(++++) SCALING THE HEIGHTS

Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Nos. 30-32. Gerardo Teisonnière, piano. Steinway & Sons. $17.99.

Schubert: Piano Sonatas Nos. 20, D. 959, and 21, D. 960. David Deveau, piano. Steinway & Sons. $17.99.

Ravel: Gaspard de la Nuit; Rachmaninoff: Piano Sonata No. 1. Valentina Lisitsa, piano. Naïve. $16.99.

Soundscapes 2: Piano Music by Eleanor Alberga, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, Nkeiru Okoya, Betty Jackson King, Julia Perry, Joyce Solomon Moorman, Tania León, Krystal Grant Folkestad, Errollyn Wallen, Mary Lou Williams, Judith Baity, Shirley Thompson, Maria Thompson Corley, and Florence Price. Maria Thompson Corley, piano. MSR Classics. $14.95.

     Elegance, refinement, and technical perfection are the hallmarks of performances of Beethoven’s final three piano sonatas by Gerardo Teisonnière on a new Steinway & Sons CD. Teisonnière’s readings show remarkable understanding of the individuality of these masterpieces, while at the same time indicating his knowledge of where they fit into Beethoven’s creative life and into the sonata literature in general. After Beethoven scaled genuinely Olympian heights with his two piano sonatas marked Hammerklavier – Op. 101 of 1816 and the better-known, much-larger Op. 106 of 1818 – he essentially used his final three sonatas to explore the summit he had attained. It is not that these works are absent of striving but that their exploratory elements give them a kind of relaxed triumphalism (to the extent that such a thing is possible) that stands in stark contrast with the ever-upward clawing and frequent cragginess of the slightly earlier works. Created from 1820 to 1822, Sonatas Nos. 30-32, Opp. 109-111, sound entirely different from each other, yet all seem to inhabit the same world, one in which Beethoven gazes from the heights at all that surrounds him and allows himself to revel in his hard-won achievements, if not quite to relax within them. Teisonnière’s performances all couple this sense of attainment after great struggle with sensitive exploration of the intricacies of each of these sonatas and the differences among them. No. 30 is an intimate work, the tempo designation of its finale – Andante molto cantabile ed espressivo – standing for the overall impression it leaves. It is toward this finale that the sonata, like many other Beethoven works, builds, and it is to Teisonnière’s credit that he fully explores the finale’s lyricism while not downplaying the importance of the first two movements (which are, in effect, a single movement, being linked by the pedal at the end of the first). The contrasts within the final theme and variations are especially well-conveyed. Sonata No. 31 is emotionally quite different: it is a work of communicative extremes, containing despair, euphoria and everything in between. Again, Beethoven here builds toward the finale, bringing a first-movement theme to fruition at the conclusion and, not incidentally, creating a fugal finale in which the rather academic, straitlaced form takes on substantial emotional intensity that allows the work to end in dramatic fashion. Again, Teisonnière’s sensitivity to details of the music makes his performance highly convincing: there is delicacy aplenty when called for, lots of pianistic power when needed, and a sure sense of the sonata’s underlying structure that allows Teisonnière to explore the work’s many moods while keeping the totality cohesive. Sonata No. 32 contains both the fugal elements of No. 31 and the variations of No. 30; it is filled with lyrical elements akin to those of No. 30, and also with the passion and intensity of No. 31; but it incorporates all these musical aspects into something that sounds genuinely new, even for Beethoven – notably with the difficulty of preserving the underlying rhythms of the second movement’s variations, handling the complexities of that movement’s note-value changes, and figuring out what to do with the highly syncopated section that sounds so jazz-like to many modern listeners. The complexity of the second movement – following a dramatic first movement that neatly sets up a strong contrast between the sonata’s two parts – leads to a closing passage of quiet tranquility that is, in this context, almost mystical in effect. Teisonnière successfully navigates the movement’s considerable difficulties without apparent strain, but makes it clear that the calm of the work’s end has been difficult to achieve – a very effective conclusion, capping a very effective exploration of these three remarkable works.

     Schubert’s last two piano sonatas, D. 959 and D. 960, were written only a year after Beethoven’s death but in the last year of Schubert’s own life – and were not published for a decade thereafter. Both works contain echoes of Beethoven, but incorporated into Schubert’s mature style and with some of the growing emotionalism that was to characterize the Romantic era (Schubert intended to dedicate the sonatas to Hummel, who, like Schubert himself, helped usher in Romanticism in music). David Deveau’s readings in no way neglect the Romantic components of the music, but at the same time they showcase some of the works’ Classical proportions and the clarity with which Schubert presents, modifies and combines thematic material. This is an interesting approach, because it has the effect of highlighting ways in which these sonatas look back to earlier times while simultaneously striving toward a different pianistic future. For example, the first movement of D. 959 is wholly conventional in many ways, from the tonic-to-dominant modulation for the second theme to the traditional recapitulation, but it ends with an unexpected penultimate chord that helps tie this movement to the one that follows. In Deveau’s performance, the Classical-era balance of most of the movement makes its unusual conclusion that much clearer. The consistent beauties of Schubert’s themes are also very clear in Deveau’s readings: he lets the music flow with gentle beauty, time and again. But when Schubert indulges in a level of playfulness quite different from anything in Beethoven – in the third movement of D. 959, for example – Deveau readily accepts this element of the composer’s style. The result is that even when Schubert’s transitions are quite abrupt – or nonexistent, as the music sometimes simply stops doing one thing to start doing another – Deveau holds the material together so it emerges with greater cohesiveness than might be expected. This works particularly well in the development section of the first movement of D. 960, which brings in several earlier themes and can sound a touch chaotic – but does not in this reading. The unexpected key choice for the slow movement – C-sharp minor for a sonata in B-flat major – also works well here, as Deveau ensures that the contrasting moods of first and second movement help, in effect, explain their keys. Deveau also pays close attention to the notation that the third movement is to be played con delicatezza, to very good effect. Schubert’s final sonatas exist on a plane of their own, one quite different from that on which Beethoven’s last sonatas reside. Deveau performs the Schubert works with care and with a clear understanding of their unique musical language, presenting them both as a culmination of Schubert’s writing for piano and as an entry point to the grander (and, for better or worse, more grandiose) Romantic-era sonatas that were still to come.

     Eighty years after Schubert’s death, the Romantic era was itself giving way to new forms of expression, and the virtuosity that was developed to such a high degree during much of the 19^th century was being put to new uses. In the year 1908 – the clever connection used by Valentina Lisitsa as a framework for a new Naïve CD – Ravel and Rachmaninoff took Romanticism, or post-Romanticism, in different but (in hindsight) complementary directions. Ravel’s illustrative Impressionism is at its fullest and most successful in Gaspard de la nuit, his interpretation of three Aloysius Bertrand poems that, in totality, amount to a portrait of the Devil himself. Lisitsa, whose formidable performance prowess sometimes overcomes the structural and emotional underpinnings of the music she plays, is here very much in her element. She performs with elegance, poise, and tremendous beauty, sensitive to the portrayals of Ondine, Le Gibet and Scarbo while she revels in the music’s colors and the sheer technical requirements of the character pieces. Ondine is palpably about a water spirit here: the music flows up and down the keyboard with ease and a constant sense of unceasing motion. This makes for the strongest possible contrast with Le Gibet, which is here all about the stillness of death rather than anything particularly horrific. The piano’s constant imitation of tolling bells keeps the music focused as Lisitsa interprets Ravel’s quiet eeriness. Lisitsa reserves the real fireworks for Scarbo, which quickly becomes a nonstop burst of unceasing activity that veers from the puckish to the genuinely, well, devilish. This is a highly dramatic, genuinely exciting performance with a perpetuum mobile feeling that makes the central slow section – reminiscent impressionistically of Le Gibet – into a suitably spectral pause in the little creature’s flitting-about activities, which eventually conclude with just the right sense of flickering disappearance. Lisitsa is really in her element in Gaspard de la nuit – more so than in Rachmaninoff’s first piano sonata, which is also very well-played but does not have the kind of crackling intensity that Lisitsa finds so congenial. She has actually made Rachmaninoff something of a specialty in her performances and recordings, but her handling of this composer’s work is uneven: his big, broad, intense passages come across with the surety born of her excellent technique, but his tendency toward bloat is not mitigated by Lisitsa, and his often over-expansive structures are often a bit more than she can handle. On the surface, Lisitsa’s reading of Sonata No. 1 is very fine, but that is precisely the problem: it is on the surface, getting the notes right but doing little to prevent the music from seeming to lurch almost, if not quite, out of control. If the year 1908 saw Ravel reveling in compression and precision, it saw Rachmaninoff pushing Romanticism ever further into sprawl and size. There is an interesting literary parallel between this sonata and Ravel’s work – Rachmaninoff originally thought of the sonata as programmatic, based on Goethe’s Faust – and it is not surprising that the sonata’s third and final movement is decidedly Mephistophelean. Nor is it a shock that Lisitsa is at her best in this movement, and is least convincing in the opening one, which is harder to capture emotionally and more difficult to control structurally. In all, this is a CD characterized by exceptionally fluid playing and attentiveness to the unusual pairing of the two works, with the Ravel coming across more convincingly than does the Rachmaninoff – although the readings of both pieces have much to recommend them.

     The scope is very much narrower and the works very much more variable in kind and quality on a new (+++) MSR Classics CD featuring pianist/composer Maria Thompson Corley. This is one of a slew of recent “unknown composer” releases from a variety of sources: of the 14 people whose works are heard here (one of them being Corley herself), only Florence Price will likely be even moderately familiar to most listeners. But of course familiarity does not matter if the music is worthwhile – and, incidentally, the skin color of a composer also does not matter if the music is worthy, making the “women of African descent” connection among the creators heard here a matter of political correctness rather than artistic significance. It is scarcely surprising to discover that some of the pieces are considerably more interesting than others. The intensity of Eleanor Alberga’s Jamaican Medley is immediately winning, for example, while the two African Sketches by Nkeiru Okoye are overly obvious. A Summer Afternoon in South Carolina by Joyce Solomon Moorman flows prettily, but flow is largely missing from the three movements of Rivers I Have Walked by Krystal Grant Folkestad. Nitelife by Mary Lou Williams is suitably ebullient, but the two movements from SUSpected by Shirley Thompson are effective only in a very ordinary way. Corley’s own pieces – there are four of them, one a four-movement suite – are pleasant enough in their illustrative ways but are not particularly distinctive. Price’s 10-minute Fantasie Negre, the last and longest work on the disc, is both the most-substantial piece on the CD and the most musically and emotionally satisfying. Corley plays it with strength and conviction, and also handles the rest of the music quite well, even though many of the pieces are less consequential than Corley’s determined performances try to make them out to be.