Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring—version for piano four hands; Debussy: Six Épigraphes antiques; Bartók: Two Pictures. Nadezda Pisareva and Georgy Tchaidze, pianists. Genuin. $19.99.
Gordon Jacob: Concerto for Chromatic Accordion, String Orchestra and Percussion; Edward McGuire: Accordion Concerto; Jonathan Dove: Northern Lights. Owen Murray, accordion; BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Sir James MacMillan. Toccata Next. $18.99.
Stravinsky’s two dual-pianist versions of Le Sacre du Printemps bracket the 1913 orchestral première: he created one for piano four hands in 1912 and one for two pianos in 1914. More than a century later, the piano forms of the ballet supplement rather than in any way supplant the orchestral one, which remains justifiably famous not only for its notorious first performance but also for the exceptionally skilled orchestration through which it communicates. Stravinsky himself felt the 1914 two-piano version was a better concert piece than the earlier one for four hands, but when those four hands belong to Nadezda Pisareva and Georgy Tchaidze, a strong argument can certainly be made for the earlier arrangement. In a new Genuin recording, Pisareva and Tchaidze focus on the pervasive dissonance of the work and deliver its rhythmic complexities with such intensity – to the point of actual pounding from time to time – that after a while, listeners will not miss the orchestration, so effectively do the performers advocate for it in this form. The intensity with which Pisareva and Tchaidze attack the strongly accented portions of the music requires a very strong piano – the Steinway D holds up as well and with as much resonance as always – and works best if listeners distance themselves from the notion of this as ballet music: the sheer strength of the playing and emphasis on heightened sound in the service of imagined primitivism produce a performance mostly devoid of connection to anything on stage. The final dance actually makes a racket more than an apotheosis. Le Sacre du Printemps dominates this CD on all levels, but it melds interestingly with the other two works offered by Pisareva and Tchaidze. Debussy actually played the four-hand Le Sacre du Printemps with Stravinsky, although there is no way to know the extent to which Debussy had the dramatic strength of Stravinsky’s ballet in mind when producing his own four-hand work engaging with the dim past, Six Épigraphes antiques (1914-1915). Here Pisareva and Tchaidze keep their dramatic instincts appropriately in check: Debussy’s antiquarianism is altogether milder and more distant than Stravinsky’s, differently evocative of an imagined long-gone time and Impressionistic only in a very general sense. Delicacy is the primary effect here, and tone painting is less than specific: there is nothing lusty, much less lustful, in Pan as evoked in the opening piece, where he is called “god of the summer wind,” nor is there anything sepulchral at the tombeau sans nom that follows. All six Debussy miniatures inhabit scenes quite different from those limned by Stravinsky – but the musical methods of evoking those scenes are clearly of the same time period, resulting in an apt and intriguing juxtaposition of the two composers’ works. The third piece on the disc is slightly earlier: Bartók’s Two Pieces dates to 1910. And each of the Bartók items is significantly longer than any of the Debussy pieces or any single section of Stravinsky’s ballet. There is nevertheless considerable complementarity here, thanks in large part to the two-piano transcription by Zoltán Kocsis (1952-2016). The atmospheric elements in Bartók lie somewhere between those of Stravinsky and Debussy, although some cadences in the first piece sound, from the standpoint of our much later time, reminiscent of Stravinsky (despite being written earlier). Bartók’s rhythms are less irregular than Stravinsky’s, less free-flowing than Debussy’s. And each of the Two Pieces has noteworthy elements strictly on its own terms. The rippling effects toward the end of the first, In Full Flower, provide an interesting overlay of the pianos on each other. The second, Village Dance, starts with an immediate contrast to the first through strong accents and much more substantial volume. Varying in speed throughout – and not inherently danceable at all times – this piece features strong chordal passages and a gradual accelerando in the last two minutes that builds to a forceful climax. One thing that is particularly evident from this well-thought-out musical mixture is that Pisareva and Tchaidze are both technically and emotively well-suited to each other and to the music they have chosen to play. Another thing is that these pieces by Debussy and Bartók reaffirm, if reaffirmation is necessary, just how revolutionary Stravinsky was in his creation of Le Sacre du Printemps.
A milder revolution is on display on a Toccata Next release featuring an instrument that, like the piano, uses a keyboard – but one that, like the organ, is more of a wind instrument than a percussive one. The instrument is the accordion – and it is in fact handled more-or-less like a chamber organ by Gordon Jacob (1895-1984) in his Concerto for Chromatic Accordion, which dates to 1972. Accordions were not suitable for classical-style compositions until the free-base keyboard – featuring a left-hand manual on which all buttons play individual, single notes – emerged in the 1950s. Even after that development, composers were not especially quick to take advantage of the accordion as a concerto element. But Jacob, who had an appetite for exploring the capabilities of individual instruments, created a well-balanced four-movement work that sets off the accordion’s sound well by juxtaposing it with timpani, glockenspiel, xylophone and tambourine as well as strings – and gives the accordionist an unaccompanied third-movement Largo of modest emotional content that is succeeded by a finale with the sort of playfulness that was a characteristic of much of Jacob’s work. Owen Murray plays the concerto with understanding and just the right amount of lilt, and the accompaniment by the BBC Concert Orchestra under Sir James MacMillan is well-matched to the solo material. The other two works on the disc, both composed specifically for Murray, take advantage of his expressive skills but are not, on the whole, as engaging as Jacob’s concerto. The 1999 Accordion Concerto by Edward McGuire (born 1948) tries a bit too hard to assert its seriousness, from its strongly accented opening to the accordion cadenzas in the second and third, final movement. The harmonic landscape is dissonant, the rhythmic one quite varied, but the piece as a whole seems to make somewhat too great an effort to pull the accordion into the panoply of solo instruments: it is a work of advocacy rather than one whose use of the accordion seems organic to it. Northern Lights (2019) by Jonathan Dove (born 1959), in form a concerto for accordion and chamber orchestra, is more unconventionally structured and more engaging to hear. The first two of its three movements are both labeled Very spacious, and the second immediately follows the first, so the effect is of a very extended contemplation of the titular phenomenon, with multiple sections suggesting vastness in different ways and through different instruments – the accordion prominent among them. This leads to a finale marked Musing that, despite its title, is not so much thoughtful as it is celebratory, often dancelike, and interestingly orchestrated, with a prominent, recurring glockenspiel. The movement incorporates material from Farewell to Stromness by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (1934-2016) and is intended as a tribute to him. But knowledge of the provenance of the music is not necessary for appreciation of the well-thought-through way in which Dove incorporates the solo instrument into a movement that gives the accordion plenty of virtuoso opportunities without preventing other instruments from asserting themselves effectively into the atmosphere. Murray and MacMillan present all the music on this disc with as much skill and engagement as any listener could wish for, creating, all in all, an effective argument for inclusion of the accordion – in its current form – among instruments that are quite worthy of having the spotlight of concertos shine upon them.
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