Agustin Hadelich Makes his SFP Debut

Agustin Hadelich and his accompanist, Francesco Piemontesi (from the SFP Web page for last night’s performance)

Last night violinist Agustin Hadelich made his debut with San Francisco Performances (SFP) as a soloist in the Shenson Great Artists & Ensemble Series. Many readers may recall having seen him in Davies Symphony Hall, where he made his last visit in November of 2023, when he was the soloist in the San Francisco Symphony performance of Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 53 violin concerto in A minor. For his visit to Herbst Theatre, he was joined at the piano by Francesco Piemontesi for a program structured around three sonatas for violin and piano. In “order of appearance,” the composers were Claude Debussy, Francis Poulenc, and César Franck.

Each of these sonatas was preceded by a sharply contrasting composition. Debussy’s sonata followed “Récit du chant de l’hymne précédent” (recitative on the melody of the preceding hymn), composed in the late seventeenth century by Nicolas de Grigny, organist at the Notre-Dame de Reims cathedral. Poulenc was preceded by Jean-Philippe Rameau with a selection from his Pièces de Clavecin en Concert collection. Finally, the concluding Franck sonata followed the most recent work on the program, a set of three short pieces by György Kurtág composed in 1979.

It would be fair to say that the overall breadth of the program was balanced by the depth of each of the sonatas. The fact is that the only thing the sonatas had in common was an association with the history of French music. That said, Hadelich knew how to evoke just the right rhetorical interpretations for each of those sonatas; and, where Poulenc was concerned, Piemontesi seemed to be enjoying himself as much as Hadelich. Taken as a whole, this was a “no frills” program; but both soloist and accompanist knew exactly how to mine engaging rhetoric from each of the selections. Just as engaging was the encore entitled simply “C.” This was an arrangement for violin and piano of the first piece in Poulenc’s vocal work, Deux poèmes de Louis Aragon.

Hadelich always gives the impression that he enjoys visiting San Francisco, and I am glad to acknowledge that I have enjoyed every one of my encounters with him.

Modigliani Quartet Returns with More Beethoven

When the Paris-based Modigliani Quartet made its San Francisco Performances (SFP) debut in April of 2023, they focused on the First Viennese School by coupling an early string quartet by Ludwig van Beethoven, the third (in the key of D major) of his six Opus 18 quartets, with Franz Schubert’s D. 810 quartet in D minor, best known for its set of variations on the theme from his D. 531 “Der Tod und das Mädchen” (Death and the maiden) song. Last night they returned to Herbst Theatre for their second SFP recital with another First Viennese School program. This time Beethoven was coupled with his Viennese School predecessor (and teacher), Joseph Haydn; and the ensemble is still led by first violinist Amaury Coeytaux, joined by violinist Loïc Rio, violist Laurent Marfaing, and cellist François Kieffer.

György Kurtág (from Wikimedia Commons)

The two composers were situated on either side of the intermission. Haydn was represented by the second quartet, in F major, in the Opus 77 “Lobkowitz” collection (Hoboken III:82). The intermission was then followed by the last of the three string quartets, in the key of C major, in Beethoven’s Opus 59, composed on a commission by Count Andreas Razumovsky. These two significant “sign-posts” of “the classical style” (with a nod to Charles Rosen) were preceded by music by the one living composer on the program. That composer was György Kurtág, who will turn 100 this coming February 19. The selection was “Homage à Andràs Mihàly: 12 Mikroludien für Streichquartett,” the composer’s Opus 13.

This selection presented Kurtág at his most playful. Only half of the pieces were given specific tempo markings. However, because each was brief (“mikro”), there was little opportunity to establish much of a sense of tempo. One might almost say that the Modigliani players selected this piece to “warm up” audience attention for the compare-and-contrast approach to the coupling of Haydn and Beethoven. Personally, I relish any opportunity to listen to Kurtág’s music, my most recent encounter being baritone Benjamin Appl’s Alpha album Lines of Life, which interleaved Kurtág songs with those of Franz Schubert. Last night Kurtág’s music did not interleave with the First Viennese School, but it certainly knew how to get the audience to sit up and take notice!

The Razumovsky quartet was followed by an encore of more Beethoven. The Modigliani players turned back the clock to Opus 18, playing the second movement (Adagio affettuoso ed appassionato), composed in the key of D minor, from the first of those six quartets in F major. This could not have been a better choice for sending the audience on its way with a feeling of satisfaction!

harmonia mundi to Release New Ligeti Album

György Ligeti is one of those composers that intrigued me upon “first contact,” which, in my case, was “Atmosphères.” Leonard Bernstein recorded his performance with the New York Philharmonic shortly after having given the New York premier with the New York Philharmonic early in 1964. My interest was reinforced when the music surfaced in the soundtrack for 2001: A Space Odyssey; and, for all I know, Kubrick used the Bernstein recording after having rejected the original score that Alex North had composed for him. Fortunately, my awareness of Ligeti was reinforced by conductors that understood him better, such as Pierre Boulez and the pianist Yuja Wang, who included three of his études in her Berlin Recital album. 

György Ligeti on the cover of the album being discussed

The end of this month will see the release of a new harmonia mundi album devoted almost entirely to Ligeti. It will begin with his five-movement violin concerto (first conducted in its final version by Boulez) and conclude with his piano concerto, also in five movements. In the center of the program, so to speak, there is a performance of one of his earliest works, the “Concert românesc,” completed in 1951. Scored for a small orchestra, this amounts to an engaging account of “Ligeti before he became Ligeti!” Interleaved among the three Ligeti selections are two of the five Aus der Ferne compositions by György Kurtág, scored for string quartet.

The primary soloist on this album is violinist Isabel Faust, since she performs the Aus der Ferne movements as well as the violin concerto. The other quartet members are violinist Martial Gauthier, Carole Roth on viola, and cellist Robin Michael. The soloist for the piano concerto is Jean-Frédéric Neuburger. The orchestra is Les Siècles, conducted by François-Xavier Roth. As most readers will probably expect, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for processing pre-orders for this album.

One of the things I like about Ligeti is that he is just as capable of being prankish as he is of being cerebral. This is most evident in the violin concerto, in which one of the solo violin passages is accompanied by four ocarinas. (The more time I spend listening to Ligeti, the more I recognize that there is never a dull moment!)

I was somewhat amused to be writing this while Faust is currently visiting San Francisco to perform with the San Francisco Symphony. For that occasion she prepared Alban Berg’s violin concerto. Most likely, both Ligeti and Kurtág were influenced by Berg; so I took some pleasure in having the opportunity to write a post-Berg article! Nevertheless, both of the composers on this new harmonia mundi album have distinguished themselves with “voices” decidedly different from Berg’s. I continue to look forward to new “contacts of discovery” in Ligeti’s catalog, and I enjoyed the decision of the producers to draw upon Kurtág to provide “spacing” between the Ligeti selections.

Once you get used to the dissonance, you will find that this album serves up an engaging journey of discovery.

In Search of Benjamin Appl’s Latest Album

Benjamin Appl and György Kurtág on the cover of their new album

Some readers may recall that I first encountered baritone Benjamin Appl in May of 2023 through San Francisco Performances (SFP), when he was the final recitalist in the Art of Song series. This drew my interest to Alpha’s release of his album Forbidden Fruit, on which he was accompanied by pianist James Baillieu, who had also joined him for his SFP recital. The title of Appl’s latest album is Lines of Life, and its “program” involves the alternation of songs by Franz Schubert with those of György Kurtág. This time he has three pianists serving as accompanist on different tracks, one of whom is Kurtág himself. The other two are Baillieu and Pierre-Laurent Aimard. One of the Kurtág tracks also requires both trombone (Csaba Bencze) and tuba (Gergely Lukás). The final Schubert track is followed by a single song by Johannes Brahms, the third in his Opus 47 collection entitled “Sonntag” (Sunday). (There is also an “appendix track” of an interview with Kurtág.)

The alternations between Schubert and Kurtág make the overall listening experience a rough ride. Nevertheless, I have been fascinated by Kurtág for quite some time; and my interest in him on this site dates all the way back to April of 2007 (which is prior to my writing for Examiner.com). It would be fair to say that Kurtág is not afraid of shock value, and Appl may have prepared the ordering of tracks on this album to invoke Schubert for the sake of softening Kurtág’s “blows.” However, I have been interested enough to give this album several listenings; and it would be fair to say that I learn a little bit more of what Kurtág was up to with each encounter.

I have previously told the joke about an introduction to a program that was intense enough that the presenter was reluctant to say, “Enjoy the concert!” He decided, instead, to conclude by saying, “The Force be with you!” I have now listened to this album enough that the “Force” is definitely with me. I look forward to returning to the album and getting to know it even better!

Still, it is worth noting that the above Amazon.com hyperlink leads to a Web page that currently supports only MP3 downloads (even though there is an “Audio CD” option).

Víkingur Ólafsson Exchanges Bach for Kurtág

This Friday Deutsche Grammophon (DG) will release its latest album of recordings of Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson. Some readers may recall that his last release came out in September of 2018 with the title Bach Reworks / Part 1. Those expecting that the new album will be Part 2 may be disappointed. The title of the new album is From Afar, and Ólafsson has shifted his attention from Johann Sebastian Bach to György Kurtág. As expected, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders of this new release.

I first encountered Kurtág’s music at a recital presented by San Francisco Performances back when my “profession” was information technology. The recitalist was pianist Marino Formenti, and the title of his program was Kurtág’s Ghosts. The selections were an extended collection of compositions taken from the ten volumes that Kurtág had entitled Játékok (games). The individual selections were miniature unto an extreme, often assigned titles that could be playful (as in games) or provocative, if not both.

The tracks on From Afar draw upon the first, third, and fifth of those ten volumes. They are interleaved with selections by Bach (often arranged for the keyboard), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Béla Bartók, and Thomas Adès. There are also a few arrangements of Icelandic sources. Furthermore, in addition to surveying the Játékok repertoire, the album begins with Kurtág’s arrangement of Bach’s BWV 619, one of the chorale preludes collected in the Orgelbüchlein. Those readers that recall my thoughts about Bach Reworks may recall my conclusion that all of the tracks “seemed to have everything to do with the ego of the pianist and little to do with anyone else, not just Bach but also the transcribers.”

An intimate performance of a Bach transcription by Márta and György Kurtág (screen shot from a YouTube video)

While the advance material for From Afar claims that the album was “inspired by a life-changing meeting” with Kurtág, I have to say that I wonder what, specifically, inspired Ólafsson. I offer the album’s opening track as a case in point. Ólafsson’s performance of Kurtág’s Bach arrangement was labored and tedious unto an extreme. My immediate reaction was to ask myself whether this was Kurtág having his way with Bach, perhaps in some of the ways that Ólafsson did in Bach Reworks. Fortunately, I was able to find a YouTube video of Kurtág playing one of his Bach transcriptions, a four-hand version that he played with his wife Márta. To my surprise (and satisfaction), Kurtág’s arrangement was about as true to the source as one could expect; and the only playfulness in the performance had to do with the interleaving of the hands of husband and wife.

I also have to wonder if Kurtág had inspired Ólafsson to record all of his selections twice, first on a grand piano and then on an upright. This means that the album has two CDs, one for each of the instruments. (That’s the good news. Had the two performances been interleaved, the listening experience would probably have driven me crazy!) The track listing in the booklet provides a side-by-side account of the durations of each of the 22 tracks. This is clearly “useful data” for comparing the two performances, but I must confess that I was far more interested in comparing the printed durations than in getting my head around how they related to the individual track performances.

Kurtág’s Miniaturist Approach to Kafka Texts

courtesy of PIAS

One week from today harmonia mundi will release a recording of György Kurtág’s Opus 24 Kafka-Fragmente. Scored for soprano voice (Anna Prohaska) and solo violin (Isabelle Faust), this composition basically feeds the concept of a song cycle to the meat-grinder of minimalism. The work consists of 40 movements partitioned into four parts. The shortest of these is only thirteen seconds in duration; the longest is a few seconds short of seven minutes. As is usually the case, Amazon.com is currently processing pre-orders for this new album.

I first learned about Kurtág in 2007, back when I was still working and living in Palo Alto. Thanks to San Francisco Performances (SFP), my wife and I attended a piano recital by Marino Formenti, which took place at the De Young Museum. Both the title and the content of the program were taken from a solo album that Formenti had released entitled Kurtág’s Ghosts. The track listing for this album, including track durations, can be found on an Amazon Web page. However, there was no substitute for the immediacy of a recital performance, and this one left me hooked on “all things Kurtág.”

I also have SFP to thank for introducing me to Isabelle Faust, whom I was fortunate enough to meet at a donor reception a couple of years ago. Prohaska, on the other hand, I knew only from her Deutsche Grammophon debut album, Enchanted Forest, which I had discussed on my Examiner.com site in March of 2013. On the basis of those experiences, I was not prepared for either of them venturing onto the turf that had been introduced to me by Formenti; but I definitely wanted to check out what they would do on that turf!

Sadly, harmonia mundi was a bit vague in accounting for the recording sessions for this album. The booklet states only that those sessions took place in May of 2020. Whether this was a “one shot” session, recorded from beginning to end after the performers had prepared themselves with rehearsals, or an extended series of sessions allowing for each track to be allotted as much or as little time was necessary to provide a satisfactory account was not explicitly stated in the production information. I would definitely have preferred the former option.

There tends to be an undercurrent of spontaneity in each of the Kafka texts, at least those taken from his diaries and posthumously published letters. Excerpts from the stories were probably less spontaneous. Nevertheless, a general rhetoric of spontaneity pervades Faust’s violin work, as well as Prohaska’s deliveries of the texts. On the other hand so many of those texts, however brief, slam the reader with what can only be called (if the abbreviation will be forgiven) “WTF reactions.” As a result, those listening to this recording may be inclined to hit the Pause button after at least some of these songs to allow mind to catch up with some of Kafka’s convolutions.

Indeed, this is music that puts attentive listening to a serious test. The entire album is slightly shy of an hour in duration. Nevertheless, Kurtág’s focus on even the shortest of his text settings is so intense that one may have to worry about listening fatigue. It is thus more than a little helpful that both the track listing and the libretto make note of the divisions that separate the four parts of the overall structure. I suspect that Kurtág anticipated that the most attentive listeners would deserve a break from time to time. The album may not have allotted sufficient time for those breaks, but the serious listener would do well to make judicious use of that Pause button!

A Curious Blend of Czech and Hungarian

courtesy of Jensen Artists

A little over a month ago ECM New Series released its first album of the Parker Quartet. This group consists of violinists Daniel Chong and Ken Hamao, violist Jessica Bodner, and cellist Kee-Hyun Kim. They are Blodgett Artists-in-Residence at Harvard University, and the group is now in its seventh year as faculty members in the Department of Music.

The “program” for the album was conceived as one of powerful contrasts. The “center” of the three selections is the Opus 97 string quintet in E-flat major by Antonín Dvořák. It is “flanked on either side” by works for string quartet composed by György Kurtág, both of which reflect the composer’s rhetoric of minimalism. The opening selection is the Opus 44 collection of six short pieces entitled Moments Musicaux. The Dvořák quintet is then followed by a series of fifteen even shorter pieces collected under the title Officium Breve in Memoriam Andreae Szervánszky, Kurtág’s Opus 28.

The recording of the quintet also includes violist Kim Kashkashian. Kashkashian is probably familiar to those interested in the ECM New Series repertoire. In 2013 she won a Grammy Award for the album Music for Viola, which showcased music by both Kurtág and György Ligeti. She introduced the Parker to Kurtág’s Opus 44. They performed it for the first time in 2005; and, since then, they have played it more than any other composition in their repertoire.

Through my many encounters with concerts produced by San Francisco Performances, I found myself hooked on Kurtág long before I started writing about music as my “retirement gig.” Indeed, I used my tenure with Examiner.com to do all I could to put out the word about both recordings and concert performances of Kurtág’s music. I have long delighted in the sense of play that he brings to his compositions. In that context I would say that his rhetorical stance differs significantly from that of Dvořák’s chamber music. On the other hand, when one homes in on the details of Kurtág’s miniatures and the way in which he juxtaposes them, I would conjecture that his “sense of play” owes much to a rhetoric of sharp contrasts, even in a sequence of those miniatures.

In other words the contrast of the Opus 97 quintet with both of the Kurtág selections amounts to “distinctions in the large” that complement the “distinctions in the small” that one encounters in those two Kurtág collections. Whether the Parker musicians (or, for that matter, Kashkashian) would agree with my conjecture does not matter very much to me. The mind of the attentive listener finds its own way through any sequence of compositions that it confronts, and even stumbling along the way can be part of the listening experience. I may not yet have adjusted to the “big picture” of Parker’s new ECM release, but it is certainly an album that deserves multiple listening experiences.

Aimard’s Beethoven in a Stimulating Context

Pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard (courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

Last night French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard returned to Herbst Theatre, giving his second Piano Series recital for San Francisco Performances (SFP) since he made his SFP debut at the end of March of 2012. For his debut Aimard prepared a program of considerable breadth, with the early nineteenth century of Robert Schumann at one end at the recent past of György Kurtág at the other. This time he went for depth, rather than breadth.

The major work on the program was Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 106 (“Hammerklavier”) sonata in B-flat major, which occupied the entire second half of the program. The first half, on the other hand, was devoted almost entirely to György Ligeti’s imaginative cycle of eleven solo piano compositions, Musica ricercata. As if this coupling of Ligeti and Beethoven were not enough, Aimard chose to begin with “Le Courlis cendré” (the Eurasian curlew), the last of the thirteen solo piano compositions that Olivier Messiaen collected in his Catalogue d’oiseaux (catalog of birds).

This made for an evening replete with some of the most imposing technical challenges in the piano literature. Aimard’s impeccable capacity for technique was clearly up for all of those challenges, but his performance was far more than an exhibition of jumping through burning hoops. Aimard also has a keen aesthetic foundation upon which he knows how to tease out the expressive side of everything he plays.

That skill was immediately apparent from the very beginning of the program. As Eric Bromberger put it in his notes for the program book, each of the pieces in Messiaen’s “catalog” is “a small music drama set in a specific location.” The bird identified in the title is the “leading character;” but the piece itself develops the sense of the animal in its proper environment, assigning different motifs for each of the elements of that environment (primarily the other birds in the region). “Le Courlis cendré” is the last “dramatic journey” in the set; and the overall setting is a rich one. Aimard knew exactly how to lead the attentive listener through every detail of that setting in a manner that would provoke and then satisfy curiosity. This opening selection was very much a harbinger of things to come.

Musica ricercata is probably best translated as “researched music;” and, from a structural point of view, one might almost say that the score reads like a laboratory notebook. The “laboratory experiment” consists of working with limited numbers of pitch classes, starting with only one with a second introduced at the very end. By the time the eleventh piece is encountered, the entire chromatic scale is in play.

However, this is far from a traversal of an abstract path, similar to traversals of all of the major and minor keys encountered in any number of earlier compositions going back at least as far as Johann Sebastian Bach. Instead, Ligeti develops his own “mini-drama” for each of the eleven pieces; and it would be fair to hypothesize that each of those pieces is a reflection on some past listening experience. Thus, one encounters a wide diversity of styles, along with two composers explicitly named in the titles of the pieces, Béla Bartók and Girolamo Frescobaldi. In other words, if Musical ricercata is a laboratory notebook, it amounts to systematic documentation of Ligeti’s own approaches to making and listening to music.

While the Bartók selection is a memorial one, there is no shortage of wit for the listener to encounter as the cycle unfolds. Where humor is concerned, Ligeti is capable of eliciting everything from a sly chuckle to a robust belly laugh. Unfortunately, that sense of humor tends to get hidden behind the technical demands, which get increasingly challenging as the cycle progresses.

Then, of course, there is the punch line for the whole cycle that brings us back to the name of the collection. The title of the final piece is “Omaggio a Girolamo Frescobaldi.” This is a study in imitative counterpoint, whose subject is a twelve-tone row that is given a descending chromatic scale as a countersubject. (Yes, I am avoiding the noun “fugue,” due to my old-fashioned bias for a fugue in which the tonal subject is answered at the dominant.) Frescobaldi composed many similar pieces that explored such an imitative process. He and his contemporaries often called such imitative compositions “ricercars.” Cue the laughter from the informed audience!

An intermission was clearly necessary before Aimard could get down to business with his Beethoven. Nevertheless, I doubt that anyone drawn into the first half of the program could have cleared his/her mind of all those auditory encounters with Messiaen and Ligeti. I would therefore humbly submit that Aimard wanted us to listen to Beethoven with ears that had just been informed by those two far more recent composers.

Sometimes this was little more than a matter of surface structure. There is that tremolo moment in the Scherzo (second) movement that usually sounds like a brash interruption of the frolicking rhetoric. This time it sounded more like one of Messiaen’s birds having wandered into the wrong place at the wrong time. Then of course there are the two fugues, the “little one” in the development section of the opening Allegro and the Allegro risoluto “big one” that dominates the final movement. These reminded the alert listener of just how far we have advanced from those Frescobaldi ricercars. However, even below these more obvious features, Aimard played his Beethoven in such a way that one could appreciate just how much his approach to playing any form of music had been informed by the “training ground” of Ligeti’s Musica ricercata.

The audience clearly would not let Aimard leave without playing an encore. He explained that the only proper way to follow the “Hammerklavier” was with silence. Rather than turn to John Cage, he selected three of the shortest pieces from Kurtág’s Játékok (games) collection. Aimard played seven pieces from this collection at his debut recital, but I am afraid that I cannot remember if last night’s pieces revisited any of them. What was more important is that he allowed a calming spirit of quietude to settle in after a stormy evening of technical and expressive challenges, all of which had been impressively dispatched by Aimard’s consummate musicianship.

Reinbert de Leeuw Records all of Kurtág’s Music for Ensemble and Choir

In reviewing (to the best of my ability) all of my experiences involving listening to the music of György Kurtág, I discovered that, until the beginning of this month, the largest number of performers that gathered to perform one of his pieces was four. Where concert performances were concerned, the number was three; but this past September I had the opportunity to listen to a Kurtág album entitled Complete String Quartets. My curiosity was thus piqued when ECM announced that, this coming Friday, ECM New Series would release a new album of that composer’s music entitled Complete Works for Ensemble and Choir. Amazon.com is currently taking pre-orders for this three-CD collection; and, for those fascinated with Kurtág’s work, this is quite a find, even for those (like myself) skeptical about the release of “complete” albums by a composer who is still alive and, as far as we know, active.

The ensemble on this new album is Asko | Schönberg, the result of a merger in 2008 of two ensembles with a shared interest in “advanced modernism” that had previously performed and recorded together many times. The Asko Ensemble was formed in 1965 and never had a regular conductor. The Schönberg Ensemble was founded in 1974 by students and former students of the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, and all of my vinyl recordings of the group named Reinbert de Leeuw as the Music Director. He is the conductor on the Kurtág album, and the choir is the Netherlands Radio Choir.

It is important to note that, even when writing on an “ensemble” scale, Kurtág tended to prepare one-to-a-part scores. Consequently, the accompanying booklet singles out a generous number of soloists. On the vocal side these are soprano Natalia Zagorinskaya, mezzo Gerrie de Vries, tenor Yves Saelens, and bass Harry van der Kamp. In addition there are tracks that feature solo performances by cello (Jean-Guihen Queyras), guitar (Elliott Simpson), and piano (Tamara Stefanovich). In addition Csaba Király plays pianino and serves as speaker in “Samuel Beckett: What is the Word,” which has the rather lengthy subtitle “Samuel Beckett sends word through Ildikó Monyók in the translation of István Siklós.” Equally important is that the tracks for this collection have been arranged in the chronological ordering of the works’ respective composition.

Those familiar with Kurtág probably know him as a miniaturist. That makes the Beckett piece rather distinguished, since it lasts more than sixteen minutes. Furthermore, it is not the longest piece in the collection. “Colindă Baladă” runs about one minute longer. Completed in 2010, it is the penultimate composition in the collection. The last is the instrumental suite in four movements Bref messages, completed in 2011. However, if we are to go by the Wikipedia page of Kurtág’s compositions, he wrote a work for full orchestra (which probably involved string sections, rather than individual players) to honor Pierre Boulez’ 90th birthday. Indeed, this is not the only piece in the “Ensemble/orchestral” category that is not included on the album, suggesting that de Leeuw confined his attention only to one-to-a-part compositions.

What is most fascinating about the collection is the number of pieces that were composed for instruments “dispersed in space,” either individually or in groups. Such selections do not fare well under the limitations of recording technology. There have, of course, been listening environments in which the audience is surrounded by loudspeakers; but, at least currently, those environments have had to take a back seat in a culture that resorts to ear buds as all one needs for listening. Thus, at least where these particular compositions are concerned, the primary value is to introduce the attentive listener to the compositional devices that Kurtág has deployed in the hope that such a listener will eventually have the opportunity to experience the spatial qualities that the composer seems to have intended.

Fortunately, that is my only real quibble with this new release. Kurtág is as imaginative in working with diverse collections of instrumentalists and vocalists is he is when working on a chamber-music scale. In both cases he is primarily concerned with drawing our attention to sonorities that are practically at an atomic level. Because his pieces are brief, he tends to focus on only a few of those qualities in any individual compositional gesture. Thus, through a recording like this one, the attentive listener can begin to appreciate the vast scope of his creativity when working at such a microscopic level.

Nevertheless, this is not music to be “consumed in a single gulp,” so to speak. If Kurtág wants us to be attentive to an unfolding of individual moments, then we should not compromise their distinctive qualities. Better to listen to these pieces in “isolated individuality.” That way each one can work its own characteristic magic without confronting any risks of “crosstalk.”

GENUIN classics Presents Elisabeth Kufferath on Violin and Viola

At the beginning of this month GENUIN classics released its first solo album of Elisabeth Kufferath. Entitled Libero, fragile (free, fragile), Kufferath performs the music of Luciano Berio, Elliot Carter, György Kurtág, and Jan Müller-Wieland without accompaniment. However, Kufferath’s performances see her alternating between violin and viola. Each of these composers is represented by music for each of these instruments. Both of the Müller-Wieland tracks are world premiere recordings; and the viola selection, “Himmelfahrt” (ascension to heaven), was dedicated to Kufferath.

The longest tracks on the album are devoted to Berio. Kufferath plays the two pieces in his Sequenza (sequence) series for solo violin (the eighth) and solo viola (the sixth). These were composed in 1976 and 1967, respectively; and the whole collection of fourteen pieces was composed over the course of Berio’s life, beginning with the first (for flute) in 1958 and concluding with the fourteenth (for cello) in 2002. In each of these compositions, Berio was interested in exploring the instrument’s potential for a wide scope of sonorities, often involving non-standard techniques for their creation. One may thus regard each as an étude; but it is as much an étude for the listener (broadening expectations of how one listens to each of the instruments) as it is for the performer learning how to master the necessary techniques for execution.

All of the remaining tracks are relatively brief. Most of them are pieces that Kurtág collected under the title Jelek, játékok és üzenetek (signs, games and messages). All of these are solo works; and he has composed them for violin, viola, cello, bass, flute, oboe, clarinet, and bassoon between 1984 and 2008. (Since Kurtág is still alive, he may well be writing more of these pieces.) Each is a miniaturist study, and most involve an aphoristic reflection on some particular topic. Many of them are memorial in nature. Kufferath performs selections from both the violin and viola collections.

Like Müller-Wieland, Carter is represented by two short pieces, “Mnemosyné” for the violin and “Figment IV” for the viola. Like Sequenza, Figment is a title for a series of six pieces, each for a single instrument. However, the collection is neither as extensive nor as systematic as Berio’s. The first two were composed for cello; and the remaining three were composed for bass, marimba, and oboe.

Taken as a whole, the album presents a useful survey of modernist techniques during the twentieth century. Because the tracks are short, the survey is more accessible than what one might encounter during a two-hour “new music” concert or, for that matter, an album with fewer but longer selections, particularly one that focuses on a single composer. I must confess that I have had an ongoing fascination with Kurtág’s music ever since my first encounter with his Játékok pieces for solo piano, when I heard them performed by Marino Formenti back in April of 2007. I also first became acquainted with some of the Jelek, játékok és üzenetek viola pieces through a recording that Kim Kashkashian made for ECM in 2012 that coupled Kurtág with György Ligeti.

My interest in Berio, on the other hand, has tended to be more “academic.” I share his interest in diversity of sonorities and the idea that sonority itself can be as “legitimate” an element in composition as are melody, harmony, and counterpoint. As a result I have felt a certain frustration over how few of the Sequenza compositions I have managed to encounter for serious listening.

Nevertheless, I have been struck by a shared approach to performance at the few occasions I have experienced. Because the technical demands are so great, page-turning tends to be impractical, if not impossible. As a result, the soloist will set up a row of music stands and spread the score pages across them. This requires playing while standing, rather than seated; and it entails movement from (the performer’s) left to right as the performance advances. However, for the listener this physical layout provides a sense of the entirety in a single glance, so to speak; and the performance amounts to a journey along a well-defined path that is as literal as it is metaphorical. I have come to expect this as part of the listening experience when I attend a recital that includes one of the Sequenza pieces; and, clearly, that component is absent when one is listening to a compact disc recording.

To be fair, I have no idea whether Berio knew of musicians playing these pieces this way during his lifetime. However, once a score has been published, the composer has to accept the fact that is no longer entirely in his hands. There is clearly a systematic approach to how Berio explores his diversity of sonorities. However, in the absence of those visual cues, those explorations run the risk of feeling like little more than one thing after another. On the other hand, because these pieces are performed so seldom, having recordings like these does much to prepare the listener for the diversity of sonorities that will ensue.

Pianist Jonathan Biss Continues his “Late Style” Project with a Solo Recital

Last night in Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Performances advanced to the third of the four concerts in the Late Style series conceived by pianist Jonathan Biss. This program was Biss’ solo recital. This provided him the opportunity to explore late works by the three most significant composers of solo piano music during the nineteenth century: Frédéric Chopin, Robert Schumann, and Johannes Brahms (listed in chronological order of birth). Biss fleshed out the program with six short pieces by one of his favorite contemporary composers, György Kurtág (who is still alive and still composing).

The performance was an uneven affair, beginning with its most notable strengths and gradually losing its grip as it progressed. Biss opened with the Schumann selection, which seems to be another one of his favorites. This was Schumann’s last work for piano to be given an opus number, the Opus 133 collection of five short pieces composed in 1853 and entitled Gesänge der Frühe (morning songs). The WoO 24 “Geistervariationen,” “ghost” variations, were composed in 1854 but were not included in the 1893 Collected Works edition and not published until 1939. These were written only days before his suicide attempt, which led to his commitment to an asylum.

There are many ways in which Opus 133 differs from the previous collections of short pieces for solo piano. The almost hesitant opening gesture in parallel octaves, which then alternates with chorale-like homophony, can be taken as a suggestion that Schumann was shedding prodigious technical virtuosity as a snake might shed its skin. Following that analogy leads to a new “surface” that is inevitably far more sensitive to touch; and that analogy seemed to be behind Biss’ approach to the keyboard for this piece.

This opening is then followed by what might almost be called a “rhetoric of striving.” From our point of view of what would shortly happen to Schumann, one could take these as anxiety-ridden pieces facing the future with dread; however John Daverio and Eric Sams, authors of the Grove Music Online entry for Schumann, dismiss such hypothesizing as “a dubious exercise at best.” Thus, the point of the snake analogy may be that Schumann shed one skin simply in order to grow a new one. As a result, Biss’ approach to these pieces had no shortage of well-honed dramatic tensions; but it could not be taken as dark omens of the last years of Schumann’s life.

Sadly, that sense of keenly-crafted expressiveness in both the music and its interpretation eluded Biss’ approach to both Chopin and Brahms. For both of these composers, his expression of the score pages was severely muddied by too heavy a right foot on the damper pedal. As a result, where there was clarity in the Schumann interpretation to support the ideas of Daverio and Sams, Chopin and Brahms were murky, almost to a point of being barely recognizable.

This was most evident in Chopin’s Opus 61 “Polonaise-fantasie” in A-flat major. This is, again, music of dramatic tension arising from the music’s “inability to decide its identity.” The result wavers between the “security” of the familiar polonaise form and the “exploratory uncertainty” of a fantasia. However, because Biss could do little more than pound out the notes, the idea of a “rhetoric of insecurity” could never take root, leaving the listener at a loss as to just how to take this performance.

In the Brahms repertoire Biss seemed more interested in how the second (Andante espressivo) movement of the very early Opus 5 piano sonata in F minor served as an “omen” of the B minor intermezzo that is the first of the four Opus 119 piano pieces. As hypotheses go, Biss’ assertion is a very long forward pass that leaps over too many significant way stations along Brahms’ biographical journey. At best he could make the case that Andante espressivo “worked” as a tempo for the first Opus 119 intermezzo; but it works just as well for any number of other Brahms movements.

Brahms was represented by both Opus 119 and the preceding Opus 118 collection of six pieces. These were played in reverse order, so Biss could make his point about the connection. However, there was something routine about all of his Brahms performances that conveyed little of Brahms the musician-at-work, let alone how he chose to approach that work towards the end of his life. Most critically, there was almost no sensitivity to the rich textures of interleaving lines of counterpoint encountered in both of these collections. Not only were the lines themselves muddled, but also Biss played as if he had given little thought to how those lines shifted position between foreground and background.

Kurtág was represented by his Játekók (games) project. The project involves a very large collection of short pieces, each of which has its own individual sense of play. The earliest of these pieces were written in 1975, and 2003 saw the publication of 34 pieces in the seventh volume of the series. Biss played six of those 34 pieces.

For those familiar with this project, these were engaging explorations of some of Kurtág’s more recent thoughts. Those encountering works under the Játekók title for the first time, however, may have been perplexed; and Eric Bromberger’s notes for the program book did little to resolve that perplexity. Nevertheless, one could get the sense that Biss enjoyed setting out Kurtág’s mud pies for others to admire (to purloin a metaphor from Alfred North Whitehead). His sensitivity to these short pieces made for a logical sequel to his sensitivity to Schumann, and that latter may explain why his only encore, following his ventures into Chopin and Brahms, was a reprise of the first of the Schumann Opus 133 pieces.

San Francisco Performances will Launch its Piano Series in Early February

This was the month in which San Francisco Performances (SFP) launched its Vocal Series of four recitals. The next series to get under way will be the Piano Series, which will also consist of four recitals, the first of which will take place at the beginning of February. This will be a series of familiar faces, one of whom first visited San Francisco to perform with the San Francisco Symphony and will be making his San Francisco recital debut with SFP. In addition, one of those familiar faces will be that of Jonathan Biss, whose solo recital will also be included in his own four-part series, Late Style. All of the concerts will begin at 7:30 p.m. in Herbst Theatre, located on the southwest corner of Van Ness Avenue and McAllister Street. The specific dates and their related pianists are as follows:

Thursday, February 2: Alexander Melnikov made his SFP debut in 2011 with a marathon performance of the 24 preludes and fugues, one pair for each key, collected by Dmitri Shostakovich as his Opus 87. This time he will devote the second half of his concert to Claude Debussy’s second book of preludes, twelve pieces, each based on an evocative image, that he composed between 1912 and 1913. In the first half he will play two sets of variations, both composed by Sergei Rachmaninoff. The Opus 22 set, based on a theme by Frédéric Chopin, will be followed by the more familiar Opus 42. Rachmaninoff identified the source of this theme as Arcangelo Corelli; but it is actually the much older Spanish “Folia” theme. Corelli himself had composed variations on this theme as the last of the twelve violin sonatas he had collected in his Opus 5.

Saturday, February 11: This is the recital that overlaps with Jonathan Biss’ Late Style series. The program will be framed by the music of Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms. The former will be represented by his last published piano composition the Opus 133 “Gesänge der Frühe” (songs of dawn), composed in 1853, when Schumann was already suffering from mental and emotional decline. The “Geistervariationen” (ghost variations) were composed the following year but not published until after his death by Brahms. Brahms, in turn, will be represented by his last two publications of piano music, the six short pieces of Opus 118 and the four short pieces of Opus 119, both composed in 1893. Opus 119 was his last solo piano composition, although it would be followed in 1896 by both the Opus 121Vier ernste Gesänge (four serious songs) and the eleven chorale preludes for organ (Opus 122). By way of contrast, Biss will also play one of Brahms’ earliest piano compositions, the second movement from his Opus 5 sonata in F minor.

The adjective “late” will be somewhat stressed by Biss’ decision to include music by György Kurtág, who, as of this writing, is still alive. Biss has long been a champion of the short pieces that Kurtág has collected under the title Játékok (games). Biss will play selections from the seventh volume in this series. Published in 2003, this is the most recent collection of solo piano music. (The eighth volume, published in 2010, contains music for two pianos and for four hands on one keyboard.) On the other hand the one Chopin selection, the Opus 61 “Polonaise-Fantasie” in A-flat major was completed in 1846, making it one of the last pieces he wrote before succumbing to ill health.

Tuesday, April 25: This will be a “dynamic duo” recital of music for two pianos and four hands on one keyboard. Both pianists, Leif Ove Andsnes and Marc-André Hamelin, will be familiar to SFP audiences. The focus of the program will be Igor Stravinsky with performances of both his concerto for two pianos and his keyboard version of the music he composed for the ballet “The Rite of Spring.” The program will also include Debussy’s suite for two pianos En blanc et noir (in black and white), composed within two years after the premiere of “The Rite of Spring.” The program will begin with a coupling of Larghetto and Allegro movements in E-flat major by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, which does not appear in Ludwig Ritter von Köchel’s catalog but is included in the ninth volume of the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe and is available for examination (only, since the content is not public domain in the United States) through an IMSLP Web page.

Saturday, May 6: Spanish pianist Javier Perianes made his San Francisco debut playing Manuel de Falla’s “Nights in the Gardens of Spain” with Charles Dutoit conducting the San Francisco Symphony in June of 2015. This concert will be his San Francisco recital debut. Falla will again be in his repertoire with the memorial piece he composed for Debussy, “Le tombeau de Claude Debussy.” This will introduce three short Debussy compositions, “La soirée dans Grenade” (the evening in Granada) from Estampes (prints), “La puerta del Vino” (wine gate) from the second book of preludes, and “La sérénade interrompue” (the interrupted serenade). This “Spanish-French connection” will conclude with “El Albaicín” (the name of a district in Granada) from the third book of Isaac Albéniz’ Iberia collection. The program will begin with two selections by Franz Schubert, the D. 664 sonata in A major and the D. 946 set of three short piano pieces.

While this is late in the season, subscriptions are still on sale for $275 for premium seating in the Orchestra and the front and center of the Dress Circle, $210 for the Side Boxes, the center rear of the Dress Circle, and the remainder of the Orchestra, and $150 for the remainder of the Dress Circle and the Balcony. Subscriptions may be purchased online in advance through a City Box Office event page. Orders may also be placed by calling the SFP subscriber hotline at 415-677-0325. Corresponding prices for single tickets are $70, $55, and $40, except for the duo recital by Andsnes and Hamelin, for which the prices are $85, $65, and $50. The hyperlinks on the dates given above all lead to City Box Office event pages for the purchase of single tickets. 

ATMA Classique Releases the Complete (to date?) String Quartets of György Kurtág

At the beginning of this month, the Canadian ATMA Classique label released an album of the music of Hungarian composer György Kurtág entitled Complete String Quartets. Kurtág turned 90 in February, and there does not seem to be any evidence that he is not still going strong. Furthermore Kurtág specializes in miniatures. Placed alongside some of this scores, the works of Anton Webern seem almost gargantuan. This explains why the headline for this article was qualified, since there is no reason to assume that Kurtág has given up on writing for string quartet, particularly when any act of composition can involve such minimal physical activity.

Because of the duration of Kurtág’s pieces, it should come as no surprise that this “complete” album consists of only a single CD. Indeed, the editor of the booklet seems to have gotten carried away with Kurtág’s reputation. There is a single track for a fifteen-movement piece, one of Kurtág’s many memorial compositions for a fellow Hungarian. The track listing gives the duration of this work as being a bit shy of three minutes! As impressive as this sounds, it was a misprint. Performance of all fifteen movements takes about twelve and one-half minutes, which is a bit more consistent with Kurtág’s style!

The performers on this new album are the members of Quatour Molinari, quartet in residence at the Conservatory of Music in Montreal. I first became aware of them when ATMA Classique released another “complete string quartets” album of another living composer, in this case Sofia Gubaidulina, in January of 2015. (This album was a bit more extensive, since it had two CDs!) Membership of Quatour Molinari has not changed from that time; and the players are still violinists Olga Ranzenhofer and Frédéric Bednarz, violist Frédéric Lambert, and cellist Pierre-Alain Bouvrette. Other adventurous modernists that have found a place in this ensemble’s repertoire are Alfred Schnittke and Canadian R. Murray Schafer.

Getting used to Kurtág’s miniaturist thinking may require some adjustment. Where his piano compositions are concerned, this tends not to be that difficult. Many of his pieces are playful and have been collected under a title that is the Hungarian word for “games.” Where the string quartet music is concerned, there is more of an element of seriousness, probably because so much of the content is memorial in nature. Fortunately, the album begins with his Opus 1, which amounts to a six-movement “abstract” composition. As the booklet notes by Ranzenhofer (translated into English by Sean McCutcheon) explain, Kurtág prepared himself to write his first original composition by copying out Webern’s works. As a result he began to appreciate what could be achieved by working with only a small number of notes without necessarily being bound by grammatical constraints such as those Arnold Schoenberg had developed for his twelve-tone system.

Once he had found his own way, composing was a bit like eating potato chips. It was almost as if he could not complete one piece without feeling the need to launch into another. He also found ways to sneak in appropriations from other sources, even on the small scale. (He calls his Opus 13, a set of twelve pieces collected as a single memorial, a group of “microludes.”) Thus, it is not surprising that his fifteen-movement memorial includes a quote from Webern, while another single-movement piece reflects on the Renaissance polyphony of Jacob Obrecht.

Another composer explicitly acknowledged by Kurtág is Olivier Messiaen. However, even before birdsong is explicitly acknowledged in the fifth of his Opus 44 Moments Musicaux pieces, it is easy to detect by the rhythms and phrasings of bird-calls, even if many of those birds are imaginary. While this is a useful “working metaphor,” my personal thoughts turn to the summer of 1968, when I found myself hunting for mushrooms as part of a seminar that John Cage had organized during his visit to the University of Colorado at Boulder. It was a dry time of year, and mushrooms were scarce. As a result, one of the things I learned was how any number of other natural phenomena could provide clues as to where mushrooms might be found. Listening to this quartet music is a bit like looking for such clues, even if the objective that those clues abet is less well-defined. In a way listening to the pieces on this album is a bit like thinking about how a walk in the woods can be more than just walking in the woods.

GRAMMY Recognition for Kurtág

I am still stunned (in a very pleasant way) by the news that Kim Kashkahsian won a GRAMMY for her recent CD of the music of György Kurtág and György Ligeti. That two such challenging (not to mention witty) modernists should get that kind of attention from such a mainstream institution is rather an achievement. I only regret not seeing her being handed the award by LL Cool J. On the other hand I have no trouble imagining a conversation between LL Cool J's alter ego, Sam Hanna, and Henrietta Lange during an NCIS: Los Angeles episode, during which Hetty would disclose that she had shared many a fine bottle of Tokaj with Kurtág.

What is Remembered

Since I am not particularly big on top-ten lists, I decided to set myself the exercise of trying to identify one event for each month of this year that I would be only too glad to experience for a second time. Here are the results:

January: The San Francisco Performances recital by violinist Christian Tetzlaff accompanied by pianist Leif Ove Andsnes. This was one of the most imaginative programs I have experienced, bringing together Leoš Janáček, Johannes Brahms, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Franz Schubert. The encores were then by Jean Sibelius.

February: Sofia Gubaidulina's extended visit to the San Francisco Symphony (which is probably my one point of agreement with Joshua Kosman's "Top 10" list).

March: Frank French's two recitals covering all 48 preludes and fugues in Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, performed on a modern piano tuned according to a system developed by Thomas Young in 1799. This could well have been the most fascinating recital of the year, and we have a local artist to thank for it. French's intention was to restore the distinctive character of each of the keys covered in Bach's two cycles, a character that is totally lost under equal temperament. By the end of the first recital, my capacity for listening was just beginning to grasp what he was trying to demonstrate. Of all the experiences I would like to repeat, this is the one that means the most to me, just in my own interests of being a better listener.

April: My discovery of selections from György Kurtág's Játékok, performed by Jonathan Biss in a "Concert with Conversation" event organized by San Francisco Performances at the Community Music Center at 544 Capp Street in the Mission District. I was first exposed to Kurtág during Marino Formenti's "San Francisco Piano Trips" recitals in 2007. Since then my primary exposure to his music has come from recitals at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Not only would I enjoy hearing Biss' performance again, but also I suspect I could get more out of his remarks by being more familiar with the music.

May: Bernard Labadie's visit as guest conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, providing highly stimulating accounts of Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and George Frideric Handel.

June: The coupling of Alban Berg's 1925 "Chamber Concerto" with Schubert's D. 944 C major ("Great") symphony during the Dawn to Twilight series of concerts by the San Francisco Symphony.

July: Tien Hsieh's recital for the InterHarmony Music Festival, in which she demonstrated her capacity for giving equal "justice" to both Franz Liszt and Johannes Brahms.

August: A thoroughly compelling performance of Frederick Rzewski's "Coming Together," given as part of an evening of chamber music at the Old First Concerts series, at the Old First Church.

September: The opening program of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra season, particularly in the approach Nicholas McGegan took to the seventh symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven.

October: Osmo Vänskä's visit as guest conductor of the San Francisco Symphony and the delightful repertoire he prepared for his two concerts.

November: The visit to Davies Symphony Hall by the Berlin Philharmonic under the direction of Sir Simon Rattle, particularly with regard to the program Rattle prepared to cultivate an appreciation for the music of Arnold Schoenberg.

December: The two Aspects of the Divine recitals arranged by pianist Marino Formenti for his second San Francisco Performances visit.

From this point of view, 2009 was definitely a stimulating year. Furthermore, not all of the stimuli came from the usual venues of Davies Symphony Hall and Herbst Theatre, which should serve as encouragement to see what lies beyond the beaten path in 2010!

Following the Score

Yesterday, in preparing my Examiner.com piece about the new Wigmore Hall Live recording of a performance given by Jonathan Biss in that space on May 12, 2009, I did something I had not done in a very long time: I listened to the two sonatas by Franz Schubert on the CD (D. 840 in C major and D. 959 in A major) while following copies of the printed music. Indeed, since I did not have a copy of D. 840 (having only the Dover Publications volume of reprints from the Breitkopf & Härtel 1888 Kritisch durchgesehene Gesammtausgabe), I downloaded a PDF of it from IMSLP. Regular readers may wonder how this squares with an exchange I had last April with the composer Steven Gerber over how I approached my work. Here is the relevant excerpt from that exchange, incorporating Gerber's assertion and my response:

He chose to end his argument with the following proposition:

Critics really should study scores before writing reviews.

This statement seems to conflate criticism with music theory; and, while there are any number of occasions in which an understanding of music theory can inform the critic's task, the critic is writing for an audience of listeners (or would-be listeners), rather than a symposium of music theorists. There have been plenty of times when I have hauled out scores to test a particular hypothesis about listening that I have been trying to work. When the Internet provides me with scores that I do not already have in my collection, I may draw upon those resources, just as I currently do when consulting books; but, when I am just beginning to speculate about a hypothesis, I am not always going to go off on a data-gathering expedition, particularly when, as is the case in what I write for Examiner.com (as opposed to this blog), I feel a need to get my position expressed "with all deliberate speed." Sometimes we just have to play with the cards that have been dealt to us. If that leaves us with some loose ends, then we are all the better if we remember that they still need to be investigated in the future!

The operative concept in my position is that serious listening is an ongoing process of hypothesizing and, to the extent that it is possible, testing those hypotheses. In the real-time spontaneity of the moment in a concert hall, one cannot dwell heavily on hypothesis-testing, particularly if it interferes with listening-in-the-moment; but, when one has a recording, one has the opportunity to change the rules of the game.

At this point I should make a disclaimer: When I received this CD I was already familiar with all of the compositions on it. Furthermore, I was familiar with the two selections from György Kurtág's Játékok, which Biss had used to "frame" his Schubert performances, because I had heard Biss perform them as part of his "Concert with Conversation" event at the Community Music Center in the Mission District. In addition I had listened to the CD on two occasions, separated by about half a week. The first listening was for getting a general familiarity with the content, and it was through that experience that I decided to dive deeper into the content on the second listening. Finally, my act of hypothesizing was influenced not only by the recorded performance but also by Biss' comments in the booklet of notes, in which he tried to explain why he had prepared a program that coupled Kurtág with Schubert. As a result I found myself hypothesizing about not only the immediacy of the performance but also the structural architecture of the entire program. Thus, I was dealing with hypotheses of a scope beyond the limitations of my own time-consciousness; and I had to draw upon "artifacts of memory," if I was going to give those hypotheses the full consideration they deserved. Those artifacts included the CD (which I was prepared to play as many times as necessary, either in whole or in part), the printed texts, and possibly even recordings of other performances (particularly the recording of D. 959 made by Artur Schnabel on January 15, 1937, made available on an Arabesque CD).

The result was "an awfully big adventure" (without any of James M. Barrie's macabre connotations) of identifying claims and seeking out warrants for those claims. What ended up on my Examiner.com site was as much a document of that adventure as an account of the CD itself. Needless to say, I have no idea what Biss would have to say about my claims or whether he would attempt to refute my warrants; but then I also have no idea whether, six months from now, I would listen to this recording the same way I did in preparing my article. I am reminded of a remark that Isidore Cohen made when Nicholas Delbanco interviewed him for his book about the Beaux Arts Trio. He said that he could not imagine a job better than one that required him to play Mozart every day. I suppose I can say the same about the way in which my current work is grounded in serious listening, since that "awfully big adventure" extends far beyond the project I set myself yesterday for a single CD!

Keeping my Faith

Apparently, my new "beat" on Examiner.com has resulted in a new first for me (even in my advanced years): my first comment from an irate composer! Apparently, Steven Gerber did not like my observation that "exposure to Moondog greatly enhanced my own listening experience of [the world premiere of his composition] 'Music in Dark Times'" by the San Francisco Symphony last week. This is hardly the first time I have written a review that rubbed the subject the wrong way; but I found the reaction (as Spock was fond of saying while raising his eyebrow) "fascinating."

Writing about the listening experience itself has been one of my favorite topics on this blog. I continue to occupy myself with the puzzle of how we can all follow the injunction of Igor Stravinsky and elevate ourselves from the sensory experience of hearing to the more cognitive nature of listening. When this involves the experience of an entirely new composition, the puzzle becomes all the more challenging. Nevertheless, I feel it is important to recognize that present listening is always a product of past listening, meaning that, from a cognitive point of view, no new composition ever registers on a "clean slate mind," so to speak. Now I know that there are composers who can go on at great length about significant properties of their works, but I feel that it goes against the cognitive grain to try ever to examine any composition in isolation. Thus, any past listening experience, regardless of genre, that engages the mind during a present listening experience is going to have value, even if the value is one of posing a hypothesis that, upon further reflection, will be soundly refuted.

"Music in Dark Times" consisted of six relatively brief movements. In my own listening experiences, I realize that I have come across few composers whom I would approach (if not admire) as "architects of brevity." I am fascinated by the way in which John Zorn glorifies the short attention span without being judgmental about it either positively or negatively. Yesterday I tried to approach the problem of how we, as listeners, approach the short pieces of Anton Webern's Opus 5. I have also been trying to build up my listening experiences of György Kurtág, whose own influences seem to draw upon a rich appreciation of music history (and it would not surprise me in the least if Moondog was one of his influences). In the field of all those experiences, Moondog happened to rise to the top while I was listening to "Music in Dark Times;" and, if it became the seed for the sensemaking taking place as I listened to the music, then so much the better.

Nevertheless, I can see at least one way in which such an approach could irritate a composer. The basic premise is that, once a composition is presented to an audience, it no longer "belongs" to the composer. Each of us has a unique way of listening, and there will never be any guarantee that any listener will hear a composition the way the composer intended it to be heard. That is part of what makes all of us human, the subjective nature of cognitive interpretation of sensory impressions. The composition leaves the objective and subjective worlds of the composer's working environment and enters the social world, where it becomes part of a vast network of listeners and listenings, very much in the spirit of the social networks that Randall Collins postulated and investigated in The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. From such a point of view, it would seem natural for any composer to experience some sort of past-partum depression with such a departure; but, hopefully, at some point the composer can take pleasure in being the parent of a child that has now left the womb, so to speak.

This brings me to another aspect of Gerber's criticism. He chose to end his argument with the following proposition:

Critics really should study scores before writing reviews.

This statement seems to conflate criticism with music theory; and, while there are any number of occasions in which an understanding of music theory can inform the critic's task, the critic is writing for an audience of listeners (or would-be listeners), rather than a symposium of music theorists. There have been plenty of times when I have hauled out scores to test a particular hypothesis about listening that I have been trying to work. When the Internet provides me with scores that I do not already have in my collection, I may draw upon those resources, just as I currently do when consulting books; but, when I am just beginning to speculate about a hypothesis, I am not always going to go off on a data-gathering expedition, particularly when, as is the case in what I write for Examiner.com (as opposed to this blog), I feel a need to get my position expressed "with all deliberate speed." Sometimes we just have to play with the cards that have been dealt to us. If that leaves us with some loose ends, then we are all the better if we remember that they still need to be investigated in the future!

Lunch with Bartók

Today's Noontime Concerts™ in San Francisco concert consisted entirely of the music of Béla Bartók played by members of the Laurel Ensemble. Pianist Lori Lack accompanied flautist Sarah Holzman in a performance of the Suite Paysanne Hongroise, an arrangement of piano settings of Hungarian folk songs. This was followed by Contrasts, in which Lack, playing music that Bartók had composed for himself, was joined by clarinetist Ann Lavin, playing the part of Benny Goodman, and violinist Christina Mok, playing the part of Joseph Szigeti. (I drop these names because the work was conceived with them in mind.) When this was performed last May by San Francisco Conservatory students, I wrote the following about the music:

Contrasts are everywhere to be found, from the large scale differences across the three movements to the variety of acoustic effects elicited by each instrument and the ways in which these acoustic differences are combined. By way of introduction, we were told that Bartók never particularly liked Goodman; and it is easy enough to see that Bartók might not have taken very well to Goodman's approach to swing (if not to swing in general). In my personal fantasies Bartók suffered the tragedy of being to early for the jazz that would have meant something to him. With his keen ear for recording Hungarian folk music, he probably would have felt more at home with the improvisations of Charlie Parker; and, had he lived long enough, he would have appreciated the effort John Coltrane made to play along with a recording of the introduction to the first movement of his Concerto for Orchestra (from which Coltrane learned the value of wide intervals, which he would then exercise in "Giant Steps"). Whatever the hardships surrounding its composition, however, Contrasts is still a great sonic adventure, giving the ear a roller coaster ride through its contrasts on so many different scales of magnitude; and the Conservatory students did an excellent job of meeting the challenges of this piece, which really deserves to be performed more often.

Any tension that may have existed between Goodman and Bartók was absent in the relationship between Lavin and Lack. Indeed, Lavin summoned up a variety of brash sounds that were about as remote as one could get from Goodman's brand of swing (but right at home with both Bird and Trane), entirely consistent with Bartók's particular brand of rhetoric, which could be vulgar without necessarily being offensive. Thus, the roller coaster was still there; and Mok was equally at home on it, particularly when she launched into the sort of cadenza in the final movement that Trane himself, with his habit of trying to learn new licks from recordings, would have been tempted to acquire. The opening suite was a bit more on the tame side, although every now and then Holzman caught on to the folk spirit with her own bursts of energy. Since the last time I heard Bartók's music, it was a link in a chain that ran from Ernő von Dohnányi to György Kurtág, I appreciated the opportunity to hear him dominate an entire program!

To Infinite Brahms and Beyond

By paying so much (too much?) attention to whether or not Johannes Brahms was "stuck in the long shadow of the history of the music that preceded him, particularly that of Ludwig van Beethoven," I realize I have neglected the extent to which Brahms cast a shadow of his own into the twentieth century, perhaps because it sometimes seems as if Arnold Schoenberg was the only one to recognize that shadow. Indeed, on the basis of the Chamber Music Masters concert at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music last night, organized around the visit of violist Kim Kashkashian, there is good reason to believe that Brahms was already casting that shadow before his death. Viewed in terms of that possible shadow, what made last night's event particularly interesting was that the four composers on the program were all Hungarian, thus at least suggesting that, for all the ways in which Brahms had been influenced by Hungarian sources, the "real Hungarians" were now ready to turn the tables on him, not so much out of revenge but more out of a need to clarify Hungarian identity.

The laws of optics explain why it is that shadows are always sharper when one is closer to both the source and the light behind it. From this point of view, I think it makes sense to examine the works on the program in chronological order. This is not the order in which they were performed; but, since the order listed in the program also had to be modified, I have no qualms about imposing my own order to provide a better perspective on the listening experience.

Thus, I shall begin with the final work on the program, the Opus 1 of Ernő (Ernst) von Dohnányi, the first (of two) piano quintets he composed, this one in C minor. According to my records, I have written about Dohnányi only twice and about the same composition on both occasions, his Opus 10 Serenade for string trio. In both of those programs, his music was coupled with that of Brahms; and my first post was entitled, "Late Brahms and Early Dohnányi." However, while this Serenade dates from 1902, the piano quintet was completed in1895, which puts it approximately two years before Brahms' death and one year after the two Opus 120 clarinet sonatas with which Brahms had emerged from "retirement" under the inspiration of Richard Mühlfeld.

Whether or not Dohnányi intended it, there is nothing wrong with listening to this piano quintet as a sincere homage to Brahms Both the key and the plan of the work follow those of Brahms' final (Opus 60) piano quartet (about twenty years old when Dohnányi was working on his own project); and, as is the case in the Brahms piano quartet, the third movement is dominated by a melodic line in the lower voices. However, while the cello dominates in the Brahms, the viola takes the lead in the Dohnányi, which may explain Kashkashian's interest in the work. The only really interesting difference is that Dohnányi has dispensed with the "Werther connection," often associated with the Brahms piano quartet. In spite of its minor key, the Dohnányi quintet is charged with highly positive energy and has progressed into the major key by its final movement. Thus, this is a work that, even if it is an "Opus 1," has very much established its own voice; and the "family resemblance" to Brahms simply guides our understanding, just as Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that conceptual understanding, in general, is guided by such family resemblance.

The next work in the chronological ordering I have chosen to follow is a 1905 Adagio for viola and piano (again featuring Kashkashian) by Zoltán Kodály. In this case the only time I previously wrote about Kodály's music was when it also shared a program with Brahms, this time the Opus 25 G minor piano quartet, with its distinctively Hungarian final movement. It sometimes feels as if Kodály is better known for his ethnomusicological studies of Hungarian folk music than for his composing; but, if I am to believe the dates in his Wikipedia entry, I would assume that this Adagio was completed before he began his extensive field work. This is thus another composition where the primary influence appears to be coming from Brahms, most likely the reworking of the Opus 120 clarinet sonatas as viola sonatas. As was the case with the Brahms sonatas, it is an excellent vehicle for demonstrating just how lyrical the sound of a viola can be; but it makes its case in a single ternary-form movement.

Chronological order next brings us to Béla Bartók and the 44 violin duos, number 98 in András Szöllősy's chronological Sz. numbers. These were completed in 1931, which places them after Bartók had begun to accompany Kodály in his ethnomusicological field work. We have now left the domain of direct influence from Brahms and entered that of some of Brahms' sources. Bartók, however, was finding his voice in the original sounds, which were often quite striking in comparison with what one was expecting to hear in a concert setting. Eleven of these duos were performed from a transcription for two violas, possibly by Kashkashian herself. They were also arranged (again possibly by Kashkashian) for an ensemble of eight violas, which included six students and Conservatory Faculty Member Jodi Levitz (along with Kashkashian herself). These arrangements used the ensemble in a variety of ways, not only in terms of when a voice was played by a single or multiple instruments but also with regard to the spatial effects of which voices came from which directions. (The ensemble was arranged in a U formation, with the open end facing the audience.) All of the works were brief, and a few felt as if they filled the duration of a single breath. However, even the more pensive works were highly charged with energy; and I could easily understand why, chronological considerations aside, this made for an excellent beginning of the evening's program.

This brings us to 1978, the year in which György Kurtág completed his "Hommage À Mihàly András, 12 Mikroludien Für Streichquartett." I was first introduced to Kurtág when Marino Formenti gave his three "San Francisco Piano Trips" recitals in April of 2007, the first of which was entitled "Kurtág's Ghosts." From that concert I learned that Kurtág was a miniaturist with a truly exhaustive sense of music history. I also formed the suspicion that he had a sense of humor; and that suspicion was confirmed when I heard another of his homage compositions, this one for Robert Schumann, performed last April in another Chamber Music Masters concert. That humor is again evident in his bilingual title in which he invents a word that conjures up Bartók's (also miniaturist) Mikrokosmos, the plural of the German for "prelude" that we find in the scores for Johann Sebastian Bach, and quite possibly a play on the Latin ludus for "game" (as in Paul Hindemith's own set of preludes and fugues, Ludus Tonalis). The shadow of Brahms has now grown so faint that we can barely recognize it (if it is still there at all in any form other than Kurtág's "Schumann connection"); and it may even have been displaced by the shadow of Anton Webern. These pieces are even shorter than the Bartók duos, and they reflect the influence of both Bartók and Webern in their approach to eliciting unconventional sounds for the instruments of a string quartet. They also remind us just how far our capacity for listening has progressed since the death of Brahms and how much further it may yet venture!

MEA CULPA, Mozart!

I realized this morning that, by concentrating yesterday on the juxtaposition of György Kurtág and Franz Schubert in the Chamber Music Masters program at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music I had overlooked the K. 493 E-flat major piano quartet by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that opened the program, thus committing the same sin of omission that I seem to keep laying on Joshua Kosman's accounts in the San Francisco Chronicle. If I am to be allowed an excuse, it is that yesterday I was working "on the road" with far more limited resources under far greater time constraints and therefore felt obliged to make what I felt was the most important point about the recital. Now that I have a bit more time at my disposal, I shall try to make contrition for that sin that I try to take so seriously.

I first came to know the two Mozart piano quartets from a old Musical Heritage Society vinyl. It is long gone, and I can no longer remember the performers. However, I do remember that the liner notes had a strong bias toward the K. 478 G minor work as the more substantive of the two. What I cannot remember is why the author of the notes made this judgment. It may have been a bias induced by the key of Mozart's penultimate symphony or, even worse, a tendency to regard the minor key as "deeper" than the major. Whatever the explanation may have been, it was clear from the performance that Peter Frankl developed with violinist Axel Strauss, violist Jodi Levitz, and student cellist Erin Wang that it was thoroughly specious. K. 493 may start with a sunny welcome; but it does not take much attentive listening to recognize that no end of subtle nuances unfold at every turn in the performance, many of which are endowed with that light touch that can be traced back to his earliest piano sonatas for both two and four hands. Both sonatas were composed at the time when Mozart was entering his early thirties; but K. 493 is a strong (but not forceful) reminder from Mozart that his "inner twenty-year old" is still alive, well, and up to its usual show-off tricks. This is the same spirit I cited in Richard Goode's recent performance of the final movement of the K. 456 piano concerto with the San Francisco Symphony; and it is somewhat interesting that, in the overall Mozart chronology, these two works sort of "flank" the premiere of The Marriage of Figaro. What it importance in both these works is that Mozart's intensions can only be honored through just the right approach to execution, and Frankl and his colleagues appreciated this subtlety as much as Goode did. Once again, San Francisco had an opportunity to flourish as what I have called "a city of well-developed Mozart listeners!"