David Oistrakh on Warner: Twentieth Century

In his Warner Remastered Edition box set, David Oistrakh’s attention to the twentieth century was about as modest as his late Romantic recordings. Readers may recall that this earlier category focused primarily on Johannes Brahms with two recordings each of two of his compositions. The good news about the twentieth-century repertoire is that there are no overlaps across the eight CDs.

Croatian conductor Lovro von Matačić (photographer unknown, from Wikimedia Commons, made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication)

As might be guessed, the composer to receive the most attention is Sergei Prokofiev, accounting for three of those CDs. He is represented by both of his violin concertos, Opus 19 in D major and Opus 63 in G minor, as well as his Opus 94bis (second) sonata in D major. Both of the concertos were recorded in London, the first with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Lovro von Matačić and the second with the Philharmonia Orchestra led by Alceo Galliera. Both of these are solid accounts, even if the conductors are not familiar to current listeners. The pianist for the sonata was Oistrakh’s usual accompanist, Vladimir Yampolsky. The CD of the first concerto begins with Max Bruch’s Opus 26 (first) concerto in G minor, making for a decidedly engaging compare-and-contrast experience.

The collection also affords a “Khachaturian family encounter.” Oistrakh’s account of Aram Khachaturian’s violin concerto in D minor was recorded with the Philharmonia Orchestra under the composer’s baton. More interesting is that the composer’s nephew Karen is included in this selection with a recording of his Opus 1 violin sonata (again with Yampolsky). There are two Russian composers of note, the earlier of which is Sergei Taneyev, whose Opus 28 Suite de concert is performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra under the baton of Nikolai Malko. More familiar is Dmitri Shostakovich, with his Opus 99 (first) concerto in A minor, performed by the New Philharmonia Orchestra led by Maxim Shostakovich.

Aside from Bruch, the only departure from the Russian repertoire is Jean Sibelius. Oistrakh performs his Opus 47 concerto in D minor with the Stockholm Festival Orchestra conducted by Sixten Ehrling. This is music that very much has a voice of its own. One might even say it deliberately resists Russian efforts to influence Finnish life. Oistrakh gives the concerto a solid account, but it would be fair to say that I have encountered more passionate interpretations from violinists more sympathetic to Finland than they were to Russia!

Anderson & Roe “Overlay” Familiar Classics

The piano duo of Greg Anderson and Elizabeth Joy Roe presented one of the last performances in Herbst Theatre before the lockdown conditions were imposed to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Their last recital for Chamber Music San Francisco (CMSF) took place on February 15, 2020. Last night they made their first “post-pandemic” CMSF appearance. As in the past, high spirits reigned over the course of the evening with their usual innovative twists on familiar repertoire selections.

Because those twists are anticipated by those that have attended past performances, they have given the technique a label. They assign the title “Overlay” to their imaginative techniques of embellishment. The two Overlay selections on last night’s program were applied to two of the pieces under Antonín Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances title. In “order of appearance,” those were the second (in E minor) from the Opus 72 collection and the fifth (in A major) from the Opus 46 collection. These made for a delightfully adventurous departure from the “original scores,” complete with each of the pianists adding some vocalizations.

These two selections were preceded by a “straight” account of “Silent Woods” the fifth composition in Dvořák’s Opus 68 collection, From the Bohemian Forest. A third Overlay provided the first encore of the evening, based on Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.” The other “unembellished” selection on the program was the first, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 448 sonata for two pianos in D major.

Nevertheless, the program abounded with richly developed accounts of music from a variety of genres. More often than not, embellishment was a matter of “pulling out all the stops” (so to speak), as in rethinking the final movement of Mozart’s K. 331 piano sonata in A major into “Ragtime alla Turca.” Particularly impressive was their ability to command the rich orchestration of the “Daybreak” episode from Maurice Ravel’s score for the ballet “Daphnis et Chloé.” Ironically, the was the one piece on the program that involved an arranger other than Anderson and/or Roe. Vyacheslav Gryaznov took on Ravel’s score, but Anderson and Roe took on his transcription with jaw-dropping technique.

The duo could also deliver a subtle insight or two in their own arrangements. They closed out their program with four selections from Leonard Bernstein’s score for West Side Story. However, they were not afraid to remind listeners that “Somewhere” was a product of not-so-subtle appropriation. For those that thought the music was Bernstein’s own invention, Anderson and Roe were helpful by providing an interjection of the passage from Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 73 (fifth, know as “Emperor”) piano concerto in E-flat major that “inspired” that upward leap that began the “Somewhere” tune. (As Johannes Brahms said, “Das bemerkt ja schon jeder Esel!”)

The third Overlay was followed by two more encores. The first of these presented the duo at its most lyrical in their arrangement of “Mondnacht” (moon night), the fifth song in Robert Schumann’s Opus 39 Liederkreis song cycle. The was the calm before the stormy no-holds-barred account of the “Sabre Dance” movement from Aram Khachaturian’s score for the ballet Gayane.

Mitropoulos in Twentieth-Century Europe

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

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

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

• Hostianos
• Kleftikos
• Peloponnisiakos
• Epirotkos

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

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

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

Alto’s Frustrating David Oistrakh Anthology

courtesy of New Sounds Consulting

A little less than a month ago, Ukrainian violinist Igor Oistrakh died at the age of 90. Sadly, word seems to have reached this side of the Atlantic Ocean only earlier this month, which is yet another sign of the extent to which his talents have been overlooked. This was due to the fact that his father was David Oistrakh, who was such a major presence in the Soviet Union that he enjoyed more opportunities for travel than just about any Soviet citizen that was not in the diplomatic service (either explicitly or “under cover”). There is thus a certain amount of irony in the fact that Alto released a ten-CD collection of David Oistrakh playing 24 different violin concertos on a date that was so close to Igor’s death.

To be fair, I would not want to detract from the older Oistrakh’s reputation for no better reason than “bad timing.” As violinists go he had a repertoire so extensive that, in some respects, his recording legacy was comparable to that of the abundance of sessions that Jascha Heifetz made with RCA. Furthermore, while the Alto recordings capture Oistrakh performing in Vienna, London, Paris, and even Philadelphia; Heifetz never performed as a visiting artist in the Soviet Union.

As a result, the Alto collection provides a rich account of not only the extensive diversity of Oistrakh’s repertoire but also the breadth of the many different ensembles and conductors with whom he worked. Furthermore,  his achievements were as important in his own “immediate present” as they were in his interpretations of music from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus, both of the violin concertos that Dmitri Shostakovich composed, as well as Aram Khachaturian’s only violin concerto, were dedicated to him; and, in this collection, the recording of that latter concerto was conducted by the composer.

Given the richness of content in Alto’s anthology, it is more than a pity that the music itself should be so poorly packaged. One can appreciate that, in the interest of economy, Alto should direct listeners to a URL, should they wish to consult the booklet prepared for the release. However, the PDF that I downloaded numbered all of the tracks from 1 to 48 with no indication of which tracks were associated with which CD! Also, because many readers know how historically-minded I am, I find the lack of dates associated with all of the performances to be an unpardonable sin.

My guess, however, is that most readers will not pick as many nits as I do in these matters. Nevertheless, I suspect that readers that take their listening seriously will find Oistrakh’s Wikipedia page to be far more satisfying in content, particularly when it comes to establishing the context for many of the selections included in the Alto anthology. Alternatively, one may wish to ignore everything but the music itself, in which case one is likely to be more than consistently satisfied with the ten CDs in this collection.

Pine Presents Concertos Worthy of More Attention

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

At the beginning of this month, Avie Records released its latest album featuring violinist Rachel Barton Pine. The album is devoted to two concertos, both of which get less attention than they deserve. These are presented in chronological order, beginning with Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 53 concerto in A minor, which always seems to lurk in the shadows behind the far more popular Opus 104 cello concerto in B minor. This is followed by the violin concerto composed by Aram Khachaturian, who, ironically, was born one year before the year of Dvořák’s death (1904). This was actually a moderately popular concerto during my student days in Cambridge, Massachusetts; but that may have been due to the strong Armenian community in neighboring Watertown.

On this album Pine performs with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, conducted by Teddy Abrams. Abrams was born in Berkeley and began studying with Michael Tilson Thomas in San Francisco at the age of twelve. He dropped out of the public school system prior to middle school but received a Bachelor’s degree from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music at the age of eighteen, after which he studied conducting at the Curtis Institute of Music. My first listening encounter came when he conducted the annual program of music by Ludwig van Beethoven for the Summer and the Symphony San Francisco Symphony series in July of 2013. He is currently Music Director and Conductor for the Britt Music & Arts Festival Orchestra.

My first recital encounter with Pine took place when she appeared as a guest in The Artist Sessions, an occasional series of “close encounters between musicians and audiences” organized by pianist Lara Downes. Prior to that, I had written on Examiner.com about her performance on the Native Informant album in the Naxos American Classics series featuring works by Arab-American Mohammed Fairouz. As a result, this recent album provided my first encounter with Pine’s concerto work.

As may be inferred from my opening paragraph, I tend to greet any opportunity to listen to either of these concertos as a welcome one. If I have a preference, it is for the Dvořák, perhaps because I am beginning to feel a bit saturated with the cello concerto! Both Pine and Abrams clearly relish the Czech influences in the composer’s rhetoric, even if the thematic material is not as “folk based” as it is in other compositions. Khachaturian’s Armenian rhetoric is more straightforward. Nevertheless, the almost incessant repetition of the opening motif may well be a prankish nod to the repetitive opening of Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 10 piano concerto in D-flat major. (Prokofiev completed that concerto in 1912, while Khachaturian composed his concerto in 1940.)

Taken as a whole, this is a thoroughly enjoyable album, which is likely to enjoy future listening encounters while I wait for opportunities to listen to both of these concertos in concert performances!

Carr-Petrova Duo’s Refugee-Inspired Debut Album

from the Web page for the album being discussed

The Carr-Petrova Duo brings violist Molly Carr together with pianist Anna Petrova. They began playing together as students at both the Juilliard School and the Manhattan School of Music. In August of 2018 they became involved in the non-profit organization Project: Music Heals Us and launched an interdisciplinary project called the Novel Voices Refugee Aid. Their debut album Novel Voices is named after this project and is scheduled for release this Friday. As of this writing, the best place to arrange for pre-ordering is through the Web page for the album created on the duo’s Web site.

The album is also named after its final selection, which is being given its world premiere recording. Written by Mexican composer Fernando Arroyo Lascurain, “Novel Voices” is a three-movement “tune without words” that reflects on encounters with children in refugee camps. The titles of the movements are “Stories and Dreams,” “Dance of Uncertainty,” and “Call and Prayer;” and they reflect the stories at the different camps visited by both the performers and the composer.

The other selections are somewhat variable as reflections on the album’s title. The first selection is the “Lullaby” movement from Aram Khachaturian’s score for the four-act ballet Gayane, a narrative about an Armenian “woman warrior,” which was first performed by the Kirov Ballet in December of 1942. Carr and Petrova prepared their own arrangement of Khachaturian’s music. They also play a sonata by Mieczysław Weinberg that reflects on his flight from Poland to the Soviet Union in the wake of Hitler’s invasion of his country of birth. This Opus 28 clarinet sonata, composed in 1945, was arranged for viola by Julia Rebekka Adler, making it much earlier than the solo viola sonatas discussed on this site last month.

The remaining selection is probably one of the best-known viola sonatas from the twentieth century, composed by Rebecca Clarke for a composition competition sponsored by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. There was a fair amount of push-back by those that believed that such extensive and progressive music could not possibly have been composed by a woman. Back when she was on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, violist Jodi Levitz championed this piece, consistently giving it an introduction in the form of a wry reflection on male opinions of female composers.

All the selections on this album are given perfectly acceptable accounts. Whether or not they are interpretations that will engage the curious listener is another matter. This is not to suggest a lack of expressiveness on the part of either Carr or Petrova. Rather, I tend to react cautiously to music that is presented in a context of social issues when it is perfectly capable of standing on its own in a recital setting. On the other hand the duo is certainly worthy of attention; and, if politicization serves to draw that attention, then perhaps they are working with a valid strategy.

Decca Honors Szeryng Centennial with 44 CDs

from the Amazon.com Web page for this recording

Polish violinist Henryk Szeryng was born in Warsaw on September 22, 1918, making this part of the centennial year of his birth. He made his solo debut with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra on January 6, 1933, playing Johannes Brahms’ Opus 77 violin concerto in D major. However, his career in Poland was interrupted by World War II.

He was invited by Władysław Sikorski, Premier of the Polish government in exile, to serve as his liaison officer and interpreter. This included a trip to Mexico in 1941 in an effort to resettle 4000 Polish refugees. Szeryng was so impressed by the country’s efforts that he decided to become a naturalized citizen there, and his citizenship was granted in 1946. Beginning in 1945 he led the String Department at the National University of Mexico.

Following the War, Szeryng’s career escalated on an international scale. Arthur Rubinstein introduced him to Sol Hurok; and the rest, as they say, is history. To honor the centennial of his birth, Decca compiled a 44-CD box set collecting all of the recordings that Szeryng made for Philips, Mercury, and Deutsche Grammophon (DG). The repertoire for these recordings is, for the most part, traditional, beginning with Johann Sebastian Bach but with a “center of gravity” firmly rooted in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, in May of 1988 he had a session with DG to record Alban Berg’s violin concerto, suggesting that he was always interested in expanding his repertoire.

As is usually the case with these major anthologies, I try to segment the content into “meaningful chunks.” The most appropriate segmentation is by record label, but it is not particularly balanced. The first 29 of the 44 CDs are devoted to Philips recordings, the first of which were made in 1966. Szeryng began recording with Mercury in 1962, but only seven CDs resulted. The DG sessions began in 1968 and resulted in eight CDs. I shall use those dates of first recording sessions to order the way in which I approach the labels, meaning that this article will deal with the Mercury sessions, followed by Philips and DG in that order.

Szeryng’s Mercury sessions took place when one of that label’s leading conductors was Antal Doráti. As a result, three of the CDs in this portion of the collection are concerto performances made with Doráti conducting the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO). These include revisiting his “debut concerto” by Brahms, as well as Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 35 concerto in D major, Aram Khachaturian’s D minor concerto, Robert Schumann’s WoO 23 concerto in D minor, and Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 64 concerto in E minor. (This is the first CD release of the Tchaikovsky concerto.) In addition, Szeryng recorded two concerto performances with Gennady Rozhdestvensky conducting the LSO, Jean Sibelius’ Opus 47 in D minor and Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 63 (second) concerto in G minor. The CD of those two concertos is receiving its first international release.

Also receiving its first release on CD is the one Bach album in the collection of the “usual” three concertos: BWV 1041 in A minor, BWV 1042 in E major, and BWV 1043, the “double” concerto in D minor. Szeryng himself leads the Collegium Musicum Winterthur. The second violinist in the performance of BWV 1043 is Peter Rybar.

On the remaining two CDs Szeryng is accompanied by pianist Charles Reiner at recording sessions made in New York. These might be classified as “encore albums;” but that would be too dismissive. One is devoted entirely to compositions by Fritz Kreisler, and each of the thirteen tracks offers a vivid reminder that there was far more to Kreisler than merely showing off technique. Indeed, one encounters a sense of deep affection in Szeryng’s performances that tends to be lacking in any of those “Historic Recordings” of Yehudi Menuhin in the mammoth Warner Classics The Menuhin Century collection. The other CD offers a wide diversity of shorter selections, almost all of which are arrangements. Indeed, one of the most interesting of those arrangements is of Brahms’ F-sharp minor Hungarian dance made by Kreisler.

Those who have followed this site for some time may have noticed that I tend not to “deep end” on violinists the way they I do on cellists. The fact is that, for better or worse, Jascha Heifetz continues to have a firm lock on my interest in the violin repertoire; and Warner’s Menuhin project did little more than reinforce my allegiance to Heifetz. To be fair, however, the DVD box in that Warner collection has some fascinating footage of a very young Doráti performing with a very young Menuhin, both at the piano and conducting the “Symphony Orchestra of Hollywood.” I find my encounters with Doráti recordings to be consistently satisfying; and, when it comes to his work with Szeryng, I find the chemistry between them to be utterly irresistible! Indeed, I would say that their partnership on the Schumann concerto makes it clear how undeservedly neglected this composition is.

Oscar Levant as Concerto Soloist

I decided to make a slight departure from my plan for covering the recordings made by pianist Oscar Levant for Columbia Records, collected in the eight-disc anthology A Rhapsody in Blue; the extraordinary life of Oscar Levant, by devoting a single article to the fifth and sixth CDs. The “titles” of these discs simply enumerate the composers included, which misses the significance of their contribution. What is important is that these discs present the only recordings of Levant’s concerto performances other than his classic record of George Gershwin’s concerto on the very first CD.

This “concerto collection” offers an intriguing mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar. The fifth CD offers two of the long-standing warhorses in the piano concerto repertoire, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 23 (first) in B-flat minor and Edvard Grieg’s Opus 16 in A minor. The sixth CD contrasts these “standards” with concertos one is unlikely to encounter at concert performances (or, for that matter, on recordings), Aram Khachaturian’s Opus 38 in D-flat major and Anton Rubinstein’s Opus 70 (fourth) in D minor. The fifth CD also includes a performance of Arthur Honegger’s E major concertino, his only composition for piano and orchestra, which he composed in 1924 after his career as a composer had been established.

The conductor for both the Khachaturian and Rubinstein concertos is Dimitri Mitropoulos. The recordings were made relatively early in his career with the New York Philharmonic (then the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York). The Khachaturian recording was made in 1950, when Mitropoulos was co-conductor with Leopold Stokowski, while the Rubinstein recording was made in 1952, after he had become Music Director. The “New York band” also appears in the recording of the Grieg concerto, made in 1947 with Efrem Kurtz conducting. Levant plays the Tchaikovsky with Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1947, while the Honegger is conducted by Fritz Reiner. That recording was made in 1949 when Reiner was conducting at the Metropolitan Opera. The ensemble for the concertino is given as the “Columbia Symphony Orchestra,” which was probably a pickup group that may have included members of the Met orchestra familiar with Reiner’s conducting style.

Photograph of Fritz Reiner from the time of his recording with Oscar Levant (from Amazon.com)

Nevertheless, that short Honegger selection stands out as the jewel in the “concerto crown,” so to speak. Levant certainly gives competent accounts of Tchaikovsky and Grieg; but there is not the sense of his own “personal spin” than one encounters in many of his solo Chopin performances. The Honegger performance, on the other hand, is a breath of fresh air; and that freshness probably has a much to do with Reiner (a fearless advocate of modernism past and present) as with Levant. To be fair Mitropoulos was also an adventurous conductor. (His Columbia recording of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck may have had obvious flaws; but he never short-changed the uncompromisingly visceral rhetoric.) However, there is little adventure than can be mined from either Rubinstein (Tchaikovsky’s composition teacher) or even the Armenian vigor behind much of the Khachaturian score. On these two CDs the best things come in the smallest package.

Levant’s International Survey on Columbia

The title of the third CD in the eight-disc anthology A Rhapsody in Blue; the extraordinary life of Oscar Levant, collecting all of his recordings for Columbia Records, is Oscar Levant Plays the Music of German, Russian and American Composers. The country that receives the most attention is Germany, with music by Ludwig van Beethoven, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Richard Wagner. Russia is represented by Sergei Rachmaninoff and Aram Khachaturian. (Strictly speaking, Khachaturian is Armenian; but he was born in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. At the time of his birth, he was a citizen of the Russian Empire and became a Soviet citizen following the Revolution. He studied at the Moscow Conservatory and subsequently taught there. Like his colleagues Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich, he was subjected to the vagaries of the Soviet authorities. Rachmaninoff, on the other hand, left Russia after the Revolution, eventually ending up in the United States.) Levant is one of the two American composers on the disc, the other being Aaron Copland.

As was the case with Oscar Levant Plays Popular Moderns, most of the selections on this CD are relatively short, recorded with consideration for the duration of a single side of a 78 RPM record. Among the German selections, some are short enough to allow two of them to fit on a single side. This is the case, for example, with the coupling of the penultimate of Brahms’ sixteen Opus 39 waltzes (in the key of A-flat major) with “Träumerei” (dreams), the seventh movement from Robert Schumann’s Opus 15 suite Kinderszenen (scenes from childhood).

Consequently, the longest selection on the CD is the second of Beethoven’s Opus 27 sonatas in C-sharp minor, best known by the name “Moonlight.” This would have had a “sales draw” based on the popularity of both the music and the pianist. While the sonata is associated with any number of “higher class” pianists, Levant still deserves his place among the vast population of interpreters. This is much more than a mere accounting of the notes, and he clearly had his own approach regarding how the phrases should be shaped. There is also no evident sign that his Columbia producers were obliging him to keep one eye on the clock while he was playing. Equally impressive is his account of the second movement of the Opus 13 (“Pathétique”) sonata in C minor, making one wish for some document of how he played the outer movements.

Original 78 RMP packaging of music form the film Humoresque, with clips from the film (from Amazon.com)

The “wild card” among the German selections involves Wagner. This involves Levant performing with violinist Isaac Stern in an arrangement by Franz Waxman of music from Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. Waxman is conducting a studio orchestra, because he prepared this music for the soundtrack of the 1946 Warner Bros. film Humoresque, a torrid account of a romance between an aspiring young violinist (John Garfield) and his older patroness (Joan Crawford). (Levant appeared in this film in the role of the violinist’s accompanist.) The plot involves the violinist preparing a transcription of the “Liebestod” for a concert performance; and we hear that music while watching Crawford drown herself in the Pacific Ocean. As might be guessed, Stern is the center of musical attention on this track, while Levant acquits himself dutifully along with all of the other (anonymous) studio musicians.

The Khachaturian selections, both excerpts from his Gayane ballet (one being the notorious “Sabre Dance”) are also performed with an orchestra, identified only as the Columbia Concert Orchestra. This is what is usually called a “pickup group;” and it is conducted by Lou Bring, who was probably one of the conductors working on recordings for soundtracks. Of greater interest is his approach to three Rachmaninoff preludes, two from the Opus 23 set (the third in D minor and the sixth in E-flat major) and the fifth (in G major) in the Opus 32 set. Note the absence of the “notorious” C-sharp minor prelude (the second in the Opus 3 collection). Levant was clearly more interested in the musical value than in mass approval. One wonders whether Rachmaninoff himself ever heard Levant play and what he thought about Levant’s pedal-heavy approach to the E-flat major selection.

Levant’s own composition, the very last track on the CD is “Blue Plate Special.” This probably would have been called a “novelty” piece when it was first released. It is basically a comic tone poem in miniature depicting a hash house in the midst of its daily lunchtime rush. Nevertheless, rhetorically it is far more convincing than the excerpts from Copland’s “Billy the Kid” ballet arranged for solo piano by Lukas Foss. This is music that thrives on Copland’s ability to take simple tunes and endow them with vibrant life through instrumentation. When they are just tunes they can do little more then prompt memories among those who have seen the ballet in performance.

Adventures in New Listening

Considering the scope of my listening experience, it is very rare that I come across a program that covers a period from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century in which I am familiar with only one composition. Even more curious is when that one composition is one with which I have become only recently acquainted, Amy Beach's Opus 67 piano quintet in F sharp minor. However, this particular program came from last night's Graduate Viola Recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music; and my entire knowledge of the Beach quintet comes from two performances (one professional, one student) that I previously heard at the Conservatory. Furthermore, some of the oddity of the evening was blunted by the fact that the Beach performance was actually a repeat of the student performance I heard last November. There is little I can add to my past writing about both the composition and the students who performed it, other than the obvious observation that this is a work that deserves to be performed more frequently. The only thing that may bear repeating is that, probably only by virtue of my own listening experience, performances of this quintet continue to tweak my memories of Edward Elgar's piano quintet. However, Elgar wrote his quintet in 1919, about a dozen years after Beach completed hers; and it is hard to imagine his having been influenced by it. Had he, for example, visited the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, we would have known about this from some biographical account; but there does not appear to be any evidence of his having been in North America. Indeed, Elgar's most serious connection to the United States probably came from Yehudi Menuhin, who recorded Elgar's violin concerto with Elgar conducting. However, Menuhin was born in 1916; and, for all his reputation as a child prodigy, it is hard to imagine his having influenced Elgar's composition work in 1919, even in the extremely unlikely event that he had heard Beach's music while still in utero! (For the record, while Menuhin was raised in San Francisco, he was born in New York.)

Returning from this digression, however, the most important aspect of last night's recital was the framing of the entire program. It began with two miniatures for viola and piano by a composer sitting in the audience (Sahba Aminikia) and concluded with the Opus 1 (a string quartet in D major) by a composer (Josif Andriasov) who died in 2000 but was represented by a thorough set of program notes by his musicologist widow (Marta Andriasova-Kudryashova). Both of these composers received their initial music education in Russia, Aminikia at the St. Petersburg State Conservatory and Andriasov at the Peter I. Tchaikovsky Moscow Conservatory. Andriasov was born in Moscow to an Armenian family, while Aminikia was born in Tehran. While the two composers were separated by half a century, they both vividly illustrated Robert Mann's precept that a composer is best understood in terms of the music to which he has been exposed; and, in this case, there could well have been a common exposure that could be traced back to origins along the banks of the Caspian Sea. Both compositions captured a certain "Armenian spirit," which is probably best associated with Aram Khachaturian but was displayed in a more "earthy" rendering than Khachaturian ever delivered. Indeed, Aminikia seemed more interested in capturing the sound qualities of these folk sources, rather than the tunes themselves, which would put him closer to Béla Bartók than to Khachaturian. Furthermore, Aminikia is currently a graduate student in composition at the Conservatory; and this was the first performance of his miniatures. So this was probably a case of one student composing for another and probably working closely together on this emphasis on the nature of the sound itself.

The "other end of the time-line," so to speak, was represented by the Opus 94 of Johann Nepomuk Hummel. What the program listed as a fantasy for viola and orchestra is probably what (according to Wikipedia) the British Library Integrated Catalogue calls his "Potpourri for Viola and Orchestra," based on "Il mio tesoro." Many of us gave our first serious listening to Hummel when Wynton Marsalis recorded his trumpet concerto, and this work made it clear that Hummel was a great admirer of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Its first movement seemed to take the first movement of the K. 385 ("Haffner") symphony and turn it on its head, while its second movement came off as a fantasy on the second movement of the K. 467 piano concerto. Thus, it was no surprise that Hummel would have also turned to Don Giovanni for inspiration; and, since the viola is the "tenor" of a string quartet, what better source than the most famous tenor aria from the opera? In many respects this work can be heard as a harbinger of the sort of salon music that would flourish throughout the nineteenth century, much of which involved such homages to the spirit of the preceding century.

Similarly, Max Bruch's Opus 85 romance for viola and orchestra may be heard as a reflection on Ludwig van Beethoven's two similarly-titled works for violin and orchestra (Opera 40 and 50); but Bruch's work is anything but a mere homage. Rather, it is likely the work of a composer who, like Johannes Brahms, had to live with the influence of Beethoven without succumbing to that influence. Bruch's result certainly exhibited a unique voice, which served the voice of the viola as well as his more popular works for violin and cello served those respective instruments.

Finally, after the Andriasov quartet the evening concluded with an encore. The string quartet returned to perform Astor Piazzolla's "Four for Tango," which he had composed for the Kronos Quartet in 1987. Piazzolla provided a sharp contrast to that "Caspian" sound that began and ended the formal program; but it also ended the evening with a playful gesture, which always makes for good programming!