Tag Archive: classical


Innervisions: Arnold Schoenberg, the Painter

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January 22, 2012

Schoenberg's "Gehendes Selbst-Portrait" / "Going Self-Portrait," 1911. All images courtesy of the Arnold Schönberg Centre, Vienna*

In a prior piece on Alban Berg (1885-1935) I pointed to a 1910 painting of the composer.  (You can click here to view it.)  The painter was Berg’s composition teacher, Arnold Schoenberg.  The idea there was that the portrait leaves us with a faint trace of life in pre-war Vienna – a period which, as Stefan Zweig idealized it in The World of Yesterday, was for the citizens of that city an “age of security.”

In later letters, Schoenberg would also recall the period as a time of peace and pause, before that age of war and unrest when twentieth century European history seesawed into darkness.  With a view to the composer’s creative life, the pre-war years find Schoenberg undertaking his earliest experiments with atonal composition – listen to the Six Little Piano Pieces of 1911, for instance – and in this respect mark his first soundings into the uncharted depths of the future.  But they were also the years in which he experimented most concentratedly with painting.

Enter Schoenberg the painter.

"Blue Self-Portrait" (February 1910)

From 1908-1912 Schoenberg produced paintings and sketches of distinctive style.  While he was hesitant to consider himself part of an established school of any kind, his work is generally recognized to orbit the Expressionist movement.  For a short time, Schoenberg even belonged to Wassily Kandinsky’s Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) group, a circle of friends who held that the ultimate aim of art was to seize and give expression to the spiritual dimensions of experience.

In a telling 1911 letter to Kandinsky, Schoenberg expresses his belief in the unconscious character of artistic perception:

"Hass" / "Hate" (October 1910)

“. . . I am sure that our work has much in common – and indeed in the most important respects: In what you call the ‘unlogical’ and I call the ‘elimination of the conscious will in art’. . . .  Every formal procedure which aspires to traditional effects is not completely free from conscious motivation.  But art belongs to the unconscious! One must express oneself!  Express oneself directly!  Not one’s taste, or one’s upbringing, or one’s intelligence, knowledge or skill.  Not all these acquired characteristics, but that which is inborn, instinctive. . . . But whoever is capable of listening to himself, recognizing his own instincts, and also engrossing himself reflectively in every problem, will not need such crutches.  One does not need to be a pioneer to create in this way, only a man who takes himself seriously – and thereby takes seriously that which is the true task of humanity in every intellectual or artistic field: to recognize, and to express what one has recognized!!!  This is my belief.”**

In this way, many of Schoenberg’s paintings aim less to represent the world in its outward semblance than to capture things as they “really” are on the subjective plane: the world refracted through the lens of the inner eye.

"Denken" / "Thinking" (October 1910)

Consider “Thinking,” the painting immediately above.  It’s just one expression of thinking in its most immediate or unconscious sense: the subjective experience of thinking in a manner that’s unmediated by the concepts that ordinarily order, the lines that frequently frame conscious thought.  It’s a glimpse of the mind’s eye, the artist’s experience freed from the terms of traditional perspective.

"Blauer Blick" / "Blue Gaze" (1910)

If the perspective in Schoenberg’s paintings feels askew, it’s because artistic expression in the expressionistic mode isn’t meant to capture the world as it outwardly appears to us through our sensory faculties.   This orientation, like art itself, is ultimately born of the unconscious.  Freed from both the mind-forged manacles of conscious thought and the shackles of sensory perception, the objects of the external world fade.

Schoenberg’s Gazes

What is experience without the tether of the senses?  Schoenberg’s mesmerizing set of visions and gazes gives us some feeling for his conception of it.  Nature abandoned, the artist inwardly encounters gazes rather than faces:

"Blick" / "Gaze" (May 1910)

“I painted gazes . . . .  That is something that only I could have done, for it is in my nature and is fully opposed to the nature of an actual painter.  I have never seen faces, but rather, where I have seen into others’ eyes, only their gazes.  From this is also happens that I can recreate the gaze of a man.  A painter, however, captures with a glance the entire human being – I only his soul.”***

According to Schoenberg’s view of artistic experience, at least, these gazes subsist on a plane of perception where everything is illuminated by the light of the unconscious.  They are visions – let’s call them innervisions – beyond the pale of the senses.  It isn’t important whether Schoenberg’s conception of artistic perception is wholly accurate; more crucial is the recognition that experience (both conscious and unconscious) is rich and layered, that there are many different ways of perceiving it – and that art is one very real part of it.

What’s ultimately important is Schoenberg’s belief that the vision of the creative artist isn’t veiled by custom.  Instead, one task of his imaginative work is to pierce the fabric of convention – a life of humdrum habit – and to tune in to a key of experience to which we customarily grow deaf.  In “listening to himself,” the artist’s aim is to probe the innermost reaches of the self and to translate that which he inwardly hears into a form that we, the onlookers, can outwardly witness.

Schoenberg’s paintings stand as glimpses into the creative depths of one of the twentieth century’s great composers: innervisions of a man who strove for art that was decidedly more than meets the eye.

"Christus" / "Christ" (October 1910)

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References and notes:

  • *  All images appear courtesy of the Arnold Schönberg Centre in Vienna.  You can visit them here for a “complete printed overview of Schönberg’s pictoral works.”
  • **  In a letter of January 24, 1911, A Schoenberg Reader, edited by Joseph Auner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 90-91.
  • ***  My translation.  The original German reads:

“Ich habe Blicke gemalt […] Das ist etwas, was nur ich getan haben konnte, denn es ist aus meiner Natur heraus und ist der Natur eines wirklichen Malers vollkommen entgegengesetzt.  Ich habe niemals Gesichter gesehen, sondern, da ich den Menshen ins Auge gesehen habe, nur ihre Blicke.  Daher kommt es auch, dass ich den Blick eines Menschen nachmachen kann.  Ein Maler aber erfasst mit einem Blick den ganzen Menschen – ich nur seine Seele.”

(Cited in Elmar Budde, “‘Ut musica pictura – ut pictura musica’: Musik und Bild. Ein Rückblick nach vorn zu Arnold Schönberg,” in Der Maler Arnold Schönberg: Bericht zum Symposium, 11-13 September 2003.  Published 2004 by Universität für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Wien, Wissenschaftszentrum Arnold Schönberg.)

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Merry Humbug: A Classical Christmas with Praetorius, Schütz, and Bach (featuring Heino and Hasselhoff)

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December 24, 2011

David Hasselhumbug - "The Night Before Christmas"

Christmas time is here, and with it the bescrooged revelation that people will use the festive season as an excuse to listen to some of the most torturous music to have been conjured in the human brain.  We should all, of course, be free to listen to whatever we feel pleases us most, and I have no trouble watching people listen to music – whatever the kind – on headphones.  But there’s a marked difference between the plotted murder in a private study and the circus of a public execution in town square, and one problem is that prefab holiday schmaltz greets you in the most public of spaces.  Picture Christmas music extending its net over the crowds in a shopping mall food court.  Merry humbug!

Someone was kind enough to put together this humorous pictorial run-through of the “Fifty Worst Christmas Albums of All Time.”  There’s something wowingly warped about so many of the albums pictured there – in the twilight zone manner, say, of North Korean propaganda posters.  So it has become my seasonal obligation to remember that two of the more otherworldly artists on that list – Hasselhoff and Heino – are not the only words that begin with the letter H.

Humbug!  

Happily, like Jacob Marley, Hasselhoff’s career as a pop artist is as “dead as a door-nail” – “a coffin-nail” – and future generations will chiefly remember the ghostly Heino for his memorable album art.

(Allow me here to link parenthetically to one of the most remarkable and utterly confounding holiday moments, Christmas with Heino, which is seemingly without parallel and possibly the stuff of pure transcendence.)

Jest aside, Christmas in Germany has not always been all Heino and Hasselhoff.  It was after all a German (and another “H”), Georg Friedrich Handel, who with the Messiah in 1742 gave the English-speaking world its most famous choral Christmas work.

Since Handel’s Messiah continues to fill concert houses the world-over, I want to point casually to three other masterworks (of German origin) that could be as mandatory a part of one’s holiday season as Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Vince Guaraldi’s “A Charlie Brown Christmas” album, and the act of routinely spiking the eggnog.

I. Michael Praetorius: Mass for Christmas Morning (~1620)

Praetorius (1571–1621), possibly the first historically significant composer of Lutheran church music, put together his Christmas mass at some point towards the end of his life.  In a recording by Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort we have one of the more remarkable performances of Christmas music on the market.  The album is one in a line of many McCreesh projects that attempt to reconstruct the experience of being in the particular time and place of a work’s genesis.

Listen here for a taste of what it might have been like to attend a Lutheran mass on Christmas morning in 1620 Dresden.  It’s an ambitious recording that breathes history, and as a musical experience, it’s incredible.

II. Heinrich Schütz: Weinachtshistorie (1664)

Schütz (1585–1672) was nearly 80 years of age when he published his Christmas Story in 1664.  As a young man, Schütz had studied under Gabrieli (and later Monteverdi) in Venice, the then-centre of European music.  In an attempt to write music fit for the ostentatious interior of St. Mark’s basilica, Gabrieli had taken to writing music on a grand scale: Dividing his choir and instrumentalists among the upper galleries on all sides of the room, he inaugurated the so-called polychoral style.  Schütz returned to Germany, heavily influenced by the musical life of Catholic Venice, and he took up work principally in Dresden, where he devoted his remaining decades to the composition of sacred music.  Like Luther, Schütz freed up the German language, and his Christmas Story of 1664 – which you can listen to here – is a fine and festive example of his art.

III. Johann Sebastian Bach: Christmas Oratorio (1734)

And where else to end this quick jaunt through Luther-land than with Bach (1685-1750), to whom all roads seem to lead?  You can listen to the opening movement of his Christmas Oratorio here.  Anyone who’s visited Leipzig’s St. Thomas Church (Thomaskirche) won’t have difficulty picturing the periwiged Bach leading his musicians on a Christmas afternoon in 1734:  Sunlight warms the stained-glass windows; a seasonal, communal calm meets the crisp air.  And then a thought – the thought of Heino, of Hasselhoff, creeps in.  Humbug!

Johann Sebastian Humbug (stained-glass window of Bach in the Thomaskirche, Leipzig.

Bach Humbug!  Merry, merry Humbug!
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Suggested Classical Recordings:
  • Praetorius: Mass for Christmas Morning (Paul McCreesh & the Gabrieli Consort; Archiv, 1994).
  • Heinrich Schütz: Weihnachts-Historie (Rene Jacobs & the Concerto Vocale; Hamonia Mundi, 2011).
  • J.S. Bach: Weihnachtsoratorium / Christmas Oratorio (Nikolaus Hanoncourt & the Concentus Musicus Wien (Teldec, 1993).
Very Special Mention:
  • Vince Guaraldi Trio: A Charlie Brown Christmas (Fantasy, 1965).
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Pablo Casals (I): Bach’s Cello Suites

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September 28, 2011

Casals, Abbaye Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa, 1954 (copyright Yousuf Karsh)

No conversation about historic recordings of J.S. Bach’s music can begin to take flight without mention of Pablo Casals’ early discs of the Six Suites for Solo Cello.  And no musician has been more closely associated with the Suites than the Catalan cellist who first discovered a dusty score of the set in a small shop on a Barcelona side street.  That was in 1890, just as he was entering his teens.  Casals would later tour them in the interwar years, eventually giving them relative permanence on record, both in sessions at Abbey Road and in Paris (1936-39).

Watch him perform the first half of the opening Suite in this documentary footage taken in the French abbey pictured to the left, in 1954.

It’s important to remember the 1930s as a decade of certain striving for classical music in the studio.  Only to scratch the surface: In that period we find Edwin Fischer carrying out the first complete recordings of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier on the piano (1934-36).  For his own part, pianist Arthur Schnabel sat down in the studio to capture the first complete cycle of the Beethoven sonatas (1932-35).  So it is that Casals’ recordings of the Six Suites take their place somewhere alongside those historic studio performances of the “48” and the “32,” respectively, the so-called “Old Testament” and “New Testament” of keyboard literature.

But when Casals set up to put down the complete performances of Bach’s music for solo cello, the six suites were not yet part of a fixed tradition of any kind.  If it’s true that tradition can never quite properly be called fixed, it’s still the case that unlike Fischer’s contemporaneous recordings of Bach, or Schnabel’s of Beethoven, Casals was not putting his stamp on works that were considered part of a perceived “canon” as such.  Few, at the time, were at all familiar with the Cello Suites.  It was through Casals that they saw the light of day for the very first time, and it was Casals who illuminated the road for cellists and audiences to come.

In his memoirs, Licht und Schatten (Light and Shadow), Casals expresses the state of neglect into which the suites had fallen:

“These suites had been deemed academic rubbish, mechanical studies without musical warmth – can you imagine that?  How could they be considered cold – these works, that positively radiate poetry, warmth and feeling of sound?  They are the quintessence of Bach’s work as a composer – and Bach is the quintessence of all music.”*

Before Casals, to search for the suites was to jump at shadows.

In The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece journalist and author Eric Siblin illuminates the story of the cello suites in the context of Bach’s own life, sketches out Casals’ lifelong relationship with them, and colours the whole with personal reflections about his own initial search for, and continuing journey with Bach’s cello music.  Siblin’s stellar and approachable book is an invitation to come along for the ride.

As Siblin suggests, it is in no small way due to Casals that we have come to listen to Bach’s music for solo cello as part of a greater musical story of some kind.  These six soliloquies, voiced by a single performer on his solitary instrument, have since found their audience.  This is desert island music.  An inexhaustible well.

If there’s something strikingly apocryphal in talk about historic recordings such as these, then perhaps it’s because they have the paradoxical effect of holding a continued sway over the imagination while simultaneously granting us a view of how things no longer are.  It’s conceivably an expected consequence of the ever-changing nature of musical taste that the slippery notion of historic vision should be recast in the more measurable concept of the historical document.  This, so it goes, has proved to be the fate even of the most influential of “testaments.”

Casals’ Bach.  Cello Suite Jesus!

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*Quote taken from the liner notes to the Naxos Historical issue of Casals’ Cello Suites (linked to below).

**Eric Siblin, The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2009).

Recommended Recording:

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Edwin Fischer’s Bach: Dropping the Curtain of Memory

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May 25, 2011

Edwin Fischer (1886-1960)

My grandfather, who was a disarmingly intelligent but warm and selfless storyteller (not pictured), once told me of a concert he attended at some point in his youth.  The recital took place in Düsseldorf, the city of his birth, and the pianist was Edwin Fischer.  I can’t be sure of the exact date of the performance, but my struggling sense is that it would have taken place somewhere between 1918 and 1925.  To insist on nailing down the specifics would be to crucify the moment, since so much of the meaning we draw from the past takes shape through a hazy layering of myth and fact.

“all the old accumulated rubbish-years which we call memory, the recognizable I, but changing from phase to phase as the butterfly changes once the cocoon is cleared, carrying nothing of what was into what is…” ~ William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

My grandfather never relayed to me the details of the program itself, but one thing stuck with him for decades: Fischer had the younger members of the audience join him on stage.  He invited them to gather around the piano to watch him perform an encore.  With that warm gesture my grandfather found himself next to one of the old masters of the piano, youthfully spellbound by a performance of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C-sharp Minor (BWV 849)  from Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier.

Listen here to Fischer’s 1933 studio recording of that very piece.

The prelude is all beauty in a minor mode; the fugue, which eventually reaches out with its “trumpet call” (4.44), is a darkish gem.  My grandfather always singled out that moonstone as his most treasured of the “48.”

In 1960, some three to four decades after that recital in Düsseldorf, Fischer’s renowned student, Alfred Brendel, would reverently recollect that “with Fischer, one was in more immediate contact with the music: there was no curtain before his soul when he communicated with the audience.”*

When I listen to Fischer’s recording of the C-sharp Minor Prelude and Fugue, I suppose that a “curtain” of some sort does fall.  But it’s a curtain drawn by the invariably limited reach of memory, drawn between me and the faded world of a childhood in Düsseldorf, between me and a Germany pre-‘33.

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Recommended Recordings:

  • Edwin Fischer: Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Books 1 & 2 (EMI).  You can read a review of this CD issue here.  These are the very first recordings of the complete “48.”  The same performances have been reissued on the Naxos Historical label, but I haven’t heard them and am unable to speak to their sound quality.

Notes:

* Quote taken from Alfred Brendel’s “Edwin Fischer: Remembering My Teacher” (1960), published in Thoughts and Afterthoughts but legally fetched online.

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Landowska and Tolstoy – Landowska and the Sounds of War: Two Historical Snapshots

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May 19, 2011

First Snapshot: Landowska and Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana (1907)

A significant 1907 black and white photograph captures a young Wanda Landowska seated at the piano.  Behind her stands Russian literary giant, Leo Tolstoy, in the Cossack garb of his later years.  The photograph was taken at the author’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana, by his wife, Sophia.  That would have been just three years before Tolstoy would leave both his wife and estate behind, ultimately dying of pneumonia in a lonely railway station of the remote Russian countryside.

The image of Tolstoy in his last moments is a lasting, if silent one: the final flash of a life that was everywhere marked by an introspective struggle with the apparent meaninglessness of human existence.  In his A Confession of 1882, you can get Tolstoy’s own account of his spiritual development.

The 1907 photograph also takes on something of a resonant note in the context of Landowska’s own life.  For it was one of the few personal possessions she could bring with her to America, a few months after the 1940 approach of the invading Nazi forces forced her to flee her adopted home of Saint-Leu-la-Forêt.  It was there, on the outskirts of Paris, that Landowska had founded her Temple de la Musique Ancienne, her school and concert house.  Her longtime student, Denis Restout, recounts that the Nazis looted all of Landowska’s treasure – her numerous instruments, her thousands of books and manuscripts – and left not a wreck behind.

Second Snapshot: Landowska's Wartime Scarlatti

In one of Landowska’s many 1940 recordings, we have one of the more remarkable musical documents of the era.  In the studio Landowska performs one of Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas.  In the distance we hear the sounds of bomb or artillery fire as the Nazis move in on the French capital.

You can listen to it here.

The bombs fall at approximately the two-minute mark.  As the studio engineers run for cover, an extraordinarily concentrated Landowska completes the performance without missing a beat.  Amazing.

That recording must have taken place only hours before Landowska would leave France behind.  In that sense, and like her cherished photograph of 1907, it anchors a would-be fleeting moment.

These two snapshots of Landowska’s life remind me of the power of such historical documents: They capture, they anchor moments.  And in allowing us to hear echoes of the past, they anchor us as well.

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Wanda Landowska’s Goldberg Variations (1933). With a Thought on the Myth of Historically Informed Performance Practice

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May 12, 2011

Landowska at her Pleyel harpsichord in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt (1933).

In November of 1933, harpsichordist Wanda Landowska put to wax the very first recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations.  It’s true that the Goldbergs, at least since the time of Glenn Gould’s historic piano recording for Columbia in 1955, have been widely recorded by pianists and harpsichordists alike.  In fact, the market has been so inundated with stellar recordings of the Golbergs that I sometimes catch myself wishing that the record industry – to summon but one of the mercilessly many, inane slogans from the business world – would diversify its portfolio.  But I know that it’s ultimately an embarrassment of riches, and I remind myself that in 1933, before the Goldbergs met the gramophone (and well before the levy broke) the public had very little opportunity to hear this great music.  Audiences, for that matter,  had very little exposure to the harpsichord, Landowska’s ultimate instrument of choice.  Peering into the early twentieth century, we find a time in which the harpsichord was perceived as a relic of a bygone age.  We find an era in classical music history that is often characterized as the golden age of the piano.


Landowska was instrumental in reviving the harpsichord as something other than a mere museum piece.  By the time of her first recording of the Goldbergs, Landowska had already publicly championed the instrument for close to three decades.  She had scoured Europe for clavichords, harpsichords and examples of other period keyboard instruments.  Her years of study of the keyboard music and literature of the preceding centuries culminated in 1909 with the publication of La musique ancienne.  Shortly thereafter, she commissioned the Pleyel company to build her a personalized instrument that was capable of greater dynamic range and tonal colour than more conventional, less muscled harpsichords.  She exhibited four such Pleyels to American audiences during a tour of the US in 1923.

You can hear one in action here in a sampling of her Paris Goldberg sessions of the subsequent decade.

Landowska’s performances, like her writings, were positioned and persuasive, and their impact on music culture was both immediate and sustained.  As a result, the harpsichord came to be resurrected as the instrument on which to perform Bach “properly.”  So considerable was the move to “proper” – which is to say “historically informed” –  performance practice that pianists were reluctant to go near the music of the periwigged one.  (Edwin Fischer and Claudio Arrau in the ‘30s, and Rosalyn Tureck shortly thereafter, are three of the more remarkable exceptions to that lamentable trend.)

The Harpsichord: “the sound of two skeletons copulating on a tin roof in a thunderstorm.” ~ Sir Thomas Beecham

In Landowska’s wake came the Historically Informed Performance (HIP) brigade.  Its proponents, for whom I’ve coined the term HIPsters, followed Landowska in holding that music should be played in accordance with the standards of performance – and on the instruments – of the historical period in which it was composed.  Now it’s all in good fun that I call them HIPsters here; and I recognize that their opinions are rich and varied, if sometimes prone to dogmatism.  I’ll write more on another day, and I mention them here for a simple reason:

In following through on Landowska’s contention that musical interpretation should everywhere be informed by the principles of performance of a given historical period, HIPsters came to believe that Landowska’s own interpretations of Bach’s music were bygone and inauthentic – which is to say not “historically informed.”  Writing of the Pleyel and its chief ambassador, one writer tells it as he sees it:

“Undue emphasis was laid on the ability of the harpsichord to vary its tone color. . . .  These instruments produced an enormous variety of sounds, all bad.  However, Pleyel was blessed by the genius of a young Polish pianist named Wanda Landowska, who in a transcendent exercise of pure imagination found a way of using even the Pleyel to make viable music.  Thus, for nearly fifty years the movement to revive the literature of the harpsichord was to be dominated by this perversity.”*

The Pleyel was a harpsichord in name, perhaps, but it had the capacity for sonics that were not proper to keyboard instruments of Bach’s day.  Some chose to label it a “perversity,” and found equally perverse Landowska’s approach to Bach’s music: Landowska, high-priestess of Baroque music, played it like a hopeless Romantic (or so some thought).

“You play Bach your way, and I’ll play him his way.” ~ Wanda Landowska

It’s true that Landowska was also sometimes guilty of taking a firmer-than-necessary stance on the nature of correct or proper performance.  But the mythologized words above, so often taken out of context and even falsely attributed, were actually said in jest during an interchange with cello great Pablo Casals in 1941.

Landowska am Cembalo ("Landowska at the Harpsichord") 1920

In La music ancienne of 1909, published in English some 15 years later as Music of the Past, Landowska attempts to debunk “the sorry legislators of taste” who, in the name of progress, undersold the harpsichord and the musical riches of a bygone age: “In all times, not only the mediocre minds, but sometimes the cultivated musicians as well, have imagined that their art had surpassed that of their predecessors.”**

It turned out that in dusting off the harpsichord, Landowska had inadvertently laid the ground for a school of Historically Informed Performance that would imagine that its art had eclipsed her own.

Myths of progress, myths of “proper” performance: In the extreme, they run counter to the notion of art as something in motion, bound to unfold in ways unforeseen.

In coming to terms with the history of music, it’s as important to look ahead as it is to look back.  And that, in my view, is yet another expression of artistry that is truly historically informed.  If we can draw lines, if we can impose boundaries, then I see them as traced in sand rather than as set in stone.  I still believe that the history of music is guided by a principle of process rather than of progress.

Landowska’s 1933 recording of the Goldberg Variations – a work which she called “a secular temple of absolute music” – is an invitation to think it through all over again.

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Recommended Recording:

  • J.S. Bach: Goldberg Variations / Italian Concerto / Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue (1933-36) – Wanda Landowska, Pleyel Harpsichord – Naxos Records. (More info here.)

Harpsichord Comparison:

You can sound out for yourselves the differences between Landoswka’s Pleyel harpsichord and a period harpsichord from Bach’s day by clicking on the two great performances below.  (Remember that in terms of audio fidelity, the Landowska has the disadvantage of some sixty years):

  • Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue – Landowska, Pleyel Harpsichord
  • Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue – Christophe Rousset, Harpsichord (Henri Hamsch, Paris 1751)

Notes:

* Quote taken from Frank Hubbard, “Reconstructing the Harpsichord,” in The Historical Harpsichord I, edited by H. Schott (New York, 1984), p. 8.

** Wanda Landowska, Music of the Past, translated by William Aspenwall Bradley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924), p. 5.

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Alban Berg’s Piano Sonata, Op.1: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

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April 9, 2011

Alban Berg published his first and only piano sonata (Opus 1)  in 1910.  He was twenty-five years of age and finishing up a lengthy period of study with Arnold Schoenberg.

I often think of Berg’s sonata as one good entry point to the thick terrain of 20th century classical music.  It rethinks the sonata as traditionally conceived, over the course of a single movement.  If there’s a steady feeling that the centre might not hold, the music never slips out of orbit.

Debussy once suggested that, after Beethoven, the sonata was no longer a valid form of composition.  Whether he meant it absolutely or rhetorically is a matter of some question; but I take his point.  In Berg’s sonata we find still another considered position.  For it stands at a threshold, at the threshold of atonality.  While it may not represent a “schooled” breaking with the music of the past, you never get the sense that its young composer is anything but open to the possible shape of music to come.  In the liner notes to his Carnegie Hall Concert (Teldec Classics, 2002) pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard calls it an “odd” work that “suggests a reflection on what the sonata has been and might become.”

You can watch Canadian pianist, Marc-Andre Hamelin perform Berg’s sonata live here.

It was Berg’s teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, who painted a well-known portrait of the young composer.  It dates from 1910, the same year as the publication of the piano sonata.  Here, as above, it would appear that Berg was fond of leaning his chin on his clenched right hand.

Schoenberg's portrait of Alban Berg (1910).

In the bigger picture, Schoenberg’s portrait of Berg stands as a snapshot of pre-World War I Vienna – a lost world that Berg’s friend, author Stefan Zweig, thoughtfully described as “the age of security.”  It is, as the title of Zweig’s great autobiography has it, The World of Yesterday.

I sometimes think about the young Berg in that time and place, at the threshold of tomorrow, before the monumental mess of 20th century European history.  For it’s in that historical context that his piano sonata – like Schoenberg’s painting of the same year – provides us with an important portrait of the artist as a young man.

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A special note on Yvonne Loriod (1924 – 2010):

I’ve only recently discovered Yvonne Loriod’s sizzling version of the Berg sonata.  Loriod, most often remembered as interpreter and wife of Olivier Messiaen, died in May of last year.  It’s in memory of her that I link to her special interpretation of Berg’s Opus 1 here.

Recommended Recordings of the Berg Sonata:

  • Glenn Gould – Berg, Krenek, Berg, Debussy & Ravel (Columbia, 1958; Sony, 1995).
  • Maurizio Pollini – Debussy: 12 Etudes – Berg: Sonata. Op. 1 (DG, 1994).
  • Mitsuko Uchida – Schoenberg: Piano Concerto – Berg: Sonata, Op. 1, etc. (Philips, 2001).
  • Pierre-Laurent Aimard – At Carnegie Hall – Berg: Sonata, Op. 1 – Beethoven: Appassionata, etc. (Teldec Classics, 2002).
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Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring – Trampled Under Foot

Filed under: Classical — Leave a comment
February 24, 2011

I had the good fortune of taking in the Toronto Symphony Orchestra perform Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring last night at Roy Thompson Hall.  The young Russian, Vasily Petrenko, was guest conducting.  Anyone who’s heard his 2010 recordings of the eighth and tenth Shostakovich symphonies with the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra (on Naxos) will know why that fact is worth mentioning.  Petrenko is a supreme talent: passionate and full of insight – and possibly only a third of the average age of what was a largely brontosaurial crowd.  It’s a great thing to hear the conducting.  And visually, it was as though he were dancing the Rite while maestroing.

The night began with Elgar’s “In the South (Alassio),” (for me) a relatively unexciting but enjoyable concert overture.  Anyone unfamiliar with the work should take in its gorgeous serenade section, which features a noteworthy viola solo over hushed strings. The Elgar was followed by Andre Laplante performing Liszt’s first piano concerto.  Laplante was in dazzling form, having more than mastered that beast of a work.  I laughed to myself while watching his hands run over the piano keys, while a young woman (and, I assume, aspiring pianist) sitting behind me sighed, “I’m so bad.”  Liszt’s first concerto, with its imposing and unforgettable opening theme, has always struck me as an awkward piece, an untamed dance of piano and orchestra.  As for last night’s performance, I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard the lighter moments of the work played with such poetry.  If only Laplante had let his white hair down: You’d have thought that Liszt himself had come back from the dead.  (A matter of intermission marginalia: It was amusing to watch a handful of begeezered aristocrats fawn over former Governor General, Adrienne Clarkson, and her husband, the thinker.)

The real untamed dance came with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.  The TSO was on fire; under Petrenko’s baton, they played like the TSOul.

Most of you will be familiar with the story that Rite of Spring caused a real stir (read: riot!) when first performed in 1913 Paris.  In a well-known essay, “A Myth of the Twentieth Century: The Rite of Spring, the Tradition of the New, and ‘The Music Itself,’” Richard Taruskin has suggested that Stravinsky himself was responsible for sparking the myth that his music was the root cause of the rioting.  Stravinsky the spin doctor.

“Spinning” is a good image in this context, for the Rite of Spring is dizzyingly restless in its sweep.  And while there’s really no replacement for hearing the work performed live – audio recordings and Youtube clips feel like mere shadows of the dance – you can take part in “The Sacrificial Dance” here. I was left feeling like the great Led Zeppelin song: Trampled Under Foot.  ‘Physical Graffiti’ may be still another way of describing the Rite: The music really leaves its mark.  Chock-full of rhythmic invention, it’s a work of serious play, and may be as close to rock and roll as classical will get.  To talk of its poly-rhythmic dimension is but a musicological way of saying that it has the hippy hippy shake.  “Stravinsky” very well may be Russian for “ass-kicking genius.”

OMGaga! - my coinage

 

I’m left wondering what music one would have to play to cause a riot in our day.  The Rite of Spring is certainly something of a spectacle, but I’m simply not convinced that people care enough about music (nor should they) to riot in the streets.  (The generally nonviolent reaction to Nickelback, the apotheosis of awful, is a case and point.***)  But I think of present-day spectacles: On the last occasion I unintentionally saw Lady Gaga perform on television, I also – perchance – saw her labia.  And there’s something odd in saying that about someone you’ve actually never seen naked.  Alas, with my train of thought thus derailed, I guess the feeling of spring must be in the air.

The Rite of Spring: OMGaga.

____

*** My lovely girlfriend reminds me that the reaction has not always been nonviolent.

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Nat King Cole & Rachmaninov: Forgotten Sides

Filed under: Classical, Jazz — 1 Comment
August 6, 2010

In 1944 Nat King Cole recorded Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor with his Los Angeles-based piano trio.  What’s special about the moment is that it represents a meaningful meeting of classical and jazz, a convergence of the twain: music of worlds so-called “Old” and “New.”

While branded in the popular imagination for the great “Unforgettable,” it has at times fallen into forgetfulness that Cole was a pianist of prodigious skill.  In fact, in an age of the swinging jazz bands, his early trio of the 1930s was something of a rarity – the very first of its kind, even.  If piano greats Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson were instrumental in establishing the trio as a standard ensemble of jazz performance, then they did so following in Cole’s footsteps.  The vocal works for which he’s most often remembered were produced largely due to popular demand.  Those cuts sold; the market demanded them.

Listen to the trio’s recording of George and Ira Gershwin’s “The Man I Love.”  The interplay of piano, bass and guitar (not, as would later become the standard, drums) is the stuff of magic.  Lest we forget: In the history of jazz, Nat King Cole was also instrumental as an instrumentalist.

There is so much great jazz to be discovered in the King Cole Trio’s output, but I’d like to bang even harder on the doors of forgetting.  For it’s really with his performance of Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor that we’re invited to consider a side of Cole that’s largely fallen on deaf ears.

What’s especially cool to hear in this performance is the weight of the Russian soul reconceived by the freer, improvisatory spirit of jazz.  (Just listen to Oscar Moore’s guitar solo!)  There are inumerable great classically-oriented performances of the prelude.  (You can listen to Rachmaninov himself perform it here, in three separate recordings from 1919, 1923 and 1928.)  But that there are so many strong performances in the classical tradition of interpretation gives all the more resonance to this particular King Cole Trio session.  If unorthodox, I consider it as viable an interpretation as any other, but one of many legitimate ways of interpreting Rachmaninov.  Though not entirely faithful to the letter of the score, there’s no question to my ear that he’s true to the spirit of Rachmaninov’s music.

Let me push a bit more and say that Rachmaninov himself would agree.

To get concrete: Rachmaninov emigrated to the United States in 1918 and lived there intermittently until his death in 1943.  In those years he tirelessly toured America’s cities.  In a recent article by James Bash of the Oregon Music News, it’s said that Rachmaninov performed in Portland, Oregon, no fewer than five times between 1923 and 1933.

I mention Portland in this case because it was in a 1931 issue of its newspaper, The Spectator, that Rachmaninov spoke to the subject of the interpretation of his music:

‘To be quite honest, no,’ he replied.  ‘You see when it comes to the average pianist, I am perfectly willing to let him play my pieces just as he chooses – especially if I am not there to hear him.  As for a master pianist, he is justified in finding his own interpretations and in putting his own personality into the rendering of the composition.  I indicate my own feeling about tempo, phrasing, and dynamic shading in the music itself, and this is the outline of my own conception.  But some great pianist may play my piano pieces with many differences of detail, with nuances and shadings I might not use myself; and yet his conception of the piece as a whole will never be wrong because his own good taste and musical instinct would guard against it.

‘It is certainly most interesting, at times, to see how some other pianist will give a piece you have written yourself an entirely different musical color, or present it from quite another angle of interpretation than your own.’” (*See below for source information.)

It is with an eye to the composer’s open view of artistry and musical interpretation that I think he would have approved of Nat King Cole’s playful take on his work.  Cole’s is a freer approach to this music, of course; but that freedom is the spirit of jazz itself.  It is the very voice of the New World.

The King Cole Trio’s performance of Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor is both a place for the jazz fan to encounter the riches of the classical tradition, and an occasion for the classical devotee to think more freely about jazz.

Given that Rachmaninov and Cole both lived in Los Angeles, I wonder if each had heard the other in concert.  Could they have met? (Readers please jump in!)

The Trio’s Rachmaninov session dates from January 1944, ten months after the composer’s death.  I don’t think it’s a stretch to see Cole’s recording of the Prelude in C-sharp minor as his small way of remembering, of paying homage to Rachmaninov.  That’s just one more way of remembering this forgotten side of Cole.

__________

Recommended Recording:

  • The King Cole Trio: That’s What (1943-47) (Naxos Jazz Legends 8.120826; originally recorded for Capitol Records)

Personel: Nat King Cole, piano, vocals; Oscar Moore, guitar; Johnny Miller, bass

*The Rachmaninov quote from the 1931 Portland Spectator is taken from James Bash’s “When Bartok, Ravel, and Rachmaninoff came to Portland,” (The Oregon Observer, July 12, 2010).

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Classical Competition: Industry, not Artistry

Filed under: Classical — Leave a comment
July 16, 2010

Van Cliburn - Life Magazine, 1958The idea of formal competition has become an established part of the classical music industry.  Freely, competitions give a great many musicians the opportunity to showcase their talents on the national and international stages.  And there is something to be said for their role in the advancement of young players on the pathway to professional careers in music.  (Exposure in music magazines, record deals will often follow.)  But I see a darkness in it all: the general flattening, rather than the development, of the creative landscape.

But let me warm up by bringing up three of the more momentous moments that come to mind when I think of the history of classical competition.

THREE SNAPSHOTS

FIRST: Russian pianist, Tatiana Nikolayeva, took first prize in the Leipzig Bach Competition in 1950.  Oral history sometimes has it that she played both books of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier – which is to say all 48 Preludes and Fugues!  Hmmm … Given that the competition only called for a single Prelude & Fugue as part of a contestant’s program, it’s unlikely that there’s much accuracy in that version of the story.  But there’s an echo of truth in it: Another – more likely – account goes like this: Nikolayeva was prepared to play anything from the Well-Tempered Clavier and offered to play whichever Prelude & Fugue the jury requested.  So impressed was Shostakovich (one of the panel judges) with her performance that he composed his own set of 24 Preludes and Fugues – and dedicated them to her.  Whatever the details of the 1950 Leipzig Bach competition in 1950, the result is some of my favourite music of the 20th century.  Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues linger on; they are more important than the competition – than any competition.  (You can listen to her play Bach’s great Prelude & Fugue in C-sharp Minor here.  And also be sure to check out her rendition of Shostakovich’s dark Prelude & Fugue in E minor.)

History is like a piano: It resonates long after the notes are struck.  And, sometimes, its notes will blur.

SECOND: American pianist Van Cliburn was famously awarded first place at the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.  That the year was 1958, at the height of the so-called cold “war,” only added to the resonance of the event.  I may be tripping on my own self-spun legend here, but I think it was my grandmother who told me that Russian pianist Emil Gilels – who was heading the competition jury – personally awarded the Texan with a score of 100 (on a scale of 1 to 10!) in order to guarantee Cliburn’s victory.

Do we find ourselves here, again, amidst the mist of myth?

One thing we do have is the Cliburn’s own account: that Gilels – after walking the American onto the stage to take his bow before a standing audience, beside itself with enthusiasm – kissed him on the cheek as sign of his admiration for the American’s performance.  It’s a wonderful story, and a tribute to the cultural promise of music.  For it’s now 2010, and who has won?  The McCarthyites or Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto?  A quick listen to the opening notes of that masterpiece – from the infamous 1958 competition itself! – clearly answers the question.

Sometimes music can help to temper the illusions, to dampen the delusions, of a time.

THIRD: The year is 1980, and Yugoslavian (Serbian) pianist Ivo Pogorelich is eliminated from the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw.  Argentinean pianist Martha Argerich walks away from her position on the jury, and famously declares Pogorelich “a genius.”  So sharp is the controversy that Pogorelich is asked to give a last recital at the end of the competition (a privilege usually only reserved for the competition winner!).  You can here take in the dizzying levels of artistry and technique that Pogorelich brought to that very performance.

Pogorelich - "The Genius" (DG)THE VERDICT

But how would Pogorelich’s career have progressed had Argerich not resigned in protest?  What if the other members of the jury – the supposed arbiters of “truth” – had had their way?  My questions are speculative, I admit, but I write them here to trigger a bit of discussion about the state of competition culture as it exists in our day.  And if my questions seem speculative, I certainly don’t think they’re any more so than the pretense of a jury that supposes to offer an “objective” gauge of a musician’s performance.

To my mind, objectivity is impossible to the point that the very thought of it is boring; and I fear that music culture is dulled by structures that discourage the flowering of an artist’s personal (and, yes, subjective) vision.  I’m reminded of the end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where the young Stephen Dedalus takes on his role as an artist in the world, and sets out to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”  In the world of music, what competitions do is impose limits on the artist by pushing for a standardized measure of what constitutes proper performance, and in this sense limit the reach, the creative potential, the variety of views and interpretations of music.

The present and future of music are compromised by the conservative idea of “proper” performance.  Think of the blandness of American Idol.  (Sure, “America’s Got Talent,” but what’s talent without vision?)  Think of the merciless number of songs that are given the auto-tune treatment.

It hurts.  Even Beethoven’s ears are bleeding.

I don’t think that competitions should be done away with.  But I don’t need to state their merits here: You don’t have to put your finger to the wind to learn that their merits are everywhere assumed.  I only hope that people who are part of the industry begin to think of alternative ways of furthering music, of writing about it, of poking holes in the surface of what is blindly accepted.

Ultimately, it will continue to be up to the artists to forge the uncharted horizons of music.  Gone are the days – so to speak, because I doubt there ever were such days – when the interests of the industry coincided with the interests of artistry.

The basic issue is that there is a general acceptance of the way things are rather than a push to explore how things could be.  The first is a question of the music industry, and the second, a question of classical music culture, a matter of artistry.

And while industry doesn’t necessarily exclude artistry, it doesn’t always encourage it.  So if I see something of a darkness in it, then maybe it’s that the idea of classical competition misses the mark, misses the point of artistic development.  And if it can be said to see the truth at all, then I really think it can only do so as through a glass, darkly.

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