(++++) INTERSECTIONS

Nadia Boulanger: War Years in America and Her Last Decades. By James Whipple Miller. Chestnut Hill Press. $39.99. 

     Imagine a book about Mozart’s quirky and often childish sense of humor that mentions his comic operas and amusing comments in scores such as those of his horn concertos only in passing and you will have some idea of the approach of James Whipple Miller to Nadia Boulanger. Imagine further that the nonexistent Mozart book is structured essentially as an epistolary novel – or rather an epistolary work of nonfiction – and you will have further insight into Nadia Boulanger: War Years in America and Her Last Decades. This is to say that musicians, including the great ones, are people, too, and however much their music may be the center of their lives, it is not the totality of their existence. 

     It is true that if it were not for music, there would be little reason for this book – but the musical material exists mostly in the background here, never quite fading into it but rarely assuming foreground emphasis. This is not so much a biography of Boulanger (1887-1979) as it is a story of her interactions with two of her pupils: Ruth Robbins (1910-2005) and Idil Biret (born 1941). Robbins was Miller’s aunt, and Biret is married to Miller’s longtime friend Şefik Büyükyüksel, so there are ties that bind here that go beyond music, and they are many and of considerable duration. 

     Miller writes attractively for a general audience – classical-music knowledge is helpful but scarcely required here – and structures the book in two clearly delineated sections. The first introduces the three principal characters, with Boulanger first and foremost but more in the role of primus inter pares than that of someone idolized and idealized. The second, much longer segment is a year-by-year presentation of hundreds of letters and telegrams and jottings, amply footnoted, sent from 1941 through 1979. It is these missives that bring forth the essential humanity of a couple of 20^th-century musical giants (Boulanger and Biret, with Robbins not quite at their level). The greetings, good wishes, complaints and preoccupations with trivia provide refreshing insight into these women’s personalities precisely because everything is so matter-of-fact. From “hoping to lunch with you this Wednesday” (1944) to “pray the Lord to help you in all your terrible anxiety” (1959), the communication is at the same time heartfelt and mundane. Miller carefully provides context for many references, but the essential humanity of the missives, their essential humanness, comes through even without knowledge of the specifics to which they refer. The book becomes a kind of reassurance, a clear demonstration that even people who excel in rarefied areas (classical music certainly being one) have the same sorts of worries, concerns, and ups-and-downs of life as do those who can only read about significant accomplishments in a field and admire them from afar. 

     Music is scarcely absent from the book, and some of the comments on it are trenchant and seem surprisingly up-to-date, such as this from Robbins in 1955: “If I knew people who liked to get together once a week or so just for the pleasure of making music together, life would be entirely different. But there is such a commercial point of view about music here: you either have to ‘make money’ with it or ‘get on the radio’ (or television, which is even worse), or it is not worth doing.” There is throughout a frankness in the back-and-forth that sometimes reveals thinking that, if expressed nowadays on social media, would come back to haunt people. One example, from Robbins in 1956: “Our house is not sold and no prospects at the moment. We thought that giving it to a Jewish agent would be a good thing as Highland Park has become 80% or more Jewish (that is probably an exaggeration, but not much). However, it seems that the newer type of wealthy Jew is not buying property here anymore as the town has become so saturated with the undesirable kind! So now we will switch to a gentile agent and hope for better results.” 

     If some of these writings thus clearly show their age and the time period and sociopolitical environment in which they were produced, that is actually all to the good, because it further humanizes people who might otherwise – certainly in the case of Boulanger and Biret – be considered to have “celebrity status” and therefore be unknowable as real human beings (the parasocial phenomenon long predates today’s social media). When Boulanger in 1944 writes from the safety of California that “the sacrifices are too terrible” and that so many have been “killed by the Germans, dead through suffering – gone because it was the time marked by God,” the experience of World War II comes through with all too much clarity. And then, when in 1947 she sends Robbins a list of things she needs, including chocolate, cheese, powdered milk, rice, candy, dried fruit and more, this is testimony not only to the postwar world but also to the quotidian reality in which everyone, no matter how well-known, lived and still lives. 

     There are some deeply significant events on which Miller’s book does shine a particularly bright light – such as November 22, 1963, the date of the assassination of President Kennedy, when Biret (whose birthday was the day before) was scheduled to perform with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Erich Leinsdorf. The decision to proceed with the concert, and the feelings engendered by that decision as well as by the music itself, come through with particular pathos and emotional involvement through the words here – and may remind readers of other notable juxtapositions of music and earthshaking events, such as Leonard Bernstein’s Christmas 1989 East Berlin concert, marking the fall of the Berlin Wall, in which the conductor changed Freude to Freiheit in the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. But Nadia Boulanger: War Years in America and Her Last Decades is not, by and large, about occurrences or people writ large: by design, it is a sidelight on the life of Boulanger and those close to her, not a full-fledged biography. A book like this is invariably self-limited to readers who know the subject matter, at least in general terms, and are eager for additional specifics and insights. But if it is unlikely to engage a large audience, it reaches out with considerable skill and sensitivity to a smaller group whose members will here discover that some of their idols have feet not of clay but of flesh and bone, and, moreover, clad in sensible shoes.

(++++) A PLACE IN HISTORY

Anton Rubinstein: Piano Sonatas Nos. 1 and 2; Three Serenades. Han Chen, piano. Naxos. $19.99. 

Anton Rubinstein: Piano Sonatas Nos. 3 and 4. Han Chen, piano. Naxos. $19.99. 

     Founder of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory and brother of Nikolai Rubinstein, founder of the Moscow Conservatory, Anton Rubinstein (1829-1894) encapsulated the entire history of piano music through seven gigantic consecutive concerts that he played in Russia, Eastern Europe and the United States. Even his more-standard concert programs could run three hours. Rubinstein was Tchaikovsky’s composition teacher; his only private piano student was Josef Hofmann; and he was a prolific composer in all forms – although always admired more for his piano playing than for the specific works he played, which inevitably included his own. Rubinstein strongly influenced Rachmaninoff, who called Rubinstein “the most original and unequalled pianist in the world.” 

     Yet for all his outreach and considerable influence, it would seem, on the basis of two first-rate Naxos CDs featuring Han Chen’s performances of all four Rubinstein piano sonatas, that Rubinstein – unlike Liszt, who thought Rubinstein resembled Beethoven both in appearance and in pianistic technique – wrote piano music that only Rubinstein himself could present fully effectively. This was not a matter of its enormous virtuoso requirements – indeed, Rubinstein was famous (or notorious) for hitting numerous wrong notes during his recitals, and not caring about doing so provided that he successfully communicated the emotional effects of the music. Instead, it had to do with music that, however well-played, speaks more of its influences (notably Mendelssohn and Schumann) than of anything especially insightful brought to it compositionally by Rubinstein himself. This does not mean Rubinstein’s piano sonatas are directly imitative of earlier models but that they absorb those models effectively without actually extending them, as if Rubinstein-as-composer expects Rubinstein-as-performer to clarify the breadth and depth inherent in the notes. 

     That is a near-impossible feat for any post-Rubinstein pianist to accomplish, and it is to Chen’s credit that he undertakes it with such prodigious technique and enthusiasm, even if the results are not always entirely convincing. It is worth noting that Chen (born 1988) brings to the sonatas a kind of youthful vigor that fits their years of creation well: Rubinstein started writing Nos. 1 and 2 when he was just 19, and Chen’s performances of those sonatas date to 2018. Furthermore, Rubinstein completed No. 3 and the Three Serenades in 1855, in his mid-20s. It is only the final and longest sonata, which dates to 1877, that can be thought of as being in the composer’s fully mature style. 

     Sonata No. 1 is a work that reaches for vastness and is attractively played by Chen with close attention to its scale. It is not a particularly well-unified work, sounding somewhat Beethovenian here and a bit Schubertian there, but it benefits from the clean sound and careful focus on detail that Chen brings to it. Interestingly, Rubinstein himself once said that “the pedal is the soul of the piano” – perhaps a clue to the reason his performances sounded so accomplished notwithstanding the wrongly struck notes – but Chen’s use of the pedals is well-considered and not overdone. This lets the music say clearly what it has to say – although that turns out not to be very much that is original. Sonata No. 2 is the only one of the four in three rather than four movements, its centerpiece being a very extended theme-and-variations movement that is unfortunately somewhat too extended in Chen’s reading: the pacing draws altogether too much attention to the rather mundane nature of the material. The sonata as a whole sounds more complex than No. 1, and its first movement is genuinely noteworthy (pun intended) – it initially sounds like an extended étude or set of études before eventually becoming a vehicle for effective virtuosic display. The sonatas are separated on the CD by the Three Serenades, which are pleasant and tuneful and of no great consequence – they function essentially as aural palate cleansers between the more grandly conceived sonatas. 

     Chen’s recording of Sonatas Nos. 3 and 4 dates to 2024, and the six years between the performances on these two discs show that Chen has, if anything, become even more fluent in presenting and interpreting Rubinstein. No. 3 – the only one of these works in a major key – was Rubinstein’s personal favorite among the four sonatas, but despite the skill with which Chen performs it, it feels more like a work-in-progress than one fully formed and fully communicative. This sonata may point unusually clearly to the apparent disparity between what Rubinstein wrote down and what he performed: it is certainly possible that under his own hands, the work would be more cohesive and seem more thoroughly worked-out than it does here. This is not to take anything away from Chen’s technical prowess, and indeed the finale as Chen plays it comes across well and as a conclusive capstone to a work that until this fourth movement has seemed somewhat uncertain about where it has been going. As for Rubinstein's Sonata No. 4, its 44-minute duration in Chen’s reading puts it at the length of Beethoven’s No. 29, Hammerklavier, and it actually covers some of the same emotional territory, albeit much less cogently. The highly dramatic first movement goes through abrupt mood changes; the second, a scherzo in all but name, is light and surprisingly humorous; the third goes through many emotive motions without ever settling into any specific one or becoming convincingly lyrical; and the fourth offers the strongest possible contrast between light, even elegant passages and tub-thumping ones requiring the most-powerful keyboard technique possible – which Chen duly and suitably supplies. A work of grand scope that is nevertheless somewhat lacking in grandeur, Sonata No. 4 shows Rubinstein as a clear master of piano technique and a composer highly fluent in creating works that explore and exploit the keyboard. But it also shows him to have been lacking in the kind of emotional connectivity that translates well to pianists other than himself and that leads audiences to move beyond admiration to genuine emotional engagement. It can be rather exhausting to hear Rubinstein’s piano sonatas – not to mention to play them! – but their aftereffects lie more in the realm of being impressed with their technical demands than in that of appreciating and responding to any sort of inward journey on which the composer guides his listeners.

(++++) EXPLORING THE EXOTIC

Stravinsky: Chant du Rossignol; Favn i Pastushka; Divertimento from “Le Baiser de la fée”; Pulcinella Suite. Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by JoAnn Falletta. Naxos. $19.99. 

Music from Armenia: Works of Ashot Zohrabyan, Koharik Gasarossian and others. New Focus Recordings. $39.99 (4 CDs). 

     A rather oddly assorted set of works showcasing Stravinsky in his neoclassical mode, the latest Naxos CD from JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra is distinguished more by exceptionally fine playing than by any particularly revelatory interpretations of the repertoire. The disc bears the title “Fairy Tales,” which is accurate as far as it goes but somewhat limited in scope: these four works are really, in the main, explorations of nonexistent locales through rethinkings and reimaginings of pre-Stravinsky composers whose influence shaped Stravinsky’s own musical thinking – particularly in its earlier form. Chant du Rossignol draws from Stravinsky’s first opera, The Nightingale, a venture into chinoiserie that was strongly influenced by Rimsky-Korsakov. The orchestration is a highlight and is handled with considerable sensitivity under Falletta’s direction: solo trumpet, muted strings, violin-flute duet and other elements of the score are brought forth with care and considerable beauty. Favn i Pastushka (“The Faun and the Shepherdess”) is a setting of a Pushkin poem about the erotic awakening of a 15-year-old shepherdess and her unsuccessful wooing by a woodland god – ending in her death by drowning. The rather dour story sounds more Tchaikovskian than anything else: this is the earliest work on the CD, dating to 1906 (two years earlier than Stravinsky’s first work on The Nightingale). The songs are presented with warmth and as much emotional heft as they can handle by mezzo-soprano Susan Platts, and the orchestra holds forth with particular lushness in the strings, resulting in a work that, although slight, is more pleasant musically than in its mythic/pastoral narrative. The other works on the disc postdate World War I: the ballet Pulcinella was first heard in 1920, the ballet Le Baiser de la fée in 1928. The orchestral extracts and arrangements heard here are later than their balletic sources and altered in various ways – Stravinsky was in some ways Handelian in his reuse of his own material – but they are effectively atmospheric in their own right. Divertimento is Stravinsky’s orchestration of his violin-and-piano transcription of music that in turn followed the composer’s creation of an orchestral suite from the ballet – the provenance of these things can get complicated where Stravinsky is concerned. Like the Pushkin setting, Divertimento and the ballet to which it connects are Tchaikovskian – quite deliberately in the case of Le Baiser de la fée, for which Stravinsky actually used various little-known, not previously orchestrated Tchaikovsky works as the basis of his own music. Also like the faun-and-shepherdess tale, Le Baiser de la fée is a dark story, but the beauties of the music and rhythmic subtleties that Stravinsky brings to it produce an overall feeling of warm engagement that is somewhat at odds with the more dismal elements of the narrative. As for Pulcinella, whose music is the best-known on this CD, this is Stravinsky deriving 20^th-century material from works thought to have been written by the 18^th-century composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi – although later scholarship discovered that, as with Brahms’ famous variations originally thought to be on a theme by Haydn, some of the “Pergolesi” music was composed by others. In any case, Stravinsky’s subtle handling of the original material neither transcribes nor arranges anything – instead, he uses his sources as inspirations for his own concept of a farce featuring traditional comedic characters. Falletta makes sure to emphasize the overtly humorous portions of the music – the sarcastic exclamations from double bass and trombone in one movement, for example – while aptly balancing the fun with sensitive presentation of its variety of more-lyrical elements. The Pulcinella Suite is in many ways an update of the suites of the 18^th century – an aspect of its cleverness and of Stravinsky’s successful appropriation of his source material. It is played with suitable elegance and enthusiasm by the Buffalo musicians, and serves as a pleasant conclusion to a disc that, although something of a mishmash conceptually, is enjoyable and enjoyably lightweight throughout. 

     The exoticism is considerably more serious and less fairy-tale-like on a substantial New Focus Recordings release of music from Armenia – a land likely to be sufficiently unfamiliar to most music-loving audiences so that only the name of Aram Khachaturian, whose Sonata-Song for viola solo and Sonata-Monologue for violin solo are included in this four-disc set, will likely be known to most listeners. This is a major production on all levels – with more than four hours of music in all – and is especially noteworthy for two entire CDs focused respectively on piano music by Koharik Gazarossian (1907-1967) and chamber works by Ashot Zohrabyan (1945-2023). The collection, led and in part performed by violinist Movses Pogossian, is an extremely ambitious one, intended not only to showcase individual Armenian composers but also to reflect Armenian sociopolitical and geopolitical history from the waning days of the Ottoman Empire through the genocide of 1915-1916, the years under the domination of the Soviet Union, and the eventual emergence and reemergence of Armenian culture in more-recent times. The sheer volume of material here is impressive, although by definition the release will appeal in full only to audiences seeking to delve deeply into both the music and the history of Armenia in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Its self-limitation is what makes this admirable collection a (+++) offering. Generalizing about the material is well-nigh impossible and would do a disservice to the individuality of the composers. Even individual creators emerge in varied form here – for example, Zohrabyan’s three string quartets and two sonatas for, respectively, piano and cello-and-piano, have very different sounds and use differing compositional techniques, while the two Khachaturian solo works showcase a side of this composer rarely experienced by listeners (both pieces are very late works, the Sonata-Song of 1976 being Khachaturian’s last significant composition before his death in 1978). Audiences interested in sampling the diversity and wide-ranging musical creativity of Armenian composers will find plenty to explore here, including items by Vahram Sargsyan (born 1981), Aram Hovhannisyan (born 1984), Ghazaros (Lazarus) Saryan (1920-1998), Artur Avanesov (born 1980), and Tigran Mansurian (born 1939); there is also one very short piece by Komitas Vardapet (1869-1935), who is generally regarded as the founder of Armenia’s national school of music. The actual arrangement of material on the discs is somewhat questionable:  Zohrabyan’s two sonatas are interpolated amid his three quartets, while Avanesov’s music appears in one place on the first disc and five on the fourth CD – in the latter case with other composers’ works alternating with his. Given the general unfamiliarity of the material, it would have been more effective to bundle the music in ways that would allow audiences to experience the similarities and differences in each individual composer’s output (at least the elements of it offered here). Instead, there is a somewhat scattershot approach: the reasons for the music being offered in this particular sequence are by no means clear. The motivation for the total collection, however, is very clear indeed. Anyone interested in exploring some generally well-crafted and frequently moving music from a nation and culture whose appearance in concert halls and on recordings is limited will find this variegated set of sensitive, well-played pieces to be nothing short of revelatory.