(++++) SMALL WORKS WRIT LARGE

Chopin: Nocturnes Nos. 1-21 (complete). Tom Hicks, piano. Divine Art. $25.99 (2 CDs). 

David S. Lefkowitz: Preludes and Fugues for Piano. Steven Beck, David Kaplan, Michael Mizrahi and Mika Sasaki, piano. Bridge Records. $33.99 (2 CDs). 

     As renowned as they are, Chopin’s Nocturnes are fraught with complexities for performers – not just technically and expressively, but in terms of figuring out just which notes to play in the first place. There are well-known disparities among the 21 works, caused by multiple equally valid editions and Chopin’s own tendency to revise works even after publication, and to improvise upon and within them in his own performances. Thus, there is no such thing as a definitive set of these Nocturnes. Each recording is by its very nature a pianist’s expression of opinion on what music each short work ought to contain – and how each should fit into the group (which is not a true cycle but simply a collection). None of the textual and textural questions interferes with listeners’ enjoyment of the music, however, and Tom Hicks’ fascinating decision-making underlying his two-disc recording of the complete Nocturnes on the Divine Art label shows just how expressive the pieces can be, individually and collectively, whether or not the audience notes (so to speak) the intriguing, mostly subtle choices that Hicks made that are out of the ordinary. Most of those decisions really are minor within the sweep of individual works and the totality of the group. What matters here, and what comes through with exceptional clarity, is how thoroughly engaged with the music Hicks is – whether through careful study to evaluate variants or through emotional connection is almost beside the point. Again and again, Hicks impresses with his attention to the pieces’ free-flowing rhythms, their bel canto thematic sound, their elements of drama contrasted with those of emotion that ventures well beyond the salon. What Hicks does particularly well is to communicate the songfulness of the music, his unerring attentiveness to the right-hand melodies making a designation such as “songs without words” almost as apt for these works as is the word “nocturnes.” Hicks’ pedal use is also worth noting: Chopin used the sustaining pedal liberally, creating a kind of musical climate or sonic background against which the “foreground” melodic material shines through with greater clarity. But overuse of the pedal does the music no favors, tending to muddy the sound and enlarge the overall audio impression of the Nocturnes in a way that undermines their effectiveness. There is no gigantism here. Hicks thoroughly understands this, using the pedal effectively and in true partnership with the left and right hands, almost as an organist uses pedal material in a third contrapuntal line. The comparison with the organ is overstated, true, but the notion of counterpoint is not: Chopin’s Nocturnes employ the technique to a considerable extent, using it to add to the pieces’ dramatic qualities while giving them the feeling of works hovering between the Classical and Romantic era (although their sheer expressiveness puts them firmly in the latter time period). Hicks is, from a strictly technical standpoint, a very fine pianist, one not afraid to step back from a focus on his own performance and let the music flow through his fingers (and pedals) so that what listeners hear is not all about the player but all about the composer – even though, in this case, exactly what the composer intended from each of the Nocturnes is unknowable, and perhaps was less than clear even to Chopin himself. Because the Nocturnes were not created as a cycle, it is just as valid and just as engaging to listen to Hicks’ recording in small bits, the way the pieces were originally published (in sets of two or three), or as a totality lasting close to two hours and immersing a listener into an auditory environment that becomes deeper and more welcoming every time it is experienced. 

     Chopin’s Nocturnes were deeply influential, not only directly (on Fauré, Liszt, Rachmaninoff and others) but also through their underlying styles and emotive techniques (on Brahms, Wagner, Liszt, et al.). Yet their influence has not been as widespread as that of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, which not only led to analogous (if not really similar) works by Mendelssohn, Shostakovich and others but also continues to inspire thinkings and rethinkings about keyboard writing and musical forms. A genuinely fascinating new example of this is Preludes and Fugues for Piano by David S. Lefkowitz (born 1964). Now available as a two-CD Bridge Records release, this set of 26 (not 24) works is as contemporary in approach, outlook and sound as was Bach’s work in its day. That means that it does not sound like Bach at all – well, not very much, not very often – and uses The Well-Tempered Clavier mostly as a jumping-off point for musical thoughts that percolate and scatter in a wide variety of intriguing, surprising and sometimes rather silly and overdone ways. Lefkowitz follows the “Book I” and “Book II” arrangement used by Bach, labeling the first grouping “Expanded Universe” and the second “Parallel Universes,” although the titles could pretty well be reversed for the same effect. Lefkowitz is determined, in Book I, to embrace and simultaneously extend the meaning and design of a “prelude” and a “fugue,” with the former trending more closely in the Bach direction (since preludes were, after all, largely free-form works) and the latter generally bearing modest-to-nonexistent resemblance to fugues as Bach created them. Forget keys and key structures and key relationships: the auditory palette here is thoroughly modern, tonally rambling to altogether atonal, with the result that rhythmic complexities come to the fore to a far greater extent than in Bach’s work. Book I gives no particular hints of where it is going from piece to piece, and ends up expanding not only the keyboard sounds of Bach’s time but also the scaffolding on which Bach’s work was constructed – hence Lefkowitz’s 13 rather than 12 pieces. The four pianists who collectively present Lefkowitz’s material are all experienced in modern keyboard music and all expert at providing focus and forward impetus within a dissonant audio environment (or at least one that is rarely concordant); the result is that each piece in Book I stands entirely on its own while retaining a subtle sense of being connected in less-than-obvious ways to the others in the sequence. Something different then happens with Book II, wherein it almost seems that Lefkowitz decides that the forms he has chosen for this extended keyboard presentation (which lasts two hours and 40 minutes) are too constricting – even though he himself selected them. The “Parallel Universes” designation points to music that is scarcely classical, certainly not Bachian, not always particular “musical” in a traditional sense, and thoroughly exploratory for performers and audiences alike. Book II uses a prepared piano in the John Cage tradition, the modified sounds of the instrument widening the tonal palette or just making it weird (sometimes both at the same time). In this book, each piece has a title that ranges from helpful for listeners (“Bells,” “Drums,” “Mechanical Motion”) to abstruse and not understandable without consulting program notes (“Pélog,” “Sonia Delaunay”). And here Lefkowitz is not content with piano modifications, or indeed with piano sounds even when modified: he adds some excrescences such as, in one piece, whistling (which he performs himself) to create an Oriental atmosphere abetted by the piano part; an entire additional bass line elsewhere; and even, in one case, vocal elements (delivered by Cantor Marcus Feldman). Unlike the first book, Book II is somewhat too self-involved and assertively contemporary-for-its-own-sake, and it does veer close to self-parody from time to time with here an extra bass line, there a crawl-around-in-the-piano technique (well, that’s what it sounds like). Lefkowitz seems determined to prove his bona fides as an experimenter, but all too often Book II simply sounds like another rather tired attempt to shock, or at least surprise, the audience; in truth, there is nothing in the sounds generated and reproduced here that listeners with any experience with modern keyboard music will find unfamiliar. Nevertheless, even when Lefkowitz overreaches (or underreaches through utilization of techniques heard frequently elsewhere), his strong sense of rhythm and willingness to combine and juxtapose disparate elements of keyboard writing frequently lead to music that is enjoyable and often surprising, even if much of Book II does not stand up well to repeated listening. These Preludes and Fugues for Piano turn out to be a thoroughly intriguing rethinking of The Well-Tempered Clavier in musical language that, when it does not pay homage to Bach, at least shows that Lefkowitz is thoroughly familiar with the Baroque masterpiece and determined to look for ways to adapt and update it for our own time – even if he does not always find what he is seeking.