Critic’s Notebook: Alexandre Tharaud's Debut in Vienna

Also reviewed for DiePresse: Ein Oktopus hätte das nicht besser spielen können

A naughty-but-fitting local bon-mot in Austria's capital goes like this: “World famous in Vienna”. But because the arts scene in Vienna can tend to be complacent and enough unto itself, an inversion of it can be true, too, which is more frustrating still: "World famous outside Vienna". This recital might just have changed that for at least one artist, hitherto ignored at the local music-lovers’ peril.

It’s been entirely too long since I last heard Alexandre Tharaud in recital. 13 years, apparently. Alas, the long time ionarts-favorite, while enjoying a major career in most of the rest of the world, is still a neglected, little-known entity in German-speaking countries. It was telling that his recital at the Wiener Konzerthaus last Sunday was his solo-recital premiere in Vienna.

On the upside, that way it was still possible to hear the undisputed grandmaster of the small form in the Konzerthaus’ gorgeous, ideally suited mid-size Mozart Hall (when they get too popular, economics eventually dictate a move to the Great Hall), where he performed a program ideally suited to show off his skills. A selection of all-French miniatures, from Couperin to Ravel by way of Debussy and Satie. It is especially in the baroque works, be it Bach, Rameau, Couperin, or Scarlatti, where Tharaud has always been an incomparable interpreter, combining incredible playfulness with wonderful pianism, spark and wit with an air of liberation – but without expressing the extreme wilfulness of, say, a Tzimon Barto or Anton Batagov. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) If “Les Barricades mysérieuses” was a study in fluidity and clever, almost disorienting agogics, yet as crystal clear as a mountain brook, his attack elsewhere was like that of a starved hen picking at a particularly fat worm. “Carillon de Cythère” rang brightly from the Steinway, with the left hand steady as the clapper of a bell while a carillon accompanied its big sister in the right hand. All that drollery and cheek was enough to cause involuntary smiles.

tic toc choc F.Couperin Alexandre Tharaud Harmonia Mundi

M.Ravel Piano Concertos Alexandre Tharaud ONF, Louis Langrée Erato

His Debussy, six preludes from Book 1, was at least as varied, from nervous frippery to thunderous exclamations, hectic here, pensive there. Everything – except the pastel-colored impressionist cliché. When the first notes of the second half rang out, a lady behind exclaimed excitedly to her friend: “I know that one!”. The friend replied: “Me, too!”. It was established: They knew that one – the popular and memorable first of Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies. They probably also had heard some of the Gnossiennes before, those semi-precious jewels that so charmingly straddle the realm of Muzak and genius, minimalism and all-out romanticism, lowbrow and highbrow. That’s exactly how Tharaud makes them sound, too, with his supreme care, phrasing, and ever-present dash of irreverence.

Ravel to bring the curtain down: First À la manière de Chabrier, a little throw-away curtain raiser for the Pavane, which is – at least as per the later, self-disapproving Ravel, also, but involuntarily, “à la manière de Chabrier”... though really just a sweetly charming treat. Twenty years later, Ravel was more in the mood for sweet poison than honey – and accordingly laced his Viennese-esque La Valse just so. Tharaud performed his own transcription (as had Ravel himself, Glenn Gould, and probably several others) and it was a hoot. A few bitter, dark notes early on showed that this wasn’t going to end well, waltz-wise, but as far as the recital was concerned, it brought the house down. Hands were flying about, lusty glissandosi slid up and down, crashing exclamation marks exploded, deliciously hesitant grace notes rang out. All that was missing at the end, for a flourish, was for Tharaud to smash the piano shut. Bach & Piaf as encores rewarded an excited, sizeable crowd, which will all turn out again when Tharaud comes back to town.

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Photo © Manuel Chemineau

Briefly Noted: Jupiter and Lea Desandre

Amazone, L. Desandre, Jupiter, T. Dunford (released on September 17, 2021) Erato 190295065805 | 75'37"

Last Sunday, the early music ensemble known as Jupiter made its maiden appearance in the Washington area, with a stupendous all-Vivaldi concert at the Phillips Collection with mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre. (Although unreviewed in Washington, the group's debut at Carnegie Hall on Thursday received a well-deserved laudatory review in the New York Times.) Founded in 2018 by the talented lutenist Thomas Dunford, this crackerjack group has already released two fine albums. Following their debut disc in 2019, an exciting selection of Vivaldi arias and instrumental pieces for Alpha, this program of music inspired by the theme of Amazons came out last fall on the Erato label. Their Phillips recital was a mixture of repertory from the two.

The Amazons, presented often as the stuff of legend in Greek mythology, were likely based on real warrior women among the Scythians, as shown by recent research. Yannis François helped mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre design the program, selecting examples from Amazon characters in French and Italian Baroque operas, many of which had never been recorded before. Percussionists Keyvan Chemirani and Marie-Ange Petit add a touch of exotic savagery to some of the tracks, including the opener, "Non posso far" from Provenzale's Lo schiavo di sua moglie. A wind machine and thunder sheet set the scene for the storm sinfonia from Georg Caspar Schürmann's Die getreue Alceste, and castanets make "Sdegni, furori barbari" from Pallavicino's L’Antiope into a fandango. The two arias from Vivaldi's Ercole sul Termodonte make as fine a climax as they did at the Phillips concert.

The arias are often paired in fast and slow combinations, like the two from Mitilene, regina delle Amazzoni by Giuseppe de Bottis, featuring both Desandre's rapid-fire melismatic technique and luscious legato line. In one of several memorable guest appearances, mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli soars in tandem with Desandre in the marvelous duet "Io piango / Io peno" from the Bottis opera. Soprano Véronique Gens joins with Desandre in a scene from Philidor's Les Amazones, and William Christie contributes a Passacaille in C by Louis Couperin, shadowed by Dunford on therbo. Virtuoso Jean Rondeau, who serves as the group's regular harpsichordist, improvises a postlude to one aria and performs the dance "L’Amazône" from François Couperin's Second Livre. A curious Thomas Dunford original, Amazones, rounds out the disc, although it is not listed in the booklet or provided with translations like the other vocal pieces.

Briefly Noted: Rousset Surveys the Nations

F. Couperin, Les Nations, Les Talens Lyriques, C. Rousset (released on January 25, 2019) Aparté AP197D | 109'01"

While Washington's concert presenters gave us a lethal overdose of Leonard Bernstein's music last year, the anniversary of a far more prolific and talented composer went largely unnoticed. Only Christophe Rousset, on an extraordinary visit to the Library of Congress last fall, offered a tribute to François Couperin, a composer distinguished from other members of his family by the epithet "The Great." With his ensemble Les Talens Lyriques, Rousset has also released a complete recording of the composer's fourth collection of chamber music for instruments, published as Les Nations in 1726, a few years before the composer's death.

Each suite in Les Nations is named for one of "the four political powers – French, Spanish, Imperial (the Holy Roman Empire), and the Savoy dynasty of Piedmont – that for many years influenced Couperin’s world," as esteemed French musicologist Catherine Cessac puts it in her savant booklet essay. The music, however, is largely reworked from earlier sources, as Couperin himself explained in the preface to the collection, making it more a survey of his own trajectory as a composer. The four suites all open with a long "sonade," a trio sonata in which Couperin gives homage to the Italian music of Corelli and Lully, "both of whose compositions I shall love as long as I live." An array of dazzling, shorter dance pieces in the French style fills out the rest of each suite, merging the true "nations" of the collection, France and Italy.

Rousset achieves a diverting range of sounds from his small ensemble -- two violins, two traverso flutes, two oboes, bassoon, viola da gamba, theorbo, and himself at the harpsichord -- covering the four parts (two treble lines, sustained bass instrument, and continuo). Varied instrumentation movement to movement yields any number of registrations from intimate to full. While all the playing is at the highest level, the pastel breathiness of the flutes is especially striking, as in the slender "Gavote" of the second suite, L'Espagnole, a compact, quiet minute of concentrated charm. Even the locale of the recording is apt: the Galerie dorée of the Hôtel de la Vrillière, once the residence of the Comte de Toulouse, second legitimated son of Louis XIV and his mistress, Madame de Montespan, and harpsichord student of François Couperin. Now it is the home of the Banque de France, which has opened the restored space to musicians and occasional public visits.

CD Review: Couperin's Lessons

Tom Huizenga and Charles T. Downey, CD reviews: Joyce DiDonato looks at war, peace and the Baroque
Washington Post, November 18

F. Couperin, Leçons de Ténèbres, L. Crowe, E. Watts, La Nuova Musica, D. Bates (released on September 9, 2016) HMU 807659 | 70'32"

Lucy Crowe’s first solo disc in 2011, a selection of Handel arias recorded with Harry Bicket and the English Concert, was such a stunning debut that it’s surprising that the British soprano had not recorded another solo album until now, and it’s an equally sensuous recording. This time, the focus is on François Couperin’s “Trois Leçons de Ténèbres,” the first three of the nine musical readings from the Book of Lamentations for the end of Holy Week.

Couperin composed these glorious pieces for the nuns of the Abbaye Royale de Longchamp, a convent founded with the dowry of the sister of King Louis IX, Isabelle de France, who lived there until her death. This famous monastic house in the Bois de Boulogne, just outside Paris, was destroyed, like so many, during the French Revolution. A racetrack now occupies the site.

Crowe is outstanding in this expressive music, especially as the soloist in the first lesson. Her top range is limpid, free of all strain and perfectly suited to the needs of the music. Breath support is effortless. Take, for instance, the melismatic extension of the final note of the first little section, which encapsulates the appeal of her voice in a mere 40 seconds.

In the opening “Aleph,” the first of the exotic vocalizes that accompany the text’s initial letters in Hebrew, preserved in the Latin translation, long melodic arcs swell delicately toward dissonance and then realign with the harmony in ornamented resolutions. The accompaniment is a pale watercolor wash underneath Crowe, provided by Jonathan Rees on viola da gamba, Alex McCartney on theorbo and David Bates on delicately registered organ.

Elizabeth Watts, the soloist in the second lesson, has a more full-bodied voice that carries some excessive weight toward the top and sometimes overpowers the accompanying forces. Although less pleasing on its own, her voice pushes and pulls in beautiful ways against Crowe’s lighter sound in the third Couperin lesson.

Two of Sébastien de Brossard’s trio sonatas are a pretty lagniappe, with two violins playing the same intertwining roles as the two sopranos in the “Leçons.” They complement La Nuova Musica’s performance of Brossard’s chromatically infused setting of the “Stabat Mater,” although in this piece the solos, by members of the chorus, vary in quality.

PREVIOUSLY:
Charles T. Downey, Briefly Noted: Lucy Crowe's Handel (Ionarts, August 29, 2012)

CD Review: Rediscovered Couperin Cantata

Charles T. Downey, CD reviews: Two rediscoveries of Brahms and Couperin
Washington Post, October 21

F. Couperin, Ariane consolée par Bacchus (inter alia), S. Degout, Les Talens Lyriques, C. Rousset (released on November 11, 2016) Aparte AP130 | 107'03"

The musicologist, harpsichordist and conductor Christophe Rousset has published a new book on the composer François Couperin (Actes Sud/Classica), and during his research, he made a singular discovery. In a manuscript collection of mostly anonymous French cantatas was an unknown cantata devoted to the story of Ariadne rescued by Dionysus on the island of Naxos. Many would not have given it a second look, but Rousset immediately thought of an unresolved mystery of Couperin’s oeuvre, a lost Ariadne cantata.

The manuscript in question had belonged to the Count of Toulouse, the son of Louis XIV and his mistress, Madame de Montespan, and the count’s music teacher was none other than Couperin. Rousset made the connection and substantiated the find, identifying elements of the composer’s musical signature in the work. He then assembled an all-star team to record it, including Christophe Coin on viola da gamba and baritone Stéphane Degout. Laura Mónica Pustilnik plays the lute, and Rousset himself leads from the harpsichord. As Rousset admits in his booklet essay, this cantata is far from a masterpiece, but the performance makes a strong argument for hearing it.

Also interesting are the two “apothéoses” by Couperin that Rousset includes on the disk: instrumental tributes to two deceased composers he admired: Lully and Corelli. Although the cantata was recorded in the church of Saint-Pierre in Paris, in sound that’s not exactly ravishing; these two pieces sound better as captured in the acoustic of the Les Dominicains de Haute-Alsace, a friary converted into a concert space. The “Plaintes” by Lully’s jealous contemporaries, here given to two delicate flutes, is one of many high points.

FURTHER THOUGHTS:
Rousset does not address one small problem, that the cantata he has found is titled Ariane consolée par Bacchus. In both the catalogue of Couperin's publisher, Etienne Roger, and the Parnasse Français by the chronicler Évrard Titon du Tillet, the missing cantata is called Ariane abandonnée par Thésée.

PREVIOUSLY:
Charles T. Downey, Christophe Rousset in concert (Ionarts, April 12, 2013)

Andreas Staier Waxes Saturnine

...pour passer la melancolie, A. Staier (Harmonia Mundi, 2013)

Early keyboard specialist Andreas Staier got his start as harpsichordist of the excellent historically informed performance ensemble Musica Antiqua Köln, sadly now defunct. Staier has released a series of excellent recordings on the Harmonia Mundi label, which we have followed with great interest at Ionarts. He always plays on interesting and historically appropriate instruments, whether in Mozart concerti or an especially delightful Beethoven Diabelli Variations. Although Staier has played somewhere in Washington some years ago, our first opportunity to review him in a live concert finally came on Wednesday evening, in a beautiful recital at the Library of Congress.

Staier played the same program as on his 2013 CD, ...pour passer la melancolie, devoted to the subject of melancholy as found in musical representations of the theme of Vanitas — down to the Courante of Clérambault's first book of Pièces de Clavecin, left off the program but definitely played. Thomas and Barbara Wolf brought their harpsichord built in 2005, modeled on a Nicolas Dumont instrument from 1707, loaned by the University of Maryland; happily, Staier did not play any part of the program on the Landowska Pleyel in the Library's collection. One obvious side of musical melancholy came in the rhapsodic freedom Staier took in the preludes and other free pieces, taken with a free sense of rubato that had the feel of improvisation. This was balanced by dance pieces in more strict rhythm, as well as fugues and other contrapuntal pieces that were more cerebral.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, Contemplating mortality, with pleasure, at harpsichord recital (Washington Post, March 10) James R. Oestreich, Andreas Staier on the Harpsichord, Coaxing Gravity and Gloom (New York Times, March 7)

Minor finger slips or places where the key did not quite make the key sound only served to underscore the contemplation of the fleeting nature of human endeavor, in music or anything else. As he did with the instrument on the recording, a reconstructed historical instrument, Staier brought out a charming range of sounds from the Wolf harpsichord, by combining stops in unexpected ways. A full registration in the prelude from the first book of d'Anglebert's Pièces de Clavecin set up the more mellow Tombeau de Mr. de Chambonnières that followed.

In all of these lament pieces, like Louis Couperin's Tombeau de Monsieur Blancrocher and Froberger's plaint on his own misfortunes during a trip to England, Staier used the hesitations and slow pacing to create a sense of ineffable nostalgia. Never did the concept of the Doctrine of the Affections, espoused by late Baroque theorists, seem so relevant as this music in this performance steeped a room in sympathetic gloom. Insufficient applause prevented Staier from playing an encore, which may possibly have been the only piece from the CD he did not play, Froberger's lament on the death of King Ferdinand IV.

Anne Sofie von Otter @ LoC

Sogno barocco, A. S. von Otter, S. Piau, S. Sundberg, Ensemble Cappella Mediterranea, L. García Alarcón (released on August 28, 2012) Naïve V 5286 | 71'

As noted yesterday, Anne Sofie von Otter is a versatile singer; but maybe not able to do everything. Her recital at the Library of Congress on Tuesday night, in a packed Coolidge Auditorium, had some high points, but it raised eyebrows, too, and not just mine. Her renditions of John Dowland's pearl-like lute songs came nowhere near the artful grace of Iestyn Davies in his Dowland recital, when he also partnered with lutenist Thomas Dunford last year. There were moments of vocal strain, probably related to being at the end of an American tour with this program, which exposes Otter's voice at the top in not always pleasant ways. The instrumentalists, Dunford on theorbo and Jonathan Cohen on harpsichord and organ, even got into the act, singing the part-song versions of some of the pieces, in a way that recalled Sting's excursion into Dowland territory a few years ago. This added a certain roughneck charm on Dowland's Fine knacks for ladies, with its wares-hawking text rendered in a street vendor's broad accent.

The later Baroque selections often suited von Otter's voice better, except for when some odd musical characterization drove her to excess, as in the shivering repetitions of Purcell's What Power Art Thou from King Arthur. The composer's more conventional pieces, like Music for a While and especially Venus's Fairest Isle, also from King Arthur, were lovely. At least a partial reason for von Otter's choice of repertory seemed to be based on the oddity of some pieces, beginning with Francesco Provenzale's cantata Squarciato appena havea, which interpolates Neapolitan street ballads, of extremely low, even ribald content, into an artful lament by the Queen of Sweden Maria Eleonora over her dead husband. Recorded on her Sogno barocco album, it is a truly weird piece, and von Otter brought out all its eccentricities, reaching for a tambourine and other percussion instruments to heighten the shift between learned and popular.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, Anne Sofie von Otter has chosen to be a singer who is expressive, not excessive (Washington Post, November 19) James R. Oestreich, Review: The Mezzo-Soprano Anne Sofie von Otter at the Frick Collection (New York Times, November 15) David Patrick Stearns, Anne Sofie von Otter at the Perelman: Warm, expansive, charismatic (Philadelphia Inquirer, November 13)

Dunford's solo contributions were some of the best parts of this concert, especially a heartfelt performance of Dowland's Lachrimae Pavan, the instrumental version of his wrenching song Flow My Tears. It reduced me to tears, an unspoken tribute to the victims of the Paris terror attacks the previous Friday, something that Dunford did not need to say aloud. His version of Robert de Visée's D Minor Chaconne was equally touching, a nice connection to the theme of ground bass tunes in the French part of the program -- including Michel Lambert's Vos mespris chaque jour, composed on the same bass pattern as Monteverdi's famous Pur ti miro from L'incoronazione di Poppea. While Cohen provided beautiful continuo playing, his solo pieces, composed for harpsichord by Couperin (Les barricades misterieuses) and Rameau (Les sauvages) became slightly odd with accompanying parts improvised by Dunford on theorbo.

One of the highlights was an austere rendition of Arvo Pärt's My Heart's in the Highlands, from 2000, which introduced a concluding section of recent popular songs (not reviewed). Pärt's original organ part was here split between Cohen playing the longer notes on the Baroque organ and Dunford taking the arpeggiated notes on theorbo. In a twelve-measure pattern, with four measures of the voice declaiming the text on a single note followed by eight bars of instruments alone, the piece has a mesmerizing quality and the combination of these three musicians created a sense of timeless stasis. Since my family's trip this past summer to see where our Downey ancestors came from in Scotland, this poem by Robert Burns and this musical setting have greater meaning for me.

The Library of Congress's 90th anniversary season continues this evening with a concert by Apollo's Fire, the Baroque ensemble based in Cleveland, and soprano Amanda Forsythe (November 19, 8 pm).

Alexandre Tharaud's Crushing Fortissimo Power

Bach / Rameau / Couperin, A. Tharaud (3-CD re-release, Harmonia Mundi) Scarlatti, A. Tharaud (Erato, 2011)

Alexandre Tharaud continues to surprise me. At his latest recital here, at the Phillips Collection on Sunday afternoon, it was not surprising to hear him play jewel-like Couperin (his opening set) or a delightful Scarlatti sonata as an encore (the guitar-like K. 141). The bulk of the program, though, showed the French pianist going in new directions, with composers not previously associated with him, at least by these ears.

Even in the set of eight Couperin pieces, drawn from all over the place, Tharaud seemed to be questing after new sounds and approaches, adding many changes and embellishments on repeats, not afraid to use the pedals copiously, strongly differentiating polyphonic voices, even hammering out some accents for percussive effect. His Les calotines clicked and clacked, as if with mechanical sounds, and he stretched Les rozeaux and the gorgeous Les barricades mistérieuses with taffy-like rubato. The pairing of Les ombres errantes and La triomphante was played for maximal contrast, delicate and ultra-slow for the former, trumpeted motifs bustling with agitation for the latter. After the clanging, sonorous bells of Le Carillon de Cythère (an effect easier to produce on the modern piano than on the harpsichord), the rhythmic infusion of Le tic-toc-choc, now synonymous with Tharaud, was played with more force than in his recording (or his 2008 recital at the French Embassy).

Mozart's A major sonata (K. 331) followed, the variations on its gentle lullaby theme given accented wrong-note grace notes and expertly voiced hand crossings. The menuetto was organized around its big orchestral unison motif, which set off more fast and delicate music, the trio a little slower and warmer in tone. Tharaud took the piece's famous finale, Alla Turca, at a perfect Allegretto tempo, not too fast, which allowed him to make strongly marked dynamic contrasts and apply a hard-biting touch in the loud Janissary sections, enlivened by percussive attacks. Tharaud's last performance of Schubert, the Moments musicaux at his 2010 recital at the Library of Congress with Jean-Guihen Queyras, was somewhat disappointing. Here he dove into that composer's set of sixteen German dances, D. 783, with much more variety of interpretation, from big and gutsy to forlorn and enigmatic, technically solid in the many challenges (parallel thirds, filigree rising scales, and so on) but with that free, lovely sense of rubato applied in the slow pieces.

Other Reviews: Robert Battey, A limited program and an inscrutable pianist at the Phillips (Washington Post, January 27)

The program was designed as a long crescendo toward the final piece, Beethoven's sonata in A-flat major, op. 110, or really toward that sonata's finale. Tharaud took the first movement at a slow, expressive tempo, emphasizing the music's delicate side and telling a compelling story with it through gradations of color in sound. The middle movement, marked Allegro molto, was taken at a rather slow speed, startling at first and perhaps not right for the joking quotations of folk songs (snatches of Unsa Kätz häd Katzln ghabt, or 'Our cat has had kittens', and Ich bin lüderlich, du bist lüderlich, or 'I'm a slob, you're a slob'), but again with the payoff of being able to make maximal dynamic contrasts and to exaggerate sforzando attacks, as well as giving the piece a more legato feel than it usually has. The Klagender Gesang section was steeped in tragic gloom, through which the fugue subject pierced like a ray of sunshine. The tempo of the fugue was perfect, floating weightlessly, allowing all the voices to be delineated cleanly, even in the stretto sections, and making possible a furious cranking up of tempo as the piece rocketed to its conclusion. One of the remarks I made about Tharaud's 2012 recital at the French Embassy was that "crushing fortissimo power is the only weapon missing from [his] arsenal." The exultant hammered chords at the conclusion of the Beethoven made clear that this reservation was no longer justified.

The next recital not to be missed at the Phillips Collection will feature violinist Isabelle Faust and pianist Alexander Melnikov (February 8).

Mitzi Meyerson at LoC

This article is an Ionarts exclusive.

François Couperin: Les Ombres Errantes, M. Meyerson (2005) Richard Jones, Sets of Lessons for the Harpsichord, M. Meyerson (2010) [REVIEW] R. Jones, Chamber Airs for a Violin (and Thorough Bass), K.-M. Kentala, L. Pulakka, M. Meyerson (2012) [REVIEW]

American harpsichordist Mitzi Meyerson is, in more ways than one, the successor of Wanda Landowska, the pioneer of the harpsichord revival. Meyerson holds a professorship of harpsichord and fortepiano at the Universität der Künste in Berlin, the first position of its kind when it was created for Landowska. As Meyerson showed at a Saturday afternoon recital at the Library of Congress, she is also the player to tame the Pleyel harpsichord-hybrid constructed to Landowska's specifications, now in the Library's collection. Around the time of Meyerson's 2012 recital, I spent some time speaking to her and watching her teach, as part of a feature I wrote for the Washington Post. Last week, as she prepared for this weekend's recital, we spoke about her assessment of the Landowska Pleyel and the program she had put together for this recital.

Meyerson told me that she spent a couple days just sizing up the Pleyel. “It was like an animal you have never encountered before,” she said with a laugh. “You don’t know whether to make eye contact. If you put out your hand, you are not sure how it will react.” The instrument’s registrations -- a 4’, 8’, and a decidedly un-harpsichord-like 16’, plus a very pretty buff stop and a nasal (“it sounds like the harpsichord has a cold”) -- are controlled by a series of pedals. “Some of them are on when you push them down and lock them to one side, but not all of them. Some of them are engaged when the pedal is up.” Landowska was known to play the instrument wearing hand-sewn velvet slippers. Meyerson realized that to control the pedals, especially mid-performance, she needed to be able to grasp the pedals with her toes. She could not do that while wearing shoes, so she decided to play barefoot. “I was hoping that Landowska’s slippers might be in the collection of the Library of Congress,” she told me, with a twinkle in her eye. “Then I could see what it was like to be in her shoes.”

Meyerson ultimately decided to use the Pleyel for two-thirds of her concert program. It was especially suited to the Bach pieces, where she could use the 16’ stop to give a sense of the tutti sound in a more orchestral texture. This put the Pleyel in the best possible light right from the start, Bach's harpsichord adaptation of a Vivaldi violin concerto (D major, BWV 972), with all sorts of different manual and registration shifts to create different combinations of sounds. The Bach piece on the second half was the BWV 998 Prelude, Fugue, and Allegro, a late work that features Bach's most thoroughly contrapuntal side -- analyzing the complexities of the fugue, Meyerson described it as "like one of those Chinese boxes with a secret drawer." The Pleyel's aptness for creating contrasts between solo and ensemble textures worked in two sets of Purcell grounds, as well, including one in E minor, added to the second half to take advantage of the sound of the buff stop, which featured the song Here the Deities Approve (a beautiful poem by Christopher Fishburn, which Meyerson recited from memory).

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Briefly Noted: Tharaud's Encores

Autograph (Encores), A. Tharaud (released on November 19, 2013)

Last week, I mentioned Alexandre Tharaud's special concert residency at the Cité de la Musique this week. The French pianist's new CD, Autograph, arrived in the mail recently, and the official release date is today. In most cases, such a recording of favorite encores is nothing more than the self-indulgence of a star musician. As usual, even under those circumstances, Tharaud delivers something that is instead thoughtful and mostly devoid of overly familiar chestnuts (a Rachmaninoff prelude, op. 3/2, and Chopin's Minute Waltz aside). There are a couple favorites from Tharaud's past, like Rameau's Les Sauvages, Couperin's Le Tic-Toc-Choc, and a Scarlatti sonata (K. 141): Tharaud has described the disc as a sort of self-portrait through the lens of his own discography. Many pieces, perhaps too many, are of the dreamy, sugary melodic variety -- Tchaikovsky's op. 19/4 nocturne, Fauré's Romance sans paroles, Sibelius's Valse triste, Satie's third Gymnopédie, Poulenc's Mélancolie, Mompou's El Lago -- but this sort of piece is so squarely in Tharaud's wheelhouse that it is hard to complain about their inclusion. The surprises are the best part -- the frantic celebration of Grieg's Wedding Day at Troldhaugen, the homesickness of Adios a Cuba by Ignacio Cervantes, the prancing dissonance of Oscar Strasnoy's Tourbillon -- and, of course, there is Tharaud's crisp and joyous Bach, which bookends the disc. The only thing one misses is hinted at in this radio interview (en français): Tharaud loves to improvise, which is another reason he thinks that having a piano in his apartment would put him at risk of doing nothing but playing for his own own amusement. A Tharaud improvisation would have been just the thing to give the final punch to this pleasing little disc.

Christophe Rousset, Musical Journeys

Charles T. Downey, Christophe Rousset on the harpsichord
Washington Post, April 15, 2013

J.-P. Rameau, Les Indes Galantes, C. Rousset (Naïve, 2009)

In the right hands, the harpsichord can be a mesmerizing instrument. Christophe Rousset, in two concerts over the weekend, took listeners on unforgettable musical journeys: through two centuries of French music for the harpsichord, through musical depictions of world cultures, through the portal of life and death.

At La Maison Française on Friday night, which happened to be Rousset’s birthday, the French harpsichordist began with music of the 17th century, in a concert called “In Praise of Shadows.” The shades of the giants of the French harpsichord school were headed by a stately, pensive pavane by Jacques Champion de Chambonnières. The three suites that filled out the program, played without intermission, each ended with a “tombeau,” a musical tribute by one composer to another composer who has just died, like a sculpted portrait placed upon a tomb. To the dances of Johann Jakob Froberger’s 19th suite, Rousset appended Froberger’s tombeau for the lutenist Charles Fleury de Blancrocher. This cerebral piece ended with a crashing minor scale down the bass keys, a reference to Blancrocher’s death after falling down a flight of stairs, where he died in the arms of his best friend, Froberger. [Continue reading]

Christophe Rousset, harpsichord
La Maison Française (April 12)
Library of Congress (April 13)
[See my preview article]

Christophe Rousset in Concert

Froberger, Suites de clavecin, C. Rousset (Naïve, 2010) L. Couperin, Suites de Clavecin, C. Rousset (Aparte, 2010) J.-P. Rameau, Les Indes Galantes, C. Rousset (Naïve, 2009)

We are big fans of the harpsichord playing of Christophe Rousset around here. The French harpsichordist and conductor has a vast discography to his name, with discs of music by a startling range of composers, some largely unknown, most of them excellent. As much as we love his playing and have savored so many of his recordings, we have yet to review him in concert, with only a near-miss when he played on the Estate Musicale Chigiana during my summer in Siena a few years ago. That is all about to change, as Christophe Rousset will play two concerts in Washington this weekend: first at La Maison Française this evening (April 12, 7:30 pm) and tomorrow afternoon at the Library of Congress (April 13, 2 pm), with two completely different programs. At the French Embassy Rousset offers a concert called Éloge de l’ombre (In Praise of Shadows), which opens with a pavane by Jacques Champion de Chambonnières (c. 1601-1672), followed by three suites that all end in a tombeau (a tribute by one composer to another, dead composer), by Johann Jakob Froberger (1616-1667), Louis Couperin (c. 1626-1661), and Jean-Henry d'Anglebert (1628-1691), the last one ending with a tombeau to Chambonnières. At the Library of Congress, Rousset plays a program he describes as a "keyboard travelogue," with dances and other pieces by François Couperin (1668-1733) and Jean-Philippe Rameau, all representing exotic locations and nationalities, "from Peru to China and the Far East."

Rousset recorded some of these pieces a while ago, but at left are a few of the recent recordings that include music to be featured on his Washington concerts. Rousset will play a Froberger suite from his earlier CD of that composer's music, but he has recently released a disc of more suites from Froberger's extensive output. Froberger was from Stuttgart, but because he worked much of his career at the imperial court in Vienna, musicologist Guido Adler featured his music prominently in the collection of music he edited, Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österrreich. His distillation of the French style brisé kind of dances into a suite -- Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, [Optional], Gigue (although Froberger did not always have all of these slots, or have them in this order) -- had a major influence on subsequent composers in German-speaking countries. One part of the appeal of Rousset's recordings is that he has made them on a series of interesting historical instruments -- on the Froberger disc and others, instruments now in the museum of the Cité de la Musique in Paris (in this case, a 1652 Couchet harpsichord here). The result is playing that is not only pleasing, musical, diverting, and affecting -- but with lessons to be learned by matching historical music to an instrument like that for which it was likely destined. The 12th suite is especially moving, with the first movement given over to a lament on the death of Ferdinand IV (eldest son of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III), who died of smallpox in his 20s. At the end of the lament, Froberger has the right hand rise up the keyboard in a C major scale, ending at the highest C, where he drew a bunch of heavenly clouds in the manuscript.

The harpsichord music of Louis Couperin, the uncle of François Couperin who was mentored by Chambonnières himself, is becoming more familiar to audiences, heard recently in concerts by Blandine Rannou and Mitzi Meyerson, for example. At La Maison Française, Rousset will play this composer's F major suite, and his recorded performance of the work is embedded below. The "travelogue" program at the Library of Congress will conclude with a section of one of the strangest pieces in the Baroque repertoire, the fourth suite from Rameau's own transcription of the music from his own opera-ballet Les Indes Galantes. This arrangement has been recorded before, but some of the pieces in the fourth suite appear impossible to play on the harpsichord -- especially the Ritournelle, written on three staves, and the Adoration au Soleil (Adoration of the Sun), written on four staves. Rousset plays everything, except one tiny introductory piece, on a mostly unaltered 1761 Jean-Henri Hemsch harpsichord.

Davitt Moroney at the Smithsonian

Byrd, Complete Music for Keyboard, D. Moroney (2010) Le Clavecin Français: Marchand and Clérambault, D. Moroney (2007)

On Sunday night, Davitt Moroney brought the series of concerts leading up to the Westfield Center International Harpsichord Competition to its close. In the previous three recitals, by Arthur Haas, Mitzi Meyerson, and Charlotte Mattax Moersch, we had heard only two harpsichords, both large, double-manual instruments from the 18th century. Moroney, an English-born harpsichordist who now teaches at the University of California at Berkeley, played on all four of the historical instruments from the Smithsonian collection during his recital at the National Museum of American History. The program was a survey of music by English and French composers, but Moroney did not necessarily choose the instrument on which he played each selection according to the date of the instrument or the nationality of the instrument builder. As he explained it, in droll and charming introductions to each piece, the most important thing one learns from playing on historical instruments is that the instrument dictates some of the decisions in how to approach music played on it, rather than the other way around.

Thus he began with Henry Purcell's D major suite, published posthumously by the composer's wife, on a little virginal built by Andreas Ruckers (Antwerp, 1620). Last week, in preparation for my preview article on the competition for the Washington Post, Kenneth Slowik gave me a quick introduction to these precious historical instruments, including the two virginals in the collection. One of these virginals has the peculiar feature, not uncommon in early keyboard instruments, of cleft chromatic keys -- that is, the G♯ and A♭ are tuned to different frequencies, and the player activates them by playing on the upper or lower part of the key, which is split in two. (There are examples of this in early organ pedal boards, too.) The virginal that Moroney played does not have that feature, but it was designed for a quinte tuning, meaning that it sounds a fifth higher than the keyboard indicates. The instrument, played with the musician standing up, has a beautiful, fragile, slightly tinny sound, with a limited compass on the keyboard, to which Purcell's little suite was well suited.

Thomas Wolf, the Washington-area harpsichord builder who has been at all the concerts -- his wife, Barbara, an expert in her own accord, has been tuning all the instruments used for the concerts and competition -- has been telling me some wonderful stories about what instrument builders go through to keep these instruments in shape. The Ruckers has apparently not been played in a concert for a few years, and it had to be re-quilled for this event: the old mechanism uses quills, generally from a crow or similarly sized bird, to pluck the strings. These quills need to be replaced periodically, which causes some issues in how to acquire the wings of recently killed crows. After encountering some problems in this area, Wolf got into touch with the Texas Crow Patrol, which helps control the crow population in the agricultural fields of Texas. As it turns out, Wolf's contact at that organization has a son who is an organist.

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Charlotte Mattax Moersch at the Smithsonian

Pierre Fevrier, Pièces de Clavecin, C. Mattax Moersch (2011) W. F. Bach, Keyboard Sonatas, C. Mattax Moersch (1997)

The tour of accomplished harpsichordists playing on historical instruments in the Smithsonian's Hall of Musical Instruments continued on Saturday night, at the National Museum of American History. After recitals by Arthur Haas and Mitzi Meyerson last weekend, it was time to hear Charlotte Mattax Moersch, a prize-winner at the Paris and Bruges harpsichord competitions who has made many recordings and now teaches at the University of Illinois. The series of four concerts, which concluded on Sunday night, was in preparation for this week's Westfield Center International Harpsichord Academy and Competition, which begins today at the Clarice Smith Center in College Park. Both of last weekend's performers played on the 1760 Benoist Stehlin harpsichord, which Mattax Moersch used for her French first half, choosing the 1745 harpsichord built by Johann Daniel Dulcken in Antwerp for her second half of music by J. S. Bach.

Mattax Moersch has excellent hands, and the finesse with which she approached some complicated and detailed music was always striking. She used the prelude of the opening Troisième Suite by Jean-Henri d'Anglebert (1635-1692) to make an introspective exploration of the Stehlin's range of sounds, taking time with the unusual harmonic changes, adding some registration changes on repeats of some sections in the dances. Neither the gigue nor the courante was overly fast, but it was all clean and lilting, while the Sarabande, played with a full, even heavy registration and interpretative approach, was bent and tweaked almost out of its meter, with lovely embellishments on the repeats. The suite's concluding Tombeau, honoring M. de Chambonnières, a harpsichordist who died in 1672, took advantage of the Stehlin's softer side, a thoughtful rumination that sometimes got a little lost in itself. It was followed by another welcome chance to hear the music of Armand-Louis Couperin, some flashy selections from his Pièces de Clavecin: a playful, flirtatious L'Arlequine with a tart, shiny flavor, an enigmatic La Chéron, and a fancy-fingered La Blanchet, named for the Parisian harpsichord builder whose daughter Armand-Louis married.

The Dulcken instrument, brighter and chirpier, was a good match for the intricacies of the Bach selections, beginning with Bach's D minor sonata (D. 964, transcribed from a violin sonata). The pensive Adagio movement did not have much to notice but Mattax Moersch added a pleasing manual shift effect in the Allegro, that immaculate touch making for almost no stray notes. The recital reached its apogee with the challenges of Bach's D major partita, opening with its brilliant overture, especially in the fast contrapuntal part, taken at a fiery tempo. The rhythmic detours of the Allemande rolled freely, like the opening up of the melodic ideas they are supposed to be, and the Courante and Gigue were sprightly, the Menuet bouncy. She put the Aria after the Sarabande, keeping the Aria airy and light and again twisting the Sarabande around too many corners and yet cutting short that hanging half note in the strange opening gesture, one of the interpretative tangles of this odd little movement. The only noticeable slips were in the repeats of both sections of the Gigue, which at the end of the concert, she probably should have omitted anyway. An Adagio by Belgian composer Joseph-Hector Fiocco (1703-1741) was offered as an encore, chosen, Mattax Moersch said, to show off the sound qualities of the Dulcken harpsichord.

Mitzi Meyerson at the Smithsonian

This review is an Ionarts exclusive.

François Couperin: Les Ombres Errantes, M. Meyerson (2005) Richard Jones, Sets of Lessons for the Harpsichord, M. Meyerson (2010)

The introductory weekend of the Westfield Center International Harpsichord Competition and Academy, which began on Saturday night with a recital by juror Arthur Haas, continued on Sunday night. The same precious historical instrument from the Smithsonian collection (Benoist Stehlin, 1760) was put at the disposal of American-born harpsichordist Mitzi Meyerson, who is serving the competition not as a juror but as instructor of the Academy this week and as a sort of sounding board for the competitors after the first round, available to offer her thoughts on the performances of winners or those eliminated. This is a natural role for Meyerson, who holds the professorship of harpsichord and fortepiano at the Universität der Künste in Berlin, the first position of its kind when it was created for Wanda Landowska. Her excellent program in the Hall of Musical Instruments at the National Museum of American History was devoted to three scions of the Couperin dynasty in France, which ended with Céleste-Thérèse Couperin, who "was obliged to resign" from a post as organist "following complaints from parishioners about the poor quality of her playing" (according to Nigel Simeone) and had to sell the collection of family portraits before her death in 1860.

What made this concert stand out above the one by Haas the previous evening was the much greater degree of surety and polish in the execution, but also the clarity of thought behind the interpretation, revealed also in Meyerson's droll and informative comments about the music. The unmeasured prelude that opened the D minor suite by Louis Couperin (1626-1661) had exactly the improvisatory feel that Meyerson said she wanted to capture, and in all of the dances, she used a careful regulation of articulation to draw out voicings, with brilliant trills and a perky rhythmic vitality to the Courantes and the Gavotte. In the Sarabande, an unusual piece, she took some delicious rhythmic liberties, to couch the harmonies carefully, and although she had not done much with registration changes for most of the piece, she used the Stehlin's different sounds to give the Chaconne some shape.

Pride of place went to François Couperin (1668-1733), known as "le Grand" for his primacy of fame in the family. Here the fleetness of Meyerson's fingers was most pronounced, in the extravagant ornamentation added to the repeats of the various movements, some of them in the written-out right-hand embellishments that Couperin included in the score. The two sarabandes had a nice contrast, affectionate but not overly sentimental in "Les Sentiments" and a full-registered gravity in "La Majestueuse." The use of the instrument's registration possibilities increased here and in the closing selections by Armand-Louis Couperin (1727-1789), with some very interesting sounds created. After the concert, Meyerson explained one of the unusual registrations she had used, which was to have only one hand play on couple the peau de buffle buff (soft stop) to the upper manual, with oddly ethereal results. The later pieces had a more dramatic bent, which Meyerson brought out in little operatic vignettes. Rather than a Couperin showpiece for an encore -- I was hoping for Le Tic-Toc-Choc ou Les Maillotins -- Meyerson offered a meaty performance of Forqueray's La Couperin.

Two more concerts by members of the Westfield Competition jury are scheduled for this weekend, featuring Charlotte Mattax Moersch (August 11) and Davitt Moroney (August 12). Both will be held at the National Museum of American History, starting at 7:30 pm.

Angela Hewitt: Art of Fugue

Bach, Keyboard Works (15 CDs), A. Hewitt Rameau, Keyboard Suites, A. Hewitt Couperin, Keyboard Music, Vol. 2, A. Hewitt

This review is an Ionarts exclusive. This article has been corrected since publication.

When Angela Hewitt comes to the area, Ionarts is there -- in 2009, 2006, and 2003. Right on schedule, the Canadian pianist, an Ionarts favorite in Bach and other Baroque music, came to Baltimore's Shriver Hall on Sunday afternoon. We are lucky, as it turns out, that she made it: after a performance in Nashville in early March, Hewitt underwent some emergency surgery, a situation that she naturally prefers to keep private but that was scary enough for her to comment on in a recent statement on her Web site. Her recovery, fairly arduous, forced her to cancel recitals in Copenhagen, Birmingham, and Berlin, and concerto appearances in Brussels and Ankara, after which she returned to her planned schedule in Dublin on March 30. She made no mention of her ordeal on Sunday, and it reportedly had nothing to do with a change in the programming of this recital, with Rameau (alas) replaced by some 19th-century French music (the confusion over the program announced was due to a miscommunication). My disappointment at the lost of the Rameau suite is not out of disrespect for Fauré or Ravel, but because my chances to hear Rameau's keyboard music live are so depressingly rare.

A François Couperin set was limited to four selections from the composer's Sixième Ordre, arranged in a sort of mini-suite. These pieces were impeccable in the way one expects of Hewitt: crisp ornaments, gorgeously shaped phrasing, variation of dynamics and articulation. Putting the lie to the sometimes repeated assumption that all Baroque music sounds the same, Hewitt drew a different character from each movement, with a languid Les Langueurs (so much made of so little on the page), an understated way with the famous Les Barricades Misterieuses, and a rug-cutting Le Moucheron -- a gnat dancing a jig. Bach's fifth French suite (G major, BWV 816) was likewise a marvel, with charming embellishments adorning the repeats, even in the spirited, bouncy Gigue. The Sarabande was exquisitely turned, perhaps wallowing just a bit too much in the details, but the buoyant Gavotte, light with the sense of dancers' leaps on the strong beats, was about as perfect as it could be.

After her surgery, Hewitt has written that she did not touch the piano for over a week, coming back to practicing eventually by taking her first look at the score of The Art of the Fugue, which is planned for performances at Royal Festival Hall next season. We had a sneak preview of her thoughts about the piece because she played the first four contrapunctus movements, and my advance response is that it is going to be very good indeed. In brief comments, she admitted that she thought that the sections of this complicated piece would all sound the same. With that in mind, she quickly dispelled that assumption with four different styles of performance in these movements: a jaunty no. 2; a tortured, wandering no. 3; a whimsical no. 4 dotted with the little two-note motif she identified, quite convincingly, as a cuckoo's call.

The rest of the program was given over to Hewitt's recent fascination with 19th-century French music, which will be the subject of the disc she plans to record in August. She made Fauré's Thème et Variations in C-sharp minor, op. 73, a rather odd and rambling piece, into something delectable, especially the slow, delicate inner variations. Even better, because it is stronger music, was Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin, an evocation of the French Baroque to which Hewitt applied her whole bag of Baroque tricks. The Prélude was fleet, vanishing in a puff of sound, and she did nothing to exaggerate the delicious, extravagant harmonies of the odd Forlane, thinking first of the sense of the dance. A feisty Rigaudon and a cool, unemotional Minuet led to an athletic Toccata that nevertheless revealed a few unexpected slips in Hewitt's technique. One is so used to everything being just so and in place with Hewitt's playing, but she is not the sort of power player who can flash her way through a piece like this on nothing but adrenaline. (Lingering after-effects of her surgery could also be an issue.) With the encore, Debussy's omnipresent Clair de lune, from the Suite Bergamasque, we were back in the realm of the expertly carved miniature, which makes the prospect of a Hewitt Debussy disc, planned for release sometime in the fall, a palatable one.

Next season's series of concerts at Shriver Hall will feature the Brentano Quartet (October 14), Europa Galante and Fabio Biondi (November 4), pianists Piotr Anderszewski (December 2) and Marc-André Hamelin (January 27), mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená and pianist Yefim Bronfman (February 17), violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg (March 3), violinist Alina Ibragimova with pianist Cédric Tiberghien (March 16), the Pavel Haas Quartet (April 7), and cellist Alban Gerhardt with pianist Cecile Licad (May 5).