Salomon Jadassohn: Symphonies
Nos. 1-4; Cavatine for Violin and Orchestra; Cavatine for Cello and Orchestra.
Klaudyna Schulze-Broniewska, violin; Thomas Georgi, cello; Brandenburgisches
Staatsorchester Frankfurt conducted by Howard Griffiths. CPO. $33.99 (2 CDs).
Carl Czerny: String Quartets in A
minor, D minor, D, and E minor. Sheridan Ensemble (Yuki Kasai and Matan
Dagan, violins; Florian Donderer, viola; Anna Carewe, cello). Capriccio. $16.99
(2 CDs).
Alkan: Études dans Touts les
Tons Mineurs, Op. 39; Trois morceaux dans le genre pathétique, Op. 15; Grande
Sonate “Les Quatre Áges,” Op. 33; Sonatine, Op. 61; Étude,
Op. 76, No. 3. Vincenzo Maltempo, piano. Piano Classics. $27.99 (3 CDs).
Josef Suk: About Mother, Op. 28;
Chausson: Four Dances, Op. 26; Reger: From My Diary, Op. 82, Vol. 3. Paul
Orgel, piano. MSR Classics. $12.95.
As the long-delayed rush to
rediscover now-little-known composers of the Romantic era proceeds headlong,
those rescued from oblivion become more and more obscure. Few have been as
thoroughly forgotten as Salomon Jadassohn (1831-1902). A noted pedagogue who
taught, among others, Delius, Grieg, Busoni, Felix Weingartner, Emil von
Reznicek and George Chadwick, Jadassohn was so conservative as a composer that
he himself admitted, in 1899, that he had fallen behind the times musically and
no longer understood what others were writing. Jadassohn’s conservatism was
different from that of his near-contemporary, Saint-Saëns, who had strong esthetic reasons for sticking to harmonic
approaches and compositional techniques that had served him well for decades.
In Jadassohn’s case, his compositions – his four symphonies in particular – had
a distinctly academic cast, being created in furtherance of a philosophy that
deliberately harked back to and largely duplicated the sounds of Mendelssohn
and Schumann and that incorporated a belief that (among other things)
everything of value had to be heard twice. This, not surprisingly, resulted in
works that were long on repetition and rather short on development of themes,
and that made no attempt to reach beyond the harmonic boundaries of Jadassohn’s
models. Indeed, Jadassohn explicitly stated his tripartite approach to creating
music: “melody is the soul of a musical composition,” counterpoint is essential
to developing musical themes, and “in every composition everything important
has to be repeated.” Notably absent from this formulation is any of the
emotionalism generally attributed to the Romantic era. And indeed, Jadassohn’s
symphonies, even in performances as nuanced and attractive as those of the
Brandenburgisches Staatsorchester Frankfurt conducted by Howard Griffiths, have
a certain pervasive coolness about them, their slow movements studied rather
than heartfelt, their fast ones right on the edge of being formulaic (with
speedups at ends of finales being one predictability among many). The four symphonies
(from 1860, 1863, 1876 and 1888) are uniformly well-crafted, attractively assembled,
and nicely if not innovatively scored. The first two (in C and A) are upbeat
pretty much throughout, the latter pair more thoughtful, as befits minor-key
works (D minor and E minor, respectively, although in a couple of places CPO
wrongly lists No. 3 as being in D major). But there is little profundity to be
had anywhere in these works, and little musical inventiveness beyond that of the
time of Wagner’s Lohengrin (1850), a
work that Jadassohn much admired. These symphonies are nevertheless quite
interesting to hear as examples of the sort of music being produced in and
around conservatories in the 19th century by composers with talent
but without genius. And Griffiths certainly handles the music with sensitivity
and considerable skill. The presentation of the symphonies is also broken up
interestingly, with two works written in the operatic style of a Cavatine – one for violin and one for
cello – that are in some ways more appealing than the symphonies themselves.
Jadassohn worked in many forms, but not that of opera; he nevertheless shows in
these two pieces – especially the one for cello, which was his last orchestral
work – an affinity for the lyrical expressiveness of opera, as well as skill in
composing for the solo instruments, which (especially in the violin work) carry
essentially all the interest of the material. Jadassohn may justifiably be only
a footnote as a composer, but hearing his compositions will be fascinating for
listeners looking for a wider-than-usual perspective on the thriving musical
world of the Victorian era.
Much of what is said about
Jadassohn also applies to Carl Czerny (1791-1857), who even today is known for
his pedagogy but already in his own time was deemed at most an adequate or
pedantic composer. Czerny’s case, though, is different from Jadassohn’s, for
Czerny divided his work into segments and was well aware that the exercises and
salon-style pieces that he created for students and popular entertainment were
different from what he called his “serious” music. He was quite capable of
producing virtuosic and superficial piano works based on themes from operas
while at the same time putting together thoughtful, well-proportioned and often
quite impressive string quartets – witness the four performed by the Sheridan
Ensemble on a new Capriccio release. Two of these works, in A minor and D, have
never been recorded before, and the other two are scarcely better known:
interest in Czerny’s music has barely begun to revive, part of the same
increasing attention being paid to less-known 19th-century composers
that has brought Jadassohn back to a measure of public awareness. Czerny shows
in these quartets a genuinely impressive command of instrumental voices, of
thematic balance, of the conversational elements of chamber music, and of the
expressive potential of a small string ensemble. The three minor-key quartets
delve more deeply into emotion than does the one in D, the emotive characteristics
of the music here appearing quite genuine and less studied than those in
Jadassohn’s symphonies. And Czerny offers some genuine cleverness of musical
design in these works: in the D minor, for example, the first theme of the
first movement is introduced by viola and cello rather than violin, and the
second theme is a variation on the first one – in the relative major. Certainly
there are influences of other composers audible here: a touch of Mendelssohn in
the first movement of the A minor work, a bit of Haydn in the finale of the
quartet in D, even a bit of Schubert here and there. But there is a stylistic
solidity to Czerny’s quartets that shows him to have had his own compositional
style, one that did more than choose bits and pieces of the approach of other
composers. These very fine quartet performances show that Czerny’s more-serious
music is certainly worthy of at least occasional revival.
Charles-Valentin Alkan
(1813-1888) has been getting something of a revival for a while now, although much
of his often-astonishing piano output remains quite obscure (and beyond the technical
reach of many modern pianists, for all their virtuosity in other composers’
works). The first great modern proponents of Alkan’s music were the formidable
if somewhat dry Ronald Smith (1922-2004) and the more-theatrical Raymond
Lewenthal (1923-1988). Both of their Alkan recordings deserve to be re-released,
along with the notes Lewenthal provided about the music: his technique was not
always perfect, not always as strong as Smith’s, but Lewenthal’s knowledge,
enthusiasm and breezily accessible writing style made Alkan’s music come quite
vibrantly alive. A few pianists in more-recent times have made some first-rate Alkan
recordings, notably Marc-André Hamelin – and Vincenzo Maltempo,
whose name might as well be “bontempo” in this music, so assured is his
handling of the repertoire. Several of his recordings on the Piano Classics
label have now been combined into a first-rate three-CD set whose primary
attraction is an extraordinary presentation of all 12 of the Études
dans Touts les Tons Mineurs, pieces so complex that Alkan labeled four of
them a symphony for solo piano and three others a concerto for the solo
instrument. The composer surely knew that the labels did not fit: the
techniques called for are such purely pianistic ones that these pieces could
never have been thought of as working in a piano-and-orchestra combination,
much less for an orchestra alone. But in terms of communicating the scale and
intention of these works, Alkan’s labels make perfect sense: this is music that
is truly symphonic in scope, and concerto-like mostly in terms of a work such
as Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1, itself essentially a symphony with piano. Indeed,
Alkan was always pushing the boundaries of musical definition: his Grande Sonate “Les Quatre Áges,”
for example, is really much closer to a fantasy in the sense of Schubert’s Wanderer-Fantasie, a point made
explicitly by Maltempo, who, like Lewenthal, offers his own notes on the works
he performs. Alkan’s music is so difficult to play that it is tempting to
dismiss the works as mere showpieces, like Czerny’s variations on operatic
tunes; but in fact Alkan’s pieces flow from a very personal and
difficult-to-encompass esthetic. Like Liszt, Alkan was interested in making the
piano an orchestra-in-miniature, but he also sought to find expressive
potential in what is essentially a percussion instrument – potential realized not
in a Chopinesque manner but through intimate understanding of the piano’s
capabilities and full, knowing exploitation of them. Le festin d’Ésope, the last and most famous
of the Études dans Touts les Tons Mineurs, is a particularly
trenchant example, refusing to provide listeners with a guide to the attendees
at Aesop’s feast but leaving it up to listeners to decide just which animals
are on hand (Lewenthal wrote that in one section he heard fleas). It is the
combination of distinctive use of the piano’s capabilities with an insistence
on taking the performer’s ability to an absolute extreme that lends Alkan’s
music its unique character. The challenge for any pianist trying to scale these
particular heights is not to make the virtuosity seem easy – that runs counter
to the sensibilities of the music – but to harness the extreme difficulty in
the service of the expressive potential of the material. Maltempo clearly
understands this, getting the scale of the works just right – the Sonatine, for example, is a typical
example of Alkan’s understatement in his titles, since it is very much a sonata
even though its scale is less than that of the Grande Sonate “Les Quatre Áges.” Alkan’s music does not
always rise to the level of the profound, but it is always interesting music, with characteristics of expression and
expressiveness not found in the works of most other composers of his time.
Maltempo plays it not only with tremendous skill but also with considerable
understanding, of the heart as well as the head: he “gets” Alkan in a way that
helps listeners “get” him, too. Maltempo writes that Alkan’s music offers “a
constant contrast between the angelic and the demonic,” and that is a good
formulation as far as it goes. But Maltempo’s performances go further: this
music not only contains beauty and challenges, but also requires that
performers find the beauty through the challenges. And that is what
Maltempo does in this exhilarating release.
Matters are less intense and
complex in the repertoire on a new MSR Classics CD featuring Paul Orgel, but
there is still plenty of room for fine pianism here, and for sensitive
interpretations of yet more little-known Romantic music. At least two of the
three composers featured on this recording, Chausson and Reger, are better-known
than Jadassohn and Czerny, although not many of their compositions are
performed with any frequency; and Josef Suk (1874-1935) is known almost
entirely for his relationship with his father-in-law, Dvořák, rather than on his own account. It
turns out, interestingly, that About
Mother is a work in which Suk was moving beyond the Dvořák influence that is clear elsewhere
in Suk’s work. Despite its title, this set of five character pieces is a
reminiscence of Suk’s wife – that is, it was written for Suk’s children about their mother. Suk actually subtitled it
“simple pieces for my children,” but the pieces – although often charming in
their straightforward emotional expression – are not easy to play, in part
because Suk was not a pianist and may have been unaware of some difficulties he
created for the performer. These pieces are 19th-century in feeling
and approach, despite having been written in 1907: they have enough of
Impressionism about them to seem very much of their time, and enough of
introspection to reflect a thoroughly Romantic emotional temperament. Orgel
plays them with appropriately tender feeling, with the simplicity of the middle
piece, “How Mother sang at night to her sick child,” especially affecting.
Chausson’s Four Dances (1896) is also
a contemplative work, despite its title, with three of its four movements slow
or moderate and only the concluding Forlane marked Animé. There is some sense of Impressionism here as well, some
resemblance between the moods of these dances and those of works by Fauré, Debussy and Ravel, but Chausson’s
emotional connection is somewhat more rarefied, less personal, than that
communicated by Suk. As for Reger, a composer frequently considered dry and
formal, not emotional at all, Volume 3 of From
My Diary (Aus meinem Tagebuch) is
a surprisingly lush work and another piece that is clearly in the late-Romantic
idiom despite being written after the turn of the 20th century (in
1910-11). The structural parallels between Reger’s six movements and Chausson’s
four are interesting, since in Reger too the predominant pacing is
slow-to-moderate: two Andante sostenuto
movements, an Allegretto, two more
marked Andante sostenuto, and only at
the end a Vivace. Reger, like
Chausson, is a touch more emotionally removed from his subject matter than is
Suk from his, although there is a certain pervasive moodiness through most of
the Reger suite. Orgel’s playing is sensitive to the emotional ups and downs of
all these works, which do, however, tend to pall a bit if heard straight
through – largely because of the tempos chosen by the composers (even Suk’s
five movements consist of four slow-to-moderate ones plus a not-much-faster Allegro molto moderato). The attraction
here lies in the chance to be exposed to some less-known works by some only
moderately well-known composers, and to experience the emotions generated by
piano pieces that clearly partake of Romantic sensibilities even when their
dates of composition range from the end of the 19th century to the
early part of the 20th.
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