Mozart: Piano Trios KV 254, 442, 496, 502, 542, 548, and 564. Trio Parnassus (Wolf-Dieter Streicher, violin; Michael Groß, cello; Chia Chou, piano). MDG Preziosa. $49.99 (2 CDs).
Rudy Wiedoeft: Music for Saxophone. Chad Smith, saxophones; Mikaela Bennett, voice; Lynette Wardle, harp; Dalton Ridenhour, piano; Sinfonia of London conducted by John Wilson. Chandos. $21.99 (SACD).
Mozart’s music for piano trio floats so effortlessly and with such elegance and eloquence that it is surprising to realize that it was, to an extent, trailblazing: along with Haydn, Mozart was largely responsible for creating a piano-trio form that was more than a piano sonata with strings obbligato. The violin and, to an even greater extent, the cello were relegated to distinctly subsidiary roles in most piano trios of the early Classical era, with the violin essentially supporting the piano’s right-hand melody and the cello underlining the left-hand accompaniment. It was only gradually that the trio became a genuine collaboration among equals; and although Mozart never brought it to the height of his greatest string trio, K. 563, his seven works for piano trio do show the form emerging into a worthwhile addition to chamber music in its own right. Performances as good as those of Trio Parnassus on a two-CD release from MDG Preziosa further enhance the standing of Mozart’s piano trios, although a more-thoughtful arrangement of the works on the discs would better have clarified Mozart’s growing engagement with the development of the form. The earliest work in this re-release of well-recorded 1990 performances is KV 254 in B-flat, which, labeled as Divertimento à 3, is in the same three-movement form as all of Mozart’s piano-trio pieces but is closer to a piano-and-violin sonata than a true trio – although it shares its gracefulness with all the other works recorded here. Mozart’s next foray into the form came in 1786, a decade after KV 254, when he wrote what he labeled a Terzette of trios: KV 496 and 502 (wrongly labeled 469 and 503 in this release) for piano trio plus the “Kegelstatt,” KV 498, for piano, clarinet and viola. The two piano trios in the Terzette start to show the cello as a full member of the ensemble, even though the piano and violin still tend to dominate the material. And this instrumental development extends further in KV 542, 548 and 564, which not only treat all the instruments as equals but also have the piano, formerly so dominant, used as accompaniment from time to time – a significant rethinking of the form. Mozart’s creativity shows itself in other ways as well in these works, notably through his combination in some finales of rondo and sonata elements. Trio Parnassus plays all the pieces in suitably upbeat fashion – all are in major keys and are comparatively light – with the precision of ensemble playing especially suitable to this repertoire. And although the recording’s sequencing of works – KV 502, 542, 496, 254, 548, 564 and 442 – has no particular justification, placing KV 442 last does make sense, since this three-movement grouping is not a complete trio by Mozart but an assemblage of three fragments put together by Maximilian Stadler after the composer’s death. Its placement as a kind of appendix to the fully formed trios provides a welcome chance to experience some additional Mozart thinking about the form, with the first of the three pieces – an Allegro in D minor – being especially welcome for a deeper if scarcely more somber hue than generally appears elsewhere in these works.
There is a certain subtlety to the instrumental changes observable in Mozart’s works for piano trio – but much less of one when it comes to the evolution of the saxophone after Belgian musician Adolphe Sax invented it in the 1840s. Sax played the flute and clarinet and actually redesigned the bass clarinet to its still-extant design, but his saxophone (the only one of several of his “sax” instruments that is still in use) struggled to find a place in classical music. It started to come into its own in the 1920s in a form called “C melody” or “C tenor,” whose size lies between those of the alto and tenor sax and whose pitch is a whole tone above the B-flat of the tenor saxophone. The C melody instrument, which does not transpose, became popular among families for its ability to join with home pianos, allowing players to read the music as written for the keyboard. It declined and essentially disappeared during the Great Depression because people could no longer afford the luxury of buying it, and by the mid-20th century it was fully supplanted by the saxophones that remain in use today. During the 1920s, though, the C melody sax – and saxophone music in general – had something of a heyday, led in large part by Rudy Wiedoeft (1893-1940), a virtuoso clarinetist who became enamored of the saxophone after discovering previously untapped bounce, joy and exhilaration in it at a time when the Jazz Age was just starting to flourish. That is the time period explored by Chad Smith and the Sinfonia of London under John Wilson on a tremendously peppy Chandos SACD whose 18 tracks make use of the C melody and other saxophones in thoroughly delightful ways. Virtually all the music here is by Wiedoeft, sometimes as solo composer and sometimes in collaboration, and Smith’s ebullience in performance certainly does justice to Wiedoeft’s own, which can still be heard on a few recordings (and seen in some old film shorts). The titles of the works, which date to the years 1916-1932 and mostly cluster in the early 1920s, give a good idea of the sort of material at which Wiedoeft believed the saxophone excelled: Sax-O-Trix, Saxophobia (in two versions, one a historical performance), Sax-O-Phun, Saxema and Saxarella are all offered, along with Valse Mazanetta, Valse Llewellyn, Valse Sonia and Valse Vanité. A couple of vocal trifles vary the sound a bit: Kiss Me Again by Victor Herbert and You Forgot to Remember by Irving Berlin. There are also a couple of transcriptions for saxophone (Gloria and Canary Cottage-One Step) and even a world première recording (Cloudy Days), although for most listeners everything on the disc will be previously unheard. The remaining tracks are called Dans L’Orient, Rubenola, and Danse Hongroise. Clearly there is nothing here intended to be less than brightly entertaining – although the expressive potential of the saxophone does come through when appropriate, always at a popular-music rather than concert-hall level. The recording is better heard in small doses, since nearly an hour of this uniformly lighthearted music tends to become a bit wearing: no matter how well Smith plays and Wilson and the Sinfonia of London accompany him, there is a sameness of sound and technical display in these pieces that eventually undermines their historical fascination. Still, the vocal entries and some intriguing instrumental mixtures – Danse L’Orient uses harp, while Rubenola includes violin and piano – help keep matters interesting. There is nothing profound here, really nothing beyond pure entertainment from a time when the saxophone was just coming into its own – and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. The recording is so well-played and the saxophone performance techniques (and antics) that these pieces require are so engaging in small doses that the release serves as a very enjoyable tribute not only to an instrument in a form that is rarely heard nowadays but also to a composer/performer who has been more thoroughly forgotten than the now-obscure type of saxophone with which he made his musical mark.
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