Violinist and conductor Pekka Kuusisto calls in sick for the rest of 2022 -- but we get to hear him play Ives anyway

Violinist-conductor Pekka K. posted this Facebook announcement Tuesday -- one of the more human (and humane) uses of social media I've encountered.

by Ken

And on Wednesday, when The Strad passed along to its e-mail list Pekka K.'s announcement that he's calling in sick, some background was filled in about his "busy" 2022. There's been a lot of the good kind of busyness on multiple professional fronts: "In addition to violin performance engagements including at the BBC Proms, [he] was named principal guest conductor and artistic co-director at the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra." Then there was busyness of the pretty awful kind: "In his personal life, cancer claimed both his mother and his brother Jaakko within two months in the spring of 2022."

Yikes! Makes you wonder whether the mere five weeks or so he's carved out, which of course includes the holidays, when you figure he may not have been that heavily booked, is enough of a breather, especially when you consider the moving and shaking he had to do to get his sick leave.


IT SO HAPPENS THAT PEKKA K. WAS ALREADY
LURKING IN THE SUNDAY CLASSICS PILE-UP

If we're musical-lark-harking, we really need to count the number of: (1) "hark"s and (2) stanzas ["finally" (?) updated version]

[SUNDAY'S ORIGINAL "CONSTRUCTION-ZONE" NOTE: Proceed at your own risk. (It's the usual thing. I've gotta, and I mean just gotta, be able to see 'n' hear this thing with the audio clips in place.)]

[MONDAY "FINALLY (?) UPDATED VERSION" NOTE: With all those elements in place, I'm content to leave this post more or less as-was, with occasional added comments -- plus the promise of a follow-up focusing on the Schubert "Ständchen," even venturing into the totally unrelated but much better-known "Schubert Ständchen," the one from Schwanengesang. -- Ed.]

*          *          *

Shakespeare, you'll recall, wrote just one stanza of "Hark, hark the lark" for Act II, Scene 3, of Cymbeline. We've already heard these two very different musical settings (in, admittedly, very different German translations), but not these performances. Let's listen just to this much.

"Hark, hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings,
and Phoebus 'gins arise,
his steeds to water at those springs
on chaliced flowers that lies;
and winking Mary-buds begin
to ope their golden eyes:
with every thing that pretty is,
my lady sweet, arise:
arise, arise!"

-- Cloten's song from Cymbeline, Act II, Scene 3

(1) "Hark, hark!" ("Hark" total = 2)

SCHUBERT: "Ständchen" (Serenade): "Horch, horch, die Lerch' im Ätherblau" ("Hark, hark, the lark in heaven's blue"), D. 889

[German translation by August Wilhelm von Schlegel]

Rolf Reinhardt, piano. Deutsche Schallplatten-Gemeinschaft, recorded 1962

(2) Just a single "Hark!" ("Hark" total = 1)

NICOLAI: The Merry Wives of Windsor: Act II, Scene 4: romance, Fenton, "Horch', die Lerche singt im Hain" ("Hark, the lark sings in the meadow")

[German translation by Ferdinand Mayerhofer]

Bavarian State Orchestra, Robert Heger, cond. EMI, recorded Feb.-Mar. 1963

Wait, what about the singer? Probably you recognized him right away. If not, better still! You're making the acquaintance of somebody really special -- we'll have full credits when we hear these performances in full. (You no doubt noticed that I cut them off once the stanza taken over from Shakespeare was done.)

by Ken

You may remember that last week, in writing about that fine English pianist Imogen Cooper's October 2022 choices for BBC Music Magazine's "Music that changed me" feature (choices that "not only genuinely did change her life but make glorious listening for us"), I mentioned that even as I was discovering in the magazine feature that Dame Imogen is the daughter of the distinguished English musicologist and critic Martin Cooper, I happened to be perusing her father's lengthy and informative booklet essay for the Decca recording of Otto Nicolai's opera The Merry Wives of Windsor conducted by Rafael Kubelik for yet another long-simmering Sunday Classics project.

Which is to say: a follow-up to the October 16 post, in which I wrote about a long-long-ago SC post gathering what I think of as the three great musical lark depictions: Haydn's Lark Quartet, Vaughan Williams's rhapsody for violin and orchestra The Lark Ascending, and the gorgeous "romance" from Nicolai's Merry Wives, "Horch', die Lerche singt im Hain" ("Hark, the lark is singing in the meadow," derived from Shakespeare's Cymbeline song "Hark, hark, the lark"), in which the hopelessly-love-besotted young Fenton sings a wake-up serenade to his adored Anna Reich.

I was angling to exhume the old "lark" post and restore it to working order, for which I started by making a pile of new audio clips, only to discover I couldn't figure out how to merge my "then" and "now" selves for such a rehab job. Instead what I set out to do was to spit the "lark" pile into instrumental larks (Haydn's and Vaughan Williams's) and "singing" larks (Nicolai's and a fourth musical lark I'd added to the mix: Schubert's "Ständchen" (Serenade), "Horch, horch, die Lerch' im Ätherblau" of -- yes! -- "Hark, hark, the lark."

In that Merry Wives introductory note, my eye stuck on Martin Cooper suggestion that Fenton's romance is "almost worthy of Schubert." As I think about it, I think this makes a good deal of sense, but what stopped me was the coincidence (?) that Schubert himself had actually done his own "Hark, hark, the lark" setting -- and it's nothing like Nicolai's. Which brings us to the question of how many "hark"s we can count in the Nicolai and Schubert settings.

In last week's tracing of Imogen Cooper's "Music that changed me," I always intended to pluck some samples of Dame Imogen's piano-playing from the SC archive

by Ken

I got so caught up in arranging our musical examples to enable us to trace Dame Imogen's five choices for "Music that changed me" that I just never got around to plucking those samples out of the archive. So, here are some samples.

MOZART: Piano Concerto No. 23 in A, K. 488:
i. Allegro

Piano Concerto No. 9, in E-flat, K. 271:
ii. Andantino

Northern Sinfonia, Imogen Cooper, piano and cond. Avie Records, recorded live in Hall One of the Sage Gateshead, Gateshead (across the River Tyne from Newcastle-upon-Tyne), England, Oct. 18-20, 2005

Try listening to just the orchestral opening of each of these concerto movements, up to the entrance of the piano. Of course, in the case of the first movement of K. 488, this means the entire exposition, and just listen to the way the conductor shapes the music: so flowing yet soulful, unfussy yet singing in gripping musical poetry.

Then listen to what happens when the soloist enters, taking over the material the orchestra has just introduced us to. Isn't it devilish how uncannily the two statements dovetail, and yet they're not quite the same, because, after all, an orchestra and a solo piano don't "hear" music exactly the same way -- and so the working out of the whole movement is set up: I think the basic reason I love Mozart's piano concertos so much is that somehow or other his unique dramatic imagination oversees them in much the say it does his great operas -- and I realize that that statement of the exposition of K. 488 could be the work of a great opera conductor.

All these musical roles are being played, of course, by one person: our pianist-conductor. Of course K. 488 is a masterpiece, but it isn't one of the Mozart piano concertos I eternally hunger for. Performed this way, though . . . .

K. 271, however, is one of the Mozart piano concertos I just plain adore. It doesn't come competely out of nowhere; we can hear intimations of it in any number of works Mozart composed shortly before it, including its predecesor, the Concerto No. 8 in C, K. 246. And yet, K. 271 explodes in at least my consciousness that had never existed before and maybe would never exist again -- except that Mozart kept performing this feat over and over. There are so many great slow movements among the Mozart piano concertos, and once again in her dual role as conductor and soloist Cooper leaves no doubt that the Andantino of K. 271 can stand with any of its successors.


GETTING INTIMATE WITH BRAHMS

SC fave Imogen Cooper's choices of "Music that changed me" not only genuinely did change her life but make glorious listening for us

[ALERT: This evocative poster isn't entirely relevant to our topic.]

We hear the implacable Rigoletto Prelude -- our formal invitation to what we'll hear Imogen Cooper describe as the opera's "dark rich vistas" -- led first by Rafael Kubelik, from his beautifully conducted La Scala-DG Rigoletto of July 1964; and then at higher voltage by Georg Solti, from his June 1963 Rigoletto made in Rome with the RCA Italiana Chorus and Orchestra.

"For some reason the Evening Standard photographer was there, and there's a photograph in the family album of me with big round cheeks, wearing a polka-dot taffeta dress, standing smiling on the steps up to the Crush Bar."

-- Dame Imogen Cooper, in BBC Music Magazine's "Music
that changed me" feature for October 2022, on attending a
Covent Garden Rigoletto in the early 1950s -- at age three!

by Ken

Yes, yes, we've got all kinds of business pending, so rest assured that everything that's "in the works" is still there, and in most cases growing even as we (and they) wait. Meanwhile, this is an idea that has been gnawing at me every since my October issue of BBC Music Magazine gasped its exhausted way into my mailbox after its arduous Atlantic crossing -- arriving, it always seems to me, about the same time the next month's issue has begun circulating on the other side of the ocean.

"Music that changed me," I should explain, is a feature that appears on the magazine page inside the back cover of each issue, where a wonderfully nutty assortment of folks -- professional musicians, folks known for work in other fields with a known side-interest in music, and folks known for work in other fields whose musical predilections are wholly unknown to most of us -- share with an assigned interviewer a selection of pieces of music that have, well, changed them. (Do I have to add that many of the folks who are bona fide "celebrities" on their side of the pond are entirely unknown to me? This can be fun too, because even as I'm learning about their musical passions I'm busy trying to figure out who the heck they are.)

I confess that "Music that has changed me" has become a feature I check out fairly early in my perusal of the magazine just plucked out of the mailbox. And certainly my interest shot up when I saw that for October the subject was Imogen Cooper, a pianist whose deep culture, musical sophistication, and passion for clear musical communication have been marked here on multiple occasions. It was a special pleasure to see her name appear in the 2021 Queen's Birthday Honours list, making her Dame Imogen (a form of address she doesn't seem to have much use for).


DAME IMOGEN'S "MUSIC THAT CHANGED ME" NOT
JUST MEETS BUT WELL EXCEEDS EXPECTATIONS