(++++) PINNACLES OF PIANISM

Adolph von Henselt: Piano Concerto in F minor; Hans von Bronsart: Piano Concerto in F-sharp minor. Paul Wee, piano; Swedish Chamber Orchestra conducted by Michael Collins. BIS. $21.99 (SACD).

Ives: Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840-60; The St. Gaudens (“Black March”). Donald Berman, piano. AVIE. $19.99.

Charles-Valentin Alkan: Symphonie pour piano seul, Op. 39, Nos. 4-7; Les Mois (“The Months”), Op. 74. Igor Do Amaral, piano. MSR Classics. $14.95.

     The unending pursuit of unattainable perfection has been the lodestar of pianists for centuries, the definitions and musical means always changing but the reaching-out never ending. Today’s pianists continue the impossible quest – and some of them nowadays do so by rediscovering and reviving the music of composers and composer/pianists who themselves sought the heights but, at least in the judgment of posterity, never quite attained them. As the piano evolved to something close to its modern form during the mid-19^th century, the prior performance excellence of Mozart, Beethoven and Hummel tended to disappear into the rearview mirror as the likes of Carl Czerny, Johann Peter Pixis, Henri Herz, and Sigismond Thalberg took center stage – along with, of course, Franz Liszt, whose combination of personal magnetism and astonishing technique captivated audiences, capturing the very essence of pianistic perfection and remaining its touchstone to this day. But there were other astonishments as well, most now forgotten but many deserving of renewed exploration. It falls to a modern pianist of the first water, Paul Wee, to revive two major works by two minor but still notable composers: the piano concertos by Adolph von Henselt (1814-1889) and Hans von Bronsart (1830-1913). Wee’s recording on the BIS label, in which he is paired with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra under Michael Collins, practically defines tour de force in its drama, sweep and intensity. Both these concertos are large-scale despite relatively modest total lengths (each lasts just under half an hour, making them much shorter than, say, the two by Brahms); both are emotionally sweeping in a thoroughly Romantic idiom; and both put avowedly excessive demands on the soloist – demands to which Wee, who is something of a phenomenon, appears to have no difficulty rising. The Henselt concerto – given its première in 1844 by no less than Clara Schumann, then published in 1847 – had an influence well beyond its own time period: one of Henselt’s students, Nikolai Zverev, became the teacher of Rachmaninoff, who directly quoted from Henselt’s work while also adapting and further extending its broad lines. Wee accepts the grand gestures and alternating drama and lyricism of the Henselt at face value, knowing not to overdo or over-emphasize its admittedly over-the-top elements – simply presenting them with their superb flow is more than enough to turn the recording into a fascinatingly engaging listening experience. The Bronsart concerto – whose composer was the soloist in the première of Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2 – dates to 1873 and features a gorgeous slow movement and a finale in tarantella rhythm that is repeatedly and often amusingly punctuated by unexpected fanfares. Wee is wonderfully aware of both the soulful and the amusing elements of the work, delivering a bang-up performance that shows how both these display pieces, if scarcely proffering great emotional depth, make for exceptional pianistic expressiveness melded with plenty of keyboard fireworks. Wee’s recording, which also features first-rate accompaniment by Collins and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, is nothing less than exhilarating.

     Splendid pianism does not of course require orchestral accompaniment. Nor does pianistic compositional creativity need any instrument other than the piano itself to offer a fascinating experience for both performers and listeners. And certainly there is no better proof of that than the “Concord” sonata by Charles Ives – which remains, many decades after its creation, so far ahead of its time that it seems music will never quite catch up to it. How many decades ahead of its time the work may be is part of the complexity of its genesis and an underlying consideration of the new AVIE recording featuring pianist Donald Berman – who, not coincidentally, is also president of the Charles Ives Society. Berman has studied and re-studied the “Concord,” including extensively with John Kirkpatrick, who gave the work’s première performance and himself recorded it twice, communicating extensively with Ives for many years about revisions to the piece. Berman made his own edition for this recording, incorporating much of what Kirkpatrick did and some things that Ives himself did but that do not appear in any of the printed versions of the score. How exactly these elements, some considerably more evident than others, affect the sonata will be of greater interest to Berman’s fellow scholars than to a “mere” listening audience; but there is nothing “mere” about being a member of any group experiencing this complex, difficult, endlessly fascinating, programmatic yet purely musical work. It helps to know something about the 19^th-century Transcendentalist movement to understand some of the nuances of the sonata, at least from a programmatic standpoint; but the music itself is so complex and captivating that even those who know nothing about Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts or Thoreau – the four subjects of the work’s movements – can be pulled into the ebb, flow and emotional (and technical) difficulties of the music without quite knowing why. The “Concord” sonata is an experience, not merely a piano piece, and Ives was well aware of this – some performances, for example, include Ives’ optional flute and/or viola, and the work features polytonality, sound clusters, un-metered rhythms and other avant-garde techniques that, however, never interrupt its flow or turn it into a display-for-its-own sake piece. Editions and performance techniques for the sonata vary so widely that comparisons among performers’ versions are irrelevant and largely impossible. Suffice it to say that Berman plays the work with firm technique, considerable understanding of its nuances, pacing that seems intuitively right (his performance is one of the quicker recordings), and no shrinking whatsoever from the rhythmic and interpretative difficulties in which the sonata abounds. And Berman pairs it interestingly with The St. Gaudens (“Black March”), a work better known in orchestral guise from the version Ives used in Three Places in New England. Berman makes a less-than-obvious Transcendentalist connection between this work and the “Concord” sonata; but here as with the sonata itself, the underlying philosophical musings matter less than the effects of the music, which are considerable. Transcendentalism took itself very seriously indeed, and Ives and Berman clearly do so too, but it is worth noting that the philosophy was not without its detractors: notably, Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience hilariously undermines the pretenses of its British version and those who practiced (or claimed to practice) it – “The meaning doesn’t matter if it’s only idle chatter of a Transcendental kind,” wrote Gilbert. The meaning of the “Concord” sonata, though, does matter, and does not require acceptance of the foundational philosophy. It does, however, require opening one’s ears to sounds, expressions and techniques that are often extremely complex but that at some level bespeak a degree of simplicity and understanding communicated with almost magical skill by the composer and by sensitive interpreters such as Berman.

     Sensitivity is also a prerequisite for understanding and effectively performing the frequently amazing piano works of Charles-Valentin Alkan, the one 19^th-century pianist to whom even Liszt was said to have deferred. Reclusive and mysterious to the point of mysticism – one of the only two photos of Alkan shows him standing, facing away from the camera, holding a furled umbrella, his face completely unseeable – Alkan produced music that he knew full well was unplayable, including works calling for notes that did not yet exist on piano keyboards. Nowadays some of the most-accomplished pianists can indeed play Alkan’s works, and a few of his pieces have achieved something approaching fame. However, for the young virtuoso Igor Do Amaral (born 1989), it is a very-little-known Alkan composition that is the highlight of Volume 1 of what is planned as a multi-CD Alkan cycle on the MSR Classics label. Les Mois (“The Months”) is a set of 12 pieces in which not a single movement actually mentions any month of the year – this indirection is the sort of thing in which Alkan reveled. Instead, the pieces have descriptive titles, and it is left up to listeners to figure out to which specific months or seasons those designations and their accompanying music refer. The opening Une nuit d’Hiver (“A Winter Night”) is clear enough, if unspecific to a particular month, but what of movements labeled Promenade sur l'Eau (“A Walk on the Water”), Le Mourant (“The Dying”), and the concluding L’Opera? Each piece in Les Mois is a small gem, encapsulating a feeling if not a specific season or time period, and Amaral gets fully into the spirit of the individual elements and the cycle as a whole, exploring elements of seriousness and levity, intensity and gentleness, with understanding and unfailing skill. The performance certainly whets the appetite for more Alkan from Amaral – but this is a (+++) disc, because the other work on it receives a reading that can most charitably be described as odd. This is one of Alkan’s most-famous pieces, Symphonie pour Piano Seul, which includes four of the 12 Études dans Touts les Tons Mineurs, Op. 39. Here Amaral’s performance is curiously wrongheaded: it is extremely slow throughout, turning a work that usually takes up 25 to 30 minutes into one lasting 40. If the draggy tempos somehow revealed nuances of construction or communication absent from other performances, the pacing would be justifiable; but the opposite is in fact the case. The expansive opening Allegro moderato here becomes a very, very slow movement, close to an Adagio, while the following Marcia funebre simply comes apart – it is a cortège without rhythm, too disconnected to have any sense of the funereal – and the normally speedy Finale lacks all drama and intensity. It is clear from Les Mois that Amaral has the technique needed to present Alkan’s music effectively, which means that his approach to the Symphonie pour Piano Seul is a purposeful one, not a failing of ability. It is, unfortunately, impossible to discern what Amaral’s purpose here may be. Nevertheless, despite the disappointment of this reading, the high quality of Amaral’s handling of Les Mois is a hopeful sign for his future forays into some of the most interesting and interestingly difficult piano music ever written.