Owen Dalby to Bring String 4tet to Noe Music

Many readers probably know by now that violinist Owen Dalby is Co-Artistic Director of Noe Music. Next month he will also be a performer. He has arranged a string quartet in which he will be joined by violinist Alexi Kenney, Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt on viola (founding violist of the Dover Quartet), and cellist Oliver Kenney.

Orlando di Lasso, artist unknown, from the International Museum and Library of Music, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

The second half of the program will be devoted entirely to one of the best-known string quartets by Ludwig van Beethoven, his late-period Opus 130 quartet in B-flat major, which will be performed with the original final movement, now known as the “Grosse Fuge” (which translates as “great fugue”). The first half will offer particularly interesting diversity. It will begin with “Carrot Revolution,” composed by Gabriella Smith. The advance material I received describes this composition as “a patchwork of early music, bluegrass, jazz, rock and post-minimalism.” (Is the kitchen sink missing?) This will be followed by Alfred Schnittke’s third string quartet, which includes a phrase from Orlando di Lasso’s setting of the “Stabat Mater’” hymn to the Virgin Mary, Dmitri Shostakovich’s “DSCH” monogram, and the theme of the “Grosse Fuge.”

This will be a Sunday afternoon performance, beginning at 4 p.m. on November 1. As most readers probably know by now, the event with take place at the Noe Valley MinIstry, which is located (in Noe Valley, of course) at 1021 Sanchez Street. As of this writing, all Reserved Seating tickets have been sold; but General Admission tickets are still available for $45 with a $15 rate for students. A Web page has been created for online purchases.

Duo Gazzana’s Eastern European Album

 Cover of the album being discussed (from its Amazon.com Web page)

The latest ECM New Series album of performances by Duo Gazzana will be released this coming Friday. Most of the music consists of two multi-movement compositions by Sergei Prokofiev: his first sonata for violin and piano (Opus 80 in F minor) and the Opus 35a collection, Five Melodies. Each of these is followed by a more recent work. Arvo Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel” provides the “punctuation mark” for the sonata, and the album concludes with Alfred Schnittke’s “Gratulationsrondo.” Unless I am mistaken, my last encounter with the former took place almost exactly two years ago, at the beginning of April of 2024, when Yo-Yo Ma included “Spiegel im Spiegel” in his recital in Davies Symphony Hall. The Schnittke selection, on the other hand, was probably a “first contact” experience.

Having now had enough opportunities to listen to Duo Gazzana ECM albums, I always tend to be interested in what they will do next. While my enthusiasm Prokofiev is usually muted, I tend to look forward to opportunities to listen to previously unknown music. In this case I was particularly drawn to the rhetorical diversity across the four movements of the Opus 80 sonata. I am hoping that I shall have an opportunity to listen to this music in recital in the not-too-distant future.

Where Schnittke is concerned, I am always looking forward to his tongue-in-cheek rhetoric. The title of his selection suggests music that was composed for the interest of teachers more than students! He wrote this piece in the year after he had composed the tongue-in-cheek Suite in the Old Style. That rhetoric can also be found in “Gratulationsrondo;” but the edges are not quite as sharp! It is a bit long to make for an engaging encore selection, but it definitely has the makings of a definitive punctuation mark.

DSQ’s Stravinsky-Schnittke Connection

Last night the Danish String Quartet (DSQ) made its third visit to Herbst Theatre to perform a recital presented by San Francisco Performances. Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen took the leadership chair with Frederik Øland on second violin, violist Asbjørn Nørgaard, and cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin. Much of the program was devoted to traditional Nordic music; and, to politely suggest that they have been keeping up with news about our President, many of those selections originated in Greenland.

This attention to folk music was preceded by works of two major twentieth-century composers, Igor Stravinsky and Alfred Schnittke. The contrast could not have been more engaging. Stravinsky’s Suite Italienne consists of selected movements from the ballet “Pulcinella,” whose score appropriated compositions by Giovanni Pergolesi. The composer clearly enjoyed having his way with eighteenth-century Italian tradition, and his instrumentation had some raucous moments to underscore the ballet’s narrative. DSQ provided its own arrangement of the suite’s movements, which may not have been quite as raucous but were still high-spirited.

Photograph of Alfred Schnittke in Moscow taken by Dmitri N. Smirnov, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

This was followed by Schnittke’s second string quartet. This composition also had a “background source” in the form of Russian church music. However, the composer’s capacity for intense dissonance tended to override any reflections on liturgical traditions. The thorns in Schnittke’s music are long and sharp, and I must confess that it took a fair amount of listening experience for me to begin to find my way through his string quartets. Nevertheless, last night it was clear that DSQ had a firm command of Schnittke’s unforgiving rhetorical stances. Now that I am more familiar with those stances, I could appreciate the intensity of DSQ’s interpretation of his music.

DSQ to Balance Traditional Music with 20C

The members of DSQ, “three Danes and one Norwegian cellist” (from the event page for their next SFP recital)

Next month the Danish String Quartet (DSQ) will return to Herbst Theatre for another recital presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP). The members of the ensemble have not changed since their last visit: violinists Frederik Øland and Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, who share the leadership chair, violist Asbjørn Nørgaard, and cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin. This will be their first appearance since their last visit in the fall of 2022, when they prepared a program for SFP consisting of works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Robert Schumann, and Benjamin Britten with an encore by Joseph Haydn.

This time, the second half of the program will be devoted to arrangements of traditional Nordic music, prepared collectively by the four members of the quartet. The program will begin with another of their arrangements, this time of music by Igor Stravinsky. Suite italienne consisted of compositions by Giambattista Pergolesi that Stravinsky had appropriated for his score for the one-act ballet “Pulcinella.” DSQ rearranged this orchestral suite for string quartet. As a result, there will be only one composer on the program whose music was not arranged. That will be Alfred Schnittke, whose second string quartet will be performed after the Stravinsky arrangement.

This performance will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 14. The venue will be Herbst Theatre, which many (most?) readers know is located in the heart of the Civic Center at 401 Van Ness Avenue, on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. Ticket prices will be $85, $75, and $65. As those readers probably also know, SFP has created a Web page for purchasing those tickets.

Matt Haimovitz Takes on Schnittke Cello Concerto

My interest in Alfred Schnittke probably predates my commitment to serious writing about music. The earliest additions to my collection of recordings were the CDs released by BIS in the late eighties. These were, for the most part, provocative; but they never failed to pique my curiosity. The first time he appeared on this site was at the end of April of 2007, when my obituary for Mstislav Rostropovich cited his interest in the "Suite in the Old Style,” which I was fortunate enough to hear him perform when I was living in Singapore.

I was reminded of that occasion when I learned that the latest album of cellist Matt Haimovitz is devoted entirely to a performance of Schnittke’s first cello concerto. This was completed in 1986, followed by a second concerto in 1990 (which was dedicated the Rostropovich). While the “Suite” was readily accessible (if one could appreciate the many tongue-in-cheek gestures), most of the Schnittke repertoire is known for sharper edges punctuating a rhetoric of despair. As an exile from the Soviet Union (for touring with “foreign” orchestras), Rostropovich could appreciate that rhetoric.

The Haimovitz album was released at the end of last month. As of this writing, its Pentatone Web page supports only download or streaming with no word as yet of a “physical” release. From a personal point of view, I would not recommend streaming. Those that know a thing or two about information theory will quickly appreciate that Schnittke’s compositions require far more “information bits” than can be easily managed in “real time.” Put in more pedestrian terms, any Schnittke recording requires several listening experiences before one can get one’s head around what the music is doing.

Matt Haimovitz playing Schnittke’s first cello concerto with Dennis Russell Davies leading the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra (photograph by Jeffrianne Young, from the booklet for the album being discussed)

That said, there is more than a generous share of expressiveness in Haimovitz’ cello work to encourage listener attention. He performs with the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra led by its Principal Conductor, Dennis Russell Davies. Even when composing a concerto, Schnittke could be very generous in letting all the different sonorities of the ensemble have a say in the matter. There is definitely no shortage of that diversity in his cello concerto!

It is almost two decades since I began to add Schnittke recordings to my collection, and I still look forward to encounters with new releases with enthusiasm!

Duo Gazzana Release New (and Diverse) Album

Cover of the album being discussed

I am not sure how the latest ECM New Series album of performances by Duo Gazzana came to my attention, since I have not been able to associate it with any recent entries in my Inbox! This should not be a surprise, since that album has no title other than the listening of the five contributing composers: Francis Poulenc, William Walton, Luigi Dallapiccola, Alfred Schnittke, and Valentin Silvestrov. (This is not their “order of appearance” that I encountered when I downloaded the tracks!)

That said, I have now listened to the album several times; and I am delighted to be able to add it to my library. When I last wrote about performances by the Italian sisters Natascia Gazzana (violin) and Raffaella Gazzana (piano), I gave them “high marks for eclecticism!” Those familiar with all five of the above composers will probably agree with me that the duo’s commitment to eclecticism is as strong as ever. In this case, however, I would further argue that there is also a generous share of wit across all five of the contributing composers.

Mind you, while Schnittke is definitely capable of tongue-in-cheek rhetoric, his tongue tends to be a forked one! Silvestrov’s wit, on the other hand, is one of twists and turns (although it is impressive how many he can pack into a mere five minutes)! Poulenc’s sonata, on the other hand, is basically a Gallic romp, which I have known (and loved) for more than several years. My impressions of Walton’s toccata, lasting about a quarter of an hour, tended to remind me of when I learned that he once conducted the Hoffnung Festival Orchestra with a fly swatter! The final track is Dallapiccola’s “Tartiniana seconda,” which I probably would appreciate more were my knowledge of Tartini more thorough!

My overall impression is that I was entertained by this album, but it was an entertainment that activated a generous number of my “little grey cells” (with apologies to Agatha Christie)!

Returning to Alfred Schnittke with “Fresh Ears”

Alfred Schnittke (photograph taken in Moscow on April 6, 1989 by © Dmitri N. Smirnov, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

This morning, after refreshing my recollections of the violin sonatas of Sergei Prokofiev while preparing to write about a forthcoming performance of his Opus 94a (second) violin sonata in D major at the San Francisco Conservatory, I realized that, in my Gidon Kremer anthology of chamber music, the all-Prokofiev CD was followed by one which began with a string trio by Alfred Schnittke. I honestly do not remember when I first encountered Schnittke, but it was definitely a “shock to the system.” Indeed, the shock was so strong that, when I was living in Singapore during the first half of the Nineties, I tended to keep my Schnittke CDs “under wraps.” Nevertheless, when I attended Mstislav Rostropovich’s recital in Singapore, I took comfort in the fact that his program included Schnittke’s “Suite in the Old Style” (in an arrangement for cello and piano).

Schnittke had a particular knack for taking the rhetoric of nostalgia and transforming it from the sentimental to the sarcastic. My guess is that most of those in the Singapore audience gave little thought to those rhetorical undercurrents. Rostropovich’s appearance was an “event;” and that was all that mattered. Mind you, while I was there, I had a friend (American) who clearly knew more about music than I did; but we tended to avoid any “deep end” discussions. He had his work as a teacher, and I had mine as an information technology researcher. I did not want to overstep my bounds, and I doubt that he wanted to either.

Now that I live in San Francisco, I can listen to as much Schnittke as I wish without worrying about the “context of my situation.” Ironically, it has been over a decade since I was able to attend a concert performance of his music. According to my archives, that would have been in May of 2011, back when Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg was Music Director of the New Century Chamber Orchestra (and when I was writing for Examiner.com). She was bold enough to couple his “Moz-Art á la Haydn” with Edward Elgar’s Opus 47, the allegro movement preceded by an introduction scored for full string ensemble and a string quartet of soloists. If any cobwebs had collected in my mind due to too much “conventional” listening, they were definitely blown away by the Schnittke offering!

This morning I had a similar experience with that string trio, which Schnittke had composed in 1985. By that time, his music was beginning to receive worldwide attention, thanks not only to Kremer but also to cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky. However, what struck me the most was not just the attentiveness to that trio by Kremer performing with violist Tabea Zimmermann and Heinrich Schiff on cello. Rather, it was how the three of them could sound like a full string ensemble. This probably was due to a richness in multi-string bowing, suggesting that all the resulting notes had to come from more than three players!

Sadly, Schnittke’s music did not fill an entire CD in Kremer’s anthology. The CD was roughly divided between Schnittke and Carl Maria von Weber. Mind you, that collection was released decades after Schnittke had died; and I have no idea how much say Kremer had in how the it was produced. Nevertheless, given Schnittke’s prankish reflections on “the old style” (which were originally scored for viola d’amore, harpsichord, and a fair amount of percussion … enough for two performers), I suspect that his spirit would have been amused by the partnership!

Anna Gourari Links Schnittke to Hindemith

Cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of Jensen Artists)

Around the middle of this month, ECM New Series released its first album of pianist Anna Gourari performing with an orchestra. She had previously released three solo albums, so this new release offered a new perspective for those following her work. She performed two twentieth-century compositions with the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana conducted by Markus Poschner. As of this writing, the album is available for MP3 download from an Amazon.com Web page; and the Web page for the CD is taking pre-orders for a release date of August 2.

The album begins with the more recent of these works, Alfred Schnittke’s 1979 concerto for piano and string orchestra, a single track with a duration somewhat short of 25 minutes. It concludes with “The Four Temperaments,” a composition by Paul Hindemith given also the more abstract title “Theme and Four Variations.” The music was commissioned by George Balanchine, and the resulting ballet is known only by the “Four Temperaments” title. Between these two performances is an orchestral account of Hindemith’s “Symphony: Mathis der Maler.” The subtitle is that of an opera Hindemith had been planning about the painter Matthias Grünewald, and thematic material from the symphony eventually found its way into that opera.

There is an old joke about the monorail being an idea of the future whose time had passed. In his youth Hindemith was an adventurous (and occasionally raucous) composer. As might be guessed, the Nazis dismissed his work as “degenerate;” and he was wise enough to leave Germany before it was too late. He eventually found his way to the United States, where he became a member of the Music faculty at Yale University. By that time his interest in the past seemed to have taken the lead over his more adventurous side. However, that shift had already begun when he was working on his symphony in 1934 and was just as evident in the ballet score. (Where Balanchine was concerned, Hindemith’s music was a far cry from what Igor Stravinsky was providing him.)

In that context, anyone listening to this new album is likely to find the Hindemith selections to be a trip down memory lane. For my part, those are good memories; but I doubt that I shall visit them very frequently! Schnittke, on the other hand, first became an “item” during the last quarter of the last century, due primarily to a generous number of releases of his music by BIS. Most of these were ambitiously thorny, interspersed, occasionally, with ironic (if not sarcastic) reflections on the “old style.” If Noël Coward was best known for his “talent to amuse,” Schnittke seemed determined to establish a talent to provoke; and there is no shortage of provocations in his concerto. One might even think of the “Concerto for Piano vs. Orchestra;” but P. D. Q. Bach was definitely funnier!

Some readers may recall my fondness for the joke that the monorail was “an idea of the future whose time had passed;” and, while I cannot argue with the skilled techniques of the performers on this new album, I fear that both Hindemith and Schnittke have become targets of that joke.

Melnikov Couples Composers with Keyboards

Alexander Melnikov (photograph by Marco Borggreve, from the San Francisco Performances announcement of his visit in 2018)

This coming Friday harmonia mundi will release a new solo album by keyboardist Alexander Melnikov. He has been a familiar presence here in San Francisco, primarily through the auspices of San Francisco Performances. Past programming has included two solo recitals and, most recently, a performance by his trio, whose other members are violinist Isabelle Faust and cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras.

In all my articles about those occasions, I referred to him as a pianist. However, the title of his new album is Fantasie: Seven Composers, Seven Keyboards. That required a noun with a broader scope! As many are likely to assume, Amazon.com has created a Web page for pre-orders of this new release.

The seven composers are as follows:

1. Johann Sebastian Bach
2. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach
3. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
4. Felix Mendelssohn
5. Frédéric Chopin
6. Ferrucio Busoni
7. Alfred Schnittke

The earliest instrument is a two-manual harpsichord created by Hans Ruckers II in 1624, but this served as a model for a reproduction made by Markus Fischinger in 2019. The most recent instrument is the Steinway D-274. This instrument has become so popular among concert pianists that it has its own Wikipedia page, which cites it as “the flagship of the Steinway & Sons piano company.”

Melnikov is clearly serious in his appreciation of how the construction (and, as a result, the sonorities) of the instrument has evolved over the centuries. In fact, he owns three of the early models:

1. Christopher Kern’s 2014 reproduction of a fortepiano made by Anton Walter in 1795
2. A fortepiano made by Alois Graff in 1828, restored by Edwin Beunk
3. An 1885 Érard piano dating from around 1885, restored by Markus Fischinger

That list leads me to wonder if Melnikov does not have his own Steinway, probably because he does not have room for it! Whatever the case may be, he clearly believes that it is important to play on an instrument whose sonorities would have been familiar to the composer.

I have to confess that I have been interested it this “proper pairing” of instrument and composer for many decades. Indeed, when I was responsible for arranging guest lecturers to visit the research laboratory where I worked in Connecticut, I managed to persuade Malcolm Bilson to give a lecture-demonstration about the eighteenth-century fortepiano. He had no trouble preparing for this, since he arrived at our lab with his instrument in his VW microbus.

Melnikov’s recording reminded me that Bilson’s visit marked the tip of an iceberg larger than I realized had existed. At the risk of tempting virulent disagreement, I would suggest that, on the basis of sonorities, the “piano as we know it” began to take shape relatively early in the nineteenth century (which, on this album, would mean the Mendelssohn selection). On the other hand, even after three or four listening experiences, I feel as if I am just beginning to get my head around the “steps to Parnassus” that lead from the eighteenth century to the contemporary Steinway.

In other words, I expect to spend a fair amount of time with this album, taking it for granted that Melnikov will be able to guide me through the six stages of transition that link Schnittke to Bach.

Masur’s Twentieth-Century Repertoire

The final account of the recordings made by conductor Kurt Masur collected in a 70-CD box set released by Warner Classics will address his twentieth-century repertoire. There is far less completeness in this portion of the collection than had been encountered in his nineteenth-century recordings. The only commitment to thoroughness can be found in the five piano concertos by Sergei Prokofiev, recordings made with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra featuring piano soloist Michel Béroff.

This provides a somewhat limited perspective on the composer, particularly since the only symphony included in the collection is the Opus 100 (fifth) symphony in B-flat major. This selection was recorded with the New York Philharmonic on an album that also included a not-particularly-satisfying collection of excerpts from the music for the Romeo and Juliet ballet. Somewhat better was the CD with the concert version of the music composed for Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky film and the Opus 20 Scythian suite, originally conceived as a score for “Ala i Lolli,” a ballet commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev who rejected the music.

Mind you, there is a considerable diversity in nationalities among the other twentieth-century selections. Thus, Prokofiev’s symphony is complemented by two symphonies by Dmitri Shostakovich: the Opus 60 “Leningrad” in C major and the Opus 113 “Babi Yar” (setting poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko) in B-flat minor, which is framed by recordings of Yevtushenko reading two of his poems (in Russian). There is also a recording of Gustav Mahler’s ninth symphony in D major, which provides a potentially viable context for the symphonic efforts of both Prokofiev and Shostakovich.

The only other concerto offering is the Opus 47 violin concerto in D minor by Jean Sibelius on an album which is filled out by three shorter compositions. This is a Leipzig CD featuring Thomas Zehetmair as the violin soloist. Nationalism can also be found in the contributions by Leoš Janáček and Zoltán Kodály. Curiously, Béla Bartók is absent from this collection.

Another coupling involves familiar works by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel on a single volume. The one departure from “the usual” is Debussy’s L. 104 “Rapsodie,” scored for alto saxophone and piano and orchestrated by Jean Roger-Ducasse. A more interesting coupling is that of Kurt Weill with Alban Berg. The Weill selection is the score for the ballet “The Seven Deadly Sins” with a libretto by Bertolt Brecht. This is followed by the symphonic movements that Alban Berg extracted from his score for the opera Lulu (which is not quite as systematic in exploring the deadly sins).

The only other vocal offering is the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss. This is a New York Philharmonic recording featuring soprano Deborah Voigt. That performance is preceded by two familiar tone poems, “Don Juan” and “Death and Transfiguration.”

There is also a Philharmonic recording of Benjamin Britten’s Opus 66 War Requiem, featuring vocal soloists Carol Vaness (soprano), Jerry Hadley (tenor), and Thomas Hampson (baritone). Mind you, there will always be those that prefer the recording that Britten himself conducted with tenor Peter Pears and baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. While I am definitely hooked on both of those vocalists, I cannot say the same for the soprano that Britten conducted, Galina Vishnevskaya. Apparently, no one took the trouble to coach her on the proper pronunciation of the Latin Requiem texts; and her account of “Liber scriptus” verges on the downright painful. Vaness is much more at home with singing Latin.

Then there is an album that is not, strictly speaking, a Mazur album. It presents pianist Fazil Say playing the music of George Gershwin, providing his own arrangements where necessary. Masur and the Philharmonic appear only for Ferde Grofé’s arrangement of “Rhapsody in Blue” and the set of variations on “I Got Rhythm.”

That leaves only two offerings that can be classified as “bleeding edge” compositions. The older of them is the set of variations on “America” that Charles Ives composed for organ, which was then orchestrated by William Schumann. The more recent is the cello concerto by Alfred Schnittke, featuring cellist Natalia Gutman performing with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. This left me wishing that Masur had conducted more Schnittke selections and that there had been a recording of his performance of the music by Sofia Gubaidulina that he led with the San Francisco Symphony.

Kremer’s DG Chamber Music: 20th Century

Gidon Kremer performing at his 2008 Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival (photograph by Guus Krol, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

Readers may recall that, in the Deutsche Grammophon (DG) 22-CD box set of concerto recordings featuring violinist Gidon Kremer, the portion devoted to the twentieth-century repertoire was the largest. Mind you, not all of the compositions were concertos, but they were all concertante performances. In a sharp and unexpected contrast, the twentieth-century portion of the chamber music anthology was the smallest portion of the DG collection. It amounts to three and one-half discs with Alfred Schnittke sharing one of the discs with Carl Maria von Weber. Schnittke is one of the three composers found in the concerto anthology, the other two being Béla Bartók and Alban Berg.

The only composer to be allocated an entire CD is Sergei Prokofiev (both of whose concertos were absent from the DG concerto collection). The chamber music CD presents three of his compositions, the two sonatas, Opus 80 in F minor and Opus 94a in D major (reworking the Opus 94 flute sonata), and the Opus 35bis set of five “melodies.” Only the Opus 115 solo violin sonata is missing from this collection in representing Prokofiev.

The most interesting CD amounts to a “journey to the Second Viennese School.” It begins a quarter-century before the beginning of the twentieth century with the quartet for piano, violin, viola, and cello composed by a teenaged Gustav Mahler. This is followed by one of Arnold Schoenberg’s earliest compositions, simply called a “piece” in the key of D minor for violin and piano.

The remainder of the CD explores the ambiguities of atonality. Both Schoenberg and Berg share their offerings with Schoenberg’s other best-known pupil, Anton Webern. Webern begins the “set” with his Opus 7 collection of four pieces for violin and piano, composed in 1910. This is followed by a bit of an oddity. One of Alban Berg’s most sophisticated serial compositions is his “Kammerkonzert” (chamber concerto), scored for piano and violin soloists accompanied by an ensemble of thirteen wind instruments. By all rights this piece should have been recorded in its entirety. However, all that is included is an arrangement of the second of its three movements for piano, violin, and clarinet.

Even more disconcerting is the following account of Schoenberg’s Opus 45 1946 string trio. This is chillingly macabre music, which Schoenberg used to document the experience of his heart attack. I have had the good fortune to listen to recital performances of this music that have scared the living daylights out of me. (The older I get, the scarier the experience.) Kremer’s recorded performance with violist Veronika Hagen and cellist Clemens Hagen is, if you will pardon the expression, disconcertingly bloodless. The trio is followed by the Opus 47 “Phantasy” for violin and piano, another composition that I have rapturously enjoyed in a recital performance setting. Sadly, neither Kremer nor pianist Oleg Maisenberg come close to capturing a spirit that, as violinist György Pauk once observed, makes you want to dance.

The remaining CD provided an interesting (if not informative) perspective on the first half of the twentieth century. It begins with two sonatas, both of which were completed in 1921. The first of these is Bartók’s first violin sonata, followed by Leoš Janáček’s only sonata for that coupling of violin and piano. When I consulted Halsey Stevens’ biography of Bartók, I was not particularly surprised at the absence of Janáček from the index; but their respective sonatas definitely make for some interesting side-by-side listening. They are followed by Olivier Messiaen’s set of five variations of a theme, composed for violin and piano in 1932. This is before-Messiaen-became-Messiaen music, which definitely has a spirit of its own; but neither Kremer nor his accompanist, Martha Argerich, gave much evidence of grasping that spirit.

Personally, I am glad that ECM Records provided a platform after Kremer formed his Kremerata Baltica; and their recordings to date all feel like a breath of fresh air when compared with these DG offerings.

Gidon Kremer on Warner: Twentieth Century

As was observed at the beginning of this month, the lion’s share of performances offered in the Warner Classics release Gidon Kremer: The Warner Collection consists of works composed during the twentieth century. While this involves many of the “usual suspects,” such as Igor Stravinsky, Jean Sibelius, Béla Bartók, Paul Hindemith, Alban Berg, and Benjamin Britten, Kremer was far more interested in using the recording studio to bring attention to composers that were less known when he was preparing programs for his albums. This was a bold move, because much of this music challenged listeners with its thorny rhetoric, while other selections came off as decidedly remote from concert hall settings.

Original album cover showing Gidon Kremer, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Yuri Bashmet (from the Amazon.com Web page)

The largest share of those thorny offerings came from the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke. Like many, I was unaware of the composer until the emergence of compact discs and the release of The Alfred Schnittke Edition by BIS Records, based in Sweden. As previously observed, Kremer’s performances of Schnittke’s music can also be found in his albums for the Deutsche Grammophon (DG) 22-CD box set of concerto recordings; but the Warner collection offers a far more extensive and diverse account of that composer’s catalog. There is even an element of “star power” in the CD that has Kremer playing two Schnittke selections with violist Yuri Bashmet and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.

The other composer to receive generous attention is Astor Piazzolla. One might say that Rostropovich was responsible for bringing Piazzolla out of the Argentinian tango dance halls when the latter composed “Le Grand Tango” for the former. Rostropovich gave the work its first performance in 1990, and later in that decade Kremer would work with several arrangers to prepare “concert versions” of Piazzolla’s music.

Ironically, the most familiar of those undertakings, an arrangement by Leonid Desyatnikov best known as The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, is not included in the Warner anthology. Instead, Kremer was involved in a project to record far less familiar music by Piazzolla, the tango operita (tango opera) “María de Buenos Aires,” which was first performed in Buenos Aires on May 8, 1968. Readers may recall that a recording of this one-act opera was discussed on this site in March of 2019. The instrumentation followed that of Piazzolla’s quintet for the tango halls: bandoneon, violin, piano, guitar, and bass. Desyatnikov’s arrangement keeps the bandoneon, violin, piano, and bass but then adds flute, viola, cello, and percussion. Sadly, neither a libretto nor a synopsis is provided; and the titles of the tableaux (cuadros) are given only in Spanish.

The entire opera fills two CDs. There is then a third CD of Piazzolla compositions provided by three different arrangers. Desyatnikov’s contribution is a transcription for violin and string orchestra of “Tango Ballet,” which Piazzolla originally composed for string quartet. This is followed by “Concierto del Angel,” transcribed by Rolf Gupta for violin, bandoneon, bass, piano, and string orchestra. As was the case with Four Seasons, this is a compilation of four individual Piazzolla compositions. The final transcription is by José Bragato, who arranged Four Seasons for piano trio. “Tres piezas para orquesta de camera,” scored for piano and string orchestra, is an arrangement of three short pieces for cello and piano, which were collected and published as Piazzolla’s Opus 4.

Desyatnikov’s original music can be found on an album entitled Le Cinema. The album, as a whole, includes both original compositions and arrangements. Kremer performs with pianist Oleg Maisenberg, along with Andrey Boreyko conducting the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the orchestra originally founded in 1946 by American occupation forces. Piazzolla’s music can also be found on this album, along with two selections by Nino Rota (Federico Fellini’s preferred composer). This album also marks the only appearances of Dmitri Shostakovich, Darius Milhaud, and Toru Takemitsu.

The other “themed” album is entitled From my Home. “Home” refers not only to Latvia, where Kremer was born, but also to the other two Baltic states, Lithuania and Estonia. While Kremer would subsequently champion Arvo Pärt in recordings he released on ECM, this earlier album includes only the 1992 version of “Fratres,” scored for violin, string orchestra (the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie), and percussion. Pēteris Vasks (also Latvian) can be found on this album with his “Musica Dolorosa,” scored for string orchestra; but there is also an entire CD devoted to two Vasks compositions. This is the only CD in the collection in which Kremer is performing with his Kamerata Baltica.

Taken as a whole, this collection of twentieth-century music is a mixed bag. Some may find this frustrating for the unfamiliarity of much of the content.  Others will laud the opportunity to encounter unknown compositions by barely-known (if at all) composers. Such novelty is most accessible when useful background information has been provided, but the text of the accompanying booklet offers more information about Kremer than about his repertory choices. The good news is that there is much on the Internet to satisfy those more interested in the music itself.

Gidon Kremer on DG: Twentieth Century

My third and final account of the Deutsche Grammophon (DG) 22-CD box set of concerto recordings featuring violinist Gidon Kremer will focus on the twentieth-century repertoire. As I observed, the nineteenth-century share of the albums offered the fewest number of selections. In contrast the twentieth-century share is the largest by a long shot. Very few of the offerings can be classified as “usual suspects;” and some of them involve unexpected and eccentric shifts. In addition, there is a far more extensive account of “non-concerto” selections. Furthermore, in addition to “usual suspects” ensembles and conductors, the twentieth-century performances provide the first opportunities to listen to Kremer’s own chamber orchestra, Kremerata Baltica.

The fact is that, for most listeners, only the first CD in this section is likely to be familiar. It couples Béla Bartók’s first violin concerto with Alban Berg’s only violin concerto. The Bartók concerto is conducted by Pierre Boulez leading the Berlin Philharmonic. The Berg is performed by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Colin Davis.

“For the record” Kremer performed the Bartók with the San Francisco Symphony in October of 2015 under the baton of Andrey Boreyko. I had thought that he had played the Berg with Michael Tilson Thomas, but I was unable to confirm that proposition. As a more general fun fact: the Berg was recorded in 1985 and became one of the earliest “Digital Classics” releases on Philips.

Where the overall content of this category is concerned, it is clear that Kremer wanted to get on to more adventurous undertakings. Most important seems to have been his desire to promote the compositions of Alfred Schnittke coupled with a somewhat unconventional perspective on the music of Dmitri Shostakovich. What is interesting about the latter is that there is only one “straight” account of Shostakovich’s music. That is the recording of the Opus 129 (second) violin concerto, performed with Seiji Ozawa conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

This selection is coupled with Opus 125, whose recording is a curious hybrid. In the Shostakovich catalog, Opus 125 is a re-orchestration of Robert Schumann’s Opus 129 cello concerto in A minor. Ironically, Schumann himself had prepared the violin part that Kremer played for his recording. More idiosyncratic is the arrangement of Shostakovich’s Opus 134 violin sonata. This was reworked into a concertante performance with the solo violin accompanied by percussion and string orchestra. The arrangement was a joint effort by Michail Zinman and Andrei Pushkarev, the latter being the percussion soloist on the recording. This may also be the earliest recording of Kremerata Baltica.

Schnittke was a tough nut to crack when I first encountered him, primarily through BIS Records, based in Sweden. That was my own “first contact” with that composer’s 1966 (second), which violin concerto, which Kremer recorded with the Sinfonieorchester Basel conducted by Heinz Holliger. I had become curious about the BIS recordings after listening to performances of his string quartets by the Kronos Quartet. There was an almost violent aggression in Schnittke’s rhetoric, and I would later discover that even his capacity for wit often involved dangerously sharp edges. The good news is that Kremer never tries to smooth over any of those sharp edges.

I was struck that Schnittke’s fifth concerto grosso was released on an album with Philip Glass’ first violin concerto. On the DG album Christoph von Dohnányi conducts the Vienna Philharmonic; and placing Glass before Schnittke amounts to a chronological order of the compositions. I was also glad to see that the Kremerata Baltica discography included Glass’ second concerto, which was entitled “The American Four Seasons.”

Conductor Riccardo Chailly and violinist Gidon Kremer on the original vinyl cover of their performance of Darius Milhaud’s “Le Bœuf sur le toit” (from the Amazon.com Web page for this album)

One of the more unexpected offerings in this collection is a performance of Darius Milhaud’s “Le Bœuf sur le toit” (the ox on the roof), which the composer had envisaged as (in his words) “background to any Charlie Chaplin silent movie.” This was originally scored for small orchestra, but Milhaud subsequently arranged the score for both violin and orchestra and violin and piano. In addition Milhaud’s Les Six colleague Arthur Honegger provided a violin cadenza. Kremer recorded the violin/orchestra version (including the Honegger cadenza) with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Chailly. While I was impressed with how Kremer negotiated the Honegger cadenza, I felt that the departure from the original instrumentation diminished many of the amusingly sleazy qualities of the score.

The fact is that the wide diversity of content in this particular segment of the Kremer anthology is likely to evoke an equally wide diversity of reactions. Different listeners may react in different ways, but I doubt that many would buy into the repertoire in its entirety. On the other hand that broad extent says a lot about how music was being made over the last half-century. All of these recordings make for a valuable time-capsule, even if it is not necessarily a consistently engaging one.

Returning to Mount Beethoven

The replacement for my defective Brilliant Classics collection of the complete works of Ludwig van Beethoven has finally arrived, after a long wait, apparently due to the failure of the United States Postal Service (USPS) to process properly the material that Collectors' Choice had provided under their exchange agreement. If I had to make an educated guess (where, in this case, "educated" would honor John Dewey's definition as "informed by experience"), it would be that the package to be returned never made it out of San Francisco. This is, after all, a postal system that managed to lose my property tax bill one year, which is why I now have an Outlook reminder to check the City Web site by a certain date if the bill has not yet shown up in the mail. I gather from my wife that the Postal Service is offering more and more "do it yourself" services (like weighing packages and then allowing you to purchase the required postage, all at a single "work station"); but it is still the case that human hands are required to get an object from here to there. Given that we are obliged to take that word "service" seriously, this is a case of "service pathology" that is far more serious than the situation at my favorite target, the San Francisco Public Library, or my more recent complaints about the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum. Presumably the "quality of service" of the USPS falls under the jurisdiction of the Postal Regulatory Committee (PRC); but, if the PRC is paying as much attention to the USPS as they are to maintaining their Web site with timely and useful information, then anyone depending on the USPS for even part of the job of getting anything "from here to there" is likely to be in very deep yogurt! So much for ranting over an inordinately long wait!

Since the entire Beethoven collection had to be replaced due to a single defective disc (due to the decision of Brilliant Classics to avoid direct communication with a customer when this problem arises), I am now faced with the prospect of listening to all of the discs in the replacement package. Needless to say, I do not regard this as a hardship, particularly when this second attempt to ascend "Mount Beethoven" begins with recordings of the nine symphonies by the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig under the baton of Kurt Masur. I have a history of listing to "live" Masur performances that probably covers about 25 years and actually began with his leading the San Francisco Symphony in a truly "ear-opening" performance of Beethoven's Opus 60 fourth symphony. These recordings have given me the opportunity to experience the ways in which he can tease subtleties out of all nine of these familiar works and are therefore as important to my learning to listen as are my two collections of these symphonies performed by Wilhelm Furtwängler (along with a variety of individual recordings). I have not always been entirely satisfied with Masur, as was the case a few years ago when he came to San Francisco to conduct Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem;" but my disappointments have been heavily outweighed by performances that have been as informative as they were exciting, such as his performance of the second cello concerto by Alfred Schnittke. Thus, I continue to be more than satisfied that Masur was chosen to "represent the Beethoven symphonies" in this particular collection and have no problems with making another pass through this particular cycle.

Awakening from the Nightmare of History

I first became aware of the music of Alfred Schnittke when I was living in Los Angeles and attending regularly the subscription series of concerts given by the Kronos Quartet at UCLA. The first of these series I attended covered the first three of Schnittke's string quartets; and, since there did not appear to be any budget for program notes, my initial exposure to Schnittke, the first of the quartets, left me completely in the dark, probably frustrated as much as I was mystified. Having the second quartet as my second dose did not improve the situation. It was only by persevering until I heard the third quartet that things began to make sense.

By this time I knew that Schnittke was Russian and that Dmitri Shostakovich had been a major influence on his work. This was a time when we were beginning to appreciate the strain that Shostakovich had endured in his efforts to survive as a composer in the Soviet Union. There was even a play based on a fictitious meeting that Joseph Stalin called with both Shostakovich and Serge Prokofiev, basically to let them know, on no uncertain terms, that his self-perceived obligations to the legacy of the Russian Revolution were far more important than any of their attempts to be "revolutionary" in artistic creativity, since in the interests of the proletariat, such activities were fundamentally elitist (to invoke an adjective being used rather heavily right now). This play provided a good way to set the context for why I had suggested that Shostakovich's fifth symphony (now generally regarded as one of the "great hits" of the twentieth-century symphonic repertoire) was best "viewed through the lens of a pious acknowledgement of authority" and why Shostakovich's surface-level piety was actually "invoking irony in ways that would elude the perceptions of more superficial listeners" (such as Stalin).

It is likely that by 1983, when Schnittke composed his third quartet, he was aware of what Shostakovich had endured. His studies at the Moscow Conservatory must have included a "Soviet-approved" version of history, which included the notorious description of the Shostakovich fifth as "a Soviet artist's reply to just criticism." Whether or not Schnittke ever had (or took) the opportunity to read James Joyce, he very likely shared with Stephen Dedalus (in the "Nestor" episode of Ulysses) the conviction that history "is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." If Shostakovich tried to deal with his personal nightmare of political history through irony, Schnittke seems to have turned to metaphor by taking on the authority of music history imposed by both his training and subsequent teaching responsibilities. On this "playing field" he could more easily get away with ridicule as an alternative to Shostakovich's cryptic ironies.

We see one of the earliest examples of Schnittke's strategy in his first violin sonata, composed in 1963. This was an effort to work with the twelve-tone system technique of Arnold Schoenberg; but he called the result "a tonal world with atonal means." It was also a reflection of Shostakovich's thinly-veiled flirtations with popular music, particularly when, in the final movement of this sonata, he managed to twist his twelve-tone row around to reveal a principle theme that is basically "La Cucaracha," thus ridiculing the historical burdens of both the Soviet system and the Western obsession with Schoenberg's legacy.

This sonata can be heard as a bit of muscle-flexing in preparation for his 1972 "Suite in the Old Style, for violin and piano or harpsichord." This begins, innocently enough, as "a pious acknowledgement" of the authority that the study of music still assigns of seventeenth-century practices; but, as Schnittke leads us through his five movements, it becomes clear that he is more interested in showing us how frayed the fabric of that authority has become. His sense of ridicule thus progresses from subtle to blatant without ever wallowing in anger.

By the time of the third quartet, he is more favorably inclined towards history while still guarding against history-worship. On the very first page of the score, he introduces three statements that pretty much span music history as it is currently studied:

1. A cadential phrase from a "Stabat Mater" by Orlando di Lasso
2. The principle fugue subject from Ludwig van Beethoven's Opus 133
3. Shostakovich's "signature" motif, DSCH (D, E flat, C, B)

These three seeds cultivate each other, sprouting tendrils that weave among each other for the (trying to swim?) in Richard Wagner's leitmotif for the Rhine River. History may still be a nightmare, but it can be endured if one applies the right level of surrealistic humor.

Unfortunately, Schnittke suffered a stroke in 1985 that not only sent him into a coma but also led to his being declared clinically dead several times before his recovery. However, he was never in good health after that recovery; and this may have influenced his outlook on history. Thus, in 1988 he composed a piano quartet whose first movement was a very early (1877) sonata movement by Gustav Mahler (whose later years were also plagued by bad health) and whose second scherzo movement was thoroughly Schnittke at his most aggressive approach to late-twentieth-century idioms. The few sketches Mahler had left for the scherzo are in among those idioms; but it is unclear whether they are a nightmare of history, an invocation of the Sehnsucht found in so much of Mahler's music, or a combination of the two.
Certainly, as Schnittke's health deteriorated with his age, his humor deteriorated along with it. During my time in Singapore I remember hearing that one of his last symphonies was so intense that, when it was performed by the New York Philharmonic, conductor Kurt Masur strongly suggested that the concert was unsuitable for children.

I do not come across many reports of performances of Schnittke these days. Several years ago, on one of his visits to the San Francisco Symphony, Masur conducted a truly gripping performance of his second concerto for cello from that final period of his life. I also had the opportunity to hear one violin recital that included the first sonata; and, while I can no longer remember the soloist, I do remember that he took the time to provide the audience with some background (including the "Cucaracha" reference) before beginning the performance. Since August will be the tenth anniversary of Schnittke's death, one would think this would be a good time to hear this music; but, at least here in San Francisco, I seem to be the only one with that idea!

Remembering Rostropovich

I first heard the news of Rostropovich's death on my XM BBC feed, so I made it a point to check out the story on the Web site. My one opportunity to hear Rostropovich in concert was at a recital he gave in Singapore. I was particularly delighted that he included the cello version of Schnittke's "Suite in the Old Style." On the surface this appears as sentimental nostalgia, and I suspect that it is still heard that way by most audiences everywhere. However, Schnittke had a sarcastic streak in his nostalgia that Rostropovich handled with politic delicacy, making it clear only to those who knew how to hear it. Programming an anti-authoritarian like Schnittke in Singapore involved a certain amount of risk, but the risk was a subtle one that Rostropovich handled with aplomb.

The BBC announcer tried to portray Rostropovich as an artist who preferred to avoid politics but could not always do so. Find this hard to believe on the basis of his own reflection of the letter he wrote to Pravda in support of Solzhenitsyn back in 1970:

The best step was not found in music, but in one page of this letter. Since that moment my conscience was clean and clear.

I think it would be fairer to say that Rostropovich was strongly political without being blatant about it. That was the spirit in which he introduced Singapore to Schnittke.