Prokofiev:
Visions Fugitives; Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 4; Bach: Prelude and Fugue in E,
BWV 878. Stephen Beville, piano.
Divine Art. $18.99.
Schumann:
Kreisleriana; Ives: Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840-1860—“The
Alcotts”; Bach: Aria from “Goldberg Variations,” BWV 988. Jenny Q. Chai, piano. Divine Art. $18.99.
Bloch:
Suite No. 1 for Unaccompanied Cello; Gaspar Cassadó: Suite for Solo Cello; Hindemith: Cello Sonata, Op.
25, No. 3; Britten: Suite No. 2 for Unaccompanied Cello. Benjamin Whitcomb, cello. MSR Classics. $14.95.
Highly personalized musical mixtures possess, at best, the opportunity
to give audiences new views of familiar music, or introductions to previously
little-known works; these mixes also serve as entry points to a performer’s
personal likes, dislikes and predilections. By definition, this means recitals
of this type are not for everybody: listeners who do not like a specific
combination of works will not care for the grouping even if they enjoy one or
more elements of it. But even when the entirety of a program does not resonate
with the audience, some elements of it very well may – as is clear in three
recent solo-recital releases, two for piano and one for cello.
Stephen Beville’s new Divine Art disc features works by composers whose
music is rarely heard on the same program. The longest piece here is the
22-brief-movement Visions Fugitives
by Prokofiev. These are micro-miniatures (half the movements last less than 60
seconds) that explore various keys, rhythms and tempos with greater delicacy
than one usually associates with this composer. Movements such as the fourth, Animato, are a bit closer to the dry and
wry wit of Prokofiev than are most of these little pieces, many of which have a
pleasantly relaxed air about them: Pittoresco,
Commodo, Allegretto tranquillo, Poetico and others. At the other extreme is
the genuinely amusing Ridicolosamente,
which has a purity of fun not usually heard in Prokofiev – the Feroce and Inquieto movements are less surprising. The final two movements,
which Beville contrasts especially effectively, sum up the many moods of this
suite very well: the penultimate Presto
agitatissimo e molto accentuato is followed by the longest movement of all,
Lento irrealmente. The tempo
designations themselves show just how much Prokofiev wanted to communicate
through these not-quite-trifles in terms of their mood swings. That makes the
contrast between this piece and the Beethoven sonata that Beville offers all
the clearer. This fourth Beethoven piano sonata, Op. 7, is quite an early work
(1796) but was seen by the young composer as a grand one – in fact, Beethoven
designated it Grande Sonate, and at
29 minutes it is one of the longest the composer ever wrote. One reason Beethoven
labeled it as he did was that the sonata was published by itself, not as part
of a set – an unusual occurrence at the time. But the significant growth in
expressiveness after his first three sonatas may have had something to do with
the designation as well. The first two movements are big, almost imposing, and
filled with plentiful themes and virtuosity (first movement) and with poetry
and drama (second). The third and fourth movements are simpler and more earthbound.
The sonata as a whole is an impressive achievement, and the first such work in
which Beethoven began to explore new expressive forms. The contrast with the
miniaturization in Prokofiev’s Visions
Fugitives is very pronounced indeed. Beville sets up the Prokofiev/Beethoven
exploration by first offering Bach’s Prelude
and Fugue in E, BWV 878, which he presents with straightforward simplicity,
if perhaps rather too much reliance for emotional impact on the piano’s pedals
(especially in the fugue). The Bach sits somewhat uneasily at the start of this
CD, leaving it unclear where Beville is going with the whole thing – although
by the disc’s end, his interest in contrast both within the Prokofiev and
Beethoven and between them is clear enough.
Bach also leads off another Divine Art piano recital, this one featuring
Jenny Q. Chai. Here too Bach is offered along with one 19th-century
work and one from the 20th. But the emphasis in this case is more
strongly on a single work than on Beville’s disc: Chai devotes 36 minutes of
the CD’s total of 51 to Schumann’s Kreisleriana.
The eight-movement suite, always highly expressive (and central to Schumann’s
piano oeuvre) gets a passionate and
involving reading here: Chai is very impressive in the way she contrasts the
hard-driving passages with the delicate, quietly lyrical ones. This contrast is
key not only to Kreisleriana but also
to Schumann himself, with the Florestan and Eusebius characters that he
believed, together, encompassed his personality. In fact, a piano work focused
on Johannes Kreisler, a brilliant but very mercurial imaginary conductor
created by E.T.A. Hoffmann, seems perfect for Schumann – and Chai’s
determination to explore the extreme contrasts of mood and approach in the work
as a whole, and also within its movements, makes the totality of Kreisleriana come alive with a high
level of expressiveness. Immediately before offering the Schumann, Chai plays The Alcotts, the third movement from
Ives’ Concord Sonata. The sonata was designed
by Ives to contain a significant component of each performer’s thinking: much
of it has to be created as well as interpreted when it is played, and in the
hands of many players (including Ives himself) it would sound different each
time. On this particular CD, at this particular time, Chai makes The Alcotts a simple, genuine, rather
straightforward movement expressing warmth, affection and a certain level of
delicacy – a very strong contrast indeed to the Schumann heard afterwards. Even
before the Ives, though, at the start of the disc, Chai delves into Bach,
offering the basic Aria from the Goldberg Variations in a very slow,
quiet, stretched-out version that contains far more emotional heft than it
would on the harpsichord for which it was written – indeed, far more than a pianist
with a focus on some level of historically informed performance would bring to
it. Chai seems to see this Bach work as a curtain-raiser to scenes of strongly
felt emotion, and while that is a thoroughly un-Bachian view of the music, it
is undeniably effective for listeners who find themselves in tune, so to speak,
with Chai’s thinking about all these works.
The contrasts among the pieces on an MSR Classics CD featuring cellist Benjamin Whitcomb all come from the 20th century: the four works heard here date from 1922 to 1967. It is the composers’ handling of the solo cello that provides the aural spectrum on this disc. Bloch’s four-movement Suite No. 1 for Unaccompanied Cello (1956) opens the recital with the composer’s typical focus on richness of sound and warmth of tone, both of which Whitcomb brings out effectively. This is a very late work – Bloch died in 1959 – but its sound is readily recognizable as Bloch’s. The long lines of the first and third movements are well-contrasted with the comparative brightness of the second and fourth, with the finale having an especially pleasing dancelike character. Next on the disc is the three-movement Suite for Solo Cello (1926) by Gaspar Cassadó (1897-1966), the least-familiar composer here. Although written 30 years before Bloch’s suite, Cassadó’s piece ventures farther harmonically and explores the cello’s range to a greater extent. It is also even more dancelike than Bloch’s work, with its second and third movements both featuring dance elements. Written in the same decade, Hindemith’s five-movement Cello Sonata, Op. 25, No. 3 (1922) seems to occupy an entirely different world. It is filled with the sounds of experimentation that pervaded music in the 1920s and were crucial to Hindemith’s development in particular. Very little here focuses on the aural beauties of which the cello is capable, and when there is a short dance section, in the second movement, the sound is a lumbering rather than graceful one. Again and again, Hindemith pushes the cello – and the audience – to what were then new sonic areas, including dissonant double stops and use of the extremes of the instrument’s range. The very short, skittering fourth movement (only 44 seconds long) gives way to a rhythmically striking but emotionally rather vapid finale. The sonata comes across as considerably more intellectual than heartfelt. The last work on this disc, another five-movement offering, is Britten’s 1967 Suite No. 2 for Unaccompanied Cello, which structurally somewhat resembles Bloch’s piece but sonically is closer to Hindemith’s, although with a generally lighter touch. Although Whitcomb includes nothing by Bach in this recital, the Britten suite has definite and deliberate ties to the Baroque master, with a second movement Fuga and a finale marked Ciaccona (Allegro). These movements do not sound like throwbacks, however, because Britten uses the forms in his own way – and the remaining three movements of the suite are quite different from anything in Bach, the fourth movement’s contrast of legato and pizzicato being especially notable. Whitcomb plays all these works attentively and engagingly, allowing each its own form of expressiveness while producing a totality that showcases some of the many directions in which composers took cello writing in the 20th century. The disc as a whole may be of particular interest to cello performers – non-cellists are more likely to enjoy one or two of these works than to find all of them equally congenial.
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