In Brief: Summer Festival Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to online audio, online video, and other good things in Blogville and Beyond. (After clicking to an audio or video stream, press the "Play" button to start the broadcast.)

• You can listen to a rare performance of Jules Massenet's Thérèse (1907), from the Festival de Radio France Montpellier-Languedoc Roussillon, with Johann Christoph Vogel's Démophon (1788) as an appetizer. [France Musique]


• The Verbier Festival gets under way this week: coming up are performances by Elisabeth Leonskaja, Alexandre Tharaud, Denis Matsuev, and more. [Medici.tv]


• Jérémie Rhorer leads violinist Julien Chauvin and Le Cercle de l’Harmonie in an all-Mozart concert, from the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence. [France Musique]


• William Christie leads Les Arts Florissants in Marc-Antoine Charpentier's opera David et Jonathas, at the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence. [France Musique]


• Paul Agnew, in his new role as conductor, leads Les Arts Florissants in excerpts from five Baroque operas, also at the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence. [France Musique]


• Don't forget that it is also time from the Proms -- listen to the latest performances from the Royal Albert Hall in London. [BBC Proms]


• Listen to a recital by pianist Luka Geniusas, winner of the Second Prize at the 2010 Chopin Competition in Warsaw. Yes, he plays Chopin but also music of Anton Reicha, Hindemith, and Alexey Sergunin (b. 1988). [France Musique]


• From the Styriarte Festival, the Zemlinsky Quartet performs music by Dvořák. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Lutenist Thomas Dunford plays music of John Dowland and contemporary composer Jules Matton (b. 1988), from the Festival de Radio France Montpellier-Languedoc Roussillon. [France Musique]


• Also from the Styriarte Festival, the Arnold Schoenberg Chor performs sacred music by J. S. Bach and sons. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Finally, congratulations to Yekwon Sunwoo, who weathered this year's Kapell Competition to take First Prize, followed by Jin Uk Kim (Second Prize), and Steven Lin (Third Prize). [2012 William Capell International Piano Festival]

Richard Egarr: 'History is fun'

J. S. Bach, Das wohltemperierte Clavier, Book 1, R. Egarr (2007) Mozart, Fantasias and Rondos, R. Egarr (2006) [REVIEW]

On the international jury for the 2012 William Kapell International Piano Competition is an unexpected member, Richard Egarr. The British historically informed performance (HIP) specialist is known for his careful scholarship, pursuit of rare historical instruments (including surviving instruments once played by important composers or performers), and facility in playing them -- organ, harpsichord, pianoforte, and others. (This was his third appearance at the Clarice Smith Center, and we have heard them all.) Still it was surprising to see his name on the jury of a major piano competition, a realm where the pianos are grand and the music of Bach is regarded as the ancient limit of music history. In the competition’s preliminary round, most competitors played a piece from the 18th century, and there was plenty of evidence in the playing that young musicians, even those gearing up for major competitions, are aware of the influence of the HIP movement and listen to recordings made on original instruments. This has appeared true to me for some time, but Egarr’s presence on the jury seemed to formalize it.

At the end of the semifinal round, Egarr agreed to give a recital-seminar on a fortepiano, on Thursday night. If the conservatory world is coming to grips with the HIP movement -- jury chairman Santiago Rodriguez was in the audience -- listeners are not always in step. More than one Kapell regular who has attended almost every performance told me that they had no interest in hearing a pianoforte, and indeed the audience in the small recital was the sparsest it has been for any of these feature recitals. This was doubly sad, because grand piano aficionados should have their universes expanded beyond the historical continuum between Mozart and Rachmaninoff, and because Egarr, who spoke with considerable charm about the sort of historical information he uses to guide him in his performances (touching on types of instruments used by the composers he was playing, temperament and tuning -- including the infamous affair of the squiggle -- articulation, embellishment), presented the HIP process knowledgeably but without any hint of snobbish orthodoxy.

If he had been obsessed with historical correctness, Egarr observed, he would have had to use at least four different instruments, but he played on only one, a Thomas and Barbara Wolf fortepiano, modeled on a Johann Schantz instrument from Austria. In fact, keyboard technology was advancing at a dizzying pace in the 18th and 19th centuries -- Egarr likened it to advances in computer technology today -- and most composers had access over their lifetimes to several different instruments, and most would have been happy to perform music on any of them and take advantage of whatever advances in sound and control they could. Egarr began with the first prelude and fugue from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, explaining that Bach wrote at one point that he often played the now-famous prelude by leaving out the second half of each measure, that is, playing only one iteration of each arpeggiated chord. Egarr also played the fugue’s subject with a straight rhythm (eighth-note followed by two sixteenths, instead of the dotted pattern usually heard). This, he explained, was what manuscript evidence showed was the rhythm first written down: much later, someone carefully went through the manuscript adding dots and extra beams.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, Richard Egarr demonstrates pianoforte’s elegance with music and musings at Clarice Smith Center (Washington Post, July 21)

In demonstrating the instrument, which had a pedal to control the damper mechanism and a moderator pedal (which vastly softens the possible attack on the string), Egarr explained how knowledge of the instruments composers knew can help performers understand some of the effects they were going for in their music. This came across in two Mozart pieces, the K. 511 rondo and K. 475 fantasia (the former from Egarr's fine Mozart recording), and in the prodigious decorations of the first movement, a major-minor double variation set, of Haydn's G major sonata (Hob. XVI:40). The most interesting discovery of the program, however, was two pieces by Jan Ladislav Dussek, a Czech forerunner of the Romantic style who died 200 years ago this past March. The Sufferings of the Queen of France, a dramatic homage to his one-time patron, Marie Antoinette, composed in 1793, showed the sharp contrasts of loud and soft and harmonic twists we more usually associate with Beethoven. The Fantasia and Fugue in F Minor was even more harmonically complex and showed Dussek to be perhaps the most accomplished contrapuntist of his age. In all, Egarr played with remarkable facility in his fingers, achieving a broad range of color and sound from the much smaller instrument.

Jeremy Denk and Competitions

Ligeti, Études pour piano / Beethoven, Sonata (op. 111), J. Denk (released on May 15, 2012) Nonesuch 530562 | 67'

When one thinks of pianists who might be invited to play at a piano competition, the name of Jeremy Denk does not leap to mind. Not that he is not a fine musician, with an eclectic sense of programming and a daring interpretative approach, but perhaps because of those things. Denk has not risen to prominence by winning a major competition. In fact, he does not think much of competitions, as he wrote in a tongue-in-cheek response to a review of another pianist in the New York Times in 2008. Comparing the virtues of Apollo and Dionysus, as a way to deconstruct the opposition of "Apollonian" and "Dionysian" as ways to describe a musician's style, he wrote about Apollo's competition with Marsyas, which Apollo rigged, then won, and then took revenge by flaying Marsyas alive and displaying his inside-out skin on a tree:

Apollo was among the first to propose a music competition. That alone would be the darkest imaginable mark on his record, an utterly unforgivable sin. But then, after he wins by subterfuge—like a jerk—he is not particularly gracious in victory. Whereas: Dionysus never even gets involved in a music contest to begin with… In my opinion, Dionysus 2, Apollo 0.

Yet there was Jeremy Denk on Wednesday night at the Clarice Smith Center, invited to play a high-profile recital as part of the William Kapell International Piano Competition and Festival. I quote this humorous passage not because I think that Denk agreed to play this recital as a way to thumb his nose at the idea of competitions, but because the example of Denk's unusual career is a reminder to all of us, including the competitors, that competitions do not always bring out the best in us.

Denk chose to play something from his new CD, on the Nonesuch label (you can listen here), that also raised an eyebrow, most of the first two books of György Ligeti's Études pour piano, concluding, as he did on the recording, with no. 13, "L'escalier du diable." The etude, of course, is the symbol of the process of technical perfection that is the goal of competition pianists, something that Ligeti pokes fun at, as Denk observes in his entertaining liner notes, with all sorts of tricks, like keys being held down so that a chromatic scale exercise is forced to stumble and stutter and a passage in octaves with wrong notes built in, both heard in the third etude ("Touches bloquées"). Ligeti, who died in 2006, is one of the giants of the later 20th century, a composer who transcended the rigid boundaries of modernist orthodoxies, and the etudes are among his greatest achievements. What most impresses me about Ligeti's approach to the piano in these pieces is that he draws from the instrument a prismatic range of sounds and ideas without resorting to any Cagean tricks. There are no bells and whistles in the Ligeti etudes -- no objects disrupting the strings, no monkey business under the lid, no thumping on the body -- all sound is made through the keys, which is how the instrument was meant to function.

Other Reviews: Robert Battey, Jeremy Denk mixes Brahms and Ligeti at Clarice Smith Center (Washington Post, July 20)

Denk attacked this music with ferocity, taking at face value the composer's many directions to strip away the veneer of technical precision. Misplaced accents in no. 1 ("Désordre") eventually separate the two hands, notated in conflicting key signatures -- so that the right hand, which Ligeti instructs should always be louder, plays only white keys, while the left plays only black keys -- and misalign the bar lines. The often puckish dynamic markings split hairs down to the absurd pppppppp, and Ligeti often instructs that time signatures are "only a guideline," as in no. 7, and Denk often gave the impression of musical structure, in spite of or perhaps because of an attempt at rigorous control, coming apart at the seams. The most memorable parts played to Denk's strength of vicious attack, while the more coloristic etudes fell a little flat for want of greater craftsmanship of sound (see Pierre-Laurent Aimard, whose obsession with details of sound was documented in the film Pianomania). Still, few pianists are crazy enough to play so many of these works at once in a live concert, and Denk's rendition was thrilling to hear.

The same virtues and weaknesses were heard in the Brahms second half, with playing that emphasized rumble over finesse. The gorgeous second piece in the op. 118 set had some lovely hesitations and unusual moments savored, and the final piece was quite enigmatic. The first book of the Paganini Variations was much more in Denk's wheelhouse, again favoring wildness of attack and tempo over beautiful finish. Enthusiastic ovations elicited two encores, both reprises of pieces played earlier in the recital: Ligeti's fourth etude ("Fanfares"), this time played from memory, and an even more sentimental version of Brahms op. 118/2.

Kapell Competition, Nearing the End

Competitions are strange things, and members of juries tend to hear things differently than other listeners. In any case, it is unwise to second-guess the jury at this year's 2012 William Kapell International Piano Competition, but some very interesting performances in the preliminary round went unrewarded, apparently overshadowed by players with greater technical flash.

French pianist Guillaume Masson, currently studying with Christopher Elton at the Royal Academy of Music in London, showed an idiosyncratic approach to all three of the pieces the jury requested. A Mozart sonata (C major, K. 330) had a fast movement a little too fast for the Allegro Moderato tempo marking: although Masson gave it a winsome, fluffy touch, the runs were not always clear and the trills a little dusty. His interpretation was subtle and diverting though, emphasizing a precise control of the piano side of the dynamic spectrum. An outstanding slow movement still had bounce, never becoming too languid, with a poetic minor section. A Debussy prelude ("Canopic Jar," from Book 2) was oneiric and strange, as if one were walking into a vision, in this case of the funereal practices of ancient Egypt. Masson turned on his story-telling power for a theatrical performance of Liszt's "Fantasia quasi Sonata" (After reading Dante), again keeping much of the piece contained, which made the explosive passages at the end all the more explosive. It was a performance that stood out for its interpretative oddities, the kind of playing that one enjoys hearing in an actual concert but that does not always win competitions.

American pianist Jun Asai was the last to play in the preliminary rounds, the only competitor I saw who chose a Kawai piano. The instrument's brasher sound suited what she did with her selections, emphasizing stark differences between piano and forte and Grave and Allegro in the first movement of Beethoven's "Pathétique" sonata. She gave distinct sounds to three singing voices in Liszt's spitfire transcription of Schubert's song "Der Erlkönig." Slow passages tended to stymie her energy, as in an overly precious performance of a Chopin nocturne (op. 27/2). Her overindulgence of the Chopin put her over the time limit, meaning that a rather dramatic performance of two movements of Stravinsky's "Petrouchka" was cut short by the judges.

I was not able to hear much of the semifinal solo rounds, but of those I did hear, Yekwon Sunwoo distinguished himself the most. Currently studying with Robert McDonald at Juilliard, the South Korean 23-year-old played a daring rendition of Schumann's Symphonic Etudes, with exceptional panache, although his Chopin G minor ballade was a little shy and retiring, if finely nuanced. The semifinal solo round was when each pianist performed his or her required piece, one of a series of pieces by American composers from the last 50-some years. Sunwoo gave the most convincing performance of Leon Kirchner's Interlude II, from 2003, smoothing out its jagged edges and making the bluesy passages sing. Perhaps hoping to make the grandest impression in his concerto performance, with Colette Valentine playing the orchestral reduction, he took the last movement of Rachmaninoff's third concerto at breakneck speed, missing little bits along the way but with remarkable fire in his belly.

Based on comments from many people I spoke to during the early rounds, American pianist Steven Lin has emerged as the leading contender of the competition. After finally hearing him in the semifinal chamber music round on Tuesday afternoon, I can say that his technique is indeed clean and bewildering. Another student from Juilliard, where he was a pre-college student after moving back to the U.S. from Taiwan and where he will start as a Master's student with Robert McDonald this fall, he has a beautiful touch at the keyboard. However, the chamber music part of the competition does reveal something about each musician's musical maturity, and while Lin had a solid handle on the piano part of Beethoven's third cello sonata, he was not particularly adept at listening to and melding with his partner, cellist William DeRosa.

The most accomplished accompanist heard that day, in fact, was Chinese pianist Yue Chu, who gave a sensitive and full-bodied rendition of the third Brahms violin sonata, subtly bringing out inner voices under and around the solo line and grounding the work on Brahms's bass line. With a nice leggiero touch in the scherzo and plenty of agitation in the finale, his collaborative approach brought out superior playing from violinist Melissa White, who sounded more comfortable than she had in the same piece earlier in the day. Based on his technically astounding (if musically lackluster) performance in the preliminary round, Chu seems most likely to join Lin among the three finalists, who will perform concertos with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra at Saturday's final concert (July 21, 8 pm).

The third slot seems much less clear, although two possibilities would be South Korean pianist Jin Uk Kim and Chinese pianist Diyi Tang. Both gave striking performances in the preliminary round -- stronger on technical force than subtlety, true, but that is generally the way to go in a competition -- although neither distinguished himself in the chamber music department. After today's conclusion to the semifinal chamber music round, the announcement of the names of the three finalists is expected at around 7:45 pm.

SVILUPPO:
The three finalists for the 2012 William Kapell International Piano Competition will be Jin Uk Kim (playing the Brahms second concerto), Steven Lin (Rachmaninoff, Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini), and Yekwon Sunwoo (Rachmaninoff's third concerto).

At Home with the Fleishers

This review is an Ionarts exclusive.

The preliminary round of the 2012 William Kapell International Piano Competition and Festival came to an end yesterday, with the announcement of the nine semifinalists who will continue in competition: three from China (Yue Chu, Jun Sun, and Diyi Tang), three from South Korea (Jin Uk Kim, Jeewon Lee, and Yekwon Sunwoo), plus Steven Lin (U.S.A. -- by report the best competitor on the second day), Masafumi Nakatani (Japan), and Misha Namirovsky (Israel). As it turns out, I actually heard the preliminary round performance of only three of the semifinalists, but of those I did hear, my feelings about what sort of playing wins competitions -- technically formidable but usually empty -- are not changed. The semifinal solo round continues this weekend (July 13 to 15, 3 pm to 6:30 pm, tickets now $35), with each competitor receiving an hour to perform more solo repertoire and part of a concerto with piano accompaniment.

L. Fleisher and A. Midgette, My Nine Lives: A Memoir of Many Careers in Music (2010) Leon Fleisher Recital (Takács, Bach/Brahms)

The other part of the competition is the festival, with a number of high-profile pianists, some on the competition jury, performing recitals in the evening. After jury chairman Santiago Rodriguez on Saturday night, it was time for a joint recital by local legend Leon Fleisher and his wife, Katherine Jacobson Fleisher, on Thursday night at the Clarice Smith Center. After regaining the use of his long-damaged right hand, Fleisher has returned to performing repertory for the left hand, music for which he was justly celebrated. As he showed in a performance with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra this past May, the octogenarian Fleisher may not be at the top of his game anymore, but his interpretations, especially of his signature repertory, can still capture the imagination. As Fleisher, who quipped his way through introductions to several pieces, observed wryly, the first composer whose music he played, Jenő Takács, lived from 1902 to 2005, "which gives us all hope."

Fleisher's solo pieces were both for the left hand, and both had a serious, even somber cast to them. Takács composed his Toccata and Fugue, op. 56, in imitation of Bach's Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, and Fleisher gave a sober, carefully parsed performance of its chromatic vagaries. When Brahms made his arrangement of Bach's D minor Chaconne, part of a set of etudes for the left hand, all he did was lower the music an octave, into more comfortable Brahmsian territory, and keep most of Bach's score intact. Fleisher played much of it with the same forceful touch he had applied to the Takács -- such power still in that left hand -- until a ray of light burst forth in the parallel major section. The rest of the program consisted of four-hands pieces, with Jacobson Fleisher, as is customary, playing the primo part. While nothing to write home about, these duo performances had a homey intimacy about them that was quite pleasing, recalling previous eras when four-hands music was more common to hear. The husband-wife duo seemed most comfortable in Schubert's F minor fantasy, D. 940, one of the monuments of the four-hands repertoire that I would never refuse the chance to hear. Lucien Garban's four-hands transcription of Ravel's La Valse was perilous fun, with the best example of the balletic coordination so important in four-hands music -- primo has to lift her hands out of the way just so for secondo's full-keyboard glissando. Brahms's own four-hand version of the Liebeslieder Waltzes, op. 52, seemed the least comfortable. The duo switched roles for an encore, with Fleisher on primo.

The next festival recital will feature Gloria Cheng in a program of contemporary music (July 13, 8 pm).

SVILUPPO:
Stephen Brookes, Pianist Gloria Cheng offers eclectic, engaging program at University of Maryland (Washington Post, July 16)

Punch Shaw, Leon and Katherine Fleisher impress at PianoTexas (Dallas Star-Telegram, June 29)

Kapell Competition: Day 1

Anyone who has been a music major or conservatory student knows the anguish of juries. They are the final exams for applied performers, and they are really not supposed to be as terrifying as they are. Perhaps it is just the word -- jury -- that summons up the image of a darkened star chamber, a panel of grim-faced judges haloed in bright light, who listen to you play and then pronounce their verdict -- "GUILTY!" Perhaps this is mostly the imagery of my own nightmares, but the point is that a musician's life is full of stress and worry.

The pressure is magnified for those taking part in a major piano competition, but the preliminary round of the 2012 William Kapell International Piano Competition and Festival, which began on Tuesday morning, was set up in a rather similar way. Each pianist received a half-hour of time in the large concert hall of the Clarice Smith Center, with the jury seated above in the balcony and a small audience in the orchestra section. One of a handful of gleaming Steinways, all with that new piano smell, was wheeled into center stage. Each performer had to show as many facets of his or her performing personality and technical expertise as possible, and each had distractions -- summer camp kids brought in for the free performance, errant cell phone rings, women in the front row throwing colorful shawls around their shoulders mid-performance -- to do their best to ignore.

At the end of the preliminary round, the jury has to eliminate two-thirds of the competitors, from the twenty-seven twenty-four (some withdrawals) who started down to nine semifinalists. It is not an enviable task, and it does explain at least some of how most competitions work. All of these musicians are playing at a high level, but small technical issues -- even memory slips, reportedly heard from one candidate on Tuesday morning -- are likely to be an easy factor to lead judges toward elimination. Having heard only part of the morning session and the whole evening session on Tuesday, I offer the following thoughts.

Jin Uk Kim, from South Korea, played a technically stunning set (the jury selects from each candidate's submitted repertoire list, including choosing only some movements of a work in some cases) that opened with a remarkably colorful "Le Loriot" from Messiaen's Catalogue d'oiseaux, velvety parallel chords over which lunatic, ecstatic bird calls shattered the silence. He took the first movement of Beethoven's op. 7 sonata extremely fast, using a mostly clipped attack that showed off his virtuosic panache. He ended with Liszt's showpiece transcription of the valse from Gounod's Faust, the sort of Liberace-style work that Chico Marx parodied so memorably.

Moldovan pianist Maria Sumareva showed herself a finesse player, which is not necessarily rewarded in competitions, with a subtly voiced "Night's Music" movement from Bartók's Out of Doors suite, a half-remembered folk melody over ostinato frog croaks and mosquito buzzing. Two movements of Schubert's D. 850 sonata were a little precious in her hands, a lot of music-box sounds that did not give her much room to make an impact. With Richard Egarr, a historical instrument specialist, on the jury, it has been interesting to hear how these mostly mainstream pianists are confronting the work of HIP performers: Sumareva's rendition of Handel's G major chaconne was crisp and fluidly ornamented, seeming to show the influence of early music-minded pianists like Alexandre Tharaud or Angela Hewitt.

Canadian pianist Younggun Kim (image courtesy of 2012 William Kapell International Piano Competition)

The evening's two other performers impressed with fiery technique, beginning with Chinese pianist Diyi Tang. Three movements from Haydn's C minor sonata (Hob. XVI:20) went by very fast, as did three movements from Stravinsky's Petrouchka, so fast in the fast sections that it was a bit of a blur. Competition pianists work so hard to perfect the surfaces of this kind of music that they are left with little depth below the shine. Tang drew out some nuances -- the questioning pause before a closing section in the Haydn, the dreamy ballerina's theme in the Stravinsky -- but it was all a little mechanical. Another Chinese pianist, Yue Chu, was even more technically astounding and even more robotic. Beethoven's C minor variations (WoO 80), a ground-bass piece that sounded like a tribute to the Handel chaconne heard just before, was virtuosic but empty, with three of Rachmaninoff's Moments Musicaux bordering on banal. He then pulled the Circus stop with Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 12, to show off more razzle-dazzle. Mercifully, the jury told him to stop before the end, a request that he did not hear or chose to ignore, insisting on playing to the bitter end, even taking a curtain call to acknowledge the crowd's applause.

This was playing that, sadly, garners the attention of a competition jury, but that ultimately sounds empty-headed. By contrast, the performance that most impressed me was that of Canadian Younggun Kim, who had just as much technical acumen but much greater subtlety of phrasing, his superior rendition of the same Haydn sonata (Hob. XVI:20) marked by sensitivity of touch and light facility. The same qualities were heard in Poulenc's Trois Novelettes -- a great example of classical music in touch with popular music, they could be chansons de boulevard -- and a sharp-fingered but still varied seventh sonata by Prokofiev. Kim did not push the tempos to the breaking point and in fact kept many slow enough that he could still bring out subtle details: some listeners, including those on juries, could see this tendency as erring on the side of caution.

The preliminary rounds of the 2012 William Kapell International Piano Competition continue today and tomorrow.