New Pentatone Album from Tamara Stefanovich

Tamara Stefanovich on the cover of her latest album (from its Amazon.com Web page)

According to my records, my last encounter with Tamara Stefanovich took place in June of 2017 when I wrote about her contribution to the Complete Works for Ensemble and Choir album of music by György Kurtág. Her latest recording is a solo piano album entitled Organized Delirium. It will be released this coming Friday, but the preceding hyperlink can be used to place pre-orders through Amazon.com. It is a collection of five solo piano sonatas, each by a different composer. Only the last of those composers, Domenico Scarlatti, is not from the twentieth century. The “order of appearance” of the other four composers is:

• Pierre Boulez
• Hanns Eisler
• Béla Bartók
• Dmitri Shostakovich

Boulez is represented by his second piano sonata in four movements. A photograph in the booklet suggests that Stefanovich consulted him in preparing to make her recording. Boulez was, of course, a master of abstraction unto an extreme; but he was also a stickler for expressive performance. My guess is that he coached her in bringing expressiveness to her performance. Nevertheless, expression tends to be in the ear of the listener; and I suspect that many well-intentioned listeners may find themselves overwhelmed by the abstractions, rather than the expressiveness.

In that context, the other three twentieth-century selections will almost definitely come across as highly accessible. The one I know the best is the Bartók sonata, which I have often enjoyed in the past. My guess is that the final Scarlatti track was included as an “exclamation point” for the entire album, but the eleven tracks of “serious content” that precede it tend to undermine any suggestion of wit!

Stefanovich reminds me of Peter Schickele’s epithet about “holding a black belt in piano.” She approaches every track on the album with fearless dedication. Nevertheless, I would prefer listening to the compositions on this album individually, rather than undergoing a beginning-to-end journey!

Alpha to Release New Benjamin Appl Album

A little over a month ago, San Francisco Performances concluded its 2022–23 season with a recital by baritone Benjamin Appl accompanied at the piano by James Baillieu. This was a themed program, given the title Nocturne. I had a bit of fun writing about this performance, giving it the title “Benjamin Appl’s Long Night’s Journey into Day.” To be fair, however, I would not accuse the event as being overly long, even with the spoken introductions by both Appl and Baillieu that accounted for the progress of the journey.

from the cover of the Forbidden Fruit album on its Presto Music Web page

This coming Friday Alpha will release an album entitled Forbidden Fruit. Like Nocturne, this amounts to another themed recital, this time based on one of the earliest narratives in the Book of Genesis. The program is structured around 28 songs by eighteen composers. The earliest offering is an anonymous folk song; and the one living composer on the album is Jake Heggie, represented by his song entitled “The Snake.” As is often the case, the album is currently available for pre-order; but the most reliable site is a Presto Music Web page, which accounts for both download and CD offerings.

One can probably guess from the album title that the narrative for this album is that of the Garden of Eden. The folk song that beings the album has, as its first line, “I will give my love an apple;” but those that know their British folk songs will know that this song has nothing to do with temptation, let alone an idealized Eden. So it goes as the cycle progresses, in which the narrated phrases have much more to do with temptation and the resulting Fall from Grace than do the selections sung by Appl. For that matter, the first selection to follow that folk song is the “In Paradisum” antiphon that concludes Gabriel Fauré’s setting of the Requiem Mass (which is performed as a piano solo by Baillieu). However, that first word translates as “into,” rather than simply “in,” since the Mass concludes by the soul entering heavenly Paradise (as opposed to the earthy Paradise from which Adam and Eve are expelled).

All this is a long-winded way of saying that listening to the songs as individual entities is likely to be more satisfying than trying to string them all into a coherent narrative structure. Personally, there are any number of tracks that provide pleasure on their own merits. One of my favorites is Kurt Weill’s “Youkali,” which is more lusciously exotic than any Biblical account of Eden! Also, since I have so few opportunities to listen to the songs composed by Arnold Schoenberg, I was particularly delighted to encounter “Arie aus dem Spiegel von Arcadien,” which was given the title “Langsamer Walzer” in his Brettl-Lieder collection. Finally, there is Hanns Eisler’s vicious account of bureaucracy his setting of  Bertolt Brecht’s poem “Ballade vom Paragraphen 218,” summoning a voice more vicious than anything Eden’s serpent could have mustered.

Both Appl and Baillieu serve up convincing accounts of all of those songs (and, for that matter, all of the songs on the CD); and, as far as I am concerned, their efforts are more important than whether there is an underlying Biblical narrative!

A Muddled Conclusion of E4TT’s Season

Last night the Center for New Music (C4NM) streamed the concluding concert in the 2020/21 season presented by the Ensemble for These Times (E4TT). The performances were captured at the Berkeley Piano Club, but they were streamed through the C4NM YouTube channel. The title of the program was Émigrés & Exiles in Hollywood; and the performers were soprano Nanette McGuinness, cellist Anne Lerner-Wright, and pianist Margaret Halbig.

That title was more than a little deceptive, since the “Weimar on the Pacific” composers shared the program with Polish composers, at least one of whom, Grażyna Bacewicz, left Poland only for her musical studies. However, that deception was the least of the problems encountered in last night’s performance. The only convincing accounts were those given by Halbig’s solo piano performances. She contributed selections by Alexandre Tansman, André Tchaikowsky, and Miklós Rózsa with consistent technical skill and a clear understanding of how to bring expressiveness to the marks on paper. The rest of the program never came close to the bar set by those performances.

Nanette McGuinness singing Hanns Eisler’s “Hollywood” with pianist Margaret Halbig (screen shot from the video being discussed)

McGuinness opened the program with three of the songs from Hanns Eisler’s Hollywooder Liederbuch (Hollywood songbook), the first, “Hollywood,” sung in English and the other two sung in German. There were frequent uncertainties in both pitch and her approach to the underlying expressiveness. Furthermore, in the absence of subtitles, most listeners were probably deprived of how Eisler approached the sharp edges of the texts by Bertolt Brecht that he was setting. Similar problems arose with McGuinness’ delivery of the more affectionate texts set by Eric Zeisl.

Most disappointing, however, were the cello performances. Lerner-Wright seemed to be having consistent problems with finding pitch. These were particularly apparent in her performance of the first four of the 24 solo cello preludes composed by Mieczysław Weinberg. These are all highly demanding pieces with a broad range of expressive stances, several of which are affectionate nods to Dmitri Shostakovich. Sadly, Lerner-Wright never got beyond doing justice to the marks on paper to take on any of that expressiveness, making for a seriously disappointing account of some of the most interesting music for cello written in the twentieth century.

Theo Bleckmann Blunts Brecht’s Sharp Edges

Theo Bleckmann (photograph by Lynn Harty, courtesy of Jensen Artists)

Last night in Herbst Theatre San Francisco Performances presented the third of the four concerts in its PIVOT series. The title of the program was Berlin—Songs of Love and War, Peace and Exile. This was the title of vocalist Theo Bleckmann’s 2008 album, devoted primarily to cabaret songs. Last night Bleckmann was accompanied at the piano by Dan Tepfer, along with the members of the Telegraph Quartet. For last night’s performance Joseph Maile took the first violin chair with Eric Chin on second, Pei-Ling Lin on viola, and Jeremiah Shaw on cello. The instrumental arrangements were by Fumio Yasuda, and almost all of the selections were based on the poems of Bertolt Brecht. Most of the settings were by Hanns Eisler, and a few of the more familiar selections were from Kurt Weill.

I am afraid I have to take issue with the program note, which stated that Bleckmann “breathes new life into classic German songs.” The Weill selections were familiar enough to count for a vernacular interpretation of “classic;” but I am not sure I have previously listened to a concert performance of any composition by Eisler in this country. This is unfortunate. Brecht wrote his poems with a heavy, and frequently merciless, hand; and his collaborations with Weill, powerful as they are, do not really count as representative of his full corpus. The many songs that Eisler wrote to set Brecht’s words account for a far broader and more representative account of the author.

Sadly, Bleckmann’s interpretations tended to smooth over the many rough edges one encounters in Eisler’s settings and the source texts themselves. This results in a kinder and gentler account of material conceived to be about as far from kind and gentle as one can get. Furthermore, between his vocal qualities and his microphone work, Bleckmann seldom endowed the words he was singing with sufficient clarity; and his casual approach to pitch seemed to be fundamental to his rhetorical stance.

In other words Bleckmann took a stylistic stance that did little justice to the repertoire he had prepared. This is one of those cases in which the obvious pun cuts right to the bone: Just about anything Brecht wrote must be delivered with qualities that are primarily curt and vile. Weill’s widow, Lotte Lenya, whose sense of pitch was basically oriented around Sprechgesang, was an expert in realizing those qualities. To a great extent Joel Grey captured the spirit of those qualities in his performances of Cabaret on both stage and screen. However, it is worth recalling that Lenya was part of the original Broadway cast of Cabaret, and it is easy to imagine that Grey learned a thing or two from her.

Beyond the vocalizing there was, fortunately, much to be enjoyed in the instrumentation. Tepfer provided Bleckmann with solid accompaniment and even seemed to venture into an imaginative improvisation or two. Similarly, the quartet arrangement came across with a better sense of the cabaret spirit than Bleckmann ever evoked. I found it interesting that the more memorable solos were allocated to the viola and the cello. Both Lin and Shaw provided just the right darkness to set context for Brecht’s poetry.

The Sound of a Sextet

I sometimes feel at a disadvantage for not being able to play any instrument in the string family. (No, I do not count the washtub bass that I played during my brief engagement with a bluegrass group.) There is something about the rich diversity of sound one can evoke from just one of these instruments that compounds in such remarkable ways as the ensemble grows. One could hear this in the concert at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music that featured three members of the violin faculty, and one heard it last night in the Chamber Music Masters concert at the Conservatory that featured cellist Joel Krosnick. The first of these concerts progressed from duos to a trio; the second culminated in a sextet.

I have to confess that I am a real sucker for the sound of a string sextet with its equal pairings of violins, violas, and cellos. I think I got "hooked" many years ago, when Jaime Laredo organized a concert at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, which consisted entirely of the two Brahms sextets, each one played on either side of the intermission. I have a similar weakness when Tchaikovsky's "Souvenir de Florence" is played in its intended sextet form. However, the ultimate in that sextet sound has to be Arnold Schoenberg's "Verklärte Nacht." When I wrote about the performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's K. 515 string quintet that took place during Robert Mann's visit to the Conservatory, I described listening to it as being "a bit like eavesdropping on a very intimate and highly amicable social conversation." In "Verklärte Nacht" every instrument also has the personality of a unique voice, but the effect is more one of drama than of social conversation. Nevertheless, Schoenberg's approach to drama is rather unique; and this is what makes the listening experience so interesting.

One way to explain this would be through the terminology of Kenneth Burke, which seems appropriate, since the sextet is based on a highly narrative poem (of the same name) by Richard Dehmel. At its highest level of abstraction, the poem is a dialog between two agents: A woman confesses, and a man forgives. (This is not to reductively oversimplify the poem but, from a narratological point of view, to sort out the story from the discourse.) However, Schoenberg was not interested in the traditional approach of program music to illustrate the core story; and, as a result, he shifted his attention to the scene in which the story takes place. This is the "night" of the title, which is the focus of Dehmel's first stanza, briefly appears in the third stanza (which stands between the woman's confession and the man's reply), and serve to wrap up the final line, which characterizes the "transfiguration." In some ways the listener might to better to put aside the poem (which Schoenberg himself had suggested) and turn (which he had not suggested) instead to some of his landscape paintings (which I had the good fortune to see at the Galerie St. Etienne in Manhattan late in 1984. These canvasses are less interested in objects than in the play of color and light; and Schoenberg's approach to Dehmel's night and the critical role played by the moon (which may or may not anticipate the "moon views" of Pierrot Lunaire). From this point of view, the individuality of the instrumental voices almost constitutes an embodiment of brushwork in auditory form.

Now all this may be a ploy on my part. "Verklärte Nacht" is a rather long piece of uninterrupted music; and, while it may have five large sections corresponding to Dehmel's five stanzas, I still have trouble finding my way around its expanse of time. (This is probably why I leap at any opportunity to hear a concert performance. I can negotiate Gustav Mahler's longest symphony movements, but my ears still need more exposure to "Verklärte Nacht!") In this respect the Conservatory performers (Ian Swenson and student Daniel Jang on violin, Paul Hersh and student Alexa Beattie on viola, and Joel Krosnick and Jennifer Culp on cello) honored the seamlessness of Schoenberg's texture, consistent with his avoidance of sharp object boundaries in his landscape paintings. More importantly, though, they were sensitive to all the gradations of color in the sonorities, which is why I feel that the metaphor of brushwork contributes to the listening experience.

This sextet was sharply contrasted by the worked which preceded it just before the intermission, the Opus 7 duo for violin and cello by Hanns Eisler. Eisler studied with Schoenberg but is probably better known for his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. This duo (which paired Krosnick with violinist Axel Strauss) had a much sharper sense of "objects," cast in rather traditional forms but rendered with an extremely free chromaticism.

This Eisler-Schoenberg axis was complemented by the opening of the concert, which was the Opus 1, Number 1 piano trio of Ludwig van Beethoven. It is interesting to compare the Opus 1 trios with the Opus 2 sonatas that opened András Schiff's performance of the complete cycle of piano sonatas last October. They both begin with an energetic ascending arpeggio line, they are both rich in wit, and they both involve what, in writing about the Schiff recital, I called "the rhetorical impact of the rest." Thus, once again the case was made that, even in his Opus 1, Beethoven was exploring how to stray from the beaten path, setting examples that would later be followed by Schoenberg and Eisler. For this performance Strauss and Krosnick were accompanied by piano student Kevin Korth; and as a group they knew exactly how to honor both the impact of the silences and the wit that makes the listening such a treat.

All this set me to thinking back to Krosnick's comments on Tuesday evening about not performing the notes too "factually." Each of these three compositions had much to communicate to the listener; but none of them communicated through "factual" means. To go back to the narratological framework, everything was in the discourse; and the "story" was incidental. Once this was accepted, it was easy to let the music speak for itself.