Sunday Classics' "Sicilienne"-style sendoff for Chuck McGill -- as prélude to a tasting table of morsels from Gabriel Fauré

Spoiler alert for anyone who hasn't watched any Better
Call Saul episodes since before the Season 3 finale


The McGill brothers, Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) and Chuck (Michael McKean), are seen here in . . . um . . . well, not-that-much-happier times -- this scene is from "Klick," the final episode (No. 10) of Season 2 of Better Call Saul.

by Ken

It's kind of embarrassing that it wasn't till the premier episode of Sieason 4 of Better Call Saul that I registered the death of Chuck McGill (Michael McKean), the big brother of our new-old friend Jimmy McGill, previously known to us, in Breaking Bad, as his later self, Saul Goodman. I mean, flashing back even in my dim memory, I had to have known from the Season 3 finale that Chuck was a goner in the fire that consumed his house. Still . . . . I guess I couldn't believe that the show's creative team, headed up by Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, would let go of such an extraordinary character (which everyone on the creative team has told us in interviews was heavily influenced by the extraordinary and largely unexpected qualities Michael McKean brought to the role), with so much about him still to be explored. And I guess I had enough faith in the devious story-telling skills of Vince, Peter, and their team that I wasn't prepared to believe Chuck was really gone until the proverbial last nail was pounded into the coffin.

However, from the start of Episode 1 of Season 4, it became clear that Chuck was indeed kaput, gone, good-bye. Naturally one of the first things I thought of was -- well, here's how I put it in that unprecedented Monday edition of Sunday Classics of Feb. 23, 2016, "Special late-Monday Better Call Saul edition: Chuck McGill plays the Fauré Sicilienne!" (Set in front of Chuck on his baby-grand piano was an edition of the Sicilienne for violin or flute and piano.)


Original (2/23/2016) caption: Sure enough, there's a piano in Chuck McGill's living room! Given the light level, don't hold me to it, but isn't this Howard (Patrick Fabian), the managing partner of Chuck's law firm, arriving for his "delivery for McGill" in tonight's Better Call Saul episode, "Cobbler" [Season 2, Episode 2]?

At the time I wrote in part:

If there's one thing probably none of us expected to see, it was Chuck McGill (Michael McKean) at the piano playing the piano part of Fauré's Sicilienne. But there it was, at the top of tonight's Better Call Saul episode, with something like this score page just visible to Chuck, and to us, with the little bit of natural light that found its way into his otherwise-dark living room -- Chuck can't, of course, have electric light.

Eventually, of course, Better Call Saul masterminds Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould and their team would gradually fill us in, in their patented time-hopping, circuitious way, but at this point I don't think we knew much of anything except that there was all too clearly a huge something-or-someone missing from Chuck's life, and now suddenly we had him playing the piano, with the obvious indication that the missing something-or-someone had something to do with classical music, specifically either the violin or the flute -- the version of the Sicilienne Chuck was playing from was for violin or flute and piano. (It took two subsequent episodes in Season 2 and another in Season 3 to fill for us the void left in Chuck's life left by the implosion of his marriage to Rebecca, indeed a violinist. Ann Cusack, who has played Rebecca, was back for the first episodes of Season 4, in -- kind of literally -- the wake of Chuck's passing.)

And at that time we heard the Sicilienne three ways --

For violin and piano:

Krzysztof Smietana, violin; John Blakely, piano. Meridian, recorded c1993?

For cello and piano:

Steven Doane, cello; Barry Snyder, piano. Bridge, recorded in Rochester (NY), January 1992

For orchestra, with flute solo (no. iii from Fauré's Suite from the incidental music for Pelléas et Mélisande, Op. 80):

Orchestre de Paris, Serge Baudo, cond. EMI, recorded June 1969


WE HAVE ANOTHER VERSION OF THE SICILIENNE,
BUT WE'LL ALSO NEED TO BACKTRACK A LITTLE

Before we backtrack, though, let's go ahead and hear the "new" performance of the Sicilienne, which I like a lot. Without rushing it all, it whiff of the languor that has a way of creeping into performances of a lot of Fauré's music. This Sicilienne is throbbingly vital.

It may help to look again at the cheat sheet we consulted when we first listened to the Sicilienne:

The siciliana [sitʃiˈljaːna] or siciliano [sitʃiˈljaːno] (also known as the sicilienne [sisiljɛn]) is a musical style or genre often included as a movement within larger pieces of music starting in the Baroque period. It is in a slow 6/8 or 12/8 time with lilting rhythms, making it somewhat resemble a slow jig or tarantella, and is usually in a minor key. It was used for arias in Baroque operas, and often appears as a movement in instrumental works. Loosely associated with Sicily, the siciliana evokes a pastoral mood, and is often characterized by dotted rhythms that can distinguish it within the broader musical genre of the pastorale.

Siciliana rhythms

-- Wikipedia

Fauré's Sicilienne, as we can see from the printed page below, fits right in, and we can hear it too as we listen to our "new" version.



Frédéric Lodéon, cello; Jean-Philippe Collard, piano. EMI, recorded 1976-78

I honestly didn't know anything about Frédéric Lodéon, but my first response to hearing his Sicilienne was wanting to hear him play one of Fauré's best-known pieces, the gorgeous Élégie for cello. So we're going to do that, and when we do, we're going to begin by following up on my much-later second response to Frédéric Lodéon's Sicilienne, which was to try to find out more about him.


BUT FIRST, WE STILL HAVE THAT BACKTRACKING TO DO,
TO SEE HOW THIS POST FOLLOWS FROM LAST WEEK'S

In a sense, in fact, this post is a completion of last week's, "So I slapped on this CD I'd picked up -- and had to share this little Intermezzo, Cavatine, and Andante con moto."

From last week's post title you know that those beautiful slow movements from Poulenc chamber works came from that "CD I picked up," but there was more to the story. The CD pickup happened during a now-infrequent (but once-all-too-frequent) visit to NYC's Academy Records on 18th Street, concentrating on the large section of "bargain" CDs. The first "Aha!" discovery was one of the pair of two-CD boxes from EMI France of the Musique de Chambre of Fauré, after which I came upon the two-CD box of chamber music of Poulenc. Finally, to my delight, there was the other Fauré chamber-music box!

This was a deeply personal moment, harking back to the night I put together the above-referenced Better Call Saul post. Needing illustrative performances of the Fauré Sicilienne, my obvious first destination was the EMI Fauré chamber-music boxes, which I was dead sure I owned. Except apparently I didn't. Now I have, to put it politely, a whole lot of records, and it's hardly unknown for me to get confused about what I own and what I don't. However, I'm not often this grossly mistaken. I was just so sure I owned those sets. In the resulting state of confusion I continued scrounging and dug up with enough specimens for that post (not to mention their encore performance in this post!). Clearly, though, the Episode of the "Missing" Fauré Chamber-Music Boxes lodged in my brain, and when I stumbled across them, it was a moment of hushed reverence -- with the Poulenc chamber-music box (which I was pretty sure I didn't have) as a somehow-earned bonus. (The record will show that that day at Academy I "stumbled across" a whole bunch of other stuff I decided I couldn't do without, but you don't need to know about that. Of course just what I need now is more records.)

The Fauré sets set me to thinking again about a post I've been contemplating for years. No, this isn't it, but I think it may serve as a kind of stepping stone to it. If you must know, the piece toward which we're heading is the First Piano Quartet, Op. 15, which you may not be surprised to hear has attached to it yet another backstory, which as usual is bound to be of no interest to anyone but me. But one immediate harvest from the EMI Fauré chamber sets was Frédéric Lodéon's impassioned performance of the Sicilienne, which I naturally wanted to share.


WHICH BRINGS US BACK TO OUR FRÉDÉRIC'S ÉLÉGIE


Here's our Frédéric, along with his EMI Fauré chamber-music compagnons, violinist Augustin Dumay and pianist Jean-Philippe Collard, playing a chunk of the Beethoven Triple Concerto (the slow movement and the start of the finale), with Charles Dutoit conducting the Polish Chamber Orchestra.

As I suggested earlier, I did finally set out to find out a bit about Frédéric, and it turned out that there was a lot to find out. It turns out that at the time of EMI France's Fauré musique de chambre project, 1976-78, we're encountering him in his mid-20s, since (as Wikipedia tells us) he was "born 26 January 1952 in the 14th arrondissement of Paris." Here's the "Biography" section of the Wikipedia article (with footnotes plus lotsa links onsite) about this "contemporary French cellist, conductor and radio personality":

In 1960, his father, André Lodéon, was appointed director of the School of Music of Saint-Omer (Pas-de-Calais). It was there that the young Frederic began learning music with the cellist Albert Tétard.

Frédéric Lodéon received the first prize of cello at the Conservatoire de Paris in 1969 (awarded unanimously by the jury). In 1977, he won ex-aequo the first Mstislav Rostropovich competition; he is the only Frenchman to have won it.

Thereafter, he directed several orchestras, among which the Orchestre philharmonique de Radio France, the Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse, and the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine.

At the beginning of the 1990s, he presented on France 3 the program Musiques, Maestro! which wants to make known the Orchestre de Paris, the Orchestre National Bordeaux-Aquitaine or the l'Orchestre National de Lyon to a very large audience.

He became famous to the general public by his programs on France Inter, for which he animated Carrefour de Lodéon[1] from 1992, as well as Les grands concerts de Radio France. His cheerful tone and his erudition earned him continued success. He also presented the Victoires de la musique classique on France 3. In June 2014, his broadcasts are removed from France Inter but Carrefour de Lodéon is aired on France Musique.

In 2015, he became the godfather of music festival of Saint-Malo " Classique au large ".[2]

Frédéric Lodéon is chevalier of the Légion d'honneur and officier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.[3]

So now, finally, let's hear Frédéric play the Élégie. And I figured that as long as we're listening to the piece, we might as well hear some other performances, including several of Fauré's orchestral version.


[NOTE: You'd figure that must be a typo in the first line, where the solo entrance, following the piano's diminuendo from mf to p, is marked f (loud) rather than p (soft), as in the piano part. (Then, when the soloist reenters, it's softer still, at pp.) Except that in the second line the soloist has the marking "sempre f." I expect that this has been discussed, possibly endlessly, elsewhere.]

The Élégie for cello and piano:

Frédéric Lodéon, cello; Jean-Philippe Collard, piano. EMI, recorded 1976-78

Wladislaw Warenberg, cello; Sara Crombach, piano. Brilliant Classics, recorded Mar. 10, 1999

The Élégie for cello and orchestra:

János Starker, cello; Philharmonia Orchestra, Walter Süsskind, cond. EMI, recorded July 14-17, 1956

Jules Eskin, cello; Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa, cond. DG, recorded c1990

Leonard Rose, cello; Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded Mar. 27, 1967


WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? HOW ABOUT
A TINY TASTING TABLE OF FAURÉ MORCEAUX?

Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) in 1907

What I've done here is take all the morceaux from EMI's Fauré Musique de Chambre Vol. I box and arranged them all -- whether for violin, cello, or flute and piano -- in chronological order according to the most readily accessible information I had (remember that opus numbers represent order of publication, not composition), then added a few other performances I was able to lay hands on quickly. I hope that, for example, you'll find the contrast of our three versions of the beautiful Berceuse as interesting as I did. I wonder whether it will occur to you too that Chee Yun and Akira Eguchi, with their steadily, sturdily rolling rhythm, seem to remember better than the other teams that this is, after all, a lullaby.

You're probably wondering what the Big Idea is of dumping out this pile of musical morceaux while saying approximately nothing about them. This can't even be said to be a sampling of Fauré's output, since we don't even touch on what I think most people would agree are the creative hearts of it: the solo-piano works and the songs. At some point we should no doubt come back to those, but for now this "tasting table" is meant just as an opportunity to taste at will from this not-entirely-unrepresentative sampling of what I'm going to call Fauré's highly individual "sound world." I hope I'll be able to make what I mean by this a little clearer when we get to listening to and talking about the First Piano Quartet (with its backstory). For now, however, I'm hoping readers can simply go a bit wild with this assortment of music widely spaced in time, with a fair diversity of musical styles as well as instrumental resources. I also like to leave room for the possibility of inadvertently reclicking on an audio clip one has already heard -- second (and third and fourth) hearings are maybe more valuable than first ones.

I'll offer a couple of bits from the Wikipedia article on Fauré to think while you sample:

Although his best-known and most accessible compositions are generally his earlier ones, Fauré composed many of his most highly regarded works in his later years, in a more harmonically and melodically complex style. . , . During the last twenty years of his life, he suffered from increasing deafness. In contrast with the charm of his earlier music, his works from this period are sometimes elusive and withdrawn in character, and at other times turbulent and impassioned.

But note how hard even this distinction is to pin down. Those later works, we hear, may be either "elusive and withdrawn" or "turbulent and impassioned." I don't mean to suggest that Fauré's music is all the same, or even similar, just that it has qualities that, at least in my imagination, unite it and separate it from everyone else's music. And I think this tasting table is a good way to start finding our way in it. (One obvious tasting comparison to try: the 1877 Romance for violin vs. the 1894 one for cello.)

So let's do it!

FAURÉ: Romance in B-flat for Violin and Piano, Op. 28 (1877)

Augustin Dumay, violin; Jean-Philippe Collard, piano. EMI, recorded 1976-78

FAURÉ: Berceuse (Lullaby) in D for Violin and Piano, Op. 16 (1878-79)

Augustin Dumay, violin; Jean-Philippe Collard, piano. EMI, recorded 1976-78

Yehudi Menuhin, violin; Jeremy Menuhin, piano. EMI, recorded May 14-15, Sept. 23, 1970

Chee Yun, violin; Akira Eguchi, piano. Denon, recorded in Tokyo, July 31-Aug. 1, 1992

FAURÉ: Papillon (Butterfly) in A for Cello and Piano, Op. 77 (1884)

Frédéric Lodéon, cello; Jean-Philippe Collard, piano. EMI, recorded 1976-78
[NOTE: If you're thinking that Papillon is kind of a catchy title, be advised that Fauré didn't think so. He merely gave in to his publisher's insistence on something catchier than his preference, "Piece for Cello."]

FAURÉ: Romance in A for Cello and Piano, Op. 69 (1894)

Frédéric Lodéon, cello; Jean-Philippe Collard, piano. EMI, recorded 1976-78

FAURÉ: Andante in B-flat for Violin and Piano, Op. 75 (1897)

Augustin Dumay, violin; Jean-Philippe Collard, piano. EMI, recorded 1976-78

Yehudi Menuhin, violin; Jeremy Menuhin, piano. EMI, recorded May 14-15, Sept. 23, 1970

FAURÉ: Fantaisie in C for Flute and Piano, Op. 79 (1898)

Michel Debost, flute; Jean-Philippe Collard, piano. EMI, recorded 1976-78

FAURÉ: Morceau de concours (Competition piece) in F for Flute and Piano (July 1898)

Michel Debost, flute; Jean-Philippe Collard, piano. EMI, recorded 1976-78

FAURÉ: Morceau de lecture à vue (Piece for sight-reading) for Violin and Piano (1903)

Augustin Dumay, violin; Jean-Philippe Collard, piano. EMI, recorded 1976-78

FAURÉ: Sérénade in B minor for Cello and Piano, Op. 98 (1908)

Frédéric Lodéon, cello; Jean-Philippe Collard, piano. EMI, recorded 1976-78


A BRIEF NOTE OF APOLOGY EXPLANATION

It's probably stretching to palm the Monday-evening posting of this, er, "Labor Day edition" of Sunday Classics as a timely installment. I can only say, "Better late than never," maybe. Over the last two or three days I frequently found myself totting up the pluses and minuses in both the "Late" and "Never" columns, and I wasn't quite sure about the final totals. This was supposed to be a relatively easy column, to fill what might otherwise have been the first gap in production in however many weeks it's been. In the end it turned out to be not the least bit easy, even if you're thinking, "Huh? My dog could have cranked that out in an hour." And very likely he could have. Maybe you could send me his e-mail address?

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