(+++) NOTES UPON NOTES

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5; Erwin Schulhoff: Five Pieces for String Quartet—arranged for orchestra by Manfred Honeck and Tomáš Ille. Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra conducted by Manfred Honeck. Reference Recordings. $19.98 (SACD).

Richard Stöhr: Orchestral Music, Volume One—Concert im alten Stil for Strings, Piano and Percussion; Suite No. 2 for String Orchestra. Agnieszka Kopacka-Aleksandrowicz, piano; Sinfonia Varsovia conducted by Ian Hobson. Toccata Classics. $18.99.

Richard Stöhr: Orchestral Music, Volume 2—Suite No. 1 for String Orchestra; Symphony No. 1. Sinfonia Varsovia conducted by Ian Hobson. Toccata Classics. $18.99.

     The verbiage associated with classical CDs tends to get short shrift nowadays, often justifiably. In the societal rush to eliminate physical storage of music and turn all listening experiences into virtual ones, mostly on devices with tiny and tinny speakers barely suitable for much beyond the consistent volume and constant similarity of rhythm of popular music, actual discussions of the works being performed have become truncated even when such commentary exists at all. Some CD releases no longer include it, or include barely anything worthwhile, while even those that try to present some information beyond the trivial fall far short of what used to be available on the backs of vinyl albums and in the large-format, often elaborately produced enclosures (not to mention opera libretti) that came with many records. There are occasional welcome exceptions to this state of affairs, though, and releases featuring conductor Manfred Honeck are among them. Honeck is an exceptionally thoughtful conductor who also happens to be a very good writer, and who genuinely and generously shares many details of his thinking about music in booklets such as the one enclosed with the new Reference Recordings SACD featuring music by Tchaikovsky and Erwin Schulhoff. Honeck offers 16 pages of notes on the works heard on this disc, delving into elements of his performance practices in so much detail that he repeatedly cites specific times within the performances at which listeners can hear how his thoughts translate into interpretation. It is disheartening, though, to realize that for those who simply listen to these performances without absorbing Honeck’s thinking about them, the readings fall somewhat short – especially that of the Tchaikovsky, which is a combination of the revelatory and the disappointing.

     What happens in Honeck’s handling of this symphony involves the classic debate about how best to make a composer’s desired points – by close adherence to the score or by subtle-to-not-so-subtle modifications of it. Honeck chooses the latter approach, delivering a performance pervaded by rubato that creates a kind of emotional stuttering that is at odds with the flowing emotionalism so central to Tchaikovsky’s work. The first movement has a broad slowdown just before the five-minute mark, a speedup around half a minute later, then a slowdown again: this sort of accentuation of ebb and flow is well-intentioned and well-argued in Honeck’s writing, but the movement’s impact would be present (and indeed stronger) without the overdone tempo changes. This movement speeds up again at about 10 minutes and by 12 minutes is really too fast. The playing is excellent – highly responsive – but the approach is musically unconvincing. The second movement is exceptionally beautiful but stretched to the breaking point of sentimentality, and the gorgeous clarinet passage at the end sounds disconnected from the rest. The third movement, very dancelike and generally well-paced, has a slowdown near the end that changes its character, and the pacing is quite slow for the final two chords. The finale features highly emphatic timpani throughout, but again there are pacing issues: the music is much faster at the seven-minute mark and has by then become episodic. This is genuinely elegant playing, but the disconnected tempo arrangement is distracting. The symphony actually sounds as if it ends with the finale’s full stop after nine-and-a-half minutes. Then comes a conclusion that is undeniably exciting – but the slowdown of the final four chords is quite unnecessary.

     The piece by Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942) fares better, surely thanks to the brevity of its five component parts and to Honeck’s admirably dedicated work on the arrangement for full orchestra. This piece has a generally Romantic sensibility but uses 20^th-century harmonic language, and its orchestration here is very skillful at highlighting the parodistic intent with which Schulhoff offers interpretations of (or homages to) five dance forms. Schulhoff’s playfulness and piquancy make for a strong contrast to Tchaikovsky’s sincerity and heart-on-sleeve emotionalism – although there is really no reason for the pairing of the two specific works on this disc, and Honeck, in all his commentary, never explains why they are offered together. Schulhoff’s piece is rather dry, on the edge of sarcasm. Among other features, the Czech polka is very hectic and brassy, with percussion particularly well-used; the violin in the fourth movement, which is ostensibly a tango, is more Gypsy-like in character; and the brass outbursts and overall frantic pace of the final tarantella are very good, with the use of tam-tam particularly felicitous. Honeck’s understanding of and commitment to both Schulhoff and Tchaikovsky are considerable, and his writing about both is admirable – and a sign of how well essays on music can be incorporated into and reflected in physical recordings. But there is also a cautionary tale here: where the Tchaikovsky is concerned, the writing proves more convincing and satisfying than the music.

     The scholarly written material is even more extensive in the booklets for two Toccata Classics releases featuring the music of Richard Stöhr (1874-1967), a famed Austrian academic and composer who fled the 1938 Anschluss and lived out his life in straitened circumstances in the United States. Highly regarded as a pedagogue (he taught Leonard Bernstein, Rudolf Serkin, and many, many others), he was well-thought-of as a composer in Austria but became thoroughly obscure after emigrating: all four pieces on these two CDs are world première recordings. Putting Stöhr and his music into perspective are two unusually thick booklets, a 24-page one for the first volume and a 28-page one for the second, both consisting primarily of very extended and very amply footnoted essays by music historian William Melton. Unlike Honeck’s writing, which deals with the intricacies of musical interpretation and certainly lays to rest any notion that all a conductor does is stand in front of the orchestra and wave a stick, Melton’s articles are both biographical and musically explanatory – very illuminating regarding a little-known musical figure, but dealing not at all with the niceties of actually playing Stöhr’s music. That is left to Sinfonia Varsovia under Ian Hobson – and here as in the Honeck recording, there is a disconnect between the fascinations of the written material and the effects of the music itself. Stöhr, it turns out, produced workmanlike and well-crafted orchestral pieces that are far from compelling when heard without specific reference to the written material explaining their provenance. Stöhr was proudly and avowedly an old-fashioned Romantic in orientation, but much of his harmonic language in the first volume of these two discs is of the 20^th century – at least in this regard, his music is somewhat akin to Schulhoff’s. Concert im alten Stil is not really in “old style,” despite its title, although there is nothing particularly “modern” and acerbic about it either – not even in the piano at the start of the third-movement Burleske. The piece, which dates to 1937, is relentlessly upbeat, but it sounds more forced than free-flowing – a characteristic of all the music on these two discs. Suite No. 2 dates to Stöhr’s American period (1947), and it starts seriously, as befits a work in A minor. But it lacks emotional connection and seems a bit like an academic exercise – witness an Adagio con espressione that is indeed expressive but is never really heartfelt.

     The second Stöhr volume features earlier and somewhat-more-successful works. The flow of Suite No. 1, which has only three movements, is somewhat better than that of the later, five-movement work. The first movement is bright; the second, which is as long as the first and third put together, is broad and emotionally expressive, if perhaps a bit overextended; and the third is a well-constructed fugue that is generally upbeat and concludes with a suitably emphatic coda. Suite No. 1 dates to 1908-09, the same period as the first of Stöhr’s seven symphonies (1909). This is a substantial work, larger and weightier in some ways than Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, if nowhere near as melodic. Stöhr’s first movement at one point actually sounds a lot like Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony. The opening movement is large and dramatic, but it is somewhat gestural, as if its parts are carefully assembled rather than connected viscerally/emotionally. Next is a Scherzo featuring strong use of percussion. It is fanfare-like, even celebratory, and actually sounds more like a finale than a middle movement – but it seems overextended by the time the Trio appears and develops. The movement as a whole is on the grandiose side – and, tellingly from the point of view of the symphony’s design and impact, it is twice as long as the slow movement that comes next. That movement is marked Andante religioso, a designation that implies a high degree of seriousness that the movement does not really deliver despite the inclusion of an organ – instrumentally a clever idea that does not seem driven by any particular necessity of emotional expression. This movement speeds up significantly three-fourths of the way through, as if Stöhr really has little patience with slow or even moderately slow material, much less anything "religioso." The movement does not so much end as drift away. The symphony’s finale is somewhat disconnected and episodic – again, there are suitable finale-like gestures throughout, but no sense of inevitability or necessity to its structure. The message is that a finale is needed, so here is one! Halfway through, as the brass surges repeatedly, the whole thing becomes somewhat tiresome – but a bit later, there is a somewhat Brucknerian pause and appearance of different thematic material that, despite some repetitiveness, works better. As occurs near the end of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, this finale has a full stop near the end – here, just 90 seconds before the conclusion – after which the brass-plus-timpani material is emphatic but rather obvious, before a speed-up that rushes to a conclusion that is going to be formulaic until it suddenly drops a long way toward silence and seems about to end quietly until its final loud chord. There are many individually clever moments in the symphony, but as a totality it is far from convincing. And just as Honeck’s well-reasoned, well-written discussion of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth does not translate to a musically compelling performance of the symphony, so Melton’s very learned and highly informative essays on Stöhr and his music – for all their considerable value – do not make the case for Stöhr as a significant composer as well as Hobson and Sinfonia Varsovia would make it if the music itself had as much depth as the writing about it.