Hamelin Returns to SFP for “Anniversary” Recital

Marc-André Hamelin (photograph by Sim Connety-Clarke, courtesy of SFP)

Last night pianist Marc-André Hamelin returned to Herbst Theatre to contribute to the 45th Season Favorites series presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP). This was his fifteenth visit to SFP. Hamelin has a prodigious command of just about every keyboard style at the piano, and the diversity of those styles was both evident and engaging in the program he prepared. The first half juxtaposed Joseph Haydn with three twentieth-century composers (one of whom is still alive). The second half was also twentieth-century, this time featuring two Russian composers whose births were separated by less than a decade. The earlier of these was Sergei Rachmaninoff, born in 1873; and he was preceded in the program by Nikolai Medtner, who was born in 1880.

Hamelin consistently takes the stage with an engaging personality. However, when he sits down at the keyboard, he is intensely focused on his work. Nevertheless, he opened his program with two composers with reputations for their prankish personalities. He began with Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken XVI/37 sonata in D major, the third of the five Opus 30 compositions. Haydn was known for his engaging approach to expressiveness, and it would be fair to say that Hamelin’s account caught that expressive spirit. However, he also adapted it to his instrument, taking the liberty of a wider dynamic range than any of Haydn’s keyboards could have afforded.

Most importantly, however, Hamelin was not shy in expressing Haydn’s prankishness, making his interpretation a perfect complement to the following offering, Frank Zappa’s “Ruth is Sleeping.” The title referred to Ruth Underwood, the percussionist for The Mothers of Invention from 1968 until 1977. However, that title was even more specific than naming one of Zappa’s “partners in crime.” Apparently, during a long rehearsal that would involve other members of Zappa’s band, she would “curl up underneath the marimba and go to sleep” (in Zappa’s words). My guess is that, if there is a Heaven, Zappa is up there having a good time sharing stories like these with Haydn!

Zappa was followed by the far more serious composer Stefan Wolpe with a performance of the “Passacaglia” movement from his Opus 23, Four Studies on Basic Rows. This music was inspired by Arnold Schoenberg’s approach to treating all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale as equals, exploring different ways in which “rows” of all twelve of the tones could be permuted. I must confess that I could not, for the life of me, suss out what made this composition a passacaglia; and the performance, as a whole, reminded me more of Amadeus than of Schoenberg, with that “too many notes” phrase in the script! The first half of the program then concluded with John Oswald’s “Tip,” which amounted to a plethora of thematic quotations, which were presumably meant to be funny but, due to excessive length, came across as only tedious.

I welcomed the second half of the program because I have had little exposure to Medtner’s music. Hamelin selected two relatively short pieces played without interruption: a set of variations given the title “Improvisation” (Opus 31, Number 1 in B-flat minor) and “Danza festiva” (Opus 38, Number 3). However, Medtner had to give way to Rachmaninoff, represented primarily by his Opus 36 piano sonata in B-flat minor. Sadly, too much of this felt like Hamelin was just banging away at the notes, which had also been his approach to the “warm-up” for the sonata, the E-flat minor “Étude-tableau,” the fifth piece in the Opus 39 collection. Taken has a whole, his performance of Rachmaninoff’s music came off more like an Olympic event than a piano recital.

That disposition continued in Hamelin’s second encore with a particularly aggressive (but unidentified) selection by Sergei Prokofiev. The first encore, on the other hand, was more engaging. “Music Box” was a short piece that Hamelin had composed during his school days. As far as I am concerned, it definitely benefited from an opportunity to see the light again!

David Oistrakh’s Rarities on Warner

Readers may recall that last week I began my venture into the 31 CDs classified as Premières, Rarities & Live Performances in the Warner Remastered Edition box set collection of recordings of performances by Russian violinist David Oistrakh. This began with an examination of the two CDs identified as Early Recordings. I am now in a position to discuss those albums associated with the “Rarities” category.

The most unique of these is the complete recording of a recital that Oistrakh performed in Moscow on February 16, 1960. He was accompanied by Vladimir Yampolsky; and the “heart” of the program consisted of three sonatas, each from a different century. Oistrakh began with Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1019 duo sonata in G major. He then leap-frogged into the late Romantic period with the last of Johannes Brahms’ three violin sonatas, Opus 108 in D minor. Late Brahms was followed by the Opus 1 of Karen Khachaturian (nephew of Aram), a three-movement sonata without a key specification.

Presumably, the rest of the album involved the encore selections, of which there were five, most of which were probably unfamiliar to much of the audience. Oistrakh began with the prelude-fugue coupling that constituted a solo violin partita by Alfred Mendelssohn. This was followed by the Opus 7 “Ciaccona” by Giovanni Battista Vitali, composed in 1682 for two violins and continuo violone and arranged for violin and piano by Léopold Charlier. This was followed by Oistrakh’s own arrangement of the sixth of the nine piano arrangements by Franz Liszt of “valses-caprices” by Franz Schubert. The encores were concluded with two works by twentieth-century composers: Sergei Prokofiev (his “Melody,” Opus 35b, Number 3) and Maurice Ravel (the familiar “Tzigane”).

Sergei Taneyev (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Two of the CDs are identified as “Sonata Rarities.” They live up to that title through the composers they represent (in order of appearance): Nikolai Medtner, Mieczysław Weinberg, Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov, Sergei Taneyev, Zara Levina, and Wilhelm Stenhammar. There is also a “Bravura” album, which is framed by Niccolò Paganini at the beginning (with five of his Opus 1 caprices, beginning and concluding with arrangements by Fritz Kreisler and Leopold Auer, respectively) and Pablo de Sarasate’s Opus 25 (“Carmen Concert Fantasy”) at the end.

Finally, there is an album classified as “Vignettes.” This consists of 21 tracks, all of which are shorter than ten minutes in duration. Nine of the tracks are premiere releases. They are framed by arrangements by Carl Flesch of arias by George Frideric Handel at the beginning and the “Mazurka-oberek” by Alexander Glazunov on the final track.

Personally, I can attest to the “Rarities” classification. Yes, there were many familiar encounters (which the reader will easily recognize above). However, my mind is still trying to “digest” the abundance of “first contacts” I experienced while listening to the six CDs in this category!

Hamelin will be Next SFP “Anniversary” Artist

Marc-André Hamelin at the keyboard (photograph by Sim Connety-Clarke, courtesy of SFP)

The 45th Season Favorites subscription series presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP) will continue at the beginning of next month. Readers may recall that there are four programs in this series, two of which will be solo recitals. Next month will see the first of those recitals, performed by pianist Marc-André Hamelin, who made his SFP debut in December of 2003. This will be his fifteenth appearance, the last having been in July of 2021, which was structured around very early and very late compositions by Ludwig van Beethoven.

There will be no Beethoven in next month’s program. However, Hamelin will begin with music by Beethoven’s teacher, Joseph Haydn. He will play the Hoboken XVI/37 sonata in D major, the third of the five Opus 30 compositions. Haydn will then get to rub shoulders with three far more recent composers, each with his own unique approach to making music: Frank Zappa, Stefan Wolpe, and John Oswald.

The second half will be shared by two major Russian composers of the twentieth century. The first of these will be Nikolai Medtner, represented by the first of his Opus 31 compositions, an improvisation in B-flat minor, followed by the third of the Opus 38 pieces, given the title “Danza festiva.” The program will then conclude with two works by Sergei Rachmaninoff, the fifth of the nine Opus 39 études, given the collective title Études-Tableaux. This one is in E-flat minor with the tempo “Appassionato.” Hamelin will then conclude the program with a complete account of Rachmaninoff’s second piano sonata, his Opus 36 in the 1931 version.

This performance will begin on Saturday, February 8, at 7:30 p.m. in Herbst Theatre, located at 401 Van Ness Avenue on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. Ticket prices are $85 (premium Orchestra and front and center Dress Circle), $75 (remainder of Orchestra, all Side Boxes, and center rear Dress Circle), and $65 (remaining Dress Circle and Balcony); and they may be purchased through an SFP secure Web page. Single tickets may also be purchased by calling 415-392-2545.

The Path to Beethoven’s Opus 111

Pianist Rachel Breen (from her Old First Concerts event page)

Yesterday afternoon in the Old First Presbyterian Church, the 2022 San Francisco International Piano Festival presented the first of the three Old First Concerts recitals to be performed at that venue. The recitalist was Rachel Breen, making her Festival debut. Breen prefaced both halves of her program with well-informed verbal introductions, making the case for a well-considered plan behind the overall performance.

The conclusion of that path was Ludwig van Beethoven’s final piano sonata, Opus 111 in C minor. Beethoven departed from structural conventions of the past in many of his late compositions. By the time he completed Opus 111, he had distilled structure down to only two movements. This consisted of a hyper-charged sonata form with a Maestoso introduction followed by an extended set of variations on an Arietta theme. Both of these movements lead the attentive listener down a series of highly convoluted paths involving elaborate embellishments of thematic elements based on almost naive simplicity. Breen clearly appreciated the full scope of those embellishments and knew how to communicate them to the attentive listener, providing a clear account of music that many members of the audience have probably encountered any number of times in the past.

Breen also decided that the second half of her program needed an introduction to this massive icon in the Beethoven catalog. Since the two movements are in C minor and C major, respectively, she chose to introduce the sonata with Robert Schumann’s Opus 18 “Arabeske,” which he composed in the key of C major. As the title suggests, this is also highly-embellished music. While the music itself post-dates Beethoven, that attention to embellishment served to prepare the audience for the extreme thematic elaborations that would be encountered in the Beethoven sonata.

The first half of the program concluded with music that had also been selected to prepare the listener for Beethoven. Breen’s selection was Nikolai Medtner’s Opus 22 sonata in G minor. She explained that this sonata reflected the same prioritization of counterpoint over harmony that one encounters in Opus 111, particularly where the second-movement variations are concerned. She also suggested that Medtner’s attention to rhetoric would guide the attentive listener to recognizing rhetorical devices in Opus 111, this time in both of the sonata’s movements.

At the same time, the Medtner sonata reflected the approaches to composition that preceded it in Breen’s program. It would be fair to say that the first half of the program involved the exploration of multiple tonalities and the processes of modulation that connect them. Conventional modulation generally involves shifts in tonality across the interval of a perfect fifth. Medtner’s sonata, on the other hand, deploys modulations across the interval of a third (major or minor). Furthermore, the opening selection, a fantasia by John Bull, amounts to an exercise in stepwise modulation. He made this clear to performers and listeners by giving this composition the title “Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La.” Breen used dynamics to clarify how Bull deployed his modulations, a clarification that would probably have been more difficult to perceive when his music was performed on keyboard instruments of his own time, such as the virginal.

The “bridge” between Bull and Medtner was Alexander Scriabin. Breen selected seven of the preludes from his Opus 11. This is the set of 24 preludes that account for all of the major and minor keys. The last of Breen’s selections was the prelude in E-flat minor, and she preceded it by another Scriabin prelude in the same key, the fourth of his five Opus 16 preludes. Breen clearly had her own strategies for guiding the listener through Scriabin’s preludes. Her techniques left me hoping that, at some time in the future, she would return to Old First to present an all-Scriabin program.

Ken Iisaka’s F-Sharp Major Piano Break

Last week I wrote about the Piano Break recital presented by the Ross McKee Foundation for Zak Mustille, the winner of the 2020 Ross McKee Young Artist Competition. Last night’s recitalist, Ken Iisaka, is a three-time finalist in the Van Cliburn Amateur Piano Competition, dividing his time between music and artificial intelligence. He presented a program entitled In F-sharp Major: Etherealism and Exoticism in One Key. The composers he selected for this performance were, in order of appearance, Frédéric Chopin, Nikolai Medtner, and Alexander Scriabin.

The Scriabin selection was particularly interesting. The Opus 30 (fourth) sonata in F-sharp major was the last of the ten sonatas to be assigned a key. Scriabin was determined to get away from conventional harmonic progressions; but, as Donald Francis Tovey put it in his “Harmony” entry for the Encyclopædia Britannica, the composer “complained shortly before his untimely death [in 1915] that he had, after all, not succeeded in getting away from a sophisticated dominant seventh.”

Even with its key assignment, Opus 30 shows early signs of Scriabin’s quest. Last night’s video provided many convenient overhead shots of Iisaka’s playing, suggesting that he wanted his listeners to “see the action” involving the black keys. Where Scriabin is concerned, one of my conjectures that, in choosing the key of F-sharp major, the composer had sought to attempt to reverse the roles of black keys and white keys, making the white keys the “chromatic auxiliaries” to the black ones.

This would require that new approach to harmonic progressions. The black keys allow for only two triads, F-sharp major and D-sharp minor. White keys are necessary for the dominant triad of either of these keys, C-sharp major and A-sharp minor, respectively, suggesting that progressions that avoid the white keys are likely to be unsatisfying, at best. In the opening Andante movement of Opus 30, it almost seems as if Scriabin was trying to get beyond harmony as the basis for progression, turning to rhythm instead. Such a premise would suggest that the black keys and the white ones have become “equal partners,” a premise that Arnold Schoenberg was just beginning to address when Scriabin’s Opus 30 was first published in 1904.

Opus 30 thus serves somewhat as a “landmark,” not only in Scriabin’s catalog but also in the history of music during the first half of the twentieth century. One could thus take considerable satisfaction in the video techniques that Iisaka planned to complement the listening experience of his account of this sonata. Regrettably, however, this was the most satisfying portion of his program.

The Medtner selection was his Opus 27 (eighth) piano sonata, which the composer called “Sonata-Ballade.” The composer structured the piece as a ballade, an introduction, and a finale. While the score is rich in thematic ideas, from a rhetorical point of view it never manages to get beyond rambling. Medtner seemed more interested in unfolding an assembly of engaging themes without endowing those themes with a framework through which the attentive listener can appreciate progressions from beginning to middle to end. As a result, when the composer tries (not particularly successfully) to launch into a fugal exposition, one begins to wonder whether this will be a “grand finale.” (It wasn’t.)

The author of Medtner’s Wikipedia page claims that there is a “passing reference to Chopin’s Barcarolle.” Given that Iisaka began his recital with that Chopin composition, I have to say that any “passing reference” went by too quickly to be recognized. One problem may have been that, while Iisaka tended to have a strong command of phrasing in managing Scriabin’s unconventional approaches to progressions, his accounts of both Chopin and Medtner tended to be flatter, with less sense of prioritizing the primary and the secondary. Given the duration of Medtner’s Opus 27, one needed considerable patience to hang in there until the Scriabin account got under way.

Two Generations of Virtuoso Piano Composition

The listing in SF Weekly for Daniel Glover's piano recital at the Old First Presbyterian Church in San Francisco last night read:

The pianist plays Romantic Russian brooders plus religious compositions by Liszt.

I am not sure how many members of the audience were actually drawn to the concert by that sentence. Personally, I felt it was better to view the program as a presentation of piano composition in transition, even if the earlier stage of that transition (the Liszt portion) constituted the second half of the evening. After all, viewed strictly along the timeline of history, Franz Liszt died in 1886, not that long after the births of the two Russian composers from the first half. Sergei Rachmaninoff was born in 1873, and Nicolai Medtner was born in 1880. Whether or not they were "brooders," Glover presented them to us in his program notes as members of the "Russian Triumvirate" (along with Alexander Scriabin, whose music was played as an encore). More important is that all of the compositions in the first half came from the early twentieth century, while the Liszt works were firmly settled in the middle of the nineteenth. Furthermore, the Liszt compositions were all written after he had retired (at the age of 35) from his career as a concert pianist; so they mark his own transition from the flamboyant rock-star-of-his-day performer to the more reflective soul who had gone so far as to take minor orders, thus earning the title of Abbé (hence the SF Weekly description of his compositions).

How reflective Liszt actually was will probably always be a matter of opinion. It is hard to tell how sincerely devout his Two Legends of 1863 ("St. Francis of Assisi Preaching to the Birds" and "St. Francis of Paola Walking on the Waters") actually are; but then the same can be said of just about any "religiously inspired" painting. As might be expected, the birds receive more attention than their Franciscan sermon; but, as a rule, sermons do not lend themselves to musical depiction. One might be cynical and observe that, at the end of the composition (presumably the end of the sermon), the birds have not changed very much; but, given Liszt's past reputation for excess, particularly when he was deliberately playing to the crowd, his grammar of embellishment for depicting those birds is far more subdued. So the focus of the music may well be less on the preaching itself than on the establishment of a communion when Francis comes into the presence of those birds. On the other hand the second Legend is far more dramatic, capturing the contrast between turbulent waves in a raging storm and the serenity of the "other Francis" walking on top of those waves, which may be viewed as another instance of a communion, this time between a holy man and the very forces of nature. Thus, the theme of communion could well have been the stuff of Liszt's reflections; and Glover's performance allowed this theme to emerge across both of the Legends, elevating them beyond two short works that others might dismiss as "mere" tone painting.

The Legends were followed by one movement ("Benediction of God in Solitude") from Liszt's earlier (1852) collection of Poetic and Religious Harmonies. This music was intended to invoke the spirit of meditation; but I fear that my own meditations were preoccupied with that word "solitude." Was this a depiction of a "solitary" God or a divine blessing of a solitary soul? Either way, the implication seemed to be one of communion between an individual mortal and "the" individual God, which contrasts with the broader scope of communion in the Legends. The structuring of this movement into three large sections was also puzzling. Then again, I am not in a particularly good position to appreciate Liszt's particular faith, although, to the extent that I can be capable of meditating on the mysteries of Catholicism, I tend to feel better served by the more meditative piano music of Erik Satie or the seven movements of the more overt Visions de L'Amen by Olivier Messiaen.

From a more secular point of view, this was also a time when Liszt applied his compositional talent to the transcription of opera music, particularly the works of his future son-in-law, Richard Wagner. The earliest (1859) of these efforts in the "Fantasy on Themes from Rienzi." In his notes for the Dover edition of the Liszt transcriptions, Charles Suttoni calls Rienzi "Wagner's first mature opera;" and it would probably be fair to call it the first opera the "sounds like Wagner." The Wikipedia entry for this opera tells you pretty much what you need to know about it:

Rienzi is Wagner's third completed opera, and is mostly written in a Grand Opera style. The first performance in Dresden was well received despite running over six hours (including intermissions). Later, Wagner experimented both with giving the opera over two evenings and making cuts for performance in a single evening.

Because of its atypical style, and its sheer length, Rienzi is rarely performed today, and has never been performed at the Bayreuth Festival. Wagner later saw the work as an embarrassment, but it remained one of his most successful until his death. An ingenious staging at the English National Opera in London, produced by Nicholas Hytner in the 1980s, placed the hero in the context of 20th century totalitarianism.

The opera concerns the life of Cola di Rienzi, a medieval Italian populist figure who succeeds in outwitting and then defeating the nobles and their followers and in raising the power of the people. Magnanimous at first, he is forced by events to crush the nobles' rebellion against the people's power, but popular opinion changes and even the Church, which has earlier urged him to assert himself, turns against him. In the end the populace burns the Capitol, in which Rienzi and a few adherents have made a last stand.

It may also be worth mentioning that, while one of the more reliable accounts of Rienzi can be found in Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Wagner wrote his own libretto for this opera based on Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel, Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes (which is not the source for the most famous Bulwer-Lytton quote, "It was a dark and stormy night")! I find this particularly ironic, since the only other composer I know who has drawn upon text by Bulwer-Lytton is Charles Ives!

Liszt's transcription is a relatively modest one (which, considering the length of Wagner's score, is a blessing). It is structured around only a few of the basic themes, two of which most of us know from the overture; and it does not go overboard (or at least very far overboard) with its embellishments. It does make a sharp contrast with his more religious work, but it also allowed Glover to bring his recital to a rousing conclusion.

Does it make sense to approach Rachmaninoff and Medtner by viewing them from "the other side of a transition" that began with Liszt? As a Conservatory student, Rachmaninoff was a pupil of Alexander Siloti, who, in turn, had studied under Liszt; and Liszt was part of his performing repertoire (although he does not receive much attention in the recordings Rachmaninoff made). On the other hand there seems to be less evidence of a "Liszt connection" for Medtner. Nevertheless, his Opus 31, Number1 "Improvisation" is a set of variations on a theme that abounds with harmonic ambiguities of a sort similar to those with which Liszt experimented towards the end of his life (but whose origins may best be traced to the "Chaos" prelude to Joseph Haydn's Die Schöpfung). Unfortunately, after stating the theme, Medtner immediately launches into an abundance of embellishments, which, at least to a first-time listener, tend to obscure all those ambiguities that make the theme so interesting.

Sadly, the problem here may not have resided strictly with Medtner's compositional technique. I was familiar with only one of the three compositions that Glover performed, the "Danza festiva," which had been recorded by Egon Petri in 1958. It did not take a lot of familiarity to realize that Glover's rushed approach to this composition pretty much deprived it on any dance-like qualities; but it was nice to have Petri as a point of reference to confirm that those qualities were there in the first place. Thus, the shortcomings of the Medtner portion of the program may have had more to do with Glover focusing so much on the notes as to miss the music than with Medtner's skills as a composer.

Rachmaninoff was represented by his second (Opus 36) piano sonata, composed in 1913 (four years after his "notorious" third piano concerto) and revised extensively in 1931. If the "monster status" of "Rocky 3" comes more from the cinema world than from Rachmaninoff's biography, the revision of the second sonata had to do with Rachmaninoff's own recognition of superfluity in the massive wash of notes he had composed. Ultimately, neither version satisfied Rachmaninoff, and eventually Vladimir Horowitz was granted permission to compile a performing version based on the best of both attempts. This is, for the most part, the version that Glover performed; and, while it has a clear sense of structure, that "massive wash of notes" is still there. On the other hand, if Glover had approached this work the same way he had approached the Medtner compositions, there may be more music in this sonata than made it to at least this listener's ears; but I still have to wonder whether or not, at some point towards the end of his life, Rachmaninoff may have just resigned himself to the problem that "the music just wasn't there" in this particular piece of work.