Telegraph Quartet to Return to Noe Valley

Telegraph Quartet members (clockwise from upper left) Eric Chin, Jeremiah Shaw, Pei-Ling Lin, and Joseph Maile (photograph by Lisa Marie Mazzucco, from the TicketSource Web page)

Some readers probably know already that I have been following the Telegraph Quartet since its inception in 2013 and continue to do my best to keep up with them. Indeed, I was delighted to declare, about half a month ago, my delight at the fact that all four of the performers are still the founders: violinists Joseph Maile and Eric Chin, Pei-Ling Lin on viola, and cellist Jeremiah Shaw. Currently, they are the Quartet-in-Residence at the University of Michigan; but their touring schedule will take them back to San Francisco early next month. They will be joined on that tour with five selected Michigan students.

That tour will take them back to San Francisco. More specifically, all nine performers will visit the Noe Valley Ministry to present a program of chamber music from the early twentieth century (almost). That parenthesis accounts for the fact that the final work on the program will be Arnold Schoenberg’s Opus 4, “Verklärte Nacht” (transfigured night). Schoenberg completed it in 1899, but it was not given its first performance until March of 1902, This will be complemented at the beginning of the program with Anton’s Webern’s Opus 5 string quartet, given simply the title “Fünf Sätze” (five pieces). This piece, which is almost microscopic, will be followed by the lengthier three-movement string quartet, Béla Bartók’s Opus 27 (Sz. 67), the second of the six that he composed.

The performance will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, November 6. The venue will be the Noe Valley Ministry, which is located in Noe Valley at 1021 Sanchez Street, just south of 23rd Street. There will be no charge for admission, but reservations are advisable. TicketSource has a created a Web page for making those reservations. As of this writing, over 50 tickets are available.

Napolitano’s Third “Progressive” Brahms Release

It has been a little over a year since my last opportunity to write about the Italian pianist Pina Napolitano. I tend to follow her as faithfully as possible to keep up with the repertoire she has organized around the Second Viennese School composers Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. My last encounter with her took place early in November of last year, not long after the release of the album Kammerkonzert: Music of Arnold Schoenberg. However, what has particularly interested me in her recordings is the series of releases entitled Brahms the Progressive, which has that late nineteenth-century composer “rubbing shoulders” with all three of those Second Viennese School composers.

In the past two volumes, the composer that received the most attention was Webern. Indeed, in the second volume Webern’s Opus 24 three-movement “Concerto for Nine Instruments” joins the piano with flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, trumpet, trombone, violin, and viola. This serves as a “warm-up” for Brahms’ Opus 83, his second piano concerto in B-flat major. The contrast could not be greater, but one might argue that the note-by-note impressions of Webern prepare the ear for the rich diversity of phrases in Opus 83.

The first volume, on the other hand, suggests an overall structure of “boxes within boxes.” It both begins and ends with two late collections by Brahms, the Opus 118 and Opus 119 Klavierstücke compositions. Opus 118 is followed by two short Webern pieces, while Opus 119 is preceded by his brief “Klavierstück – Im Tempo eines Menuetts” and the Opus 27 “Variations.” These, in turn, enclose the “core” of the album, Alban Berg’s Opus 1, a single-movement solo piano sonata.

Pina Napolitano at her keyboard performing with violinist Franco Mezzena (photograph by Tommaso Tuzj, courtesy of Odradek Records)

Having performed both solo and with orchestra, Napolitano has devoted her third album to duo performances with violinist Franco Mezzena. Brahms now accounts for his two late violin sonatas, Opus 100 in A major and Opus 108 in D minor. These are separated by Schoenberg’s first appearance in this project, his Opus 47 “Phantasy for violin with piano accompaniment.” He also introduces the album with a 1928 sonata fragment. This is only about four and one-half minutes long, which is also roughly the duration of the concluding selection, Webern’s Opus 7 set of four pieces, each somewhat longer than a single minute.

Personally, I was particularly glad that Napolitano finally brought Schoenberg into her fold, so to speak. After all, “Brahms the progressive” was the title of an essay that Schoenberg wrote. It began as a radio talk that he gave in 1933. He then revised that script in to the essay that now can be found in Style and Idea, a collection of fifteen essays edited and translated by Dika Newlin. The essay version of “Brahms the progressive” was completed in 1947. With such a rich background, I can only wonder with no shortage of anticipation where the concept of “Brahms the progressive” will next lead Napolitano.

E4TT: A Disappointing Evening at SFCM

Last night in the Barbro Osher Recital Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), Ensemble for These Times (E4TT) presented its latest program, entitled Expression:Ism. The program was described as “a multimedia dialogue between music by the Second Viennese School triumvirate of Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, and Anton Webern and contemporary pieces by composers inspired by their groundbreaking work.” The evening was visual as well as auditory, working with the SFCM Technology and Applied Composition (TAC) Department to present images by Schoenberg himself and various Expressionist painters, along with videos by Stephanie Neumann, making for real-time processing of a rich “media mix.”

Lylia Guion, Dale Tsang, and Amy Brodo playing David Garner’s second piano trio, with projected “video enhancement” (screen shot from the video stream of last night’s performance)

At the end of the day, however, what mattered most was the music; and the music was at its best at the end of the program. Following the interleaving of Second Viennese School and contemporary programming, the evening concluded with the world premiere of the second piano trio composed by David Garner, a co-founder of E4TT. This was performed by three artists appearing as guests for E4TT, violinist Lylia Guion, Amy Brodo on cello, and pianist Dale Tsang (E4TT emerita). There was just the right blend of commitment and technical capabilities to bring this music to life with a spirit that was sorely lacking in all the preceding selections on the program.

Sadly, the Second Viennese School did not fare as well. Tsang seemed to be too preoccupied with getting all the notes in the Schoenberg solo piano pieces (from his Opus 11) in their proper place to endow the music with any expressiveness. Taylor Chan fared somewhat better with the rondo that Anton Webern composed for solo piano, given the title “Sonatensatz” and not published during his (short) lifetime. On the other hand, TJ Martin’s instrumental arrangement of Alban Berg’s Sieben Frühe Lieder, scored for cor anglais (Laura Reynolds), vibraphone (Elizabeth Clark Hall), and cello (Amy Brodo) muddled the interplay between voice and accompaniment, rather than enhancing it.

On the contemporary side, the “Mystic Trio” by SFCM graduate Valerie Liu, with Chan at the keyboard performing with Reynolds and Brodo, had little to offer other than tolerable brevity. Reynolds and Brodo performed in another trio with Guion, “unmute,” by Britney Dawn Do, which was similarly unimpressive. The program began with Chan playing “Olive Orchard,” one of the movements from Adam Schoenberg’s Picture Etudes, which seems to have been included for the composer’s name, even though (to the best of my knowledge) he is not related to the Second Viennese School composer!

I experienced this performance through the SFCM livestream. I have never found the Osher Recital Hall to be a particularly conducive setting for listening. However, readers know that many of the livestreams of Chamber Music Tuesday programs have been as satisfying for the video work as for the music. Sadly, last night’s video fell distressingly short of that previous high standard. This may have been due to the visual side of how the space was used, for which the video crew might have been unprepared. As a result, almost the entire evening was unsatisfying until the more straightforward presentation of Garner’s trio at the conclusion.

Gabriel Martins’ Two-Centuries Cello Recital

Cellist Gabriel Martins ((c)Geneva Lewis, courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall the San Francisco Symphony presented the second program in the third season of its Shenson Spotlight Series. The recitalist was cellist Gabriel Martins, accompanied at the piano by Victor Santiago Asunción. The program was framed by the “usual pairing” of nineteenth-century composers, Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms. Their works “enclosed” two decidedly different selections composed during the second decade of the twentieth century. The first of these was Claude Debussy’s 1915 cello sonata, one of his last works. This was followed by Anton Webern’s Opus 11, entitled simply “Drei kleine Stücke” (three little pieces). This was composed in the previous year, 1914; and it was a bold leap into the future that contrasted sharply with Debussy’s account, which bordered on nostalgic.

From a personal point of view, I feel that I encounter performances of Webern’s music so seldom that each occasion feels like a fresh one. Opus 11 is representative of his skills as a miniaturist. The entire set of three pieces usually clocks in at around two-and-a-half minutes. Audiences tend to feel disoriented when they realize that the piece is over before they knew it, and the composer’s pointillist attention to individual tones often triggers restless coughs and squirms in the audience. (Michael Tilson Thomas was a champion of Webern’s music and was consistently frustrated by audience behavior at his San Francisco Symphony performances.) Mind you, Opus 11 is so short that no one in the audience had time to start squirming! Once the piece had concluded, there was a polite response that was at least willing to acknowledge the enigmatic qualities of the experience.

Debussy was provocative in his own way, even if he was better at “coloring within the lines.” Traditionally, the sonata is appreciated for its abstract qualities in which expressiveness emerges from the interpretation of structure, rather than narrative. On the other hand, Debussy came close to tipping his hand by giving this sonata of programmatic title, “Pierrot fâché avec la lune.” The program note by James M. Keller translated this as “Pierrot Angry at the Moon;” but I suspect that Debussy came closer to the French expression for “pissed off!”

The first movement amounts to a brief study in frustration. This is followed by a somewhat nostalgic recollection of serenading, which is then also frustrated. In the final movement, Pierrot finally gets beyond his frustrations and launches into what Debussy himself called “a song of freedom.” Martins seemed well-attuned to all of these narrative qualities, and his interplay with Asunción made for an absorbing journey with a joyous conclusion.

In that context the Brahms Opus 99 (second) cello sonata in F major came across as a sharp contrast. Nevertheless, there was no shortage of expressiveness in Martins’ account. If the music did not have explicitly narrative qualities, it still emerged as a journey through a vast landscape of dispositions in which retrospection emerges in various intriguing guises. My favorite example comes in the first movement, which takes off like a bolt of lightning with its opening Allegro vivace theme. However, when the soloist arrives at the recapitulation, he confronts the theme now disguised as a chorale!

The entire program was framed by Schumann. The opening selection was his Opus 73 Fantasiestücke set of three pieces. Martins tended to approach these with subdued dynamics, which allowed one to appreciate the subtleties in the composer’s rhetorical approaches. Those subtleties would have had more impact, however, had Asunción decided to keep his piano lid at half-stick level. More often than not, the piano overshadowed the cello; and, while Schumann himself was a pianist, I doubt that he had such dominance in mind!

Fortunately, subtlety prevailed during the encore selection, the “Träumerei” (dreams) movement from the Opus 15 Kinderszenen (scenes from childhood) collection. There are probably any number of arrangements of this solo piano selection for cello and piano. The one by Friedrich Grützmacher is probably the most familiar; but, for all I know, Martins may have prepared his own!

Taken as a whole, the recital made for a thoroughly engaging evening; and I look forward to hearing more of what Martins has to offer.

The Mathematician’s Ballet

After having kept the book on a shelf for far too long, over the last several months I have been working my way through Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet by Jennifer Homans. This effort was probably motivated by the recent appearance of Homans’ second book, which is devoted entirely to George Balanchine. It would be fair to cite Balanchine as the  pioneering force in the development of American ballet, distinguishing it clearly from much of European ballet tradition. For the most part, Apollo’s Angels has made for a consistently enjoyable reading experience; but things became interesting for me when the timeline arrived at Balanchine’s achievements. Reading Homans evoked distant memories of the period when I took out my first subscription to New York City Ballet (NYCB) performances in Lincoln Center.

At that time I was an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, majoring in mathematics and taking as many electives as I could manage in music courses. As I have previously observed on this site, my spare time (such as its was) was spent working at the campus radio station, devoting much of my time to programming twentieth-century music. As might be guessed, the mathematician in me was particularly drawn to techniques pursued by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern that involved permutations of pitch classes, leading eventually to what became known as the twelve-tone technique.

In that context I became totally hooked on Igor Stravinsky’s “Agon,” which he composed for a Balanchine ballet with the same title. For the better part of his life, Stravinsky wanted nothing to do with Schoenberg. However, after Schoenberg’s death, Stravinsky took an interest in atonal technique, possibly as a result of the influences of Robert Craft.

“Agon” fascinated me for the ways in which atonality rubbed shoulders with tonal traditions, traditions that, in this case, reflected back to the seventeenth century of René Descartes, Étienne Pascal, and particularly Marin Mersenne, whose Harmonie universelle treatise was published in 1636. It was the bold rhetoric of “Agon” than convinced me that I had to see how Balanchine had created a ballet for it. So it was that I began following Balanchine’s choreography both at Lincoln Center and in works that were performed by the Boston Ballet.

Thus, after about 500 pages of reading, I found myself scribbling no end of marginal notes when Homans wrote about “Agon.” She cited the ballet as the third part of a “Greek trilogy” of Balanchine working with Stravinsky’s music. The first two ballets, “Apollo” and “Orpheus,” were grounded in familiar narratives. In sharp contrast, “Agon” was inspired by a seventeenth-century treatise on the dance. What was important, however, was that such dances were intended for “recreational activities” taking place in the setting of a royal court; they were not created to present narratives.

In that context “Agon” had less to do with ancient myths and drew, instead, upon Balanchine’s abstract approach to Paul Hindemith’s composition for piano and strings involving a theme with four variations, given the subtitle “The Four Temperaments.” Balanchine’s choreography realized each of the dispositions associated with those variations (melancholy, sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric). However, there was also an underlying “vocabulary” for the entire ballet; and all of the elements of that vocabulary were assembled into the choreographic interpretation of Hindemith’s coda. As a result, it was no surprise to me to observe that the choreography for “Agon” also wraps up with a coda that reflects on the opening measures of Stravinsky’s score.

All this should reflect back on the thoughts about “Agon” that I documented back in June of 2020 when, due to pandemic conditions, I had turned to YouTube when I was unable to attend “physical” performances. At that time I had discovered that John Clifford had uploaded digitizations of films of NYCB performances. The “Agon” film had no end of technical shortcomings; but I made it a point to cite “the rich interplay of abstraction and expressiveness.”

Because of the close partnership between Balanchine and Stravinsky, one could appreciate the many intricacies of abstraction based on how Balanchine chose to interpret Stravinsky’s music. At the same time there is an underlying foundation of expressiveness coming from all of the dancers, reflecting not so much on Stravinsky’s music as on a rich understanding of what it means to bring Balanchine’s choreography to life through the act of performance. From my own point of view, I feel that mathematics provided me with a platform on which I could grasp the elements of of abstraction; and those elements, in turn, provided a second platform from which I could view the “parallel” elements of expressiveness.

This may well be the only setting in which mathematics can serve as a prerequisite for appreciating a ballet!

LIEDER ALIVE! Launches 11th Season on Sunday

Composer Tarik O’Regan, soprano Heidi Moss Erickson, and pianist John Parr (courtesy of LIEDER ALIVE!)

Those that follow this site regularly probably already know that the Grand Opening of the Eleventh Annual Liederabend Season, presented by LIEDER ALIVE!, will take place this coming Sunday. Those readers will also know that the highlight of the program will be the world premiere of a new song cycle by Tarik O’Regan entitled Seen and Unseen, which will be performed by soprano Heidi Moss Erickson, accompanied at the piano by John Parr. I had hoped that, this close to the performance, specifics for the remainder of the program would have been finalized and released; but, sadly, that is not the case. The program will still offer settings of the poetry of Emily Dickinson composed by Aaron Copland, George Walker, and Lori Laitman, along with selected songs composed by Richard Strauss, Lili Boulanger, Anton Webern, and Kurt Erickson. What those songs will be may not be revealed until the program is printed! [added 9/30, 8:50 a.m.: The titles of the songs that will precede Seen and Unseen are as follows:

The Dickinson selections will be taken from Copland’s 12 poems of Emily Dickinson (“Going to Heaven” and “Heart, we will forget him”), Walker’s Emily Dickinson Songs (“I have no life but this”), and Laitman’s Four Dickinson Songs (“Im Nobody” and “If I… can stop one Heart from breaking”). Strauss will be represented by “An die Nacht” from his Brentano Lieder and “September” from his “last songs” collection. The Webern selection will be his Opus 4 set of five settings of poems by Stefan George. The Boulanger offering will consist of three songes from her Clairières dans le ciel (clearings in the sky) settings of pomes by Francis Jammes. Finally there will be three Erickson songs, each setting a text by a different poet: Friedrich Hebbel (“Ich und Du”), Josef von Eichendorf (“Mondnacht”), and Carl Sandberg (“Young Sea”).]

The performance will begin at 5 p.m. this Sunday, October 2. The venue will be the Noe Valley Ministry at 1021 Sanchez Street, located between 23rd Street and Elizabeth Street. Tickets are being handled through an Eventbrite event page; and, as of this writing, only the $80 reserved seats are available. While this is the first concert in the season, subscriptions are no longer being sold.

Erickson to Give World Premiere Performance

Heidi Moss Erickson and John Parr (from the Eventbrite event page)

Readers that follow LIEDER ALIVE! programs probably know that, at the end of this month, soprano Heidi Moss Erickson will be one of the four vocalists performing Johannes Brahms’ Opus 52 Liebeslieder Walzer. Next month she will return to the Noe Valley Ministry, appearing again with pianist John Parr. The original plan was that she would present a recital devoted entirely to the songs of Richard Strauss, as she did with Parr in June of 2019.

However, there has been a change in plans. Next month Erickson and Parr will present the world premiere of a new song cycle by Tarik O’Regan, who last year was appointed the first-ever Composer-in-Residence with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. The title of the new work is Seen and Unseen. The program will still include a selection of Strauss songs. However, there will also be settings of the poems of Emily Dickinson by Aaron Copland, George Walker, and Lori Laitman. Other composers contributing to the program will be Nadia Boulanger, Anton Webern, and Kurt Erickson.

This performance will begin at 5 p.m. on Sunday, July 10, with doors opening at 4:30 p.m. The venue will again be the Noe Valley Ministry, which is located at 1021 Sanchez Street, between 23rd Street and Elizabeth Street. Single tickets for all concerts in this series are $75 for reserved seating, $35 for general admission, and $20 for students, seniors, and working artists. These may be purchased in advance through Eventbrite.

SFCA to Return to “Physical” Performance

from the SFCA Web site

Given that June is shaping up to be a busy month, particularly in the “physical” (rather than virtual) world, this is probably a good time to let readers know that the next San Francisco performance by San Francisco Choral Artists (SFCA) will take place early next month. The title of the program will be Boats & Trains & Flying Machines. Details regarding the works to be performed have not yet been finalized; but there will be four world premieres, including the winners of the New Voices Project competition. Featured composers will include Clara Schumann, Frederick Delius, Bohuslav Martinů, Chen Yi, Anton Webern, and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

The San Francisco performance of this program will begin at 4 p.m. on Sunday, June 5. The venue will be St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, which is located at 1111 O’Farrell Street, just west of its intersection with Franklin Street. Ticket prices at the door will be $35 for general admission with a discounted $30 rate for seniors. However, online purchases will be on a pay-what-you-can basis.

The season summary Web page includes the interface for buying tickets online. Online sales will close at 11 p.m. on Saturday, June 4. Note that there will not be any “physical” tickets. Online purchases will be on the Will Call list at the door.

As of this writing, masks covering the nose and mouth without gaps will be required at all times. In addition, proof of full vaccination, with at least one booster, and proof of identification will be required for entry. All SFCA performers, staff, and volunteers are fully vaccinated and will be masked for the entire event.

Pina Napolitano Revisits “Progressive” Brahms

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

At the end of last month, Odradek Records released its latest album of Italian pianist Pina Napolitano. This was her second recording entitled Brahms the Progressive. The first “volume” in this project was released almost exactly four years earlier; like most (but not all) of her recordings, it was a solo album. The new release consists of two instrumental concertos, with most of the program devoted to Johannes Brahms’ Opus 83 (second) piano concerto in B-flat major. It is preceded only by Anton Webern’s Opus 24, entitled “Concerto for Nine Instruments.” It would probably be unfair to call the piano the solo concertante instrument. It would be fairer to say that it “performs on a level playing field” with solo parts for flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, trumpet, trombone, violin, and viola. The instrumental ensemble for both selections is the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Modestas Pitrėnas.

Napolitano’s first album in this series consisted of what could be called a “nested” program. It began with the six piano pieces in Brahms’ Opus 118 and concluded with the four in Opus 119. Nested between these compositions were two Webern sets. Opus 118 was followed by two early works, neither of which received an opus number; and Opus 119 was preceded by the Opus 27 variations. At the “core” of the program was Alban Berg’s Opus 1 single-movement sonata.

That nested structure was decidedly more elaborate than the “after-before” program of the new release. However, it is important to bear in mind that the Brahms concerto is a major undertaking unto itself. Back in the days of “long-playing” vinyls, it would fill an entire album with no room to spare. In that context the inclusion of the Webern concerto was a matter of fortuitous “packaging.” However, it also represented a “semantic interpretation” of the concept of concerto that differed radically from just about every concerto that preceded it in music history (not to mention the many that followed it).

Would it have been better to present the two concertos in chronological order? Personally, I think not. Opus 83 is as exhaustive an undertaking for the listener as it is for the performer. By the time the fourth movement has concluded, mind has little attention for anything more. Instead, the listener to this album as a whole is greeted with an interplay of syntactic ambiguity and the sonorous diversity of nine distinct instruments. One emerges from that ambiguity to enter the much more secure framework of symphonic structures, all basically ternary in nature. This makes for a more satisfying sense of overall conclusion, hopefully without obliterating any memories of how the journey began.

Perhaps what is most important is that, as a conductor, Pitrėnas brings as much clarity to Webern’s ambiguities as he brings to the overall architecture of Brahms’ concerto. Thus, while there is no shortage of satisfying recordings of the Opus 83 concerto, none of them offer the contextual framework established by the “program” that Napolitano designed for the album. Like the first Brahms the Progressive release, this album encourages the attentive listener to appreciate the emergence of a fault line between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Now that we, as listeners, have advanced to yet another century, we can appreciate a “vantage point” from which we can experience the nature of that transition.

Jerusalem Quartet Debut with SFP Next Month

The members of the Jerusalem Quartet (courtesy of SFP)

The beginning of next month will see two concerts that will conclude the San Francisco Performances (SFP) Shenson Chamber Series. Both programs will present string quartets, the first making its SFP debut and the other a familiar visitor. The “new arrival” will be the Jerusalem Quartet, whose members are violinists Alexander Pavlovsky and Sergei Bresler, violist Ori Kam, and cellist Kyril Zlotnikov.

The program they have prepared provides three contrasting perspectives on what may be called the “Romantic” style. The program will begin early in the nineteenth century with the second, in the key of E minor, of Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 44 quartets. It will conclude late in that same century with Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 11 quartet in D major, the first of his three string quartets. Between these two major compositions, there will be a shorter work, which, in many ways, constitutes a “last gasp” of Romanticism. This is one of the earliest compositions of Anton Webern, composed in 1905 and entitled simply “Langsamer Satz” (slow piece).

This concert will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, May 5. It will take place in Herbst Theatre, whose entrance is on the ground floor of the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue, located 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.

Ticket prices are $70 (premium Orchestra and front and center Dress Circle), $55 (remainder of Orchestra, all Side Boxes, and center rear Dress Circle), and $45 (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.

Kremer’s DG Chamber Music: 20th Century

Gidon Kremer performing at his 2008 Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival (photograph by Guus Krol, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

Readers may recall that, in the Deutsche Grammophon (DG) 22-CD box set of concerto recordings featuring violinist Gidon Kremer, the portion devoted to the twentieth-century repertoire was the largest. Mind you, not all of the compositions were concertos, but they were all concertante performances. In a sharp and unexpected contrast, the twentieth-century portion of the chamber music anthology was the smallest portion of the DG collection. It amounts to three and one-half discs with Alfred Schnittke sharing one of the discs with Carl Maria von Weber. Schnittke is one of the three composers found in the concerto anthology, the other two being Béla Bartók and Alban Berg.

The only composer to be allocated an entire CD is Sergei Prokofiev (both of whose concertos were absent from the DG concerto collection). The chamber music CD presents three of his compositions, the two sonatas, Opus 80 in F minor and Opus 94a in D major (reworking the Opus 94 flute sonata), and the Opus 35bis set of five “melodies.” Only the Opus 115 solo violin sonata is missing from this collection in representing Prokofiev.

The most interesting CD amounts to a “journey to the Second Viennese School.” It begins a quarter-century before the beginning of the twentieth century with the quartet for piano, violin, viola, and cello composed by a teenaged Gustav Mahler. This is followed by one of Arnold Schoenberg’s earliest compositions, simply called a “piece” in the key of D minor for violin and piano.

The remainder of the CD explores the ambiguities of atonality. Both Schoenberg and Berg share their offerings with Schoenberg’s other best-known pupil, Anton Webern. Webern begins the “set” with his Opus 7 collection of four pieces for violin and piano, composed in 1910. This is followed by a bit of an oddity. One of Alban Berg’s most sophisticated serial compositions is his “Kammerkonzert” (chamber concerto), scored for piano and violin soloists accompanied by an ensemble of thirteen wind instruments. By all rights this piece should have been recorded in its entirety. However, all that is included is an arrangement of the second of its three movements for piano, violin, and clarinet.

Even more disconcerting is the following account of Schoenberg’s Opus 45 1946 string trio. This is chillingly macabre music, which Schoenberg used to document the experience of his heart attack. I have had the good fortune to listen to recital performances of this music that have scared the living daylights out of me. (The older I get, the scarier the experience.) Kremer’s recorded performance with violist Veronika Hagen and cellist Clemens Hagen is, if you will pardon the expression, disconcertingly bloodless. The trio is followed by the Opus 47 “Phantasy” for violin and piano, another composition that I have rapturously enjoyed in a recital performance setting. Sadly, neither Kremer nor pianist Oleg Maisenberg come close to capturing a spirit that, as violinist György Pauk once observed, makes you want to dance.

The remaining CD provided an interesting (if not informative) perspective on the first half of the twentieth century. It begins with two sonatas, both of which were completed in 1921. The first of these is Bartók’s first violin sonata, followed by Leoš Janáček’s only sonata for that coupling of violin and piano. When I consulted Halsey Stevens’ biography of Bartók, I was not particularly surprised at the absence of Janáček from the index; but their respective sonatas definitely make for some interesting side-by-side listening. They are followed by Olivier Messiaen’s set of five variations of a theme, composed for violin and piano in 1932. This is before-Messiaen-became-Messiaen music, which definitely has a spirit of its own; but neither Kremer nor his accompanist, Martha Argerich, gave much evidence of grasping that spirit.

Personally, I am glad that ECM Records provided a platform after Kremer formed his Kremerata Baltica; and their recordings to date all feel like a breath of fresh air when compared with these DG offerings.

Juilliard’s Second Viennese School Recordings

During my undergraduate years in the early Sixties, I discovered that, while there were any number of brilliant academics skilled at talking about the Second Viennese School composers (Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern), there were almost no opportunities to listen to the music being performed; and recordings tended to be in short supply. Such a situation reminds me of what I have long felt was the ultimate joke behind Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. The narrative is primarily about a monastic order formed not around religious conviction but the playing of a highly complex game. (I liked to think that Hesse had been inspired by the Japanese game of Go.) As the novel evolves, the reader discovers that this order is so devoted to analyzing the strategies of games played in the past that no one has time to play the game any more.

So it was that time spent poring over the scores of the Second Viennese School composers occupied far more attention than listening to the music or preparing a performance of that music. Schoenberg himself recognized that a preoccupation with “systems” had, for all intents and purposes, nothing to do with the music itself. In a caustic letter to René Leibowitz concerning his obsessions with such “systems,” Schoenberg wrote:

I do not compose principles, but music.

Like those monks obsessed with analyzing the games in Hesse’s narratives, Leibowitz had detached himself from anything having to do with composing or performing music.

In that context I approached the four CDs of Second Viennese School music in the new Sony Classical anthology, Juilliard String Quartet: The Early Columbia Recordings 1949–56 with some trepidation. The recordings account for the four numbered string quartets by Schoenberg, the two quartets by Berg (the Opus 3 quartet and the Lyric Suite), and Webern’s Opus 5 collection of five short “movements.” These were, without a doubt, performances of music. If the making of that music had been guided by “principles,” then that was strictly a matter of how the performers chose to interpret the complexities encountered on the score pages. Nevertheless, listening to that music was not without its challenges.

The succession of the four Schoenberg quartets provides the attentive listener with a path that basically traverses his departure from nineteenth century traditions to a world of “luft von anderem planeten” (air from another planet). That phrase comes from a poem entitled “Entrückung” (rapture) by Stefan George, which is sung by a soprano in the last movement of the Opus 10 (second) quartet in F-sharp minor. Indeed, the very structure of that quartet’s four movements is so remote from the structural foundations encountered in the quartets of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that Schoenberg had camped out on that “other planet” long before George’s words are sung.

In many respects the very idea of a four-movement structure seems to have provided Schoenberg with a framework that looks back on the eighteenth century while forging a new path through the immediate present. The Opus 7 (first) quartet in D minor consists of a single movement about 45 minutes in duration. However, there are a variety of ways to “parse” it into a sequence of four episodes, which amount to movements, even if there are no breaks separating them. The third (Opus 30) and fourth (Opus 37) quartets, on the other hand, are built on four-movement foundations; but both of them show Schoenberg advancing confidently on that “other planet,” having rejected the need for a tonal center.

The fact is that, whatever insights Heinrich Schenker may have brought to the analysis of tonal music, attentive listening has more to do with links between the recent past and the future-about-to-happen than with some grand design for the passing of 30 or more minutes of active listening. This past March I cited an observation by Virgil Thomson to the effect that “for all of Schoenberg’s efforts to transcend tonality, the rhythms of his music always seemed to revert to the late nineteenth-century traditions of Vienna.” Put another way, the phenomenology of listening to music is more likely to guided by rhythmic patterns than by progressions of pitch classes.

The “first generation” Juilliard Quartet musicians seemed to understand how to approach all four of the Schoenberg quartets through such rhythmic patterns. I would also conjecture that such an approach also guided them through their recording of Berg’s Opus 3 quartet. The Lyric Suite, on the other hand, poses a rather unique challenge in its approach to tempo. It has a six-movement structure consisting of three fast-slow pairings. However, in the overall architecture, the fast movements get progressively faster; and the slow movements get progressively slower. As a result, from a rhetorical point of view, the entire journey seems to expire with a “last gasp.”

Even if the listener is not explicitly aware of that interleaved structure, the desolation of the final movement (the tempo marking is Largo desolato) tends to be felt as an intense rhetoric of loss. That rhetoric can also be found in Berg’s preferences for opera narratives. As a result one can approach the overall architecture of the Lyric Suite in the context of the multilayered structural architecture for the unfolding of the narrative behind Berg’s Opus 7 Wozzeck opera. At the same time the Lyric Suite may have initiated similar multilayered techniques for the unfolding (and symmetries) of the Lulu narrative.

Webern is represented only by his Opus 5. In the context of Schoenberg and Berg, his scope of expression is uncannily microscopic. Indeed, his very approach to structure is in a class by itself. If Schoenberg could evoke rhythm to guide the ear through the absence of tonal progression, Webern’s abstractions of rhythm are as opaque as those of “harmonic progression.” Nevertheless, like Berg he has his own thoughts about overall design. These involve duration: The outer movements are the longest, and the movements get short as they converge on a center that is less than in minute in length.

In many respects the listener is left to contend with “it’s over before you know it” episodes. Nevertheless, since the entire composition is so short, one can benefit from multiple listening experiences. (There have been recital performances in which the entire piece is played a second time, right after listening to the first iteration has “sunk in.”) Personally, I spent a lot of time as a student listening to the Juilliard recording I had purchased; and the impact of that experience remains with me. Indeed, not too long ago I was delighted to encounter this music again in the repertoire of the Telegraph Quartet, first listening to them in recital and then through the recorded performance on their Into the Light album. I could not think of a better source of light to cast on those Juilliard recordings made back in the early Fifties.

Center for New Music: November, 2020

The Center for New Music (C4NM) seems to be progressing towards developing monthly schedules. Readers may recall that, when I tried to write about this month’s C4NM plans, I began with a list of two items, deleted one, and added another. Granted, every day is still Anything Can Happen Day (for those that remember the weekly occasion offered by Walt Disney); but, as of this writing, C4NM has plans for four programs during the month of November. All of them will be live-streamed.

Those concerts for which admission will be charged will provide information about the streaming source as in the past: All tickets must be purchased 45 minutes prior to performance. 30 minutes before the performance begins, all ticket-holders will receive electronic mail with a link to the YouTube Web page through which the performance will be streamed. For the free concerts, the same procedure may take place through a donation Web page; or, possibly, the link will simply be added to the Center for New Music YouTube Web page. The events currently planned for next month are as follows with hyperlinks to their respective Web pages:

from the www.pianolibrary.org Web page

• Saturday, November 7, 8 p.m.: This program will be shared by two solo pianists. Janis Mercer will play selections from her new CD commemorating the 75th anniversary of the death of Anton Webern. These will include short works taken from The Kinderstück Project, music composed used the twelve-tone row taken from Webern’s 1924 “Kinderstück” (see above). Contributing composers will be Brian Belet, Pablo Furman, Donivan Johnson, and Martha Stoddard. William Sorenson will then play Roger Sessions’ first piano sonata and Igor Stravinsky’s 1919 “Piano-Rag-Music.” Tickets will be sold for $15 for general admission and a $1 rate for C4NM members and students. There is currently a hyperlink for online purchase.
• Friday, November 13, 8 p.m.: Flutist (and former C4NM curator) Meerenai Shim will give a solo recital. She will premiere her own graphic score composition “On All Sides” and also give the first performance of “Wings to Air,” composed by Andrea Reinkemeyer and dedicated to Natalie Haworth-Liu, who commissioned the work. She will also perform solo compositions by Alice Jones, Janice Misurell-Mitchell, and Adolphus C. Hailstork. Tickets will be sold for $15 for general admission and a $1 rate for C4NM members and students. There is currently a hyperlink for online purchase.
• Sunday, November 15, 8 p.m.: Tom Nunn will return to C4NM to perform on his invented instruments. On this occasion he will be accompanying six solo dances performed by Christina Braun. Underlying the dance and music is the idea of chaos and our human response to it. Instruments newly born and without a history offer a unique “field of play” where the random can subvert the purpose. Improvised dance born from Butoh and the modern dance techniques of Isadora Duncan may express intention emerging from chaos. There will be no charge for admission for this performance. However, a donation of between $10 and $20 is suggested, all of which will be split between C4NM and the artists. [added 11/4, 5:45 p.m.
• Saturday, November 21, 8 p.m.: The San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of the National Association of Composers/USA (NACUSA) will present a program entitled New Music for Strings & Piano. The program will consist of new duo and trio works by eight West Coast composers Adrienne Albert (“Musescape”), Davide Verotta (“Asynchronous”), John Beeman (“Luminosity”), Joanne Carey (second piano trio), Sheli Nan (“Awaken”), Karl Schmidt (“Interlude”), Allan Crossman (“Frequent Flyer”), and John Bilotta (“Sass”). All performances will be by three members of the Ives Collective: Susan Freier (violin and viola), Stephen J. Harrison (cello), and Lori Lack (piano). There will be no charge for admission, but donations to NACUSAsf are encouraged.]
  
• Saturday, November 28, 8 p.m.: This will be a pre-recorded broadcast through the C4NM YouTube Live channel. The Friction Quartet of violinists Otis Harriel and Kevin Rogers, violist Lucia Kobza, and cellist Doug Machiz will showcase some of the new works by Bay Area composers that were originally planned to be performed this past October 17. The composers whose works will be presented will be Monica Chew, Allan Crossman, Davide Verotta, and Shawne Workman. The concert will be free, but donations to C4NM are suggested and encouraged.

Episodes from Balanchine’s “Episodes”

This past Sunday, when I decided to write about George Balanchine’s ballet “Ivesiana,” I realized that I ran the risk of painting myself into a corner. I suggested that, in deciding to work with the music of Charles Ives, Balanchine took the first of three steps that involved departing from the conventions of tonal music, conventions that were still honored by many twentieth-century composers. Indeed, the second of those steps, “Agon,” marked Igor Stravinsky’s first venture into working with atonality. In that context the third of the steps was the most adventurous, since it involved all of the orchestral compositions by Anton Webern, music that probably perplexes many listeners today as much as it did during Webern’s lifetime in the first half of the twentieth century.

To “review” the bidding, Balanchine and Martha Graham divided their repertoire into two approximately equal portions for a two-part full-evening composition entitled Episodes. Graham selected the earliest compositions, which were also the longest, the Opus 1 passacaglia and the six pieces for full orchestra collected in Opus 6. She also presented the first of the two parts, a narrative based on the tense relationship between Mary, Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I, the Queen of England, counting on Webern’s “tense” sonorities to account for that relationship and its fatal conclusion.

Of the compositions that remained for the second part of the program, Balanchine set aside the Opus 30 “Variations” to choreograph as a solo for Paul Taylor, then a featured dancer in Martha Graham’s company. That left four Webern compositions for the New York City Ballet (NYCB) dancers, the Opus 21 “Symphony,” the Opus 10 collection of five pieces, the Opus 24 “Concerto,” and Webern’s imaginative instrumentation of the six-voice fugue that was included in Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1079 collection entitled The Musical Offering. After Episodes was performed in its entirety, Graham’s portion was dropped from both her own repertoire and that of NYCB; and “Episodes” remained in repertoire as the four pieces that Balanchine had created for his own dancers.

I saw this version exactly once as part of the only NYCB subscription I ever purchased. I was majoring in mathematics at the time and was one of many of my ilk that was fascinated by the different approaches to permutation found in serial composition. Nevertheless, I suspect that, like everyone else (I do not think I need to quality “everyone” with “just about”), I came away most satisfied with the orchestrated Bach fugue. For that matter, my guess is that Balanchine was in the same boat with the rest of us. He understood Bach fugues well enough to set them to choreography, regardless of what instruments were playing the notes.

I had hoped that I would be able to take a deeper dive into Balanchine’s choreography for the other three movements, but this turned out to be more problematic than I anticipated. The best I was able to manage was to find three separate “Episodes” videos of the first (Opus 21), third (Opus 24), and fourth (Bach) movements. These were in color with black-and-white opening titles identifying the music and the NYCB soloists for each of the movements. The overall video quality was, at best, middling and practically intolerable for the Bach. (It would not surprise me if the Opus 10 movement was absent because it was even worse than the Bach movement.) No indication was given of where, when, or by whom these videos were made.

Of these three videos, Opus 21 probably provides the best evidence of how Balanchine approached analyzing the music before creating choreography for it. I would assume that his attempts to learn about Webern’s techniques included an awareness of the two primary ways in which a sequence of pitches could be permuted. One of them is the retrograde transform, which simply reorders the notes in reverse. The other is inversion, in which all note-to-note intervals are the same but rising and falling directions are reversed.

At this point I need to digress a bit on the issue of how transformations of marks on paper register with the ear. Inversion tends to be easy to recognize, particularly if the rhythm stays the same. (Think of how often Bach uses this device in his fugues.) Retrogression is far more difficult for mind to process. Indeed, it cannot be processed by a basic “finite-state machine” (the mathematical construct that serves as the foundation of any computer). It requires a more powerful abstract construct; and, without risking losing readers by going into too much detail, I shall say simply that the construct is called a “push-down automaton” (named after the ways plates are stacked in a cafeteria).

What all this means is that, because inversion registers with the ear far more readily than retrogression, I suspect that Balanchine was more aware of it in examining the scores of the music he was setting. Thus, towards the end of Opus 21, when he encountered an inversion he had his male soloist (Anthony Blum on this video) take his partner (Sarah Leland) firmly and flip her upside down:

from the YouTube video of the first movement of Balanchine’s “Episodes”

She then did a series of ronds de jambes in that position before getting flipped back upright and set down on the floor. This is but one instance of how Balanchine seems to have decided that any connection between Opus 21 and what anyone thinks a symphony is would be purely coincidental!

Opus 24 goes to an even further extreme. This is a “concerto” for nine solo instruments. The choreography involves only six dancers, a “leading couple” (Allegra Kent and Bart Cook on the video) and a “chorus” of four women. In this case what is most interesting is how these six dancers are deployed in a series of interconnecting configurations, which may or may not parallel the interconnections of the solo instruments. In order to capture some of the visual coherence of Balanchine’s designs, a few of the camera shots are taken above the dancers, rather than from the audience point of view. It would not surprise me to learn that Balanchine himself requested that those shots be incorporated in this video account of the geometric aspects of his choreography.

It would not surprise me to learn that, after having agreed to be part of this “Webern project,” Balanchine found himself in “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” (as Winston Churchill put it when he was trying to describe Russia under the rule of Joseph Stalin). Balanchine’s “Episodes” is likely to appeal to puzzle-solvers. It is definitely not a “sit back and watch” ballet. However, just as there are dances created by Merce Cunningham that appeal to an appreciation of abstract art, Balanchine seemed willing to work with the abstractions that figured in Webern’s music (including his Bach orchestration). The viewer willing to let those abstractions be abstract, so to speak, should have no trouble getting drawn into Balanchine’s choreography; and I suspect that such attraction would be even more powerful if there were a better video account of that choreography.

Peter Serkin on Sony: Twentieth Century

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

The repertoire that most distinguishes pianist Peter Serkin from his pianist father Rudolf is his interest in the twentieth-century repertoire. Indeed, in the 35-CD anthology The Complete RCA Album Collection, the twentieth-century category receives the largest number of CDs (twelve). Readers may recall that the preceding three categories consisted of Johann Sebastian Bach (six CDs), the First Viennese School represented by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven (eleven CDs), and the nineteenth century (seven CDs). (Yes, the total number comes to 36; but one of the CDs is shared by Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven.)

Serkin’s interests in the twentieth-century repertoire were somewhat idiosyncratic. The composer that receives the most attention is Olivier Messiaen. Four CDs are allocated to him, three for solo piano compositions and one for the “Quatuor pour la fin du temps” (quartet for the end of time). This was recorded by the Tashi Quartet, whose other members are violinist Ida Kavafian, cellist Fred Sherry, and clarinetist Richard Stoltzman. Indeed, Tashi was founded in 1973 explicitly to perform the Messiaen quartet, and the music was recorded over a series of sessions in Tokyo in the second half of 1975.

The only other composer to receive generous attention is Toru Takemitsu. Indeed, the only recordings of Anton Webern occupy half of an album (performed by Tashi), the other half devoted to solo piano music by Takemitsu. Berg is represented only by his “Kammerkonzert” (chamber concerto), recorded about a dozen years after Serkin had recorded the piece during the 1971 Marlboro Music Festival with Leon Kirchner conducting. To be fair, however, the recording in the anthology is part of an Isaac Stern album, coupling the “Kammerkonzert” with the violin concerto; and, as expected, there is no trace of Serkin in that concerto performance. The Arnold Schoenberg album, on the other hand, is devoted entirely to Serkin in three different settings, the five Opus 23 pieces for solo piano, the Opus 47 “Phantasy” for violin (Arnold Steinhardt) and piano, and the Opus 42 concerto, performed with Seiji Ozawa conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Serkin also joins forces with Ozawa and the Chicago for an album of the first and third piano concertos by Béla Bartók.

In contrast there is only a single CD devoted to Igor Stravinsky, and that is another Tashi album. Serkin performs on most of the tracks, but Stoltzman’s account of the three solo clarinet pieces is the most compelling of the selections. The one other composer that appears more than once in the collection is Peter Lieberson. He is first encountered on an album entitled …in real time, consisting entirely of world premiere recordings of compositions written for Serkin. His music accounts for sixteen of the 24 tracks (three of which are by Takemitsu). The other is a Sony album consisting entirely of Lieberson’s King Gesar, a cantata for narrator and chamber ensemble based on an epic about a Tibetan warrior-king. (Lieberson was a student of the Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa.)

Taken as a whole, this portion of the collection accounts for a generous amount of breadth; but that breadth is not necessary complemented by much depth. Sadly, I only heard Serkin in recital once; and that was a poor representation of how performing for an audience differs from making a recording. My encounter took place in Herbst Theatre in November of 2006, not long after my wife and I had made the move from Palo Alto to San Francisco. Serkin had prepared an all-Takemitsu program with two Bach compositions serving as “bookends.” Sadly, most of the audience was uncomfortable with the stillness of Takemitsu’s music; and Serkin had to contend with an ongoing volley of coughs and sneezes.

As a result, I value the Takemitsu recordings for providing the opportunity to listen to the composer, rather than the audience! Most of the selections were “first encounters;” and all of them were enthusiastically welcome. On the other hand I cannot say that there was much about any of the Lieberson compositions that drew my attention, and his cantata ran the gamut from pretentious to just plain annoying. Most disappointing, however, was none of the many selections from the first half of the twentieth century made for particularly compelling listening. Most of those tracks left me thinking about far more satisfying encounters, either on recording or at a concert program.

Quatuor Arod’s Context for Schoenberg’s Music

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

This past October Erato released an album that seems to have been inspired by the social context in which some of the most fascinating works of the early twentieth century were composed. The performances are by Quatuor Arod, whose members are violinists Jordan Victoria and Alexander Vu, violist Tanguy Parisot, and cellist Samy Rachid. The title of the recording is The Mathilde Album; and readers may be forgiven for associating that name with Mathilde Wesendonck, one of the more influential characters in the biography of Richard Wagner. This would be a mistaken assumption, since the title refers to Mathilde Zemlinsky. Arnold Schoenberg had been studying with her brother, Alexander von Zemlinsky, since 1894; and he married Mathilde in October of 1901.

A more appropriate title might have been Of Teachers and Pupils, but that would have overlooked the social context of Schoenberg’s life. This would have included Mathilde’s brief affair with the young Austrian painter Richard Gerstl (who would commit suicide after she returned to Schoenberg) and Schoenberg’s intense reaction to her own death in October of 1923. (That intensity was short-lived; in less than a year he had married Gertrud Kolisch, sister of violinist Rudolf Kolisch, who was studying with Schoenberg at the time. However, those events took place much later than the time-frame of The Mathilde Album.)

The music on The Mathilde Album was composed between 1905 and 1915, and the three selections are ordered chronologically. The centerpiece (so to speak) is Schoenberg’s Opus 10 (second) string quartet in F-sharp minor), which was composed in 1908. It was dedicated “to my wife,” even though it was written at the time of Mathilde’s affair with Gerstl. It is not, strictly speaking, a string quartet because the last two of the four movements include an obbligato part for a soprano (Elsa Dreisig on this album), who sings the texts of two poems by Stefan George, “Litanei” (litany) and “Entrückung” (rapture). The ordering of those texts can be interpreted as a reflection on Matilde’s infidelity, but I am not sure there is any hard evidence that Schoenberg had that connotation in mind.

The Schoenberg quartet is preceded by one of the first compositions written by Anton Webern at the beginning of his studies with Schoenberg in 1905. This was a single-movement composition for string quartet, which was only published after Webern’s death with the title “Langsamer Satz” (slow piece). The final selection on the album is by Zemlinsky himself, his Opus 15 (second) string quartet, composed between 1913 and 1915. There is much to be gained from listening to this piece juxtaposed with with Schoenberg’s Opus 10. Not only do the two quartets share the same rhetorical context, but also the appearance of a few of Schoenberg’s motifs is almost certainly more than coincidence.

This album provided my “first contact” with Quatuor Arod; and it left me hoping that one of our local impresarios would make arrangements for them to give a recital here in San Francisco. Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize that this is far from a sit-back-and-listen album. Considerable attention went into the creation of each of the three pieces on the album, and it is clear that the same level of attention was engaged in the acts of performance. However, that sort of attention matters. Any account that does not get beyond providing a dutiful account of the notation will miss out on the full extent of rich rhetoric, even in Webern’s earliest efforts as a composer. Still, recognizing and appreciating that rhetoric calls for focused listening; but those willing to make that effort will definitely be rewarded for doing so.

Finishing Franz Schubert’s “Unfinished”

courtesy of [PIAS] America

Franz Schubert’s D. 759 symphony in B minor is best known by its “Unfinished” nickname, since only two movements were completed. However, Otto Erich Deutsch’s thematic catalog also includes a sketch of the first nine bars of a scherzo movement. Schubert’s autograph includes orchestration information in the form of an annotated piano score, along with sketches for the elaboration of the entire movement.

As the Wikipedia page for this symphony observes, the preceding century saw a variety of efforts to “finish” the symphony. In 1928, the 100th anniversary of Schubert’s death, Columbia Records even held a worldwide competition for a four-movement version of D. 759. (The results faded into obscurity not long after the awards were assigned.) More recently, there have been several performing versions that have appropriated the entr’acte music that Schubert composed to follow the first act of the play Rosamunde to serve as the fourth movement of D. 759, preceded by efforts to flesh out Schubert’s sketches into a complete scherzo movement with trio.

One week from today the French APARTE label will release a new recording of this “completed” version of Schubert’s symphony. It is the first recording to use the new (completed in 2015) Urtext edition of the symphony, which includes a performance edition of the scherzo prepared by Nicola Samale and Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs and the Rosamunde entr’acte serving as the final movement. Cohrs prepared this new edition, along with a foreword consisting an extended essay, supplemented by a rich supply of musical examples, to explain how this performance edition came to be. (That essay is also available as a downloadable PDF file.) The performing ensemble on the recording is the Concentus Musicus Wien, initially founded for period-instrument performances of Austrian baroque music by Nikolaus and Alice Harnoncourt and now conducted by harpsichordist Stefan Gottfried. As usual, Amazon.com has created a Web page for this album from which pre-orders may be processed.

(Some readers may recall that both Samale and Cohrs were part of the team that prepared a performing edition of the fourth movement of Anton Bruckner’s ninth symphony, released as a recording of Simon Rattle conducting the Berliner Philharmoniker in May of 2012.)

So much for theory: how to these results play out in practice? Given Gottfried’s background as an instrumentalist, one might wonder how suited he is to conducting Schubert. However, almost as soon as the exposition of the first movement is established, one can appreciate the crisp qualities of his approaches to both phrasing and dynamics. This is a performance in which the sharper edges of early nineteenth-century technique register far more effectively than many of those more syrupy approaches to Schubert that occupied too many of the conductors of the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, Gottfried’s approach to the symphony’s first movement prepares the listener for the wild shifts in dynamic level that make for a symphonic scherzo decidedly unlike any that Ludwig van Beethoven ever wrote.

On the other hand my own jury is still out on the wisdom behind the Rosamunde appropriation. This is probably a matter of personal taste, but I tend to prefer concluding movements that serve up a somewhat lighter touch. Obviously, there are exceptions; but I have always found a joyous quality that cuts across other movements that conclude Schubert symphonies (a joy that even works its way into at least some of the concluding movements by composers such as Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler). Perhaps it would be better to leave D. 795 in its “unfinished” form, even when the reconstruction of the scherzo is included.

On the APARTE recording D. 759 is preceded by seven Schubert songs with orchestral arrangements of the accompanying piano parts. Four of those arrangements are by Anton Webern, and three are by Brahms. Here I have to “come clean” and own up to having my own dog in this hunt. Readers may recall that, at the beginning of this month, I wrote about a performance of the D. 911 Winterreise (winter’s journey) song cycle in which the accompaniment was provided by a string quartet with an added bass part playing an arrangement prepared by cellist Harold Birston. My overall impression was a positive one, frequently for transparency that is too often masked to a pianist who likes his damper pedal too much but also for the way in which the intonation of the strings often endowed some of Schubert’s dissonances with sharper edges.

With regard to that latter criterion, I have to confess that I found most of the orchestral arrangements to be far too mushy to do justice to Schubert’s rhetorical skills. Indeed, to my surprise, the Webern arrangements tended to be mushier than those of Brahms! For that matter, Brahms seemed much more comfortable in both selecting instruments and balancing them than Webern was. To put it more politely, Webern’s skill set is a key asset where the music of Webern himself is concerned and not so much when he is arranging Schubert. On the other hand all of the songs were sung by bass-baritone Florian Boesch, who was clearly aware of all the rhetorical twists and turns in Schubert’s settings. Hopefully, I shall have an opportunity to listen to his Schubert performances when he has a good pianist accompanying him.

Piatigorsky’s Early Years Recording with Columbia

1945 photograph of cellist Gregor Piatigorsky (photographer unknown, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

A little over a month ago Sony Music Entertainment released their latest anthology based on the significant and substantial archival material now available to the organization. The title of the collection is Gregor Piatigorsky: The Art of the Cello, and it consists of all of the recordings that this cellist made for both Columbia and RCA. Piatigorsky’s name will probably be familiar to those who have already encountered RCA’s Heifetz Collection (released in 1996) and/or Rubinstein Collection (remastered in 1999), neither of which are currently available. Personally, I have been waiting for a “Piatigorsky collection” for several years, simply because I wished to account for his achievements beyond his partnerships with such luminaries as Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein.

We often overlook the fact that the twentieth century was the first century in which documentary records of musical performance could be compiled with results that could, for the most part, be faithful to the technical skills of the performers. Furthermore, due to the Russian Revolution and Adolf Hitler’s attempts to conquer all of Europe, it was “the best of times” to bring such artists into contact with the first serious generations of engineers working in audio recording technology. Furthermore, thanks to both Hitler and Joseph Stalin, some of the best of Europe’s musical talent gravitated to Los Angeles, where the film industry provided a home base for most of those engineers. Thus, this wealth of archival material owes much to the right people being in the same place at the same time.

Of the 36 CDs in the Piatigorsky collection, 28 contain the recordings that were recorded and released by RCA. That leaves eight CDs, the first seven of which were released by Columbia. The eighth seems to have been produced under the Vox Cum Laude label. Most of the content of these recordings comes from the time when Piatigorsky was head of the cello department at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia between 1941 and 1949. Thus, he did not become part of the musical life in Los Angeles until several years after the end of World War II. At that time he joined the faculty of the University of Southern California and remained there until his death at the age of 73 on August 6, 1976.

This article will focus on those first eight CDs, dividing the RCA releases into concertante and chamber music categories. As might be guessed, one cannot get very comprehensive with only eight CDs; but they certainly provide an introduction to the sort of music that Piatigorsky favored. As might be guessed, his repertoire was not as adventurous as the sorts of compositions associated with the chronicles in Dorothy Lamb Crawford’s book, Evenings On and Off the Roof. Indeed, Crawford’s sources have almost nothing to say about the fact that Heifetz, Rubinstein, and Piatigorsky (often along with violist William Primrose) offered Los Angeles music lovers a much more familiar repertoire of chamber music. (I was somewhat amused to see that, in The Doctor Faustus Dossier, the only thing mentioned about Heifetz and Piatigorsky is that they were neighbors of Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann!) Indeed, one of Crawford’s sources even went as far as to take Piatigorsky to task for his failure to include Zoltán Kodály’s solo cello sonata in his repertoire!

On a more positive side the author of Piatigorsky’s Wikipedia page quotes Richard Strauss on having conducted Piatigorsky in a performance of his Opus 35 tone poem “Don Quixote.” Strauss supposedly declared, after the slow variation in D minor, that Piatigorsky had evoked “Don Quixote as I imagined him.” Sadly, we do not have a recording of that performance; but Columbia did record Piatigorsky playing “Don Quixote” with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra back when it was conducted by Fritz Reiner. Given that I have often felt that Reiner knew more about conducting Strauss than Strauss did, that would make this particular CD in the collection one of the most valuable! Similarly, I would argue that the recording of Piatigorsky playing Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 104 cello concerto in B minor with Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra made for a particularly memorable experience. (To be fair, however, I grew up in Philadelphia during the Ormandy years; so my reaction may well be one of nostalgia.)

On the chamber music side it almost seems as it the Columbia producers wanted to record “a little of this and a little of that” in that same “middle-brow” spirit that looms over so many of their recordings of pianist Oscar Levant. On the other hand I have to confess that Piatigorsky’s recording of Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 65 sonata in G minor is not only one of the most coherent I have encountered but also, more often than not, downright compelling. This may not be a “sonata for the ages;” but, playing with pianist Ralph Berkowitz, Piatigorsky went a long way to making it sound that way! As to whether or not Piatigorsky’s spirit should be taken to task for having neglected the Kodály sonata, I was more than a little surprised to discover that he had recorded Anton Webern’s Opus 11 set of three little pieces with pianist Charles Rosen!

As might be guessed, much of the fun on the chamber music side arises once Heifetz is in the picture. Thus, we have what is probably the earliest recording of the two of them playing “Suite italienne.” This was Piatigorsky’s own arrangement of selections from Igor Stravinsky’s score for the ballet “Pulcinella.” Ironically, the Stravinsky selection is on the same CD as the Webern. It would be nice to fantasize about Piatigorsky have helped Stravinsky to get his head around Webern’s music; but the truth is that the Webern pieces were recorded in March of 1972, almost a year after Stravinsky’s death in April of 1971!

Thus, while RCA has the lion’s share of the recordings that Piatigorsky made, there is much to appreciate in the first eight CDs of this recent Sony release.

“Private Musical Performances” by Linos Ensemble

courtesy of Naxos of America

Back when I was writing for Examiner.com, I had the good fortune to learn about the Linos Ensemble, a chamber orchestra founded by oboist Klaus Becker in 1977. They had an ongoing project with the Austrian Capriccio label to record chamber music arrangements that had been prepared for performances by the Society for Private Musical Performances (Verein für musicalische Privataufführungen). Arnold Schoenberg had founded this organization in Vienna in 1918 with the intention of giving high-quality performances of unduly neglected compositions. When those compositions required more resources than could be mustered, Schoenberg and his colleagues prepared arrangements suitable for chamber ensembles. At the beginning of this month, Capriccio released an eight-CD album of all the recordings made by Linos for this project. That album is now available from Amazon.com; but, sadly, it is only available for MP3 download.

Ironically, the only Linos recording I had encountered prior to last month presented music that was never given a Society performance. Schoenberg himself began an arrangement of Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde in the fall of 1921 but never made it past the middle of the first movement. By the end of that year, the Society had dissolved for lack of funds; and Schoenberg abandoned his project. Long after Schoenberg’s death, in 1982, the German conductor and composer Rainer Riehn decided to complete Schoenberg’s unfinished project with the goal of realizing Mahler’s sonorities with the sorts of chamber resources used at the Society concerts. That is the version that Linos recorded for Capriccio, true to the spirit of the Society if not to the flesh.

Those familiar with this composition will immediately recognize the limited dynamic range of the arrangement. Nevertheless, there is a transparency that emerges through the thinner textures. That transparency allows the attentive listener to identify more layers of detail than can make it to the surface in the setting of a large string section and energetic percussionists.

This is basically a rule of thumb that pervades the many compositions documented in the new Capriccio collection. This is far from a complete account the arrangements made for the Society. For one thing the repertoire that accumulated over the 113 concerts presented between December 29, 1918 and December 5, 1921 was extensive and highly varied. Furthermore, many of the arrangements involved only a single keyboard; the very first concert featured Mahler’s seventh symphony in a four-hand arrangement by Alfredo Casella.

Thus, while this Mahler selection is familiar, it is also one of the most ambitious where arrangement is concerned. Among the Capriccio recordings its closest rival would probably be Anton Bruckner’s seventh symphony in E major. This is the symphony in which, during the second (Adagio) movement, Richard Wagner was welcomed into heaven with a cymbal crash; and those expecting an outburst of percussion will probably be disappointed. Nevertheless, within the scope of reduced instrumentation, the spirit behind that climactic moment still rings true.

It is worth observing that many viewed the Society as a highly dedicated, but nevertheless grim, gathering of modernists serious to the brink of fanaticism. I was therefore very pleased to discover that the last CD in the Capriccio collection demonstrates that both Schoenberg and his best-known students, Alban Berg and Anton Webern, could have a sense of humor. The disc presents five waltzes by Johann Strauss II, three arranged by Schoenberg and one each by Berg and Webern.

As I recall, when these manuscripts were rediscovered, the American Musicological Society celebrated the occasion by hosting a ball (of sorts) at its annual meeting. The intention was to get musicologists dancing to Strauss by virtue of the Second Viennese School, and some of the attendees even dressed appropriately for the occasion. Unfortunately, I did not make it to that meeting. Four of the waltzes were subsequently recorded by the Boston Symphony Chamber Players; but, thanks to Linos, this was the first time I learned that those were not the only four arrangements.