(++++) SOUNDS OF THE RARELY HEARD

Lost American Violin Sonatas, Volume 2. Solomia Soroka, violin; Phillip Silver and Arthur Greene, piano. Toccata Next. $18.99. 

Franz Krommer: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2; Concertino for Flute, Oboe and Violin. Klára Mach Jasenčáková, flute; Vojtěch Podroužek, oboe; Markéta Čepická, violin; Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice conducted by Marek Štilec. Naxos. $19.99. 

Music for Viola da Gamba by Marin Marais, Antoine Forqueray, Le Sieur de Machy, and Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe. Caroline Nicolas, viola da gamba; Kevin Payne, theorbo. AVIE. $19.99. 

     The second Lost American Violin Sonatas release from Toccata Next again delves largely into Romantic sensibilities as expressed by three virtually unknown composers, two of whom lived in and through the Romantic era itself and one of whom postdates it. This time, Solomia Soroka, Phillip Silver and Arthur Greene focus on Clara Kathleen Rogers (1844-1931), Albert Stoessel (1894-1943), and Julius Chajes (1910-1985). Only one work here, Stoessel’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, has ever been recorded before, so the CD continues the first volume’s exploration of worthy but neglected repertoire. It must be said, though, that to some degree, the neglect is understandable: all of these sonatas are well-crafted and well-assembled, but only the one by Chajes shows sufficient originality to be worthy of somewhat-more-frequent performance. Rogers’ 1888 sonata, in D minor, bears the title Sonata Dramatico (spelled that way), but it is more dour than dramatic – at least until the final, longest movement, which offers broader gestures and more strongly felt pacing. That concluding Allegro giojoso also gives more prominence to the piano, which is distinctly in the violin's shadow in the first two movements: in the finale, although still subservient, it is more participatory. The more-or-less Brahmsian sound of the music is carried through the entire sonata, with the eventual exploration of the highest register of both instruments well-handled and more original than much of what has come before. Stoessel’s sonata, which dates to about 1920, is warmer than Rogers’ from the start and more sweeping. Despite its date, it is actually more imbued than hers with Romantic sensibility, mixed with a certain degree of Impressionism. The G major home key notwithstanding, the first movement is distinctly melancholic, even autumnal – again in Brahmsian mode, although Stoessel’s writing is somewhat on the turgid side. Stoessel’s harmonic language is a bit more extended than Rogers’, which is not a great surprise in light of the dates of the two sonatas, but Stoessel’s work remains in the service of emotional expression throughout. Indeed, it is somewhat unremittingly sad through its first two movements. The concluding third movement, however, almost sounds as if it belongs to a different work: it is much brighter from the start, with the violin skipping about as the piano figurations dance here and there across the keyboard. A middle section slows matters down and returns to the mood of the first movement before the work ends in a way that justifies the finale’s Allegro scherzando tempo marking. More intriguing than either the Rogers sonata or Stoessel’s is the A minor one by Chajes, written significantly later than the others (early 1940s) and sounding at times unusual to the point of idiosyncrasy. It opens with very considerable intensity but soon swerves to a curious section in which the violin's journeys up and down its range have an almost electronic sound to them. Later, a single long-held violin note persists over a passionate piano passage in an unusual use of the instruments’ respective sounds. This is a four-movement work whose two internal movements are quite short. The second, titled “Mourner’s Prayer,” has a feeling not of despair but of resignation, with repeated low piano notes sounding like the incessant tolling of a funeral bell. The third, although labeled Scherzo, does not feel like one for most of its duration: the initial exclamation of the instruments in turn soon gives way to expressive, piano-dominated material before a frisky violin passage finally makes the movement sound like a Scherzo, pulling the piano along into lighter, higher-register territory. In the finale, the mood shifts repeatedly. This movement is somewhat meandering, with touches of acerbity but plenty of warmth and lyricism as well. All in all, the Chajes sonata is a multifaceted work that never quite settles into any particular mood for long. It is interesting in many ways, if too uncentered in mood and style to be truly compelling. Nevertheless, this second forgotten-sonata disc will whet the appetite of adventurous listeners for more to come. 

     Skilled composers have become footnotes in musical history for hundreds of years, not just in the Romantic and post-Romantic time periods. A number of contemporaries of Mozart created more-than-serviceable works – often while in service to the nobility of the time – and then fell quickly into obscurity. This is why the names of Carl Philipp Stamitz, Ignace Joseph Pleyel, Leopold Koželuch, Paul Wranitzky and other once-notable musical creators born in the 1740s and 1750s have almost completely faded from memory. A new Naxos CD featuring works by Franz Krommer (1759-1831) shows what has been lost by relegating these lesser lights to obscurity – although it also helps explain their neglect. Krommer wrote about eight or 10 symphonies – some are lost and some numbering is obscure – and broke very little new ground in any of them, although some later ones reached out a bit beyond the Haydnesque. Not very far, though: as the excellent performances by the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice under Marek Štilec show, Krommer was thoroughly mired in the past – certainly in the symphonies Nos. 1 and 2, the first of which was written after Haydn finished his “London” dozen and the second of which appeared at the same time as Beethoven’s Second. By comparison with all those much greater and more exploratory works, Krommer’s are light, almost frothy, delightfully tuneful and with especially jaunty finales. But that is all they are: light entertainment in a style that greater composers had long since moved beyond. The symphonies, in F and D respectively, are pleasant throughout and deserve to be thought of as “easy listening” for the Habsburg aristocracy that Krommer served. And to be fair, if their pleasures are surface-level, they do not pretend to be anything else: in some ways they are refreshing in the way they are free of any sort of pretense to significance. Štilec and the ensemble handle them with plenty of enthusiasm and do not try to overstate their modest charm. The result is highly pleasurable music-making. The highlight of the CD, though, is not the symphonies but the Concertino for Flute, Oboe and Violin, which – its minimizing title notwithstanding – is actually longer than either symphony. It is in five movements and is essentially a serenade, showcasing, in this recording, three first-chair players of the very fine orchestra. Unpretentious, inconsequential, but charming from start to finish, the Concertino shows that Krommer had real skill in writing for the three solo instruments and setting them gently against the ensemble. The shortest movement, an Adagio placed third – between two Menuetto entries – is essentially devoid of emotion despite a brief dip into the minor; and this shows both the strengths and weaknesses of Krommer’s approach, which was highly successful for entertaining listeners of his time but which understandably fell into disfavor afterwards as tastes, audiences, and expectations of music changed. 

     It can be argued that changing musical interests from the Baroque era to the Classical period were every bit as substantial as those from the Classical to the Romantic. There was an especially great changeover of instrumentation in the 18^th century, with compositions involving viola da gamba, theorbo and other former staples declining rapidly and eventually vanishing except when music could be updated to newer performance practices. In more-recent times, a revival of interest involving not only older pieces of music but also the original instruments for which the works were written has produced a small but strongly committed crop of performers whose dedication results in some fascinating listening experiences. The works played by Caroline Nicolas on viola da gamba and Kevin Payne on theorbo certainly belong to a much earlier aural environment than the works of Krommer, but it is worth remembering that the two composers mainly featured on this AVIE disc both lived nearly into the Classical time period: Antoine Forqueray from 1672 until 1745, just 14 years prior to Krommer’s birth, and Marin Marais from 1656 to 1728. Yet the sound of Nicolas’ instrument is so different from that of later strings that hearing just the first notes of any piece on the CD will transport listeners to a time that seems (and musically is) very long ago indeed. In a sense, everything on the disc is a miniature: only one of the 20 tracks lasts as long as five minutes. But most of these little pieces were originally conceived as parts of a larger whole, being taken from suites of the type well-known from Bach and Telemann and eventually carried into later times and emerging in guises such as that of Krommer’s Concertino. The selections that Nicolas and Payne offer, far from being the stylized dance forms familiar elsewhere, are almost pure dances: the clarity of rhythm, attentiveness to pacing and evenness of presentation make these small gems highly danceable. The occasional ornamental flourishes, such as the quick scalar trips in the Allemande & Double from Marais’ Suite No. 7, serve to highlight the comparative plainness of most of the movements, which charm through elegance, daintiness where appropriate, and consistency of engagement throughout. Works by Marais dominate the CD (12 tracks), being scattered throughout the recording; the six movements of Forqueray’s Suite No. 1 in D minor are offered as a group. The remaining two entries are for solo viola da gamba: a Prelude by Le Sieur de Machy (fl. 1655-1700) and a Chaconne by Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe (c. 1640-c. 1700). The two solos give Nicolas a chance to explore the sound of her instrument – and her own capabilities in playing it – in somewhat different ways from those included in the movements involving theorbo. She displays complete mastery of fingering, tone production, rhythm, and the sweetly resonant sound that the viola da gamba shares only distantly with more-familiar, more-modern stringed instruments. Her ability to evoke contrasting feelings from single-string and chordal passages is exceptional, and her overall approach to all the music argues convincingly that in the right hands and beneath the right fingers, the viola da gamba’s sound is transformed from an exotic rarity to something highly engaging and often genuinely moving – a trip back through time, to be sure, but one well worth making and still having a great deal to offer so many centuries after the age of Marais and Forqueray.

(++++) KEYED UP AND KEYED IN

Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring—version for piano four hands; Debussy: Six Épigraphes antiques; Bartók: Two Pictures. Nadezda Pisareva and Georgy Tchaidze, pianists. Genuin. $19.99. 

Gordon Jacob: Concerto for Chromatic Accordion, String Orchestra and Percussion; Edward McGuire: Accordion Concerto; Jonathan Dove: Northern Lights. Owen Murray, accordion; BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Sir James MacMillan. Toccata Next. $18.99. 

     Stravinsky’s two dual-pianist versions of Le Sacre du Printemps bracket the 1913 orchestral première: he created one for piano four hands in 1912 and one for two pianos in 1914. More than a century later, the piano forms of the ballet supplement rather than in any way supplant the orchestral one, which remains justifiably famous not only for its notorious first performance but also for the exceptionally skilled orchestration through which it communicates. Stravinsky himself felt the 1914 two-piano version was a better concert piece than the earlier one for four hands, but when those four hands belong to Nadezda Pisareva and Georgy Tchaidze, a strong argument can certainly be made for the earlier arrangement. In a new Genuin recording, Pisareva and Tchaidze focus on the pervasive dissonance of the work and deliver its rhythmic complexities with such intensity – to the point of actual pounding from time to time – that after a while, listeners will not miss the orchestration, so effectively do the performers advocate for it in this form. The intensity with which Pisareva and Tchaidze attack the strongly accented portions of the music requires a very strong piano – the Steinway D holds up as well and with as much resonance as always – and works best if listeners distance themselves from the notion of this as ballet music: the sheer strength of the playing and emphasis on heightened sound in the service of imagined primitivism produce a performance mostly devoid of connection to anything on stage. The final dance actually makes a racket more than an apotheosis. Le Sacre du Printemps dominates this CD on all levels, but it melds interestingly with the other two works offered by Pisareva and Tchaidze. Debussy actually played the four-hand Le Sacre du Printemps with Stravinsky, although there is no way to know the extent to which Debussy had the dramatic strength of Stravinsky’s ballet in mind when producing his own four-hand work engaging with the dim past, Six Épigraphes antiques (1914-1915). Here Pisareva and Tchaidze keep their dramatic instincts appropriately in check: Debussy’s antiquarianism is altogether milder and more distant than Stravinsky’s, differently evocative of an imagined long-gone time and Impressionistic only in a very general sense. Delicacy is the primary effect here, and tone painting is less than specific: there is nothing lusty, much less lustful, in Pan as evoked in the opening piece, where he is called “god of the summer wind,” nor is there anything sepulchral at the tombeau sans nom that follows. All six Debussy miniatures inhabit scenes quite different from those limned by Stravinsky – but the musical methods of evoking those scenes are clearly of the same time period, resulting in an apt and intriguing juxtaposition of the two composers’ works. The third piece on the disc is slightly earlier: Bartók’s Two Pieces dates to 1910. And each of the Bartók items is significantly longer than any of the Debussy pieces or any single section of Stravinsky’s ballet. There is nevertheless considerable complementarity here, thanks in large part to the two-piano transcription by Zoltán Kocsis (1952-2016). The atmospheric elements in Bartók lie somewhere between those of Stravinsky and Debussy, although some cadences in the first piece sound, from the standpoint of our much later time, reminiscent of Stravinsky (despite being written earlier). Bartók’s rhythms are less irregular than Stravinsky’s, less free-flowing than Debussy’s. And each of the Two Pieces has noteworthy elements strictly on its own terms. The rippling effects toward the end of the first, In Full Flower, provide an interesting overlay of the pianos on each other. The second, Village Dance, starts with an immediate contrast to the first through strong accents and much more substantial volume. Varying in speed throughout – and not inherently danceable at all times – this piece features strong chordal passages and a gradual accelerando in the last two minutes that builds to a forceful climax. One thing that is particularly evident from this well-thought-out musical mixture is that Pisareva and Tchaidze are both technically and emotively well-suited to each other and to the music they have chosen to play. Another thing is that these pieces by Debussy and Bartók reaffirm, if reaffirmation is necessary, just how revolutionary Stravinsky was in his creation of Le Sacre du Printemps. 

     A milder revolution is on display on a Toccata Next release featuring an instrument that, like the piano, uses a keyboard – but one that, like the organ, is more of a wind instrument than a percussive one. The instrument is the accordion – and it is in fact handled more-or-less like a chamber organ by Gordon Jacob (1895-1984) in his Concerto for Chromatic Accordion, which dates to 1972. Accordions were not suitable for classical-style compositions until the free-base keyboard – featuring a left-hand manual on which all buttons play individual, single notes – emerged in the 1950s. Even after that development, composers were not especially quick to take advantage of the accordion as a concerto element. But Jacob, who had an appetite for exploring the capabilities of individual instruments, created a well-balanced four-movement work that sets off the accordion’s sound well by juxtaposing it with timpani, glockenspiel, xylophone and tambourine as well as strings – and gives the accordionist an unaccompanied third-movement Largo of modest emotional content that is succeeded by a finale with the sort of playfulness that was a characteristic of much of Jacob’s work. Owen Murray plays the concerto with understanding and just the right amount of lilt, and the accompaniment by the BBC Concert Orchestra under Sir James MacMillan is well-matched to the solo material. The other two works on the disc, both composed specifically for Murray, take advantage of his expressive skills but are not, on the whole, as engaging as Jacob’s concerto. The 1999 Accordion Concerto by Edward McGuire (born 1948) tries a bit too hard to assert its seriousness, from its strongly accented opening to the accordion cadenzas in the second and third, final movement. The harmonic landscape is dissonant, the rhythmic one quite varied, but the piece as a whole seems to make somewhat too great an effort to pull the accordion into the panoply of solo instruments: it is a work of advocacy rather than one whose use of the accordion seems organic to it. Northern Lights (2019) by Jonathan Dove (born 1959), in form a concerto for accordion and chamber orchestra, is more unconventionally structured and more engaging to hear. The first two of its three movements are both labeled Very spacious, and the second immediately follows the first, so the effect is of a very extended contemplation of the titular phenomenon, with multiple sections suggesting vastness in different ways and through different instruments – the accordion prominent among them. This leads to a finale marked Musing that, despite its title, is not so much thoughtful as it is celebratory, often dancelike, and interestingly orchestrated, with a prominent, recurring glockenspiel. The movement incorporates material from Farewell to Stromness by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (1934-2016) and is intended as a tribute to him. But knowledge of the provenance of the music is not necessary for appreciation of the well-thought-through way in which Dove incorporates the solo instrument into a movement that gives the accordion plenty of virtuoso opportunities without preventing other instruments from asserting themselves effectively into the atmosphere. Murray and MacMillan present all the music on this disc with as much skill and engagement as any listener could wish for, creating, all in all, an effective argument for inclusion of the accordion – in its current form – among instruments that are quite worthy of having the spotlight of concertos shine upon them.

(++++) CONNECTIONS

Dvořák: Piano Trio No. 3; Josef Suk: Piano Trio; Elegy in D-flat; Rudolf Friml: Piano Trio “Rural Life in Bohemia.” Hermitage Piano Trio (Misha Keylin, violin; Sergey Antonov, cello; Ilya Kazantsev, piano). Reference Recordings. $24.98 (SACD). 

Brahms: Clarinet Quintet; Clarinet Trio; Sonatas Nos. 1 and 2 for Clarinet or Viola and Piano. Rúnar Óskarsson, clarinet; Helga Bryndís Magnúsdóttir, piano; Sigurđur Bjarki Gunnarsson, cello; Siggi String Quartet (Una Sveinbjarnardóttir and Helga Þóra Björgvinsdóttir, violins; Þórunn Ósk Marinósdóttir, viola; Sigurđur Bjarki Gunnarsson, cello). Sono Luminus. $16.99 (2 CDs). 

     Although not as well-known as his fourth and final trio for piano, violin and cello (the “Dumky”), Dvořák’s Piano Trio No. 3 is a substantial work both musically and emotionally – and the linchpin of an interestingly conceived Reference Recordings release featuring the Hermitage Piano Trio. Dvořák’s work is of significant length – more than 40 minutes – and darkly dramatic almost throughout. It is in F minor – all Dvořák’s piano trios except No. 1 are in minor keys – and permeated both by emotion and by dance forms modified to accommodate the changing moods of the four movements. The trio contrasts interestingly with the Scherzo Capriccioso, written later in the same year (1883), as if the pervasive darkness of the chamber work is balanced, at least to an extent, by the ebullience of the orchestral one. The Hermitage Piano Trio plumbs Dvořák’s music elegantly and with suitable intensity, but without overdoing the work’s emotionalism to the point of sentimentality. By the time the final movement reaches its resilient if scarcely bright conclusion, the players have managed thoroughly to explore its emotional foundations to allow its full impact to come forth. The Dvořák is by far the most substantial work on this recording, but the other pieces on this very fine-sounding SACD compare and contrast well with it. Sequentially, it is followed on the disc by the Elegy in D-flat by Dvořák’s son-in-law, Josef Suk (1874-1935). This work was originally written for a stage play and was interestingly scored for violin, cello, string quartet, harmonium and harp before Suk arranged it as heard here. Dating to 1902, this Elegy is suitably gloomy but pervaded by thematic beauty and a generally gentle flow that sounds very much like Dvořák’s. The restraint of the Hermitage Piano Trio is notable here: everything is in its place, nothing is overdone, and the music flows and flowers naturally. The Elegy is one of only two Suk works for piano trio, the other being a slightly earlier (1898-1891) trio also heard on this recording. A much less ambitious work than Dvořák’s Piano Trio No. 3, Suk’s is a student piece that in fact earned him admission to Dvořák’s  master class in composition. Suk’s trio contains elements similar to those favored by Dvořák himself, including modified folk dances and considerable warmth and lyricism. It is, however, somewhat on the thin side, being less than half as long as Dvořák’s Piano Trio No. 3 and much less emotionally exploratory – but it is, after all, a student work, and it does effectively showcase Suk’s abilities in forms ranging from dance to march. Again the Hermitage Piano Trio avoids trying to make the piece into something grander than it is: the work’s pleasantries come through clearly and without pretense. The two Suk works are separated on the recording by a world première: the Piano Trio “Rural Life in Bohemia” by Rudolf Friml (1879-1972) has not been recorded before. Friml’s Dvořák connection is less well-known than Suk’s but was significant: Dvořák was, for a time, his composition teacher. Nowadays Friml is remembered as an operetta, stage and film composer, but he did produce a substantial amount of concert-hall music and had, like Dvořák, a strong sense of Czech nationalism. Friml’s single-movement trio, written in 1918, is a brief five-section work that is brighter (and slighter) than anything else on this disc: despite its date, it shows no sign of postwar trauma or even questioning, instead offering a series of pleasant, wistful dances, at most mildly melancholic, interspersed with the sort of sweeping, swooning lyricism that made Friml’s stage and screen music so popular. Immediately appealing and determinedly surface-level throughout, Friml’s trio comes across as snapshots of a time long gone – old-style picture postcards, but in music – and sounds more like a paean to the past than do the earlier works by Dvořák and Suk. The mingling of Czech nationalism and late-Romantic harmonic sensibility, plus the intertwined lives of these three composers, show their different-but-related ways of processing their similar musical backgrounds, with the Hermitage Piano Trio doing a fine job of highlighting both the parallels among the works and their sometimes subtle differences of form and expression. 

     Just as Dvořák’s relationships with Suk and Friml were personal as well as musical, so a similar dual form of relationship existed between Dvořák and Brahms – but in this case it was Brahms, eight years older than Dvořák, who served as mentor as the two men developed their close and long-lasting friendship. The story is well-known of how Brahms paved the way for Dvořák to build an international reputation – all the while staying true to his own musical predisposition, which was quite different from the more-nationalistic one of Dvořák. Brahms interconnected musically and personally with other important figures as well: Clara Schumann for many years, Robert Schumann until his early death, and Richard Mühlfeld at the end of Brahms’ own creative career, to name three. Mühlfeld became first clarinetist of the Meiningen Court Orchestra in 1876, and it is intriguing to realize that until that point he had been a violinist – had he continued in that role, music would have been the poorer for it. As actually happened, Mühlfeld’s clarinet playing inspired Brahms, who had gone into self-imposed creative retirement, to reemerge compositionally and create four great clarinet-focused works: his quintet, trio and two sonatas that were Brahms’ last pieces of chamber music. The complete set of these four clarinet explorations receives sensitive and beautifully balanced performances from a bevy of Icelandic musicians on a new two-CD release from Sono Luminus. Clarinetist Rúnar Óskarsson is the headline performer, given the repertoire, but he is so ably abetted by the other players that he emerges as primus inter pares rather than an overarching presence. And the music is all the better for it: Brahms showed his mastery of blending in these four pieces, integrating the clarinet with other instruments with a level of subtlety that results in an ensemble sound in which everyone shares the spotlight even though the clarinet is, at the same time, in the forefront. The balancing act is quite a remarkable one, and performers who are sensitive to it – as these players are – are able to deliver chamber music that is quite unlike anything else Brahms wrote. The motivic interweaving of themes in the quintet, which is the largest-scale of these four works, is well-displayed in Óskarsson’s performance with the Siggi Quartet. The care with which Brahms positions the woodwind in accord with the piano and cello in the trio is matched here by the sensitivity that Helga Bryndís Magnúsdóttir and Sigurđur Bjarki Gunnarsson bring to their portions of the music. And the two sonatas – with which Brahms himself toured with Mühlfeld in readings that so impressed the composer that he gave all the fees to his clarinet partner – come across here as sublimely expressive, glowing instrumental pairings in which the back-and-forth between Óskarsson and Magnúsdóttir fits the musical meshing to perfection. 

     Connections between and among composers are musically meaningful in one way, those between and among the performances who re-create their music in another. Especially in chamber music, a kind of blurring of the self in favor of expressive mutuality goes a long way toward communicating a composer’s intentions and bringing the music’s feelings and meaning to an audience. The emotional expressiveness of composers such as Brahms and Dvořák benefits to an especially great degree from performers such as those heard in these two releases – who delve into the music in ways that draw composer and listener together in a melding of interdependence and understanding.

(++++) A LIFE WELL PLAYED

Life and Music: A Memoir. By Idil Biret with Dominique Xardel. Chestnut Hill Press. $35. 

     Autobiographies are awkward things: unbelievable when self-effacing, irritating when self-aggrandizing, prone to the triple temptation to become, at various points, maudlin, self-congratulatory and unduly modest. The flaws of the form come through with remarkable consistency, for, as Idil Biret points out in a different context, “Really, nothing reinvents itself.” 

     And right there is one way in which the aptly titled Life and Music stands out: Biret (born 1941) has thoughts that, ostensibly about music, are in fact about life both in and beyond the area to which she has devoted so many decades and in which she has produced so many literally noteworthy performances. 

     Much of this book is a translation by Gunesh Guran Gery of a work originally published 20 years ago in French and not previously available in English. That work, Une pianist turque en France, was built around conversations – in the form of exchanges of correspondence – between Biret and Dominique Xardel (born 1934), who among other things was editor-in-chief of the French version of Harvard Business Review. And there are indeed elements of the business of music discussed here, including a notorious and still-debated “Biret boycott” resulting from traditional record labels metaphorically “circling the wagons” to protect their turf (and profits) when Biret was making recordings for the then-upstart, then-budget label Naxos. But business is scarcely the primary focus of the book, and indeed, in a curious way, Biret herself is not the focus – certainly not the entirety of it. That is because so much of what Biret discusses with Xardel uses her experiences, and music itself, as jumping-off points for contemplation of and commentary on broader and wider issues. 

     Biret’s thinking is often expressed through startling observations – or, perhaps more accurately, in startling commentary about trenchant observations: “The pianistic concept has evolved a lot, often at random, since the 1960s, a decade that in many ways was still part of the nineteenth century. Since then the compositions are at the mercy of the interpreters and not the other way around as it generally should be. The large egos of today’s interpreters are offensive to the fragility of the well-known works of composers who could never have imagined such a change.” Notions born of experience and worthy of much further contemplation are packed into that half paragraph – about the 1960s, about the balance between composer and performer, about the “fragility” of traditional piano repertoire. Whether a reader agrees with Biret or not, her insights provoke nearly as much surprise and thought when verbalized as they do when communicated via the piano. 

     It is of course necessary to have some familiarity with classical music to appreciate Biret’s place in it, and some basic knowledge about repertoire and well-known performers to share fully in the perspectives that Biret offers. Life and Music is not a full-fledged biography, but there is enough background information in it to allow the casual reader, one not thoroughly versed in the ins and outs of the concert-music world, to understand Biret’s place in the pianistic firmament and to appreciate her often remarkably penetrating insights. Again and again, she challenges conventional wisdom in her words as she often does in her performances: “It seems to me that even now we have a romantic, a wrong idea of what a ‘career’ or a ‘reputation’ means.” But again and again, Life and Music shows the tremendous solidity on which Biret’s own career and reputation rest: the 80 photographs bound into the center of the book, arranged chronologically from 1946 to 2020, directly display her interactions with family, with the leadership of her native Turkey, and with some of the great performers and teachers with whom she has interacted throughout her long and distinguished career. 

     Readers interested in the mundane aspects of professional performance will find Biret’s thinking especially intriguing. “The sitting position permits proper breathing comfortably as long as you do not stoop. …You have to watch carefully for any signs of arthritis, follow a healthy diet, take vitamins, especially antioxidants. Do not smoke, drink lots of water and, once in a while, a glass of wine…” There is something rather charming in those remarks. And there is always a surprising or unexpected thought lurking on a nearby page: “I think it’s a good idea not to work with first-rate pianos, not to get used to the beautiful sound of an instrument. It’s more interesting to try to get a good sound from a mediocre piano.” 

     It is because Biret is an intermediary, an interpreter putting her creativity at the service of the creativity of others – of the composers whose work she creates and re-creates – that her thoughts, even when personal, resonate beyond herself, so that the focus of Life and Music is not the usual narrow one found in a book whose professed topic is a single individual. Indeed, Biret returns repeatedly to the theme – more of a theme and variations – of music as an art and music within the arts. Her thinking becomes a touchstone of engagement for anyone fortunate enough to encounter not only her performances but also the words she offers here: “Music is what you feel immediately, outwardly and within yourself. …Music goes beyond words, beyond colors, beyond forms. …When we think about music, we hear it within ourselves, in detail. We don’t need an instrument.” Perhaps not – but it helps to have an instrumentality. And that, as Life and Music makes abundantly clear, is exactly what Idil Biret is.