Sony Classical Releases Peter Serkin Collection

Between writing about recorded music and video documents of both ballet and modern dance, I have not had trouble keeping myself busy in the absence of opportunities to attend performances due to “Shelter in Place” conditions that have now been around for more than three months. Where recordings are concerned, I maintain a queue that is ordered roughly on a first-in-first-out basis. Ironically, I found myself reflecting at the beginning of this week that the queue seemed to be getting slimmer than usual, followed by the arrival of two significant anthology releases two days ago. One of these is a 35-CD Sony Classical release of recordings of pianist Peter Serkin entitled The Complete RCA Album Collection. The second is the latest anthology of recordings by conductor Herbert von Karajan on 33 CDs entitled The Complete Decca Recordings.

As usual, I do not intended to provide a “whole-cloth” encounter of either of these collections. Instead, regardless of how the CDs are ordered in their respective boxes, I set about to divide each release into what, in my previously life in the world of information technology, we tended to call “mind-sized chunks.” As in the past I was guided by the ways in which music history tends to get divided into periods, but the categories themselves differ for the two collections. Thus, while the nineteenth century accounted for a single, relatively small collection in the Serkin anthology, it had to be further divided into instrumental music and opera for Karajan (which should not surprise anyone).

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

With that as my methodological background, I shall devote this article to the Serkin recordings of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach in The Complete RCA Album Collection. In the interest of “truth in advertising,” however, I should begin by observing that the last two of these CDs were released by Columbia, rather than RCA, giving them the same sort of “bonus” status that I attributed to the album of pianist Leon Fleisher included at the end of the Sony Classical box set of recordings released under support by the Fromm Foundation. Those Columbia recordings have enough historical significance that one really cannot quibble with their being included in this Serkin anthology.

The Bach recordings, in turn, can be divided into solo keyboard music and ensemble compositions. Across the entire collection one encounters Serkin playing both piano and harpsichord, but his harpsichord work is limited to playing continuo for four of the ensemble compositions. In other words all of the solo recordings were made with a piano.

While I suspect that advocates for historically-informed practices are already raising their collective eyebrows, I think it is worth examining which of the solo keyboard music compositions Serkin selected. Almost all of them were published in the last three of the four volumes that Bach entitled Clavier-Übung (keyboard exercise). In other words this was music written for pedagogical purposes, and the pedagogical intentions behind the study of piano technique today do not differ that significantly from Bach’s approaches to pedagogy in the early eighteenth century.

In order of publication, Serkin’s selections are the following:

• The “Italian Concerto” (BWV 971 in F major) from the second volume
• The “four duets” (BWV 802–805) from the third volume, the only one of the volumes intended for organ study
• The BWV 988 “Goldberg Variations” from the fourth volume

The only other selection was also written for pedagogical purpose, the BWV 772–801 short pieces generally called the Inventions and Sinfonias. In other words Serkin chose to focus primarily on compositions that serve to document Bach’s approach to teaching his students (some of whom were his sons), which, as been often noted previously on this site, involve both technical proficiency and expressive interpretation.

Indeed, the extent to which Serkin was honoring Bach’s intentions can be found in the fact that he made two different recordings of BWV 988, the first in 1965, the year of his graduation from the Curtis Institute of Music (where his father Rudolf taught), and the second in 1994. My guess is that many readers will leap to recalling that Glenn Gould did the same thing, making his first recording in 1955 and the second in 1981. At the risk of ruffling too many feathers, all I can say is that I have never listened to a Gould recording that was not all about Gould, while both of Serkin’s approaches to BWV 988 show more respect for Bach-the-pedagogue. The fact is that all of these solo piano recordings have much to offer anyone interested in approaching the music of Bach on a modern keyboard instrument.

All of the ensemble recordings, on the other hand, involve the participation of both Serkins in the Marlboro Music School and Festival. The music school was launched in Marlboro, Vermont in July of 1950 by Rudolf and his father-in-law Adolf Busch. The following year both of them turned down an invitation to the Edinburgh International Festival in favor of launching their own festival, which is still going strong and will hopefully continue to do so in spite of current medical conditions.

Marlboro has become significant enough to enjoy the participation of major musicians on a global scale. Thus, on the third CD in the collection, Peter shares the spotlight with both his father and Mieczysław Horszowski (one of Peter’s teachers at Curtis) in a performance of Bach’s BWV 1064 concerto in C major, originally scored for three harpsichords, string ensemble, and continuo. All three soloists played pianos, and the conductor was Alexander Schneider.

This performance took place in July of 1964. Regular readers probably know by now that I like to speculate that this music figured in the weekly Collegium Musicum performances that took place at Gottfried Zimmermann’s coffee house in Leipzig. Basically, these amounted to an eighteenth-century approach to jamming among musicians familiar enough with each other to “play with the music,” rather than just “play the music.” Sadly, there is little sense of such jamming on this RCA recording, leading me to wonder how much, if any, of that spirit came across to those in the Marlboro audience when this performance was recorded.

The other Marlboro recordings were also made in July of 1964, but these were the the Columbia releases included at the end of the collection. They account for all six of the “Brandenburg” concertos (BWV 1046–1051). The concerts themselves were probably a “major draw,” since the conductor was Pablo Casals. Peter provided harpsichord continuo for four of the concertos. He played piano for the last two movements of BWV 1049 in G major, having just flown in from the Ravinia Festival, arriving too late for the first movement, which was covered by his father Rudolf, who was also the pianist for BWV 1050 in D major.

Casals is clearly the “draw” for these recordings. However, here, again, there is little sense of “jamming among friends.” To be fair, this is often the case when a performance is more about the performers than about the music; and, for what it is worth, Casals is still at the top of my list of preferences for recordings of the solo cello suites (BWV 1007–1012). Nevertheless, I would say that there is too much in any of the Brandenburg recordings that I would call “squirm-inducing;” and my attention will probably continue to home in on Peter’s solo recordings.