courtesy of Naxos of America
Near the beginning of this month, Cedille Records released the solo debut album of the young American violist Matthew Lipman. Back in my student days, I had a fellow undergraduate working with me at the campus radio station who liked to say that a viola was what a violin wanted to be when it grew up. Witticisms aside, I have developed a soft spot for the viola over the course of the writing I have been doing for roughly the last two decades. Much of the development was due to the many opportunities to listen to really fine viola performances by both faculty and students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), not to mention encounters with new repertoire.
To cite one example, one of my earliest jobs involved teaching computer science at the University of Pennsylvania. This was at a time when composer George Rochberg was on the faculty of the Penn Music Department, whose building shared a parking lot with the Engineering building that housed the Department of Computer and Information Science. Nevertheless, I never heard a note of Rochberg’s music being performed until I encountered Jodi Levitz playing his 1979 viola sonata at SFCM!
These days I view every encounter with a performance, whether in concert or on recording, as an opportunity to learn more about repertoire. Ascent, the title of Lipman’s album, provided me with “first contact” experiences of unfamiliar compositions, two of which were given their world premiere recordings, and a new perspective on a piece I have come to know and love through frequent exposure over those past two decades. The fact is that only two of the selections on the album presented pieces with which I was familiar.
The longest offering on the album is Robert Schumann’s Opus 113 Märchenbilder (fairy tale pictures) suite in four movements. There has been no end of speculation over what Schumann intended his title to mean. Since the titles of the movements are tempo markings that make no mention of any specific fairy tales, I have, in the past, held to the position that, if the suite is "about” anything, it is about the telling of the tales, rather than the tales themselves. Thus, each of the four movements presents a characteristic example of the rhetoric of a “narrating voice.” Furthermore, that voice frequently involves an interleaving of the viola and piano parts, rather than having the piano, performed on this album by Henry Kramer, simply accompany the viola. Indeed, the final movement marked Langsam, mit melancholischem Ausdruck (slowly, with a melancholy expression) begins with the viola line embedded between the right-hand and left-hand piano parts; and it is music that sends chills up the spine of the attentive listener. While I shall always prefer experiencing Schumann’s rhetoric in performance, rather than on recording, I was definitely impressed with how much of Schumann’s rhetoric Lipman could express on this recording.
The other familiar composition on the album amounts to the “encore” selection, Franz Waxman’s “Carmen Fantasie.” This was composed for violin and piano, and my guess is that those who know this piece at all came to know it through the Jascha Heifetz recording. Lipman’s performance is identified as the first recording with the viola taking the solo line. While Lipman gave a perfectly credible account of the score, making it clear that a viola was just as capable as a violin, my own reaction was that he was a bit too cautious in his rhetoric when it was clear that Waxman had been going for flamboyance to the max.
At the other end of the timeline, so to speak, Lipman’s album offers two world premiere recordings. One of these, Clarice Assad’s two-movement “Metamorfose,” was composed for him. The booklet notes for this piece are by the composer herself. She explains that Lipman approached her to write a new piece in memory of his mother. I have listened to enough of Assad’s music by now to appreciate the presence of her own personal stamp and the world view associated with that personal perspective.
Thus, her program note dwells on the challenge of creating a composition based on two personalities (Lipman’s and his mother’s) distinct from her own. I clearly have no idea whether or not she successfully rose to the challenge she set for herself. What I can say is that the piece unfolds through a discursive rhetoric that is similar to what one encounters in the spirit of Schumann’s Opus 113, even if the flesh is that of an entirely different animal. Since I never really got to know the Schumann piece until I had encountered it in performances, all I can do is hope that Assad can find a platform for its performance here in San Francisco.
The other world premiere involves a discovery. Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 33, an impromptu movement for viola and piano, only came to light from the Moscow State Archives in 2017. This was not one of the composer’s “desk drawer” pieces that had been deliberately concealed from Soviet authorities. Rather it was found among the effects of Vadim Borisovsky, violist on the Beethoven Quartet, the ensemble that premiered thirteen of the fifteen Shostakovich string quartets. The Opus 33 manuscript is dated May 2, 1931, meaning that it may well have been an “exercise on the side,” while Shostakovich was working on Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, the opera that would bring about his first denunciation. It was dedicated to Alexander Mikhailovich Ryvkin, violist of the Glazunov Quartet, which premiered Shostakovich’s very first string quartet in 1938.
Musically, the piece offers up a melancholy rhetoric. That melancholia would eventually find a more sophisticated voice in Shostakovich’s final composition, the Opus 147 viola sonata. Opus 33, on the other hand, amounts to a dumka in miniature entirely in a minor key, perhaps suggesting that Ryvkin took personal delight in playing the music of Antonín Dvořák. Opus 33 is not particularly profound (it runs only a few seconds shy of two minutes); but it is always a pleasure to encounter yet another side to Shostakovich’s personality as a composer. Lipman did not try to overplay the significance of this short piece; but it is clear that he enjoyed bringing it to the attention of his “virtual audience.”
The other two offerings on the album might be called “specialty” compositions. York Bowen wrote his Opus 58 Phantasy for viola and piano in 1918, a time when Lionel Tertis may have been the only violist (at least in the United Kingdom) to give his instrument a “public face.” Those familiar with tonal practices among British composers during the beginning of the twentieth century are likely to easily warm to both the technique and the rhetoric that Lipman brings to his performance.
Bowen’s piece is nicely complemented by “Fuga libre,” composed by Irish violist Garth Knox in 2008 and first recorded on the Saltarello album that Knox recorded for ECM. Teasing out the essence of fugue in Knox’ score is no easy matter. It involves more time and concentration than tends to be required for one of the solo violin fugues composed by Johann Sebastian Bach. Nevertheless, Lipman has clearly grasped the nuts and bolts behind Knox’ polyphonic writing, meaning that seriously attentive listening will definitely be rewarded.
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