Peter Serkin on Sony: Nineteenth Century

The original cover of the vinyl release of Peter Serkin’s first Schubert recording (from the Amazon.com Web page for this album)

The nineteenth-century selections recorded by pianist Peter Serkin included in The Complete RCA Album Collection are very modest, almost as modest as his recordings of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Nevertheless, one of them has highly personal significance, which deserves an anecdotal background. Back in the Sixties my father worked for RCA during its brief attempt to venture into the computer hardware business. One December all the employees got a “Christmas gift” in the form of a recently-released album. The one my father brought home was Serkin’s second recording for RCA, which consisted entirely of Franz Schubert’s D. 894 piano sonata in G major.

At that time I tended to be more than a little scornful of Schubert. I had little exposure to his songs and just as little interest in getting to know them. His symphonic music, on the other hand, struck my arrogant attitude as warmed-over attempts to revive the spirit of Ludwig van Beethoven. On the chamber music front I knew little other than the D. 810 (“Death and the Maiden”) string quartet in D minor. As a result, when I put down the needle on the first side of the D. 894 album, my mind had already closed like a steel trap.

In less than a minute, it sprang open. I had not yet been exposed to the ideas of Buckminster Fuller, but almost immediately I grasped that Schubert had tapped into that technique of “making more and more with less and less.” Furthermore, that “more and more” registered with me with the same intensity I kept encountering in the symphonies of Gustav Mahler. That album got me hooked on Schubert, leaving me eager to get to know the rest of his catalog.

Since that album was produced so early in Serkin’s tenure with RCA, it is the second CD in the new box set, making it my first exposure to Serkin’s approach to nineteenth-century repertoire. I was delighted to find that the magic was still there, regardless of the number of recital performances and recordings of D. 894 that I have subsequently encountered. Indeed, when I was living in Santa Barbara and had a piano teacher that encouraged me to try everything, I even struggled with trying to play the damn thing for myself (thankful that my piano teacher was the only individual exposed to my efforts).

While many of Schubert’s songs were setting of texts by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, I am not sure how well acquainted he was with Faust, beyond the song texts that Goethe had included in the script. However, one way to approach D. 894 is in terms of the contract that Faust makes with Mephistopheles. Those terms are nicely summarized on the Faust Wikipedia page:

Faust's arrangement is that if he is pleased enough with anything Mephistopheles gives him that he wants to stay in that moment forever, then he will die in that moment.

So much of D. 894 involves that sense of staying in a moment forever, and each of the four movements has its own way of conveying that sense. Whether or not that was Schubert’s intention, it may well have been the motivating force behind Serkin’s approach to interpreting the marks on paper; and that approach carries just as much impact today as it did half a century ago.

There are two more Schubert selections in the RCA collection. One is a much earlier sonata, D. 568 in E-flat major. The other is a Tashi performance of the D. 667 (“Trout”) quintet. Tashi members Serkin, violist Ida Kavafian, and cellist Fred Sherry are joined by Joseph Silverstein on violin and Buell Neidlinger on bass. The resulting recording tends to convey of sense of friends gathering the make music. This is not to short-change the quality of the musicianship; but the interpretation comes off as sounding little more than dutiful.

D. 568 is another matter. The music is a revision and completion of the D. 567 sonata in D-flat major, whose composition was interrupted in the midst of the third movement. On the RCA album it was coupled with Robert Schumann’s Opus 82 collection of nine short pieces entitled Waldszenen (forest scenes). From a structural point of view this set is more intriguing than the Schubert sonata. Here again a quotation from the Wikipedia page for the composition is in order. Schumann addresses the “programmatic” nature of the music as follows:

The titles for pieces of music, since they again have come into favor in our day, have been censured here and there, and it has been said that “good music needs no sign-post.” Certainly not, but neither does a title rob it of its value; and the composer, by adding one, at least prevents a complete misunderstanding of the character of his music. What is important is that such a verbal heading should be significant and apt. It may be considered the test of the general level of the composer's education.

For my part, I am less interested in the composer’s capacity for either denotation or connotation. What interested me most about the titles is the symmetrical plan organized around a solitary journey that begins when the protagonist enters a forest and concludes when (s)he departs. Indeed, the outer movements are entitled “Eintritt” (entry) and “Abschied” (farewell). The second and eighth movements then address two encounters with hunters, “Jäger auf der Lauer” (hunters on the lookout) and “Jagdlied” (hunting song). The third movement, “Einsame Blumen” (lonely flowers), is reflected by “Vogel als Prophet” (bird as prophet), while the fourth and sixth movements are about buildings in the forest, “Verrulene Stelle” (haunted place) and “Herberge” (wayside inn), respectively. Finally, the central movement “Freundliche Landschaft” (friendly landscape) seems to suggest comparison with the field that the protagonist left upon entering the forest. I would thus suggest that the coupling of Schumann’s Opus 82 with the D. 568 sonata presents the listener with two complementary approaches to structuring a multimovement composition, and Serkin effectively finds approaches to mine expressiveness from both of these “mechanical” foundations.

There is also an album of two compositions both written in 1910 and reflect the “twilight” of the nineteenth century, rather than the emergence of the twentieth. One of these was a personal “first encounter,” Max Reger’s Opus 116 (fourth) cello sonata in A minor, with Serkin accompanying cellist Mischa Schneider. Since my knowledge of Reger has been cultivated primarily around his organ music, I must confess that I am still finding my way with this relatively late undertaking.

On the other hand I have long been familiar with Ferruccio Busoni’s “Fantasia contrappuntistica” in a variety of different settings. Like many of Reger’s compositions, this “Fantasia” was conceived on a large scale, which embraces four fugues, an opening set of chorale variations, three variations on an intermezzo, and a concluding no-holds-barred stretto. Serkin recorded the two-piano version of Busoni’s score, joined by Richard Goode. Since I encounter performances of this massive project so seldom, I found myself particularly satisfied with its realization by this particular partnership.

The remaining nineteenth-century offerings are three albums of solo compositions by Frédéric Chopin. Given how adventurous Serkin could be in the recordings that he planned, it is hard to avoid thinking that some RCA executive was nagging him to provide them with a more salable commodity. Serkin’s accounts of Chopin are dutiful enough; but given how much inventive imagination he has put into so many of his other albums, one comes away with the impression that duty was all that mattered. Personally, I sympathize with his attitude, as many readers can probably guess on the basis of the sense of relief that usually arises when I get to write about a piano recital with no Chopin on the program! Suffice it to say that Chopin-lovers will have no trouble finding favorites on these three CDs; but, for my own tastes, there are performances of all of those selections that I prefer through the hands of other pianists.