Balanchine served up more thoughts about choreography and structure than one might ever want to know. Nevertheless, I encourage all those that have read this far to check out John Clifford’s YouTube upload of a 1964 Canadian film of NYCB performing “The Four Temperaments.” If there is any shortcoming in this film, it is the absence of cues that let the reader know which temperament the viewer is seeing at what time.

The only text Clifford provides accounts for the solo dancers for each of the three sections of the theme and each of the temperaments themselves. It would have been helpful if he had put in the time-stamp for each of those seven divisions. (If he ever reads this, perhaps he will take the trouble to update his site.) However, the contrasts that separate both the theme sections and those temperaments have been very well defined in Balanchine’s choreography. The only thing missing in Clifford’s summary is citation of the coda for the entire ballet, in which pretty much all of the choreographic motifs are brought together on the stage at the same time, providing a visual impression not unlike a view of the interconnections of the gears and springs in a pocket watch.

Beginning of the coda of “The Four Temperaments” (screen shot from the video being discussed)

Nevertheless, I should conclude by making it clear that this is no mere “choreographic machine.” All the soloists that have been named by Clifford bring a compellingly rich sense of humanity to Balanchine’s choreography. There is as much sense of a “human drama” unfolding in “The Four Temperaments” as there is in the poignancy of “Serenade.” Indeed, any viewer interested enough to revisit this video from time to time may well discover that, with each viewing, (s)he is more inclined to feel both wonderment and a lump in the throat during the ballet’s extraordinary coda.

Impressive Historical View, Tepid Spirit

The seventh program in the “Digital Spring Season” of the New York City Ballet (NYCB) served as a survey of five relatively short selections, most of them excerpts, three of choreography by George Balanchine. The other two featured the work of Jerome Robbins. All of the videos were captured during performances that took place between September of 2016 and  May of 2019. All but one of them were works I had previously seen in performance (not necessarily by NYCB).

If part of the objective behind the “Digital Spring Season” was to sample the many different aspects of Balanchine’s choreography, then this program provided particularly essential viewing. One of the selections is even based on my favorite Balanchine anecdote, documented in Bernard Taper’s 1960 biography:

A friend who went backstage to congratulate Balanchine after the première, in 1952, of Caracole, a ballet to the music of Mozart’s Divertimento No. 15, remembers finding Balanchine off to one side, by himself, in a kind of rapture. “Oh, that Mozart—that music!” he kept saying, and paid no heed to his admirer’s compliments on the wonders of his choreography.

That setting of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 287 would be entirely overhauled and performed on May 31, 1956 under the new title “Divertimento No. 15.”

The statement of Mozart’s theme in Balanchine’s “Divertimento No. 15” (screen shot from the video being discussed)

Unless I am mistaken, Balanchine dropped the second Menuetto movement from Mozart’s six-movement score. However, the high point of both the music and the choreography was the second movement; and Andante theme with six variations, almost all set as solo dances. I am not sure there has ever been any other piece of choreography that captures the spirit behind Mozart’s approach to writing variations as this one does. This is all the more impressive given the brevity of the theme itself, reminding at least some of my generation of Buckminster Fuller’s injunction that we all need to find ways of making more and more with less and less.

That said, the only real shortcoming of this movement is that it has to contend with the behavior of rabid balletomanes. Both theme and variations are models of the impact of brevity, so this is both music and choreography in which every instant counts. Nevertheless, there will always be those that cannot resist the urge to applaud enthusiastically at every skillful solo turn. Unfortunately, the choreography flows along with the pace of Mozart’s music; and pausing after each variation not only would be tedious but also would upset the flow Balanchine had conceived. Thus, the viewer of last night’s video had to contend with audience applause drowning out the music at the beginning of each following variation, even when that opening gesture is the one that defines the spirit of the choreography for that variation! Both Balanchine and Mozart deserve more respect, but audiences will be audiences.

Such overt enthusiasm was better suited to the final work on last night’s program, the final movement of Balanchine’s “Western Symphony,” set to an arrangement of cowboy songs prepared by Hershy Kay. The choreography is unabashed entertainment from a time of pride in a richly extroverted American spirit. While there is no shortage of solo work, the highlight of the choreography resides in how the size of the corps de ballet keeps growing and growing. At its core this ballet may be little more than foot-stomping spectacle, but Balanchine knew how to make a silk purse out of that spectacle.

The remaining Balanchine selection was the “Phlegmatic” movement from “The Four Temperaments.” Balanchine commissioned Paul Hindemith to write the score for this ballet, and the composer replied with what amounted to a concerto for piano and string orchestra. The ballet was first performed on November 20, 1946.

It is a perfect example of how Balanchine’s approach to the abstract could reflect the subtleties of personality traits, very much following in the spirit of “Serenade.” Each of the four personality types depicted in the ballet has its own unique representation in both music and dance. However, in contrast to the variations in “Divertimento No. 15,” there are geometric motifs through which the individual temperaments are integrated into the seamless unity of human nature itself. Last night’s account of the geometry could not have been more satisfying. Sadly, however, while male soloist Ask la Cour had a solid command of Balanchine’s steps, he never really conveyed any sense of the phlegmatic as a personal disposition. Balanchine always knew that there was more to his choreography than the steps, but this particular reconstruction never seemed to have captured just what that “more” was.

Robbins was represented by two works from different times in his career. The program began with the “Spring” movement from “The Four Seasons,” another ballet based on the music from Giuseppe Verdi’s operas. The choreography is abstract, coming across almost as a playbook of modern ballet patterns. Nevertheless, Robbins seemed more attuned to the spirit behind Verdi’s music than Balanchine was when he created “Ballo della Regina.”

Far more memorable is Robbins’ “Afternoon of a Faun,” which was first performed by Tanaquil LeClerq and Francisco Moncion on May 14, 1953. Robbins’ interpretation has nothing to do with Vaslav Nijinsky’s portrayal of an erotic faun or any of the earlier programmatic connotations of Claude Debussy’s music. Rather, it presents two dancers in a studio exercising their technical skills in front of a mirror, which is the “wall” between the audience and the stage. Nevertheless, for all of that abstraction, there are definitely erotic undertones in Robbins’ choreography. Sadly, those undertones never really registered in the duo work presented by Sterling Hyltin and Joseph Gordon; and this is yet another ballet in which getting the steps right is only a fraction of a convincing presentation.

Worldwide Violists Unite on YouTube

Last month’s report on a YouTube account of making music in cyberspace discussed how the New York Youth Symphony used video conferencing technology to perform an excerpt from the second movement of Gustav Mahler’s first symphony while practicing social distancing at the same time. Today I take pleasure in reporting on the launch of the Oneperbar YouTube channel presenting an alternative approach to uniting musicians from around the world in a shared performance of a single composition. Almost all of the contributors to this channel are violists, and their international distribution is an impressive one.

The name of the channel provides the basic explanation. Each performance is a movement from a composition that can be played by solo viola. That movement is “sliced” into individual measures, each of which is assigned to a different violist, whose performance of that measure is captured on video. Some uncredited editor (or editing team) then pieces together all of the fragments to present a smoothly executed account of the entire movement.

The project was launched with one of those selections that tends to be known only by violists, since there are so few recital opportunities at which to encounter it. The music was the first movement from the first of Max Reger’s three suites for solo viola (Opus 131d), composed in the key of G minor; and the video was posted on March 25. This was followed about a week and a half later by the most familiar of the selections currently on the channel, a performance of the opening (Prélude) movement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1007 (first) suite for solo cello. Those that have followed my writing for some time probably know by now that viola strings are tuned to the same pitches as those of the cello, only an octave higher; so the Bach suites are as amenable to viola performance as they are for the cello. This second video was posted on April 4.

The opening measures of Paul Hindemith’s Opus 25, Number 1 solo viola sonata (from IMSLP, public domain)

Only a few days later, on April 7, the third video appeared. This involved a far more ambitious selection, the third (Sehr langsam) movement from Paul Hindemith’s Opus 25, Number 1 sonata for solo viola. This selection presented the first effort to stretch the original “ground rules.” While the Bach prelude easily lends itself to measure-by-measure decomposition and the Reger movement can be similarly “sliced and diced,” the phrasing of the Hindemith movement is far more sophisticated. As a result, the torch was passed, so to speak, over less consistent intervals of duration, making the necessary effort to honor the phrases as the composer had conceived them, rather than a slavish commitment to the marks on paper. In addition, two of the segments were performed by cellists; and the final segment was played on the double bass (whose strings are tuned in fourths, rather than the fifths found on violas and cellos). The result was a significantly more imaginative approach to creating the video, which served up its own innovations to bring attention to the inventiveness encountered in Hindemith’s score.

All three of these videos take an imaginative approach to encourage attentive listening to each of these selections. All of the movements are performed at a relatively slow tempo. This tends to allow for smoother transitions from one player to another, as well as allowing each player to exercise some degree of personal expressiveness in his/her contribution. This is clearly not a “recital experience;” but it is still one that honors Bach, Reger, and Hindemith with informative listening opportunities.

Profil’s Anthology of Janigro on Cello

courtesy of Naxos of America

When I was growing up, my earliest awareness of the very idea of a chamber orchestra came from listening to Antonio Janigro and the Zagreb Soloists (called “I Solisti Zagreb” on their album jackets) on the radio. Janigro founded this group in 1953 under the auspices of Zagreb Radiotelevision and served as its conductor through 1968. I had no idea that he was a cellist until he performed as soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Fritz Reiner’s recording of Richard Strauss’ “Don Quixote.” I had pretty much forgotten about him until I received word that Profil would release a four-CD anthology of his performances entitled The Rare Cello Recordings.

This is one of those releases that Amazon.com seems to be recognizing only as a download product. The good news is that the product page includes the accompanying booklet; but that is only available if one purchases the entire collection, rather than selected tracks. Those interested in a physical copy will have to wait until a week from today, when it may be purchased through Presto Music, which is based in the United Kingdom but maintains dollar-based Web pages for American customers. The Web page for this recording supports purchase of the physical release and the download version.

The collection as a whole dwells heavily on the chamber orchestra repertoire featuring a solo cello part. Thus one encounters concertante music by Arcangelo Corelli, Antonio Vivaldi, Joseph Haydn, and Luigi Boccherini. However, the 1959 Reiner recording of “Don Quixote” is also included, along with a recording of Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 104 cello concerto in B minor with Erich Kleiber conducting the WDR Rundfunkorchester Köln.

More interesting are the chamber music offerings, particularly the performance of Johannes Brahms’ Opus 38 (first) sonata in E minor accompanied by Jörg Demus. Equally satisfying is Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 97 (“Archduke”) trio, performed with Jean Fournier on violin and Paul Badura-Skoda on piano. Beethoven is also represented by two of his five sonatas, Opus 69 in A major and the first of the Opus 102 sonatas in C major. Both of these were recorded with pianist Jan Natermann. Ironically, while this collection is supposed to be focusing on Janigro the cellist, it includes a Zagreb Soloists recording of Paul Hindemith’s Trauermusik (funeral music) suite, featuring viola soloist Stefano Passaggio.

Thus, taken as a whole, this is a collection of Janigro performances that is more than slightly less than modest. The recordings (at least most of them) may be rare; and they certainly present Janigro in a good light. Nevertheless, they are too sparse for serious listeners to appreciate his better qualities.

Ondine Launches Hindemith Recording Project

This past Friday Ondine released what it called “the first volume in a series dedicated to Paul Hindemith’s (1895–1963) chamber works.” It is unclear just what this project will encompass in its entirety. After all, while Hindemith may not have written a sonata for every instrument of the orchestra, he definitely took in the string section, the winds, and the brass (and then added viola d’amore for good measure). Then there are the chamber compositions for multiple instruments, including seven string quartets and two string trios.

Given the contents of the first volume, however, it looks like the first two releases will cover those compositions given the title “Kammermusik” (chamber music) by Hindemith. These are part of three published collections, two in Opus 24 (1922), four in Opus 36 (1924–5), and two in Opus 46 (1927). However, as Calum MacDonald (cited on the Wikipedia page for this collection) observed, these require more resources than are usually associated with chamber music. Only the second Opus 24 composition, entitled “Kleine Kammermusik” and scored for wind quintet, is on what would usually be called “chamber music scale.” The first Opus 24 “Kammermusik” is scored for flute, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, harmonium, piano, string quintet and percussion, while all of the Opus 36 and Opus 46 pieces are concertos, each for a different instrument.

The compositions included on the new Ondine release are the two Opus 24 pieces and the first two in the Opus 36 set, the latter being concertos for piano and cello. Christoph Eschenbach leads the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival Orchestra, which is joined by the Kronberg Academy Soloists. The concerto soloists are pianist Christopher Park and cellist Bruno Philippe.

From a personal point of view, my “first contact” with this collection was with “Kleine Kammermusik.” Since I lived in a suburb of Philadelphia, I had purchased an album of the Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet that included this piece. The group consisted of members of the Philadelphia Orchestra occupying the principal chairs of their sections: William Kincaid (flute), John de Lancie (oboe), Anthony Gigliotti (clarinet), Sol Schoenbach (bassoon), and Mason Jones (horn). (This group would later record Francis Poulenc’s sextet with Poulenc himself at the piano.)

The recording was a sheer delight. The overall rhetoric was upbeat and often downright comical. Even the introspective third movement (Ruhig und einfach) has a middle section that involves a prodigious repetition of a B minor triad, which is played by flute, (B-flat) clarinet, and horn (in F). However, the pitches of the triad keep bouncing from one instrument to another:

Excerpt from Hindemith’s “Kleine Kammermusik” (from IMSLP, public domain)

Those that know the music of Arnold Schoenberg may view this movement as a poke in that composer’s ribs with regard to the “Farben” movement in his Opus 16 set of orchestral pieces, completed in 1919, in which Schoenberg explored taking a single chord and having each pitch played by a sequence of different instruments.

In a similar vein, the overall rhetoric of the other four compositions tends to be upbeat. The only one of the pieces I had previously encountered was the first Opus 24 “Kammermusik,” which had been choreographed by a member of the Boston Ballet that I had come to know rather well during my graduate student days. My guess is that, like just about everyone else in the audience, I jumped out of my seat with the entry of a fire siren at the end of the final movement; and I am happy to report that this instance of “shock value” is as sure-fire as ever!

Where the concertos are concerned, I have to say that, when playing with a smaller ensemble, the soloist has the freedom to be less “competitive.” This is just as well, since the music that Hindemith wrote for solo performance tends to go over the top in the demands it imposes. In that context there is some sense that the small-scale ensemble is in a better position to be supportive of the soloist. The prevailing rhetoric says “We’re all in the same boat,” rather than having the ensemble say to the soloist, “You know, of course, that we are only here to make you look good!”

From that point of view, I shall take the liberty of taking issue with Hindemith’s choice of label: rather than calling these pieces “chamber” music, I would prefer to called them “collegial” music.

Another Delightful Visit from Janowski at Davies

Violin soloist María Dueñas (from the event page for this week’s SFS program)

As was observed about a week ago, October is the month of three conductors visiting the podium of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in Davies Symphony Hall. This afternoon the “leader of the pack” was Marek Janowski, whose repertoire tends to the traditional but whose interpretations are consistently imaginative and stimulating. The program for this week’s three concerts was a case in point, an overture-concerto-symphony offering organized around Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 64 violin concerto in E minor serving as a platform for the SFS debut of sixteen-year-old María Dueñas as soloist.

There is a tendency to view the Mendelssohn concerto as an “old reliable” selection that allows any up-and-coming soloist to display his/her capacity for the right balance of technical legerdemain with expressive interpretation. That reliability often leads to a here-we-go-again reaction from any informed listener concerned that (s)he may have experienced this concerto once too often. Fortunately, both Dueñas and Janowski seemed to agree on a path that would draw attention even among listeners that could probably play back Mendelssohn’s score in their sleep.

Janowski was particularly good at allowing each movement to flow seamlessly into its successor, presenting the whole as a well-oiled engine capable of shifting gears so smoothly that one barely notices the transitions. Nevertheless, both Janowski and Dueñas seemed to share a perspective of an underlying tension over the course of the entire journey. Thus, while Dueñas could sail through both the virtuoso passages and the lyrical thematic lines with an apparent sense of comfortable ease, there was a certain grittiness to her energetic bowing that made it clear that this would not be just another reading of an all-too-familiar concerto. The tension behind that grittiness also found its way into Janowski’s approach to leading the ensemble, reminding listeners that Mendelssohn was one of those nineteenth-century composers eager to honor the innovations of Ludwig van Beethoven but determined to find his own voice in doing so. All too often Mendelssohn’s music is dismissed as being too facile, but facility was definitely not part of the rhetorical stance shared this afternoon by Dueñas and Janowski.

The same could be said of Janowski’s approach to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for the symphony selection following the intermission. That selection was Mozart’s final symphony, K. 551 (“Jupiter”) in C major. This score abounds with a diverse variety of opportunities for interplay, not only between the strings and the rest of the instrumentation (flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, and timpani) but also among the five “voices” of the string section (two violins, viola, cello, and bass). Indeed, watching the string section and its engagement with Janowski often felt a bit like watching a string quartet taking on the more ambitious offerings from both Mozart and Joseph Haydn. Serious music students are familiar with K. 551 as a model for polyphonic composition, particularly when all the themes of the final movement are superposed during the coda of that movement. The rest of us can simply enjoy how much always seems to be going on at any given time with so much stimulation that Janowski’s decision to take all repeats could not have been more welcome.

For this visit Janowski turned to the twentieth century for his “overture” selection, presenting Paul Hindemith’s Opus 50, which he called “Konzertmusik for Brass and String Orchestra.” Those arriving early enough to listen to Peter Grunberg’s Inside Music Talk were given a foretaste not only of the imaginative approaches to writing for these two sections of the orchestra but also a sense of humor not always associated with Hindemith. One might almost say that the overall rhetoric oscillates between contentious arguments between the two sections followed by agreeable settlements upon a common ground. Furthermore, as is the case in K. 551, much of that rhetoric unfolds through skills in polyphonic writing that are often splendidly uncanny. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, too many performers tended to dismiss Hindemith for being too stale and academic; but the freshness of Janowski’s interpretation of the “Konzertmusik” made it clear that Hindemith had suffered a bad rap first from the serialists and then from the minimalists. I, for one, hope that the coming crop of conductors will learn a thing or two from Janowski’s insights!