Olga Kern Returns to CMSF, Joined by Quartet

Olga Kern seated at a Steinway piano (photograph by Natalia Roslova, Web page from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

Yesterday afternoon saw the penultimate recital in this year’s season in San Francisco presented by Chamber Music San Francisco (CMSF). The recitalist was Russian-born pianist Olga Kern, who has made frequent appearances in past CMSF seasons. The first half of her program presented solo performances of compositions by Sergei Rachmaninoff, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Alexander Scriabin, and Mily Balakirev. For the second half she was joined by the Dalí Quartet, whose members are violinists Ari Isaacman-Beck and Carlos Rubio with Adriana Linares on viola and cellist Jesús Morales. They concluded the program with Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 81, the second of his piano quintets, composed in the key of A major. This was preceded by a string quartet performance of Astor Piazzolla’s Tango Ballet.

Each half of the program had its own approach to encores. Kern preceded the intermission with three solo offerings. She began with “Feux d’artifice” (fireworks), the last of the 24 pieces in Claude Debussy’s Préludes collection. This was followed by “Spinning Wheel,” a composition by Charles Lisberg that has been in Kern’s repertoire for many years. Her final selection was “Étincelles” (sparks), the sixth piece in Moritz Moszkowski’s Opus 36 collection, 8 Characteristic Pieces. The encore following the Dvořák performance was the Scherzo movement from Robert Schumann’s Opus 47 piano quartet in E-flat major. Sadly, there was a lack of clarity in Kern’s account of the piano part for that energetic movement.

The performances were more than somewhat mixed. There were significant problems with a blurring of thematic lines in just about all of Kern’s solo selections, not just in her approach to the Schumann quartet. On the other hand, Linares’ viola work practically soared with expressiveness in both the Dvořák quintet and the “Encuentro–Olvido” movement of Tango-Ballet. In other words, there were any number of moments of engaging performances; but, unfortunately, none of them involved the pianist.

A Dim Shenson Spotlight Performance

Pianist Jaeden Izik-Dzurko (by Waldy Martens Photography, courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)

Yesterday evening in Davies Symphony Hall saw the beginning of this season’s Shenson Spotlight Series, its fifth iteration. The was the first of four recitals, the remaining three of which will take place on February 25, April 15, and June 3. Last night saw a solo performance by pianist Jaeden Izik-Dzurko, who framed his program with works by two major Russian composers. He began with Alexander Scriabin’s Opus 28 “Fantasy,” composed in the key of B minor, and concluded with Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 23 collection of ten preludes. These selections framed the “keystone” of the program (to mix metaphors), which was César Franck’s “Prélude, Choral et Fugue.”

Sadly, this was a promising undertaking that did not live up to its promise. To be fair, the Scriabin selection receives more attention in my collection of recordings than in concert performances. Thus, Izik-Dzurko deserves credit for advocating that attention. However, when it came to the listening experience on audience side, his delivery amounted to little more than sound and fury signifying you-know-what.

The Rachmaninoff preludes did not fare much better. Each of the ten selections is in a different key, but the composer conceived an intricate overall design based on how the individual preludes were paired. To be fair, it is easier to appreciate that design by looking at the program book; but it would not surprise me if Rachmaninoff himself encouraged his audiences to do just that while he was unfolding the journey from one prelude to the next. Sadly, many of the thematic lines were blurred by Izik-Dzurko’s heavy-handed execution, thus undermining any thoughts the composer might have had of the unfolding of texture.

The Franck selection tends to be more familiar with those that like to follow the piano repertoire. This past August, for example, it was one of the major selections performed at the eighth annual San Francisco International Piano Festival. I have to confess that, while the music is way beyond my “pay grade,” I still enjoyed taking the time to work through the score to enhance any experience of listening to the music in recital. Last night it was difficult for me to avoid disappointment with Izik-Dzurko’s delivery, which amounted to a plethora of notes with little sense of expression.

Sadly, that plethora reared its head again in the first of the two unannounced encores, the second of which was a lame attempt at trying to explore jazzy rhetoric; hopefully, next month’s Shenson pianist will deliver more engaging offerings.

An Evening of Excess with Marc-André Hamelin

Marc-André Hamelin (photograph by Sim Cannety-Clarke, courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)

French-Canadian pianist Marc-André Hamelin is no stranger to San Francisco. He was one of the recitalists to contribute to the 45th Season Favorites series presented by San Francisco Performances this past February. Last night he returned to Davies Symphony Hall to give his first Great Performers Series recital since March of 2019.

As I observed at the beginning of this season, Hamelin “does not shy away from ambitious undertakings.” Putting aside any need to “warm up” the audience, he launched last night’s recital immediately with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 106 piano sonata in B-flat major, known best by the title “Hammerklavier.” As might be guessed, this was the entire first half of the program. Things calmed down after the intermission with a straightforward account of the calmer rhetoric encountered in Robert Schumann’s Opus 82 suite, Waldszenen. Then it was “back to the races” with a “no holds barred” approach to the finger-busting demands of Maurice Ravel’s suite Gaspard de la nuit.

One would have thought that, after so much sound and fury, enough was enough. However, Hamelin returned to present five encores. The first of these was the C-sharp minor étude, the first of the three pieces collected in Alexander Scriabin’s Opus 2 set of three pieces. This was followed by Hamelin’s own composition “Music Box” and a jazzy tune given no introduction. He then (I think) moved on to one of the Claude Debussy preludes, leading up to the final encore, which I could document only as “something with a lot of notes!”

Hamelin’s performances tend to be like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates: You never know what you are going to get! I suppose he chose to begin with Beethoven’s Opus 106 because he wanted listeners to approach it with fresh minds, rather than echoes of other pieces of music. However, selecting Ravel for the other “bookend” almost seemed like a you-ain’t-heard-nuthin-yet gesture. A Hamelin program always seems to come across as promising a hearty meal … until the listener has to deal with digesting it!

Cadillac Hotel to Host Something Different

Many readers probably know by now that this site does its best to keep up with the Concerts at the Cadillac events. These performances almost always include the Patricia Walkup Memorial Piano in the lobby of the Cadillac Hotel. Late next month, that piano will be the center of attention. Six amateur pianists, all living in the Bay Area, will contribute to a recital. As of this writing, the works to be performed and their respective performers will be as follows:

1. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Fantasia for keyboard in F-sharp minor, H 300 (Asako Tsumagari)
2. Frédéric Chopin: the sixth (E-flat minor) and eleventh (E-flat major) études from the Opus 10 collection (Christina Lee)
3. Franz Liszt: the last of the three nocturnes in the Liebesträume collection, S. 541/3 (Kaidi Zhang)
4. John Williams: the theme music for the film Schindler’s List (Daniel Abreu)
5. Sergei Rachmaninoff: the first movement of the Opus 36 piano sonata in B-flat minor (Jonathan Chu)
6. Alexander Scriabin: the last two movements in the Opus 23 piano sonata in F-sharp major (Calvin Huang) 

Photograph of Morton Feldman at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw (from a Wikipedia Web page) 

I have to say that I am impressed by the breadth of repertoire prepared for this recital. My only misgiving is that I wish at least one of these pianists would have dared to be a bit more adventurous. For example, as can be seen on his Wikipedia page, there is a more-than-generous list of solo piano compositions by Morton Feldman. I have barely begun to account for them in my collection of recordings, and I am not sure I have experienced a performance by any of the local performers other than the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. (For those whose curiosity has been piqued, that performance can now be seen on a YouTube video.)

As usual, this show will begin at 1 p.m. on Friday, October 24. The Cadillac Hotel is located at 380 Eddy Street, on the northeast corner of Leavenworth Street. All Concerts at the Cadillac events are presented without charge. The purpose of the series is to provide high-quality music to the residents of the hotel and the Tenderloin District; but all are invited to visit the venue that calls itself “The House of Welcome Since 1907.”

Jeneba Kanneh-Mason: Too Much for One CD?

It has been a while since I wrote about one of the members of the Kanneh-Mason family, a clan that seems to have yielded an abundance of musical talent. My most recent encounter was this past September, when I wrote about Isata’s Mendelssohn album, which, like the Takács Quartet album I discussed yesterday, accounted for music by both Felix and Fanny. Where the future is concerned, cellist Sheku will be visiting Davies Symphony Hall at the beginning of June for the final offering in this season’s San Francisco Symphony Great Performers Series.

Cover of the album being discussed (from the Amazon.com Web page)

This coming Friday Sony Classical will release what I think will be the debut album of pianist Jeneba, given the title Fantasie. As is almost always the case, Amazon.com has already created the Web page for this album, which is currently processing pre-orders. This is, to say the least, a major undertaking, which reminds me of the old nothing-succeeds-like-excess jibe.

If this album were a book, I would describe it as being structured in four chapters:

1. Frédéric Chopin
2. Americana
3. Claude Debussy
4. Alexander Scriabin

Each of those individual composers is represented by two compositions. The entire album is framed by two multi-movement sonatas, beginning with Chopin’s Opus 35 (“Funeral March”) sonata in B-flat major and concluding with Scriabin’s Opus 19 in G-sharp minor, a two-movement work given the subtitle “Sonata-Fantaisie.” Both of those composers are also represented by two shorter works. The Chopin sonata is followed by the first two nocturnes in his Opus 27 set, and the Scriabin sonata is preceded by the first and eleventh preludes in his Opus 11 collection of preludes in all major and minor keys. The Debussy selections are also preludes, “La fille aux cheveux de lin” (the girl with the flaxen hair) from the first book and  “Bruyères” (Heather, named after a town Eastern France) from the second.

Bearing in mind that the Kanneh-Mason family is British, I have to confess that I was most interested in how Jeneba approached the three American composers in her program. She began with the first of Florence Price’s “Fantasie nègre” pieces, composed in 1929, revised in 1931, and based on the spiritual “Sinner, please don’t let this harvest pass.” The original version of this music was first performed by Margaret Bonds, who happens to be the second of those three Americans. “Troubled Water” is basically a fantasia on the African-American spiritual: “Wade in the Water.” The final composer is William Grant Still, represented by “Summerland,” which is the second piece in his Three Visions suite composed in 1935. (This is probably the best known of the three parts, since it was subsequently arranged for violin and orchestra.)

Taken as a whole, Jeneba has presented a decidedly generous offering. (Those that took the trouble to “do the math” will have discovered that this album offers 67.5 minutes of music!) That would make for a relatively impressive recital program, particularly if intermissions were scheduled on either side of the “Americana” segment. (Were I to produce that recital, those would be the intermission choices I would make; but, since I am just a listener, I am just as glad to have no say in the matter!)

Nevertheless, I think it would be fair to caution those acquiring this new release that it is not particularly conducive to beginning-to-end listening. (My guess is that those that try will begin to feel the onset of fatigue during the elaborate embellishments in the American selections.) On the other hand, each of the individual tracks is given an account that is thoroughly absorbing in its clarity. As a result, those with the appropriate gear are likely to have a richer (and, perhaps, better-informed) listening experience through MP3 technology, rather than a CD player!

Ian Scarfe to Kick Off New Groupmuse Series

Ian Scarfe at the keyboard (from the Groupmuse Web page for this month’s Centuries of Sound recital)

Readers may recall that, this past April, the Century Club of California hosted a Groupmuse performance by pianist Ian Scarfe and his colleagues from the Trinity Alps Chamber Music Festival that featured the suite that Aaron Copland extracted from the music he composed for Martha Graham’s “Appalachian Spring.” This marked the end of a series of Groupmuse concerts for the season, and the new season will begin towards the end of this month. The title of the series will be Centuries of Sound, and the first performance will be a solo recital by Scarfe.

The first half of the program will be structured around Robert Schumann, his wife Clara, and their close friend Johannes Brahms. Scarfe will begin with Schumann’s Opus 18 “Arabeske” in C major. This will be followed by the F major “Notturno” from Clara’s Soirées musicales collection. The first half of the program will conclude with two movements from Brahms’ Opus 116 collection of seven Fantasies. These will be the fourth and fifth pieces, both entitled “Intermezzo” in the keys of E major and E minor, respectively.

The second half of the program will explore a variety of approaches to virtuosity by five different composers. Scarfe will begin with Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G-sharp minor, the penultimate selection in the Opus 32 collection of thirteen preludes. This will be followed by Alexander Scriabin’s prelude in G-flat major, presumably from his Opus 11 collection of 24 preludes in all major and minor keys. (He later wrote another prelude in the same key for his shorter Opus 16 collection.) The next selection will be the “Notturno” from Ottorino Respighi’s Sei pezzi per pianoforte (six pieces for piano) collection. Somewhat more familiar, at least to some, will be Franz Liszt’s “Un Sospiro,” the last in his three Concert Études collection. Scarfe will then conclude the program with a selection of études by Philip Glass.

The Century Club of California is located at 1355 Franklin Street, between Post Street and Sutter Street. However, all arrangements must be made through a Groupmuse Web page. Ticket prices begin at $25, with $5 to hold a reservation. Doors will open at 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, October 27; and the performance should begin around 2:15 p.m. Drinks will be provided (both with and without alcohol); and this is being presented as a “kid-friendly event.” However, the club itself is not wheelchair accessible.

Yuja Wang in Vienna on Deutsche Grammophon

Cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of Crossover Media)

Many readers probably know by now that I have been following the work of pianist Yuja Wang for pretty much as long as I have been pursuing my current writing gig. Indeed, I filed my most recent article about her yesterday morning following her Great Performers Series recital in Davies Symphony Hall. While I continue to be impressed by the dexterity she can bring to massive quantities of notes, I have not always been convincingly satisfied by some of her approaches to interpretation. Indeed, my balance scales took a serious tip to the negative side about two years ago, when I cited her “slam-bang approach to Franz Liszt’s first piano concerto in E-flat major,” going as far as to described her as being a “partner in crime” with conductor Michael Tilson Thomas!

Things were not much better this week, when I realized that I had to turn to her encores to begin my article on a positive note! This morning, in hopes of a shift in context, I set aside time to listen to her latest Deutsche Grammophon album, The Vienna Recital. This provides a complete account of the music she performed at the Konzerthaus, Vienna on April 26, 2022.

The program was structured around two four-movement sonatas. The first of these was Alexander Scriabin’s Opus 23 (third) sonata in F-sharp minor. The other was the third of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 31 sonatas, composed in the key of E-flat major. As usual, most (if not all) of the notes were in the right place. Nevertheless, it was hard to get beyond what amounted to a sense of aimless wandering in her approach to Scriabin. The Beethoven account was delivered with more certainty but not much personality.

Woven among the sonatas were shorter compositions represented by three composers. The first of these was Isaac Albéniz with two of the movements from his Iberia collection. She returned to Nikolai Kapustin (whose music has interested her for the better part of her career) with two selections from his Opus 53, 24 Jazz Preludes. Those were complemented by two of the solo piano études by György Ligeti.

The remaining four tracks on the album accounted for the encores (a rather modest number when compared with Wednesday evening’s encounter). She continued the étude theme with the sixth in Philip Glass’ collection. She then turned to “Danzón No. 2,” which is probably the best known orchestral composition by Arturo Márquez. (This might be familiar to those that followed Mozart in the Jungle.) Her transcription was prepared by Leticia Gómez-Tagle. She then reverted to “old school” selections, an intermezzo by Johannes Brahms (the third in the Opus 117 set) and Giovanni Sgambati’s piano arrangement of music from Christoph Willibald Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice.

Taken as a whole, I would have to say that I was neither more nor less impressed with this recording than I had been with Wednesday evening’s recital.

Yuja Wang Disappoints on Latest Visit

Pianist Yuja Wang (photograph by Kirk Edwards, San Francisco Symphony)

Last night pianist Yuja Wang returned to Davies Symphony Hall for her latest Great Performers Series recital. She made her last Great Performers appearance about two months more than a year earlier when she was joined by the entire San Francisco Symphony conducted by Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen for a performance of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 30 (third) piano concerto in D minor. She took only two encores: Franz Liszt’s adaptation of Franz Schubert’s D. 118 “Gretchen am Spinnrade” song with text taken from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust and Giovanni Sgambati’s “Melody from ‘Orfeo ed Euridice’,” his transcription of the “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” from the opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck.

Last night it seemed as if she was more interested in the encores that on the works included in the program she had prepared. By my count there were seven of them, played out one-by-one with no hint of any verbal introduction. I must confess that the first four were entirely unknown to me, although it was not difficult to recognize that the third was a tango. She then moved onto the turf of three identifiable transcriptions.

The first of these was the second (Allegro molto) movement from Dmitri Shostakovich’s eighth (Opus 110) string quartet in C minor, offering some of the composer’s fieriest rhetoric. This was followed by a “return visit” to the Schubert-Liszt “Gretchen.” The encores concluded with the Allegro molto vivace march in the third movement of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 74 (sixth) symphony, best known as the “Pathétique.”

If I have chosen to begin with these three encores, it is because they were the most engaging portion of the evening. The least engaging was the second half of the program itself, covering all four of Frédéric Chopin’s “Ballade” compositions: Opus 23 in G minor, Opus 38 in F major, Opus 47 in A-flat major, and Opus 52 in F minor. This was probably my first encounter with Wang playing Chopin (and, for all I know, it was hers as well). She was clearly not in her comfort zone; and, if she managed to make sure that all the notes were in the right place, there was little sense that any of those notes had any rhetorical significance.

The first half of the program was an odd “reverse chronology” of three twentieth-century selections. The earliest of these was Claude Debussy’s “L’isle joyeuse,” delivered with all of its rapid-fire finger-busting accuracy and none of its erotic rhetoric. This was preceded by Alexander Scriabin’s Opus 66 (eighth) piano sonata. This was the third of the six last sonatas composed without key signatures; and, by this time (1912) Scriabin had clearly found his own “atonal voice.” Wang’s delivery was as true to the marks on paper as one could expect, making this the most satisfying account of the evening.

Less satisfying was her opening gambit, extracting two of the movements from Olivier Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus (twenty contemplations on the Infant Jesus). I have taken great pleasure in this cycle for quite some time and was fortunate enough to hear a full matinee performance, which began on a sunny afternoon and concluded with the sun setting through the large glass window behind the audience area. I happen to believe that this composition works only as a cycle. Extracting a movement tears it away from the overall context. Wang selected the fifteenth and the tenth movement, playing them in that reverse order.

I have two hypotheses as to why she was doing what she did. The more positive is that she is preparing herself to take on the full cycle. Her strategy may have been to deal with some of the most challenging movements first before allowing them to take their places in the overall flow of the cycle. The more negative is that she just wanted to play the movements with the heaviest flows of notes! In either case, I feel that last night’s approach did not situate Messiaen in a particularly good light; but, since this music is performed so seldom, I doubt that many in her audience were aware of just what that light was.

To be fair, I feel that Wang deserves credit for rising to imposing challenges; but, taken as a whole, last night’s performance lacked the spirit that I had come to know so well from my previous encounters with her recitals.

Davies Augmented with Innovative Lighting

Gustave Doré’s woodcut of Bluebeard and his wife (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Last night Lighting Designer Luke Kritzeck seemed to be in charge at Davies Symphony Hall, even if Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen was on the podium leading the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). He conceived an elaborate structure that hovered above the stage and provided a diversity of impressive visual settings for the two works on the program, “Prometheus: The Poem of Fire” by Alexander Scriabin in the first half, followed by Béla Bartók’s one-act opera “Bluebeard’s Castle” in the second. In my own humble opinion, it was the second half that stole the show.

Mind you, I take pride in having a “track record” of past staged presentations of Bartók’s opera. My first encounter was in my student days (1967 to be specific), when the Opera Company of Boston coupled it with that composers pantomime ballet (also in one act), “The Miraculous Mandarin.” Decades later, I would enjoy watching and listening to Jessye Norman, when she sang the role of Judith at the Metropolitan Opera. Last night’s Judith was Michelle DeYoung (performing the role for the second time with SFS), joined by bass-baritone Gerald Finley in the title role. Breezy Leigh delivered the spoken “Prologue of the Bard.” (Unless I am mistaken, this was the first time I encountered a performance that included that prologue.)

Staging was limited in all three of the productions I have encountered. For the most part, the “action” is a dialogue between the two characters. Judith is Bluebeard’s latest wife. The “action” involves opening seven doors in the castle, the last of which reveals Bluebeard’s previous wives. In all of the productions that I have experienced, one never sees what is behind the doors (or, for that matter, the doors themselves), informed only by the verbal exchanges between the two characters. However, each of those doors is defined in terms of its own symbolic color; and that was where Kritzeck could take charge of things, establishing the “tone” of each of those colors to suit both the text and the music.

This was most evident in the “gleaming torrent” of white light when the fifth door is opened. Prior to that door, the lighting was as subdued as the disquietingly soft rhetoric of the orchestra. With the fifth door comes the shock of the loudest dynamics in the entire opera, reinforced by offstage brass; and “blazing” is the only way to describe the intensity of the light itself. This was the “magic moment” in which Kritzeck’s design was perfectly aligned with Salonen’s impeccable command of his full resources.

Sadly, that alignment was never really established during the first half of the program. Light had to contend with scent provided by perfumer Mathilde Laurent (although I have to confess that I never was able to follow the “Olfactory Score” provided in a booklet to supplement the program book and may not really have recognized any contributing scent during last night’s performance). Then, of course, there was the extremely rich instrumentation including the solo piano performed by Jean-Yves Thibaudet and the full SFS Chorus prepared by Director Jenny Wong.

Unfortunately, this amounted to much ado about not very much. The fact is that Scriabin was at his best when working with short durations (somewhat in the spirit of Frédéric Chopin). His later piano sonatas took on extended lengths. These tended to be exploratory, but they often fumbled around excessive repetition. “Prometheus” may have been conceived as one of the earliest “multimedia experiences;” but there was not much to follow as the music itself unfolded. One could not even appreciate any particular assets in Thibaudet’s contributions as a virtuoso soloist.

Fortunately, the many virtues of the Bartók production left most of us leaving Davies with the satisfaction of a stimulating experience (even if it meant going back into the rain)!

Chochieva’s Disappointing San Francisco Debut

This afternoon Chamber Music San Francisco launched its 2024 season with a solo piano recital by Zlata Chochieva. In his introductory remarks to the audience, Executive Director Daniel Levenstein remarked that Chochieva was a highly sought-after performer, suggesting that her slot in this season’s schedule was one of very good fortune. Walking home from Hertz Theatre, I kept turning over in my mind just why the demand for her was so great. In my own “mental balance sheet” there were so many entries in the Liabilities column that the items in the Assets column were barely memorable if not noticeable at all.

The greatest source of those liabilities could be found in Chochieva’s performance of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 22, a set of 22 variations based on the C minor prelude, the twentieth selection in Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 28 collection of 24 preludes in all of the major and minor keys. That particular prelude is so well-known that many probably can sing it in their sleep. However, I knew this familiar tune was in for a rough ride when Chochieva took the first variation at the same Largo tempo that Chopin had assigned to the prelude, while Rachmaninoff gave the first variation the tempo of Moderato.

This disclosed the critical flaw in the entire performance. There was never anything even approaching Moderato in Chochieva’s approach to the keyboard. (Rachmaninoff assigned the tempo to three of the variations.) Instead she charged ahead from variation to variation, spilling notes off the keyboard in all directions in such a way that even the most attentive listener could barely associate any of the variations with the theme. Flamboyance was the order of the day, slipping over to the preceding composition that began the second half of the program, Chopin’s Opus 61, an extended work in A-flat major that the composer called “Polonaise-Fantaisie.” Suffice it to say that Chochieva gave little attention to any rhetorical qualities associated with either a polonaise or a fantasia.

At least the first half of the program got off to a promising start. The five Opus 15 preludes composed by Alexander Scriabin seemed to be within Chochieva’s rhetorical comfort zone. The attentive listener was more likely to be rewarded with an appreciation of both thematic content and the development of that content. She then moved on to the twelve Opus 10 études by Chopin (although I think she dropped the third in E major). These were technically dutiful, but there was little attention to giving each of those études its own characteristic rhetorical stance.

Rachmaninoff ruled again over Chochieva’s first encore. This was his over-the-top embellishment of the Preludio movement from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1006 violin partita in E major. In spite of my preferences for “historically-informed performance,” Rachmaninoff’s version always brings a smile to my lips. On the other hand, Chochieva hammered away at it (possibly embellishing one of Rachmaninoff’s embellishments every now and then), adding brutality to her already-established flamboyance.

Sadly, her diction was almost as brutal as her keyboard work. Her announcement of her second encore was too garbled for comprehension. I do not think I missed anything of significance.

SFP: “Back-to-Back” Recitals in November

Pianist Stephen Hough (photograph by Sim Canetty-Clarke, courtesy of SFP)

At the middle of this month, San Francisco Performances (SFP) will provide its contribution to the California Festival with two back-to-back recitals, both featuring British performers. The first will be a solo piano recital by Stephen Hough, whose program will include one of his own compositions. The following evening will see the return of the Castalian Quartet, which made its SFP debut in November of 2021. Their new offering will be “Awake,” recently composed for them by Mark-Anthony Turnage.

Both of these performances will begin at 7:30 p.m. in Herbst Theatre, which, as most readers know by now, is on the ground floor of the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. This venue is excellent for public transportation, since that corner has Muni bus stops for both north-south and east-west travel. Program specifics for the two dates are as follows:

Tuesday, November 14: The title of Hough’s own composition is “Partita.” The rest of the program will be devoted to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. “Partita” will be followed by a set of compositions by Franz Liszt, beginning with the Tre sonetti di Petrarca (three sonnets of Petrarch) and concluding with the “Dante Sonata,” taken from the second “year” of the Années de pèlerinage (years of pilgrimage) collection. Most likely, these five pieces will constitute the second half of the program. The first half will provide the twentieth-century selections, beginning with the Cant màgics (magic songs) collection compiled by Federico Mompou in 1920. This will be followed by Alexander Scriabin’s Opus 53 (fifth) piano sonata, composed in 1907. This marked the beginning of his composing single-movement sonatas without an overall key specification. The first half of the program will conclude with Claude Debussy’s three-movement Estampes (prints) suite, completed in 1903.

Ticket prices are $80 (premium Orchestra and front and center Dress Circle), $70 (remainder of Orchestra, all Side Boxes, and center rear Dress Circle), and $60 (remaining Dress Circle and Balcony); and they may be purchased through an SFP secure Web page. As available, single tickets will be sold at the door with a 50% discount for students and a 20% discount for seniors. Single tickets may also be purchased by calling 415-392-2545.

Wednesday, November 15: Both violinist Sini Simonen and violist Ruth Gibson are currently on maternity leave. They will be replaced by violinist Sean Lee and violist Natalie Loughran, performing with Castalian Quartet members Daniel Roberts on violin and Steffan Morris on cello. “Awake” will be the central work on their program, which will begin with Leoš Janáček’s first string quartet, given the name “Kreutzer Sonata,” since it was inspired by the narrative of Leo Tolstoy's novella The Kreutzer Sonata. The second half of the program will be devoted entirely to Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 130 quartet in B-flat major, concluding with the Opus 133 “Grosse Fuge.” For this program ticket prices are $70 (premium Orchestra and front and center Dress Circle), $60 (remainder of Orchestra, all Side Boxes, and center rear Dress Circle), and $50 (remaining Dress Circle and Balcony); and they may again be purchased through an SFP secure Web page.

LaDeur Returns to Piano Festival as Soloist

During the first five seasons of the San Francisco International Piano Festival, Founder and Artistic Director Jeffrey LaDeur was too busy with management to have much time for performing. As a result, his performance yesterday afternoon of the second Solo Recital Series program in the Sixth Festival could be taken as a landmark occasion. Indeed, it was his first solo performance in Old First Presbyterian Church since 2014.

As in the past, he prepared a program with a generous scope of repertoire. The first half of the program amounted to a “traversal” of the nineteenth century. He began with Franz Schubert’s D. 784 sonata in A minor, advanced to the second (in the key of F-sharp major) of the three romances in Robert Schumann’s Opus 28 collection, and concluded with Johannes Brahms’ Opus 4 Scherzo in E-flat minor. The second half of the program began with a series of dances. Maurice Ravel’s “Valses nobles et sentimentales” was followed by a selection of four mazurkas by Frédéric Chopin:

1. Opus 6, Number 2 in C-sharp minor
2. Opus 33, Number 1 in G-sharp minor
3. Opus 30, Number 3 in D-flat major
4. Opus 7, Number 3 in F minor

The program then concluded with Chopin’s Opus 49 Fantaisie in F minor. As was the case at the first recital on Friday evening, the encore was not introduced, identified only as “Scriabin.”

This made for an extensive account of a repertoire that spanned from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth. LaDeur found his own personal approach to each of the selections, bringing freshness to the more familiar selections. Furthermore, one could appreciate the intensity of his focus, whether it involved the “heavenly length” of a Schubert movement or the brevity of a Chopin mazurka. It is not often that one experiences such a considered balance of breadth and depth, which is what we should expect in any occasion called a piano festival!

Sunset Music and Arts: October, 2023

As this site begins to account for subscription series dates worth bearing in mind, it turns out that Sunset Music and Arts will be presenting only one concert during the coming month of October. That will be a solo piano recital, for which Leah Kang has prepared a strikingly imaginative program. The “core” of that program will showcase two significant female composers from two different countries.

The first of those composers will be the American Florence Price. Kang will perform Snapshots, a suite of three “visual impressions,” each associated with a specific date: October 13, 1952, July 17, 1949, and January 14, 1949. This will be coupled with the Trois pièces romantiques by the French composer (and conductor) Marguerite Canal. These two compositions will be preceded by the fifth of nine collections by Takashi Yoshimatsu given the title Pleiades Dances, each consisting of seven movements organized around a common subject matter. For the fifth collection (Opus 51, composed in 1992), that subject matter is the time of day.

Leah Kang performing Alexander Scriabin’s Opus 19 “Sonata-Fantasy” at the Hamel Music Center in Madison, Wisconsin (screen shot from the YouTube video of her performance)

The second half of the program involves a coupling of Maurice Ravel and Alexander Scriabin. The former will be represented by another collection, Valses nobles et sentimentales. It will be followed by Scriabin’s Opus 19, his second piano sonata composed in the key of G-sharp minor. This coupling reminded me that, about ten years ago, I had encountered two albums released around the same time, both of which involved albums with overall “programs” that were devoted entirely to works by Ravel and Scriabin.

As usual, this recital will take place in the Sunset district at the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation, located at 1750 29th Avenue, about halfway between Moraga Street and Noriega Street. It will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, October 7. Ticket prices are $25 for general admission with a $20 rate for students and seniors. Because the demand tends to be high, advance purchase is highly advised. Tickets may be purchased online through Eventbrite. Further information may be obtained by calling 415-564-2324.

BBC Legends 3: Pianist Emil Gilels

The final installment in the latest BBC Legends series presents the last of the five pianists featured in the entire collection. Emil Gilels was born in Odessa, the same as Shura Cherkassky; and that city is also where Sviatoslav Richter spent the better part of his youth. However, shared geography definitely does not make for shared repertoire; and the Gilels album casts a much wider web than either of those other two pianists. Sadly, that breadth of content does not consistently make for depth of understanding.

The first half of the album was recorded at a recital at St John’s, Smith Square in London. This is a redundant church (no longer used for worship) that was converted into a concert hall in the Sixties, the first recital taking place on October 6, 1969. Gilels was recorded there on October 15, 1984. The recording coupled a selection of seven keyboard sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti with Claude Debussy’s Pour le piano three-movement suite. “Reflets dans l’eau,” from Debussy’s first Images book, served as an encore. The remainder of the album was recorded over a decade earlier at Congregational Memorial Hall (also in London) on April 22, 1957.

My own encounters with Gilels’ performances has not been particularly positive. I was first aware of him when I heard a performance of Johannes Brahms’ Opus 83 (second) piano concerto in B-flat major on the radio. The recording I had was one of my parents’ first long-playing purchases, featuring Rudolf Serkin as the concerto soloist. Even before the credits were announced at the end of the performance, I found the solo work to be unpleasantly ham-fisted. As a result, I was not surprised to come away from the Scarlatti and Debussy performances with a similar impression.

The Memorial Hall selections begin with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 90 sonata in E minor. There tended to be rather generous swings to extremes where both dynamics and tempo were concerned. In this case, however, I had no trouble accepting that Gilels’ “got” what the composer had in mind and could present those ideas to the attentive listener in a coherent way.

The remaining selections brought Gilels to “Russian territory.” Both Alexander Scriabin and Sergei Prokofiev were represented by early sonatas, Opus 30 in F-sharp major for the former and Opus 28 in A minor for the latter. These were separated by six of the twenty short pieces collected in Prokofiev’s Opus 22 under the title Visions fugitives.

I was definitely satisfied by the rhetorical stances that Gilels took for all of these Russian selections. On the other hand I have other sources for both the sonatas and the Opus 22 collection in its entirety. As a result, I doubt that I shall spend much time in the future with this final BBC Legends CD.

Koussevitzky 3: Nineteenth-Century Russians

Given Serge Koussevitzky’s Russian background, it should not be a surprise that two of the five two-CD albums in the Maestro Risoluto box set are devoted to Russian composers. These can be divided roughly into nineteenth-century and twentieth-century compositions. The composers represented in the third album are Modest Mussorgsky, Alexander Scriabin, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

To be fair, however, there are shadows of the twentieth century cast over both Mussorgsky and Scriabin. For the better part of his life, Scriabin focused on solo piano music, much of which reflects the influences of Frédéric Chopin. However, those influences began to subside beginning in 1903; and Scriabin became far more adventurous in both keyboard and orchestral compositions.

He is represented on this Koussevitzky album by his Opus 54, entitled “The Poem of Ecstasy,” which is structured around a whole-tone scale leading to ambiguous chord progressions. This is one of several approaches through which twentieth-century music made a sharp break with the nineteenth century; but, from a rhetorical point of view, Scriabin’s expressiveness still reflects approaches from his earlier nineteenth-century compositions. This may not convincingly justify his rubbing shoulders with Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky; and, as will be seen in the subsequent discussion of twentieth-century Russian composers, the “fit” for Opus 54 is equally insecure in both centuries. The recording of this piece was made during a performance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) in Symphony Hall on October 15, 1946, by which time any thoughts of Scriabin as a “modernist” had begun to fade.

More interesting is the Mussorgsky selection, which is Maurice Ravel’s orchestration of the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition. Many readers may groan over the prospect of listening to yet another recording of this orchestral version. However, this particular recording is probably the most historically significant selection in the entire Maestro Risoluto collection.

That significance comes from the fact that Koussevitzky himself had a hand in the creation of this orchestral version. Ravel probably would not have undertaken the project had it not been for the fact that Koussevitzky commissioned him to do so in 1922. As a result, Koussevitzky was the first to conduct this version at a concert that took place in Paris on October 19, 1922, after which he financed the publication of Ravel’s score.

As the hucksters say, “And that’s not all!” The music was recorded for the first time by the BSO with Koussevitzky conducting recording sessions that took place between October 28, 1930 and the following October 30. That is the recording that is included in the Maestro Risoluto collection, and it is about as “historical” as anyone can expect! Ironically, the booklet accompanying this album says nothing about this significant historical background.

The other Mussorgsky selection is also a product of arrangement. “Night on Bald Mountain” is most frequently performed in an orchestration by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Ironically, neither Ravel nor Rimsky-Korsakov are given any credit for their efforts in the track listing for this album. Nevertheless, this is the “all-Russian” selection, contrasting with the “French approach” to the Pictures suite!

The second CD in this album is devoted entirely to Tchaikovsky. It consists primarily of the Opus 36 (fourth) symphony in F minor. The recording was made on May 4, 1936; and the remastering does justice to the vigorous no-holds-barred approach that Koussevitzky took in his interpretation. That intensity of interpretation then continues with his approach to the Opus 32 “symphonic fantasy, “Francesca da Rimini.” That selection was recorded on April 19, 1946. To the best of my knowledge, Koussevitzky never played the organ; but he clearly appreciated the pull-out-all-the-stops metaphor!

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.

Sunset Music and Arts: September, 2022

As is the case this month, next month Sunset Music and Arts will present two programs. Both of these will be solo keyboard recitals. The first will be a program of music for the piano, and the second will showcase repertoire for the organ. Specifics are as follows:

Saturday, September 17, 7:30 p.m.: Pianist Alison Lee, who is based in the Bay Area, has prepared an ambitious program of two compositions by Alexander Scriabin. She will begin with his Opus 11 set of 24 preludes accounting for all major and minor keys. This will be followed by his Opus 19 (second) sonata in G-sharp minor in two movements, which he called a “Sonata-Fantasie.”

Saturday, September 24, 7:30 p.m.: In contrast to Lee, Alexandra Kraft Cross will present an organ recital that will account for eleven different composers. These will range across music history from the transition from the end of the Renaissance to the beginning of the Baroque era (represented by Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck) to the very recent past (represented by a composition that Cross completed in 2010). The “in between” composers for this program will be Dietrich Buxtehude, Georg Böhm, Johann Sebastian Bach, Alexandre Boëly, César Franck, Jean Langlais, Camille Saint-Saëns, Eugène Gigout, and Charles-Marie Widor.

These performances will take place in the Sunset district at the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation, located at 1750 29th Avenue, about halfway between Moraga Street and Noriega Street. Ticket prices for both performances are $25 for general admission with a $20 rate for students and seniors. Because the demand tends to be high, advance purchase and registration are highly advised. Both may be arranged through Eventbrite. Each of the hyperlinks on the above dates leads to the appropriate event page. Further information may be obtained by calling 415-564-2324.

Finally, because we are still under pandemic conditions, all health and safety guidelines provided by the City and County of San Francisco must be honored. That means that a face covering is required for admission to all concerts, and it must be worn at all times. Face masks must completely cover the nose and mouth and have ear loops or similar to hold in place. Gaiters and bandanas are not acceptable.

In addition, proof of vaccination will be required for admittance. This may be provided with either a paper copy or a digital image. Sunset has created a Health and Safety Web page with a self-assessment based on ten easily answered questions. Those entering the building will implicitly acknowledge that they have answered “no” to all ten questions. Anyone that has answered “yes” to a question will be asked to return for another concert or offered a refund for paid tickets.

Mitropoulos in Twentieth-Century Europe

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

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

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

• Hostianos
• Kleftikos
• Peloponnisiakos
• Epirotkos

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

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

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

Scriabin Rubs Shoulders with Joplin at O1C

Pianist Lee Alan Nolan (from his O1C event page)

The title of last night’s solo piano recital by Lee Alan Nolan for Old First Concerts (O1C) was From Rags to Mystics. That title could be appreciated in terms of the two best-known composers on the program Scott Joplin and Alexander Scriabin. What could be gained from this juxtaposition is best decided in the mind of the listener.

The Scriabin selection was the Opus 64 (“White Mass”) sonata. After completing his fourth sonata (Opus 30 in F-sharp minor), Scriabin dispensed with key signatures and explicit segmentation into separate movements. The fifth sonata (Opus 53) was composed in 1907; and Opus 64 was one of two sonatas composed in 1911 (preceded by Opus 61). Without trying to be disparaging, Opus 64 is an eruption of notes, flooding the keyboard with such a density that, even with the assistance of the score, the ear can barely sort out anything on a scale larger than a brief motif. In the absence of any frame of reference, the listener must depend on how the pianist shapes all those notes to gain even the slightest hint of any underlying patterns.

Nevertheless, there was an intensity to Nolan’s keyboard style that propelled the attentive listener through that flood of notes. If Scriabin’s intention was to sever the mind of the listener from any sense of logic and, instead, shroud that listener with a mystical fog that dispensed with conventions such as any evidence of progression, then Nolan’s performance can be said to be true to the composer. Indeed, his commitment to Scriabin’s worldview was preceded, during the first half of the program, by a similarly ambiguous composition on a relatively large scale. This was Bruce Christian Bennett’s “Schematic Nocturne,” which was composed for Nolan in 1997. Last night was thus the work’s 25th anniversary, leaving me wondering how often this piece has been played since its premiere performance.

The remaining “mystical experience” was the opening selection, “Pockets of Light” by Lubomyr Melnyk. The composer described this as an example of what he calls “pure Continuous Music,” drawing upon an alternate notation to allow for a sense of improvisation. Nolan may have decided to begin his program with this selection because Melnyk is of Ukrainian origin.

While Joplin was represented on the program by two of his rags (and a third taken as an encore), Nolan also included two of his contemporaries, both of whom were female. While I do not think I have encountered either Irene M. Giblin or May Aufderheide on any of Sarah Cahill’s Future is Female programs, I do recall that, at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Corey Jamason performed their music at a Historical Performance concert in September of 2018. Both of them have Wikipedia pages (hence the hyperlinks). Nolan concluded his program with “Chicken Chowder,” described as Giblin’s “biggest success” on her Wikipedia page; and Aufderheide’s Wikipedia page includes the cover art of the selection that Nolan played, “The Thriller.” Since “Chicken Chowder” was performed immediately after Scriabin’s Opus 64, it provided a well-appreciated change of scene!

Neoclassicism? It Is What It Is!

courtesy of PIAS

One week from today, Rubicon Classics will release a new album of performances by Norwegian concert pianist Oda Voltersvik. The title of the album is NEO, intended as a reflection on neoclassicism. As expected, Amazon.com has created a Web page to process pre-orders of this new release.

Lexico.com, the Web site managed by the dictionaries division of Oxford University Press, says the following on its “neoclassicism” Web page:

In music, the term refers to a return by composers of the early 20th century to the forms and styles of the 17th and 18th centuries, as a reaction against 19th-century romanticism.

Taking that definition as context, the composers represented on NEO are, in “order of appearance,” Alexander Scriabin, Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Sofia Gubaidulina.

Given that Gubaidulina was born in 1931 and is still very much alive, I am not sure she counts as an “early 20th century” composer. Indeed, as a music student during the Communist days of the Soviet Union, she cultivated skills in smuggling scores of composers like Charles Ives and John Cage, apparently with Shostakovich’s sympathy. At the other end of the timeline, so to speak, Voltersvik’s Scriabin selection (which opens the album) is a relatively early work, which seems more focused on extending the rhetoric of Frédéric Chopin than in reacting against it.

That said, my own reaction as a listener has been to dispense with Voltersvik’s “agenda” and deal with each of the four compositions on its own terms. Thus, I have no problems listening to her approaching Scriabin’s Opus 28 “Fantaisie” in the spirit of “Chopin on steroids,” so to speak. On the other hand, I would say that the Prokofiev selection, his Opus 14 (second) piano sonata in D minor, can be approached in the spirit of endowing an eighteenth-century structure with unmistakably twentieth-century rhetoric. Ironically, this is followed by Shostakovich’s second solo piano sonata, his Opus 61 in B minor. This was composed shortly after the Nazis had begun the siege of Leningrad, and any signs of influence from eighteenth-century classicism can probably be dismissed as mere coincidence. More likely, this is music that may have inspired Gubaidulina to seek out her own new directions with compositions like the chaconne that concludes the album. (The label may reflect the seventeenth century, but the music definitely does not!)

Each of the four compositions on this album definitely deserves serious attentive listening. Voltersvik presents each one of them to inspire such a response on the part of the listener. Whether the title of her album is relevant is hardly worth consuming time to argue!