Recorded 1980, Berliner Philharmonie – Berlin, West Germany
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ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
One word – ROUSING!
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ORIGINAL LINER NOTES by Richard Osborne
“Listen to the music with reverence; for the composer meant what he said, and he was speaking of sacred things,” wrote Sir Donald Tovey of the Sixth Symphony’sslow movement.
It is well said, for this is wise and compassionate music, Sachs-like in its broodings. Tovey’s advocacy of the symphony in the early years of the century was remarkable then and would be remarkable now, for the Sixth– personal, economical, thrillingly shaped and scored – has never been much noticed by the wider musical public.
Anton Bruckner
During Bruckner’s lifetime only the Adagioand Scherzoof the Symphony were known. Wilhelm Jahn, director of the Vienna Hofoper, had conducted these two movements, to considerable acclaim, at a Philharmonic concert in Vienna in February 1883, seventeen months after the work’s completion.
But it was Gustav Mahler who brought the full score to public notice (albeit with cuts in some of the third subject groups and some revised orchestration) at a concert in Vienna in February 1899.
Mahler had long wanted to present a Bruckner symphony to the Philharmonic audience, and his choice was as enterprising as it was inspired. One wonders what Mahler made of the work in performance.
He was himself to write slow movements of omparable beauty, but his dance movements, with their persistent nostalgia, their recurrent irony, and their sophisticated orchestral method rarely, if ever, attempt to re-appropriate and re-fashion the classical scherzo as fascinatingly as Bruckner does.
Bruckner’s Trio, with its woodland horns and haunting sense of an Urwald far distant in time from our own, is a minor masterpiece in itself.
Like the trudging start to the Scherzo (which may or may not have given Mahler a germinal idea for his own Sixth Symphony), Bruckner’s music is rooted in certainties which Mahler all too rarely glimpsed.
Bruckner’s two outer movements are incluctably splendid; but they, too, follow a ground-plan, and an orchestral procedure, radically different from anything we encounter in Mahler.
Anton Bruckner – Statue – Vienna, Austria
Spacioius in design, swift in process, without a spare ounce of flesh on the orchestral texturing, the finale searches out the tonic A major– the key briefly burked out by trumpets and horns in bar 23 of the movement across a quietened, minor-key, nocturnal landscape.
During the course of the movement there are many arrivals on precipitate tonal steeps, as well as blander, blanket moments, abortive fermatas marking journey’s end.
“In Bruckner,” Robert Simpson has brilliantly observed, “the unexpected is inevitable, and the inevitable totally unexpected.” This is certainly true of the Sixth’sfinale. Its mood is by turns furtive, heroic, feverish, serene and assertive. Never, though, is it despairing. It is a movment marked by a heroic refusal to contemplate victory until all the possibilities of defeat have been squarely faced. Onlly out of doubt is faith born.
Berliner Philharmoniker
The first movement is almost unequivocally splendid! Is there a recapitulation in the history of the symphony between Beethoven and Silelius more unexpected or more thrilling that that at the heart of this particular movment?
The use of the drum is Beethovenian both as an harmonic pivot and as a source of awesome splendor in the orchestral texture; but though the effects are Beethovenian in origin they are entirely Brucknerian in their application.
Earlier, the movement begins with the note of C sharp pulsing like rapid morse high on the violins – though the crucial ideas are held, with typical Brucknerian reticence, low in the cellos and basses.
Herbert Von Karajan
Here, within a characteristically plain tonic and dominant ambit, an array of highly charged Neopolitan harmoniers give the music its special charisma, just as broad rhythmic formulations are soon to give focus to the exquisite lyrical episodes, the music made magical by the arcane loveliness of the kaleidoscopically changing inner rhythmic fragments.
By the code, as Tovey eloquently observes, the thematic inversions are ‘passing from key to key beneath a tumultuous surface, sparkling like the Homeric seas.’
TRACK LISTING:
Anton Bruckner (1824 – 1896) – Symphony No. 6 in A Major
Majestoso [15:16]
Adagio: Sehr feierlich [18:58]
Scherzo: Nicht schnell – Trio, Langsam [7:52]
Finale: Bewegt, doch nicht zu schnell [15:13]
FINAL THOUGHT:
If you’ve decided to listen to some Brucknertoday – start with this one. Your heart rate will rise. Most doctors say Bruckner’s 6th equals one hour of cardio.
Male Voices: Rundfunkchor Berlin and the Ernst-Senff-Chor
Berliner Philharmoniker
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ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
A nice performance of a ‘meh’ Symphony (which, I believe, would have been Bruckner’s review as well).
Anton Bruckner
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES – Sebastian Urmoneit (Translation Stewart Spencer)
Dating from 1865/66, Bruckner’s C minor Symphony was the Austrian composer’s first attempt to explore a field which, in the minds of all 19th-century composers of instrumental music, represented the ultimate challenge.
Neither his “Study Symphony” in F Minor, nor his D Minor Symphony which he himself later “nullified,” satisfied the high standards he set himself and that he expected of the genre.
As we know, Brahms, too, hesitated long and hard before publishing a symphony, and by the time that his first contribution to the medium was unveiled, he was already well established as a composer.
Bruckner, by contrast, was barely known outside Linz in the mid-1860s, even though he had already completed two Masses. According to his own later account, it was the local music critic, Moritz von Mayfeld, who encouraged him to explore the world of the symphony, a world to which Bruckner was to remain loyal for the whole of the rest of his life.
Mayfeld ended his review of the first performance of Bruckner’s D minor Mass with the words: “Such is his unusually fertile imagination and his musical and technical knowledge that it is hard to predict where he may go from here. But one thing is certain, namely, that he will very soon cultivate the field of the symphony and to do so, moreover, with the greatest success.”
Anton Bruckner
We know that from at least the time of his studies with the Linz Kappelmeister, Otto Kitzler, Bruckner was not only familiar with the music of Beethoven but had also been introduced to the opera of Wagner through a performance of “Tannhauser” that Kitzler conducted at the theatre in the town.
From Beethoven, Bruckner took over the symphony’s four-movement structure and even left untouched the distinctive character of all four of those movements: First movement Sonataform – Adagio– Scherzo– Finale.
From his First Symphony onwards, however, he based his symphonic expositions not one two subjects but on three; a compositional device previously found to such a clearly developed extent only in Schubert’s “Great” C Major Symphony.
A comparison between the two First Symphonies of Bruckner and Brahms shows certain similarities; not only are both in C Minor, but the sombre tonality of the opening is brightened in their final movements, both of which are in C Major.
In each case, the model is Beethoven’s Fifth. More striking than their similarities, however, are their dissimilarities, not least in their approach to the whole history of the genre.
Daniel Barenboim
In order for it to be fully understood, Brahms’ First Symphony seems to presuppose two whole centuries of music history as a living force, whereas Bruckner approached his task with an almost naïve insouciance, seeming not to suffer from the oppressive weight of tradition.
While his First Symphony is far from denying the age in which it was written, no other composer of his stature has been able to animate the elemental forces of rhythm and melody with such unrefracted immediacy and – at least in his First Symphony – to fall back so nonchalantly on Wagner’s harmonic innovations.
The German musicologist Stefan Kuntz has characterized this note of purity in early Bruckner by reference to a remark of Nietzsche’s which, although written with Wagner in mind, is undoubtedly better suited, in Kunze’s view, to Bruckner: “He who desired to liberate art, to restore its desecrated sanctity, would first have to have liberated himself from the modern soul; only when innocent himself could he discover the innocence of art.”(Untimely Meditations: Richard Wagner in Bayreuth.)
This natural simplicity of tone is a feature, above all, of the original Linz version of the symphony, a more elemental account of the piece that Bruckner later revised in 1890/91 to produce the so-called Vienna version of the work.
Rundfunkchor Berlin
The symphonic chorus Helgolandfor male-voice choir and orchestra was Bruckner’s last completed composition. The only other piece on which he worked after 1893 was his Ninth Symphony, which was to remain unfinished at his death.
Although Helgolandis little known today, it is clear from Bruckner’s last will and testament that he himself numbered it among his most important works, worth – in his opinion – of being ranked alongside his nine symphonies, three Masses, String Quintet, Te Deum and his setting of Psalm 150.
Bruckner was happy to accept the commission to write Helgolandand broke off work on his Ninth Symphonyin order to concentrate on a piece that he hoped would increase his standing in musical circles. It was written to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Vienna Male-Voice Choir, a celebration that the Emperor Franz Joseph I was to attend in person.
Its first performance on 8 October 1893 proved one of the great triumphs in Bruckner’s career. It is no longer possible to say with any certainty whether the decision to set the ballad by August Silberstein (1827-1900) was Bruckner’s own or whether that decision was taken by others.
The poem breathes the spirit of German nationalism that typified the educated Austrian bourgeoisie from the mid-19th century onwards and which singing societies – the Liedertafelnof the time – made it their duty to promulgate.
Ernst-Senff-Chor Berlin
Silberstein was numbered among the student dissidents of 1848 and driven into exile, settling in Vienna in 1856 and making his living as a journalist and occasional poet.
Silberstein’s ballade Helgolandis taken from an anthology, Mein Herz in Liedern, first published in 1868 and describes the threat posed to the island of Helgoland by a fleet of Roman warships. The Saxon islanders call on Heaven to help them, and assistance is duly provided in the form of a raging tempest. The pagan invasion is repulsed, and the Germanic people thank God for their deliverance.
The events depicted in the poem are purely fictional: the Romans never reached Helgoland, and the inhabitants of the island had not been converted to Christianity at the time of the Romans‘ wars of conquest.
Bruckner can have had no more time for such historical inaccuracies than for the contradictory claim that Catholicism is incompatible with national interests; in the apotheosis of Christianity in the hymn at the end of the ballad there seems like doubt that he grasped the underlying message.
The setting of the very last line, “O Herrgott, dich prieset frei Helgoland!” (O Lord God, free Helgoland glorifies thee), in which Bruckner modulates from G minor to the higher G major, is the most spacious in the whole work.
Berliner Philharmoniker
TRACK LISTING:
Anton Bruckner (1824 – 1896) – Symphony No. 1 in C Minor
Allegro- 12:49
Adagio – 13:36
Scherzo – 9:21
Finale, Bewegt, feurig – 14:00
Anton Bruckner (1824 – 1896) – “Helgoland”
“Helgoland” – 11:14
FINAL THOUGHT:
This is the first disc of Daniel Barenboim and the Berliner Philharmoniker’s massive (and pretty great) Bruckner Symphony Cycle. I have this disc as a one-off and not the entire box – so, going forward, it will be a mix and great (and not so great) performances of the Bruckner symphonies (and other works). I will just say this, I’m glad Anton B.kept writing after Symphony #1!
Julliard String Quartet (Robert Mann & Joel Smirnoff, Violins; Samuel Rhodes, Viola; Joel Krosnick, Cello) & Walter Trampler, Viola
Recording Location: Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, Troy, NY, May 15-17, 1995.
ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
These rarely-played chamber gems get the “Julliard” treatment to gorgeous effect but… actually, well-played doesn’t mean… exciting.
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (Bruce Adophe, 1996):
Fifty years ago, in 1946, the Julliard String Quartet was formed by the 26-year-old Robert Mann, fresh out of the Army. Fifty years before that, in 1896, the 63-year-old Johannes Brahms, despondent over the recent death of Clara Schumann, composed Four Serious Songs (Op. 121)and Eleven Chorale Preludes (Op. 122).
Brahms, who died at 64, lived almost into the twentieth century. Although typecast as a forever-bearded Romantic god trapped in a remote pantheon called “The Three B’s,” the real Johannes Brahms was only a grandfather away from the generation that founded the original Julliard String Quartet.
Brahms is known to have said, “If we cannot write as beautifully as Mozart and Haydn, let us at least write as purely.” The comment discloses Brahms’ neoclassical bent and surely would have been taken as an anti-Wagner, anti-Liszt sentiment.
Liszt’s music was so utterly disliked by Brahms and Joseph Joachim (the great violinists who was the composer’s lifelong champion and sometime friend) that they used the word “lisztisch” to mean “damnable” in their letters.
In his String Quintet in F Major, Op. 88, composed in 1882, Brahms achieves a purity of form, voice-leading and counterpoint, which heralds a master composer in his maturity. The quintet opens with luminous nobility.
This quite soon gives way to a radiant, more intimate theme (related by the viola) clothed in a new key and a stunning new texture which no one but Brahms ever dreamed of: each instrument has its own special light – cello and second violin play pizzicato, but the cello divides the measure in two while the second violin plucks in six; the first violin plays eight notes to the bar while the first viola plays the tune in syncopated sixes; the remaining viola plays a counter-melody in four.
This kind of innovative rhythmic and textural design is a blueprint for much music of our century, suggesting even the polyrhythmic configurations of Elliott Carter (whose quartets the Julliard String Quartet has recorded). But the intricate musical web vanishes – before its complexity can register in the mind – into a simpler heartbeat patter, full of yearning.
The musical purity Brahms reverered is now clearly manifested as he explores these textures throughout the movement with mastery and deep feeling.
The dark, strring Grave ed oppassionato has enough solid mass to warrant an entire movement, yet Brahms employs it as a standard by which to discover the specific gravity of an Allegretto vivaco and a Presto.
These startling juxtapositions – and their subtle harmonic interrelatedness – seem to have been inspired by Beethoven, who, especially in his late string quartets, discovered uncharted areas of human expression through the investigation of extreme contrast. The underlying metaphor is that of our ultimate aloneness (Grave) in the midst of the busy world (Allegretto vivace and Presto).
The Beethoven connection can also be heard in the finale, which opens with two abrupt, stabbing chords in the manner of Beethoven’s string quartets Op. 59, No. 2, and the third movement of Op. 131.
Following the Beethovenian path still further, Brahms unfolds an uplifting fugue, announcing each entrance with those knifelike chords. Beethoven would not have rolled over but rather sat up straight (both images are problematic!) upon hearing Brahms’ tribute.
While the integration of fugue into sonata form conjures up Beethoven, fugal writing itself summons the spirit of Bach. When Brahms died, Joachim told the Neuen Freien Presse, “On the topmost peak stands Bach, the all-powerful, the incomparable, the creator, the great beginning. Mozart follows as the originator of new forms of beauty, and then comes – Brahms.”
The interviewer asked, “And Beethoven?”Joachim then firmly placed Brahms ahead of Beethoven.
In 1996 – as the new millennium approaches – we can understand the anxiety and exhilaration, the astounded concurrence of old and new, which accompanied the turn of the last century.
Claude Debussy, the prophet and pilot of musical modernism, was twenty-eight years old when, in 1890, Brahms composed the Quintet in G Major, Op. 111. It was the year that the Manhattan Building, the first entirely steel-frame building in the world, was erected in Chicago. At sixteen stories, it was (briefly) the world’s tallest building, earning the nickname “Hercules.”
Feeling the shifting winds, Brahms included a message with the manuscript of the quintet when he sent it to his publisher, Fritz Simrock: “With this letter you can bid farewell to my music – because it is certainly time to leave off…”
But the flowing Herculean architecture of Brahms’ Op. 111 Quintetwill surely outlast Chicago’s steel-framed edifices. In fact, far from giving the impression that its composer might soon retire, the opening of the G-Major Quintetexplodes into existence with a skyscraper of a first theme in the cello, set against a tempest in the remaining four instruments.
Brahms considered rewriting this opening passage to decrease the risk of the solo cello being drowned out. A draft exists in which the upper strings alternate their activity with rests, cutting the massive texture in half. The composer quickly returned to the original conception of the work, deciding that the rewrite sounded flimsy.
Brahms did not always want cellists to be heard, however. In a now famous story, Brahms was playing his own F-Major Cello Sonata with an unsatisfactory partner. The composer let loose at the piano with an enormous fortissimo, causing the cellist to shout over the music, “Maestro, I can’t hear myself at all,” to which Brahms countered, “Lucky for you!”
Brahms loved a full sound and was renowned for his rich, massive tone on the piano. The Julliard Quartet’s Robert Mann remembers a story once told by a musician whose father, many years earlier, had taken him to hear Brahms play his F-Minor Piano Quintet. The boy’s father leaned over just before the music started and whispered to his son, “Listen well to the strings in the opening unison passage because that will be the last time you can hear them at all!”
A friend of Brahms suggested to the composer that the high spirits in the Op. 111 Quintet may have been partially inspired by a public park in Vienna, known as the Prater. “You guessed it!” answered Brahms. “And the delightful girls there.”
If Brahms meant this last comment seriously, he would probably have been referring to the graceful second theme in the first movement, which beings in the violas and is soon passed to the violins – it is as fetching and enchanting a melody as any ever composed.
Brahms professed that his beautiful themes came to him in “instantaneous flashes,” which “quickly vanished,” sometimes before he could capture them on paper. He believed that “the themes that will endure in my music all appear to me in this way.”
Brahms did not mean that he was unconscious when composing, but that he experienced what he called a “semi-trance condition.” Explaining this concept to Joachim, Brahms stated, “You must realized that Milton, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Bach and Beethoven never wholly lost consciousness when they entered that border state.”
Of his own semi-trances, Brahms explained, “I always have a definite purpose in view before invoking the Muse and entering into such a mood.”Brahms decried music which did not achieve a balance between the spirtual and the intellectual plains.
He criticized, for example, the composer August Bungert, whose work was immensely popular throughout Europe in the 1890s, for composing only with the conscious mind.
Brahms predicted such music would soon “go into oblivion.” (He seems to have been coorect so far, although an unexpected Bungert festival is always a possibility given the current craze for thematic programming.)
There is certainly no shortage of inspired, entrancing melody in this quintet. In the Adagio, Brahms unveils another jewel – a sweet, sorrowful melody which abides sublimely on the first viola before the first violin appropriates it permanently.
The violin reveals three tragic visions of the theme (as opposed to the viola’s one). The viola makes a moving, cadenza-like plea towards the movements close, but the violins retain the poignant theme for a fourth and final utterance.
The Un poco allegrettoushers in another heart-stoppingly beautiful tune, this one quality prevails, giving way now and then to momentary disquiet. Here, and throughout this quintet, we find the Brahms so admired by Schoenberg for his ability to fully explore the complexity of a seemingly simple idea.
The five instruments are intricately engaged in imitative counterpoint that is rich without excess, at once elegant and luxurious.
The first viola seems to get an idea for the finale which the other instruments quickly realize is a good one. The Vivace ma non troppo prestotakes the listener on a thrilling ride through the Hungarian countryside. It may seem brief, but you’ll find it is just the right length if you try dancing to it (which you’ll want to do).
By the way, it turns out that Brahms did not give up composing quite as soon as he had expected. Soon after completing this quintet, he heard the clarinetist Richard Muhlfeld play and suddenly found himself once again teeming with ideas, burning to compose.
TRACK LISTING:
Johannes Brahms – Quintet No. 1 in F Major, Op. 88
Allegro non troppo ma con brio – 11:19
Grave ed appassionato – Allegretto vivace Tempo 1 – Presto – Tempo 1 – 10:53
Allegro energico – Presto – 5:32
Johannes Brahms – Quintet No. 2 in G Major, Op. 111
Allegro non troppo, ma con brio – 12:48
Adagio – 6:26
Un poco allegretto – 6:13
Vivace ma non troppo presto – 5:00
FINAL THOUGHT:
Normally, Brahms’ chamber music is a can’t-miss-bing-bang-bong success. But after listening to this disc… all I feel is… meh. The answer is ‘meh.’ Not terrible, it’s fine… but… ‘meh.’
Yeah, um, no – there is nothing to say other than Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax play Brahms.
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (Bernard Jacobson, 1985):
Opus 38is not merely the first of Brahms’ cello sonatas: it was the first sonata he published for piano with any other instrument. The three surviving violin sonatas came much later and the two for clarinetlater still.
Apart from early essays that the fiercely self-critical composer destroyed, including a duet for cello and piano that he played in public when he was 18, the E minor sonata’s only partial predecessor was the C minor scherzo (or Sonatensatz) he contributed in 1853 to a composite sonata written jointly with Schumann and Albert Dietrich as a tribute to the great violinist Joseph Joachim.
If you think about the character of Brahms’ music throughout his life, and in particular about the qualities of color and texture that make it unmistakably Brahms, it is not surprising that, in 1865, he should have approached the chamber-sonata medium through the cello.
The idea that Brahms was indifferent to instrumental color is a misapprehension. The truth is, surely, that he was relatively uninterested in the more obvious and dazzling instrumental effects.
Consider, for instance, his extraordinary use of the piccolo in the Tragic Overture. This usually obstreperous instrument appears in only 15 of the work’s 429 measures – and then exclusively in mysterious pianissimo.
Rather than brilliance, it was warmth of tone that attracted Brahms. And thus it is the clarinet and the horn that he most favors among the woodwind and brass families, and the cello among the strings. In all four symphonies some of the most memorable string effects are those entrusted to the cellos.
Then there are notable solo passages like those in the slow movement of the Second Piano Concerto, not to mention the wonderfully idiomatic handling of the cello in the Double Concerto, where it not only shares the limelight with the traditionally more extrovert violin but often takes the leading role in thematic exposition.
Following this line of thought, we find also that nobody, probably, has ever written a more cello-ish cello sonata than Brahms’ E minor. Through the entire length of the work (written for and dedicated to his friend Dr. Joseph Gansbacher) it is the special dark, introspective quality of the instrument that is stressed.
The very first theme exploits its ability to sing a sonorous melody in the lowest register, and at no point in the three movements does the pitch of the cello writing rise high enough to demand the use of the treble clef.
Tone color aside, the E minor sonata is Brahmsian also in reflecting its composer’s Janus-like relation to music history. Brahms faced equally in two directions: toward the past, and toward the future.
Much of his influence on later music derives from the linear and rhythmic freedom of his style, which was to have an effect at least as far reaching as – and arguably healthier than – that of Wagner’s innovations in the harmonic sphere. But Brahms’ liberation of line and pulse, though new to the 19th century, stems from his enthusiasm for the music of a much more distant past, going back to the time of Palestrina and indeed beyond that to the earliest origins of German song.
With all its freshness of expression, this sonata has a certain almost self-consciously old-fashioned air. In the first movement, it is to be found in the unhurried deployment of traditional sonata-form elements, and, more intangibly, in the kind of legendary, “far away and long ago” feeling to the actual cut of the themes.
The other two movements are more specifically historical in reference, the one recalling the minuet style, the other adopting fugal patterns, and the two together constituting a pair of genre pieces evocative of the baroque sonata or suite.
Yet, even here, the backward look is closely related to a forward influence. It is movements like this quasi-minuet that furnish the clearest link between Mahler’s folkish Knaben Wunderhornvein and its medieval antecedents, and indeed the contrast of idioms between Brahms’ first two movements suggests a peaceable juxtaposition of past with present and future styles much like that of the corresponding movements in Mahler’s Second Symphony.
As Brahms matured, he turned away from formal displays of fugal erudition like those in the E minor sonata’sfinale, the Handel Variations for piano and German Requiem, and instead began to fuse the forms and harmonies of his sonata style more intimately with its contrapuntal elements.
Certainly the finale of the F major cello sonata, written in his Swiss summer retreat at Thun in 1886, wears its learning more lightly than its youthful predecessor. But formidably learned this sonata still is, whether in the polyphonic play and pitting of three groups against duple meter in the finale, or in the subtle rhythmic elisions of the scherzo, or in the piano’s breathtaking pp dolce augmentation of the main theme just before the end of the first movement’s development section.
It is not so much learning, however, as passion that strikes the listener first in this deceptively youthful music. The very beginning of the Allegro vivace immediately proclaims the contrast with the E minor sonata: here all is full-blooded romanticism, felt in the constant tumultuous undermining of the movement’s official 3/4 pulse, and articulated as early as the seventh and eighth measures by the devil-may-care leap to the cello’s topmost register.
If the older Brahms tended more and more to moderation, this sonata is a glorious exception, as the “vivace,” “passionata” and “molto” of its movement-headings already suggest. Perhaps, as in the Double Concerto written the following year, it was the return to his old love of the cello combined with the inspiration provided by the gifted young cellist Robert Hausmann that prompted this resurgence of expressive ardor.
It is evident also in the plangent pizzicatos and subsequent Klangfarben-like coloristic effects of the Adagio affettuoso and in that movement’s remote and Haydenesque setting in the flat supertonic key of F-sharp major.
A tangible link with the Double Concerto, incidentally, is to be found in the transition theme of the sonata’s first movement, which could almost be regarded as the concerto’s slow-movement theme set at a different melodic angle.
But the superb coup just before the movement’s end – this time a purely harmonic device that transmutes the last, literal restatement of the stirring subordinate theme into a tender valediction – is a stroke of genius that is all the sonata’s own.
TRACK LISTING:
Johannes Brahms – Sonata For Cello And Piano No. 1 In E Minor, Op. 38
Allegro non troppo – 14:43
Allegretto quasi Menuetto – 5:58
Allegro – 6:37
Johannes Brahms – Sonata For Cello And Piano No. 2 In F Major, Op. 99
Allegro vivace – 9:22
Adagio affettuoso – 7:45
Allegro passionato – 7:20
Allegro molto – 4:32:
FINAL THOUGHT:
Imagine you’re a cellist and a pianist and you’re trying to do some Brahms in your spare time and then freakin’ Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax come out and just stick the landing like it’s never been stuck before. That’s this recording!
Borodin String Quartet (Mikhail Kopelman – violin; Andrei Abramenkov – violin; Dmitri Shebalin – viola; Valentin Berlinsky – cello)
Recorded in 1980 by Melodiya in the USSR (Released in the US by EMI in 1987)
ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
It was “Kismet” that full-time scientist and part-time composer Alexander Borodin should write these exquisite string quartets! (see what I did there?)
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (by John Warrack, 1982):
When Tchaikovsky and Borodin wrote their string quartets in the 1870s – Tchaikovsky’s three between 1871 and 1878, Borodin’s first between 1873 and 1879 – they were entering virgin territory.
Though both had written a good deal of chamber music as young men, these works were for the most part either student efforts or pieces conceived in a fairly unassuming manner for amateur entertainment.
The Russian string quartet, as a genre, did not exist. There were previous attempts – even Glinka completed a quartet, though he did not think much of it – but in Russian musicians’ endless debates on the course their art should take, the quartet did not play a large part.
The foundation of the Russian Musical Society in 1859 gave an enormous impetus to Russian musical life. Chamber music featured in the Society’s programmes; and new interest in the string quartet followed upon the founding of the Russian String Quartet in 1871.
Its members were Panov, Leonov, Yegorov and the young cellist, later to be a distinguished figure in Russian musical life, Alexander Kuznetsov. Tchaikovsky described them in 1874 as ‘an ideally harmonious ensemble.’ Other players, in St. Petersburg and Moscow, formed more or less regular ensembles; and the effect was to increase rapidly the appreciation and understanding of the classics of Western string quartet music among Russian musicians.
However, Russian composers were concerned to develop their own methods, rather than model themselves slavishly on Western example. More than the virtuoso French quatuor concertant tradition, it was to the Viennese tradition that they turned, despite the natural Russian affinity for Latin rather than Teutonic art; but when Borodin began work on his first quartet, he was clearly anxious to find structural methods that were more identifiably Russian.
The use of folk music, or melodies close to the Russian folk manner, was one immediate stimulus; but Borodin did not associate himself with the so-called Slavophiles, the more vigorously nationalistic of the Russians, and indeed when he showed his first sketches of this quartet to Mussorgsky and the critic Stassov, they were ‘horrified,’ he said.
He may have begun work as early as 1873-4; the sketches were ready by April 1875, more substantial work was done during a happy summer in 1877 in the country, and the quartet was finally completed, with the scherzo, in early August 1879.
The slow gestation can be partly explained by the fact that he was also working on Prince Igor(to which there are some thematic resemblances), also perhaps by the problems of building a novel work in a non-existent tradition.
The first performance, by the quartet of the Russian Musical Society (which had by now changed some of its members) was in St. Petersburg on December 30, 1880; it was a success, the players declaring that they were ‘simply delighted’ with the work.
Borodin’s attachment to classical practice led him to keep to the traditional sonata form structure for his first movement; and indeed after a moderately slow introduction, the first subject of the movement is actually based on a theme by Beethoven.
In admitting this, Borodin did not identify the theme: it is in fact from the finale of the B-flat Quartet, Op. 130. However, the handling of the theme is in no way like Beethoven: the flowing melody is passed around the two violins and the cello with variants of its basic form.
This varied repetition was a device much admired by Russian composers in Glinka, and in many different ways used as the substance of large-scale movements, but Borodin’s handling is unusually free and subtle
It leads to a second subject also in freely-flowing quavers, at first over a shifting drone bass; and only towards the close of the exposition does the music reach any real tension, in the wake of a fugue initiated by the cello. After the recapitulation, the movement ends quietly with a long mysterious coda.
With the Andante, Borodin turns openly to a more folk-like manner, and even, it seems, to an actual folk tune. At the time he wrote the movement, 1874-5, he was helping Rimsky-Korsakov with gathering material for his Collected Russian Folk-Songs; and a song that particularly attracted him in one of the anthologies they searched, Vassily Prokunin’sRussian National Songs (1872-3), was ‘The Song of the Sparrow Hills.’
Borodin used a version of it in Prince Igor, on which he was simultaneously working, and, beginning with the viola counterpoint to the opening tune, the whole Andanteis permeated with variants and reminiscences of the song.
Borodin’s biographer Sergey Dyanin, who studies these correspondences in detail, suggests that the course of the movement is also colored by the words of the song. This concerns an eagle holding in his talons a crow which tells him of a young hero he has seen lying dead, while over him hover three pipits that are his mother, his sister and his wife.
If we wish to follow this idea, the first theme may be associated with the eagle and the crow, the fugato with the pipits, the impassioned ending with their grief.
Dyanin goes further and suggests associations with an imagined story of the young hero: there is no justification for this beyond Borodin’s known liking for background programmes, nor any reason to regard the lively Scherzoand Trioas anything but a brilliantly assured contrast to the somber mood of the Andante.
For the finale, Borodin returns to sonata form, once again prefacing it with a brief introduction. As before, there is a stronger emphasis on sustaining the movement’s considerable momentum by means of varied repetition, and insistence on the driving rhythms, than on any development in the manner of Beethoven.
By contrast with this work, Borodin’ssecond, and much better known, quartetwas written in a short space of time, during a contented summer in the country at Zhitovo.
Increased assurance, rather than this burst of creativity, should perhaps be given credit for the quartet’s greater unity, not only of mood but also in thematic handling. Thus, there already appears in the first subject a dactylic figure (a long and two short notes) which the listener is clearly intended to recall when it occurs more prominently in the second subject.
These two related themes are the substance of the movement’s progress through the traditional exposition, development and recapitulation; but Borodin produces two other fragments of themes – they are scarcely more than figures of four bars each – which serve to shed contrasting emotional light on the main pair of themes.
The Scherzois no less ingeniously put together. Perhaps Borodin thought it difficult to handle a traditional Scherzo-and-Trioin times so far removed from the Scherzo’sdance origins in the Minuet; but he acknowledges the connection by answering his fleeting, almost Mendelssohnian first theme with what is virtually a waltz. These are then made the material of a brief sonata movement.
After the famous Nocturne– a movement much abused by arrangers, and with its ravishing, somewhat oriental tune best presented as Borodin intended – the finale opens with a brusque, Beethovian gesture of question and answer.
Essentially, it is based on the rapidly and ingeniously varied treatment of these two themes (they immediately turn out to work together fugally) and a contrasting second subject. If the repeated question-and-answer interruptions suggest some private references, what matters to the listener is a skillfully and satisfyingly constructed finale, most original in form, to a brilliantly original quartet.
TRACK LISTING:
1-4: String Quartet No. 1 in A Major [36:51]
5-8: String Quartet No. 2 in D Major [28:53]
FINAL THOUGHT:
Methinks Mr. John Warrack is a bit of a snob in his notes. If you write CD notes about Borodin’s String Quartet No. 2 and fail to mention that some of the melodies became the foundation of a popular Broadway musical (“Kismet” – he even won a posthumous Tony Award!) and an incredibly beautiful popular ballad (“And This Is My Beloved”) and instead just say the quartet has been “abused by arrangers” – you are probably a bit of a music snob. For the most part, nobody would have even heard of Borodin if it wasn’t for “Kismet.”
The Philadelphia Orchestra, Riccardo Muti – Conductor
Recorded in 1985 (EMI Records)
ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
Symphonie Fantastique – it’s not just the creepy music from the insipid Julia Roberts movie “Sleeping With The Enemy.”
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (by James Harding, 1984):
Fifty years ago Berlioz was out of fashion compared with today, and there were far fewer chances of hearing his music.
Writing in the mid-thirties, the English critic James Agate observed: “Two reasons why Berlioz is unpopular in this country – nine-tenths of musical critics have not the ears to hear him, and the public, not knowing whether to sound the “z” or not, is shy of mentioning him. It will be eighty years before the work of this composer ceases to be what the American book reviewer calls a “flop d’estime.”
Add to this the fact that there is, with the possible exception of Le Carnaval Romain, hardly a whistleable tune in the whole of Berlioz, and one can understand the neglect of his music. He has since, however, achieved his right place, and more quickly than Agate’s pessimism warranted.
Yet, as always with this most paradoxical of composers, even his warmest admirers can find something to criticize.
Why didn’t he end the Symphonie Fantastiquewith the Marche au supplice?, Agate inquired. “Sheer composer’s vanity, of course, and some nonsense about finishing the story. Also because, like Wagner, he had no sense of the point at which, in the hearer, saturation is reached. The Marcheis one of the most final things in music, in the sense of bringing a work to an end; there is no more going beyond it than you can go beyond the buffers at Euston station.”
Many other people have thought the same, among them the musician Hippolyte Chelard, a close friend of Berlioz, who believed the Marche au supplice, which the composer salvaged from his unfinished opera Les Francs-Juges, to be the finest thing in the whole work.
What, though, would have been the reaction of an average middle-aged Parisian music lover in 1830 when the Symphonie Fantastique was first heard?
Remember, he would have been brought up on the classical symphonies of Mozart and Haydn. He would have thought Hummel a greater composer than Beethoven who had died three years earlier.
In any case, at that time, with no radio or gramophone records, music traveled much less fast, and a Beethoven symphony was still a novelty in Paris – or, rather, in the eyes of most, an aberration perpetrated by a madman.
How would our average music lover have responded to the ‘programme’ which Berlioz insisted on distributing among the audience?
Imagine his puzzlement at being asked to believe that the music, an ‘episode in the life of an artist,’ represented the feelings of a young man who, hopelessly in love, takes opium and plunges into a sleep haunted by strange hallucinations.
The first movement, Reveries et passions, shows him dreaming of his beloved, an idee fixe which obsesses him.
Then, at a ball, he perceives her in a swirling waltz.
During the third movement, Scene au champs, he finds momentary peace in the countryside but is troubled anew by his unrequited love.
He dreams he has murdered her, and the Marche au supplice takes him to the scaffold.
The Songe d’une nuit de Sabbat features the motif which stands for his faithless love and distorts it into a Witches’ Sabbath where evil spirits gather to bury the artist’s headless corpse and intone a hideous parody of the Dies Irae.
The views of our average music lover were doubtless echoed by composers of the time.
After studying the score Rossini is said to have murmured: “What a good thing it isn’t music.”
When the twenty-two-year old Mendelssohn heard it in 1831 he pronounced it “utterly loathsome.” He added that there was “nowhere a spark, no warmth, utter foolishness, continued passion represented through every possible exaggerated orchestral means….” The Symphonie Fantastique was “indifferent drivel” and “unspeakably dreadful… I have not been able to work for two days.”
Unlike the writer Stendhal, who in 1835 remarked that he had taken a ticket in a lottery which would bring him fame in 1935, Berlioz did not have quite so long a wait.
In his lifetime he was hailed by the poet Theophile Gautier as one of that great Trinity of Romanticism which also included Victor Hugo and the artist Delacroix.
Over the year the technical clumsiness of his scoring which so offended generations of purists has come to be seen as the price paid for a genius whose dazzling originality and fertile inventiveness are at last recognized as unique in music.
TRACK LISTING:
1: Reveries – Passions [15:35]
2: Un bal [6:09]
3: Scene aux champs [16:02]
4: Marche au supplice [6:44]
5: Songe d’une nuit de Sabbat [9:43]
https://youtu.be/rQXtC6B3CKQ
FINAL THOUGHT:
While certainly not one of the greatest symphonies of all time (in my opinion), it certainly didn’t deserve the treatment or the reviews of Mendelssohn or Rossini. Do those talentless jerks seriously think they can do any better?
Beethoven is not the ideal composer for Glenn Gould (as Bach is – as illustrated hereand hereand hereand hereand here) but this is still a rousing, exciting performance throughout and, certainly, never boring.
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (by Marc Vignal – translation by Robert Cushman):
To inaugurate at least two of the important periods of his career, Beethoven wrote a work of vast dimensions in the four traditional movements and applying Haydn’s principles of form on a scale hitherto unknown: on the one hand, the Eroica Symphony in 1804 and, on the other, the Hammerklavier Sonata (No. 29 in B-flat major, Op. 106) in 1818.
Only three piano sonatas – No. 30 in E major, Op. 109; No. 31 in A-flat major, Op. 110; and No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111– were written after the Hammerklavier. They were composed between 1819 and 1822 in parallel with the Missa Solemnis, the other major work to which Beethoven was then devoting his time.
As for the Diabelli Variations, although they were started in 1819 before the last three sonatas, they were only completed in 1823, after a long interruption. The year 1823 was also that in which Beethoven did most of the work on the Ninth Symphony. After this there remained only the last five string quartets.
Compared with the Hammerklavier, the last three sonatas appear to mark a return to a certain brevity, even to a certain simplicity. All three are about the same length with, as a common characteristic, special importance given to the finale, which in each case lasts over half the length of the entire sonata.
Nevertheless, although Opus 109 has three movements and Opus 110 four, Opus 111 has only two. In themselves these overall structures were in no way extraordinary, but it is noteworthy that, in both Opus 109 and Opus 110, the section preceding the finale tends to be reduced to the role of an introduction.
The finales of Opus 109 and Opus 111 are in the theme-and-variations form, ending almost imperceptibly in silence (and yet they do not truly seem to end), while that of Opus 110 is a complex combination of recitatif, arioso and fugue (variations and fugues especially preoccupied Beethoven at the end of his life).
By comparison with what leads up to it, the finale of Opus 111 functions as an antithesis.
That of Opus 109 returns to and somehow prolongs the first movement (with the second movement acting as a violent interlude), while the finale of Opus 110 – the only one of the three to end fortissimo – little by little frees the energy previously held more or less in check.
Unlike the Hammerklavierand each in its own way, Opus 109, Opus 110 and Opus 111are constructed in “open” form, and in them we remark a considerable simplification in style and in the working-out, as well as clearer alternations of tension and relaxation. Such alternations, however, are especially characteristic of the composer’s late works. In these sonatas Beethoven confronted time – and eternity.
Begun in 1819, Sonata No. 30 in E major, Opus 109 was finished in the autumn of 1820 but not published until November 1821, with a dedication to Maximiliane Brentano (the daughter of Antonie Brentano, whom Maynard Salomon believes the most likely candidate for the “Immortal Beloved”).
The manuscripts show that the first movement was originally planned as a separate piece, probably for inclusion in the future series of Bagatelles Op. 119. Of the last three sonatas this is the one that is most unlike the Hammerklavier, after which it offers a welcome feeling of relaxation.
The first movement presents a very free alternation of a lively theme (Vivace ma non troppo, sempre legato), of almost impressionistic sonorities, with an Adagio espressivo bearing the traits of an improvised recitatif. The Prestissimo in E minor (second movement) enters without a pause. The third movement (Andante molto cantabile ed espressivo), which returns to E major, opens with a calm, lyrical theme (a kind of sublimated sarabande) followed by six accelerating variations and closing with the repetition of the theme.
Initially sketched in 1819 and completed by December 18, 1821, Sonata No. 31 in A-flat major, Op. 110was published in August 1822, without a dedication. It begins with a Moderato cantabile molto espressivo which is undoubtedly the composer’s most beautiful lyrical movement, setting aside his slow movements. It offers resemblances with Schubert. There are many themes, but they follow one another smoothly.
Then comes a violent Allegro molto in F minor, a sort of scherzo in duple (rather than triple) time. After a normal organ point, everything forms a solid block, as Beethoven successfully performs the miracle of interlocking different opposites: arioso and fugue, profound despondency and elan vital. A solemn recitatif in B-flat minor (third movement or introduction to the finale?) marked Adagio ma non troppo opens this “universe of alternation” and culminates in an A repeated 26 times.
Then rises a song of lamentation (Arioso dolente) in A-flat minor leading to a fugue in A-flat major (Allegro ma non troppo) bringing a respite. When it falls away, the Arioso dolente comes back in G minor, more gasping, more despairing than ever. Ten increasingly powerful, obstinate G major chords try a new sally, and the fugue returns inverted and in G major (a distant key). This fugue is dropped once A-flat major reappears, thereby reinforcing the dramatic, triumphal effect of the final measures, especially since the piano writing here is particularly brilliant.
Completed in 1822 and published during the same year, with a dedication to Archduke Rudolph, Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111has only two, completely dissimilar movements: minor and major modes, sonata form and theme-and-variations form, dynamic character and static character, dramatism and contemplation, etc.
It opens with an introduction (Maestoso) largely based upon diminished seventh harmonies. Three diminished sevenths follow one another and return in the same order as chords at the end of the Allegro con brio ed appassionato and, above all, as a generalized harmonic procedure during the central development.
This development is fugal: the main theme of the movement clearly called for a fugue, but Beethoven withheld using it earlier to provide increased animation in the development.
The second movement is the famous Arietta (Adagio molto, semplice e cantabile) in C major with variations. The theme is very simple, and the working-out moves toward constantly greater simplification – not in the musical or sound fabric, quite the contrary, but as regards the very conception of the theme, which is gradually reduced to a mere skeleton.
After about a quarter hour of the purest C major, we reach a cadential trill followed by a modulation to E-flat major: this passage constitutes the only harmonic motion in the movement and also the only passage in which, from the rhythmic standpoint, everything remains completely suspended, until the return of C major in the final, accelerated variations.
As Charles Rosen points out, Beethoven’s exploration, late in his life, of the tonal universe became more and more essentially meditative.
TRACK LISTING:
1-3: Beethoven Sonata for Piano No. 30 in E Major, Opus 109
4-6: Beethoven Sonata for Piano No. 31 in A-flat Major, Opus 110
7-8: Beethoven Sonata for Piano No. 32 in C Minor, Opus Opus 111
FINAL THOUGHT:
An 85 rating almost seems too low for ANY recording by Glenn Gould (he’s Glenn freakin’ Gould for goodness sake) but this entire recording is just so over the top intense that all subtlety is lost on the first notes of the first cut. But 85 out of 88 is still way better than most. I love Glenn Gould!
London Philharmonic Orchestra (Bernard Haitink, conductor)
Beaux Arts Trio – Menahem Pressler (piano), Isidore Cohen (violin), Bernard Greenhouse (cello)
Recorded in London 1/1977 (Opus 56); La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland 5/1979 (Opus 121a)
ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
I didn’t really have anything special to do on Valentine’s Day (don’t cry for me I’m going out tomorrow night – the restaurants in L.A. are a nightmare on Valentine’s Day) – so I finally have time to write this about this recording of the Beethoven Triple Concerto and… it is fabulous!
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (by Lothar Hoffmann-Erbrecht – translation by Michael Talbot):
The Drive For Unity
Beethoven Concerto in C, Op. 56 (Triple Concerto)
Beethoven worked on the Triple Concerto during 1803-1804; it was not published, however, until 1807.
The first drafts appear already on the last pages of the “Eroica” sketchbook and are continued in the large “Eroica” sketchbook.
The concerto is dedicated to Prince Lobkowitz, but Beethoven’s later “right-hand man,” Anton Felix Schindler, claimed that this “Concertino,” as he called it, was intended for the Archduke Rudolph, the violinist Karl August Seiler, and the cellist Anton Krafft.
The same source informs us that the first performance of the concerto took place in May 1808 in the Augarten, Vienna; the concert that featured it belonged to the series that Mozart had inaugurated in 1782.
The audience’s reception was frosty; according to Schindler, the unnamed artists who performed it (and thus indirectly also Beethoven) “earned no applause at all, for they had taken the affair too lightly.” Schindler goes on: “It (the concerto) remained undisturbed until 1830.”
When, at the beginning of the present century, Hugo Riemann revised the third edition of Thayer’s five-volume biography of Beethoven, he identified the Triple Concerto as a descendant of the sinfonia concertante, widely cultivated between 1770 and 1790, in which one or more instruments from the orchestra are treated in a solo fashion.
Even without considering the fact that the piano was never thrust into the foreground at that time, Beethoven’sOp. 56seems to find a more natural home among the new concertante literature in “chamber music” style of the early nineteenth century, where in addition to the principal instrument – in our case the piano – the other instruments are all given rewarding solos to perform.
The genre constituted by compositions identified simple as “concertante” enjoyed universal popularity in Beethoven’s time and was rarely absent from the many public concerts given by travelling virtuosi.
After 1800 Beethoven inclined, in his instrumental compositions, towards share thematic and dynamic contrasts; but on the other hand he also favored a unitary approach to cyclical works, which ultimately, as in the Triple Concerto, leads to the presence of strong motivic links between all the movements.
The opening motive in characteristic rhythm, which rises up in the bass instruments and is repeated one scale degree higher, is the kernel from which all the subsequent musical thoughts of the work grow, sometimes so directly that they become hard to distinguish.
For instance, the second theme of the opening Allegro is more notable for the contrast introduced by its dynamic, compulsively modulating development than for its outline. Its structure allows the three instruments to play about with it in manifold ways and even to anticipate the “alla Polacca” finale in the minor-key transformations, which one might well described as “all’Ungherese.”
In the Largo second movement Beethoven transposes the germinal theme to A flat major. Here a broad, freely developed cantilena again eschews contrasts and leads directly into the last movement.
This Rondo alla Polacca in the traditional triple metre harks back to the opening both motivically and formally. As in the first movement we are treated to a minor-key episode, which gradually unfolds dynamically.
Beethoven – Piano Trio No. 11 in G, Op. 121a
Although by 1811 Beethoven had already almost “wrapped up” his creative legacy in the genre of the large-scale piano trio in several movements with Op. 70 and the B flat trioOp. 97, he returned once more to the fount of his artistic strivings in 1816 with the variations on “Ich bin der Schneider Kakadu” (Op. 121a).
Like the variations for piano trio on themes by Mozart from his early period, the “Kakadu” Variations are based on a simple, trifling song-theme, which he took from Wenzel Muller’s then very successful opera “The Sisters of Prague.”
Nonetheless, the differences from the early compositions are unmistakable: the structure has been loosened, and the freely flowing counterpoints and urgent, intense musical language used in the gradually expanding forms betray the proximity of the last piano sonatas and the “Diabelli” Variationsfrom the same year.
The set of variations opens with an Adagio assai in G minor, an introduction that, despite being thematically related through its concentrated, shifting harmony, still conceals its aim. Only then do we hear from the trio the merry, trilling theme in the style of a Singspiel.
The first variations initially proceed along traditional paths, allowing the instruments to come into prominence in turn and slowly building up to a climax with changing figurations.
The music grows ever more complex, develops into fugato (variation 5) and fugue (variation 7) and introduces strong contradictions which develop in broad forms (variation 9: Adagio espressivo).
The tenth and last variation begins as a gigue, then recalls its G minor middle section the harmony of the introduction, and finally, in a viruoso coda, dissolves the outline of the restated opening Allegretto theme in a whirl.
The course of this work once again demonstrates in a nutshell how Beethoven found an individual way forward from the mechanical type of variation of the eighteenth century to the character variation on which he set his stamp.
TRACK LISTING:
1: Beethoven Concerto in C (Triple Concerto) – Allegro [18:03]
2: Beethoven Concerto in C (Triple Concerto) – Largo, Rondo alla Polacca [18:24]
3: Beethoven Piano Trio No. 11 in G, Op. 121a [19:01]
https://youtu.be/dS8CkxkQ-YE
https://youtu.be/RfocptSpsYA
FINAL THOUGHT:
So the audience hated the first performance of the Triple Concerto so much that it wasn’t played again for 23 years. Man, have our standards become so low that this bum Beethoven somehow became a genius over the years – or is our knowledge of classical music so limited that anything by anyone from a couple of hundred years ago is considered great because we’re afraid any criticism would show our ignorance? My vote goes to Beethoven is a genius and that opening night audience in 1808 were a bunch of idiots.
Live recording at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London on October 20, 1982 (Opus 78) and February 2, 1983 (Opus 106)
ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
Beethoven + Alfred Brendel = MAGIC!
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (by Alfred Brendel):
Live recordings remind the listener of the fact that concerts involve risks. Whereas in the recording studio musical continuity is more often achieved as a result of careful scrutiny and painstaking labor, it has to come about on stage in one single breath and without a safety net. It has to work on the spot, and the public is part of its success or failure.
Beethoven’sSonata Opus 106 has remained one of the supreme challenges of the pianist.
Even today, it shows up the outer limits of what a composer of sonatas can accomplish, a performer can control, or a listener can take in. In a magnificent exertion of will, the work combines grandeur and filigree, openness and density of detail.
The player should muster endurance as well as boldness, fierce intensity as well as the cool grasp of a panoramic overview.
Czerny, who had played the sonata for Beethoven, describes the tempo of the first movement as “uncommonly fast and fiery.”
The initial theme relates to the rhythm of the words “vivat, vivat, Rudolphus” (it was the Archduke Rudolph to whom the sonata is dedicated).
Two elements, the tension between the keys of B-flat major and B minor, and the interval of the third, are decisive in the unfolding of the vast design. The intrusion of B minor (the “black key,” according to Beethoven) into the recapitulation of the first movement has grave consequences: not before the final fugue is this conflict resolved.
In the code of the scherzo, eerie juxtapositions of B-flat and B natural present the problem bared to its bones. We encounter the “black key” once more at a declamatory climax of the Adagio(“con grand’ espressione”) and, finally, in the cancrizans of the fugue.
For both B-flat major and B minor, the related thirds are G and D; these are the only tones the two keys have in common. In G major, there is the second thematic group of the first movement, and the inversion of the fugue. The “religious” D major sphere is given to secondary themes of the Adagio and the fugue.
Beethoven’s special contribution as a fugal composer is the turbulent and frenzied fugue that nearly, but only nearly, defies the strictures of contrapuntal writing. Boundless energy and intellectual rigor have never been coupled on a higher pitch of excitement.
The slow introduction of the fugue resembles in its psychological situation the final movement of Beethoven’sOpus 110: after its “exhausted lament,” vital forces gradually reappear.
The Adagio itself a “mausoleum of collective suffering” (W.v. Lenz), is the depressive counterpart to the manic agitation of the fast movements. Its alternating sections of una corda and tre corde turn out to be different regions of sound and grief.
On Beethoven’s pianos, the quality of sound produced by the soft pedal was more shadowy and fragile than it is today, a sphere of whispering and subdued (mezza voce) singing.
There is an immense distance between the F-sharp minor of this enormous slow movement and the idyllic and cheerful F-sharp major of Beethoven’sSonata Opus 78. Hardly less unusual than its key is the succession of two Allegros, one amiable, the other high-spirited and pianistically daring.
There are, however, four adagio bars that open the piece; and what would the sonata be without this brief declaration of love? It may have been aimed, not at Therese von Brunsvik, to whom the work is dedicated, but at her sister Josefine for whom Beethoven had a special affection.
TRACK LISTING:
1-4: Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat, Opus 106
5-6: Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 24 in F-sharp, Opus 78
FINAL THOUGHT:
I realize my initial scale ratings are pretty generous – but this one is a well-deserved 86. I’ll try to grade future performances based on the fact that this is pure genius and anything close to an 86 better rank up there with the great Alfred Brendel playing Beethoven.
Recorded October & November, 1957 – Kingsway Hall, London
ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
So, apparently, Otto Klemperer knows a little something about Beethoven – and he really knows how to conduct the Hell out the Ninth Symphony(though I wonder if this is the slowest recording of it ever made – a whopping 72 minutes!).
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES:
KLEMPERER AND BEETHOVEN (written by John Lucas – 1998):
Although Otto Klemperer had conducted complete cycles of Beethoven’s symphonies in the United States, Italy, France and the Netherlands, it was not until the late autumn of 1957 that he had an opportunity to conduct all nine symphonies in London, in a series of 10 concerts with the Philharmonia Orchestra.
The piano concertos were also included, with Claudio Arrau as soloist.
Herbert von Karajan came to London especially to hear the Eroica. After the performance he went to see Klemperer in the conductor’s room at the Royal Festival Hall. ‘I have come only to thank you,’ said Karajan, ‘and to say that I hope I shall live to conduct the Funeral March as well as you have done it. Good night.’
Walter Legge, founder of the Philharmonia and Klemperer’s record producer at EMI, was cock-a-hoop about the success of the concerts with both audience and critics.
He reported to Angel Records, the company’s subsidiary in the United States: ‘Klemperer goes from strength to strength. When we have completed the NinthI shall have given you a Beethoven cycle on records that will be prized as long as records are collected.’
The cycle at the Festival Hall concluded with two performances of the Ninth Symphony, in which the Philharmonia Chorus, trained by Wilhelm Pitz, the Bayreuth chorus-master, made its debut.
The finale, reported The Times on November 13, ‘exceeded in grandeur and brilliance and human exhilaration all that the foregoing movements had implied.’
Six of the Beethoven symphonies in the Klemperer Legacy series were recorded by EMI at the time of the 1957 cycles: the Secondand Sixth Symphonies during the week before it began, the First, Fourth, Eighthand Ninthwhile it was still in progress. The Seventhcomes from 1955, the Eroicaand Fifthfrom 1959.
SYMPHONY NO. 9 ‘CHORAL’ etc. (written by Robin Golding – 1998):
In the summer of 1817, nearly three years after the completion of his Eighth Symphony, Beethoven was approached by the Philharmonic Society in London (founded in 1813) with a request for two new symphonies, to be performed during the 1818 season.
The invitation was conveyed to him by his former pupil, secretary and copyist, Ferdinand Ries, who was then living in London, and Beethoven wrote to Ries on July 9th, promising that they would be ready by January 1818 and that he would himself bring them to London.
But he would not accept the terms offered by the Society, and the project came to nothing, although he did make substantial sketches for the first two movements of what was to become the Ninth Symphony.
It was not until the autumn of 1822, with the bulk of the Missa Solemnis behind him, that he turned his attention to the symphony in earnest, and most of the must was written between then and the end of 1824.
The idea of setting Schiller’s ode An die Freude (‘To Joy’), of 1785, had occurred to him at least as early as 1793, but it was not until 1822 that it became associated in his mind with the symphony.
He originally intended to end No. 9 with an instrumental finale (he later used the music he designed for this movement in the String Quartet in A minor, Opus 132), and even after the first performance of the symphony expressed some doubt as to whether he had made the right decision.
In November 1822 the Philharmonic Society offered Beethoven fifty pounds for eighteen months’ exclusive possession of a new symphony, and the composer accepted, though grudgingly.
In April 1824 (having received his fifty pounds) he sent the Society a manuscript copy of the score, with a dedication, in his own hand, ‘For the Philharmonic Society in London,’ but he evidently thought that ‘exclusive possession’ only referred to England, since he allowed the symphony to be performed on May 7th, 1824 at the Karntnerthor-Theater in Vienna.
The conductor was Michael Umlauf, and at the end one of the soloists had to turn Beethoven round to face the audience because he could not hear the tumultuous applause.
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – Original Manuscript Sample
The score and parts were published in August 1826 by Schott in Mainz, with a dedication to King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia.
The first English performance was given on March 21st, 1825 at the New Argyll Rooms in London (with the last movement sung in Italian!) under Sir George Smart, a founder-member of the Philharmonic Society.
The three purely instrumental movements of the Ninth Symphony are on a scale whose only parallel among Beethoven’s earlier symphonies is offered by No. 3 (theEroica) of 1802-4: an immensely grand, dignified and impassioned sonata form Allegro; possibly the greatest scherzo ever written, with a crucial part for the timpani, tuned in octaves, as in the finale of No. 8; and an expansive theme and variations interspersed with episodes, in B flat major.
The colossal finale, set to about a third of Schiller’s poem celebrating the brotherhood of Man, and for four (SATB) soloists and chorus in addition to the orchestra, is itself as long as, and fuller of incident than, most classical symphonies.
The ballet Die Geschopfe des Prometheus (‘The Creatures of Prometheus’)to a (lost) scenario by Salvatore Vigano, was produced at the Hofburgtheater in Vienna on March 28th, 1801, with music composed by Beethoven during the preceding year and consisting of an introduction and sixteen numbers, prefaced by the exuberant Overturerecorded here.
TRACK LISTING – BEETHOVEN SYMPHONY NO. 9 ‘CHORAL’
1: Allegro ma non troppo un poco maestoso [17:03]
2: Molto vivace – Presto [15:38]
3: Adagio molto e cantabile [15:02]
4: Presto [24:27]
5: Prometheus Overture, Opus 43 [5:35]
FINAL THOUGHT:
So the Philharmonic Society of London got the exclusive rights to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony for 50 Pounds? Best 50 Pounds ever spent! (Though, I know, in today’s dollars that’s not too terrible – but still!) And it’s definitely a better rate than what Mozart was getting.)
The Cleveland Orchestra (Christoph Von Dohnanyi, conductor)
Recorded in Masonic Auditorium, Cleveland on October 18 & 19, 1985
ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
This CD will receive my highest rating (88 Points!) for nostalgia reasons alone – this was the first CD I ever had (most kids my age were listening to Madonna) and I listened to it over and over and over again – simply amazed at the clarity and “awesomeness” of the new CD technology.
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (written by Steven Ledbetter):
Scarcely had Friedrich Schiller’s ode An die Freude (To Joy) reached print in 1785 before composers started setting it to music, so strongly did its theme of world brotherhood and Enlightenment ideals speak to the young and idealistic.
Soon there were dozens of versions, mostly for voice and piano, so the poet can hardly have been surprised to learn through a friend in Bonn that yet another young composer was about to set his text to music. But this one was different; the friend noted: “I expect something perfect, for as far as I know him he is wholly devoted to the great and sublime.”
The composer was Ludwig van Beethoven, then in his early twenties. Three decades elapsed before Beethoven was satisfied that he had found the way to deal with Schiller’s text, but certainly the resulting work – his final symphony – was “great and sublime.”
After completing his Seventhand Eighth Symphonies in 1812, Beethoven had turned away from the genre for five years, and only began thinking about symphonies again when he received an invitation to come to London in the winter of 1817-18 and to bring two new symphonies with him. The invitation must have been attractive – it was just such a trip to England that had made Haydn a wealthy man – but in the end nothing came of it except a few sketches for two symphonies.
Several more years passed, Beethoven returned to his sketches in the summer of 1822, still planning to compose a pair of symphonies. But by the following year he had settled on a single work in the key of D Minor.
For a long time he was torn between two possible endings – one purely instrumental, the other a choral setting of Schiller’s ode. The problem, as he saw it, was how to motivate the sudden appearance of a chorus after three lengthy instrumental movements. Even after he had invented the familiar hymnlike tune and drafted the instrumental variations that mark its first appearance, he could not find a solution.
One day he was struck by the idea of having a soloist simply sing the announcement, “Let us sing the song of the immortal Schiller,” before starting the ode itself.
In the end he settled on slightly different wording, but the point was the same: to disavow the past and turn with a conscious welcome to something new and liberating. Once he actually started setting Schiller’s words, he treated them very freely, taking the passages that particularly stimulated his muse, making cuts and repetitions as the musical development required. In the end, he actually set something less than half of Schiller’s entire text and freely rearranged the rest.
The planning of the first performance was complicated by the fact that Beethoven wanted to conduct the entire concert, an embarrassment on account of his deafness.
In the end he stood on stage next to Michael Umlauf, ostensibly to set the tempi, and, though he kept beating through the work, the players had been instructed to pay attention only to Umlauf’s beat.
The remainder of the all-Beethoven program included the overture Consecration of the House and three movements of the Missa Solemnis. The plan to perform part of the Mass ran into legal entanglements when Church authorities refused permission for liturgical music to be heard in the unsanctified precincts of a theater. In the end, that music was billed (in a mild subterfuge) as “Three Grand Hymns with Solo and Choral Voices.”
Though the music was of unprecedented difficulty, the crowds in the Kartnertor Theatre on May 7, 1824 responded with enthusiasm, cheering and applauding energetically, though the deaf composer, still turning the pages of the score and hearing the music in his mind, was unaware of it until one of the soloists pulled him by the sleeve to get his attention and pointed to the audience.
Like the Fifth Symphony, Beethoven’sNinthmoves from tragedy to triumph symbolized by the beginning in D minor and the close in D major. But the Fifthseems to be the triumph of an individual hero, while the Ninth, with a chorus singing Schiller’s text, becomes a universal triumph for human aspiration.
Though the text makes explicit the message of the symphony, Beethoven’s musical architecture reinforces and projects that message with unusual force. He planned the entire symphony in such a way that for the first three movements it remains locked in the realm of D minor and the closely related keys F and B-flat (they are part of the scale of D minor).
Late in the final movement F and B-flat are ousted in favor of F-sharp and B natural, notes that characterize the scale of D major. On paper this sounds like purely theoretical change, but in performance it achieves unparalleled force. Rarely in the history of music has simple harmonic relationship between major and minor modes generated greater power or feeling.
The symphony opens with its first theme gradually appearing out of a mysterious introduction hinting at indescribable vastness. No orchestral beginning was more influential throughout the nineteenth century, though no composer has ever surpassed Beethoven in the suggestive power of this opening. And throughout the lengthy first movement, Beethoven never allows us to stray for long from powerful reminders that his symphony is in a minor key.
The demonic scherzo of the second movement, too, fiercely reiterates the fearing of the first movement. For a moment in the middle section, Beethoven projects pure human joy in the first extensive passage in D major, but it is cancelled by the return of the scherzo.
The richly evocative lyricism of the third movement sings a pensive song in B-flat, alternating with a second, slightly faster theme in D major. But on every occasion the second theme ends up slipping helplessly back to the first key, though the variations become ever more lush and sweetly consoling.
The first sound of the finale is a “fanfare of terror” introducing Beethoven’s public search for a way to turn the minor key darkness of the opening into a firm major key conclusion. Cellos and double basses sing an operatic-style recitative (for which Beethoven originally wrote words) calling up and summarily rejecting themes from each of the earlier movements.
Finally a new idea appears, simple, singable, hymnlike, emphatically in D major (since its melody circles around F-sharp, the characteristic third step of the D major scale). The orchestra welcomes it with a set of variations. Real progress seems to be underway when this theme, too, is swept away by a renewed “fanfare of terror,” brutal and consciously ugly, containing almost every note of the D minor scale!
Here, at last, the baritone intervenes with Beethoven’s introduction to Schiller’s poem. The soloist, echoed by the chorus, sings confidently in D major, and all seems well through three stanzas of Schiller’s poem. But one more crisis remains.
At the end of the third stanza (on the words “von Gott” – “before God”), Beethoven undercuts his modulation to the expected dominant key and throws the following passage into B-flat – once again threatening that the minor mode may prevail.
The “Turkish” march of the tenor’s solo is a melodic variant of the main theme turned into a heroic aria. An extended orchestral development follows with major and minor engaged in a last dramatic opposition.
Finally the orchestra settles on a dotted rhythm repeating the note F-sharp through three octaves – the single note that most strikingly emphasizes the main theme and its major mode harmony. After two tentative beginnings in the “wrong” key, the composer changes a single note in the bass part and suddenly “realizes” that this music is, emphatically, in D major.
The chorus returns in one of the most thrilling moments in all of music, asserting through the rest of the symphony Beethoven’s sturdy, confident answer to the questions posed by the opening.
TRACK LISTING – BEETHOVEN SYMPHONY NO. 9 ‘CHORAL’
1: Allegro ma non troppo un poco maestoso [15:05]
2: Molto vivace – Presto [11:27]
3: Adagio molto e cantabile [14:57]
4: Presto [24:32]
Here’s a video treat! Note: This is not the performance being reviewed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IInG5nY_wrU
FINAL THOUGHT:
I firmly believe it was this recording of Beethoven’s 9th by the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Christoph Von Dohnanyi that got me hooked on classical music. I was 10 years old when I first heard this. By giving this disc to me, my parents created a classical music monster as I started to collect and listen to almost anything I could get my hands on. (I wasn’t a total freak – I also listened to Madonna and Culture Club – though maybe THAT makes me a total freak.)
Now this is a double-pack to be appreciated – live performances, BBC Philharmonic – unbelievable music.
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (written by Richard Wigmore):
BEETHOVEN SYMPHONY NO. 3 IN E-FLAT MAJOR, OPUS 55 – ‘EROICA’
As Joseph Kerman has observed, the ‘Eroica’ marks a turning point in the history of modern music.
In it the dimensions and reach of the Classical symphony are startlingly expanded.
The music’s gargantuan energy and unprecedented expressive range are contained within a mighty architectural span whose proportions Beethoven was not to exceed until the Ninth Symphony.
He worked on the symphony during 1803, the year after the crisis engendered by his encroaching deafness, movingly expressed in the Heiligenstadt Testament.
The work was dedicated to Napoleon Bonaparte. But Beethoven furiously tore out the dedication on hearing that the First Consul had proclaimed himself Emperor.
The hero became anonymous; and on the symphony’s publication in 1806 the title page ran: ‘Sinfonia Eroica: composed to celebrate the memory of a great man.’
SCHUBERT SYMPHONY NO. 8 IN B MINOR – ‘UNFINISHED’
The circumstances surrounding Schubert’sB minor Symphony have provoked reams of speculation.
We know for certain that in autumn 1822 he composed the first two movements and bean a scherzo, breaking off after 20 bars.
He gave the torso to his friend Anselm Huttenbrenner, and apparently forgot about it. the work’s incomplete state may just be linked to the onset of Schubert’s serious illness (syphilis)late in 1822.
But his reasons for abandoning the symphony were more likely due to a creative crisis during the years 1818-22. Virtually all of his other instrumental works from this period were likewise left as fragments.
And, as with the symphony, Schubert’s failure to complete them testifies to his struggles to evolve a new conception of the four-movement sonata ideal that reconciled the powerful impact of Beethoven’s middle-period works with an increasingly subjective melodic and harmonic vision.
TRACK LISTING:
1-2:Schubert Symphony No. 8 in B Minor – ‘Unfinished’
3-6:Beethoven Symphony No. 3 in E-flat, Opus 55 – ‘Eroica’
FINAL THOUGHT:
If I had a choice between my current creative state and Schubert’s ‘creative crisis of 1818-1822’ – I’ll take Schubert’s any day. We should all have such writer’s block!
Recorded at the Rottenbiller Street Studio, Budapest from January 16 – 22, 1994
ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
Sometimes, even though you wash your hands over and over again, you just can’t get the stink out – that’s how I feel about the Arensky String Quartets – I want them to be clean and smell good but every time I listen to them, I can’t get the stink out. (I realize that should be three sentences but I used dashes instead to preserve my one-sentence format – sorry.)
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (by Keith Anderson):
The son of keen amateur musicians, his father a doctor, Anton Arensky was born in Novgorod in 1861. His musical abilities were encouraged by his parents and he had his first piano lessons from his mother.
As a child he had begun to write music and when the family moved to St. Petersburg he was able to take more consistent musical instruction and after some preparation, in 1879 to enter the Conservatory, where his teachers included Rimsky-Korsakov for composition and Johannsen for counterpoint and fugue.
He was entrusted with the preparation of a piano reduction of the former’s opera The Snow Maiden and under Rimsky-Korsakov’s supervision began work on his own first opera A Dream on the Volga, which was later completed, to be staged in Moscow with some success in 1891.
His teacher, however, saw no great future for the works of his pupil, considering any success achieved likely to be transitory. This prediction has not proved true in every respect, since some, at least, of Arensky’s works have maintained a secure if limited place in standard orchestral and piano repertoire.
Arensky completed his studies at the Conservatory in 1882 and at once took up a position at the Moscow Conservatory as a teacher and later as professor of counterpoint and harmony. There his pupils included Rachmaninov, Gliere, Conyus and Scriabin, and there was fruitful contact and friendship with Tchakovsky and Taneyev.
He appeared as a conductor at concerts, notably of the Russian Choral Society, and his connection with church music led to his appointment, on the recommendation of Balakirev, as director of the imperial chapel in St. Petersburg, a position he took up in 1895 and held until 1901.
His final years left him free to follow a career as a composer, pianist and conductor, brought to an end in part through his dissolute way of life. He died of tuberculosis in 1906 at the age of forty-five.
In style and technique Arensky owed much to his teachers. He developed a sure command of harmonic, contrapuntal and structural musical resources, with a lyrical facility.
These elements are at once apparent in his String Quartet No. 1 in G major Opus 11, written in 1988. This shows, from the first bars, an easy understanding of the medium of the string quartet and of the possibilities still inherent in the traditional first movement form.
The second movement opens with a melody of fine contour, before a contrapuntal element is introduced by the cello, followed by the other instruments, and a treatment of the principal melodic material with more elaborately contrapuntal accompaniment.
The mood changes with a light-hearted Menuettoand contrasting Trio.
A Russian element makes its appearance in the Finale, with its variations on a Russian theme. These bring their surprises, not least in the traditional folk texture suggested by the plucked accompaniment in one variation and the later fragmentation of the theme, before a cadenza and the return of the theme in a mood of mounting excitement, leading to an emphatic and vigorous conclusion.
Arensky’sString Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Opus 35, was written in 1895 and in its first movement presents a more somber atmosphere, lightened by secondary material, dramatically developed, but returning to its initial mood.
The theme of the second movement is stated simply, before its elaboration in a series of variations with the theme taken by each instrument in turn, before the possibilities of plucked strings and further textural resources are explored in a spirit that ventures far from the original material, sometimes with the energy of a scherzo, then relaxing into a gentler lyrical and eventually somber mood.
The third movement continues in its opening bars the Russian idiom, already heard in the theme of the second. The introduction is followed by what promises to be a vigorous fugue, on a Russian subject, superseded by a reminiscence of the melancholy of the opening of the quartet and followed by an energetic and triumphant conclusion.
The Piano Quintet in D major, Opus 51, was written in 1900.
The piano starts the first movement, soon joined by the string instruments in a historic opening of a texture that recalls that of Schumann’s Piano Quintet. Here, too, the piano plays a virtuoso part, whether in accompaniment or in the statement of thematic material.
The second movement is again in the form of a theme and variations, the former entrusted first to the strings, before the lyrical intervention of the piano, followed by a turn to the more dramatic, a change of mood to the solemn and then to the lyrical. The piano moves on to a recreation of Chopin, in romantic partnership, and then to music of greater vigor, subsiding into the language of the opening.
The capricious Scherzobreaks in, interrupted in its turn by a peaceful trio that brings momentary serenity here and when it returns after a repetition of the Scherzo, which itself has the last word.
A subject of Baroque contour introduces the last movement fugue, but the rigors of counterpoint are later submerged in a thoroughly romantic conclusion.
TRACK LISTING:
1-4: String Quartet No. 1 in G Major, Op. 11
5-7: String Quartet No. 2 in A Minor, Op. 35
8-11: Piano Quintet in D Major, Op. 51
FINAL THOUGHT:
Look, I’m not going to slam Arensky too much here (he got enough of that in his life from the asshole Rimsky-Korsakov) but considering he was living a pretty wild life away from work (gambling, drinking like a fish, etc. etc.) the String Quartets are pretty boring. I’ll cut the Piano Quinteta little more slack because I just love piano quintets as a genre (for my money, there is nothing much better than the Shostakovich Piano Quintet – which I’ll get to in about two years!). Unfortunately for Arensky and his legacy – these are works you just don’t want to listen to that much.
Recorded at Performing Arts Center, Purchase College, USA – June 1994 (Philips)
ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
Dude can write one hell of a gloomy melody – perfect for staring out an icy window at the frozen Moscow River on a miserable Sunday afternoon.
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (by David Brown):
“In his youth Arensky did not escape some influence from me; later the influence came from Tchaikovsky. He will quickly be forgotten.” Thus Rimsky-Korsakov, not without a touch of pique, delivered his verdict upon his former pupil.
Born in 1861, Arensky had become Rimsky’s composition student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, but on graduating brilliantly with a gold medal in 1882, he had been appointed a professor at the Moscow Conservatory, where he was to teach both Rachmaninoff and Scriabin.
Removal to Russia’s old capital brought Arensky into contact with Tchaikovsky, and the natural creative affinity between the two men fostered mutual friendship. Rimsky’s influence faded, and Tchaikovsky became not only the most potent single force within Arensky’s music but also his staunchest supporter.
After Tchaikovsky’s death Arensky composed his Second String Quartet as a memorial, producing in the string orchestra arrangement he later made of the quarter’s slow movement (Variations on a Theme of Tchaikovsky) one work that has remained firmly in the repertoire.
Nor has Arensky’sFirst Piano Trio suffered the fate Rimsky had so balefully predicted for his music generally. Composed in 1894, this too was a memorial work, this time for the cellist Karl Davidov, who had also been a kindly director of the St. Petersburg Conservatory during Arensky’s student years.
It is a splendidly accomplished piece – and also eclectic; sometimes, for instance, the first movement of Mendelssohn’sFirst Piano Trio, also in D minor, seems to lurk behind Arensky’s opening Allegro moderato. But where Mendelssohn was urgent, Arensky gives his first theme a gentle and very characteristically elegiac tone, and his inventiveness is powerful enough to ensure that what follows has clear individuality, even though it may lack the sheer personality of a Tchaikovsky – or Rimsky.
Arensky’s craftsmanship and clarity of thought are always impeccable, and this precision is even more evident in the scherzo. Not a note is wasted in this enchanting confection built largely from a little stuttering figure (which later nearly gives birth to a more extended melodic idea), flying scales, and sparkling piano figurations.
The centre betrays the trio’s most explicit debt to earlier music, but this powerful echo from the second movement of Saint-Saens’Second Piano Concerto develops into a kind of lurching waltz very much Arensky’s own. There is careful revision of scoring when the scherzo returns, and a brief coda is added so that the movement may flicker into silence.
The heart of this memorial trio is the slow movement.
Deeply elegiac it certainly is – but not funereal; it parades no formal grief, but rather seems to reflect on precious personal memories. With its tender central section, it is surely as affectionate a tribute as any many could wish for.
Nor does the final movement end with any tone of heavy lamentation. Nevertheless, the more lyrical tune that alternates with the forthright opening music harks back to the main theme of the Elegia, preparing us for the explicit recall of the gentle music from that movement’s centre.
There follows a recollection of the whole trio’s beautiful opening melody, its sadness enhanced by a delicately chromatic harmonization before a vigorous return to the finale’s opening material rounds off the whole work.
In 1895, a year after completing his First Trio, Arensky moved back to St. Petersburg to become director of the Imperial Chapel choir. He remained in the post six years, retiring in 1901 with a pension. He was not free to pursue very successfully his career as pianist and conductor, and to compose at will.
But his lifestyle had long been disorderly; drinking and an addition to gambling had undermined his health, and early in 1906 tuberculosis finally claimed him.
His Second Piano Trio of 1905 was therefore one of his last works. The work’s subsequent fate would seem to substantiate Rimsky’s prediction; in fact, its almost total disappearance from the repertoire has been very much our loss.
It would be facile to label this music autumnal, but thoughtful it certainly is. The clear sectionalism of the D minor Trio’s first movement here gives way to a more continuous, more spacious flow, and the opening five notes of the theme quietly enunciated by the piano become a pervasive presence (and also a motto motif that insinuates itself into the following three movements).
Other motifs are gathered along the way to contribute their part in generating an unobtrusively magisterial movement as fine as any from a Russian of Arensky’s generation.
After such an impressive utterance, the main theme of the Romance might seem to promise something jejune, for all the telling harmonic detail in the accompaniment.
But the scale to which this theme grows confirms that Arensky’s greatest single asset was his melodic gift, and that gift is here confidently deployed to sustain the formidable span of an entire movement, braced the more firmly by the four haunting recurrences of the introductory four bars (the motto motif is heard just before the first theme returns for the last time).
The dazzling scherzo is as fleet and economical in texture as its counterpart in the First Trio, though its centre, with its disarmingly simple melodiousness, is more of a contrast (the motto motif quietly infiltrates this melodic flow at about midpoint).
After a truncated repetition of the scherzo, the finale’s quietly complex theme, with its contrapuntal opening and fastidious harmonic detail, might seem to be intractable material for variation treatment. But Arensky’s resourcefulness is equal to the challenge (especially in the weird valse of the third variation).
Several of the six variations seem deliberately to hard back to kinds of music heard in the preceding movements, and at the end of the grandiose final variation the motto motif builds a bridge to the coda, which returns to the reflective mood in which the movement had opened, drawing this sadly neglected work towards a muted but most satisfying resolution.
TRACK LISTING:
1-4: Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 32
5-14: Piano Trio No. 2 in F minor, Op. 73
FINAL THOUGHT:
Poor Arensky. So good but so flawed. Damn alcohol. Makes me so sad I need a really big drink (maybe at lunch!). But Anton Stepanovich did rate high enough to make it into the lyrics of a Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin song (Tchaikovsky) and that’s good enough for me!
The purpose of this blog is to force me to listen to every single recording of music I have in my personal collection.
The bulk of this collection is classical and I am starting with those recordings in alphabetical order.
This project is going to take a couple of years as I have several thousand CDs.
I’m also going to do a slight write-up of my opinions of the piece as well as all the information on the recordings that I can muster. This will include the name, conductor, performer, cover art, etc.
Should be a fun process and if anyone would like to help contribute their opinions – that would be icing on the cake.
Emily Sachs – President – Manka Music Group (A division of Manka Bros. Studios – The World’s Largest Media Company
