Pina Napolitano Revisits Temporal Basics

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

One week from today, Odradek Records will release its latest solo album of Italian pianist Pina Napolitano. Ever since Odradek released her debut recording of the complete piano music of Arnold Schoenberg, I have been hooked on her imaginative approaches to repertoire and the reverberations of those approaches beyond the nuts and bolts of music into the more adventurous domain of cognitive science. When her last recording, Brahms the Progressive, was released a little more than two years ago, I found it hard to avoid donning my cognitive science hat, describing the release as an “inventive album of time-consciousness.” The title of her new album is Tempo e Tempi (time and times); and I find myself trying to pick up where I left off two years ago. As usual, the latest release is currently available for pre-order from an Amazon.com Web page.

Brahms the Progressive juxtaposed two collections of short pieces that Johannes Brahms composed late in his life, Opera 118 and 119, with early compositions by Alban Berg and Anton Webern reflecting the influences of their shared teacher, Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg had great admiration of Brahms and would subsequently deliver a radio talk after his move to the United States as part of a celebration of the centennial of Brahms’ birth. (The title of that talk was “Brahms the Progressive.”) Tempo e Tempi bridges a much wide temporal interval, with the last two solo piano sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven (Opus 110 in A-flat major and Opus 111 in C minor) at one end and selected compositions by Elliott Carter at the other.

What I find particularly fascinating about the study of time-consciousness is the extent to which many of the fundamental principles can be found rooted in literary sources. Thus, while Augustine of Hippo may have tapped into those principles in his Confessions, those insights truly flowered when they were turned into the elegant poetry of T. S. Eliot, which I documented when writing about Brahms the Progressive:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

I was thus pleased to learn that the title of the new album is also the title of an Italian poem by Eugenio Montale, a poem that Carter used for a song cycle scored for soprano and instrumental ensemble. Montale’s phenomenology is orthogonal to Eliot’s, so there should be no surprise that it can be applied to different periods of music history.

Readers may recall that, at the end of this past May, I took a “deep dive” into how Carter’s inquiries into the nature of time led to the music he wrote, focusing my attention on his double concerto, scored for harpsichord and piano with two chamber orchestras. On that occasion my primary source was “Happy Birthday, Elliott Carter,” an article that Charles Rosen wrote for The New York Review of Books not long after Carter reached the age of 100 on December 11, 2008. As a result, when I read the accompanying booklet for Tempo e Tempi, I was pleased to see that Montale’s poem provided a delightful pithy account of what Rosen had explained over the course of several paragraphs. The English translation of the original Italian is as follows:

There is not just one time: there are

Many ribbons that, parallel, slide

Often in opposite directions and rarely

Intersect.

When I wrote about Carter’s double concerto, I emphasized that this music was not for the “casual” listener. However, a listener with the right blend of patience and attention could still be rewarded in being able to negotiate both the overall framework of the concerto and the intricate details enclosed within that framework. My “punch line” was the following summary:

Once one is comfortable within that [structural] framework [of movements and cadenzas], one can then dive into the ways in which both the soloists and the instruments in the chamber orchestras negotiate the multiplicity of tempos specified in the score; and, in all likelihood, the attentive listener will begin to appreciate Carter’s rhetoric of textures without getting too tangled by the individual threads.

That “rhetoric of textures” can also guide the listener through the two Carter compositions on Tempo e Tempi, “Night Fantasies” (which Carter himself associated with the “narrative suites” composed for solo piano by Robert Schumann) and the “mini-suite,” Two Thoughts about the Piano, whose movements are entitled “Intermittences” and “Caténaires.” Each of these two pieces is then complemented by a Beethoven sonata, played in the order in which they were composed.

In fairness to listeners willing to undertake this journey into Carter’s solo piano music, I should note that the double concerto was composed in 1961. Napolitano’s selections are much later. “Night Fantasies” was composed in 1980; and the Two Thoughts were composed between 2005 and 2006. To some extent, the concerto is the most accessible of these pieces, not only because Carter was in an earlier stage of building up his skill set but also because those “individual threads” were distributed across both the solo and chamber orchestra parts. In the solo piano music everything has been distilled down to ten fingers on a single keyboard. Mind you, there are still techniques for distinguishing the “threads,” just as there are in the polyphonic writing found in those Schumann suites.

Nevertheless, I suspect there are skeptical readers out there wondering, “Will we ever get used to the many complexities in Carter’s scores?” Such readers should recall that, in the middle of the nineteenth century, listeners were still struggling to “get used to” those late Beethoven piano sonatas (not to mention the late string quartets). These days it is difficult to find a pianist that does not include the late sonatas in his/her repertoire. We can’t escape them in the concert hall the way our ancestors could over a century ago! The problem with Carter is that, while he had many sympathetic pianists during his lifetime (including Rosen), I am not sure how many “fellow travelers” Napolitano has in her effort to champion his music. However, if we cannot get to know Carter’s music better in the recital hall, at least we can do it at home by listening to Tempo e Tempi.