Frank Dupree’s Second Nikolai Kapustin Album

Frank Dupree on the cover of his new Kapustin album (courtesy of Naxos of America)

If I am not mistaken, I have Yuja Wang to thank for introducing me to the jazzy riffs composed by the Soviet composer Nikolai Kapustin. I am pretty sure that I was still working in Silicon Valley when I had my “first contact;” but my first efforts in writing about him took place in October of 2013 during my tenure with Examiner.com. At that time Wang was a recitalist in the San Francisco Symphony’s Great Performers Series, and her program included a presentation of Kapustin’s Opus 41, “Variations for piano.” Those variations involved a motivic framework, rather than a “theme,” which, as I put it, amounted to “far more than a family resemblance to the opening bassoon gesture in ‘The Rite of Spring’” of Igor Stravinsky. The variations, for their part, reflected jazz influences, many of which could be traced to George Gershwin and Art Tatum.

More recently, pianist Frank Dupree has picked up the baton from Wang to continue advocacy of Kapustin’s compositions. At the very beginning of last year, the Vienna-based Capriccio label released BLUEPRINT: Piano Music for Jazz Trio. All of the selections were by Kapustin; and, when necessary, they were arranged for jazz piano trio by Dupree’s trio, whose other members are Jakob Krupp on bass and Meinhard Jenne on drums.

This past Friday Capriccio released a new Kapustin album. Dupree is again playing piano, but the album presents three “symphonic” selections from the composer’s catalog. The first of these is the Opus 72 (fifth) piano concerto. This is followed by Opus 104, a concerto for two pianos and percussion (without any involvement by an orchestra). The album then concludes with the Opus 49, a sinfonietta scored for four hands on a single keyboard.

For the performance of Opus 72, Dominik Beykirch conducts the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra. The second pianist for the other two works in Adrian Brendle. Opus 104 requires two percussionists, Meinhard Jenne and Franz Bach.

Opus 72 is a single movement. However, it is “parsed” by a series of tempo changes: Allegro moderato, Allegro, Lento, Allegretto, and Allegro molto. The rhetoric is, for the most part, sassy; and Dupree is free to frolic through what seems like a rapid-fire account of diverse keyboard riffs. The orchestra, on the other hand, sounds like an orchestra, reflecting the same approach to concerto form that can be found in George Gershwin’s “Concerto in F,” but without movements separated by pauses.

Opus 72 was completed in 1993, while Opus 104 was completed about a decade later in 2002. Things get a bit wilder when only percussionists account for anything other than piano sonorities. Nevertheless, Kapustin does not let the percussion instruments overwhelm the two pianos.

Opus 49, on the other hand, predates both concertos. It clearly establishes just how far things have come from the Schubertiade days of intimate music-making in the early nineteenth century. Opus 49 was clearly composed to impress a concert audience (and perhaps deflate the stuffier attendees), making it a far cry from nineteenth-century intimacy.

Dupree’s new album is a significant departure from the jazz trio setting of BLUEPRINT, but the experience of listening to a “concert hall setting” turns out to be just as engaging when Dupree sits down at the keyboard.