(++++) BACK TO THE 1780s

Mozart: Horn Concertos Nos. 1-4; Rondo, KV 371. Martin Owen, horn; Manchester Camerata conducted by Gábor Takács-Nagy. Chandos. $21.99. 

Haydn: Symphonies Nos. 84-86. Danish Chamber Orchestra conducted by Adam Fischer. Naxos. $19.99. 

     In the decade when Haydn was in his 50s and Mozart in his late 20s and early 30s, the sheer creativity of both composers was in full flower and to this day is something of a wonder to behold – and to hear. The music that flowed from Mozart and Haydn in those years continues to elicit new interpretations and rethinkings to this day, with contemporary performers finding that the works still have a great deal to say to modern audiences and are worth presenting with some new approaches designed to elicit changing listener responses. 

     There is also new scholarship underlying the music. The four Mozart horn concertos are now thought to have been composed in the order of 2, 4, 3 and 1, with No. 1 not finished until after Mozart’s death and being completed by Franz Xaver Süßmayr, who is best known for another completion, of Mozart’s Requiem. In accordance with the new information, Martin Owen gives the two-movement No. 1 a warmer and more expansive reading than it customarily receives, and is backed up aptly in the approach by the Manchester Camerata under Gábor Takács-Nagy. Nor is this the only concerto in which Owen and Takács-Nagy place Mozart closer to the forefront of the Romantic era than is usually the case: all the concertos’ slow movements are delivered with considerable warmth, their emotive qualities emphasized; and at various places – not just in the slow movements – there are tempo variations, unmentioned in the score, that are intended to make the music more expansive or communicative in various ways. It is only in the comparatively straightforward performance of the Rondo, KV 371, which dates to 1781 and thus predates all the concertos, that Owen and Takács-Nagy follow the precedent of other performers pretty much throughout, although here too there is considerable lyrical flow that is accentuated by the round, full tone of Owen’s instrument. Everything here is carefully thought through and presented with considerable elegance and very fine ensemble playing – but the Chandos release does take some getting used to for listeners long familiar with the repertoire. Soloist and conductor do succeed in shining some new light on the material, and without conveying a sense that they are somehow trying too hard to find a new line of communication between the 18^th century and the 21^st. In some ways, though, this thoughtful and well-conceived approach is a bit of a throwback to recordings such as those of Dennis Brain and Barry Tuckwell, which were exceptionally well-played and made no attempt to display the historicity of the music, the scholarship for which was on a totally different level at the time – when the notion of historically informed performance practice was essentially nonexistent. In the collaboration of Owen and Takács-Nagy, matters of history are fully understood based on current scholarship, and when the interpretations seem to deviate a bit from what is now the generally accepted approach to the music, that is entirely by design. Even if this is not a listener’s first choice for a recording of Mozart’s horn concertos, it could surely stand as a second – because it does showcase the music in some genuinely new ways while presenting it always with exceptionally fine playing and some genuine verve, especially in the exuberant hunting-horn finales. 

     Unlike Owen and Takács-Nagy, Adam Fischer may be trying a bit too hard for a new approach in his ongoing reimagining of Haydn symphonic performance. Fischer is supposed to be recording the last 25 of the symphonies for Naxos, although how that will work with three to a disc is by no means clear, since 25 is not divisible by three. The final 12 “London” symphonies did fit neatly onto four CDs, and the six “Paris” symphonies would fit on two, but the expected sequence would be Nos. 82-84 on one disc and Nos. 85-87 on another – which is not what Fischer has recorded in the fifth volume of this series. Instead he delivers first-rate performances of Nos. 84-86, with an accompanying note that sounds almost apologetic for Haydn tending to be less popular nowadays than Mozart and Beethoven despite being No. 1 among audiences of his own time. But this is where Fischer may try too hard to “redeem” Haydn, who needs nothing of the sort: Haydn wrote music not to challenge but to delight, and no apologia for that, no attempt somehow to “equalize” Haydn with his contemporaries, is required. 

     Haydn was endlessly inventive, his symphonies – including Nos. 84-86 – being totally unlike each other even when their formal plans are superficially similar. To modern ears, the differences among the symphonies, and between those by Haydn and those by his contemporaries, are subtle. But in context they were substantial, and that is why Haydn had such an outsized reputation. Today’s audiences would need to be steeped in symphonic works of Haydn’s time to hear just how distinctive Haydn’s were, and that is simply not possible after the intervening centuries. In any case, Fischer and the Danish Chamber Orchestra make a wonderful case for Haydn in general and these three “Paris” symphonies in particular. No. 84 features great clarity of the solos – a distinctive Haydn symphonic feature – despite occasional unneeded slowdowns that are intended to mark points of emphasis. This is inappropriate, as are some brief pauses before some downbeats – a performance oddity that does nothing to burnish the otherwise very clean orchestral sound. “Rescuing” Haydn is entirely unnecessary, but we would have to be steeped in the way symphonic works were commonly conceived in Haydn’s time to understand just how revolutionary Haydn was. There is simply no way to recapture the milieu in which he operated, so it is something of a fool’s errand to try to “revive” the response his music received. Fischer’s approach is attractive in its use of a variety of subtle alterations of typical performance techniques, especially in the strings, to try to bring freshness to the symphonies. They really do stand on their own, though, no matter how effective the bouncing bows in the finale of No. 84 turn out to be. 

     In No. 85, the string speed in the first movement’s runs, and the contrast when the movement dips into the minor, are handled with great panache: it is difficult to sustain the movement at this pace, but this orchestra does so exceptionally well. Fischer is also, here and elsewhere, willing to do slow movements not very slowly at all. In the third movement, piano and forte contrast to particularly good effect, and Fischer never loses sight of the humorous touches that, like the contrast between loud and soft, are characteristic elements of Haydn’s symphonic thinking. The performance climaxes with a very bouncy finale that features a perkily percolating bassoon line – the bassoon having also featured to good effect in No. 84. As for No. 86, timpani are prominent and used to especially good effect in the first movement, in which the transition from the slow opening to the main tempo is both subtle and surprising – again, a combination typical of Haydn but not to be found elsewhere (not even in Mozart). Fischer takes the first movement Allegro spirituoso quite quickly, with the repeated forte exclamations handled with aplomb. This is one of Haydn’s most perfectly proportioned symphonies, and Fischer manages it to fine effect. The second movement forte/piano contrasts are again handled particularly well – this is an unusual movement in its alteration of very slow, emotional material with brighter, quicker elements. The third movement again features especially effective timpani, and its rustic Trio with woodwind emphases is a standout. The finale is very quick, with excellent strings – this movement is a showcase for them – and yet again there are delightful little bassoon touches that are well-handled. The unexpected silences near the very end really come as a surprise here and underline the quality both of the music and of the performers. Nevertheless, nothing that Fischer delivers in his reexamination of a few dozen Haydn symphonies will be as impressive as his remarkable survey of the entire set of 104, recorded over a 14-year period (1987-2001) with the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra. But even during that monumental undertaking, Fischer was expressing misgivings about the untoward permanence being given to interpretations that he said he was reconsidering and looking at in new ways even as the cycle was being assembled. That sort of self-criticism is understandable: great music invites constant reassessment. So Fischer’s recent thoughts about Haydn’s later symphonies, like the thoughts of Owen and Takács-Nagy about Mozart’s horn concertos, have considerable validity and deserve to generate considerable interest. But nothing in these Haydn and Mozart performances can be or should be thought of as definitive: the characteristics that have kept this music appealing, engaging and meaningful from the 1780s to the 2020s will surely continue to provoke new ideas and new approaches in the future.

(+++) RETHINKINGS

Tchaikovsky: Variations on a Rococo Theme; Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture; Pezzo capriccioso; Six Morceaux, Op. 19—No. 4; Six Morceaux, Op. 51—No. 6; Violin Concerto—Canzonetta. Gabriel Schwabe, cello; Sinfonieorchester Aachen conducted by Christopher Ward. Naxos. $19.99. 

Schubert: Wandrers Nachtlied II; Am See; Auf dem Wasser zu singen; Vaughan Williams: On Wenlock Edge; Ives: The Housatonic at Stockbridge; Patrick Castillo: Skyline Palimpsest; Vivian Fung: Lamenting Earth. Nicholas Phan, tenor; Myra Huang, piano; Jasper String Quartet (J Freivogel and Karen Kim, violins; Andrew Gonzalez, viola; Rachel Henderson Freivogel, cello). AVIE. $19.99. 

     It is facile but demonstrably incorrect to think that the familiar, customarily performed versions of well-known musical works are the versions. Aside from instances such as the vocal version of the Blue Danube Waltz and the two separate Prokofiev symphonies that both are listed as No. 4, there are many, many pieces that are commonly played a certain way but are equally authentic in others. That fact lies at the heart of a rather ill-assorted set of works performed by Gabriel Schwabe and/or Sinfonieorchester Aachen under Christopher Ward on a recent Naxos release. That “and/or” is part of what makes the disc a rather peculiar one. Of the six Tchaikovsky works on it, five feature cello solo but the longest piece does not. And among the five in which Schwabe is at the forefront, two are world première recordings of his own arrangements – one of which is very odd indeed. And even works that listeners may think they know well sound different here, because the versions on this disc are ones that predate some modifications made in Tchaikovsky’s lifetime and perpetuated since then. Thus, the CD opens with a performance of Variations on a Rococo Theme in which the variations are given out of the order in which they are usually heard – because this is Tchaikovsky’s original sequence, which cellist Wilhelm Fitzenhagen, the work’s dedicatee, modified for his own purposes; and the changes stuck, resulting in the much-more-usual way the piece is played. Next is Pezzo capriccioso, a very serious work (despite its title) that was first performed on cello and piano and not in its version with orchestra, heard here, until a year and half later. Here too the cellist for whom the piece was written – in this case, Anatoly Brandukov – altered the cello part to make it more to his own liking, and here too the changed version is the one usually heard, with the current recording restoring the original. Brandukov is also the cellist for whom Tchaikovsky arranged the fourth of his Six Morceaux, Op. 19, a Nocturne; that arrangement follows Pezzo capriccioso on this disc. Then come the two brand-new arrangements by Schwabe. The first is of the slow movement from Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, and hearing it on the cello is very strange indeed – although it must be said that the movement’s warmth and lyricism fit the cello quite well. This is followed by Valse sentimentale, No. 6 from the Six Morceaux, Op. 51 – a trifle of a piece that is pleasantly unassuming both in its original form and as heard here. And after all this cello-focused material, the CD moves to the Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture, which has no solo cello part and really does not fit with anything else on the disc except for being by the same composer as the rest of the works. Furthermore, this is not the hyper-familiar 1880 final version of the work – it is the intermediate, second version that was published in 1870 and first performed in 1872. In it are notable differences from the version usually used: the entire climactic section, which is the recapitulation in the work’s sonata form, is different in emphasis and effect. What to make of all this? It is hard to see what audience the CD is intended for: the performances are quite good (although Romeo and Juliet, despite fine orchestral playing, is somewhat lacking in sweep and drama), but the collection of pieces is a hodgepodge, and the instances of rearrangements or restoration of less-known versions are more academically than musically significant. The disc is perhaps best thought of as a curious addition for the collection of audiences strongly devoted to Tchaikovsky and interested in some of the byways associated with the shaping of some of his works. 

     Several pieces on a new AVIE disc are not so much rethought as repurposed: this is one of those politically aware recordings in which music is at the service of a supposedly higher calling – in this case, the relationship between humans and the environment. To make its point, the CD takes Schubert, Vaughan Williams and Ives out of context and mixes them with two contemporary works that are intentionally designed to make sociopolitical points. The result is a rather odd collection redeemed (from a musical standpoint) in much the same way as the Tchaikovsky disc: through generally very fine performances. Nicholas Phan’s voice is beautifully expressive in the three Schubert songs, whose wistful lyricism shines through with warmth and emotional commitment. The even greater emotional range of Vaughan Williams’ settings of A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad in On Wenlock Edge gives Phan plenty of scope for emoting, and he very clearly conveys the skillful ways in which Vaughan Williams accentuates Housman’s placing of human feelings and emotions both within grand natural settings and outside of them. Political intentionality aside, this is a highly sensitive and thoughtful interpretation of the work. Ives’ The Housatonic at Stockbridge, arranged by him for voice and piano after first being used as the third of his Three Places in New England, contrasts appealingly and very effectively with On Wenlock Edge, being mostly quieter and more strongly philosophical. Here Phan melds his voice with the complexities of the piano part to very fine effect, and Myra Huang’s accompaniment is very much to the point – as indeed it is throughout this recording. However, the main extramusical purpose of this CD comes after the Schubert, Vaughan Williams and Ives material, in two contemporary works. Skyline Palimpsest by Patrick Castillo (born 1979) is an instrumental piece intended to reflect the past, present and potential future of New York City – a schema not clear from the music itself and thus requiring listeners to know the work’s reason for being in order to try to hear elements of its argument as it proceeds. It is dissonant enough and ambiguous enough to fit pretty much any scenario that an audience may envision. The CD is designed to build to its final entry, Lamenting Earth by Vivian Fung (born 1975), which is much more direct: it sets poetry by Claire Wahmanholm in four songs focused unerringly on climate change and the regrets, fears and demands for action associated with it. The vocal settings are as straightforward in their tone painting as the words are in their verbal precision, and here Phan’s determination to be expressive leads only to making the obvious sound over-obvious. This is one of those pieces filled with well-meaning verbiage and determined musical underlining; and it is quite focused on giving “Generation Z” a voice, incorporating a variety of student comments into the text. “My body is more sorrow than water,” “the birds swirling recklessly throughout the hurting skies,” “death knocks on our doors,” and other forthright if scarcely unconventional expressions of sorrow, worry and fear mingle with music intended, ultimately, as a call to – what? Concern, action, understanding, determination, resilience? Not apathy, surely – but the music itself is less effective than the composer and performers clearly hope it will be as a rallying cry of some sort. The CD as a whole moves musically from sensitivity, subtlety and thoughtfulness to a kind of hectoring that may be justified by circumstance but that is unlikely to change minds or spur actions among those not already inclined to think as these words and this music insist they should be thinking.

(+++) OF TIME AND TECHNOLOGY

Philip Glass: Suite from “The Hours”; Tirol Concerto. Simone Dinnerstein, piano and conducting Barocklyn strings. Naïve. $16.99. 

David Bird: Hinterlands; Ambient Machine; Chroma; American City. New Focus Recordings. $20.99. 

     Fans of Philip Glass’ particular brand of minimalism may have found a particularly interesting application of it in the 2002 film The Hours. Philip Glass Ensemble Director Michael Riesman and pianist Simone Dinnerstein certainly did: the former arranged a suite from the movie music that the latter has now recorded with her 11-member ensemble, Barocklyn (the name being a rather silly portmanteau of Baroque and Brooklyn). The music is richer-sounding than much of Glass’ work, and the composer’s tendency to remain in one place, aurally speaking, while having his music metamorphose very slowly into new forms, fits the film quite well: its plot deals with the interconnections in the lives of three women from different time periods – Virginia Woolf in 1941, the year of her suicide; a pregnant, unhappily married housewife in 1951; and a lesbian in 2001 who is preparing a party for an author who has AIDS and whose mother, it turns out in one of several elements of connection, is the housewife from 50 years earlier. The film is very earnest and attuned to contemporary sensibilities, and it received nine Academy Award nominations and won in one category. It and the novel on which it drew were also adapted, in 2022, into an opera with music by Kevin Puts. The music that Glass created for the film won a BAFTA award and received one of the Academy Award nominations, and is not quite as unceasingly bleak as the movie itself. Certainly Riesman, who played the piano for the score in the movie itself, has a good sense of assembling a suite from it – and, indeed, previously worked with Nico Muhly on an arrangement for piano solo. With all this provenance and all this recognition, one would be justified in expecting a more-exceptional score and suite for piano, strings, harp and celesta than Glass and Riesman actually provide. Shorn of a connection to events occurring on screen, the music sounds fine, with surface-level emotion of the sort common in movie music, and is played quite well by Dinnerstein and her ensemble; but its inevitable repetitiveness and its swells and diminutions are straightforward and, out of context, scarcely gripping. It is paired on this Naïve CD with the 2000 Tirol Concerto, Glass’ first piano concerto, in which the composer incorporates elements from his earlier piano Études. The concerto, scored for piano and strings, has a central movement that is intended as the heart of the work, being longer than its first and third put together. Its title comes from Glass’ use of a traditional Tyrolean song called Maria! Hilf mir doch! In performance, the overextended second movement is less engaging than it keeps trying to be and does not come across as well as the finale, in which Glass manages to keep a sense of forward motion while still using some of the stasis-generating techniques he commonly employs. Both Glass works here are somewhat more accessible than much of his earlier work, and the very fine playing puts them across as effectively as possible. The disc will certainly be of interest to listeners who are already fans of the composer, although the music is not convincing enough to widen his appeal. 

     Glass, himself a pianist, has a long and somewhat complex relationship with electronic music, with his Philip Glass Ensemble regularly using electronically amplified woodwinds and keyboard synthesizers. And he is scarcely the only contemporary composer for whom acoustic and electronic sounds – and their contrasts – are germane to different works. David Bird (born 1990) uses sound generation in multiple ways in the pieces on a New Focus Recordings release that is of short duration (43 minutes) but considerable sonic density. It opens with Hinterlands, played by an ensemble called lovemusic (no capitalization: an affectation). The group’s mixture of flute (Emiliano Gavito), clarinet (Adam Starkie), and viola (Sophie Wahlmüller), with electric guitar (Christian Lozano Sedano) and electronics (Finbar Hosie), exemplifies Bird’s thinking about the differing roles of forms of sound generation. The work’s inspiration is technological, so the domination of electronic material is scarcely a surprise: the piece uses unexceptional layering of aural elements to produce a series of machinelike sounds and effects. It is followed by Ambient Machine, which, despite its title, is for acoustic instruments: bassoon (Ben Roidl-Ward) and cello (Isidora Nojkovic). However, the reason for its name becomes clear immediately through the amplification and constant electronic manipulation of the sound of both instruments; indeed, the identifiability of wind and string sound origination is barely present. After this on the CD is Chroma, an ensemble piece, performed by the Grossman Ensemble under Jeffrey Meyer. It is all about timbre and the creation of a kind of soundcloud that expands and contracts and metamorphoses slowly into formlessness of various kinds. Concluding the disc is the three-movement American City, for string quartet (the Mivos Quartet). This work offers a series of electronic sound extensions, technical alterations and aural expansions that are well-differentiated among the movements but uniformly difficult to listen to because, by design, they are supposed to reflect the dehumanization inherent in industrialization. There are interesting elements here and there in all these pieces, but never enough to sustain them from start to finish: sound immersion for its own sake is dominant throughout, and once it is established, there is nowhere significant for the material to go. Actually, the most intriguing element of the CD – for anyone who cares to look into the nonmusical background of Bird’s work – is the title American City, which refers not to a place in the United States but to Magnitogorsk in Russia. That is a city developed for ore mining in Soviet days with the assistance of a consulting firm from Cleveland that helped create a copy of a steel mill then operating in Gary, Indiana – after which industry was developed along the lines used in the 1930s in Gary and in Pittsburgh. In the case of Bird’s music, though, knowledge of this intriguingly odd inspiration does little to enhance understanding of the piece itself: the sounds that Bird calls for speak clearly enough of technology and dehumanization on their own, but not in any significant ways beyond those offered by many other modern composers who build their own creations by technological means.

(++++) INTERSECTIONS

Nadia Boulanger: War Years in America and Her Last Decades. By James Whipple Miller. Chestnut Hill Press. $39.99. 

     Imagine a book about Mozart’s quirky and often childish sense of humor that mentions his comic operas and amusing comments in scores such as those of his horn concertos only in passing and you will have some idea of the approach of James Whipple Miller to Nadia Boulanger. Imagine further that the nonexistent Mozart book is structured essentially as an epistolary novel – or rather an epistolary work of nonfiction – and you will have further insight into Nadia Boulanger: War Years in America and Her Last Decades. This is to say that musicians, including the great ones, are people, too, and however much their music may be the center of their lives, it is not the totality of their existence. 

     It is true that if it were not for music, there would be little reason for this book – but the musical material exists mostly in the background here, never quite fading into it but rarely assuming foreground emphasis. This is not so much a biography of Boulanger (1887-1979) as it is a story of her interactions with two of her pupils: Ruth Robbins (1910-2005) and Idil Biret (born 1941). Robbins was Miller’s aunt, and Biret is married to Miller’s longtime friend Şefik Büyükyüksel, so there are ties that bind here that go beyond music, and they are many and of considerable duration. 

     Miller writes attractively for a general audience – classical-music knowledge is helpful but scarcely required here – and structures the book in two clearly delineated sections. The first introduces the three principal characters, with Boulanger first and foremost but more in the role of primus inter pares than that of someone idolized and idealized. The second, much longer segment is a year-by-year presentation of hundreds of letters and telegrams and jottings, amply footnoted, sent from 1941 through 1979. It is these missives that bring forth the essential humanity of a couple of 20^th-century musical giants (Boulanger and Biret, with Robbins not quite at their level). The greetings, good wishes, complaints and preoccupations with trivia provide refreshing insight into these women’s personalities precisely because everything is so matter-of-fact. From “hoping to lunch with you this Wednesday” (1944) to “pray the Lord to help you in all your terrible anxiety” (1959), the communication is at the same time heartfelt and mundane. Miller carefully provides context for many references, but the essential humanity of the missives, their essential humanness, comes through even without knowledge of the specifics to which they refer. The book becomes a kind of reassurance, a clear demonstration that even people who excel in rarefied areas (classical music certainly being one) have the same sorts of worries, concerns, and ups-and-downs of life as do those who can only read about significant accomplishments in a field and admire them from afar. 

     Music is scarcely absent from the book, and some of the comments on it are trenchant and seem surprisingly up-to-date, such as this from Robbins in 1955: “If I knew people who liked to get together once a week or so just for the pleasure of making music together, life would be entirely different. But there is such a commercial point of view about music here: you either have to ‘make money’ with it or ‘get on the radio’ (or television, which is even worse), or it is not worth doing.” There is throughout a frankness in the back-and-forth that sometimes reveals thinking that, if expressed nowadays on social media, would come back to haunt people. One example, from Robbins in 1956: “Our house is not sold and no prospects at the moment. We thought that giving it to a Jewish agent would be a good thing as Highland Park has become 80% or more Jewish (that is probably an exaggeration, but not much). However, it seems that the newer type of wealthy Jew is not buying property here anymore as the town has become so saturated with the undesirable kind! So now we will switch to a gentile agent and hope for better results.” 

     If some of these writings thus clearly show their age and the time period and sociopolitical environment in which they were produced, that is actually all to the good, because it further humanizes people who might otherwise – certainly in the case of Boulanger and Biret – be considered to have “celebrity status” and therefore be unknowable as real human beings (the parasocial phenomenon long predates today’s social media). When Boulanger in 1944 writes from the safety of California that “the sacrifices are too terrible” and that so many have been “killed by the Germans, dead through suffering – gone because it was the time marked by God,” the experience of World War II comes through with all too much clarity. And then, when in 1947 she sends Robbins a list of things she needs, including chocolate, cheese, powdered milk, rice, candy, dried fruit and more, this is testimony not only to the postwar world but also to the quotidian reality in which everyone, no matter how well-known, lived and still lives. 

     There are some deeply significant events on which Miller’s book does shine a particularly bright light – such as November 22, 1963, the date of the assassination of President Kennedy, when Biret (whose birthday was the day before) was scheduled to perform with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Erich Leinsdorf. The decision to proceed with the concert, and the feelings engendered by that decision as well as by the music itself, come through with particular pathos and emotional involvement through the words here – and may remind readers of other notable juxtapositions of music and earthshaking events, such as Leonard Bernstein’s Christmas 1989 East Berlin concert, marking the fall of the Berlin Wall, in which the conductor changed Freude to Freiheit in the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. But Nadia Boulanger: War Years in America and Her Last Decades is not, by and large, about occurrences or people writ large: by design, it is a sidelight on the life of Boulanger and those close to her, not a full-fledged biography. A book like this is invariably self-limited to readers who know the subject matter, at least in general terms, and are eager for additional specifics and insights. But if it is unlikely to engage a large audience, it reaches out with considerable skill and sensitivity to a smaller group whose members will here discover that some of their idols have feet not of clay but of flesh and bone, and, moreover, clad in sensible shoes.

(++++) A PLACE IN HISTORY

Anton Rubinstein: Piano Sonatas Nos. 1 and 2; Three Serenades. Han Chen, piano. Naxos. $19.99. 

Anton Rubinstein: Piano Sonatas Nos. 3 and 4. Han Chen, piano. Naxos. $19.99. 

     Founder of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory and brother of Nikolai Rubinstein, founder of the Moscow Conservatory, Anton Rubinstein (1829-1894) encapsulated the entire history of piano music through seven gigantic consecutive concerts that he played in Russia, Eastern Europe and the United States. Even his more-standard concert programs could run three hours. Rubinstein was Tchaikovsky’s composition teacher; his only private piano student was Josef Hofmann; and he was a prolific composer in all forms – although always admired more for his piano playing than for the specific works he played, which inevitably included his own. Rubinstein strongly influenced Rachmaninoff, who called Rubinstein “the most original and unequalled pianist in the world.” 

     Yet for all his outreach and considerable influence, it would seem, on the basis of two first-rate Naxos CDs featuring Han Chen’s performances of all four Rubinstein piano sonatas, that Rubinstein – unlike Liszt, who thought Rubinstein resembled Beethoven both in appearance and in pianistic technique – wrote piano music that only Rubinstein himself could present fully effectively. This was not a matter of its enormous virtuoso requirements – indeed, Rubinstein was famous (or notorious) for hitting numerous wrong notes during his recitals, and not caring about doing so provided that he successfully communicated the emotional effects of the music. Instead, it had to do with music that, however well-played, speaks more of its influences (notably Mendelssohn and Schumann) than of anything especially insightful brought to it compositionally by Rubinstein himself. This does not mean Rubinstein’s piano sonatas are directly imitative of earlier models but that they absorb those models effectively without actually extending them, as if Rubinstein-as-composer expects Rubinstein-as-performer to clarify the breadth and depth inherent in the notes. 

     That is a near-impossible feat for any post-Rubinstein pianist to accomplish, and it is to Chen’s credit that he undertakes it with such prodigious technique and enthusiasm, even if the results are not always entirely convincing. It is worth noting that Chen (born 1988) brings to the sonatas a kind of youthful vigor that fits their years of creation well: Rubinstein started writing Nos. 1 and 2 when he was just 19, and Chen’s performances of those sonatas date to 2018. Furthermore, Rubinstein completed No. 3 and the Three Serenades in 1855, in his mid-20s. It is only the final and longest sonata, which dates to 1877, that can be thought of as being in the composer’s fully mature style. 

     Sonata No. 1 is a work that reaches for vastness and is attractively played by Chen with close attention to its scale. It is not a particularly well-unified work, sounding somewhat Beethovenian here and a bit Schubertian there, but it benefits from the clean sound and careful focus on detail that Chen brings to it. Interestingly, Rubinstein himself once said that “the pedal is the soul of the piano” – perhaps a clue to the reason his performances sounded so accomplished notwithstanding the wrongly struck notes – but Chen’s use of the pedals is well-considered and not overdone. This lets the music say clearly what it has to say – although that turns out not to be very much that is original. Sonata No. 2 is the only one of the four in three rather than four movements, its centerpiece being a very extended theme-and-variations movement that is unfortunately somewhat too extended in Chen’s reading: the pacing draws altogether too much attention to the rather mundane nature of the material. The sonata as a whole sounds more complex than No. 1, and its first movement is genuinely noteworthy (pun intended) – it initially sounds like an extended étude or set of études before eventually becoming a vehicle for effective virtuosic display. The sonatas are separated on the CD by the Three Serenades, which are pleasant and tuneful and of no great consequence – they function essentially as aural palate cleansers between the more grandly conceived sonatas. 

     Chen’s recording of Sonatas Nos. 3 and 4 dates to 2024, and the six years between the performances on these two discs show that Chen has, if anything, become even more fluent in presenting and interpreting Rubinstein. No. 3 – the only one of these works in a major key – was Rubinstein’s personal favorite among the four sonatas, but despite the skill with which Chen performs it, it feels more like a work-in-progress than one fully formed and fully communicative. This sonata may point unusually clearly to the apparent disparity between what Rubinstein wrote down and what he performed: it is certainly possible that under his own hands, the work would be more cohesive and seem more thoroughly worked-out than it does here. This is not to take anything away from Chen’s technical prowess, and indeed the finale as Chen plays it comes across well and as a conclusive capstone to a work that until this fourth movement has seemed somewhat uncertain about where it has been going. As for Rubinstein's Sonata No. 4, its 44-minute duration in Chen’s reading puts it at the length of Beethoven’s No. 29, Hammerklavier, and it actually covers some of the same emotional territory, albeit much less cogently. The highly dramatic first movement goes through abrupt mood changes; the second, a scherzo in all but name, is light and surprisingly humorous; the third goes through many emotive motions without ever settling into any specific one or becoming convincingly lyrical; and the fourth offers the strongest possible contrast between light, even elegant passages and tub-thumping ones requiring the most-powerful keyboard technique possible – which Chen duly and suitably supplies. A work of grand scope that is nevertheless somewhat lacking in grandeur, Sonata No. 4 shows Rubinstein as a clear master of piano technique and a composer highly fluent in creating works that explore and exploit the keyboard. But it also shows him to have been lacking in the kind of emotional connectivity that translates well to pianists other than himself and that leads audiences to move beyond admiration to genuine emotional engagement. It can be rather exhausting to hear Rubinstein’s piano sonatas – not to mention to play them! – but their aftereffects lie more in the realm of being impressed with their technical demands than in that of appreciating and responding to any sort of inward journey on which the composer guides his listeners.