(++++) MORE-OR-LESS ROMANTIC

Mendelssohn: String Symphonies Nos. 2 and 5; Violin Concerto in D minor; Salve Regina for Soprano and Strings; Fuga for String Quartet; Largo and Allegro for Piano and Strings in D minor; Fugas a tre in G minor and D minor. Europa Galante conducted by Fabio Biondi; Monica Piccinini, soprano. Naïve. $16.99.

Hugo Alfvén: Symphony No. 2; Svensk Rhapsodi No. 3. Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin conducted by Łukasz Borowicz. CPO. $16.99.

Scriabin: Piano Sonatas Nos. 2, 7 and 9; Etudes Op. 2, No. 1…Op. 8, Nos. 2 and 11…Op. 62, No. 5; Prelude & Nocturne for the Left Hand, Op. 9; “Vers la flamme,” Op. 72; Five Preludes, Op. 74; Manfred Kelkel: “Tombeau de Scriabine”—Presto. Vincent Larderet, piano. AVIE. $17.99.

Tchaikovsky: Grand Sonata in G, Op. 37; 18 Morceaux, Op. 72—Nos. 2, 5 and 14; Romance in F minor; The Seasons, Op. 37a—Nos. 6 and 12. Stefania Argentieri, piano. Divine Art. $18.99.

     Although it is an exercise in futility to try to pin down the exact beginning and ending of the Romantic musical era, that has not stopped innumerable academics and aficionados from trying, or at least from toying with the idea of finding just where and how this time period began and faded. Thus, Fabio Biondi and Europa Galante probe early Romanticism by performing early Mendelssohn on a new Naïve release. Mendelssohn was, in his time, considered another Mozart, and although he never fulfilled that potential in his later works, he was definitely an amazing prodigy as a child. And his early pieces certainly showed exceptional ability to distill and reinterpret the works and approaches of earlier composers – notably members of the Bach family. The pieces offered by Biondi were written in Mendelssohn’s preteen and teenage years, from 1820 to 1827, but it would be a mistake to think of them as somehow exceptional in his oeuvre. After all, the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture dates to 1826, and the Octet to 1825. Still, the pieces heard here provide a pleasant sampling of Mendelssohn’s engagement with various forms. His 12 String Symphonies were written between 1821 and 1823, and eventually provided a foundation for Mendelssohn’s five completed mature symphonies; the Violin Concerto in D minor (1822) is nicely balanced but far more conventional than the much-more-famous E minor concerto of 1844. Biondi and his ensemble offer fleet, pleasant readings of two of the String Symphonies and the concerto (with Biondi himself as soloist), and intermingle these more-substantial early works with various ones that are even less frequently heard. The Salve Regina is particularly welcome: it is a beautiful setting, sung with warmth and understanding by Monica Piccinini against an accompaniment of tremendous delicacy and beauty. The Largo and Allegro for Piano and Strings is also well worth hearing in this historically informed performance that does not insist on using a super-resonant modern concert grand piano, which would thoroughly overwhelm the strings. Also here are three fugal movements that clearly show how early in life Mendelssohn had absorbed the basics of fugal construction, while employing some harmonies that fit better with early Romantic thinking than with the pure Baroque, with which fugues are more closely identified. Mendelssohn lived and wrote music as the Classical era was giving way to the Romantic – all these pieces were created while Beethoven was still living – but his fascination with the past never wavered either in what he created or in what he performed, as when he famously led Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in 1826. This CD is enjoyable in its own right, and also intriguing in showing Mendelssohn as something of a transitional musical figure, being in this way a bit more like Hummel and Spohr than he is generally deemed to be.

     By the time of Hugo Alfvén (1872-1960), Romantic music was at its peak and arguably past it – although Alfvén himself remained, like Rachmaninoff (who was born one year later), firmly devoted to Romantic compositional and expressive ideals. Alfvén’s Symphony No. 2, first performed in 1899, and his much later Svensk Rhapsodi No. 3, known as the Dalarapsodi, first heard in 1932 with the composer conducting, lie firmly in the expressive, large-orchestra terrain of later Romantic music, and as such contrast very strongly with the cleaner lines and balance that Mendelssohn brought to works that in some ways are equally emotionally expressive. It is interesting, for example, to compare the impact of the serious and Sweden-focused Dalarapsodi with Mendelssohn’s Scotland-imbued The Hebrides – first published 99 years earlier. The emotive landscapes are similar despite the many differences between the works. The last of Alfvén’s three rhapsodies is the most serious: the first, Midsommarvaka, is naïve and folklike in orientation, and the second, Uppsala Rhapsody, is on the humorous side. Most of the Dalarapsodi is dark, even gloomy, and although it employs a number of folk tunes (plus themes created in the folk idiom by the composer), the ones it uses are downcast and pensive. The orchestration is particularly effective, starting with a soprano saxophone solo that sets the entire work, and its mood, in motion very effectively. At nearly 25 minutes’ length on a new CPO disc, the Dalarapsodi is certainly a substantial work. But Symphony No. 2, which is twice as long, is even grander in style and ambition. The Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under Łukasz Borowicz produces a vast, sweeping canvas for this symphony, which comes across as far more serious throughout than its nominal D major home key would indicate. The work has, in effect, two slow movements, one so designated (a lengthy Andante) and one in the form of a very substantial (seven-minute) Preludio: Adagio to begin the fourth and last movement. There are programmatic elements, most of them quite serious, in Alfvén’s Symphony No. 2 – even the not-quite-a-Scherzo third movement does little to relieve the work’s somewhat downcast mood. But this is not despair along the lines that one can find in, say, Mahler – instead, it is a mood of contemplativeness, of exploring significant elements of life. And then, in the finale, after the dour Preludio, Alfvén turns to a double fugue – realizing, as Mendelssohn and many others did before him, that this form allows severity of expression without anguish. And then, again in a distant echo of Baroque thinking of the sort so frequent in Mendelssohn, Alfvén resolves the symphony by bringing in nothing less than an 18^th-century hymn tune. But this is not a triumphal hymn: it is one that acknowledges the eternal presence of death, so that Alfvén eventually ends the symphony in the minor rather than D major. These excellent performances of both the symphony and the Dalarapsodi show just how pervasive Romantic musical thinking and creation remained for many composers in Alfvén’s time, and how strong the Romantic effect can be even for audiences today.

     But long before Alfvén’s Dalarapsodi, composers had been abandoning Romanticism – or at least starting to turn it in different directions, much as Mendelssohn did with Classical-era thinking. Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915), born the same year as Alfvén, thought of music in radically different ways, even in some orchestral works that used Romantic-size instrumental forces – and certainly in his piano music, a sampling of which appears on a new AVIE recording with the rather overdone title of “The Scriabin Mystery.” In the highly capable hands of Vincent Larderet, there is no particular mystery about the works here, although the reasons for the selection of these specific pieces may be on the mysterious side: they are presented chronologically, with the specific choices likely reflecting Larderet’s own feelings for how to assemble an all-Scriabin recital that traces the composer’s changing style. Scriabin was scarcely a child prodigy, but one piece here dates to his teenage years: Etude Op. 2, No. 1 was written when he was just 14, in 1886. It has some of the darkness of Alfvén’s Symphony No. 2, but already here there is a sense of moving beyond the confines of Romanticism into new forms of expressiveness. In the next decade, Scriabin was to start experimenting more overtly with unusual ways of expressing his often-present pessimism, including polyrhythms in the Etude Op. 8, No. 2 and some of the elements of the Prelude & Nocturne for the Left Hand, written when Scriabin feared that a right-wrist problem would soon prevent him from continuing as a concert pianist. But Scriabin remained clearly in touch with a Romantic esthetic in some of his other works of this time, such as the Etude Op. 8, No. 11 and the Impressionistic Piano Sonata No. 2. The sonata, interestingly, was inspired by the ocean and seashore – the same inspiration cited by Alfvén for portions of his Symphony No. 2. Scriabin’s sonata was published in 1898, a year before Alfvén’s symphony was first played; but while Alfvén continued in the Romantic tradition into the new century, Scriabin moved away from it, as several works chosen by Larderet show. The seventh and ninth piano sonatas (“White Mass” and “Black Mass” respectively) move a considerable distance into mysticism and Satanism, which the composer had already explored elsewhere; the same intense interest, bordering on obsession, appears in “Vers la flamme.” Larderet’s approach to all this material is interesting: he gives it a level of expressive clarity that highlights rather than obscures the sometimes difficult-to-plumb philosophical depths on which the music rests. Scriabin’s synesthesia is crucial to his music but impossible for a performer to duplicate, yet the inherent colors of these piano works seem to flicker in and out in Larderet’s interpretations, rendering the music highly expressive even when it is on the abstruse side. This works especially well with the very latest works on the CD: the Five Preludes, Op. 74, were Scriabin’s final completed pieces, but his very last composition was an Acte préalable that he sketched but did not finish. The sketches were found by musicologist and composer Manfred Kelkel and used by him for a piece he calls “Tombeau de Scriabine.” This is a fascinating what-might-have-been exploration with which Larderet entices listeners – without, unfortunately, really satisfying anyone’s curiosity, since he presents only the Prelude of Kelkel’s work and not the eight variations into which it leads. Thus, the conclusion of this otherwise admirable disc somewhat misfires (although it is worth pointing out that the disc runs 80 minutes, so including the whole Kelkel work would have required a second CD or the omission of some of Scriabin’s music). On the whole, this is a fascinating and thoughtful journey through Scriabin’s Romantic, post-Romantic and highly personal forms of musical creation, with excellent playing that whets the appetite for further pianistic explorations by Larderet.

     And speaking of exploring, one way to do that in Romantic piano music – and thus to find out just where Scriabin put down roots from which something not-quite-Romantic eventually grew – is to listen to piano works that are wholly and distinctively Romantic, such as those of Tchaikovsky. His solo-piano music has never attained the popularity of his orchestral and chamber works, for reasons that are not entirely clear: the piano pieces flow with the same warmth, breadth, lyricism and strongly felt emotions as his other compositions. It does help, however, to hear them in full – and an otherwise very fine Divine Art recording by Stefania Argentieri falls short in that respect. The one complete piece here, Tchaikovsky’s only mature piano sonata, very much gets its due in Argentieri’s hands. Indeed, its expansiveness here is somewhat overdone, with a second movement marked Andante non troppo, quasi moderato that Argentieri treats so broadly as to make it almost an Adagio. The first movement is also on the slow side: clearly Argentieri is striving for expansiveness, but here she approaches bloat. The performance is technically excellent, but the interpretation is somewhat too broad for the sonata, which is labeled “Grand” but here comes across as grandiose. The other works on the disc fare better, but because they are mostly only excerpts of larger sets of pieces, they provide little chance to hear the entirety of Tchaikovsky’s pianistic thinking and the way it fits into the Romantic sensibility. The sole standalone piece here is his early Romance in F minor, which Argentieri plays with gentle delicacy that fits it well. Also here are three of the 18 Morceaux, Op. 72. No. 2 is a Berceuse that drags a bit here and therefore sounds a touch too gloomy. No. 5, Méditation, has a fantasia-like feeling that Argentieri puts across well. And No. 14, Chant élégiaque, is quietly thoughtful. The individual performances are quite fine, but the mood of the three pieces turns out to be very similar here – listeners unfamiliar with the 18 Morceaux will be left wondering whether that reflects Tchaikovsky’s plan for the entire set, or whether Argentieri specifically chose pieces with similar moods. The same issue arises with The Seasons. Argentieri here presents No. 6 (June) and No. 12 (December). Both are quite engaging, the melody of No. 6 being heard out of context fairly frequently and the lilt of No. 12 providing a very pleasant sense of enjoyment of the Christmas season. However, the choice to play just these two parts of The Seasons simply whets the appetite for more of the work, whose pleasantries and naïveté are in fact highly enjoyable throughout. All these Tchaikovsky piano pieces fit firmly into the Romantic sensibility, and they are clearly foundational to the earlier pianistic endeavors of his fellow Russian, Scriabin. But this disc as a whole is a (+++) offering because its major work, the Grand Sonata, does not come off as well here as it can, and its shorter pieces are less effective on their own – and less indicative of Tchaikovsky’s Romanticism – than would be the case if they were heard as intended, as portions of larger works.