Box Set of a Conductor Who Deserved Better

Back cover of the box showing the original album sleeves of all of the recording in the collection being discussed (from the Amazon.com Web page)

The full title of the latest box set to be released by Sony Classical is Louis Lane Conducts the Cleveland Orchestra – The Complete Epic and Columbia Album Collection. Lane joined at Cleveland Orchestra as an apprentice conductor to George Szell in 1947. He then “went through the ranks” through a series of promotions: Assistant Conductor in 1955, Associate Conductor in 1960, and Resident Conductor in 1970. Many probably know the stories about how Szell could not tolerate the pianist Glenn Gould, so Lane conducted Gould’s performances in Cleveland.

Sadly, none of those performances were included in the new Sony Classical box set. Indeed, only the last four of the fourteen CDs in this collection cite Lane as conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. The other thirteen cite him as leading either The Cleveland Pops Orchestra or The Cleveland Sinfonietta. Mind you, there is more than a little substance in those last four CDs. One of them accounts for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 334 divertimento in D major, which extends to six movements in duration. Another is the complete ballet score for The Creatures of Prometheus, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 43. Where dance history is concerned, this is a bit of an outlier, with choreography that predated first the Italians and then the Russians. A more contemporary approach to ballet can be found in the album of suites from “The Wise Virgins” (arrangements of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach by William Walton) and “The Good-Humored Ladies” (Vincenzo Tommasini’s orchestrations of the keyboard sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti). Finally, there is an interesting “first symphonies” album, coupling Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 1 in C minor with Franz Schubert’s D. 82 (first completed) symphony in D major.

For better or worse, none of the preceding CDs in the collection are in my wheelhouse. I suspect that the collection of arrangements of tunes from Broadway shows is the most cringe-inducing, but I have no trouble with listeners that would take that CD to be their favorite! Also, there are opportunities to listen to the works of composers who are now pretty much forgotten, such as Arthur Foote, Morton Gould, and Walter Piston. Indeed, if I have any affection at all for the pops genre, it would be for Gould’s “American Salute,” which I played in high school!

Nevertheless, I do not see myself returning to this collection with much frequency!

BMOP/sound Releases Walter Piston Album

courtesy of AMT PR

Regular readers are probably familiar by now with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) and its BMOP/sound label, each of whose releases tends to focus on a single composer that contributed to the repertoire of twentieth-century music. The most recent article on this site surveyed roughly three decades of compositions by John Adams, following up on an album of early compositions by Elliott Carter, released about two months earlier. Last month BMOP/sound released two new albums, and the composers are sufficiently different that these albums deserve to be examined separately.

This article will deal with the album devoted to the music of Walter Piston. Piston was a major figure in the Harvard University Music Department when I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a freshman in September of 1963. Determined to make studies my major focus, I limited my extracurricular activities to the campus radio station (whose call letters, at that time, were WTBS), where I launched a weekly program entitled Music of the Twentieth Century. With the assistance of my Program Manager, I was able to record an interview with Piston during that program’s first season, even though my knowledge of him was limited to the suite he had extracted from his score for the ballet “The Incredible Flutist” and an awareness of his four textbooks, Principles of Harmonic Analysis, Counterpoint, Orchestration, and Harmony. My only other awareness of Piston took place in 1965, when I heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra premiere his eighth symphony.

The fact is that Piston did not make very much of an impression beyond the Greater Boston Area. The only exception was that “Incredible Flutist” suite, which Howard Hanson had recorded with the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra for Mercury, an album that only made the transition from vinyl to CD in one of the Mercury “anthology” collections (the second of three released thus far). The themes from that suite remain familiar to me, along with the dog that barks at the end of the “Circus March” movement.

The BMOP/sound does not include the “Flutist” music, which was composed for the ballet in 1938. However, the “major attraction” (for which the album itself is named) is the 1934 concerto for orchestra, making it probably the first effort in that genre to be performed by a major ensemble, the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) with Piston conducting. (Béla Bartók’s more familiar concerto was composed in 1943, also for the BSO.) The more recent selections are the divertimento for nine instruments (1946), a set of variations on a theme by Piston’s composition teacher, Edward Burlingame Hill (1946), and the 1967 clarinet concerto.

While conductor Gil Rose delivers suitably attentive accounts of all four of these selections, none of them ever musters the sort of rhetoric that seizes and maintains listener awareness. The concerto solo work by clarinetist Michael Norsworthy tends to provide the most engaging moments on the album. This may be due in part to Piston’s skill in distilling the entire “concerto journey” into a single movement, but Norsworthy’s performing style may well be just as much of a factor.

When I wrote about the Adams album, I suggested that his early work situated him among composers that were determined to advance beyond what I called “the ‘mathematical abstractions’ of post-Schoenberg serial technique.” Piston was interested in those techniques, and they left recognizable marks on his clarinet concerto. Nevertheless, no one would confuse his music with anything by Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, or those later “mathematical abstractions.” However, while he could reject such premises when working on the four selections on this album, it is unclear just what premises he was committed to accepting.

Harpsichord Music Separated by a Century

Mahan Esfahani and Stefan Jackiw (from the San Francisco Performances event page for last night’s concert)

Last night Herbst Theatre saw the beginning of this season’s PIVOT series of concerts presented by San Francisco Performances. The subtitle of this series is New Adventures in the Performing Arts, and the objective is to explore new approaches to both making music and presenting it. The theme of this season’s series is String Theory; and, taken as a whole, the series amounts to a journey through different approaches to music from string instruments. Last night offered a duo recital by harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani and violinist Stefan Jackiw. They will be followed tonight by a “hybrid” trio bringing violinist Jennifer Koh together with Vijay Iyer on piano and Tyshawn Sorey on percussion. Saturday will feature the Telegraph Quartet of violinists Eric Chin and Joseph Maile, violist Pei-Ling Lin, and cellist Jeremiah Shaw performing with vocalist Theo Bleckmann and pianist Dan Tepfer; and the series will conclude, as it began, with a duo recital, this time bringing violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja together with cellist Jay Campbell.

Last night’s program took a highly imaginative approach to the harpsichord repertoire. It consisted of two “pairings” of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. The first coupled Johann Sebastian Bach with Czech composer Viktor Kalabis. The second paired Bach’s son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, with the American Walter Piston.

Of these four composers Kalabis is probably the least familiar, not just to last night’s audience but through much, if not all, of the United States. He was born into a musical family, first learning about music through piano studies. However, the Nazi invasion made it impossible for him to study at a higher level; and he was put to work in an aircraft factory. Life under the Communists after the war was not much better, but he was still able to study at the Prague Conservatory and the Academy of Music. However, both he and his wife, the harpsichordist Zuzana Růžičková, refused to join the Communist Party, meaning that the only work he could get was in the children’s music section of Prague Radio.

Nevertheless, he composed on his own time, putting much of his efforts into music that his wife could play. Last night Esfahani and Jackiw performed his Opus 28 sonata, which was composed in 1967. This was decidedly unique music that did not try to look back on the pre-Classical traditions of the harpsichord repertoire but also did not dwell on the “Czech rhetoric” of composers active at the end of the nineteenth century. The sonata was written jointly for both Růžičková and the violinist Josef Suk, who gave the premiere performance.

Each of the three movements is relatively brief with a nod to traditional structure fashioned on decidedly contemporary rhetoric. Esfahani observed that Kalabis received far more attention in Europe than he does on this continent. Given the engaging qualities of Opus 28, I would argue that those of us that are serious listeners in this country are definitely at a loss. Since so much of the Kalabis catalog involves the harpsichord, we can only hope that Esfahani will continue his advocacy of this composer.

Piston is at least more familiar by name. There are probably still many students out there that know him as the author of textbooks on harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration. He was educated at Harvard University and subsequently taught there for the better part of his life. During the interval between these two episodes he studied with both Nadia Boulanger and Paul Dukas in Paris.

As a composer he was known for a rhetoric that could best be described as “American vigor.” That vigor is very much on display in the 1945 three-movement sonatina he composed for violinist Alexander Schneider and harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick. Like Piston, Kirkpatrick studied at Harvard and then went to Paris to study with Boulanger. However, he also studied harpsichord with Wanda Landowska.

One “fun fact” is that, while Piston returned to Harvard, Kirkpatrick took up a professorship at Yale University. It was there that he undertook his intense studies of Domenico Scarlatti, eventually resulting in providing all of the keyboard sonatas with catalog numbers (known as Kirkpatrick numbers). Despite the rivalries of their respective universities, it was clear that Piston and Kirkpatrick had a highly productive working relationship when Piston was compositing his sonatina.

Last night’s eighteenth-century selections were a little less consistent. Interestingly enough, the sonatas of both father and son were in the key of B minor. However, Emanuel’s Wq 76 duo sonata was definitely one of the high points of the evening. The keyboard part was rich in dazzling diversity, and it is not difficult to imagine that it became a significant source of inspiration for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

This sonata was one of a set of four composed in the 1760s when Emanuel was in service at the Berlin court of Frederick the Great. By this time the harpsichord was beginning to go out of fashion, and Emanuel himself divided his attention between that instrument and the rise of the fortepiano. (He composed a double concerto for both of these instruments.)

Wq 76 probably provided Esfahani with the best opportunity to unleash his keyboard technique at its most prodigious. Nevertheless, his partnership with Jackiw was never strained. While Emanuel did not stint on writing solo keyboard passages, he knew better than to relegate the violin to the background. As a result, taken as a whole, Wq 76 emerged as the primary source of fireworks for both of the performers.

Sebastian’s contribution, on the other hand, was BWV 1014, the first of a set of six duo sonatas composed during the end of his tenure at Cöthen between 1720 and 1723. Like much of the other music from this period, there is a good chance that the sonata was composed for its pedagogical value. However, as is well known, pedagogy for Bach involved rhetorical expressiveness, as well as technical precision.

Unfortunately, neither of these qualities shined particularly brightly last night. The primary problem was one of balance. While almost all of the thematic material alternates between the violin and the harpsichord, the harpsichord accounts were, more often than not, barely audible. It almost seemed as if the two performers had not yet had the opportunity to figure out how to listen to each other on the Herbst stage; and it took all four movements of BWV 1014 for them to adjust to each other. That hypothesis was affirmed with the encore performance of another sonata movement (which I think was taken from BWV 1018 in F minor), which conveyed a far more satisfying sense of balance than had been encountered at the beginning of the program.

Another Neglected American Composer (and much much more)

We are coming to the end of the term at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and I am trying to catch up on opportunities to hear some of the compositions explored in recent master classes now played in their entirety. Last night it was Robert Schumann's Opus 47 piano quartet, whose first movement had been coached by Peter Frankl. Given Schumann's ongoing interest in integrating the multiple movements of an extended structure into a "unified package," this is a work that gains more from being taken as a whole, rather than a focused view on a single movement. Indeed, I would go a step further and propose that one could make an excellent listening experience out of a program that would couple Opus 47 with the Opus 44 piano quintet (as the Benda Musicians did in their PRICE-LES$ CD of Schumann chamber music), since each takes experimental steps in a different direction and both prepare us for the more finished strategy that Schumann applied to his Opus 120 D minor symphony a little less than ten years later. Opus 44 can be heard as an acknowledgement of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's final K. 551 symphony ("Jupiter"), whose concluding movement climaxes with its thematic material coming together in a single closely-knit contrapuntal network; and Schumann's fabric adds the thread of the theme that began the opening Allegro brillante movement. However, while Opus 44 climaxes by looking back to the very beginning, Opus 47 experiments with looking forward.

In this case the integration resides in the link between the third Andante cantabile movement and the following Vivace Finale. Drawing upon an extended melody line for the cello, the Andante cantabile has that same heartbreaking quality that Joel Krosnick had identified when he coached the Andante movement from Johannes Brahms' Opus 60 piano quartet, thus reinforcing the heavy influence that Schumann must have had on this movement (including its position as third, rather than second, of the four movements). Schumann's experiment, however, involved linking the coda gesture of the Andante cantabile (which, by its very context, is saturated with reflective melancholy) with the burst of energy in the opening theme of the Finale. One might almost take this as evidence that Eusebius (in the third movement) and Florestan (in the final movement) are, indeed, the same person wrapped into Schumann's body; but that does not make it a sign of dysfunctional bipolarity. This is Schumann in his early thirties, accepting his psyche for what it is and letting it lead him down unexplored paths, which means it also constitutes a critical part of the nineteenth-century repertoire that would shape how we still listen to music today.

Taking that as my own attempt to link to the present, I was also pleased that last night's program included a duo for viola and cello by Walter Piston. Piston is another example of an American composer who received too little attention in his own time and was too often dismissed as a dry academic. (Since he had written a full complement of textbooks for the study of composition and was a Harvard Professor, one could appreciate the origins of such dismissal!) There was certainly nothing to dismiss about his duo, beginning with his unique ear for the colors that emerge when viola and cello are combined without any intervening higher instruments. My only regret is that I approached this performance without any preparation, which meant that I could do little more than grasp at the most salient surface-level features, such as Piston's use of pizzicato to mark structural boundaries. I suspect there was as much ingenuity in Piston's contrapuntal fabric as I have come to love in the work of Mozart and Schumann, but I shall need several more opportunities to listen to this work before writing about such matters from an informed position.

This makes for another link, since the Piston duo was preceded by Mozart's K. 465 string quartet ("Dissonant"). This is one of the quartets that Mozart wrote for Joseph Haydn and which Haydn himself played (along with Mozart). The nickname applies only to the Adagio introduction to the first movement, but it is another source for reflection on how ideas evolve into the future. One has to wonder whether or not Mozart's little experiment with taking a repeated C natural and forging a winding trail through many tonal ambiguities before coming to a sustained dominant G in the 22nd measure planted a seed in Haydn's mind that he would then cultivate when faced with the problem of representing that state of chaos that preceded the opening text of Genesis for his Schöpfung oratorio. The "trick" in performing this Adagio is to lead the ear confidently along that trail; and it may well have been the confidence that these particular student performers brought to the very beginning of the evening that encouraged and sustained the listener from Mozart to Piston to the final bars of the Schumann piano quartet.