Neoclassicism? It Is What It Is!

courtesy of PIAS

One week from today, Rubicon Classics will release a new album of performances by Norwegian concert pianist Oda Voltersvik. The title of the album is NEO, intended as a reflection on neoclassicism. As expected, Amazon.com has created a Web page to process pre-orders of this new release.

Lexico.com, the Web site managed by the dictionaries division of Oxford University Press, says the following on its “neoclassicism” Web page:

In music, the term refers to a return by composers of the early 20th century to the forms and styles of the 17th and 18th centuries, as a reaction against 19th-century romanticism.

Taking that definition as context, the composers represented on NEO are, in “order of appearance,” Alexander Scriabin, Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Sofia Gubaidulina.

Given that Gubaidulina was born in 1931 and is still very much alive, I am not sure she counts as an “early 20th century” composer. Indeed, as a music student during the Communist days of the Soviet Union, she cultivated skills in smuggling scores of composers like Charles Ives and John Cage, apparently with Shostakovich’s sympathy. At the other end of the timeline, so to speak, Voltersvik’s Scriabin selection (which opens the album) is a relatively early work, which seems more focused on extending the rhetoric of Frédéric Chopin than in reacting against it.

That said, my own reaction as a listener has been to dispense with Voltersvik’s “agenda” and deal with each of the four compositions on its own terms. Thus, I have no problems listening to her approaching Scriabin’s Opus 28 “Fantaisie” in the spirit of “Chopin on steroids,” so to speak. On the other hand, I would say that the Prokofiev selection, his Opus 14 (second) piano sonata in D minor, can be approached in the spirit of endowing an eighteenth-century structure with unmistakably twentieth-century rhetoric. Ironically, this is followed by Shostakovich’s second solo piano sonata, his Opus 61 in B minor. This was composed shortly after the Nazis had begun the siege of Leningrad, and any signs of influence from eighteenth-century classicism can probably be dismissed as mere coincidence. More likely, this is music that may have inspired Gubaidulina to seek out her own new directions with compositions like the chaconne that concludes the album. (The label may reflect the seventeenth century, but the music definitely does not!)

Each of the four compositions on this album definitely deserves serious attentive listening. Voltersvik presents each one of them to inspire such a response on the part of the listener. Whether the title of her album is relevant is hardly worth consuming time to argue!