Beethoven: Piano Concertos Nos.
1-6. Arthur Schoonderwoerd, fortepiano and conducting Cristofori. Alpha.
$34.99 (3 CDs).
Frederic Rzewski: Four Pieces;
Hard Cuts; The Housewife’s Lament. Ralph van Raat, piano. Naxos. $9.99.
Carter Pann: The Piano’s 12
Sides; The Bills; The Cheese Grater—A Mean Two-Step; Your Touch. Joel
Hastings, piano. Naxos. $9.99.
Cameron Carpenter: If You Could
Read My Mind. Cameron Carpenter, organ. Sony. $11.98.
Rare, rare, rare indeed is
it to find a recording that is a must-have for music lovers, but that is
exactly what Arthur Schoonderwoerd’s version of the complete Beethoven keyboard
concertos is – yes, all of them, complete, including the Op. 61a piano version
of the Violin Concerto, Op. 61. These performances, recorded in 2004 (Nos. 4
and 5), 2007 (Nos. 3 and 6), and 2008 (Nos. 1 and 2) are truly revelatory, and
for that reason utterly magnificent. They are not grandiose – indeed, quite the
opposite. And they are not even piano
concertos – at least, not quite. They are fortepiano
concertos, and Schoonderwoerd proffers them in one of the most historically
accurate and thrilling recordings to be had anywhere, involving any music.
These are recordings that, more than any other currently available, show with
absolute clarity the ways in which Beethoven was a composer both of his time and beyond his time. They are a perfect introduction to a world in
which the Classical era was giving way to the Romantic through a portal named
Beethoven.
These are concertos for an
instrument spanning five, five-and-a-half or six octaves, not the 11 of a
modern piano. They are concertos written
for such an instrument, and here played in earlier versions (when such
versions exist) rather than as the music was later emended to take advantage of
larger, stronger, deeper, more resounding instruments. These are concertos
written to be conducted from the
keyboard, which means that, to keep the ensemble together, the soloist
plays as continuo in the tutti passages,
where he is not in the limelight. This alone dramatically changes the sound and
impression of the works. And the ensemble itself is not an orchestra by modern
definition – it is a chamber group, with just one pair of violins and one pair
of violas, a single cello and bass, and distinctly and appropriately modest
complements or woodwind and brass, plus
timpani that penetrate the sound thrillingly whenever they appear, more like
lightning than distant thunder. These are concertos meant to be played on an
instrument such as the original Johann Fritz fortepiano of 1807-1810 used in
Nos. 4, 5 and 6, or on an Anton Walter instrument of 1800, a facsimile of which
is used for Nos. 1, 2 and 3. These are narrow-key instruments, close kin to
harpsichords, with a shallow fall (about 6 mm, compared with 10 for a modern
piano) and – depending on the manufacturer and date of the instrument – with
knee levers instead of pedals; or, when they did have pedals, perhaps with four
of them. Heard on this recording, Beethoven’s concertos retain their ingenuity
and forward-looking compositional elements while fitting to an absolutely
perfect extent into the world of Mozart and Haydn. Never has it been clearer
how indebted to those earlier masters Beethoven was; never has it been clearer
to anyone but a non-specialist how many were the ways in which he moved beyond
them – not surpassed them, but moved
in new directions that made the Romantic era possible as piano technology
developed apace and as the notion of a conductor as a non-performing orchestral
leader started to emerge after 1820 (although the performing conductor remained
important in many circumstances; witness the Strauss family and its Viennese
competitors). Schoonderwoerd’s elegant, poised, beautifully balanced, nuanced,
sensitive Beethoven concertos are scarcely the only ones available on
fortepiano – the fine version of Nos. 1-5 by Melvyn Tan with the London
Classical Players under Roger Norrington comes immediately to mind – but no one
but Schoonderwoerd places the works so firmly, and so thrillingly, in their historical
context, while at the same time providing such absolute and total pleasure – a chance
to journey back in time and to appreciate Beethoven’s genius all the more as a
result. No matter how many versions of the Beethoven concertos you already own,
this one on Outhere Music’s Alpha label is, to repeat, a must-have.
A major shift in mental,
emotional and auditory gears is required to move from contemplating the
fortepiano era to thinking about the piano as used by contemporary composers
Frederic Rzewski (born 1938) and Carter Pann (born 1972). New (+++) CDs from
Naxos clearly show where the piano, and composers for it, stand today. The
comparative gigantism of the instrument itself has long since been taken for
granted, and today’s composers are often concerned with extending the piano’s considerable
capabilities (and those of the pianist) even further than have previous
composers. Even musicians such as Rzewski and Pann, who accept the piano as it
is – as a percussion instrument that also partakes of some of the subtleties of
the strings used to produce its sounds – frequently try to take the instrument
to its sonic and emotive limits, albeit without feeling it necessary to
“prepare” the piano to turn it into something it was never designed to be (or
have the pianist sprawl over it to pluck or bow its strings, as some modern
works require). There is actually a Beethoven tie-in in one Rzewski work here: The Housewife’s Lament (1980) is a set
of variations on a 19th-century tune written by an anonymous
composer who was audibly influenced by Beethoven – although Rzewski’s
variations are clearly 20th-century in sound, technique and focus.
His Four Pieces (1977) run the gamut
from lyrical warmth (again, in 20th-century style) to dynamic drama,
their Andean dance rhythms reflecting the now-common use of comparatively
exotic, folk-music-based elements as building blocks. Folk rhythms permeate Hard Cuts (2011) as well, in a work that
– unlike the others here – is clearly built with the minimalist style that many
modern composers favor. Ralph van Raat performs all the music with sure-handed
understanding, as Joel Hastings does the very different music of Pann. The Pann
CD is dominated by the full-hour The
Piano’s 12 Sides (2011/12), a kind of songs-without-words cycle whose dozen
movements are intended to encompass pretty much all the moods of which the
instrument is capable: lyrical, sardonic, introspective, virtuosic, danceable,
forthright, strange and intense. The piece makes its points rather obviously
and goes on at somewhat too much length, but it has many effective moments even
though, as a totality, it does not quite hang together. The shorter works on
this CD are complementary. The Bills
(1997) shows clear ragtime influence; Your
Touch (also 1997) is the slow movement from Pann’s Piano Concerto and is
suitably quiet, restrained and jazzy; and The
Cheese Grater—A Mean Two-Step (1996) is fast-paced, bouncy and intense.
The intensity is more
performer-focused than music-related on a new (+++) Sony CD called Cameron Carpenter: If You Could Read My
Mind, its title combining the performer’s name with that of a Gordon
Lightfoot song heard on the disc. This is the sort of crossover CD that is
aggressive about what it is doing: Carpenter plays what he calls his
International Touring Organ, an instrument that he had built to his own
specifications to combine sonic elements from cathedral and cinema organs from
around the world. The grandiosity of the concept is coupled with a celebrity
orientation here, the celebrity being Carpenter himself or perhaps Carpenter-plus-instrument,
but certainly not the music. There is nothing particularly bad in what
Carpenter offers, and his Bach Organ Sonata BWV 530 and Scriabin Piano Sonata
No. 4 performances are respectable if scarcely revelatory. But this is
primarily a “look at me!” disc, or rather a “listen to what I can do!” one.
Carpenter overdoes the elaboration of the Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite No.
1, and in a different way overdoes Bernstein’s wonderful Candide Overture by making it sound like honkytonk music. Carpenter
throws a little bit of everything into this disc: Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise (Op. 34, No. 14); Astor
Piazzolla’s Oblivion; Marcel Dupré’s Variations sur un Noël pour grand orgue; “song
paraphrases” including the Lightfoot work plus Burt Bacharach’s Alfie, Leonard Cohen’s Sisters of Mercy, Anthony Newley and
Leslie Bricusse’s Pure Imagination, and
Bob Montgomery’s Back in Baby’s Arms; and
Carpenter’s own Music for an Imaginary
Film. The juxtapositions might work in concert or on DVD, with the
audience’s focus being on Carpenter the performer rather than on the works
being played, but here the mixture just sounds self-indulgent and a little
silly. What Carpenter wants to do is show things off: his organ and his own
playing. What he does not want to do
is showcase the music – the works are means to an end, the end being
self-aggrandizement. And while this is perfectly acceptable (and even expected)
in celebrity-oriented pop concerts, one tends to hope for more from a medium
(CD) where the sounds are the things that matter. Carpenter certainly has
talent, as his own work and his dabblings in Bach and Scriabin show. But they are dabblings, indulgences in search of
ways to keep listeners’ attention on Carpenter and his instrument rather than
interpretations where what counts is the music and what the composer was trying
to communicate with it. Despite a few impressive elements, this Carpenter disc
is a musical disappointment – although fans of Carpenter (one of those
obviously being Carpenter himself) will undoubtedly revel in it.
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