Peter Serkin on Sony: Twentieth Century

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

The repertoire that most distinguishes pianist Peter Serkin from his pianist father Rudolf is his interest in the twentieth-century repertoire. Indeed, in the 35-CD anthology The Complete RCA Album Collection, the twentieth-century category receives the largest number of CDs (twelve). Readers may recall that the preceding three categories consisted of Johann Sebastian Bach (six CDs), the First Viennese School represented by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven (eleven CDs), and the nineteenth century (seven CDs). (Yes, the total number comes to 36; but one of the CDs is shared by Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven.)

Serkin’s interests in the twentieth-century repertoire were somewhat idiosyncratic. The composer that receives the most attention is Olivier Messiaen. Four CDs are allocated to him, three for solo piano compositions and one for the “Quatuor pour la fin du temps” (quartet for the end of time). This was recorded by the Tashi Quartet, whose other members are violinist Ida Kavafian, cellist Fred Sherry, and clarinetist Richard Stoltzman. Indeed, Tashi was founded in 1973 explicitly to perform the Messiaen quartet, and the music was recorded over a series of sessions in Tokyo in the second half of 1975.

The only other composer to receive generous attention is Toru Takemitsu. Indeed, the only recordings of Anton Webern occupy half of an album (performed by Tashi), the other half devoted to solo piano music by Takemitsu. Berg is represented only by his “Kammerkonzert” (chamber concerto), recorded about a dozen years after Serkin had recorded the piece during the 1971 Marlboro Music Festival with Leon Kirchner conducting. To be fair, however, the recording in the anthology is part of an Isaac Stern album, coupling the “Kammerkonzert” with the violin concerto; and, as expected, there is no trace of Serkin in that concerto performance. The Arnold Schoenberg album, on the other hand, is devoted entirely to Serkin in three different settings, the five Opus 23 pieces for solo piano, the Opus 47 “Phantasy” for violin (Arnold Steinhardt) and piano, and the Opus 42 concerto, performed with Seiji Ozawa conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Serkin also joins forces with Ozawa and the Chicago for an album of the first and third piano concertos by Béla Bartók.

In contrast there is only a single CD devoted to Igor Stravinsky, and that is another Tashi album. Serkin performs on most of the tracks, but Stoltzman’s account of the three solo clarinet pieces is the most compelling of the selections. The one other composer that appears more than once in the collection is Peter Lieberson. He is first encountered on an album entitled …in real time, consisting entirely of world premiere recordings of compositions written for Serkin. His music accounts for sixteen of the 24 tracks (three of which are by Takemitsu). The other is a Sony album consisting entirely of Lieberson’s King Gesar, a cantata for narrator and chamber ensemble based on an epic about a Tibetan warrior-king. (Lieberson was a student of the Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa.)

Taken as a whole, this portion of the collection accounts for a generous amount of breadth; but that breadth is not necessary complemented by much depth. Sadly, I only heard Serkin in recital once; and that was a poor representation of how performing for an audience differs from making a recording. My encounter took place in Herbst Theatre in November of 2006, not long after my wife and I had made the move from Palo Alto to San Francisco. Serkin had prepared an all-Takemitsu program with two Bach compositions serving as “bookends.” Sadly, most of the audience was uncomfortable with the stillness of Takemitsu’s music; and Serkin had to contend with an ongoing volley of coughs and sneezes.

As a result, I value the Takemitsu recordings for providing the opportunity to listen to the composer, rather than the audience! Most of the selections were “first encounters;” and all of them were enthusiastically welcome. On the other hand I cannot say that there was much about any of the Lieberson compositions that drew my attention, and his cantata ran the gamut from pretentious to just plain annoying. Most disappointing, however, was none of the many selections from the first half of the twentieth century made for particularly compelling listening. Most of those tracks left me thinking about far more satisfying encounters, either on recording or at a concert program.