Leon Kirchner Conducts Peter Serkin

courtesy of Verdant World Records

At the beginning of this month, Verdant World Records released Concertos in Concert, a fascinating document of live performances of concertante music featuring pianist Peter Serkin and conductor Leon Kirchner. This is another instance in which the only product page created by Amazon.com is for digital download. As has been explained in previous articles, Amazon has informed its customers that it is trying to limit its physical shipments; but, in this case, the album being discussed is available in its entirety, along with a highly informative PDF booklet.

The program for this album is one of striking contrasts. It begins with a performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 58 (fourth) piano concerto in G major. The performance took place on July 23, 1984 at Harvard University, where Kirchner, best known for his achievements as a composer, was Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music (having succeeded the composer Walter Piston in holding that endowed chair.) It was part of a concert held under the auspices of the Harvard Summer School; and Serkin was accompanied by the Harvard Chamber Orchestra, performing in Sanders Theater.

The second selection is the composition that Alban Berg called “Kammerkonzert” (chamber concerto). The solo parts were taken by both piano and violin (Pina Carmirelli); and the ripieno ensemble consisted of thirteen different wind instruments. This performance took place during the 1971 Marlboro Music Festival. The back cover of the album lists all of the players, two of whom are likely to be familiar to those following chamber music recitals, flutist Paula Robison and Richard Stoltzman playing E-flat clarinet.

Most regular readers will probably guess that I was particularly drawn to the Berg selection. Indeed, my only opportunity to listen to it in performance took place very early in my tenure with Examiner.com in the spring of 2009. I was covering a series of concerts presented by the San Francisco Symphony and Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas entitled Dawn to Twilight, a festival of the music of Franz Schubert and Alban Berg. The “Kammerkonzert” was presented on the third program in this series with pianist Yefim Bronfman and violinist Julia Fischer.

This was the first composition in which Berg worked with the twelve-tone serial technique of his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg. He completed it in 1925, the year of his 40th birthday; and the score was dedicated to honor Schoenberg’s 50th birthday. Berg had a knack for intricate structural detail that reaches back at least as far as his Wozzeck opera. Indeed, Berg gave a lecture about those details prior to the first performance of the opera, which I remember reading (in English translation) during my student days. Much of the content of that lecture was summarized on the album jackets of the Columbia release to this opera, taken from a concert recording by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos in April of 1951 and included in the recently released box set of the American Columbia recordings made by soprano Eileen Farrell.

Similar attention to structural detail can be found in the booklet accompanying the Concertos in Concert album. This began with Berg’s decision to work with pitch selections based on his name, along with those of both Schoenberg and Anton Webern (who was studying with Schoenberg at the same time as Berg). The booklet accounts for these “translated” patterns and also provides an elaborate structural diagram of the entire score.

However, it is worth remembering that, when Berg completed his Wozzeck lecture, he told his audience to forget everything he had presented and come back the following night to enjoy the opera! I would suggest that, over the course of multiple listenings, one is likely to become aware of at least some of the larger-scale features, rather than the more developed details abstracted in the booklet’s diagram. For example, the middle of the three movements is basically a violin concerto movement; and the transition into the final movement amounts to a cadenza in which the piano returns to pair up with the violin.

From that point of view, one may be best off by approaching this album by taking its title at face value. There are many different approaches to creating a concerto, but what is most important is the relationship that is established between the soloist(s) and the ensemble. That relationship has endured a wide variety of changes over the course of music history. One of those changes highlights Beethoven’s Opus 58 with its bold (at the time) decision to allow the soloist the “first word,” rather than keeping him/her waiting through a prolonged orchestral introduction.

On the other hand Berg’s first movement follows a theme-and-variations structure in which neither soloist contributes to the extended (30-measure) account of the theme. The piano then takes over as the only soloist in the first variation. The violin makes only a brief appearance during that movement, waiting that middle movement to make a substantive contribution. In other words the piece amounts for a concerto for piano into the first movement, a concerto for violin in the second, and a duo concerto in the final movement.

As might be guessed, the basic idea of a concerto kept changing after the “Kammerkonzert,” even in Berg’s own violin concerto; and the changes keep coming. (I get a personal kick out of some of the changes that have been explored by Magnus Lindberg.) Concertos in Concert is an album through which the attentive listener can appreciate a sampling from that ongoing cycle of changes. In my case it helps me build my appetite for further changes, and I hope that other attentive listeners may react the same way.