When you think "Schubert Serenade," isn't this the one -- "one of the most beloved of melodies" -- you're thinking of? (Part 2)

ALONG OUR WAY, WE'RE GOING TO HAVE TO PAUSE
TO LISTEN TO THE LAST MUSIC SCHUBERT HEARD

This photo of Graham Johnson, taken by Malcolm Crowthers at the site of Schubert's original grave, graces the cover of the 37th and final volume (titled "The Final Year") of the Hyperion Schubert Edition. In the booklet, among many other matters, Graham tells the horrible story of Schubert's final and unexpectedly quick descent, aware that he wasn't far from his end, which came on November 19, 1928, more than two months shy of his 32nd birthday. In chronicling the aftermath, Graham tells us:

Schubert was fortunate to have a devoted brother in Ferdinand, who went to some trouble to fulfil the composer's whispered dying wishes. Normally the body, after a blessing of a local church, would have been taken to the official burial ground for the Wieden district; but Schubert had said in his last hours that he wished to lie next to Beethoven. This was the last and most profound of his pleas that his contemporaries, and thus all of us who have come after him, should identify him with his immortal forebear. It was a desire stemming from the very heart of Schubert's own belief in his place in musical history, and it was honoured by his friends and family, some of whom, even then, sensed the justice of his beliefs.

Schubert's body was taken some distance to the Währinger cemetery where Beethoven had been buried the year before. It was not possible for him to lie right next to the older composer, but he was placed two grave plots away from his idol. (Schumann later went to visit the graves and wrote to Clara that he rather envied the man who lay between them -- a certain Colonel O'Donnell.) A permanent memorial, designed by Schober, and with a bust by Josef Dialer and an inscription by Grillparzer (quoted at the top of this essay) --

Die Tonkunst begrub hier einen reichen Besitz aber noch viel schönere Hoffnungen
(The art of music here buried a rich possession but far fairer hopes)

was erected in 1830. Care seems to have been taken that the Greek temple-like construction should not stand as high as the Beethoven column to the left of it. Fifty-eight years later Schubert's body and Beethoven's were exhumed and taken to the grand, and rather inappropriately pompous, new monuments in the Zentralfriedhof [Central Cemetery] (The one appropriate thing about this new locale is that the tombs of Schubert and Wolf are situated back-to-back as if representing different sides of the art of lieder.) The Währinger cemetery ceased to be consecrated ground and was turned into a park. Today Turkish children play in the 'Schubert Park' without having any idea why oddly emotional admirers (myself and the photographer Malcolm Crowthers among them -- see the cover of this disc) should pay attention to those rather uncared-for memorials situated between a wall and a pathway overrun by youngsters' bicycles.

The pair of graves between those of the two composers are no longer identified. Beethoven and Schubert now lie, if not exactly together, then inextricably linked, each within the space of his own immortality. In this unlikely space in an unfashionable corner of Vienna, and despite an ugly backdrop of council flats erected in the 1920s, we recapture the scale of Biedermeier culture with greater accuracy than in the stately memorials built in the era of Franz Josef.     ⓒ2000 by Graham Johnson

FROM SCHUBERT'S FINAL DAYS, GRAHAM SHARES
A GRIPPING DETAIL WE OUGHT TO FOLLOW UP ON

The obsession with Beethoven continues right until the end. In his last days Schubert expressed a desire to hear Beethoven's C sharp minor Quartet Op 131: this was arranged thanks to the violinist Karl Holz and his colleagues. Holz later recounted his memories. 'Schubert was sent into such transports of delight and enthusiasm and was so overcome that we all feared for him . . . the quartet was to be the last music he heard. The king of harmony had sent the king of song a friendly bidding to the crossing'.

WHAT THE DYING SCHUBERT SO BADLY WANTED TO HEAR --
BEETHOVEN: String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131:

i. Adagio ma non troppo e molto espressivo [at 0:01]
ii. Allegro molto vivace [at 6:50]
iii. Allegro moderato [at 10:02]
iv. Andante ma non troppo e molto cantabile [at 10:50]
v. Presto [at 25:02]
vi. Adagio quasi un poco andante [at 30:52]
vii. Allegro [at 32:54]

Barylli Quartet (Walter Barylli and Otto Strasser, violins; Rudolf Streng, viola; Richard Krotschak, cello). Westminster, recorded in the Mozartsaal of the Vienna Konzerthaus, 1952

by Ken

We left off with our sights on the "Serenade" from Schubert's posthumous final song collection, Schwanengesang. As promised, we're going to have Graham Johnson lead us through three chunks of the song, to give you a tiny sampling of some of the kinds of things that turn up in his voluminous Hyperion Schubert Edition commentaries.


BUT FIRST, THERE ARE VINTAGE PERFORMANCES
OF OUR "STÄNDCHEN" I'D REALLY LIKE TO SHARE

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

Bernard Haitink (1929-2021),part 1

1st Addition: Finale of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony (added at the end)
2nd Addition: the Adagio of the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony, plus texts for the Siegfried scene (now moved toward the end of the post) and for the Mahler songs -- and, oh yes, some blocks of text.
Final Addition: Note the "part 1" now appended to the post title. Rather than continue stuffing more stuff into this post, I decided it makes more sense to spin it off into a separate post. Prime exhibit: what we might call -- if we were the sort of person who was inclined to think in such terms -- "Haitink vs. Jochum, in Mahler and Bruckner." Of course it's not really a competition (and so, as Dave Letterman used to say, "No wagering!"). Nevertheless, the careers of these two important conductors, of decidedly different generations, intersected importantly in Amsterdam in the early 1960s. Among the exhibits (and helping plug the Bruckner gap so troubling in part 1 of this post): the Adagio from Haitink's first and last recordings, from September 1966 and June 2019, thus more than half a century apart, of the Bruckner Seventh Symphony.
Wait, One Post-Final Addition: a block of text explaining the inclusion of the Beethoven Ninth finale.

Now, back to business --

FIRST, SOME QUICK MUSICAL IMPRESSIONS OF B.H.

Haitink, who turned 92 in March, remained active up to the end [well, not quite the end; I note that he did a round of "farewell" performances in 2019 -- Ed.], and is reported to have died peacefully in his sleep on the 21st of this month. Not a fancy or excess-prone conductor, but a committed and sincerely musical one -- it was a heckuva career.

HANDEL: Music for the Royal Fireworks:
i. Ouverture

Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam), Bernard Haitink, cond. Philips, recorded in the Concertgebouw, c1962

BRAHMS: Double Concerto in A minor, Op. 102:
ii. Andante

Henryk Szeryng, violin; János Starker, cello; Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam), Bernard Haitink, cond. Philips, recorded in the Concertgebouw, September 1970

SHOSTAKOVICH: The Age of Gold (ballet suite), Op. 22a:
iii. Polka: Allegretto

London Philharmonic Orchestra, Bernard Haitink, cond. Decca, recorded in Kingsway Hall, November 1979

SHOSTAKOVICH: Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 54:
iii. Presto

Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam), Bernard Haitink, cond. Decca, recorded in the Concertgebouw, December 1983
[NOTE: For those unfamiliar with the strange musical beast that is Shostakovich 6, it begins with a fairly long and quite lovely Largo -- worthy of Mahler, who has to have been on Shostakovich's mind -- and then dashes into a startlingly goofy Allegro that segues into this giddy, dare I say foot-stomping Presto, about the last thing we could have seen coming from that opening Largo. AFTERTHOUGHT: I'm thinking we ought to spend some time with Shostakovich 6, perhaps with some hindsight-driven wonder at its position in the otherworldly sequence of Shostakovich's Sixth through Ninth Symphonies.]

by Ken

After I'd been thinking for a while as to what music might go into a proper Haitink memorial, I thought I'd just take a peek in the DWT Archive. I had no idea how much there is there, so at this preliminary stage, before I've given much thought to making this a proper Haitink memorial post, I thought we might just listen to a small portion of music we've already heard from him, starting with another Brahms concerto slow movement, hearing how he adjusts to noticeably different sorts of soloist -- note how he's a little more assertive with Brendel, more supportive with the more self-starting Arrau (with whom, we might recall, Haitink had already recorded a cycle of the five Beethoven piano concertos).

BRAHMS: Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat, Op. 83:
iii. Andante

Claudio Arrau, piano; Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam), Bernard Haitink, cond. Philips, recorded in the Concertgebouw, October 1969

Alfred Brendel, piano; Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam), Bernard Haitink, cond. Philips, recorded in the Concertgebouw, December 1973

And while we're following up on our opening selections, we might look at a very different side of Shostakovich from the jolly music we heard above: the searing Adagio of the Leningrad Symphony. Haitink, we might recall, recorded all 15 Shostakovich symphonies, split between the Concertgebouw and his beloved second orchestra, the London Philharmonic.

SHOSTAKOVICH: Symphony No. 7 in C, Op. 60 (Leningrad):
iii. Adagio

London Philharmonic Orchestra, Bernard Haitink, cond. Decca, recorded in Kingsway Hall, 1979


OF COURSE WE'VE GOT MAHLER . . .

Adding Schubert's mighty "Wanderer" to our roster of musical fantasies

Clifford Curzon plays the first two sections of Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy, in a 1949 Decca recording. You'll find the rest of the performance below.

by Ken

A couple of weeks ago we celebrated "Fantasy Week at Sunday Classics" with a fantastic roundup that included the Choral Fantasy (for piano, soloists, chorus, and orchestra) of Beethoven, the Hungarian Fantasia (for piano and orchestra) of Liszt, and the Scottish Fantasy (for violin and orchestra) of Max Bruch. Of course there are lots of other musical fantasies, or fantasias (as I pointed out, we distinguish between the two words in English, but it's a distinction that doesn't exist in the standard "musical" languages -- Italian, French, and German), but it occurred to me at the time that we were missing one obviously important one.

So this week we add to our fantasy roste Schubert's C major Fantasy, D. 760, more familiarly known as the Wanderer Fantasy, for piano solo (at least until Franz Liszt got his hands on it). It's a piece whose rhythmically driven opening, once heard, seems to me unlikely to be forgotten.

SCHUBERT: Wanderer Fantasy (Fantasy in C), D. 760:
Opening, part 1



Mikhail Rudy, piano. EMI, recorded c1987

But immediately Schubert turns the same material into something very different, and then returns to the original driven mode, and then back, and then . . . .

How a "second-tier" Mozart piano concerto can command top-tier attention

Eduard Zilberkant: The New York Concert Artists' Evenings of Piano Concerti veteran conducted two of the four EPC IV concerts and was the unquestioned star.

by Ken

We're still talking about New York Concert Artists' latest "Evenings of Piano Concerti" series, EPC IV, which as I noted in Friday night's preview gave me an unexpected measure of sheer musical pleasure, with the largest dose coming thanks to the spirit of the playing conductor Eduard Zilberkant drew from the little pickup orchestra in the two concerts he conducted, the first and third.

But for today I thought we'd scale back and just focus on one of the two concertos I mentioned had particularly delighted me in the performance offered by 22-year-old Shiran Wang and Zilberkant in the third concert, Mozart's K. 414. We already heard the slow movement, with that beautiful main theme the composer borrowed as a form of tribute to the recently deceased J. C. Bach.

Before we turn to the complete concerto, I just wanted to highlight a little Mozartean surprise that occurs in the concluding rondo, in the form of what I will call the "countertheme." I don't know if it will have the same effect it does on me, but it's the kind of thing that has a way of seizing control of my brain and not letting go. (Some readers may recall the October 2009 Sunday Classics post called "Surprise! With wizards like Bach and Mozart, you never know what you may hear next," in which the Mozart surprise was a wonderful little figuration that bursts out of nowhere in the cello in the final variation of the theme-and-variations slow movement of the A major String Quartet, K. 464, and then works its way up through all the instruments.)

Countertheme of the Rondo of Mozart's K. 414 Concerto

This is nuts, I know, but I've extracted the portions of the Rondo that are based on this countertheme, starting with its first statement, from Murray Perahia's recording, which we'll hear complete immediately afterward. In this clip we hear ripped-out chunks that representing the following bits of the 6:19 whole: (1) 0:12-0:31, (2) 0:58-2:15, (3) 2:39-2:46, (4) 3:36-4:13, (5) 4:19-4:51 (including the start of the cadenza at 4:40 -- or 0:20 of our clip).



Now here's the whole movement.

MOZART: Piano Concerto No. 12 in A, K. 414:
iii. Allegretto

English Chamber Orchestra, Murray Perahia, piano and cond. CBS/Sony, recorded June 16-18, 1979



New York Concert Artists put together this promotional video for last year's Evenings of Piano Concerti (EPC III).


NOW LET'S HEAR THE WHOLE OF OUR CONCERTO

The piano-and-orchestra Liszt -- the orator meets the poet

Here's the first part of the Second Piano Concerto played by Alfred Brendel, with Eliahu Inbal conducting the Frankfurt Radio Symphony. (The performance concludes here. There's an interesting video performance by pianist Yakov Fliere, from 1974, with Maxim Shostakovich conducting -- part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 3 here.)

by Ken

We've heard a sampling of Liszt the orchestral virtuoso (in the form of the best-known of his 13 symphonic poems, Les Préludes, Friday night) and of his virtuosic but equally poetic keyboard wizardry (performances by Sviatoslav Richter, Georges Cziffra, and Aldo Ciccolini last night, along with a video performance of the First Piano Concerto).

We've talked before about the emergence in the West of the roster of great Soviet musicians long prevented from performing here by the Stalinist and immediately post-Stalinist regimes. When Emil Gilels, by any standard one of the century's great pianists, caused the predictable furor, he told interviewers that the pianist they really needed to hear was Richter, who was still being kept under wraps. Rather amazingly, he lived up to the hype.

In 1961 in London Richter played both Liszt piano concertos and the Hungarian Fantasia for piano and orchestra with his compatriot Kiril Kondrashin and the London Symphony, and happily Philips recorded the concertos, for a disc that remains a phonographic landmark -- recorded, incidentally by the Mercury "Living Presence" team of producer Wilma Cozart Fine and engineer Robert Fine, though the tapes have for decades now rested exclusively in the hands of the sonically more conservative Philips technical people. It's a pity the two concertos made such a convenient LP, which is presumably what discouraged Philips from recording the Hungarian Fantasia, which turns out to be quite a loss when we hear the live performance. True, notes get spilled all over the place when all hell breaks loose, and this would have been fixed in a studio recording, but my goodness, is it possible not to be blown over by the hurricane force of this outburst?

LISZT: Hungarian Fantasia for Piano and Orchestra


Sviatoslav Richter, piano; London Symphony Orchestra, Kiril Kondrashin, cond. Live performance, 1961

Jorge Bolet, piano; Symphony of the Air, Robert Irving, cond. Everest, recorded c1959

Michel Béroff, piano; Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Kurt Masur, cond. EMI, recorded June 1979

Liszt wrote his two piano concertos (and indeed most of a third, only in modern times come to light) at basically the same time, which allowed him to pursue markedly different expressive agendas; the two are so different, and yet so complementary, that they have flourished in each other's company since early LP days. The First Concerto, as you may gather from the video clip we saw last night, is in large measure the Liszt of Les Préludes: grandiose, sweeping, a robust treat. While the Second Concerto indeed builds to a wonderfully grandiloquent march finale, the wonder of this piece is the gentle songfulness of its opening theme, and the way it evolves into that finale.

The piece is basically a theme-and-variations set, in a single movement, though with significant changes of tempo -- and, more significantly, and deliciously under-conspicuously, a slide from triple meter, first to 6/8 duple meter (at the Allegro agitato assai), then briefly back to the 3/4 of the opening (Tempo del Andante) before switching to good old-fashioned square-jawed 4/4 at the Allegro moderato -- the very tempo we're going to need (even with a brief return to the still-duple-meter 6/8) for the outbreak of the Marziale. (And when the Marziale finally breaks out, you really shouldn't have any difficulty hearing in it the lovely original theme.)

We're going to hear the 1961 Richter-Kondrashin studio recording I mentioned above, and also a performance by the highly poetic Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman, whom we heard playing the Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto, also with Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony, and finally Alfred Brendel's first recording (for Vox).

On a technical note: CD programmers naturally enough treat some (and some cases all) of the tempo changes in the Liszt A major Concerto as appropriate points for tracking; of course on a CD we don't hear those track points. Since in our format I have no way of creating seamless track switches, we're going to hear the piece somewhat broken up, and not identically broken up, so that in the Richter-Kondrashin recording we hear the buildup to and outbreak of the Marziale un poco meno allegro, whereas in the Zimerman-Ozawa the Marziale gets its own track point, and the Vox recording has a slightly different breakdown.

LISZT: Piano Concerto No. 2 in A:
Adagio sostenuto assai; Allegro agitato assai Allegro moderato Allegro deciso; Marziale un poco meno allegro; Allegro animato


Sviatoslav Richter, piano; London Symphony Orchestra, Kiril Kondrashin, cond. Philips, recorded 1961

Krystian Zimerman, piano; Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa, cond. DG, recorded April 1987

Alfred Brendel, piano; Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Michael Gielen, cond. Vox, recorded 1975

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