#ClassicalDiscoveries: The Podcast. Episode 002 - Alfred Schnittke's Little Tragedies

Welcome to #ClassicalDiscoveries. There is a little introduction to who we are and what we would like to achive at the first (or rather "double-zeroëth" episode). It still bears mentioning every time that your comments, criticism, and suggestions are most welcome, of whatever nature they may be. Now here’s Episode 002, where we’re talking about Alfred Schnittke's film music in general but more specifically about his music to the Mikhail Schweitzer filmed version of Pushkin's Little Tragedies on the occasion of Capriccio having released the 6^th volume of their Schnittke Film Music series with that extended soundtrack. (With Vladimir Jurowski). I love Schnittke, and we get to play one of my favorite little bits of volume 4 of the series. (Which, admittedly, I panned, when reviewing it for Fanfare Magazine. Let us know if you find Schnittke half way as intriguing as we do:

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Briefly Noted: Schnittke's Choral Music

A. Schnittke, Penitential Psalms / 3 Sacred Hymns, RIAS Kammerchor, H.-C. Rademann (released on March 4, 2016) HMC 902225 | 54'28"

Alfred Schnittke is a perennial obsession at Ionarts, although we have few chances to hear his music live in Washington. Best known for his symphonies, the Russian composer was also interested in choral music, most famously in his Faust Cantata. Add to that grand statement these two other works from the 1980s, the rather traditional Three Sacred Hymns and the immense, befuddling Penitential Psalms, both composed after he found his way back to Roman Catholicism, his mother's faith. His first major sacred work was an ominous setting of the Requiem Mass from the 1970s, in some ways more traditional than what Schnittke had written up to that point. Although he was a practicing Catholic, Schnittke acknowledged that his Russian upbringing made him more sympathetic to Orthodox liturgical music, and the three sacred hymns recorded on this new disc from the RIAS Kammerchor are on traditional Orthodox texts and recall the style of earlier Russian composers.

In both of his last major choral works, the Concerto for Choir and The Penitential Psalms, Schnittke turned not to liturgical texts but to devotional poetry by medieval writers. He composed The Penitential Psalms in 1988 for the millennium of the Christian conversion of Russia, following the baptism of Grand Prince Vladimir. The piece opens and closes with wordless music for chorus, with the first movement beginning on murky chromatic lines set very low, for the basses in three-part divisi. The emphasis on chromaticism continues when Schnittke adds the words, as descending strands of mostly half-steps mount to higher and higher starting points. Schnittke incorporates many elements of Orthodox liturgical music, a flexible sense of meter, often changing every measure, that allows him to notate a chant-like free rhythm in eighth notes. This allows the sense of time to adjust to the number of syllables in the text and where the word accents fall, and it is one way to notate the non-metrical rhythm of Gregorian chant, for example. Another Orthodox liturgical element is the use of drones, beginning with the low G at the start of the piece, and in other places placing complex structures over sustained unisons of fifths in the lower voices. Schnittke often uses the device of close imitation, with the stretto-like overlap of two contrapuntal voices, as a further nod to Renaissance polyphony and the music of Bach.

Conductor Hans-Christoph Rademann, in a booklet note about the recording, explains that Moscow choral conductor Ekaterina Antonenko served as language coach for the RIAS Kammerchor, helping the singers see relationships between the text and the music. She also helped Rademann obtain the autograph score of The Penitential Psalms from Irina Feodorovna, the widow of Alfred Schnittke, which revealed that the published score contains many expression marks not intended by Schnittke but added later by Viktor Suslin, another composer who edited the music, as well as some errors in the parts. Those corrections are important given the predominance of chromatic writing, a nightmare for intonation, through which Schnittke builds up staggeringly dissonant structures that sometimes melt back into traditional triads. The beauty of the performance, from a chorus of about forty singers, both rarefied and broad in sound, added to the new version of the score makes this recording an important addition to the Schnittke discography.

Ionarts-at-Large: Humor in Soviet Music at Vienna’s Musikverein

When Schnittke and Shostakovich beckon from the program, you don’t expect a full house, really. Certainly not in conservative Vienna, and not with the third band in town, the ORF Radio Symphony, playing. Then again, the RSO’s audience (or that of the Jeunesse organizer) would be the only one in town to appreciate the 20^th century fare on the bill…the anti-monumental corker of a Sixth Symphony and the wild’n’wacky romp that is Alfred Schnittke’s Faust Cantata.

Vladimir Fedoseyev has a Vienna history—he was the music director of the Vienna Symphony from 1991 until 1997 and had just recently had a, frankly awkward, atmospherically challenged concert with them in town—but he can’t be considered box office magic, either. And still, the Musikverein’s Golden Hall was very nearly filled (I hesitate to say “sold out”, given the amount of comps handed out to the chorus members). Because the full chorus and full orchestra sprawled out and nearly spilled over the small stage of the Musikverein, the seating had been pushed back and placed on rails that allows them to place them narrower together and squeeze the rows they lost by pushing the stage out right back in. The result is that the already ungenerous seating-arrangement in the Musikverein resembles something you would you would expect on a budget airline domestic flight in China.

Shostakovich, Sixth Symphony

D.Shostakovich, Symphonies Nos.6 & 10, A.Litton/Dallas SO Delos

Political DSCH-interpretations will forever try to find something menacing or at least ironic in this (and ever other) symphony, but the musical reality of the lopsided Sixth Symphony, with its looong first movement and quick left-right punch for movements two and (final) three, is “hoppity-hop”, a pot-boiler, a lark. For the duration of the Largo, I was concerned that Fedoseyev might have other ideas for it, making it sound drab and more like the opening of the Eighth Symphony. The woodwinds plangent (not very colorful), and the violins strident (togetherish), wiry and tense like the trumpets, and those latter occasionally shrill beyond (I would venture to guess) intended interpretative aspects. But the Allegro and the nifty Presto, by all means a gay and merry thing, became exercises in a martial show-down… a bit as if the United States Special Forces ran Six Flags. Brash and punchy needn’t be a detriment; it could well go into the credit column, as did the noise the RSO made, which was considerable (the hall was not built with Shostakovich-orchestras of 14 first violins down to 6 double bases in mind), but still controlled. Rollicking zip also goes a long way in making for entertaining listening, not just nuance, and finally the work’s strength itself is great enough to save it… in short: It was a cracking, but not terribly memorable warm-up for all involved, leading nicely into the Schnittke after intermission.

Schnittke, Faust Cantata

Schnittke/Webern-Bach/Bach, Faust Cantata/Ricerata/Chorales, Boreyko/Hamburg SO Berlin Classics

Now this is the work I came for. Once you’ve heard Schnittke’s Faust Cantata (incidentally premiered in Vienna in 1983, well before the opera—of which the cantata is essentially the third act—first hit the stage in Hamburg), it’s just too much of a hoot not to want to hear it every opportunity you get. I will plagiarize myself from when I last heard it, with Andrey Boreyko and the Munich Philharmonic:

Twenty years of composing for film had given Schnittke a dead-on sensitivity effect and he never lacked the confidence to use it brazenly. From the first notes he gets the mood just right; within two bars you feel transplanted into a black and white picture of F.W. Murnau. One of Schnittke’s devilishly good ideas was to give Mephisto to a countertenor… and a mezzo, when he is in disguise as Helen. Creepy delightful, with organ, orator (tenor Steve Davislim here just as well as in Munich) accompanied on harpsichord, and of course the highlight of the show: the tango where Mephisto (disguised as Helen) narrates the gruesome death of Faust in gory detail. From the Matthew Passion to the Rocky Horror Picture Show in less than 20 bars, Schnittke covers all your grand theatrical desires in this work. Undoubtedly one of the best treatments of Faust in music.

It’s catchy like a musical (if only I found musicals catchy), it has bite, it has laughs (if you find musical audacity funny), and it is loud (which is always good for a round of applause). Gongs, percussion up the wazoo, the aforementioned organ, harpsichord, piano, celesta, huge chorus: All the ingredients of a great night out, and just about as intoxicating. I fell in love with the work immediately upon hearing it on record, but live, in all its gory glory, it’s even more fun. Better yet, the work is almost immune against botched entries by the chorus or modest singers… not that the present lot or the Singverein were all that terrible.

Steve Davislim has a relatively fine and small voice but is wise enough not to try too hard to compensate, which I cherish immensely. Aside, in his function as quasi-Evangelist, he needn’t trumpet about in this rôle. Bariton Adrian Eröd (Faust) wasn’t very melodic in his singing, but then his part isn’t, either. Schnittke pushes him into deep bass-territory, first, where Eröd managed a hollowish Sprechgesang… then, without rest in the middle, pushes him all the way up against the vocal ceiling. It’s almost as if Schnittke wanted to deny any rest in the vocal comfort zone and Eröd rarely found any.

Matthias Rexroth as Mephisto even looks the part: His fire-engine red face (I’m not sure if make-up was deliberately involved) and the hair that looks like flames licking up his head in an attempt to reach the ceiling suggest a chap whose natural habitat is too near a subterranean blast furnace. His vocal performance, well… he sounded uncomfortable, comical, almost as if feigning vocal trouble to give Faust more character. I don’t know the score to say whether Schnittke specifies any of this… but even if, surely not quite that much. Rexroth sounded more as though he was still a baritone and tried out that counter tenor thing for the first or second time. But, given the magic of ironic-or-isn’t-he-Schnittke, it didn’t really detract from my enjoyment and Rexroth certainly had the dramatic element down pat. Elisabeth Kulman, the alto for all seasons in Vienna (when she’s not busy complaining about being overworked), finally threw herself into the role with gusto and her eyebrows expressive overtime. Not quite the over-the-top, transvestitesque show Malgorzata Walewska pulled off in Munich, but rousing and entertaining enough in the conservative confines of the Goldener Saal (Walewska might have caused a scandal), and very nicely sung by all means. The devilish tango left goosebumps all around… and the RSO under Fedoseyev a fine, impassioned impression, which is heartening.

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Poulenc Trio @ NGA

Charles T. Downey, Poulenc Trio brings urbane mix to National Gallery of Art
Washington Post, March 25, 2014

Glinka / Poulenc / Others, Poulenc Trio (Marquis Music, 2009)

The Poulenc Trio takes its name from a composer who actually wrote a piece for their unusual combination of instruments: oboe, bassoon and piano. Most of their other repertoire is arrangements of music for other combinations, and they brought an urbane mix of such pieces for their concert at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday evening.

A trio sonata by Handel more traditionally would have two treble instruments on the upper parts and the bassoon or another bass instrument doubling the continuo, but talented bassoonist Bryan Young’s light and agile approach to the second treble part made it work. Oboist Vladimir Lande had a consistently beautiful sound in Glinka’s “Trio Pathétique,” originally for clarinet, cello and piano, while pianist Irina Kaplan, generally content to be more in the background, gave a gossamer touch to the many decorative roulades in the keyboard part. [Continue reading]

Poulenc Trio
With Anton Lande, violin
National Gallery of Art

NSO's Russian Tribute to Rostropovich

Schnittke, Viola Concerto, D. A. Carpenter, Philharmonia Orchestra, C. Eschenbach (Ondine, 2009) Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5, Philadelphia Orchestra, C. Eschenbach (Ondine, 2008)

Christoph Eschenbach is taking the National Symphony Orchestra to Carnegie Hall next weekend, with a program of Russian music in tribute to the ensemble's venerated former music director, Mstislav Rostropovich. The NSO gave a run-through of the program, featuring three composers championed by Rostropovich -- Shchedrin, Schnittke, and Shostakovich -- on Friday night at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, in between concerts featuring cellist Alisa Weilerstein.

Eschenbach opened with Slava, Slava, a sort of overture composed by Rodion Shchedrin for Rostropovich's 70th birthday in 1997. The piece was premiered in Paris, but this performance by the NSO, its first, was also the U.S. premiere. (We are all thankful that Eschenbach stayed away from the terrible Slava! overture by Leonard Bernstein, a piece I never want to hear again.) Shchedrin's memorable and often strange piece, subtitled "A Festive Ringing of Bells," opens with many strikes of a cluster of three bells struck simultaneously (the score calls for Russian bells, here played on great chimes). A regular rhythmic pulse, propelled by raucous double bass pizzicati and other means, gives the feel of a solemn march, fueled further by an enormous battery of percussion. It ends in a crazy cacophony of metallic wallops, on bell plates, tubular bells, crotales, and more. It was an impressive clatter of sound.

Rostropovich himself was the last to conduct Alfred Schnittke's viola concerto with the NSO, back in 1992. Eschenbach recorded the work a few years ago with David Allen Aaron Carpenter, the same soloist featured on Friday night. Schnittke removed most treble distractions by leaving the violins out of the score, with the viola solo featured at the start against a drone in the solo cello. Carpenter emphasized the ardent soaring lines and deep-throated barks of the composer's enigmatic writing for the viola, created for Yuri Bashmet, often seeming to prefer rawness of sound over absolute precision, reaching a pretty strident tone in the cadenza at the end of the second movement. Carpenter gave plenty of frenzy to the opening of the second movement, yielding to the faux-genteel waltz with muted brass and the somewhat smug addition of harpsichord (amplified, played by Joseph Gascho). The piece's many shifting colors seems well suited to Eschenbach, who reveled in drawing out episodic characters, like the bitonal chords (recalling the "Augurs" of the Rite of Spring), the squawking high woodwinds, the crazy lush serenade eventually heightened by the nutty sound of flexatone, the Shostakovich-like grotesque march. The piece is quite a head-scratcher, but one that never leaves the ear or mind bored.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, NSO’s strengths, weaknesses, identity issues on display at Spring for Music (Washington Post, May 13) ---, Christoph Eschenbach, National Symphony Orchestra mix up the program (Washington Post, May 3) Robert Battey, David Aaron Carpenter, NSO take on Schnittke Viola Concerto (Washington Post, May 6)

Rostropovich, because of his close friendship with Shostakovich, had a special insight into the composer's works, although his limits as a conductor often got in the way with the symphonies. Eschenbach has his own way with Shostakovich, which he showed in this performance of the fifth symphony, a work that is either a desperate attempt to get back into the graces of the Soviet government, after the condemnation of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, or an ironic commentary on blind obedience to authority. One can certainly play the work either way, and the latter interpretation conveniently sounded much better for the composer in the post-Stalin years. In a fine performance, Eschenbach drew out a somber but also tender beginning to the first movement, saving the biting tone until later, with limpid violin sound over lush chords, a silvery flute solo and juicy woodwinds -- at times one can almost hear Shostakovich purging his compositional idiom of its atonal, sarcastic urges. The NSO, with all sections in excellent form save some dicey moments in the horns and some harp tuning issues in the fourth movement, made a lumbering dance in the second movement, with a tempo just the right side of Allegretto, going slower and more lop-sided in the chamber-sized trio, with smile-inducing pizzicato bits and bassoon burps. The third movement was a searing elegy for strings, with an elegant serenade for flutes and harp and a plaintive oboe solo, echoes of the Tristan theme heard at times. The fourth movement was satisfying bombastic, music that could indeed be heard either as an optimistic sort of patriotism or as a critique of blind devotion to the state. Our business is rejoicing, indeed.

This program will be repeated next weekend, when the NSO performs it at Carnegie Hall in New York (May 11, 7:30 pm).

Notes from the 2012 Salzburg Festival ( 5 )

The 2012 Kit-Kat* Conductor

Young Conductors Award • Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla

The Nestlé and Salzburg Festival Young Conductors Award Concert is a low-glam, low-yield event amid the Festival glitz, and only more obviously so when the summer is trimmed towards the big hitters and famous names of the business, staring down on us from all the posters. Not surprisingly, the Felsenreitschule was more than half empty, and half of those present presumably had comps.

Lithuanian Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla is the third winner, after the promising David Afkham in 2010 and not-quite-so promising Ainārs Rubiķis in 2011 (review here). The water in the Baltics is contaminated with music—or else why is there such a nest of competent conducting talent coming from Lithuania (Gražinytė), Latvia (Rubiķis), and Estonia (Järvi 1, 2, 3, Tõnu Kaljuste, Anu Tali et al.). (Add nearby Finland and you could about supply the world wide conductor demand.) It’s a win-win thing, really: A gift to music—and I learn to find new diacriticals on my computer.

It’s heartening to see a woman having earned the prize, because we need more women on the rostrum. Firstly: to reach something akin to normalcy seeing women as conductors, rather than conducting aberrations. Secondly: so that writers, whenever they encounter a woman-sighting on the podium don’t immediately compare her to the three, four other half-way famous female conductors. Thirdly: so that one can finally start criticizing them when they’re not terribly good, without feeling like a misogynist or male-chauvinist pig.

Fortunately there wouldn’t be too much to critique about Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, even if one were allowed. The award-concert the 25-year old Lithuanian put together for Sunday opened with Alfred Schnittke’s Ritual for Large Symphony Orchestra, a lamentation for the victims of World War II, and that got well under way just moments after she put the self-conscious pompous conductor-poses behind her, the ostentatiously shaking the concert master’s hand and the generously-portentously gesturing the orchestra to sit, which were as mannered, if not quite as flamboyant, as Rubiķis’ last year. But as she stood before the sophisticated, precise-playing Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, all rigor, as unmovable as the steady crescendo in Schnittke’s music, she became increasingly more natural. It’s a grim lament that Schnittke raises from quiet depths to furor, before it ends in quick, broken sounds of gongs and bells that stop tolling, eventually… and Gražinytė-Tyla guided the orchestra through it with clean, impersonal movements, thankfully none of them copied from the jumping-jack school of Bernstein students.

The glimmer of natural authority, the most important, most intangible of a conductor’s gifts, flickered several times during the Mozart Piano Concerto K467 in C, in which her compatriot Andrius Zlabys took on the soloist’s duties. The first movement was meant to be dashing, and succeeded but for remaining a little too plain and timid; the third movement the same, but without the caveats. It’s a neat challenge to do Mozart, to accompany a soloist, and still shine in some way, and certainly more telling, more important, than doing something by, say, Tchaikovsky. (It’s a step towards the YCA Concert mandate I would love seeing introduced: for every winner to close with a mandatory Haydn Symphony.) Zlabys, fast and wooden and completely unmannered, didn’t steal his conductor’s thunder even in the slow movement (so famous it has its own nickname), but shone in a spirited first cadenza. Zlabys’ creaking chair produced extraneous noises, of which audience members notified him vociferously before he set about giving a prettily-unsubstantial encore—Arvo Pärt’s “Für Alina” methinks. Because the sound engineers decided that the slow movement of the Mozart was ruined, the audience was asked to remain after the short prize ceremony for a re-recording (to be released by Orfeo), to assure the same acoustic conditions.

The Petrushka (Stravinsky’s 1947 version) that concluded the official program was playful and gay, even in its darker moments. Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla (singer-soloist at the 1996 Lithuanian LEGO kids’ music festival, by the looks of this video) with her Marin Alsop memorial haircut, sent about coy, flirty looks with aching sincerity, and tightly steered the orchestra through this very entertaining Petrushka with considerable, not perfect, precision. A promising debut before an international, if lamentably sparse audience to which Nestlé—this being part of the real NYC-Award booster-package—herded some sixty international journalists.

There are reasons for and against lowering the prices (€ 25-135, in this case) for predictably less desirable concerts, even if the correlation between lowering prices and increasing audiences is not a direct one under Festival circumstances. But whatever has to be done to get the 1400-seat hall fuller for the big-stage debut of a NYC-Price Winner, ought to be done. In the end, it’s better to play before something approaching a full house of listeners who paid little, admitting the event has less prestige than others, than play before empty expensive seats.

Picture courtesy Salzburg Festival, © Silvia Lelli

Notes from the 2011 Salzburg Festival ( 8 )

Mahler Scenes 7

With its wistful and lyrical opening, lean and beautiful in its classical romanticism, we hear nothing in Gustav Mahler’s youthful, one-movement Piano Quartet in A minor that suggests the Mahler of cut-and-paste inventiveness, stylistic jumble, irony, or Angst manifesting itself in twisted chords and harangued musical question marks.

Part of the “Mahler Scenes” series—exploring Mahler from the fringes rather than through yet another complete Symphony cycle—it was served up with panache by four wonderful musicians: Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Antonine Tamestit, Nicolas Altstaedt, and Alexander Lonquich, all of whose careers succeed on sheer musicality (and skill, of course), rather than glitz and elaborate PR promotions. Tangentially related: Kopatchinskaja hid her bare feet with a long flowing rust-red dress: wisely (assuming purpose behind that), because it helps avoiding accusations of the whole thing being a cheap gimmick.

Mahler, Schnittke, Strauss, PQ4ts, M.Roussi, R.Gothoni, M.Lubotsky, M.Hirvakangas Ondine

The Quartet movement, only some 13 minutes long, simultaneously benefits and suffers from its association with Mahler. Benefitting in the sense that since its publication in 1973 it gets performed for being a Mahler curiositá, a piece of intriguing proto-Mahlerianism, musical Mahler-paraphernalia, lavished with occasional attention for having flowed from the pen of the hyped and loved composer of grand symphonies. Suffering in that it is rarely played outside that context, when just on the strength of its enormous beauty it really ought to have a steady place in the Piano Quartet repertoire. It’s short, but too good to be only a musical Mahler appendix. What surprises most is its clear, especially Schubertian but also Schumannesque flair—quite removed from the density of Brahms or later romantics.

The sixteen-year old Mahler wrote 24 bars of a second movement, too, but presumably abandoned the work despite—even later—taking some pride in however much he had written of it. When the movement was found in the 60s, Alfred Schnittke was approached with the task of a completion of the quartet, took those 24 bars and ran with them. The result turned out echt-Schnittke (‘by accident’, Schnittke explained apologetically), and was not the anticipated Mahler-Schnittke Quartet, but simply a Schnittke Quartet. Even so, Schnittke was the logical choice to finish the work, though, because he is in many ways the Mahler of the 20^th century. His “Polystylistics” and use of absurdity, humor, irony, mischief, seduction, and complete independence makes him Mahler’s brother in arms. Like Mahler integrated bits and pieces from his environments to turn them into a symphonic collage, so Schnittke picks up all that interests him on the cutting room floor of Western music and reassembles it in his image.

It’s just that Schnittke is eclectic, even by Mahler’s standards, and after quoting Mahler’s fragment, he creates a work entirely his, with melting chords, askew harmonies, playful dissonances, and juxtapositions of glissandi and note-clusters—baffling and delighting as Schnittke usually does; many listeners the former, some the latter, and most of them some degree of both. Kopatchinskaja – Tamestit – Altstaedt – Lonquich dug into it with all the fervor and committed ruthlessness that Schnittke elicits and demands, from the heights of coy cacophony to the elusive lingering of heartbreaking melodiousness and its subsequent, ultimate quiet meltdown.

Richard Strauss’ Piano Quartet op.12, for all its rarity on concert stages and on recordings, is considerably more readily enjoyable than the comparatively often recorded Violin or Cello sonatas (opp.18 & 6, respectively). Throughout the 45-minute bear of a work, the energy of the players rarely sapped, even if it took its tolls on accuracy. What the audience got was a juicy, impassioned, and most enjoyable performance swiftly stomping through the second movement, aggressively convulsing occasionally, and again a twitching chuckle in the driving intensity finale. The encore followed afoot in form of the third movement of Brahms’ c-minor Quartet, op.60. Gorgeous, of course, among the sweetest and most delicate movements in Brahms and showcasing, as nothing else had that evening, the wonderful tone of Altstaedt, the fragility of him in duet with Kopatchinskaja, and the subtle interplay between them and Tamestit.

Argerich and Friends Last Year

Martha Argerich and Friends, Live at the Lugano Festival 2010 (released on March 29, 2011) EMI 0 70836 2 | 240'04"

We have recommended the series of discs from Martha Argerich's annual summer concerts in Lugano before. The elusive pianist is leading the tenth installment of the Swiss Progetto that bears her name right now: you can listen to some of those concerts via the streaming audio from France Musique. If you missed what she and her merry band played last summer, you can listen to it on this affordably priced set of three jam-packed CDs from EMI.

Last summer, as in many places in the world, Argerich was celebrating the Chopin and Schumann anniversaries, beginning with her own performance of Chopin's first piano concerto, with the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana and conductor Jacek Kaspszyk. This performance stands up to either of La Argerich's previous recordings of the work, with Claudio Abbado and the London Symphony Orchestra (DG, made shortly after her triumph at the Warsaw competition) or Charles Dutoit and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra (EMI, made thirty-some years later): it is mercurial in the way that an Argerich performance generally is, and conductor and orchestra had better be on their toes. Schumann is represented as Argerich partners with each of the Capuçon brothers, in the first violin sonata (with Renaud, smoky and debonair) and the op. 70 Adagio and Allegro (with Gautier, sebaceous and oozing). As usual with Argerich's programming, there are many rarities, including three piano quintets by Korngold, Granados, and Schnittke; the first two are lovely discoveries, and the last one is an intense, enigmatic, sometimes ear-grinding, poly-stylistic experience.

Most pianists love to play with other pianists, in four-hands or multiple-piano pieces, and Argerich is no different. We have admired many of the pieces and arrangements of this kind she has championed and performed over the years, always orchestral in scope. Last summer, she and her colleagues unearthed Brahms's Variations on a Theme of Schumann (for two pianos), Bartók's sonata for two pianos and percussion (a visceral, sometimes earth-shaking interpretation led by Argerich), transcriptions of Stravinsky's Firebird Suite (a madcap version for three pianos, including strange effects like spidery strummed or plucked piano strings plus a climactic bit for triangle, by Carlo Maria Griguoli, who is also one of the performers) and Liszt's Les Préludes (a fascinating version for two pianos, with Argerich at the helm), and Percy Grainger's toe-tapping Fantasy on Porgy and Bess (for two pianos, with Gabriela Montero on primo). These are all pieces it would be excellent to hear more in live performance, and at this price the set gets an easy recommendation.

Elgar and Schnittke on the Viola

Elgar / Schnittke, Viola Concertos, D. A. Carpenter, Philharmonia Orchestra, C. Eschenbach (released on August 25, 2009) Ondine ODE 1153-2 | 64'50"

Christoph Eschenbach champions the work of young musicians wherever he goes, and when he takes over the National Symphony Orchestra this fall Washingtonians are likely to get to know all of Eschenbach's favorites during his tenure here. American violist David Aaron Carpenter came to Eschenbach's attention when he won the 2005 Philadelphia Orchestra Young Artists Competition, earning the chance to perform Walton's viola concerto with the orchestra. Carpenter then went on to win first prize at the Walter W. Naumburg Viola Competition the following year, as well as being sponsored by Rolex in a special mentoring program in 2007, which led to studies with Pinchas Zukerman. It's hard to imagine more things going right for a young musician's career, and now he can add to his resume a CD debut, on the Ondine label, again with Eschenbach but this time with the Philharmonia Orchestra.

Carpenter leads with his own adaptation of Elgar's cello concerto, based on the one by Lionel Tertis that was approved by the composer himself, and while one wishes that he had recorded the Walton concerto instead, this is a beautiful performance of a curiosity that may find a place as an alternate version of the work. The draw of the CD is Alfred Schnittke's enigmatic viola concerto, composed for Yuri Bashmet in 1985 (the one with full orchestra, not the later one for small orchestra), just before the composer suffered a life-altering stroke. Carpenter has also studied with Bashmet, whose name is (almost) spelled out in one of the concerto's musical themes, but the student's attempt does not yet supplant the teacher's recordings. Schnittke was at the height of his powers when he composed the work, and it is not only an exploration of the instrument's expressive powers -- all of which Carpenter displays, from velvety purr to junkyard bark -- but also unites in one piece some of the most unusual instrumental, harmonic, and melodic colors ever created (especially in the hallucinatory second movement, where the combination of tam-tams, flexatone, xylophone, vibes, harpsichord, piano, and no violins is at its most surreal, with some passages sounding like a demented carousel.)

Schnittke's Charleston

.com .co.uk .de .fr

I can't get Schnittke's Charleston out of my head, so here's the snippet taken from “Adventures of a Dentist” -- to be found on Schnittke - Film Music v.4. Capriccio 5002. [Review here: RNNR: Schnittke, Sport & Soft Porn]

Reviewed, Not Necessarily Recommended: Schnittke, Sport & Soft Porn

Schnittke, Film Music v.4, Strobel / Berlin RSO Capriccio .com .co.uk .de .fr

SCHNITTKE Adventures of a Dentist. Sport, Sport, Sport. Ÿ Frank Strobel, cond; Berlin RSO ● CAPRICCIO 5002 (Hybrid multichannel SACD: 57:39)

Take equal parts James Bond, 70s soft porn soundtrack, and Henry Mancini and you should get something akin to the concert suite derived from Alfred Schnittke’s music to the 1970s film “Sport, Sport, Sport”. “Sport”—mocking the exertions of sportive Russians in pursuit of athletic activity and excellence—won a sort of Soviet silver merit badge of film: it was immediately banned by the censors. (Gold would have gone to those eminently deserving censorship, but subtle enough to slip through.) I am sure that with that in mind—and the film screened, the whole package would turn this silly, sometimes saccharine, and flamboyantly ethnic music into poignant accompaniment. Unfortunately we don’t have the film to go with it.

“Adventures of a Dentist” is more indicative of Schnittke’s polystylism with its many baroque and classical quotes; and where he cuts and pastes Tchaikovsky (on the accordion) in “Sport”, Handel and Bach are his subjects in “Dentist”. There is no way to avoid a broad smile when Schnittke serves up the catchiest two minutes of Charleston between all this (I probably hit the repeat button half a dozen times), but altogether it’s difficult to think that Schnittke’s own arrangement of one Suite from both films might not be more satisfactory than Frank Strobel’s exhaustive arrangement of each. Great film music—Rozsa, Korngold, Rota in the West, Prokofiev beyond the Iron Curtain —is great because it remains superb music independently of the film it was written for.

The Berlin RSO doesn’t seem to mind, though—they play through the bopping and bubbling score sounding fully convinced and engaged under Russian film music-veteran Stroble’s baton. If I were a Russian expatriate, I’d grab this (volume four) and another in this Capriccio-SACD series of Schnittke’s film music, always to be at hand for a vodka infused evening of melancholia and laughter-through-tears. I, meanwhile, might check out some more Charleston, instead.

Hahn-Bin and His Mohawk

Read my review today on the Washington Post Web site:

Charles T. Downey, Virtuoso Makes Striking Terrace Debut
Washington Post, October 7, 2009

The Young Concert Artists series presented an extraordinary recital by Korean violinist Hahn-Bin on Monday night at the Terrace Theater. The former child prodigy, now a mohawk-sporting 22-year-old identified only by his given name, is fresh out of Juilliard, where he studied with Itzhak Perlman and Catherine Cho. As if to present his bona fides as a serious artist, his Kennedy Center debut program drew unexpected connections between little-heard modern works and a few older pieces.

The violinist established his virtuoso credentials with an astonishingly cool rendering of Fritz Kreisler's ferociously difficult "Recitativo and Scherzo," dashing off tangled webs of multiple stops without any hesitation or struggle. Equally striking was the broad, lustrous tone that Hahn-Bin was able to draw forth from his 1825 Pressenda violin -- the same one that he famously left in a New York taxi this summer. His legato line, heard most prominently in Nathan Milstein's arrangement of a Chopin nocturne, could have been more mellifluous and seamless and the intonation more true. [Continue reading]

Hahn-Bin (violin) and John Blacklow (piano)
Young Concert Artists Series
Kennedy Center Terrace Theater

Ionarts at Large: Ravel & Schnittke in Munich

Schnittke/Webern-Bach/Bach, Faust Cantata/Ricerata/Chorales, Boreyko, Hamburg SO Berlin Classics Available on Amazon.com Available on Amazon.co.uk Available on Amazon.de Available on Amazon.fr

Ravel, Piano Concertos, Zimerman, Boulez, Cleveland Orchestra / LSO DG Available on Amazon.com Available on Amazon.co.uk Available on Amazon.de Available on Amazon.fr

Bach-Schoenberg, Piano Quartet No.1, Orchestrated, Eschenbach, Houston Symphony RCA, oop Available on Amazon.com Available on Amazon.co.uk Available on Amazon.de Available on Amazon.fr

MPhil

Rarely have I encountered a concert program seemingly so tailored to my (very mildly eclectic) tastes as that of the Munich Philharmonic earlier this month. Between June 5^th and 7^th, Andrey Boreyko conducted Schnittke’s wild and whacky Faust Cantata—the closest (and maybe close enough) we’ll likely come to the composer’s opera “Historie von D. Johann Fausten”—and the Brahms G minor Piano Quartet.

The Faust Cantata, which would become the third act of the opera, shows Schnittke at his most effective. Twenty years of composing for film had given him a dead-on sensitivity for effect and he never lacked the confidence to use it brazenly. From the first notes he gets the mood just right; within two bars you feel transplanted into a black and white picture of F.W. Murnau. One of Schnittke’s devilishly good ideas was to give Mephisto to a countertenor (and a mezzo, when he is in disguise). Creepy delightful, with organ, orator (tenor Steve Davislim) accompanied on harpsichord, and of course the highlight of the show: the transvestitesque tango where Mephisto (disguised) narrates the gruesome death of Faust in gory detail. From the Matthew Passion to the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Schnittke covers all your grand theatrical desires in this work. Undoubtedly one of the best treatments of Faust in music.

The low growling, seedy prowling Malgorzata Walewska was the sordid hit amid a very fine completed by Artur Stefanowicz as Mephisto and bass Arutjun Kotchinian as Faust.

Schoenberg’s name was squeezed into the last line and smallest font of the program book, lest the threat of Schnittke & Schoenberg keep the Philharmonic Hall an audience-free zone. Billing-strategy shrewdness, indeed. Heard live, the orchestration of the quartet really is Brahms’ Fifth Symphony—if perhaps a little heavy on the side of how we imagine a romantic Brahms and less how Brahms actually sounded. Questions like “is it Brahms” or “can one do that” (really all variants of “are we allowed to enjoy it?”) become utterly meaningless in face of how well it works. It’s terrific source material splendidly expanded to the orchestral level by another master, and it was well executed by the Munich Philharmonic. The ex-quartet sounded gorgeous in the hands of 60 strings, timpani, and nearly a dozen brass players . Why quibble with excellence only because our purity-meters begin to itch?

BRSO

The Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra offered a nearly as colorful but less eclectic mix the following week. Lothar Zagrosek led every wind, brass, and percussion player in Messiaen’s “Et expecto”, heard just half a year ago with the Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta. In- and exhalations of heaving woodwinds begin this literally “catholic” requiem that mixes Indian rhythms, Brazilian bird calls, and Christian symbolism. Assuming a minimum of an organizational principle capably executed on the part of the conductor, any performance of this work will depend on the quality and good will of the performers. The former is unquestionably in place with this orchestra, and the latter was present, too. The enthusiasm went so far that during the enormous, undoubtedly unlawful, tam tam climax, at least one hearing aid in the audience got blown up and continued to whistle and chirp as it tortuously expired.

Not quite as much excitement in Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements, but it was impressive enough that the work didn’t completely fall by memory’s wayside after Fazil Say first delivered a typically rambunctious, perfumed, and liberally jazzified performance of the Ravel Piano Concerto. There are other artists whose studied antics annoy more than they excite, but Say somehow makes it look authentic. He feels like a breath of fresh air in classical music concerts that have generally grown too darn serious to still engage in these Lisztian or Offenbachian, orgiastic, playing-for-the-sake-of-fun dazzling showboat acts. His Summertime-paraphrase brought the house down, as it does every time he plays it.