Next CBS Program to Explore Aspects of Loss

The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame (painting by Georges de La Tour on the Web page for the concert being announced)

The full title of the next program to be presented by the California Bach Society is On Leaving: Music for Parting and Passage. If the overall theme reflects on loss, longing, and transcendence, the plan is that the music will offer comfort, harmony, and hope. Yuko Tanaka will be the organist, there will be one vocalist, tenor Corey Head, and three instrumental soloists: Stacy Pelinka on flute, David Morris playing Baroque cello, and Farley Pearce on violone.

The program will begin with Max Reger’s setting of the poem by Matthias Claudius whose first line is "Der Mensch lebt und bestehet nur eine kleine Zeit" (Man liveth and endureth but a short time). This is the first of the eight motets in his Opus 138 collection, inspired by the motets of Johann Sebastian Bach. This will be followed by the motet for four unaccompanied voices “Ecce quomodo moritur justus” (see how the just dies), composed by Jacob Handl (Jacobus Gallus) for his Opus Musicum II collection. The first half of the program will then conclude with a motet that is by Bach, the BWV 229 “Komm, Jesu, komm” (come, Jesus, come).

The second half of the program will begin with “Na Ishod” (on leaving) by the Ukrainian composer Galina Grigorjeva. This five-movement composition was inspired by Orthodox chant, complementing the German and Latin selections in the first half of the program. However, the program will conclude by going “back to Bach” with the performance of another one of his motets, “Jesu, meine Freude” (Jesus, my joy) BWV 227.

The San Francisco performance of this program will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, February 27. The venue will be St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, which is located 1111 O’Farrell Street. Individual tickets are available for general admission at $40 with discounted rates for seniors and students. Tickets may also be purchased an advance until midnight of February 26 through a Web page, in which case general admission will be only $35.

SOMM to Release Tribute to Fischer-Dieskau

While I had recognized the name of baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau through my regular perusals of the Schwann catalog of recordings, my “first contact” with listening to his voice came about when I added Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem to my collection. The libretto incorporated poems written by Wilfred Owen during World War I; and Fischer-Dieskau took the “role” of a German soldier, complemented by tenor Peter Pears representing an English soldier. Fischer-Dieskau had more than a few problems with English pronunciation; but none of them interfered with the expressiveness of his delivery, whether it involved the intensity of battle or the poignant setting in the final movement of “Let us sleep now,” sung in duo with Pears.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau on the cover of the “tribute” album about to be released (from the Amazon.com Web page for this recording)

However, my account of Fischer-Dieskau’s recordings has been relatively modest, particular in light of the eleven-CD box set of the recordings he made for EMI. This Friday, SOMM Recordings will release a two-CD album entitled Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau: A Centenary Tribute; and, as is usually the case, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for processing pre-orders. The second CD is devoted entirely to two interviews, the first for his 75th birthday in 2000 and the second for his 80th birthday in 2005. The first CD offers an engaging interleaving of familiar vocal works among the less familiar.

All of the familiar offerings are by Gustav Mahler, with three songs from Lieder und Gesänge aus der Jugendzeit coupled with three of the Rückert-Lieder songs. These are all recital recordings with pianist Karl Engel accompanying Fischer-Dieskau. There are also five tracks of settings by Ferruccio Busoni of poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as well as also single settings of Goethe by Richard Strauss and Max Reger. The less familiar composers in the repertoire are Anna Amalia, Johann Friedrich Reichart, and Carl Friedrich Zelter. The album then concludes with three songs in Hungarian, two by Zoltán Kodály and one a folk song.

I have to confess that one of the reasons that drew me to this album is my interest in the Busoni catalog. I am almost certain that this was my first encounter with his approach to art song, and Fischer-Dieskau could not have been a better advocate. It is also worth noting that the Kodály tracks provided accompaniment by the London Symphony Orchestra with Kodály himself on the podium. Thus, as “centenary tributes” go, the “historical content” of this album is decidedly impressive. My guess is that Busoni and Kodály will be the primary factors in drawing me back to this album for further listening!

Rudolf Buchbinder Plays Brahms-Reger

I first became aware of pianist Rudolf Buchbinder back in the last years of the vinyl era. I remember purchasing one of his “complete works” collections but, for the life of me, I cannot remember the composer! His visits to San Francisco have been few and far between. Fortunately, his most recent appearance took place after I was well entrenched in my writing gig. My account of his performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 466 concerto in D minor with the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) led by Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) in October of 2016 made it clear that I was in hog heaven. Ironically, however, since my move from vinyl to CDs, he has been absent from my collection of recordings.

Pianist Rudolf Buchbinder on the cover of his new Song Transcriptions album (courtesy of Crossover Media)

This has now changed with the release of a new Deutsche Grammophon album entitled Song Transcriptions. There are 28 songs all by Johannes Brahms. The tracks are in chronological order, beginning with the first of the Opus 3 songs and concluding with the last in the Opus 107 set. All of the transcriptions were made by Max Reger.

I first became aware of these songs when Deutsche Grammophon released its “complete works” Brahms project as a series of vinyl albums according to category. The album of songs was my first purchase, since I knew so little of that side of the Brahms canon. Since then, I regret to say that almost all of my knowledge of those songs has come from recordings. Indeed, as far as my writing is concerned, I think that the only vocal selection I have heard in performance was the Opus 121 Vier ernste Gesänge (four serious songs) when Dashon Burton sang it for San Francisco Performances in February of 2022. This is probably the best known of Brahms’ song collections, and I was more than a little relieved by its absence from Song Transcriptions!

What is important about this new release is that Reger seems to have transcended Brahms’ compositions beyond a need for words. It goes without saying that, when a song has multiple stanzas, Reger only accounts for more than one of them when Brahms’ music eschews repetition. As a result, each track on the album presents a piece of music that is a solo piano composition in its own right. In some cases (such as the “Wiegenlied” war horse) the listener may be aware of the words that were set; but, in the overall context of the album, that selection is a rare exception.

In other words, this is a highly engaging album of 28 short pieces for solo piano. The “original source” may have been songs composed by Brahms. However, the “music as such” is Reger’s; and Buchbinder could not have done a better job in transforming what could have been a vocal recital into a solo piano recital.

Unfamiliar Reger Meets Familiar Mahler

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Max Reger. Those that have followed this site for some time probably known that almost all of the articles about Reger involved his compositions for organ. However, two pianists stand out, even if only briefly, Peter Serkin (accompanying Mischa Schneider in the Opus 116 cello sonata) and Igor Levit (for a solo piano reworking of Brahms’ Opus 121 set of four “serious” songs).

courtesy of Naxos of America

This past Friday, however, marked my “first contact” with vocal music. Capriccio released an album with three Reger settings of texts by Friedrich Hölderlin, Joseph von Eichendorff, and Christian Friedrich Hebbel, respectively. They are coupled with two familiar song cycles by Gustav Mahler, the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (songs of a wayfarer) and the Rückert-Lieder collection of five settings of poems by Friedrich Rückert. The vocalists are mezzo Anke Vondung and baritone Tobias Berndt, performing with Das Neue Orchester conducted by Christoph Spering. Two of the Reger songs also include a chorus, performed on this album by Chorus Musicus Köln.

Nevertheless, the album, taken as a whole, runs the risk of dismissing the three Reger selections (each of which is over ten minutes in duration) as an amuse-bouche that prepares the listener for the more familiar Mahler selections. This strikes me as more than a little unfair. Nevertheless, my attitude may have been shaped by recognizing that it took two journeys through all the works that Reger composed for organ to adjust my listening practices to appreciate his repertoire. From that point of view, in the context of all the entries in the Reger catalog, less than an hour of solo vocal and choral compositions does little to orient the listener to those genres.

Does that larger catalog encourage us to dig deeper? As they say, “You don’t know until you have tried.” For the listener that really wants to approach Reger attentively, a larger serving of both of those “courses” is definitely in order.

BBC Legends 3: Pianist Rudolf Serkin

Earlier this week, in the course of my disc-by-disc account of the latest 20-CD release in the BBC Legends series, I observed that pianist Shura Cherkassky “holds a special place in my personal history of collecting recordings.” The thirteenth CD in this series has even greater significance, since it dates back to when my parents were just beginning to collect LP (long playing) vinyl records. Columbia introduced this medium in 1948; and, by way of promotion, they provided about half a dozen albums free of charge to those purchasing the new turntable for playing the discs. (Some may recall a similar approach when compact discs were first released.)

Unless I am mistaken, two of the LPs that my parents selected featured the pianist Rudolf Serkin performing Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 73 (fifth) piano concerto in E-flat major (known as the “Emperor”) and Johannes Brahms’ Opus 83 (second) piano concerto in B-flat major. Once I was old enough to play recordings myself, both of those albums became personal favorites; and it would be fair to say that Serkin was the first pianist I knew by name. Ironically, I never saw Serkin in performance until I was going to Carnegie Hall concerts regularly in my forties.

The BBC Legends Serkin CD is based on a single solo recital that he gave in the Royal Festival Hall on June 4, 1973 (a few years prior to my Carnegie adventures). The second half of the program was devoted entirely to two Beethoven sonatas, the two-movement Opus 78 in F-sharp major and Opus 53 in C major, better known as the “Waldstein” sonata. The first half involved music that I would not previously have associated with Serkin. The first track was devoted to Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 993, the E major “Capriccio in honorem Johann Christoph Bachii,” dedicated to Sebastian’s eldest brother. This is followed by Max Reger’s Opus 81, his variations and fugue on the aria “Sein Allmach zu ergründen” (to know his omnipotence) from the BWV 128 cantata Auf Christi Himmelfahrt allein (on Christ’s ascension into heaven).

Most of Serkin’s life predated just about any attention to “historically informed” performance, meaning that he had no misgivings about playing Bach on a modern piano. Where Reger is concerned, many readers may recall my having done a “deep dive” into his organ repertoire; but his compositions for piano have been almost entirely unfamiliar to me. Nevertheless, I recall that, when writing about Reger’s approach to what I called “prelude (or toccata) and fugue couplings,” the results tended to come across as “Bach on steroids.”

In that context Opus 81 comes close to a roller coaster ride through fourteen variations with almost aggressive swings in tempo. The impact is all the stronger since no variation is longer than two and a half minutes in duration and three of them last for less than a minute (the first two being back-to-back). The fugue, on the other hand, unfolds over the course of about eight minutes. All this makes for an experience decidedly different from any of my previous encounters with Serkin, either in performance or on recording.

Weinberger’s Reger Project: Volume 8

A little over two weeks ago, the German label cpo released the eighth volume in Gerhard Weinberger’s project to record the complete organ works of Max Reger. Since each of those volumes consists of two CDs, this means that sixteen CDs have been released. This happens to be the total number of CDs in the OehmsClassics complete-works Reger project, recording performances by Bernhard Buttmann. The Editorial Reviews on the Amazon.com Web page note that this is the “penultimate volume;” but it does not say anything about the number of CDs in that ninth volume.

When I wrote about the seventh volume, which was released in August of last year, I was not shy about my patience wearing thin. However, I qualified my discontent by observing that one of the contributing factors was probably “pandemic weariness.” Nevertheless, to the extent that I have been using the Buttmann collection as a reference resource, I have to say that the Weinberger releases may not rise to the same level of utility.

Most frustrating has been the handling of the 52 “easy” chorale preludes collected as Opus 67. Buttmann accounted for all of them in numerical order on the first three of the four CDs in his second volume. Weinberger trickled out two of them on the second CD of his second volume with more substantial quantities in the fifth, sixth, and eighth volumes; and even the suggestion of numerical order seemed to be out of the question. Presumably, the final volume will tie up the loose ends in this collection.

Mind you, it is clear that these relatively short pieces were not intended to be performed in numerical order as a recital offering. On the other hand if one is trying to single out one of those pieces, a relatively coherent numerical ordering would be a useful asset! Thus, while I am equally impressed with how both Weinberger and Buttmann approach their performances of the Reger canon, I have to say that OehmsClassics gave significantly more thought to helping the serious listener locate specific compositions. For my part I have been able to rely on the indexing tools of Apple Music, but I would hardly expect others to follow my lead in this matter!

Masur’s Late Nineteenth-Century Repertoire

I have now traversed the full extent of late nineteenth-century music accounted for in the Warner Classics 70-CD box set of recordings made by conductor Kurt Masur. Had I realized how many recordings this would entail, I probably would have taken the same approach I took with the Dmitri Mitropoulos anthology and separate the music of Tchaikovsky as a separate category, as I had already done with Masur’s Brahms recordings.

Masur is definitely more thorough than Mitropoulos had been. He accounts for all six of the numbered symphonies, as well as the Opus 58 “Manfred” symphony, all performed with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. On the other hand his New York Philharmonic recordings include all three of the piano concertos, all performed with pianist Elisabeth Leonskaja. There is also a second recording of the first concerto, Opus 23 in B-flat minor, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Cécile Ousset as the soloist.

Finally, there is an album entitled Pas de Deux: Famous Waltzes. I have to confess that I found this one more than a little gratuitous. As anyone that knows more than beans about the ballet will quickly recognize, there are no pas de deux selections on the album. The waltzes come from a variety of sources, not just the ballets but also the Opus 24 opera Eugene Onegin, the last two symphonies, the Opus 48 serenade for string ensemble, and the incidental music composed for a production of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. All of these waltzes are gems in their own respective rights, but enough is enough!

In terms of quantity, the music of Antonín Dvořák comes in at a distant second. The only symphonies are the two most popular, Opus 88 (the eighth) in G major and Opus 95 (“From the New World”) in E minor. There are samples of shorter works, including three of the Slavonic dances. More interesting is the trilogy of overtures collectively titled Nature, Life and Love. These are Opus 91 (“In Nature’s Realm”), Opus 92 (“Carnival”), and Opus 93 (“Othello”). Opus 93 is a rather odd candidate for “love;” but, since it receives so little attention, one can appreciate its presence in Masur’s repertoire. Finally, there is a New York Philharmonic performance of the Opus 53 violin concerto in A minor with Maxim Vengerov as soloist.

Vengerov also appears with the Gewandhaus Orchestra in a performance of Max Bruch’s Opus 26 (first) violin concerto. This is the only Bruch selection in the collection, but it gets a second performance by Sarah Chang with the Dresden Philharmonic. Somewhat more generous is the share for two symphonies by Anton Bruckner, WAB 104 (the fourth in E-flat major) and WAB 107 (the seventh in E major). Both of these were recorded with the Philharmonic, and that was probably as much as the New York audiences could take of Bruckner. The only other composers to be allotted an entire CD are César Franck, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and early compositions by Gustav Mahler. Max Reger and Modest Mussorgsky have to make to with sharing their respective albums with other composers, not necessarily making the best of company.

Thus, while there is much to appreciate in Masur’s accounts for this impressive diversity of repertoire, one might have argued for a better balance of the contributing composers.

Weinberger’s Reger Project: Volume 7

This month began with the German label cpo releasing the seventh volume in Gerhard Weinberger’s project to record the complete organ works of Max Reger. As I have previously observed, each volume has consisted of two CDs. Since the OehmsClassics complete-works Reger project, recording performances by Bernhard Buttmann, consisted of sixteen CDs, it would be reasonable to expect that there will be only one more two-CD release from cpo. Both of these projects seem to have begun with initial releases in 2014. However, Buttmann’s project concluded in 2016, the year of the 100th anniversary of Reger’s death. Weinberger’s sixth volume was released early in 2020, before the COVID pandemic; but, given the overall sluggishness of the release schedule, I am not sure that COVID can be blamed for the delay of this latest release.

On the other hand pandemic weariness may be one of the reasons that my patience in following the cpo series is beginning to wear more than a bit thin. However, there are other factors, some of which may be more significant. More substantive has been Weinberger’s piecemeal approach to some of the publications.

This new release involves excerpts from both the Opus 56 collection of “easy” preludes and fugues and the Opus 79b collection of thirteen chorale preludes. Bearing in mind that there is little motivation to perform either of these collections in its respective beginning-to-end order, many will probably treat the results of this recording project as a reference resource. So, unless the final release includes a “universal” index across the entire corpus, listeners in search of a specific composition are likely to feel frustrated. That difficulty is made all the worse by a front cover that does not give a particularly accurate account of the contents.

Where the recordings themselves are concerned, Weinberger’s approach to performance is likely to strike many as problematic. His approach to dynamic range runs a wide gamut from almost inaudible to earthshakingly loud. (The latter, of course, perfectly aligns with the pull-out-all-the-stops epithet.) It is one thing to appreciate the breadth of that dynamic range in a concert hall or a church with good acoustics, but most of us do not listen to recordings with audio equipment that does justice to such breadth. As far as I am concerned, the primary asset of a recording project like this one is to serve as a resource to prepare for listening to a particular composition in performance.

These factors have left me more sympathetic to the results of Buttmann’s project, but I still hope to follow Weinberger to his final two-CD release.

Igor Levit’s Century of “Encounters” on Sony

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

One week from today Sony Classical will release its latest solo album of performances by pianist Igor Levit. The title of the new album is Encounter, following up on the one-word title of his last album, Life, released in October of 2018. (That release provided the program for a United States tour, which brought Levit to Herbst Theatre for a San Francisco Performances recital on November 1, 2018.) As is usual practice, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders for the new recording.

Most of the two-CD album consists of “encounters” in which one composer reworks music written by a predecessor by transcribing the music for solo piano. The chain of these encounters has been well considered by Levit. He begins with Ferruccio Busoni’s transcriptions of ten chorale chorale preludes that Johann Sebastian Bach had originally composed for organ. The remainder of the first CD then concludes with transcriptions of six more organ chorale preludes composed by Johannes Brahms.

That second set marks the beginning of a “chain” that links to the second CD. At the beginning of that CD, Brahms becomes the object of transcription with Max Reger’s solo piano reworking of Brahms’ Opus 121 set of four “serious” songs. Reger himself is then the next object of transcription with Julian Becker’s solo piano account of “Nachtlied” (night song), the third of eight sacred songs in Reger’s Opus 138 collection. This time the music leads to a different logic of sequencing. The stillness at the conclusion of “Nachtlied” makes a smooth transition into the beginning of Morton Feldman’s “Palais de Mari” (named for a monumental Babylonian structure in what is now Syria). The extended duration (almost half an hour) of Feldman’s composition makes for a radical shift in durational scale, since none of the preceding tracks on both CDs are longer than seven minutes. This was the last piece that Feldman composed for solo piano prior to his death on September 3, 1987.

While the very act of transcription may be viewed as a “dynamic of encounter,” there is an emerging quality of stillness that cuts through the entire recording, culminating in the sustained Zen-like stasis of the Feldman composition. Given that most chorale preludes were composed for periods of silent meditation during church services, almost all of the tracks that lead up to “Palais de Mari” can be approached as preparatory in nature. (There are, of course, exceptions. The BWV 615 “In dir ist Freude” is positively exuberant and is as spirited as the opening of the last of the Brahms Opus 121 songs.) However, the text for the Reger song by Petrus Herbert almost amounts to a secular requiem; and Reger’s homophonic setting clearly evokes Bach’s own homophonic chorale settings.

Taken as a whole, then, the experience of listening to Encounter is one of negotiating an elaborate Web of interconnections, culminating in the subtle interweaving of motifs in “Palais de Mari.” Indeed, the structural detail brings to mind the lecture that Alban Berg prepared prior to the premiere of his Wozzeck opera, which presented the whole three-act opera as an elaborate interconnection of well-crafted component elements. That said, however, it is important to recall how Berg concluded his lecture. He told everyone in the audience to forget about all those details and just come back the following night to enjoy the opera! By the same count, one can easily enjoy the individual moments of Encounter without taking into account how they are connected with other moments.

Peter Serkin on Sony: Nineteenth Century

The original cover of the vinyl release of Peter Serkin’s first Schubert recording (from the Amazon.com Web page for this album)

The nineteenth-century selections recorded by pianist Peter Serkin included in The Complete RCA Album Collection are very modest, almost as modest as his recordings of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Nevertheless, one of them has highly personal significance, which deserves an anecdotal background. Back in the Sixties my father worked for RCA during its brief attempt to venture into the computer hardware business. One December all the employees got a “Christmas gift” in the form of a recently-released album. The one my father brought home was Serkin’s second recording for RCA, which consisted entirely of Franz Schubert’s D. 894 piano sonata in G major.

At that time I tended to be more than a little scornful of Schubert. I had little exposure to his songs and just as little interest in getting to know them. His symphonic music, on the other hand, struck my arrogant attitude as warmed-over attempts to revive the spirit of Ludwig van Beethoven. On the chamber music front I knew little other than the D. 810 (“Death and the Maiden”) string quartet in D minor. As a result, when I put down the needle on the first side of the D. 894 album, my mind had already closed like a steel trap.

In less than a minute, it sprang open. I had not yet been exposed to the ideas of Buckminster Fuller, but almost immediately I grasped that Schubert had tapped into that technique of “making more and more with less and less.” Furthermore, that “more and more” registered with me with the same intensity I kept encountering in the symphonies of Gustav Mahler. That album got me hooked on Schubert, leaving me eager to get to know the rest of his catalog.

Since that album was produced so early in Serkin’s tenure with RCA, it is the second CD in the new box set, making it my first exposure to Serkin’s approach to nineteenth-century repertoire. I was delighted to find that the magic was still there, regardless of the number of recital performances and recordings of D. 894 that I have subsequently encountered. Indeed, when I was living in Santa Barbara and had a piano teacher that encouraged me to try everything, I even struggled with trying to play the damn thing for myself (thankful that my piano teacher was the only individual exposed to my efforts).

While many of Schubert’s songs were setting of texts by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, I am not sure how well acquainted he was with Faust, beyond the song texts that Goethe had included in the script. However, one way to approach D. 894 is in terms of the contract that Faust makes with Mephistopheles. Those terms are nicely summarized on the Faust Wikipedia page:

Faust's arrangement is that if he is pleased enough with anything Mephistopheles gives him that he wants to stay in that moment forever, then he will die in that moment.

So much of D. 894 involves that sense of staying in a moment forever, and each of the four movements has its own way of conveying that sense. Whether or not that was Schubert’s intention, it may well have been the motivating force behind Serkin’s approach to interpreting the marks on paper; and that approach carries just as much impact today as it did half a century ago.

There are two more Schubert selections in the RCA collection. One is a much earlier sonata, D. 568 in E-flat major. The other is a Tashi performance of the D. 667 (“Trout”) quintet. Tashi members Serkin, violist Ida Kavafian, and cellist Fred Sherry are joined by Joseph Silverstein on violin and Buell Neidlinger on bass. The resulting recording tends to convey of sense of friends gathering the make music. This is not to short-change the quality of the musicianship; but the interpretation comes off as sounding little more than dutiful.

D. 568 is another matter. The music is a revision and completion of the D. 567 sonata in D-flat major, whose composition was interrupted in the midst of the third movement. On the RCA album it was coupled with Robert Schumann’s Opus 82 collection of nine short pieces entitled Waldszenen (forest scenes). From a structural point of view this set is more intriguing than the Schubert sonata. Here again a quotation from the Wikipedia page for the composition is in order. Schumann addresses the “programmatic” nature of the music as follows:

The titles for pieces of music, since they again have come into favor in our day, have been censured here and there, and it has been said that “good music needs no sign-post.” Certainly not, but neither does a title rob it of its value; and the composer, by adding one, at least prevents a complete misunderstanding of the character of his music. What is important is that such a verbal heading should be significant and apt. It may be considered the test of the general level of the composer's education.

For my part, I am less interested in the composer’s capacity for either denotation or connotation. What interested me most about the titles is the symmetrical plan organized around a solitary journey that begins when the protagonist enters a forest and concludes when (s)he departs. Indeed, the outer movements are entitled “Eintritt” (entry) and “Abschied” (farewell). The second and eighth movements then address two encounters with hunters, “Jäger auf der Lauer” (hunters on the lookout) and “Jagdlied” (hunting song). The third movement, “Einsame Blumen” (lonely flowers), is reflected by “Vogel als Prophet” (bird as prophet), while the fourth and sixth movements are about buildings in the forest, “Verrulene Stelle” (haunted place) and “Herberge” (wayside inn), respectively. Finally, the central movement “Freundliche Landschaft” (friendly landscape) seems to suggest comparison with the field that the protagonist left upon entering the forest. I would thus suggest that the coupling of Schumann’s Opus 82 with the D. 568 sonata presents the listener with two complementary approaches to structuring a multimovement composition, and Serkin effectively finds approaches to mine expressiveness from both of these “mechanical” foundations.

There is also an album of two compositions both written in 1910 and reflect the “twilight” of the nineteenth century, rather than the emergence of the twentieth. One of these was a personal “first encounter,” Max Reger’s Opus 116 (fourth) cello sonata in A minor, with Serkin accompanying cellist Mischa Schneider. Since my knowledge of Reger has been cultivated primarily around his organ music, I must confess that I am still finding my way with this relatively late undertaking.

On the other hand I have long been familiar with Ferruccio Busoni’s “Fantasia contrappuntistica” in a variety of different settings. Like many of Reger’s compositions, this “Fantasia” was conceived on a large scale, which embraces four fugues, an opening set of chorale variations, three variations on an intermezzo, and a concluding no-holds-barred stretto. Serkin recorded the two-piano version of Busoni’s score, joined by Richard Goode. Since I encounter performances of this massive project so seldom, I found myself particularly satisfied with its realization by this particular partnership.

The remaining nineteenth-century offerings are three albums of solo compositions by Frédéric Chopin. Given how adventurous Serkin could be in the recordings that he planned, it is hard to avoid thinking that some RCA executive was nagging him to provide them with a more salable commodity. Serkin’s accounts of Chopin are dutiful enough; but given how much inventive imagination he has put into so many of his other albums, one comes away with the impression that duty was all that mattered. Personally, I sympathize with his attitude, as many readers can probably guess on the basis of the sense of relief that usually arises when I get to write about a piano recital with no Chopin on the program! Suffice it to say that Chopin-lovers will have no trouble finding favorites on these three CDs; but, for my own tastes, there are performances of all of those selections that I prefer through the hands of other pianists.

Worldwide Violists Unite on YouTube

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weinberger’s Reger Project: Volume 6

1913 photograph of Max Reger at a recording session playing the Welte-Philharmonic-Organ (taken from Welte advertising material, photographer unknown, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

This year began with the German label cpo releasing the sixth volume in Gerhard Weinberger’s project to record the complete organ works of Max Reger. Each volume has consisted of two CDs, and the first recordings for the first volume were made in 2012. Within that time interval, organist Bernhard Buttmann set a plan with OehmsClassics for his own complete-works Reger project. The schedule involved releasing four volumes, each consisting of four CDs, every year between 2013 and 2016, that last year marking the 100th anniversary of Reger’s death. Using that project as a benchmark, it is likely that, when completed, Weinberger’s project will consist of eight two-CD volumes.

Personally, I rather liked the idea of writing about two independent Reger-organ projects in tandem. The entire repertoire was far less familiar to me than that of Johann Sebastian Bach; and I figured I might learn a thing or two through “total immersion.” As far as that immersion occurring twice, that just struck me as further orientation in a new repertoire. However, my entire account of Buttmann project took place during my Examine.com tenure. Meanwhile, Weinberger is proceeding slowly but surely.

One consequence, of course, is that, if I need to consult a particular piece, the Buttmann collection is pretty much guaranteed to satisfy, while, assuming random conditions, Weinberger will satisfy six times out of eight. A more serious consequence is that increased listening will lead to increased awareness of distinguishing features. In Weinberger’s case those features concern amplitude; and, while any track may reflect a rich account of a particular organ in a particular space (usually the interior of a church), the significantly expanded scope of dynamic levels does not translate well for most of the ways in which we listen to music.

The bottom line is that Weinberger works at extreme dynamic levels at both ends of the scale. On the loud side, he may never “pull out all the stops;” but he engages enough registers that being in the presence of the performance may well set the viscera vibrating. At the other extreme Weinberger can play a pianissimo passage that would allow you to hear the drop of a pin. That latter extreme almost seems to have been conceived for meditation in a church, particularly when it is applied to many of the chorale preludes on this new album. Weinberger almost seems to encourage the listening to think more about the hymn and its words than about the music that Reger provided.

The problem is that there are very few (in any) playback systems that can accommodate both extremes without the hand of the listener changing the setting of the volume dial. This puts a new slant on what it means to be an “active listener.” To some extent this puts most listeners in the same situation as an organist’s apprentice, who assists with making major changes in the controls of the stops. Such a listener might appreciate having the music itself at hand to be prepared for making those volume changes.

Writing as a formerly rabid score-reader, however, I approach this scenario with caution. Yes, having the score to hand tends to amplify overall awareness. However, at the same time, too much attention to all of the individual notes can distract attention from the overall listening experience. As they might say, there are too many tress around to allow one to see the forest. On the other hand I am not entirely averse to the possibility that listening to Weinberger asks more of the listener than listening to Buttmann did. Ultimately, this is a matter of personal taste; and those drawn to the taste behind Weinberger’s recordings will probably be more than satisfied with the rewards of attentive listening.

A Disappointing Album of Brahms Transcriptions

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

Almost exactly a month ago MSR Classics released a new album entitled Brahms in Transcription. This is a solo piano album with Uriel Tsachor as the soloist. As the title suggests, the album consists primarily of transcriptions of compositions by Johannes Brahms. However, there are also four tracks that present Brahms as the transcriber, two of which involve his transcribing his own music.

Considering that it was conceived for relatively intimate social encounters, rather than the “mass appeal” of the concert hall, “the art of the transcription” is a challenging undertaking that demands acute sensitivity to the subtleties of both the source content and the execution of the transcribed version. Transcriptions are often encountered in recital encores; but the scare quotes in that last sentence are intended to recall that, on November 1, 1981, that phrase served as the title of a recital that Earl Wild gave in Carnegie Hall. The entire program was subsequently released as a recording, whose CD version became very difficult to get; but, thanks to a series entitled Great Pianists of the 20th Century, the recording is now more readily available.

In that context it is worth observing that, in preparing his recital, Wild did not account for any selection by Brahms as either composer or transcriber. Tsachor’s recording provides evidence that this may have been a wise decision on Wild’s part. The core of Tsachor’s album is taken from a publication by N. Simrock entitled Fünf Langsame Sätze Aus Den Sinfonien (five slow movements from the symphonies), the symphonies in question being the four composed by Johannes Brahms. The transcriptions were composed by Max Reger. There is no questioning Reger’s perceptive appreciation of both the syntax and the rhetoric of Brahms’ scores. However, that appreciation does not reveal itself through Tsachor’s performances, and it is difficult to determine whether the shortcomings are due to Reger or Tsachor.

Were I do indulge in gambling, my bet would go on identifying Tsachor as the primary source of the problem. Over the full extent of the album, it seems as if all of his priorities have to do with the marks on paper. This is not to say that he ignores issues of phrasing; but, after several listening encounters, I remain hard pressed to hypothesize any logic behind his approaches to phrasing.

Equally problematic is that his overall approach to performance never really reflects back on that aforementioned context of intimacy. Wild’s recital was powerful enough that, even in the vastness of the Carnegie Hall space, one could still appreciate the intimacy behind each of his selections. None of the twelve tracks on Tsachor’s album elicits even the slightest sense of such intimacy, making the experience of listening a rather dull and uninspiring affair.

Organist Korndörfer’s Impressive Debut in Davies

Organist Jens Korndörfer (photography by Bonnie Nichol, courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)

Yesterday afternoon in Davies Symphony Hall, the Organ Recital Series prepared by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) continued with a debut performance by Jens Korndörfer. Korndörfer has an established international reputation; but he is currently based in Atlanta, where he is Director of Worship and the Arts and Organist at First Presbyterian Church while also teaching at both Georgia State University and Agnes Scott College. He prepared a stimulating diverse program that spanned, chronologically, from Johann Sebastian Bach to the San Francisco (West Coast?) debut presentation of a recent composition by Pamela Decker entitled “Windows of the Spirit.” (For the record, Decker has also visited Davies to perform on the Ruffatti Concert Organ.)

However, these “bookends” do not do justice to the full breadth of Korndörfer’s program. A total of eight composers were represented, not counting a ninth for the encore selection. There were only two compositions from the nineteenth century. The program began with Max Reger’s coupling of a D minor passacaglia preceded by an introduction, composed in 1899 and never given an opus number. The concluding selection was Alexandre Guilmant’s Opus 42 (first) sonata in D minor, composed in 1874.

All of the other selections were composed during the twentieth century. The composers were, in “order of appearance,” George Thalben-Ball (a set of variations on the notorious 24th caprice for solo violin by Niccolò Paganini, composed to be performed almost entirely on the pedal keyboard, 1962), Arthur Foote (the 1923 revision of his “Oriental Sketch,” the fifth of the pieces collected in his Opus 41), Marcel Dupré (the Opus 20 set of variations on a French carol, 1922), and Valéry Aubertin (“Sonatine pour les étoiles” from the Opus 6 collection Le Livre Ouvert, 1994). The encore selection was by Bach’s French contemporary, Louis-Claude Daquin. Korndörfer played the last of his twelve published Noëls, which Daquin called the “Swiss” Noël. The Bach offerings were the BWV 659 chorale prelude on “Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland” (come now, Saviour of the heathen) and the BWV 541 prelude and fugue in G major.

On the surface this may have seemed like more diversity than mind could manage. Nevertheless, the selections were, for the most part, of moderate duration; and Korndörfer provided concise and informed spoken introductions to guide the attentive listener through the breadth of stylistic techniques. This was his first encounter with the Davies Ruffatti, and there was one minor incident in which an incorrect stop preset led to a false start.

For the most part, however, his command of the Ruffatti’s complexity was right on the money. In general he showed keen awareness of how stop selection facilitated guiding the attentive listener through the key thematic material, even when the overall context might involve more pipes than the ear could manage. Indeed, the only shortcoming came at the very beginning of the recital with the massive dissonant chord that opened the Reger selection. This was more of a primal scream than ambiguous dissonance, but Korndörfer quickly recovered his footing to make sure that the thematic material had its proper say. With that one exception, this performance delivered one of the clearest accounts of the many interleaving timbres being presented in each of the compositions; and I, for one, look forward to another opportunity to explore Korndörfer’s interests in repertoire.

Maltman’s SFP Recital: “nothing quite like it”

Baritone Christopher Maltman (from his SFP event page)

Last night in Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Performances (SFP) launched its replacement for its past annual Vocal Series. Under the new name “The Art of Song,” SFP plans to expand the scope of vocal programming beyond traditional “art song.” Last night English baritone Christopher Maltman launched the new series with a recital that definitely took the art song repertoire beyond its usual traditional boundaries. Along with pianist Audrey Saint-Gil, he presented a program entitled Carnival of the Animals, which had nothing to do with Camille Saint-Saëns and everything to do with texts, primarily in French and German, involved with animal life.

There was certainly no break from tradition in his choice of composers. The French texts were set by Francis Poulenc, Maurice Ravel, and Emmanuel Chabrier. Those in German were set by Robert Schumann, Max Reger, and Hugo Wolf. However, the Poulenc and Ravel sets were both collections conceived by their respective composers consisting entirely of poems about animals.

Before he began the performance, Maltman explained that the program had grown out of his desire to sing Ravel’s Histoires naturelles. From there he realized that the literature abounded with other songs of animal life, and it was not long before he had accumulated enough material for a complete program. Before last night I had known the five songs in Histoires naturelles only through recordings, so Maltman’s initial motive was sufficient to draw me to his recital. It is easy to think that the title, taken from the source of the texts, a collection of prose poems by Jules Renard, means “natural history.” However, in French “histoire” is the noun for “story” or “tale;” and what struck me most about Ravel’s selections was how each embedded rich description within the setting of a narrative, each of which is rich with connotations.

Maltman clearly appreciated this narrative infrastructure. Without ever compromising the many details (some subtle, some blatant) of Ravel’s settings, he knew how to approach each song with the rhetoric of a storyteller, always keeping the listener curious about what would happen next (even if that listener had the “full plan” in the text sheet on his/her lap). One of the more shattering moments comes in the very first song about a peacock in search of his mate. At the very center of the text is the bird’s “diabolical” cry, elicited by Renard with just the right chilling combination of phonemes and rendered by Maltman with all the shock value the poet had in mind.

Poulenc’s Le bestiare ou Cortège d’Orphée (the bestiary or procession of Orpheus) is based on a book of animal poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, each illustrated by a woodcut by Raoul Dufy. Each poem is a miniature. (The longest has five lines.) Yet, as is often the case in a haiku, the description provided in the text discloses an underlying narrative. Maltman’s evocation of the imagery behind each of these poems elapsed with such spontaneity that the momentum allowed him to advance to the two Schumann settings with only a barely noticeable break.

Those two Schumann selections, composed at different times in the composer’s life, were both about lions. In both of them description is subordinated to the unfolding of narrative; and both of the narratives evolve as chilling Gothic tales, each climaxing in a gruesome ending. The Reger selections, taken from his Opus 76 Schlichte Weisen (simple airs) collection, are far more light-hearted, if not downright cheerful. It is hard to think that these little gems of simplicity came from a composer best known for pushing the technique of prolongation to extremes in his compositions for organ.

The penultimate coupling of Chabrier and Wolf provided a study of rhetorical opposites. The Chabrier settings were unabashedly cheerful, given just the right lightness of touch in Maltman’s delivery. Wolf, on the other hand, was notorious for expressing his neuroses through his music. Each of Maltman’s accounts proceeded down a dark road, at the end of which was his setting of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s account of a rat catcher with sinister overtones of the pied-piper of fairy tales.

All of this programming led up to a “dessert course” of three songs setting the English texts of Michael Flanders, composed by Flanders’ “partner in crime, Donald Swann. The two of them compiled enough songs about animals to fill an entire album. Maltman selected “The Armadillo,” “The Warthog,” and “The Gnu.” Some of Flanders’ texts no longer hold up under the test of time; but all three of these are absolute gems, each with its own characteristic take on eccentricity.

After taking his bows Maltman acknowledged that his encore selection was inevitable. “The Hippopotamus” is probably the most beloved selection in the entire Flanders/Swan catalog. Audiences around the world can sing the “Mud, mud, glorious mud!” chorus at the drop of a hat (shamelessly appropriated from the title of the first Flanders and Swan show taken on tour from London to Broadway). However, one must not overlook Flanders’ mastery of light verse at its best (read “a regular army/of hippopotami” aloud to see how well it scans).

The World Wildlife Fund never had it so good.

Weinberger’s Reger Project: Volume 5

1913 photograph of a recording session with Reger at the console of the Welte-Philharmonic-Organ (photographer unknown, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

This Friday the German label cpo will release the fifth volume in Gerhard Weinberger’s project to record the complete organ works of Max Reger. As has already been observed, these releases have been appearing at a slow pace. On the other hand, when I made that observation I also suggested that the best way to get to know Reger’s compositions, many of which are richly embellished to yield thick contrapuntal textures, is through repeated listening. So the slow release pace may be an asset, rather than a liability: The curious listener will have plenty of time to get acclimated to the compositions on this new release prior to the next album getting released! As always, Amazon.com is processing pre-orders for this new two-CD album.

Fortunately, this new release is the first to offer selections from one of Reger’s more accessible collections. His Opus 67 is a collection of 52 “easy” chorale preludes. Fifteen of the chorale preludes from this collection are included on this new release. For those familiar with the German Lutheran services (or, alternatively, the chorale preludes composed by Johann Sebastian Bach) many of the chorale themes will be familiar. Examples would probably be “Jesu, meine Freude” (Jesus my joy) or “Nun danket alle Gott” (now thank we all our God). As is the case when listening to Bach, familiarity with the hymn tune provides an “anchor,” which makes it easier to sort out Reger’s prodigious capacity for embellishment from the pitches that are actually being embellished.

Building up a sense of familiarity with Reger’s approach to embellishment through recognizable tunes may then serve to guide the attentive listener through the composer’s more labyrinthine structures. In this new release those structures may be found in the moderately generous share of prelude (or toccata) and fugue couplings, a genre that was clearly inspired by Bach’s accomplishments. Reger’s approach to this genre can probably be called “Bach on steroids,” as long as no one mistakes that for a pejorative description. After all, many of these pieces were composed during the early years of the twentieth century, a time when Mahler was exploring extreme prolongation through his symphonies and Arnold Schoenberg was working on his massive Gurre-Lieder cantata.

There have always been those quick to dismiss Reger’s organ music as being “too much;” but, in the context of this new release, which balances the relatively short chorale preludes with the longer prelude/toccata-fugue pairings, the sympathetic listener will probably agree that the durations are “just right.”

Richter’s Schumann and Brahms on Profil

courtesy of Naxos of America

A little over two weeks ago, the Profil label released its latest collection of performances by Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter. Readers may recall that Sviatoslav Richter Plays Schubert – Live in Moscow was released this past July with Sviatoslav Richter Plays Beethoven coming out the following September. The title of the new album is Sviatoslav Richter Plays Schumann & Brahms. Like the Beethoven collection, this consists of twelve CDs, eight for the music of Robert Schumann and the remaining four devoted (almost entirely) to Johannes Brahms. The recordings were made between 1948 and 1962. Seven of the sessions took place in a studio, and all of the rest are concert recordings.

While these recordings were made in the same time frame as those of the two previous releases, clearly a time when Richter was at the top of his game, there is a sense that his commitment to both Schumann and Brahms is not as intense as that for both Beethoven and Schubert. For example, the November 16, 1958 recording, made at a Kiev recital, of the Opus 17 fantasia in C major falls so far short of the usual focus and precision that one expects of Richter than one has to wonder whether or not he had some problem (such as illness) at the time. Fortunately, the studio recording made in August of 1961 gives a much more precise account of the same music. However, the recording sessions took place of the course of five days (the first five days of the month), suggesting that this account was “synthesized,” rather than the product of in-the-moment interpretation.

Then there is the rather idiosyncratic approach to the concert performance of the Opus 13 Symphonic Studies, which alternates variations on a theme with keyboard études. This was recorded at a concert in Prague on December 15, 1956. There is an unexplained leap from Variation 6 to Variation 9; but (as compensation) the five variations that were only published posthumously are inserted between Variation 4 and Variation 5. In addition, Richter is clearly not at the top of his game in the rather raucous Finale that Schumann composed for this piece.

In a similar vein the recordings of both the Opus 12 Fantasiestücke (fantasy pieces) and the Opus 21 Novelletten are excerpted. On the other hand there are two generous (and satisfying) accounts of the Opus 82 Waldszenen (forest scenes). There are also two recordings of the Opus 54 concerto in A minor, one with the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra and the other with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra. Then there is an entire CD of Schumann songs recorded with soprano Nina Dorliak. These include the entire Opus 48 Dichterliebe (poet’s love) cycle, which one usually associates with a male voice. (One also expects it to be sung in German, but all of the tracks on this CD are sung in Russian.)

On the last four CDs there is relatively little solo work, Brahms’ Opus 2 sonata in F-sharp minor, three of the pieces in the Opus 118 collection, and all four of the pieces in the Opus 119 collection. Far more interesting are the recordings of the two cello sonatas with Mstislav Rostropovich and a convincing account of the Opus 34 piano quintet in F minor with the Borodin Quartet. It is also interesting that both recordings of the Opus 83 (second) piano concerto were both made by American orchestras visiting Moscow, the Boston Symphony Orchestra led by Charles Munch and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra led by Erich Leinsdorf.

Finally, there is a “wild card” at the end of the collection. This is Max Reger’s Opus 64 piano quintet in C minor, again recorded with the Borodin Quartet. Having never heard this piece in concert, I was quickly drawn into it. This is music that definitely deserves for attention. Whether that attention goes as far as acquiring this twelve-CD collection is left for the consumer to decide!

The Challenge of Continuing the Art Song Tradition

Of all the genres that respond to attentive listening, art song is probably the most challenging, for both composers and listeners, in our contemporary setting. This is particularly the case when the song is a setting of poetry, since the music constitutes a response to the poem as it has been written; and the capacity for reading (or listening to a reading of) poetry tends to be a challenge and has been so, probably for at least a hundred years. Indeed, the poet John Ciardi recognized the problem when he wrote the extended essay “How Does a Poem Mean?,” which was first published in 1959.

On the composer’s side, the challenge is one of establishing how the structure of the music will relate to the structure of the poem. On the text side structure involves both overall architecture and lower-level details, such as rhyme scheme and figures of speech. Then there is the layer of semantics that addresses what the poem means, in addition to how it means. Finally, one must allow for the fact that many poems were written to be recited, rather than read, which means that matters of “expressive delivery” must also be taken into account. The composer than has to decide to what extent he will enhance any of these literary features and when he will deliberately choose to contrast them.

Every other year LIEDER ALIVE! presents a Neue und Alte Liederfest program, which provides a platform to consider contemporary approaches to art song in the context of past traditions. Yesterday afternoon at the Noe Valley Ministry, LIEDER ALIVE! presented the latest installment in this project, entitled Neue Lieder, Neues Jahr! The program presented world premiere performances of songs by three composers, Composer-in-Residence Kurt Erickson, Luna Pearl Woolf, and Mark Carlson. The program also included a song by Henry Mollicone. All of the works by living composers involved reflections on settings of German poetry by composers that spanned the traditions of the nineteenth century.

It is important to observe that the nineteenth century was a time when those who chose to listen to art song did not need any explanations when it came to either what or how a poem meant. Thus, yesterday’s program, which spanned musical practices extending from Franz Schubert to Richard Strauss, provided an abundant sampling of highly literate composers, each of whom developed his own toolkit for taking a poem as a foundation and then building an innovative reflection on the text’s structure, meaning, and/or expressiveness. However, detached nineteenth-century listeners may have been from the literary sources, these were songs that drew them into the spirit of those texts.

It is thus important to acknowledge that yesterday’s performers, soprano Heidi Moss Erickson, mezzo Kindra Scharich, and pianist Ronny Michael Greenberg were are at the top of their game in leading attentive listeners into the respective domains of each of the songs performed. This was particularly evident when Erickson and Scharich presented the duets on the program. Their command of thirds and sixths, however familiar that idiom may be, never failed to engage the attentive listener, particularly since they always knew how to color those intervals to serve the needs of the text. For his part Greenberg could not have been a better accompanist, bringing a solid command of nineteenth-century techniques to provide each song with its proper context.

Of the new works on the program, the one that most seemed to provide a contemporary reflection of past traditions was Mark Carlson’s duet setting of Eduard Mörike’s “An die Geliebte” (to the beloved). His setting was preceded by Scharich singing the version composed by Hugo Wolf. In his note for the program book Carlson asserted that he “assiduously avoided listening to the Hugo Wolf setting.” Nevertheless, he had no trouble capturing the spirit of the text. Furthermore, he seemed better attuned to the extent to which sentence structure departed from strophic structure, particularly in the final lines. (The overall architecture is that of a sonnet.) Thus, while the words were being revisited, Carlson found fascinating ways in which to change not only the “lighting” but also the structural framework.

At the other extreme was Luna Pearl Woolf’s setting of Otto Bierbaum’s “Traum durch die Dämmerung” (dream into dusk). This was preceded by two earlier settings, the first by Strauss and the second by Max Reger. The listener was thus first struck by how each of those brought its own individual stance into what is essentially an intense interior monologue. On the other hand Woolf’s note for the program book cited the “sound-world” of the poem; and her composition gave the impression that her only objective was to craft her own “sound-world.” The result suggested little regard for any of those how-does-a-poem-mean factors, leaving the listener with some intriguing auditory impressions that felt curiously detached from the poem being set.

More successful was Erickson’s approach to Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s “Abschiedslied der Zugvögel” (farewell song of the migrating birds). This followed a setting by Felix Mendelssohn, which clearly grasped all the “rules of the game” in setting a poem and played the game with impressive dexterity. Erickson, on the other hand, chose to use the piano to provide what could be called an “avian context,” consisting of descending patterns of chords suggesting the birds in flight. He could then develop vocal lines for a duet that would respond to the rich harmonic textures coming from the piano while honoring the poet’s words in a separate “universe.” From a visual point of view, the piano provided a scenic backcloth in front of which the vocalists developed the letter and spirit of the poet’s words.

The program also included Erickson’s setting of Joseph von Eichendorff’s “Mondnacht” (moonlit night), which was followed by Robert Schumann’s setting of the same poem, both sung by Scharich. In this case Erickson seemed more interested in exploring the possibilities of an atonal setting. However, the results were, at best, academically impressive; and there were too many instances of the vocal line struggling to do justice to the words.

There were also a few selections of text given only one setting. The most impressive of these was the opening, Johannes Brahms’ duet setting of Mörike’s “Die Schwestern” (the sisters), the first of his four Opus 61 duets. This was lighthearted music with an ironic comic twist in the text; and Erickson and Scharich made it a sure-fire opening to draw audience attention to what would follow. (Those who know this song may also notice that, in a slightly twisted way, it serves as a predecessor for the “Triplets” number performed by Fred Astaire, Nanette Fabray, and Jack Buchanan in the 1953 MGM musical The Band Wagon.)

Then there was the encore, which could have been called show-stopping had it not been planned as the end of the show. When you have both a soprano and a mezzo as polished as Erickson and Scharich and the program has included Strauss’ music, how could you not close out with some of his best duet writing from Der Rosenkavalier? The piano part may not have been up to the full richness of Strauss’ orchestral sonorities; but Erickson and Scharich compensated with a semi-staged account of that critically pivotal moment of the entire opera. This may not have counted as art song, but it was the perfect way to send the audience off with warm feelings.

A Liederfest for the New Year

Musicians Heidi Moss Erickson, Ronny Michael Greenberg, and Kindra Scharich (above) and composers Kurt Erickson, Luna Pearl Woolf, and Mark Carlson (below), courtesy of LIEDER ALIVE!

2018 will be the year of the second concert in the Neue und Alte Liederfest biannual series presented by LIEDER ALIVE! As the title suggests, this will be a program of new and old art song involving both solos and duets. The vocalists for this occasion will be soprano Heidi Moss Erickson and mezzo Kindra Scharich, accompanied by Ronny Michael Greenberg at the piano. The “new” side of the program will consist primarily of three world premieres, each by a different composer: Kurt Erickson, Luna Pearl Woolf, and Mark Carlson. The “old” side will be firmly rooted in the nineteenth century, in tradition if not in actual date of composition.

Much of the program has been structured around “new thinking” applied to poems set by earlier composers. Thus, Erickson’s setting of Joseph Eichendorff’s poem “Mondnacht” (moonlit night), which is not his world premiere contribution, will be preceded by Robert Schumann’s setting of the same text for the fifth song in his Opus 39 Liederkreis. Note that Schumann composed Opus 39 in 1840, known as his Liederjahr (“year of song”) because of the large number of songs he composed over the course of that year. This set will be introduced by Johannes Brahms’ setting of Ludwig Christoph Heinrich Hölty’s “Die Mainacht” (May night), the second of his Opus 43 collection of four songs. All three of these songs will be sung by Scharich.

Woolf’s world premiere will be a setting of Otto Julius Bierbaum’s poem “Traum durch die Dämmerung” (dream in the twilight); and it will be preceded by settings of the same poem by both Richard Strauss (the first of his three Opus 29 songs) and Max Reger (the third of his six Opus 35 songs). Similarly, Carlson’s premiere will be a setting of Eduard Mörike’s “An die Geliebte” (to the beloved); and it will be preceded by Hugo Wolf’s setting of the same text, the 32nd of his Mörike-Lieder. The set will begin with what may well have been the first song cycle to be composed, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 98 An die ferne Geliebte (to the distant beloved). All of these settings will be sung by Moss Erickson.

Erickson’s world premiere will be a duet that will be performed by both Moss Erickson and Scharich. It is a setting of August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s poem “Abschiedslied der Zugvogel” (the farewell song of the migratory bird). This same text was also set as a duet by Felix Mendelssohn as the second of his Opus 63 collection of six duets. Duet performances will also be given of Johannes Brahms’ “Die Schwestern” (the sisters), the first of his Opus 61 collection of four duets, and two songs by Schumann, “An den Abendstern” (to the evening star) from the Mädchenlieder (songs of a maiden) song cycle (Opus 103) and “Erste Begegnung” (often called “From the Rosebush” in English after the text’s first line), the first song in the Spanisches Liederspiel song cycle (Opus 74).

There will be one remaining set involving a contemporary composer working with an earlier composer’s song text. The text is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “Nähe des Geliebten” (near the beloved), which was set by Franz Schubert as his D. 162 song. Schubert’s setting will be followed by a recent version by Henry Mollicone. Both of these versions will be sung by Moss Erickson. They will be preceded by Schumann’s setting of the same poem from his Opus 78 set of four duets.

This performance will begin at 5 p.m. on Sunday, January 14. The venue will the Noe Valley Ministry at 1021 Sanchez Street, between 23rd Street and Elizabeth Street. Single tickets will be $40 at the door with a $20 discounted rate for students, seniors, and working artists. If purchased in advance, the prices will be $75 for reserved seating and $35 for general admission. An Eventbrite Web page has been created for advance purchase. Those interested in advance purchase may also call LIEDER ALIVE! at 415-561-0100.

Weinberger’s Reger Project Advances to Fourth Volume

Franz Nölken’s 1913 painting of Max Reger at work (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Almost exactly two months ago, the German label cpo released the fourth volume in Gerhard Weinberger’s project to record the complete organ works of Max Reger. The third volume had been released in June of 2016, over a year earlier; and the project itself was launched in 2014. This does not compare favorably with a parallel project that began only slightly earlier.

Working with organist Bernhard Buttmann, OehmsClassics set a plan to release four CDs of Reger’s organ music every year between 2013 and 2016, meaning that the project would be completed in the year of the 100th anniversary of Reger’s death. OehmsClassics managed to keep to its plan, finishing on time for that landmark occasion. Meanwhile, cpo has been releasing volumes of two CDs each, meaning that, with the release of this fourth volume, they are only halfway through to completion.

So much for mere numbers. On a more personal side, I have to confess that I have been trying to get my head around Reger’s organ music ever since I listened to Paul Jacobs play the Opus 73 “Introduction, Variations and Fugue on an Original Theme” on the Ruffatti Concert Organ in Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, which Jacobs has been visiting on a regular basis for some time. That was in February of 2014; and I felt a need to confess to my readers that I came away thinking that the Opus 73 “borders on the impenetrable.” I have been trying to break through that border ever since.

One thing that I have learned is that, particularly where the fugues are concerned, the only way to “penetrate” Reger is through repeated listening. This is not meant pejoratively. The same claim may be made with regard to that vast lexicon of leitmotivs that guide the listener through the many details in the plot for Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelung (the ring of the Nibelung). One might almost say that any knowledge that comes instantly probably does not really count as knowledge.

To be fair, however, trying to get to know one of Reger’s fugues is a bit like jumping in a the deep end of a swimming pool when you do not know how deep it actually is. From this point of view, those who are still circling the pool deciding whether to jump in at all may find a fair amount of satisfaction in the latest cpo release. While it opens with the twenty-minute Opus 57 “Symphonische Phantasie und Fuge,” almost all of the remaining tracks are far more modest in duration.

Of particular interest is the Opus 145 set of seven pieces, all but one of which are less than ten minutes in duration. This collection was completed in 1916, which was not only a time when all of Europe was being consumed by World War I but was also the year in which Reger died. Each of the seven pieces was intended for performance at a specific church ritual; and the first (and longest) of these was intended for a funeral service. This is the only one with a dedication, written in memory of those who had died in battle in the years 1915 and 1916. Most likely Reger did not intend to associate his own death with the war victims, since he died of a sudden heart attack on May 11, 1916; but it would be fair to say that he wrote that first piece when death was on everyone’s mind.

With that context as a point of departure, one may be willing to approach Opus 145 as one of the composer’s more personal statements. If one can accept that “presence of personality,” then one has a fighting chance of apprehending related “instances of the personal” in his more “abstract” compositions. Perhaps this is one way of saying that the full canon of Reger’s organ music is a bit like that proverbial elephant being grasped by three blind men, each of whom describes the elephant in an entirely different way.

This leads to a second thing I have definitely learned: like the organ music of Johann Sebastian Bach, Reger’s catalog of organ works cannot be understood on the basis of any one composition. The significance of any one achievement is modest compared to the significance of the full canon of achievements. Clearly, not everyone will be willing to take the time to explore that full canon. Nevertheless, this latest cpo release has enough to allow even the beginning listener to realize that Reger approached his organ compositions by assuming a variety of different “points of view.” If one begins with an appreciation of the diversity of a few of those pieces, one can then proceed to a broader scope with a solid foundation for the prospects of new discoveries.