Lisiecki’s Quantity Doesn’t Rise Up to Quality

Jan Lisiecki at the piano (photograph by Christoph Köstlin, courtesy of SFP)

Last night Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki returned to Herbst Theatre to present his third solo piano recital for San Francisco Performances (SFP). He began his first recital with the first four of the eight preludes that Olivier Messiaen composed in 1928. For his return, he prepared a program consisting entirely of preludes.

The second half of the program was devoted entirely to Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 28 set of preludes in all major and minor keys. The first half also included its own fair share of other Chopin preludes, as well as three by Sergei Rachmaninoff, two from his Opus 23 collection and the other the notorious Opus 45 in C-sharp minor. Johann Sebastian Bach was represented only by the first two of his Well-Tempered Clavier preludes, BWV 846 in C major and BWV 847 in C minor. Lisiecki also returned to Messiaen, this time with only the first three of the preludes he had previously performed. The other composers included on the program were Karol Szymanowski (his three Opus 1 preludes) and Henryk Górecki (the first and last of his four Opus 1 preludes, both of which reminded me of Peter Schickele’s quip about holding a black belt in music).

While Lisiecki seems to have mastered a solid command to account for the overall plethora of notes in this program, he fell painfully short of bringing any expressiveness to his interpretations. Indeed, I was reminded of what I wrote about his emphasis on technical display in his debut, which I described as “often hammered out with an intensity that bordered on brutality.” There is no question that this was an impressive technical display, but I would hesitate to call it musicianship.

As a result, I was not particularly disappointed when the title of the encore selection announcement was muttered beyond recognition!

Lisiecki to Return to San Francisco Performances

Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki (from his SFP event page)

San Francisco Performances presented the debut of Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki in December of 2013, when he was the featured artist in that season’s Young Master’s Series. He began that program with the first four of the eight preludes that Olivier Messiaen composed in 1928. Later this month, he will return to Herbst Theatre with a program consisting entirely of preludes.

Once again, Messiaen will be included in the program. However, Lisiecki will also perform the complete cycle of preludes composed by Frédéric Chopin for his Opus 28. The other contributors to the program will be Johann Sebastian Bach (of course), Sergei Rachmaninoff, Henryk Górecki, and Karol Szymanowski. This promises to be an engaging journey in which familiarity with rub shoulders with discovery!

This program will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 20. Ticket prices are $85 (premium Orchestra and front and center Dress Circle), $75 (remainder of Orchestra, all Side Boxes, and center rear Dress Circle), and $65 (remaining Dress Circle and Balcony). As always, they may be purchased through an SFP secure Web page. The venue will be Herbst Theatre, whose entrance is the main entrance to the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue, located on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. The venue is excellent for public transportation, since that corner has Muni bus stops for both north-south and east-west travel.

David Oistrakh on Warner: Nineteenth Century

As I continue to work my way through the 31 CDs classified as Premières, Rarities & Live Performances in the Warner Remastered Edition box set collection of recordings of performances by Russian violinist David Oistrakh, I shall now focus on recordings of chamber music and concertos composed during the nineteenth century. This accounts for six of the CDs, and only one composer merits a “presence” on two of them. That composer is Robert Schumann, and even those recordings are not particularly comprehensive.

One CD presents the first two piano trios, Opus 63 in D minor and Opus 80 in F major, with Oistrakh joined by cellist Sviatoslav Knushevitsky. However, each trio has a different pianist with Lev Oborin in Opus 63 and Alexander Goldenweiser in Opus 80. The recording sessions were four years apart, in 1948 and 1952, respectively; and, since Oistrakh did not die until 1974, I was more than a little disappointed that he neglected to record the last of the trios, Opus 110 in G minor. Instead, he recorded the first (Opus 105) violin sonata with Vladimir Yampolsky; and the remaining selection Is the Opus 17 Fantasie, which was composed for solo piano. This was arranged for violin and piano by Fritz Kreisler, but the recording is an orchestration of this version by Sarah Feigin. I must confess that I much prefer the “original version;” but, apparently, the “powers that be” behind the USSR Symphony Orchestra had ideas of their own about repertoire!

Eugène Ysaÿe with his violin (photograph from the George Grantham Bain Collection at the Library of Congress, public domain)

Each of the remaining four CDs is devoted to a single composer. On “order of appearance” in the box set, these are Edvard Grieg, Karol Szymanowski, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Eugène Ysaÿe. Greig receives a more thorough account than Schumann with a CD of all three of the violin sonatas. On the other hand I would have preferred recordings of all six of the Ysaÿe solo violin sonatas, rather than the assortment of selections, which also include piano and orchestral accompaniment. Similarly, I would have appreciated a more thorough account of Szymanowski selections. The Tchaikovsky Opus 35 concerto was, of course, inevitable; but the remaining shorter selections on the CD struck me as a hodgepodge of encore pieces.

David Oistrakh on Warner: Late Romantic Period

1972 photograph of David Oistrakh (from the Fotocollectie Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau of the
Dutch National Archives in The Hague, downloaded from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Netherlands license)

One week ago today, this site began its examination of the Warner Remastered Edition box set compiling all the recordings that Russian violinist David Oistrakh made for Columbia and HMV. As many readers probably expected, the first article focused on First Viennese School composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Franz Schubert. This amounted to thirteen full CDs and one shared with Giuseppe Tartini.

When one advances to the nineteenth century, the repertoire is far more modest. Johannes Brahms is represented by four CDs, accounting for two performances each of the Opus 77 violin concerto in D major and the Opus 102 double concerto in A minor. George Szell is the one conductor accounting for both of these compositions, leading the Cleveland Orchestra with Mstislav Rostropovich as cellist for Opus 102. The other cellist is Pierre Fournier in a performance by the Philharmonia Orchestra led by Alceo Galliera. (That CD also includes a final track of the Opus 81 “Tragic Overture.”) The other recording of Opus 77 is led by Otto Klemperer conducting the Orchestre national de la Radio-télévision française (formerly known as the Orchestre national de la Radiodiffusion française) in 1960. There is also a recording of Édouard Lalo’s Opus 23 “Symphonie espagnole” with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Jean Martinon. The only chamber music CD couples César Franck’s A major sonata and Karol Szymanowski’s Opus 9 sonata in D minor with Vladimir Yampolsky on piano.

Oistrakh was clearly more in his comfort zone in the preceding century. Nevertheless, both Szell and Klemperer could not have been better guides in leading him through the Brahms repertoire. Where the other nineteenth-century composers were concerned, I have to confess that my attention was never seriously piqued. I happen to have a soft spot for the Franck sonata because I got to listen to my Santa Barbara neighbor preparing it and then performing it in recital. Since then, I have never really risen to any recordings of that sonata but definitely enjoyed Daniel Hope’s take on it when he visited Chamber Music San Francisco at the end of this past April.

The fact is that any revisiting of this portion of the collection is likely to lead me to Szell’s leadership of the Brahms double concerto, leaving me with better choices for the other selections.

O1C to Host Ukrainian Benefit Concert

Ukrainian-American pianist Stanislav Khristenko (from the O1C event page)

At the end of this month, Old First Concerts (O1C) will present a special Ukrainian benefit concert. The program will be a solo recital featuring Ukrainian-American pianist Stanislav Khristenko. His program will be framed by the music of Frédéric Chopin, beginning with the Opus 53 (“Heroic”) polonaise in A-flat major. At the other end the program will conclude with all four of the ballades: Opus 23 in G minor, Opus 38 in F major, Opus 47 in A-flat major, and Opus 52 in F minor. Between these “bookends” Khristenko will play music by two Ukrainian composers, Borys Lyatoshynsky and Valentyn Silvestrov, as well as the Opus 3 set of variations by the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski.

This recital will not be live-streamed. There will only be in-person attendance. The performance will take place in Old First Church at 1751 Sacramento Street, on the northeast corner of Van Ness Avenue. It will begin at 8 p.m. on Saturday, June 25. General admission will be $25 with a $20 rate for seniors. Students with identification will be admitted for $5. Tickets may be purchased online through the Web page for this concert. That Web page also includes a gofundme window for making donations. The goal is $2000; and, as of this writing, $400 has been raised. O1C is presenting this concert in collaboration with the Ross McKee Foundation, which presented Khristenko’s local debut at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

LCCE to Present Rescheduled Program

Percussionist Loren Mach, featured soloist in “I prefer living in color” (photograph by Vivian Sachs, courtesy of LCCE)

Readers may recall that, at the beginning of this year, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble opted to reschedule its January program, Living in Color, given the impact of the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. That rescheduled performance will take place later this month. The title of the program was inspired by Sarah Gibson’s “I prefer living in color,” scored for percussion and ensemble, which won the 2019 Left Coast Compositions Competition.

The remainder of the program will reflect both recent compositions and those from earlier in the twentieth century. The older of these works dates from 1915. “La Fontaine d’Aréthuse” (the fountain of Arethusa) is the first movement in a suite by Karol Szymanowski scored for violin and piano. The other composition from this period is Gabriel Fauré’s only piano trio, his Opus 120, which was first performed in 1923. Szymanowski’s mythic evocation will be paired with a more recent suite by John Luther Adams, Three Canticles of the Birds. The other recent works on the program will be “The 3 G’s” by Kenji Bunch and Errolyn Wallen’s “Dervish.”

The rescheduled date for the San Francisco performance will be Monday, May 23. It will begin at 7:30 p.m.; and the venue will still be the Noe Valley Ministry, located at 1021 Sanchez Street, between 23rd Street and Elizabeth Street, a short walk from the trolley stop at 24th Street and Church Street. Tickets are being sold for $30 with a $10 rate for students. A Web page has been created for purchasing both categories of tickets.

Clare Hammond Explores Variations on Variations

courtesy of Naxos of America

Towards the end of this past January, BIS Records released its fifth album of solo performances by British pianist Clare Hammond. The title of the album is Variations, which seems to follow up on her previous genre-based album Etude. Each of these releases explores how a familiar form was realized from novel points of view since the beginning of the twentieth century.

Variations surveys seven different works, each by a different composer. Five of them were completed in the twentieth century by Karol Szymanowski (1904), Aaron Copland (1930), Paul Hindemith (1936), Helmut Lachenmann (1956), and Sofia Gubaidulina (1931). The remaining two were composed in the last decade by Harrison Birtwistle (2014) and John Adams (2017). In many ways the chronological journey begins with flamboyant virtuosity, epitomized, perhaps, by the excessive elaborations found in much of the piano music of Ferruccio Busoni (consider the “Fantasia contrappuntistica” discussed on this site this past November); and it concludes with the shortest of the seven selections, engaging the listener with understated wit, rather than overstated technical dexterity.

Indeed, from my own perspective as a listener who still tries to spend some time at a piano keyboard every day, there was something irresistibly engaging about Adams’ “I Still Play,” beginning with the title itself. Adams is a little less than a year younger than I am; so it would not surprise me to learn that, like myself, he approaches a piano keyboard with less dexterity than he used to command. (At least that was the connotation that I personally extracted from the title of his composition!) Hammond’s booklet notes explicitly cited that Adams expected that “an accomplished amateur pianist” could take on “I Still Play;” and, after listening to Hammond’s recording, I found myself thinking about getting a copy of the score.

In that respect “I Still Play” was a welcome relief from the abundant excesses of Szymanowski’s Opus 10 set of variations on a Polish theme, in which the theme tends to be more and more obscured as the variations get more and more embellished. In the context of that composition, one can appreciate why a new generation of composers would emerge to rally under the banner reading “Enough of all that!” Copland’s set of variations accounts for that motto with the boldest strokes imaginable, and I am afraid that I was more than a little disappointed that Hammond’s strokes were not bold enough. Mind you, my own listening experience with this set was significantly influenced by listening to Simone Dinnerstein playing it with much more visceral rhetoric in a recital given in Herbst Theatre back in April of 2010.

Personal encounters also figured in listening to Gubaidulina’s chaconne. By a happy accident, I was asked to turn pages for Sarah Cahill when she played this piece in December of 2016 for a program she had entitled Chaconnes, Revisited. The opportunity to read while listening led me to conjecture that Gubaidulina had been influenced by Busoni’s over-the-top solo piano arrangement of the chaconne movement that concludes Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1004 solo violin partita. Indeed, I described the influence as leading to “the product of a rambunctious student who had had enough of what Busoni had done to Bach.” I elaborated on this proposition as follows:

While her music never explicitly points to Busoni, the score abounds with tropes that have strong family resemblance to techniques of elaboration encountered in his rethinking of Bach’s chaconne. In other words Gubaidulina set herself to do unto Busoni what Busoni had done unto Bach, and one gets the impression that she did so with gleeful prankishness. To be fair, much of that prankishness amounts to a relatively arcane in-joke; and I shall be the first to admit that I did not “get the joke” after my first encounter with the piece. However, I am now pretty confident that the joke really is there and would be only too happy to hear more pianists play Gubaidulina’s chaconne more often.

In that context, Hammond’s recording left me with the impression that she did not get the joke. (To be fair, Cahill also questioned my thoughts about any prankishness.) That said, I still tend to favor gestures of playfulness found in both the composer and the performer. Where Hammond’s recording is concerned, that playfulness is given its best account in the approaches to Hindemith and Lachenmann, while I feel that there is too much virtuosic seriousness in the Birtwistle offering. Thus, taken as a whole, the selections are somewhat mixed; but the encounters with both Hindemith and Adams made the overall listening experience worth while.

A Bold and Imaginative Gift Concert from SFP

Last night in Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Performances (SFP) presented its Gift Concert for 2019–20 season. Made possible through the generous support of George and Camilla Smith, this is a concert that offers free admission to subscribers and donors and usually provides the opportunity of a “first look” at a rising talent. Last night that talent was South Korean violinist Bomsori Kim, making her SFP debut.

Her accompanist was Finnish pianist Juho Pohjonen, who had made his SFP solo debut in March of 2008. My own first contact with Pohjonen took place in January of 2011 in Davies Symphony Hall, when he was the concerto soloist (Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 37 in C minor) when Marek Janowski took the podium as guest conductor of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). That performance preceded his second SFP recital. He returned to Davies the following November for an SFS subscription concert organized by Michael Tilson Thomas around the chamber music of Franz Schubert. Pohjonen took the piano part in a performance of the D. 667 “Trout” quintet in A major.

As accompanist Pohjonen consistently knew how to engage with Kim over the course of a highly imaginative repertoire that was probably unfamiliar to most of the audience. By way of a benchmark, the only piece on the program that was part of Jascha Heifetz’ recorded repertoire was the final selection, Franz Waxman’s “Carmen Fantasie,” originally composed for the 1946 movie Humoresque. This was a wild and wooly traversal of many of the themes from Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen, clearly conceived to allow the soloist to pull no end of virtuoso rabbits out of a hat while making it a point to one-up the earlier flamboyant fantasy that Pablo de Sarasate had derived from Bizet’s source material.

Waxman’s version holds a high place on my own “guilty pleasures” list. Last night it seemed as if both Kim and Pohjonen shared my attitude. Kim jumped through one flaming hoop after another while maintaining the cool disposition of confidence in every trick she pulled. This may have been the icing on a far more substantial cake, but it was still irresistible.

The cake itself, so to speak, was a “multi-layered” affair bringing together four composers. The first half presented Robert Schumann’s Opus 105 (first) violin sonata in A minor, three of the six pieces collected by Jean Sibelius as his Opus 79, and Karol Szymanowski’s Opus 28, which couples a nocturne with a tarantella. The intermission was then followed by Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 94a in D major sonata, originally written for flute and piano but reconceived for violin at the suggestion of David Oistrakh.

Of those four selections, the Prokofiev is the one most likely to have been previously encountered. Prokofiev satisfied Oistrakh with an array of virtuoso passages that were definitely beyond the scope of a solo flute. Nevertheless, the overall rhetoric of assertive interplay between soloist and accompanist was as powerful as Prokofiev had first conceived it, if not more so. The music sometimes recalls the more vigorous rhetoric associated with Prokofiev’s time in Paris; but there was also a prevailing mood of melancholy, which, perhaps, reflected the hardships of World War II. Nevertheless, a confident optimism arises in the playfulness of the final movement; and neither Kim nor Pohjonen was shy about letting that playfulness run its course.

In a somewhat similar context Szymanowski left Berlin during the early stages of World War I, retreating to his family estate in the Ukraine. The nocturne and the tarantella were originally composed separately and only later joined together for publication. Indeed, while the nocturne reveals the dark side of Szymanowski’s rhetoric, the tarantella was apparently composed after a night of drinking. Sadly his productive streak in the Ukraine would come to an end when the Bolsheviks took over the estate and threw the piano into a lake. Here, again, both Kim and Pohjonen clearly appreciated the breadth of Szymanowski’s rhetorical expressiveness and delivered the sort of account that leaves one hoping for another encounter with the music.

Schumann composed his first two violin sonatas, Opus 105 and Opus 121 in D minor, in 1851, a year in which several other chamber music works were written. The third sonata (WoO 27) was completed in 1853 but never published. There are those who see signs of Schumann’s mental breakdown in Opus 105; but those signs could just as easily be taken as experiments in phrasing that turn to prose, rather than poetry, as a substrate for rhetoric. Kim gave a highly personable account of the solo violin part suggesting that the composer was very much in command of his faculties when the piece was composed. Indeed, she made the case that the sonata deserves more attention within the larger community of violin recitalists.

The Sibelius selection, on the other hand, reflected an intimacy that one tends to overlook when thinking about that composer. The truth is that Sibelius himself was a violinist, suggesting that the frequently-played Opus 47 violin concerto in D minor is very much an act of personal expression. Nevertheless, he could clearly be just as expressive when working on a shorter durational scale. Kim clearly knew how to capture that expressiveness; and, for my part, she left me curious about the other three pieces in the Opus 79 collection.

While the Waxman composition may have felt like an encore selection, Kim returned to conclude the evening with a “real” encore. Somewhat in the spirit of the intimacy she had explored in Sibelius, she played Fritz Kreisler’s transcription for violin and piano of Antonín Dvořák’s “Songs My Mother Taught Me,” the fourth of the seven songs he had collected in his Opus 55 Gypsy Songs. Considering how many fireworks were detonated during the Waxman performance, Kreisler’s quietude was definitely welcome; and Kim delivered it with all the expressiveness one could have expected from Kreisler himself.

SFP Gift Concert to Present Bomsori Kim

Violinist Bomsori Kim (from her SFP event page)

Every season San Francisco Performances (SFP) offers a free Gift Concert to subscribers and donors. This special offering is made possible through the generous support of George and Camilla Smith. Once subscribers and donors have had an opportunity to respond, the remaining tickets are made available for purchase by the general public. Through past experience, I have come to expect these concerts to take place in the spring; but the Gift Concert for the 2019–20 season will take place next month. The claims of subscribers and donors have been met, so the remaining tickets are now available.

This season’s Gift Concert recitalist will be the young South Korean violinist Bomsori Kim. Her accompanist will be the Finnish pianist Juho Pohjonen. Kim will be making her SFP debut, but Pohjonen has given SFP recitals in 2008 and 2011. While I did not have a chance to listen to him on either of those occasions, his 2011 concert took place shortly after he had performed Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 37 (third) piano concerto in C minor in Davies Symphony Hall with Marek Janowski conducting the San Francisco Symphony. Suffice it to say that, when I was compiling my month-by-month account of best concerts of the year, that concerto performance had a lock on January.

Kim and Pohjonen have prepared an impressively innovative program with selections from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, most of which get less exposure than they deserve. The program will begin with Robert Schumann’s Opus 105 (first) violin sonata in A minor. This will be followed by Jean Sibelius’ Opus 79, a collection of six pieces for violin and piano. The “geographic base” will then shift from Finland to Poland with a performance of Karol Szymanowski’s Opus 28, which couples a nocturne with a tarantella. Schumann’s first sonata will then be complemented by Sergei Prokofiev’s second violin sonata (Opus 94a in D major, which was originally written for flute and piano). The program will then conclude by providing its own encore, Franz Waxman’s “Carmen Fantasie,” written for the 1946 movie Humoresque.

This concert will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, November 6. The venue will be Herbst Theatre, whose entrance is the main entrance to the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue, located on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. This location is excellent for public transportation, since that corner has Muni bus stops for both north-south and east-west travel. All remaining tickets are being sold for $45. Tickets may be purchased in advance online through a City Box Office event page.

Archival Recordings of Violinist Ivry Gitlis

2018 photograph of pianist Martha Argerich and violinist Ivry Gitlis (aged 96 at that time) (photograph by Shani Evenstein, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

At the beginning of this month, Taiwan-based RHINE CLASSICS launched a series of recordings entitled Ivry Gitlis Edition, planned as a collection of recordings of the Israeli violinist Ivry Gitlis. Because this name may not be familiar to many readers, I would like to begin with an anecdote. When I was working on my doctoral thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, one of my colleagues was the late Gilbert Voyat, a Swiss psychologist with the gift of being able to explain the work of Jean Piaget to those of us with limited knowledge of French. (Voyat died of cancer at the early age of 43, at which time he had been a Professor of Psychology at City College of New York.) Voyat once began a conversation by referring to his friend Ivry Gitlis; and I piped up, “I know who that is!” Voyat scowled, “No one in the United States knows who Gitlis is!” I replied, “Anyone who likes Alban Berg’s violin concerto knows that he is one of the few violinists to have recorded it;” and, in fact, I first came to know that concerto through a Vox recording made with William Strickland conducting the Vienna Symphony.

That conversation took place half a century ago; and, over that intervening period, I have never encountered another recording of Gitlis until this month. The first Ivry Gitlis Edition release is a two-CD collection entitled The Early Years, Birth of a Legend. The recordings remastered on this album were made between 1949 and 1963. All of the selections are either solos or works with piano accompaniment. Thus, while the Berg violin concerto fits into this time frame (the album received a “Grand Prix du Disque” award in 1954), it is not part of the collection. However, even if there is no representation of any of the Second Viennese School composers, there is a wide variety of twentieth-century approaches to composition, represented (in order of appearance in the collection) by Paul Hindemith, Karol Szymanowski, Ernest Bloch, Béla Bartók, and Joseph Achron. All other selections are from the nineteenth century with the exceptions of the Chaconne movement that concludes Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1004 solo violin partita in D minor and Giuseppe Tartini’s “Devil’s Trill” sonata.

With regard to technology, RHINE CLASSICS has done an excellent remastering job for all of the tracks on these two CDs. The performances themselves are more variable in quality. Each CD includes with its own recording of Bartók’s solo violin sonata. The earlier recording comes from a studio session in Paris in December of 1951. The later recording was recorded live at the 1963 Festival dei Due Mondi (festival of two worlds) in Spoleto, Italy. Without trying to make undue excuses, I have found that even the best of performers are not “at the top of their game” in what I like to call “high-bandwidth” festivals; so I was not surprised to find a better account of Bartók coming out of the studio!

Thus, in spite of “Spoleto conditions,” the greatest satisfaction comes from the attention that Gitlis gives to the twentieth-century composers included in this collection. By way of comparison, only two of the twentieth-century pieces can be found in the discography for Jascha Heifetz, Achron’s 1911 Opus 33 (“Hebrew Melody”) and the “Nigun” movement from Bloch’s 1923 Baal Shem suite. Particularly representative is the fact that the very first composition on the first CD is the third (1935) sonata (in E major) of the four that Hindemith composed for violin and piano. Taking Bloch, Hindemith, and Bartók all into account, this collection is definitely worth “the price of admission.”

Gabriela Martinez’ Debut Album with Delos is Delightfully Diverse

Almost two weeks ago Delos released its first album featuring solo performances by Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Martinez. The advance material (reproduced on the Amazon.com Web page) describes her as the “Brilliant young Venezuelan pianist,” which gives me a bit of pause, since my first encounter with her was in July of 2007. The occasion was one of the summer concerts offered by the San Francisco Symphony in Davies Symphony Hall, which SFS had designated as “bloggers’ night.” I was just beginning to write seriously about music, and this was an opportunity for not only free admission to an SFS concert but also the circulation of my writing among a new set of readers. The evening included both the concert itself and a question-and-answer session with Martinez after the concert had concluded.

Her selection that night was Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 30 (third) piano concerto in D minor. To put this in historical perspective, the performance took place about ten years after the release of Shine, an account (disputed by some) of David Helfgott’s efforts to learn Opus 30 and the unfortunate aftermath of those efforts. This film was clearly on the mind of many of the bloggers that attended the Q&A session, which is why the question quickly came up as to how much time it had taken Martinez to prepare the concerto. When she replied that it took about two months, one could hear gasps across Davies punctuated by dropping jaws. I ended up writing a piece in which I used a little bit of elementary information theory to make the case that too many minds had been sadly addled by the Shine narrative.

Fortunately, Martinez’ new album is more about the diversity of her music-making skills than it is about debunking fictions fabricated in the name of entertainment. The title of the album is Amplified Soul, which is also the title of one of the tracks, a piece she commissioned from Dan Visconti, which is receiving its recording debut. Just short of five minutes in duration, this is music that appears to explore reverberations within the body of the piano and therefore requires what appears to be some rather detailed attention to which dampers are raised at which times. The title probably refers to the fact that, because the amplitudes of reverberating strings are much lower than those struck by the hammers, amplification is required to appreciate the full effect of the process. While the sorts of effects that Visconti appears to exploit are easily captured in the setting of a recording studio, there are likely to be technical challenges that will arise should Martinez decide to play this piece in recital.

Curiously, similar attention to reverberation also arises in the other recent work on the album, Mason Bates’ “White Lies for Lomax.” “Lomax” is, of course, Alan Lomax, the pioneering ethnomusicologist who devoted so much of his life to collecting and documenting the many different forms of folk music encountered across the continental United States. Bates describes the thematic material as “wisps of distant blues fragments,” adding that these fragments “are hardly honest recreations of the blues.” This explains the “Lies” part of the title. Bates does not say anything (at least in the booklet notes) about the “White” part. While this may have been his way of blunting the significance of his “dishonesty,” it is worth recognizing that Lomax was white, as is Bates, while the blues has its roots among African Americans living in the Deep South, particularly at the end of the nineteenth century. Thus, there is some suggestion that Bates acknowledges distorting his source material and may even be calling out some of his predecessors, such as Aaron Copland or even George Gershwin, for doing the same, probably in the interest of appealing to what Amiri Baraka, back when he was writing as LeRoi Jones, called the middle-brow tastes of white critics.

The more traditional works on the album cover the period from the very end of the eighteenth century to the very beginning of the twentieth. The latest of these is Karol Szymanowski’s Opus 3, a set of twelve variations in B-flat minor that he composed for Artur Rubinstein. Somewhat earlier is the first (also in B-flat minor) of the set of six Moments musicaux (Opus 16), which Rachmaninoff composed in 1896. However, the album begins at the opposite extreme with the third (in D major) of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 10 sonatas, which he composed in Vienna in 1798 at a time when his reputation was just beginning to rise.

Taken as a whole, this is an album in which each of the compositions has its own distinctive rhetorical stance. Martinez is clearly comfortable with finding and delivering that stance in each of her interpretations. She has definitely come a long way since my first encounter with her almost a decade ago. I might even acknowledge that the use of the adjective “brilliant” in that advance work is justified. However, given my personal sense of my own aging over these last ten years, I have to wonder how much longer she will be presented as “young!”

A Younger Strauss

It was only coincidence that the Metropolitan HD telecast of Salome in the morning (Pacific time) was followed in the evening at Davies Symphony Hall by one of Richard Strauss' earliest works, his "Burleske" for piano and orchestra. Emanuel Ax was soloist with Peter Oundjian conducting the San Francisco Symphony. This is pretty much the only opportunity we have to hear Strauss composing for piano orchestra, and this work is almost a double concerto movement for piano and timpani. Come to think of it, for all of his later resourcefulness with percussion in his orchestration, this is pretty much his only effort at using the timpani in a melodic manner.
I think this was only my second opportunity to hear the "Burleske" in concert; and the first was a telecast of a European concert that I had the good fortune to see while in Singapore (but have no memory of the performers, alas). In many ways this short work provides an introduction to Strauss finding his voice. The piano figures are highly virtuosic but tend to draw upon familiar idioms with more than a hint of Johannes Brahms in the overall flavor. The innovation, for the most part, reside in the use of the timpani, which is the real show-stealer. Ax took a good-natured approach to the work and turned his solo into witty exchanges with both the timpani and the rest of the orchestral ensemble. Among all of these good spirits, the seasoned ear will also catch the first seeds of the voice of the more mature Strauss, particularly in the form of gestures that would return in Der Rosenkavalier in an entirely different light. (The is also one quieter gesture that may have suffered the fate of appropriation by Leonard Bernstein.) Because it tells us so much about Strauss in his youth and the direction he is facing towards maturity, this is a work that deserves to be heard more often.
Ax also performed the solo part of Karol Szymanowski's "Symphonie Concertante" for piano and orchestra, also classified as his fourth symphony. Szymanowski composed this work at 1932 at a time when the musical language of the first half of the twentieth century was beginning to converge on a variety of relatively consistent voices. Those voices are most evident in the solo piano work, while the "symphony side" takes a variety of innovative approaches with regard to both form and orchestral voicing. The primary influences on the piano solo involve the emergence of a more percussive approach (thus making the pairing with the Strauss "Burleske" an appropriate one). We can thus assume that Szymanowski was familiar with at least some of the piano compositions of Béla Bartók and, as James Keller suggested in his program notes, at least one of the piano concertos of Sergei Prokofiev. Keller also heard an evocation of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (from his Hollywood years) in the final rondo; but I was less convinced. Ultimately, Szymanowski engaged the idioms of his time with his own voice; and, since the work was dedicated to Arthur Rubinstein, we have the opportunity to become more familiar with it through the recording that Rubinstein made with Alfred Wallenstein and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
The "bookends" for Ax's solo work consisted of opening with the overture to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Magic Flute and closing with Pyotr Tchaikovsky's "Francesca da Rimini—Fantasy after Dante." The former was light and energetic, providing a nice match for the wit of the Strauss "Burleske." The latter was ponderous by being excessively repetitive. Now we all know that, on just about any scale, Tchaikovsky had a tendency to go overboard with repetition; but those of us who saw the PBS clip of Valery Gergiev rehearsing the Met Orchestra in the opening of Eugene Onegin know that, if you get down with the Devil in the details, Tchaikovsky had a lot of clues as to how to keep those repetitions from sounding repetitive. So it may well be that Oundjian lacked either the time or the inclination to endow this "Francesca" with a feeling of progress, rather than one of iteration. He could always fall back on the mighty noise that Tchaikovsky elicits from his orchestra, ultimately a richer sound than the one Franz Liszt had elicited for his rendition of this tale from the Second Circle of the Inferno in his "Dante Symphony." On sound alone this stood as the sort of rousing climax that would bring the audience to its feet to cheer, which is what they did.