Olga Kern Returns to CMSF, Joined by Quartet

Olga Kern seated at a Steinway piano (photograph by Natalia Roslova, Web page from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

Yesterday afternoon saw the penultimate recital in this year’s season in San Francisco presented by Chamber Music San Francisco (CMSF). The recitalist was Russian-born pianist Olga Kern, who has made frequent appearances in past CMSF seasons. The first half of her program presented solo performances of compositions by Sergei Rachmaninoff, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Alexander Scriabin, and Mily Balakirev. For the second half she was joined by the Dalí Quartet, whose members are violinists Ari Isaacman-Beck and Carlos Rubio with Adriana Linares on viola and cellist Jesús Morales. They concluded the program with Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 81, the second of his piano quintets, composed in the key of A major. This was preceded by a string quartet performance of Astor Piazzolla’s Tango Ballet.

Each half of the program had its own approach to encores. Kern preceded the intermission with three solo offerings. She began with “Feux d’artifice” (fireworks), the last of the 24 pieces in Claude Debussy’s Préludes collection. This was followed by “Spinning Wheel,” a composition by Charles Lisberg that has been in Kern’s repertoire for many years. Her final selection was “Étincelles” (sparks), the sixth piece in Moritz Moszkowski’s Opus 36 collection, 8 Characteristic Pieces. The encore following the Dvořák performance was the Scherzo movement from Robert Schumann’s Opus 47 piano quartet in E-flat major. Sadly, there was a lack of clarity in Kern’s account of the piano part for that energetic movement.

The performances were more than somewhat mixed. There were significant problems with a blurring of thematic lines in just about all of Kern’s solo selections, not just in her approach to the Schumann quartet. On the other hand, Linares’ viola work practically soared with expressiveness in both the Dvořák quintet and the “Encuentro–Olvido” movement of Tango-Ballet. In other words, there were any number of moments of engaging performances; but, unfortunately, none of them involved the pianist.

Benjamin Grosvenor’s 20th Century Tops his 19th

British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor made his San Francisco Performances (SFP) debut in April of 2013, serving as recitalist for the annual gift concert. Last night he returned to give his first “ticketed” recital in Herbst Theatre as part of this season’s SFP Piano Series. In the interim, in September of 2014, he made his debut with the San Francisco Symphony performing Maurice Ravel’s piano concerto “in G,” one of the selections on his first concerto album released by Decca.

At the core of last night’s program, Grosvenor presented two “gems” from the early twentieth century, both distinguished for the amount of expression they could pack into relatively brief periods of time. The first of these was the piano sonata that Leoš Janáček entitled “1.X.1905;” and the second was Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 22, a collection of twenty miniatures entitled “Visions fugitives.” These short pieces were framed by more “monumental” selections from the nineteenth century. The first half of the program was devoted entirely to Robert Schumann, coupling his Opus 19 “Blumenstück” (flower piece) to his Opus 16 cycle Kreisleriana. “Visions fugitives,” was, in turn, followed by Franz Liszt’s “Réminiscences de Norma.”

The title of Janáček’s sonata is the date of a Czech workers’ demonstration at which one of the demonstrators was bayoneted. It consists of two relatively short movements that provide a before-and-after account of the episode. The first is entitled “Foreboding” and advances through a circulation of intense motivic fragments at a Con moto tempo. This is followed by an Adagio movement entitled simply “Death.” This movement is also structured around motifs; but the motifs are slightly longer in duration and the overall rhetoric is less fragmented. Grosvenor seemed aware of how the intensity of this composition derived from the turbulent flow of Janáček’s thematic materials; and, even in the absence of the full narrative behind the sonata’s title, the attentive listener could easily respond to the urgency of the composer’s rhetoric.

Prokofiev composed his Opus 22 between 1915 and 1917, giving the piece its premiere performance on April 15, 1918 in Petrograd (the name the Soviet Union initially gave to Saint Petersburg—it would later be called Leningrad). The following month he would leave for the United States and completed immigration processing on August 11, 1918. Through his connection with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Prokofiev was well aware of what Igor Stravinsky had been doing with dissonance; and, in many respects, one might (in the spirit of Hokusai) call Opus 22 “twenty ways of listening to dissonance.” Grosvenor definitely knew how to endow each of these short pieces with its own individual identity, but the sense of that identity would probably have been better grasped had the program book allocated enough space to list the tempo markings of the individual movements.

These crystalline examples of modernism provided by both composers seemed to be Grosvenor’s sweet spot for the evening. His approach to Schumann tended to be on the erratic side. This certainly was consistent with how the author E. T. A. Hoffmann had developed the character of the musician Johannes Kreisler, for whom Opus 16 was named. However, Grosvenor’s execution tended to exaggerate the mood swings in both directions, often obscuring Schumann’s underlying logic, which is just as relevant as his rhetoric. Furthermore, that somewhat warped mentality also tended to pervade the Opus 19, where there was less logic to support it. Here, again, the program book put the serious listener at a disadvantage, identifying each movement only by its initial tempo, rather than the richer internal structures denoted by tempo changes.

One of the final holograph pages of Liszt’s “Réminiscences de Norma” (from IMSLP, public domain)

At the other end of the evening, the program concluded with the Liszt selection, an arrangement of themes from Vincenzo Bellini’s opera Norma. This is a prime example of Liszt’s flamboyant display of technical virtuosity at its most excessive. Nevertheless, Grosvenor rose admirably to the many challenges posed by this composition, leaping all of the hurdles with astonishing facility. However, even the most capable execution, coupled with a sincere attempt to honor Liszt’s rhetoric, cannot save this piece from sounding like an archaeological discovery from the nineteenth century that should have been left buried.

Grosvenor took two encores, announcing neither of them. The first was probably one of the more technically flamboyant compositions by Moritz Moszkowski [added 3/16, 4:05 p.m.: the eleventh étude (in A-flat major) from his Opus 72 collection], and the execution was certainly delightful. This was followed by a more subdued selection by Edvard Grieg, most likely one of the the 66 short works he called Lyric Pieces, published over a series of ten volumes [added 3/16, 4:05 p.m.: “Erotikk” (erotikon) from the Opus 43 (third) volume]. Having not internalized the entire collection, I was not able to identify the specific composition [added 3/16, 4:10 p.m.: until I found it on the SFP event page for the recital]!

Martin West Unearths Unknown Moszkowski for Reference Recordings

Early last September Reference Recordings released an album of the music of Moritz Moszkowski whose full title is From Foreign Lands: Rediscovered Orchestral Works. This was the result of a project proposed by Martin West, Music Director of the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra, suggesting that one could fill a CD with Moszkowski’s orchestral works. Seven compositions were recorded, four of which were released on a commercial recording for the first time. (For the record the last two selections on the album are orchestrations of Moszkowski’s better-known piano music; and none of those orchestrations are by Moszkowski himself.)

In his day (born on August 23, 1854 and died on March 4, 1925) Moszkowski had an impressive reputation; but this was primarily as a pianist and a composer of piano music. He played a two-piano arrangement of his piano concerto with Franz Liszt; and Ignacy Jan Paderewski declared:

After Chopin, Moszkowski best understands how to write for the piano, and his writing embraces the whole gamut of piano technique.

He also taught in both Berlin and Paris with students such as Joaquín Turina, Thomas Beecham, and Wanda Landowska. However, his tastes went into decline at the turn of the century. In a paper about Moszkowski’s neurological condition, Lazaros C. Triarhou observed that he stopped taking compositions students because “they wanted to write like artistic madmen such as Scriabin, Schoenberg, Debussy, Satie.”

How, then, should we regard Moszkowski today? Is he a neglected genius or a casualty of natural selection? My own experience comes from playing his Opus 12 four-hand collection of five “Spanish” dances. Whether or not Moszkowski’s sense of Spanish was authentic, those pieces are definitely fun to play; and I would happily seek out another four-hand partner to revisit them. On the other hand the orchestrations by Philipp Scharwenka and Valentin Frank on this album are disconcertingly lame, bursting all the effervescent bubbles of the original score. Sadly, on the basis of the earlier tracks on the album, it is worth hypothesizing that both Scharwenka and Frank were trying to do justice to Moszkowski’s own approach to orchestral writing. Thus, even the selections with the promise of being enticing curiosities come off as ponderous slogs.

How much of this is Moszkowski, and how much is West? That is a difficult call. Drawing upon my own past experience in covering ballet, I can acknowledge that conductors frequently have to work around the physical constraints of the dancers. In other words the well-turned ankle matters far more than the well-shaped musical phrase. Nevertheless, those who read this site regularly know that Charles Mackerras had no trouble giving a sparkling account of “Pineapple Poll” without worrying about inconveniencing the Sadler’s Wells dancers. My guess, however, is that the major problem is that the music has become too dated and that Moszkowski is better suited to a few instruments in a salon, rather than a full ensemble in a concert hall.

Fiddlers Three

"Fiddlers Three" was actually the title of a New York Philharmonic concert that was broadcast live on PBS several decades ago. It was a concert in which Isaac Stern was honored as a guest performer in the company of two "superstar" violinists from the next general: Itzak Perlman and Pinchas Zuckerman. This was back in the days when Zubin Mehta was the music director; so the whole concert was very much a "Kosher Nostra Special" (to invoke a favorite epithet from those days). Nevertheless, to this day I remember it as a reinforcement of my decision to seek out music performances other than at the New York Philharmonic. The whole thing was one of those bland affairs meant to give the big donors the sorts of things they liked, which had more to do with personalities than with music. The most interesting part of the evening was probably when Zuckerman took up a viola to perform Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's K. 364 sinfornia concertante with Stern. Every time the violin had to "respond" to a passage introduced by the viola, Stern seemed to be showing how Zuckerman could play the music with more interesting phrasing; yet, in the final measures of the third movement, it was clear that Zuckerman was no more aware of this message than he was when the piece began. It does not speak well of a concert when the most salient memory is an instance of Schadenfreude!
The three "fiddlers" at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music last night were all members of the violin faculty: Wei He, Axel, Strauss, and Ian Swensen (who also played viola). Only one work on the program required a piano accompaniment, which was performed by Timothy Bach. More interesting was that every piece performed required at least two of the violin faculty members; and the final piece brought all three of them together (with Swensen on viola). Unlike the New York affair, this was a concert where the results were anything but bland.
In a way the whole theme of the evening involved the challenges and benefits of bringing together two identical instruments, along with the corollary that two violins tend to be more interesting than pairs of instruments from other families, such as flutes or trumpets. This is probably due, at least in part, to the great diversity of sounds the different violins elicit, to such a degree that even less-trained ears can become aware of those differences. Thus, if I return to that metaphor of social conversation and view the musical performance as a dramatization of that conversation, then one of the challenges of two identical instruments is to overcome the dramatic effect of an actor in dialog with his/her own clone. A conversation is only different when the different perspectives of different personalities come into play, and the extent to which every violin has its own "personality" facilitates addressing this challenge.
Having said all that, I should also point out that each of the compositions on last night's program required a different approach to this challenge. Jean-Marie Leclair's fifth sonata for two solo violins may have been the most challenging, simply because, in its Baroque tradition, the "text" of the two voices were so close to identical, with alternation between call-and-response episodes with periods where the two voices converged into homophony. While it might be a bit of an exaggeration to say that the personalities that Swenson and He brought to their performance were the primary source of interest, it would still be fair to say that the personality element kept the music from drifting into the "automatic pilot" mode that is the fate of so much of the Baroque chamber repertoire. Another possible exaggeration would be the claim that Swenson brought a Dionysian personality to the performance, while He's was more Apollonian; but such a claim would still be a good way to approach the personality differences. Swenson was the more fiery, with energy bursting from every phrase, while He approaches those same phrases with a quieter refinement, meeting each of Swenson's celebrations of "yes!" with a calmer "yes, but …." Whether this would have been an acceptable performance practice in the early eighteenth century is less important than how it may the performance of work unknown to just about anyone who does not specialize in the violin not just a pleasure but an exciting one.
In the Opus 71 suite by Moritz Moszkowski, violinists He and Strauss were accompanied by pianist Bach. Here there were greater differences in those "texts" of the two voices; so the performance was more a matter of finding the "personalities stances" consistent with those texts. Moszkowski tends to be associated with salon music, and this particular suite would be consistent with that association. The challenges have more to do with technique than with compositional language, so most of the pleasure came from letting that technique unfold in all of its virtuosity. One would probably not want to devote an entire concert to which pieces, but it was well programmed as a follow-up to the approach to virtuosity that Leclair had taken.
The second half of the concert involved two works that were a bit more "solid" in comparison to Leclair and Moszkowski. Swenson and Strauss played Serge Prokofiev's Opus 56 sonata for two solo violins, and all three soloists played Antonín Dvořák's Opus 74 terzetto. Both Prokofiev and Dvořák were good at exploring instrumental color, and this provided one of the primary ways in which the "texts" of the voices were endowed with personality. This was particularly apparent in which way in which Dvořák employed pizzicato coloring in his scherzo movement, bringing up the "intensity of the light," so to speak, on an atmosphere of moody nostalgia. I was reminded of how Antony Tudor had choreographed this music for his extended ballet, The Leaves are Fading, which drew heavily upon Dvořák's Cypresses for nostalgic effect but also drew upon this particular scherzo. Unfortunately, Ballet Theatre felt obliged to recast all this chamber music for a string orchestra in the pit, thus robbing it of the transparency that was its greatest asset. These "fiddlers three" seemed to understand and appreciate the extent to which transparency is what made the entire Dvořák terzetto "work;" and I always welcome an opportunity to hear that scherzo get the performance it deserves.