Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Nos.
30-32. Beth Levin, piano. Navona. $14.99.
Peter Vukmirovic Stevens: August
Ruins; Tempus Edax Rerum; Étude for Raising the Dead; Versatile
Hammers; Thunder, Perfect Mind. Paige Stockley, cello. Navona. $14.99.
Perceptions: Chamber Works by
Kyle Peter Rotolo, Quinn Dizon, Amelia S. Kaplan, Kevin McCarter, Jason
Barabba, and Thomas L. Read. Navona. $16.99.
Dances of Eternity: Orchestral
Works by Hans Bakker, Anthony Iannaccone, Michael J. Evans, Margaret
Fairlie-Kennedy, and Mark Dal Porto. Navona. $16.99.
Although Navona Records
focuses primarily on music by modern classical composers (with a rather broad
definition of “classical”), it has recently begun to issue a few discs of
more-traditional classical music – which, far from appearing to “cave in” to
mainstream tastes, tend to look at older and better-known music in new ways,
and therefore fit quite well into Navona’s overall approach. Beth Levin’s
recording of Beethoven’s final three piano sonatas is a perfect case in point.
This is music at once familiar and ever-new, and Levin has an interpretative
approach to it that fully respects the past while having a definite veneer of
modernity about it – in, for example, the particularly jaunty rhythms and the
strong contrast between sections of emotional depth and those of jagged
intensity. Navona calls this disc “A Single Breath,” a reference to Beethoven’s
own comment about how he composed these three sonatas; but what is particularly
interesting in Levin’s interpretations is that they highlight contrasts among
the sonatas as well as within them – this is no single-minded interpretation,
but a genuine attempt to see each sonata as an independent unit, communicating
very different emotions within the overall context of Beethoven’s later life. The
composer’s deafness was surely responsible for some of his willingness to
explore forms of dissonance and rhythmic variety far beyond anything ever heard
before – just as the same affliction, later in the 19th century, was
more a help than a creative impediment to Smetana in his composition of Má vlast.
What Levin does
exceptionally well in her performances is to highlight both the sonatas’
unusual elements and their more-traditional ones – and turn the combination
into a fully integrated and highly satisfying whole. No. 30 combines elements
of lightness, as close to frivolity as anything in late Beethoven, with
extremely innovative third-movement variations filled with complex counterpoint
and dense textures that, under Levin’s hands, never become muddy – clarity is a
constant in her readings. The soft, questioning end of this sonata has an
almost plaintive quality here. No. 31 sounds almost like salon music at the
start, with a theme recalling those in earlier Beethoven sonatas, but a set of
flickering transformations soon pulls the music hither and yon through nearly
arbitrary key changes that, in Levin’s performance, are part of a very clear
overall conception. The contrast with the striding second movement is
particularly pronounced here, and the expansive third movement contains all
those contrasts and more within itself, with Levin balancing its sadness and
brightness, its formal complexities and straightforward thematic presentations,
to excellent effect. And her No. 32 is simply splendid. This extremely
influential two-movement sonata became the basis of many other composers’ works
– Prokofiev, for example, based his entire Symphony No. 2 on it – and it is
also the work in whose second movement Beethoven essentially invents jazz. Here
Levin’s focus on all these sonatas’ contrasts really pays off, as the first
movement’s changes of thematic structure and volume consistently surprise,
leading into a second movement that starts with deceptive gentleness before
spreading into a vastly complex canvas that eventually, almost with a sigh of
relief, finds its way to serenity at the end. Levin’s deep understanding of
these sonatas is apparent throughout the performances; her technique is
unassailable; and Navona’s willingness to release these April 2012 recordings
is testimony to its belief that what is modern in classical music appears not
only in new compositions but also in new views of truly classic works.
Of course, many composers
wrote single-instrument music after Beethoven – and before. And while it is
undeniably unfair to compare other composers’ solo works with those of a
transcendent genius, it is also inevitable, particularly when a composer’s
music seems as clearly to be influenced by works of the past as does the music
of Peter Vukmirovic Stevens. Solo works for cello always exist in the shadow
not of Beethoven but of Bach, and Stevens’ actually show Bach’s influence – although
often less of it than the influence of other composers whom he himself cites as
models, such as Erik Satie, Olivier Messiaen and Arvo Pärt. The title work on Navona’s (+++) CD of Stevens’ music, August Ruins, is the most redolent of
Bach, and Paige Stockley plays it with some of the same gestures and intonation
that cellists bring to Bach’s solo-cello suites. However, this work, like the
four others on the CD, seems to be less about exploring musical ideas than
about investigating the technical capabilities of the cello, whose wide range
of notes and emotions makes it a superb vehicle for multifaceted communication.
Stevens’ cello music does in fact try to bring together multiple forms of expressiveness:
like many other modern classical composers, he is influenced by non-Western
experiences and sounds. His writing for cello is idiomatic and effective, but
it is not very well differentiated from piece to piece. There is little reason
for each work on Navona’s CD to bear the title it has: they could reasonably be
called Piece for Cello No. 1, Piece for
Cello No. 2, and so forth. Despite its exploitation of the cello’s wide
range, the music is rather monochromatic in nature, with the result that the CD
becomes something of a chore to hear from start to finish, even with Stockley’s
fine playing throughout.
Larger ensembles, of course,
provide more opportunities for multifaceted musical experiences, and
collections of works by multiple composers also offer greater opportunities for
differentiation among sounds – albeit with the inherent weakness of anthologies
of disparate pieces thought through in different ways. Two new Navona discs
follow this label’s typical anthology pattern, with one focusing on chamber
works and the other on orchestral productions. As is often the case in releases
of this kind, there are interesting elements in various pieces by the 11
composers heard on the two CDs, and the music and performances are of high
enough quality to garner the discs (+++) ratings; but it is a bit difficult to
see to whom these releases will appeal, other than to existing fans of the
specific composers, since there is little uniting the various works presented
on either CD. Perceptions includes
the New England String Quartet’s adept performance of Kyle Peter Rotolo’s String Quartet No. 1, “Macchiato”; a
short piano-quartet work called Awakening
by Quinn Dizon, played by violinist Clayton Hoener, violist Peter Sulski,
cellist Ron Lowry, and pianist Hannah Shields; an even shorter work for piano
and violin, Above the Clouds, by
Kevin McCarter, performed by violinist Robert Lehmann and pianist Anastasia
Antonacos; a somewhat more interesting violin-and-piano piece called Insolence, written by Amelia S. Kaplan
and played by violinist Mary Kamack Kothman and pianist James Helton; the
nicely paced and interestingly scored Capricci
by Thomas L. Read, in which the New England String Quartet is joined by
guitarist Aaron Larget-Caplan; and a neat nine-movement piano-and-violin suite,
Rhetorical Devices, by Jason Barabba,
played by pianist Kevin Kwan Loucks and violinist Iryna Krechkovsky. Six
composers, six pieces, four different instrumentations, entirely different
performers for every work – this CD is an anthology on many levels, and like
other samplers of its type, will attract people interested in, well, sampling
these composers’ chamber works; but why listeners should choose this particular
grouping of works over others that showcase other modern composers’ chamber
pieces is not really clear.
There are similar
attractions and similar questions about Dances
of Eternity, which also contains six works, but in this case by five
composers – with, again, a mixture of performers. Not all the works really fit
into the “dances” description, but the two by Hans Bakker do. They are Canzona L’altra Persona, conducted by
Jan Kučera, and Canzona II: Tribute to the Sun,
conducted by Petr Vronský, both
featuring the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra. Vronský conducts the same ensemble in Mark Dal Porto’s Song of Eternity, whose relationship to
dance is considerably less clear. And Kučera
conducts the Moravian Philharmonic Chamber Players in Margaret
Fairlie-Kennedy’s Summer Solstice,
which – like Dal Porto’s work – has more of a sense of time extension about it
than an involvement with dance forms. Also on this CD are two works played by
the St. Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra under Vladimir Lande: the
intriguingly titled Dancing on Vesuvius
by Anthony Iannaccone, and Michael J. Evans’ Into the Woods. In a sense, this CD, like many from Navona, shows
the consistent high quality of much modern classical music: all the works are
well put together, crafted with a real understanding of instrumentation and of
players’ capabilities. All make attempts to extract various colors from their
ensembles, and all have a sense of rhythm and harmony that is traceable to
earlier classical music but with inflections and harmonies that are decidedly
modern. Yet none of the works especially stands out; there is nothing here with
a style so recognizable that a listener is likely to identify its composer as
someone whose music is worth seeking out repeatedly. Everything on the CD is
workmanlike and nicely crafted; nothing has about it a feeling of significant
inspiration. The result is a disc showing that classical music, however it may
be defined in the 21st century, still has power and some very
skillful adherents; and also showing that, just as in earlier centuries, the
vast majority of competent composers cannot hold a candle to the admittedly
hyper-bright flame of a creator such as Beethoven.
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