(++++) WHAT TITLES TELL

Smetana: Piano Sonata; Czech Dances. Bogang Hwang, piano. Naxos. $19.99. 

Elena Ruehr: Piano Trios Nos. 3-5; Piano Quartet No. 2. Boston Trio (Irina Muresanu, violin; Mihai Marica, cello; Heng-Jin Park, piano); Marcus Thompson, viola. AVIE. $19.99. 

Dominique Lemaître: Instants d’espace; Imago; Helix; Et le soleil comme désir; Presque bleu. Dan Barrett, cello; Michiyo Suzuki, clarinet; Suliman Tekali, violin; Nikita Yermak, violin and viola; Taka Kigawa and Jed Distler, piano. New Focus Recordings. $20.99. 

     At their most basic, the identifications of classical works indicate their form or tempo. But headings and titles can also be used as guideposts, indicating – with greater or lesser clarity – a composer’s expressive intentions, what elements performers can hope or expect to find in the music and evoke from it, and what the audience is supposed to think about or feel while listening. This has been the case for hundreds of years, and occurs to a greater extent among today’s composers than ever before. Yet the attempts at clarity and audience guidance can misfire if the music does not appear to support them; whether that is also truer now than in the past is a matter of opinion. The labels affixed by Smetana to his piano music, some of which is played by Bogang Hwang on a new Naxos CD, have elements of pure tradition and elements of guidance. Smetana’s sole piano sonata is simply labeled as such, and its four movements bear tempo indications and nothing more. This has been the longstanding most-common approach in classical works, leaving the feelings generated by the music to be plumbed by the performer – within the tempo guidelines – and experienced by audience members in their own way. The sonata is an early Smetana work, written when he was 22, and it shows the strong influence of Liszt – although, interestingly, Clara Schumann, to whom Smetana showed the piece, thought it was too much like Berlioz. Structurally, the music bears another influence, that of Beethoven, especially in the third and fourth movements. But Hwang’s performance focuses on the Lisztian elements, producing a reading of considerable clarity that is accentuated by the bright tone of a Fazioli piano – an interesting contrast to the deeply resonant Steinway sound more often heard in today’s performances of Romantic-era music. The sonata, essentially a student work of “pure music,” contrasts strongly with the two sets of Czech Dances written 30 years later. They are Smetana’s last significant piano works and, like his acknowledged orchestral masterpiece Má Vlast, were written after he lost his hearing. Also like that famous set of tone poems, and unlike the sonata, the dances are very distinctly nationalistic works – which sets up an oddity in the first set, which consists of four polkas. This is not a dance form intimately associated with Smetana’s homeland, but it does point performer and audience alike toward the pieces’ underlying rhythms and structure. The pianistic influence here, interestingly, is Chopin, especially in the decorative figurations of the second dance. Hwang’s readings are on the foursquare side – justifiable based on the building blocks of the music, but less so when considering Smetana’s attractive modifications of the basics of polka. The bright and high-spirited outer sections of the third dance, for example, are a touch too matter-of-fact here, although Hwang plays everything with technical skill. The second set of Czech Dances is explicitly Czech, with all 10 dances given titles indicating their Moravian or Bohemian sources. Here Hwang is at her best in the lighter, more delicate dances, such as Slepička (“Little Hen”) and Cibulička (“Little Onion”), although a bit more intensity would have been welcome in the more rough-hewn Medvěd (“Bear Dance”) and Dupák (“Stamping Dance”). Still, it is clear that Hwang is aware of the performance expectations associated with each dance’s title; and listeners, even if they know nothing of the specific form of each work, will certainly pick up on the forthright sound and rhythmic evenness associated with all the dance types. 

     Eleanor Ruehr (born 1963) provides more detailed and specific guidance for performers and listeners alike in the chamber works on a new AVIE release. All four pieces here bear overall titles plus indications of the intended mood and evocative elements of each individual movement. Piano Trio No. 3, “Winter Night,” is closest to traditional markings in its movement-by-movement labels of Lyric, Grazioso, Aria and Finale. There is no particular sense of chill anywhere here; this is more of an indoor winter scene, cozy and designed to keep the cold outside. Ruehr’s tonal language is on the edge of the consonance-vs.-dissonance divide, not fully committed either way, resulting in a kind of harmonic restlessness that tends to undermine the Lyrical notion but that she manages to fit well into the other movements, with graceful flow clear in Grazioso and songfulness apparent in Aria. The final movement brings back elements of the first three to good effect, and the Boston Trio plays the entire work – and, indeed, all the pieces on this CD – with understanding and a very skilled balance between solo and ensemble material. The other pieces on the disc show both the positives and the pitfalls of titles-as-guides. Piano Trio No. 4, “Ski, Kayak, Bike,” is in three movements, each given one of those labels. But the music never fully reflects the words. Ski, for example, will probably make listeners – whether skiers or not – think of a speedy downhill run through snow and ice. But the movement opens with strong dissonance and intense piano chords, attaining a small sense of outdoors and open spaces only at the end. Well written for the instruments, this trio may be mostly about Ruehr’s own associations with the three activities; but nothing in it fulfills likely audience expectations. On the other hand, Piano Trio No. 5, “Troubled Times,” not only has a very clear title but also provides more guidance to performers than the other works here. The movements, labeled without capital letters, are called gutty and laborious, spooky then aggressive, and playful but anxious. These are clearly words aimed at the players – this work was written for the Boston Trio – and the performance here is the most intense on the disc. Whatever specific events may underlie Ruehr’s design of the music will be unknown to audiences – and irrelevant, since the character of the music makes the overall feeling of dislocation and turmoil very clear indeed. The performers convey a real sense of struggle throughout the piece, and the word “playful” seems misplaced (or ironic) in the finale, which comes to no definitive conclusion but certainly puts forth a mood of anxiety and worry. On a strictly musical basis, this trio is too gloomy to constitute pleasant listening, and its lack of any final sense of hopefulness or uplift makes for a compelling if somewhat overly edgy experience. As for Ruehr’s Piano Quartet No. 2, “Maple,” it goes to the opposite extreme where movement titles are concerned. The first movement’s label, Sapling, connects clearly enough with the work’s overall title, but there is no apparent connection involving the second, Prelude, Fughetta, Chorale. The third and last movement, The Luthier, provides a small hint that the work has something to do with a type of tree used in string-instrument creation. Ruehr’s explanation of the piece – for listeners willing to read and absorb it before hearing the music – provides the full framing tale: the quartet is about a maple tree of the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the luthier who carved instruments from it, and the composers who made music for those instruments (hence the second movement’s title and Ruehr’s brief references to Bach and Vivaldi). This is all well and good, and the quartet is as well-made and well-played as all the music on this disc; but the requirement to learn the motivation of the piece in order to understand it fully is at best an arguable one. The titles of the quartet do not convey enough information on their own to guide audiences or performers, but it seems unreasonable for a composer to expect players and hearers alike to go beyond the descriptive material affixed to a piece before they can fully interpret and appreciate it. Many contemporary composers, however, do insist on that sort of pre-knowledge. Thankfully, Ruehr usually does not – a fact that makes her very well-crafted music all the more accessible. 

     Accessibility does not seem to be the point for other contemporary composers, at least where the relationship between their music and their pieces’ titles is concerned. The chamber works of Dominique Lemaître (born 1953) contrast in many ways with those of Ruehr, their use of verbiage being only one. A New Focus Recordings release explores a modest amount of Lemaître’s music (the CD runs just 43 minutes), but it is enough to show what Lemaître expects both of performers and of listeners. Instants d’espace (2024) means “Moments of Space,” but this solo-cello work’s intent is unclear from that title. The piece does explore the cello’s range and emotional compass, and without forcing it into the uncomfortable sounds that some modern composers often try to extract from this instrument and others; but this seems more of an exercise for the cellist than a work with communicative intent for an audience. Imago (2022) is for clarinet, cello and piano, and its title refers not to anything psychoanalytic but to the adult, post-metamorphosis stage of an insect’s life. Exactly how listeners are supposed to get from the title to this collage of sounds is unclear, although expansive clarinet swells and a sequence of arpeggios may be intended as growth-related. Likewise, the connection between the title of the viola-and-cello work Helix (2021) is unclear – the piece has imitative features and repetitive ones, plus some extended pizzicato material, but its apparent intent to explore the original Greek meaning of “spiral” is not evident, except, to some extent, retrospectively. Et le soleil comme désir (2007) has one of those sort-of-poetic titles (“And the sun as desire”) of which many contemporary composers are fond, but it is difficult to know if there is any particular way that Lemaître wants audiences to experience this piece for violin, cello and piano. Starting with the adjacent pitches of A and B-flat, the work expands and contracts in various ways and with various instrumental combinations, offering very little for audiences to hold onto aurally and even less apparent connection with its name. And the way in which the string trio Presque bleu (2024) is “almost blue” is equally imprecise: it is supposed to have something to do with synesthesia, which Scriabin famously (or notoriously) explored in his music, but while Lemaître’s work has some attractive textures and harmonic explorations, it neither connects meaningfully with its title nor produces a fully engaging experience of music as music. This (+++) disc features fine playing by all the performers and offers a fair sampling of Lemaître’s musical thinking and his handling of individual instruments and chamber ensembles. But the works’ titles notwithstanding, nothing here really guides audiences on a path toward greater understanding or more-meaningful experience of the material. If anything, the titles seem tacked-on or arbitrary – a communicative opportunity largely wasted, if communication beyond self-expression was ever the intent.