Andrew Wan’s Latest Analekta Releases

Violinist Andrew Wan was named concertmaster of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra in 2008. Since that time he has become a major property of the Canadian Analekta label, recording both concertos with the ensemble and its conductor Kent Nagano and chamber music with pianist Charles Richard-Hamelin. This past October Analekta released his two latest albums. The chamber music release consists of the three Opus 12 sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven, along with the Opus 24 (“Spring”) sonata in F major. The orchestral album presents concertante selections that receive relatively little attention, composed (in their order on the recording) by Alberto Ginastera, Leonard Bernstein, and Samy Moussa.

The Beethoven release is the second in what is probably a project to account for all ten of the sonatas. The project began with the release in September of 2018 of the three Opus 30 sonatas. It is important to bear in mind that the “full canon” of these sonatas amounts to relatively early work. The final sonata, Opus 96 in G major, was composed in 1812; and the other nine were written between 1798 and 1802. The other point I like to raise is that Beethoven described these as sonatas for piano and violin, perhaps setting his priorities on the assumption that he would be the keyboardist!

I have had the good fortune to encounter all ten of these sonatas both in performance and on several different recordings. The recordings are useful to establish familiarity with the thematic material; but the spontaneity of performance carries much more significance, particularly when it involves an encounter between a well-matched pair of virtuoso masters. In that context I am afraid that Wan’s second Beethoven sonata album did little to seize, let alone maintain, my attention over the course of its four sonata offerings.

A nineteenth-century imagining of Plato’s “Symposium” (painting by Anselm Feuerbach completed in 1874, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

On the orchestral album my only familiarity came from the middle selection, Leonard Bernstein’s “Serenade after Plato’s ‘Symposium.’” The composer’s educational experiences at both Boston Latin School and Harvard University clearly exposed him to considerable instances of intellect. However, while Bernstein was clearly impressed by intellect, his efforts to rise to it did not fare particularly well. In the canon of Plato’s dialogues, “Symposium” is the one that is as much a character study as a philosophical examination of the nature of love. The movements of Bernstein’s “Serenade” attempt to capture the diversity of Plato’s characters; but his understanding of “Symposium” seems to be based more on whatever predecessor of CliffsNotes he had at his disposal to spare him the trouble of working through the text itself.

“Serenade” is preceded by Ginastera’s Opus 30 violin concerto. This composition involves an imaginatively elaborate architecture with six études at its core. Instrumentation is massive, including about fifty different instruments in the percussion section. However, while the plan for the concerto looks good on paper, its execution (at least as presented by Wan and Nagano) feels like a rather tedious slog from one episode to the next. The Moussa concerto, given its world premiere by Wan and Nagano, suffers from similar tedium; but Moussa at least seems to have had a better sense of working with a shorter overall duration.

Once again, however, it appears that Analekta products have been aimed at an audience that, to borrow a phrase that John Cage liked, is “not very fussy about music.”