David Oistrakh on Warner: Twentieth Century

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

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

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

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

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

Imaginative Coupling of Beethoven and Mozart

It is not unusual to encounter compositions by both Ludwig van Beethoven and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on the same chamber music program. However, yesterday afternoon at Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco Symphony (SFS) musicians presenting the latest Chamber Music Series program used those two composers as “bookends” for the entire program, conjoining them in a rather imaginative way. The program concluded with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 581 clarinet quintet in A major, composed in 1789, only about two years before the composer’s death. At the other end the first selection was Beethoven’s Opus 81b sextet in E-flat major, composed in 1795, making it part of the first decade that Beethoven spent living in Vienna.

The link between these two compositions was reinforced by the sharing of three of the performers, violinists Wyatt Underhill and Helen Kim and cellist Sébastien Gringras. This made for a somewhat Janus-faced ensemble, first looking forward to the young Beethoven “marketing himself” in the Vienna of Joseph Haydn, Antonio Salieri, and (of course) Mozart. Then, at the end of the program, the group looked back at one of the highlights of Mozart’s final years.

Of these two offerings K. 581 made the more significant impression. To some extent that would be due to it having been the more “mature” of the pieces; but it also reflected the adventurous spirit that Mozart brought to orienting a chamber quintet around the clarinet. It was written for Anton Stadler, whom Mozart first encountered shortly after his arrival in Vienna in 1781. Stadler quickly became a fixture in playing Mozart’s music on both clarinet and basset horn; but K. 581 gave him the opportunity to play with a string quartet, rather than either an orchestra or some assortment of wind players.

Over the course of four movements, Mozart provided Stadler with the opportunity to express himself in an impressive diversity of rhetorical settings. His relationship to the string players alternated between blending and contrasting; and, in the final variations movement, he had ample opportunity to demonstrate virtuoso talents that would have been out of place in other settings. This afternoon clarinetist Carey Bell clearly appreciated the richness of the score that Mozart had written for Stadler; but, in playing with a string quartet, he made it clear that he understood when to be a “team player.”

Kim led the quartet with Underhill taking second violin, while violist Katie Kadarauch complemented Gringras’ cello work. Listening to these performers, it was not difficult to imagine that K. 581 may have first been performed when Stadler got together with that string quartet in which Mozart played viola and Haydn played second violin, joined by Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf on first violin and Johann Baptist Wanhal on cello. Mozart clearly wanted this to be a gathering of equals, meaning that the spotlight moved around more than might be expected.

For example, the Menuetto movements has two trios, the first being taken only by the strings with the clarinet only joining in for the second. On the other hand the set of variations in the final movement provide virtuoso opportunities for all the players. Nevertheless, the clarinet is given a bit of an extra boost after several variations have elapsed; and this was where Bell’s capacity for tour de force performance really shined.

To be fair Mozart’s K. 581 tends to get far more “exposure” than Beethoven’s Opus 81b. Thus, for many, K. 581 allowed the audience to leave with a comforting sense of familiarity. The Beethoven offering, on the other other, was likely to be a “first contact” for just about everyone in the audience. (In my case it was a “first encounter” with a performance, rather than a recording.)

Furthermore, the instrumentation turned out to be as novel as the music itself. Once again, there was a string quartet, led this time by Underhill with Kim on second violin and Jonathan Vinocour on viola. However, the structure was that of a sextet with both of the other instruments being horns, played by Daniel Hawkins and Jessica Valeri. Given that horns did not have valves when Beethoven wrote Opus 81b, it must have been devilishly difficult to play. On the other hand, if Beethoven’s goal was to attract attention, he certainly picked a unique way to do it!

Beethoven made the move from Bonn to Vienna late in 1792. His original intention was to establish himself as a pianist; but he had several composition teachers, the best known of whom was Haydn. By 1795 it was clear that composition had become a major activity. His first public performance was of one of his piano concertos, most likely Opus 19 in B-flat major but possibly Opus 15 in C major; and this was the year of his first publication, the three Opus 1 piano trios.

However, this was also a time when Beethoven was exploring different ways of working with winds in chamber music. By 1795 he had explored a variety of different combinations of oboes, clarinets, horns, and bassoons; and Opus 81b is the first example that brings strings into the picture. It is hard to imagine that Beethoven did not run into any problems of balance; but, given that the score was not published until 1810, it is possible that this was an “exercise on paper” long before he had to worry about how it would actually be performed.

Yesterday afternoon’s players did a noble job of dealing with those problems of balance, but they did not always succeed. There was some impression that both Underhill and Kim, relatively recent SFS members, were still adjusting to the physical setting in Davies for chamber music performance. Compared with Vinocour and Gingras, both of whom have made regular appearances in Chamber Music Series concerts, both violinists sounded relatively weak. This was problematic when trying to balance with the two horns, both of which were given demanding, but also somewhat obstreperous, parts by Beethoven. In all likelihood, Beethoven had intended this to be another opportunity in which he could exercise his wit; but that sense of humor rarely emerged from a group that seemed to be still learning to play as an ensemble at the same time that they were trying to get a handle on Beethoven’s score.

Sandwiched between Beethoven and Mozart was a particularly distinctive “outlier,” the Opus 20 piano quartet in E major by Sergei Taneyev. Most likely this was prepared by violinist Victor Romasevich, who has long been a champion of little known works by Russian composers, primarily in the period of time between Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff. Opus 20 was completed in 1906, and it is definitely an impressive undertaking. Romasevich and his colleagues, Wayne Roden on viola, Jill R. Brindel on cello, and Marilyn Thompson on piano, gave the score a capable and expressive reading, making the performance an informative journey of discovery.

On the other hand it is not difficult to think of this as “music of a setting sun,” so to speak. After all, 1906 was the year in which Arnold Schoenberg completed his first (Opus 9) chamber symphony. He was still working in a tonal framework, since the piece is definitely in E major; but his preference for fourths over fifths was disorienting when that piece was first performed. (For that matter, there are still plenty of listeners today that are disoriented!) Meanwhile, back in Russia, Alexander Scriabin was just beginning to experiment with his own distinctive approaches to the ambiguities inherent in dissonance. In that framework Taneyev’s music is more than a little retrospective; but, when taken on its own terms in a performance as solid that the one given yesterday afternoon, the piece reveals its merits to the attentive listener with little difficulty.

Bychkov Brings Two SFS Premieres to Davies

This afternoon in Davies Symphony Hall, guest conductor Semyon Bychkov returned to the podium of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) to present an overture-concerto-symphony program of seldom-encountered compositions. Indeed, “seldom” was so extreme that both the overture and the concerto were being played by SFS for the very first time. The entire program was steeped in nineteenth-century rhetoric, even if the concerto was completed in 1912.

That concerto is Max Bruch’s Opus 88a in A-flat minor, a concerto for two pianos and orchestra. Bruch wrote this piece for the Sutro sisters, the American pianists Rose and Ottilie. It is a bit ironic that San Francisco has had to wait so long for a chance to listen to this music, since the sisters were nieces of Adolph Sutro, a name familiar to anyone that has visited Cliff House or encountered the ruins of the Sutro Baths on the city’s Pacific coast. Both sisters had been students at the Berlin Conservatory (which is now part of the Berlin University of the Arts). One of the pieces they prepared as students was Bruch’s Opus 11 fantasy in D minor for two pianos; and Bruch was so impressed with their performance that he committed himself to writing a concerto for them.

The opus number reflects the fact that Bruch’s Opus 88 was also a “double concerto,” written in 1911 for clarinet, viola, and orchestra in the key of E minor. However, there is no thematic relation between Opus 88 and Opus 88a. Instead, Bruch composed Opus 88a around thematic material for an ongoing project, a suite for orchestra with organ, which he would not complete until 1915 and would not be published until after his death in 1920. The structure of Opus 88a may reflect they way in which Bruch had been approaching the suite, since the opening movement is a fugue preceded by an Andante sostenuto introduction. Both the second and fourth movements are sonata-allegro with Andante introduction, separated by an Adagio ma non troppo, which might be called the “official” slow movement.

One is struck by how straightforward all of these movements are. None of them take an extended approach to development, giving the impression that Bruch knew what he wanted to say and had no trouble wrapping things up after he said it. For the most part the concerto is organized around a give-and-take relationship between the two piano parts. Appropriately enough, these were again played by sisters, this time Katia and Marielle Labèque, making their first appearance with SFS since (if my records are correct) 2008.

Pianists Katia and Marielle Labèque (courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)

On that previous occasion they played Francis Poulenc’s two-piano concerto. Opus 88a was clearly a much more sober offering. Nevertheless, one could still sense a bit of wit in how riffs of elaboration would bounce back and forth from one sister to another. I would like to believe that Bruch intended that wit as a way to encourage the Sutro sisters to continue to play as a duo; but that wit could work the same magic with the Labèques, who are now seasoned professionals.

The overture that preceded Bruch’s concerto was Sergey Taneyev’s Opus 6, inspired by the Oresteia trilogy of plays by Aeschylus. Taneyev replaced Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky when the latter resigned from the Conservatory faculty in 1878. This is one of those cases in which the students are better known than the teacher, since Taneyev’s students included Reinhold Glière, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Alexander Scriabin.

Taneyev composed his Opus 6 in 1889, dedicated it to one of Tchaikovsky’s pupils, Anton Arensky; and its first performance was conducted by Tchaikovsky himself. It is unclear just how Taneyev saw the piece as either an interpretation or or a reflection on Aeschylus’ trilogy; but it is equally unclear that pursuing that question has much value. Far more significant is Taneyev’s capacity for working with the sonorities of a full orchestra. His ability to blend instruments from different sections is impressive and bordering on the uncanny.

The program note by James M. Keller cites Taneyev writing to Tchaikovsky to declare that his greatest interests are the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Richard Wagner. There is no doubting that Taneyev had his own ways of tapping into Wagner’s technique at its richest, but one can also appreciate his valuing Mozart’s ability always to find the right way to balance the strings against both the wind and brass sections. These are all aspects of Taneyev’s work that are far more relevant that anything he might have been trying to say about Aeschylus.

Given the rich connection between Taneyev and Tchaikovsky, one can understand why Bychkov decided to conclude a program that began with a Taneyev overture with a Tchaikovsky symphony. His selection, however, was another piece that deserves more attention than it tends to get, the Opus 17 (second) symphony in C minor. This symphony draws heavily upon folk tunes from the Ukraine, known in the nineteenth century as “Little Russia.” (These days one has to wonder if “Big Russia” still feels the same way about that territory.)

Tchaikovsky tends to be best known for the last three of his six numbered symphonies, Opus 36 in F minor, Opus 64 in E minor, and Opus 74 (“Pathétique”) in B minor. Audiences tend to eat up the intense emotions, and all too many conductors seem to go to great lengths to dish out that emotional rhetoric as profusely as possible. Opus 17, on the other hand, reflects a younger Tchaikovsky with a much lighter disposition. Bychkov clearly associated this alternative mood, and the smiles on the faces of many of the SFS players made it clear that they were all to happy to follow him into that more cheerful territory. The result was a thoroughly upbeat symphonic account that complemented the far more sober rhetoric of the first half of the program, making for an experience that was not only well-balanced but also highly satisfying for being so.

Variations without a Theme

The last time I heard Sandro Russo in recital, at St. Patrick's Church in San Francisco under the auspices of Noontime Concerts™, I suggested that his program had been "organized around the theme of the art of embellishment." I heard him again last night at San Francisco's Old First Church; and I would say that, while there was hardly a lack of embellishment, the emphasis did not seem to be as great. However, in spite of my habit (or, as I sometimes suggest, natural inclination) to find a unifying theme in last night's program, I suspect that any hypothesis I would pose would be a stretch. To some extent one might say that the recital was "about" listening to music through the medium of the solo piano (even when that music was not written for solo piano); but can we not the say the same about any piano recital?

Nevertheless, many of the works on the program seemed to demonstrate this approach from different points of view. Consider, for example, the second work on Russo's program, the "Variations on Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen" by Franz Liszt. The title comes from the BWV 12 cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach, which is the text of the opening chorus (preceded by an orchestra sinfonia). There is a slight irony in that the chorus is, itself, a chaconne of variations woven around a repeated "ground" bass passage; so, in some sense, Liszt's work could be called "variations on a set of variations." Bach, himself, would later "repurpose" this chaconne for the "Crucifixus" movement of his B minor mass (BWV 232), which was consistent with the mournful text of BWV 12. However, if Bach's music was meant for mediation on the "root tragedy" of Christian faith, Liszt's approach to "variation" is primarily one of bombast. Introverted grief is trumped by extroverted histrionics. Yet, there is also an extent to which these "variations" turn into a reflection on the entire cantata, or at least the beginning and the end; for, after it seems as if Liszt has exhausted everything he possibly can build on top of the poor little bass passage, he presents us with a coda based on the final chorale of the cantata, "Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan," which blazes with as much glory as his divisions on the ground bass. From Bach's point of view, this chorale closes the meditation with the most frequently recurring theme of his faith: "Thy Will be Done." Liszt turns that precept into a celebration of God's will, if not a celebration of his view of himself as an instrument of God's will! This music, after all, precedes by many decades Liszt decision to take the cloth and become an abbé. Indeed, to the extent that we have a reasonable chronology of Liszt's works, he seems to have been working on these variations around the same time he was composing his "Totentanz" with equal flamboyance and throwing in orchestral accompaniment for good measure.

I find it interesting that it is possible (but probably not very likely) that Liszt could have been exposed to Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" at the time he was working on both of these compositions. Whether it is a reflection on that "root tragedy" or on the horrors of the afterlife, Liszt's music may best be heard as a rebellion against the solemnity of church services that deprive the congregation of the essentially "emotional underbelly" of faith. Liszt's music lays siege to such churches and their rituals. Had he been aware of Whitman's words, he would have stormed through the doors to play his music first proclaiming:

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

This, of course, is my own conception of what was going on in this particular piece of piano music. I also have no idea if Russo is familiar with Whitman's writing. Whether or not he knows Whitman's text, however, he certainly knows how to bring a "barbaric yawp" to his performance; and that is precisely what the performance of Liszt's approach to a humble little Bach cantata required!

Liszt was also represented on Russo's program by his "Réminiscences de Don Juan." This comes from an earlier period but also may best be viewed through that song-of-myself perspective, because, by the time he set to work on what, ostensibly, was an homage to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Don Giovanni, he had accumulated his own "catalog" of female conquests, which, while not quite as numerous as Leporello's list was still pretty impressive for any mere mortal. Thus, while this paraphrase of Mozart begins with the apparition of the Commendatore in the graveyard, once the music "gets down to business," it is all about seduction and sybaritic indulgence. The heart of the work is a set of variations (once again, highly flamboyant) on the Don's temptation of Zerlina in "Là ci darem la mano" (possibly in response to the set of variations composed by the then teenaged Frédéric Chopin); and the composition goes out with a bang (almost literally) with "Finch'han dal vino calda la testa," in which the Don describes in manic detail his plans for the party at which he plans to add Zerlina's name (and others) to Leporello's list. Needless to say, Liszt had no trouble at all capturing this manic element of the Don's character; and the good news was that Russo had no trouble in rendering the way Liszt had captured it.

While it might have been interesting to offer Chopin's "Là ci darem" variations to provide both context and comparison to Liszt's treatment, Russo chose to represent Chopin instead with his more mature Opus 22, the "Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise." This provided an excellent contrast, since, while the Liszt compositions had well defined episodes to frame his yawps and indulgences, this particular coupling of two movements has a much better defined (and, for that matter, refined) architecture than just about anything Liszt ever wrote. Within that architecture embellishment is less for virtuosic display and more to, well, embellish a core structure through which the listener orients to the beginning, middle, and end of each movement. Perhaps the most important thing about such a core is that the end is there less to "go out with a bang," as I had put it for Liszt, but to close off what had begun; and one way to listen to these two movements is as two different perspectives on how one comes to closure. Now, when I last wrote about Russo, I questioned whether he was more interested in the rapidity of his embellishments than in their function; and I reinforced that question with my observations of how he had approached Joseph Haydn's "classical" approach to embellishment, in contrast to Liszt's "virtuosic" approach. Russo did not perform Chopin at this earlier recital; but last night's performance demonstrated how firmly Chopin holds that "middle ground" between Haydn and Liszt. The rapidity was still there (sometimes a bit more than I would have liked) but delivered with a lightness of touch that made it clear that the function of embellishing was being served; and, as a result, we learned more about listening to embellishment from this particular coupling of Chopin and Liszt than we would have learned had Russo opted for the "Là ci darem" variations.

Russo's program also provided an interesting exercise in listening to counterpoint, particularly as it was practiced by Bach. It began with the Largo movement from Bach's C major (BWV 529) organ trio sonata as transcribed by Samuil Evgenyevich Feinberg, a highly romanticized conception of Bach with little concern for an "authentic" sound and all concern for taking what was probably a relatively abstract exercise in counterpoint and endowing it with profound emotion. Feinberg's approach was complemented by the coupling of a prelude and fugues in G sharp minor by Sergei Ivanovich Taneyev, a pupil of Piotr Tchaikovsky. Wikipedia has an excellent entry for Taneyev, which includes the following paragraph relevant to Russo's selection:

Taneyev's specialized field of study was theoretical counterpoint. He engrossed himself in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, Giovanni Palestrina and Flemish masters such as Johannes Ockeghem, Josquin des Prez and Lassus. Eventually, he became one of the greatest of theoretical contrapuntists^[26].

This particular prelude and fugue, Taneyev's Opus 29, was composed in 1910, which is a time when Feinberg's "spirit" of Bach was flourishing; but Taneyev chose to capture this spirit through an original composition that honored Bach's craft, rather than through a transcription of Bach's own music. With its post-romantic perspective, Taneyev's conception unfolds the underlying forms of The Well-Tempered Clavier with far more layers of embellishment (not to mention duration) than Bach would have found suitable; and I have to confess that my immediate reaction to Russo's performance was that I wanted to hear this work again, since I was pretty certain that I "got" only a modest portion of it on first exposure. As I have previously observed, listening to Bach's counterpoint it no easy matter; and, regardless of how "authentic" the instrument is, the best Bach performers are those who can guide us through the intricacies of Bach's logic and grammar. Taneyev offered up a new composition as an alternative guide; but that just means that performing this twentieth-century work confronts the same challenges as performing Bach! Thus, I would have to beg off trying to evaluate Russo's performance until I am more familiar with the work; but I deeply appreciate his exposing me to this alternative to approaching Bach through transcription.

Vladimir Leyetchkiss' recent transcription of Sergei Rachmaninoff's Opus 17 suite for two pianos, on the other hand, is quite another matter. While I appreciate the desire of a solo pianist (like Russo) to play this music without having to seek out another pianist, the performance had too much of a technical display of how to compress four hands worth of notes into only two. More suitable was Russo's encore, which was Giovanni Sgambati's transcription of the "Dance of the Blessed Spirits" from Christoph Willibald Gluck's Orfeo de Euridice. Within the history of transcriptions and paraphrases, this was probably the closest thing to a warhorse that Russo performed; and it offers the best possible way to demonstrate that neither a transcription nor a paraphrase need necessarily be all about flamboyance. Russo understood this, and his sensitivity endowed his program with a perfect sense of closure.