Radu Lupu (1945-2022) [2]

Part 2: The Schubert picks from Andrew C's list
[We're not even going to finish with Schubert in this post, let alone get to Schumann, so I'm afraid we're looking at a Part 3]

SCHUBERT: Fantasy in F minor for Piano Four Hands, D. 940

Radu Lupu and Murray Perahia, four-hand piano. Sony, recorded in The Maltings, Snape (Suffolk), England, June 21 & 25-26, 1984

by Ken

As I hope I made clear in last week's Part 1, I had (and have) a heap of professional respect for the Romanian-born pianist Radu Lupu, even though he was never a favorite pianist of mine. Which makes for a tricky issue of remembrance, but I was helped as well as intrigued by a list proposed by The Guardian's Andrew Clements, "Radu Lupu: Five key performances." Andrew C made some really interesting choices, and it turned out to be an interesting path to relistening to, and maybe rethinking about, the performer.

Last time we covered two of Andrew C's choices -- the two concertos: Mozart's No. 19 in F, K. 459, and Brahms's No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15. The Mozart is a simply glorious performance, thanks in good part to the inspired contribution of David Zinman and the ardent young players of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen. That was a great call, Andrew! The Brahms D minor he selected, a 1994 live performance from Tokyo with Wolfgang Sawallisch and the NHK Symphony, is nice enough, though I think anyone who knows this concerto, a work of deep brooding as well as considerable exaltation, may suspect that "nice" is not an epithet ideally applied to it.

A little foraging turned up an even nicer live performance, from 1996, with the Finnish Radio Symphony under Jukka-Pekka Saraste, but also a gripping, gorgeous, death-defying live performance from 1983, in which again the driving force appears to be the conductor, Klaus Tennstedt (with an orchestra he worked with so much, the London Philharmonic). In fairness, Lupu in key places rises -- in a way many other pianists wouldn't have been able to -- to the considerable challenges created by Tennstedt's relentlessly brave probing.

YOU KNOW, WE COULD HEAR THOSE PERFORMANCES AGAIN

"It's a gift" (cont.): A bit more about operatic intermezzos, and a lot more about 19th-century-style instrumental ones

[Some of you had a chance to wander through the construction site for this post, and you'll notice that many things have changed -- while many haven't! At this point I'm calling it "done." -- Ken]

At Scottish Opera in 2011, soprano Anita Bader and baritone Roland Wood portray Christine and Hofkapellmeister Robert Storch in Richard Strauss's Intermezzo (1924). Funnily, Intermezzo the opera contains a generous helping of distinctive "Zwischenspiele" -- er, intermezzos.

Intermezzo. (1) Term used in the 18th century (generally in the plural, 'intermezzi') for comic interludes performed between the acts or scenes of an opera seria. . . .

[We hereby ellipsize a lengthy emburblement of facts about
18th-century intermezzi, picking up (at long last) here --]

. . . In the 19th century the term 'intermezzo' was used for lyrical pieces or moments, often for piano solo. Mendelssohn called the third movement of his Piano Quartet no. 2 'Intermezzo' and Schumann made frequent use of this title in his early piano music. Brahms composed numerous independent intermezzos for piano, and the term has been used for operatic entr'actes, as in Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana.
(2) Opera in two acts by Richard Strauss to his own libretto (1924, Dresden).

-- from The Norton/Grove Concise Encyclopedia
of Music (1st edition, 1988)

ABOUT STRAUSS'S LOVELY ZWISCHENSPIELE

In due course we're going to hear the Vier Zwischenspiele aus 'Intermezzo' (Four Interludes from 'Intermezzo'), but for now I thought we might rehear the most beautiful of Strauss's innumerable operatic Zwischenspiele, the "Moonlight Interlude" that sets the stage for the famous Final Scene of his final opera, Capriccio. Because we've heard it a number of times, we've got a whole bunch of performances in the SC Archive, and I'd be happy to rehear them all, probably more than once.

For you, though, I'm limiting it to three: first, the Previn and Karajan performances, because they have the radiant measure of this music, not to mention the participation of the ultimate Strauss orchestras, the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics, and then the soulful Clemens Krauss performance -- Krauss of course was not only an important conductor but a co-creator of Capriccio, having written the libretto with the composer, then naturally enough conducted the premiere, at the Bavarian State Opera in October 1942. In 1953, after the composer's death (at 85, in September 1949), he conducted the Bavarian Radio performance from which this clip is taken. Not long after, in May 1954, Krauss's own life would be cut short by a heart attack, age 61.

R. STRAUSS: Capriccio: "Mondscheinmusik" ("Moonlight Music")


Vienna Philharmonic, André Previn, cond. DG, recorded in the Grosser Saal of the Musikverein, October 1992

Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. DG, recorded in the Philharmonie, November 1985

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Clemens Krauss, cond. From a broadcast performance of the opera, 1953

by Ken

As you'll recall from the last post, "It's a gift: Intermezzo," when we began zeroing in on the tiny but endlessly fascinating "extra" movement, called Intermezzo, seemingly squeezed into Brahms's early breakthrough masterpiece, the Piano Sonata No. 3 in F minor, Op. 5, we're trying to pin down just what in heck an intermezzo is anyway. And so, above, we've consulted a Proper Authority.

You'll note that Our Authority points out that "the term has been used for operatic entr'actes, as in Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana," which we've already seized the opportunity to pay a call on in the previous post, and as promised, before we're done we're going to revisit it and also drop in on the Intermezzo of Cav's usual companion piece, Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci, where we won't allow some quibbling about terminology distract us overmuch from savoring the beauty of the music.

Although the sense of "intermezzo" that we're looking for is clearly the one we're going to have to try to extract from Our Authority's sense (1), I've already allowed myself to be diverted by OA's sense (2): "Opera in two acts by Richard Strauss to his own libretto (1924, Dresden)." It seems odd that OA makes no mention of the intermezzos to be found in Strauss's Intermezzo, but as you've seen, we've got his/her back on this. Before we allow ourselves this exceedingly pleasant digression, however, we should probably made some honest effort on our Intermezzo Hunt.


OBVIOUS STARTING POINT: THE LEADS OFFERED BY OA!

It's a gift: This week we have a Brahms "Rückblick" ("Lookback") -- yup, still Brahms, but this time all (or mostly) in slow(er) motion

And we start with four Brahms slow movements --
two we've heard before and two we haven't

ii. Andante sostenuto (1876)


Staatskapelle Dresden, Kurt Sanderling, cond. Eurodisc, recorded in the Lukaskirche, 1971

New York Philharmonic, Kurt Masur, cond. Teldec, recorded live in Avery Fisher Hall, May 1994

Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded in Severance Hall, Oct. 7, 1966
[UPDATE: Szell performance added early Sunday afternoon]

ii. Adagio (1858)


Clifford Curzon, piano; London Symphony Orchestra, George Szell, cond. Decca, recorded in Kingsway Hall, May 1962

Arthur Rubinstein, piano; Boston Symphony Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. RCA, recorded in Symphony Hall, Apr. 21-22, 1964

ii. Andante espressivo (1853)


Arthur Rubinstein, piano. RCA, recorded at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York City, December 17, 1959

Clifford Curzon, piano. Decca, recorded in the Sofiensaal, Vienna, December 1962

iv. Intermezzo (Rückblick): Andante molto (1853)


Arthur Rubinstein, piano. RCA, recorded at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York City, December 17, 1959

Clifford Curzon, piano. Decca, recorded in the Sofiensaal, Vienna, December 1962


TROUBLE LOADING THE AUDIO FILES?

I'm sure having trouble today, but hey, it's Sunday at Internet Archive, which means heavy traffic. It's funny how this once made me crazy -- ah, the good old days! Trust me, the files are all there, so if need be just keep refreshing. I say the music is worth it.

Of course there's more -- a whole lot more -- to come. Which of course will include proper identification of the music we've heard so far.-- Ken

#

No, for all of Brahms's admiration of Chopin, his ballades really aren't much like Chopin's

Ballade is also a typeface -- or, more precisely, a font: Ballade-Bold.

ballad  n  1. a.  A narrative poem, often of folk origin and intended to be sung, consisting of simple stanzas and usually having a recurring refrain.  b.  The music for such a poem.  2.  Music  A popular song especially of a romantic or sentimental nature.

ballade  n.  1.  A verse form usually consisting of three stanzas of eight or ten lines each along with a brief envoy, with all three stanzas and the envoy ending in the same one-line refrain.  2.  Music  A composition, usually for the piano, having the romantic or dramatic quality of a ballad.

-- The American Heritage Dictionary of the
English Language, Third Edition (1992)

A BALLADE BY CHOPIN -- No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23


Alfred Cortot, piano. Victor, recorded in New York City, Dec. 27, 1926

Josef Hofmann, piano. Live recording from the Metropolitan Opera House, New York City, Nov. 28, 1937

AND ONE BY BRAHMS -- in D minor, Op. 10, No. 1


Wilhelm Kempff, piano. DG, recorded in the Beethovensaal, Hannover (Germany), February 1972

Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, piano. Live performance from Lugano, 1981

[Now, having heard in yesterday's pre-post ("This jolly Brahms duet really isn't part of our 'work unit,' but we kind of have to hear it about now") the vocal-duet setting Brahms did a couple of decades later of the Herder ballad that inspired this ballade, we can appreciate more fully the grimness of the setting.]

by Ken

We've been peeking at the fascinating process by which Brahms acquired mastery of musical forms. Our view of the process, we should note, is seriously hampered by the fiercely high standards the composer maintained, which caused him to destroy so much music which in his view didn't meet his standards, which he tended to think, especially when he looked back at his younger years, were rather too low than too high. So we really don't get to hear him experimenting much. What we hear are the results of experiments that he considered to have had a satisfactory outcome.

We came to this line of inquiry, for those who may still be wondering, by working backwards through Brahms's long, arduous path to the creation of a symphony, a goal he thought early on would be the achievement that really put him on the international compositional map. Luckily for him and us, he managed to fashion a rather spectacularly successful career even without managing the symphonic feat, which didn't come till his Op. 60.


WHY IS BRAHMS'S EARLIEST SURVIVING WORK HIS 'OP. 4'?

This jolly Brahms duet really isn't part of our "work unit," but we kind of have to hear it about now

Brigitte Fassbaender, mezzo-soprano; Peter Schreier, tenor; Karl Engel, piano. DG, recorded in Studio Lankwitz, Berlin, June 1982
Iris Vermillion, mezzo-soprano; Christoph Prégardien, tenor; Helmut Deutsch, piano. CPO, from Brahms Complete Duets & Quartets, recorded in the Kleiner Sendesaal of RBB (Berlin-Brandenburg Radio), Berlin-Charlottenburg, 1997-2003, released 2017


AND WE HAVE TO HEAR IT BECAUSE --

Of course it was possible for the young Brahms to be aware of Chopin's scherzos and ballades without in any way imitating them

[With assorted strategic Monday-morning touching up]

Plus, we get to have some fun with Weber's Oberon Overture
and Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream music (than
which musical wonderfulness doesn't come any wonderfuller)

Given Brahms's reverance for the great masters who preceded him, and in particular one who had revolutionized the way composers could think about the piano, how could he not have been keenly aware of Chopin?

"Johannes Brahms began his musical life studying the piano, and his earliest, truly great compositions were solo piano works, both presented here. The Scherzo in E-flat minor, Op. 4, is the earliest surviving composition by Brahms. He wrote it in November 1851 when he was 18 and published it as Op. 4, rather than Op. 1, because, he explained to a friend, “when one shows one's self for the first time, people must first see the head and not the feet.” Musical scholars feel that, despite the composer’s denial, it obviously shows a “dependence” on Chopin’s scherzi, and quotes from Heinrich Marschner’s Hans Heiling at bar 46 as well."

-- from an online note accompanying a listing for Yefim Bronfman's early recording of Op. 4 (the Scherzo) and Op. 5 (the F minor Piano Sonata)

SO, HERE AGAIN IS HOW BRAHMS'S SCHERZO GOES
(in two performances we haven't heard before and one we have)

BRAHMS: Scherzo for Piano in E-flat minor, Op. 4


Yefim Bronfman, piano. MusicMasters, recorded c1986

Julius Katchen, piano. Decca, recorded in Decca Studio No. 3, West Hampstead (London), 1964

Wilhelm Kempff, piano. DG, recorded in the Beethovensaal, Hannover (Germany), March 1958

I'll have something to say about the performances farther down. For now, I suggest keeping in mind the ages of the pianists at the time of recording -- roughly 28, 38, and 62. Turns out, it seems to matter.

by Ken

In a moment we're going to hear how a Chopin scherzo goes. But first let me say that it's been a good week for me, musically and in other ways as well, I guess. (Funny how the two often go together!) After a couple of years in which it was all but impossible for me to listen to music on my aging computer, which I imagined was suffering from some likely fatal hardware or at least heart-stoppingly expensive malady whose repair would likely cost almost as much as replacing the poor old computer, well --

Long story short (I actually started writing the whole story before just chucking it, since what interest could it have for anybody but me?), like magic I managed to solve all the problems, and then some, and suddenly I found myself with wonderful music pouring forth from both my computers. It used to be that even when I was most depressed about the purposelessness of these posts, the music revived me. So lately I've been allowing myself to wallow a bit in the pleasure of all this music, and later in this post we're going to allow it ourselves the luxury of some pleasurable musical wallowing.


NOW HERE'S HOW A CHOPIN SCHERZO GOES
(via a Czech, a Hungarian, and of course the Pole -- thrice over!)

Let's take a moment to meet and greet Brahms the musical poet

"When I listen, in my home, to this music played on a fine gramophone, I feel I receive the full impact the original listeners might have felt. In that atmosphere -- quietly listening alone, or with a person close to you -- they take your heart."

-- a special guest commentator who'll be sharing "his" Brahms with us

BRAHMS (AS WE MIGHT SAY) "DOES SCHERZO"

Scherzo for Piano in E-flat minor, Op. 4

Wilhelm Kempff, piano. DG, recorded in the Beethovensaal, Hannover (Germany), March 1958

by Ken

The above, in case you haven't guessed, is our mystery piece and pianist from last Sunday's "sneak preview of what I'm working on": the work that was identified as "Solo-piano work that comes before Op. 5," which is to say the 21-year-old Brahms's breakthrough work, the mighty and exalted Piano Sonata No. 3 in F minor, as performed by "Some kind of keyboard magician (don't you think?)" -- and on second hearing don't you still think? There's a tendency to think of Wilhelm Kempff (1895-1991), even while ostensibly appreciating him, as a stalwart upholder of the grand Austro-Germanic Classical and Romantic tradition, which he assuredly was. Yet I often feel that this was just the most visible surface of his playing, that there was almost always something else going on, a free -- disciplined, yes, but still free -- range of imagination that he didn't adverise or flaunt but that could create not just musical intimacy but musical magic, often in standard repertory -- like many of the Beethoven piano sonatas -- where most pianists don't even know it's hiding.

I think we should really try to take in the whole of the F minor Sonata ("the whole" encompassing in this case not three or even four but five movements), but I'm not ready for that. Instead, for now we're going to jump over Op. 5 all the way to Op. 10, the set of Four Ballades that Brahms composed in 1854 -- in other words, early on in the period we're interested: 1854-58, the years when he got his new idea for the growing mass of musical material he had been developing, after transforming it from an incipient sonata for two pianos into something he thought could instead be developed into the symphony he so dearly wanted to write, and now instead was imagining as a big and bold piano concerto, which would occupy him until 1858 and not achieve performance in even preliminary form until 1859.

If these two forms, "scherzo" and "ballade," call to mind another great composer for the piano, one who may have brought to composition for the piano a higher-soaring poetic imagination than any other composer of the 19th -- or any other -- century, who happened to have wound up creating four each of these forms, scherzos and ballades, that's fine by me. It could be that this composer by sheerest chance happened also to have been in large measure a "discovery" of Robert Schumann, who was already providing Brahms with the inspiration of a composer centrally concerned with combining fluency in the Classical forms, with at the same time a grounding in the free flight of poetic imagination. Brahms would certainly have been keenly aware of this great predecessor, and all the music of his he laid hands on while the predecessor was still alive and composing up a storm until his always-fragile health gave way in 1849, when he was 39 and Brahms 16, achieving growing mastery of the piano and imagining himself as a composer.

It's not that Brahms's idea of a piano scherzo (and here we're thinking of "scherzo" not as a movement of a symphony or string quartet or other work in what we think of as "sonata form," even a piano sonata as a free-standing piano form rather than the scherzo movement of a symphony or string quartet or even piano sonata) or ballade is much like that predecessor's. Still, the fact that he gravitated to these forms, and in them let his imagination run free through subjects of human time and place and situation and mood, I don't see how any of this could have been an accident.

I don't think we often think of Brahms as, particularly, a font of supreme poetic imagination in music, but in the course of some random listening I was doing while pondering Brahms for our current project, I happened to hear the very recording we're going to be listening to in just a moment, and I was bowled over even more than I was by the Wilhelm Kempff recording of the Scherzo in E minor, with its magical range of touches and variously-breathed musical traceries. We're going to talk and learn a bit more about the construction of the Ballades, but first I'm proposing that we just listen to Kempff ensorcel his way through the Brahms Ballades. And once he's through them, I think we'll be primed for the appearance of a special guest commentator who's going to share some of the secrets of his lifelong love affair with Brahms's piano music, whom we're first going to hear play the Ballades.

BRAHMS: Ballades (4), Op. 10:
i. After the Scottish ballad: "Edward" in Herder's "Voices of the People" (Andante)
ii. Andante
iii. Intermezzo: Allegro
iv. Andante con moto

[ii. at 3:44; iii. at 10:06; iv. at 14:18] Wilhelm Kempff, piano. DG, recorded in the Beethovensaal, Hannover (Germany), February 1972

[ii. at 4:01; iii. at 9:52; iv. at 13:53] Our special guest commentator, piano. (Recording details to come later)


NOW LET'S MEET OUR SPECIAL GUEST BRAHMS-LOVER

Here's the key -- or is it?

Piano Trio: 
i. Allegro moderato -- opening

Arthur Rubinstein, piano; Jascha Heifetz, violn; Emanuel Feuermann, cello. RCA-BMG, recorded in Holllywood, Sept. 12-13, 1941

Vladimir Ashkenazy, piano; Itzhak Perlman, violin; Lynn Harrell, cello. EMI, recorded in New York, c1979

UPDATE: If you looked at this post before 10pm ET/7pm PT, you saw only the Ashkenazy-Perlman-Harrell clip, and in fact originally the whole first movement. When I went back to edit it to include just the opening, I was disheartened by how namby-pamby the performance is. (I actually thought the EMI CDs contained a different one, and then I figured how far wrong could we go with this one? I learned.) Most of my CD versions are on a hard-to-get-at shelf, so as an add-on I chose a much grander performance that happened also to be more readily at hand.

by Ken

This piece suddenly popped into my head this afternoon, and I couldn't have been happier that it did. So we're going to hear it tomorrow. Meanwhile it set me to thinking about other works in the same key, with the realization (I'm sure not for the first time, but then, who remembers?) that it's hard to find others of the same character.


SOME OTHER WORKS IN THE SAME KEY

Thinking of the "snorting and grunting" Brahms's "inwardly restless and propulsive" piano playing

Jacqueline du Pré (1945-1987) and husband Daniel Barenboim play the third-movement Allegro passionato of the Brahms F major Cello Sonata, the movement we heard in this week's preview.

by Ken

For this week's preview I seized on a quote included by the program notes for the performance of Brahms's Second Cello Sonata I heard recently, with the fine young cellist Dmitry Kouzov, in British pianist-conductor-professor Ian Hobson's 14-concert New York series of "The Complete Solo Piano and Chamber Music with Piano of Johannes Brahms," under the general title Brahms: Classical Inclinations in a Romantic Age. (There are still two concerts remaining in the series: a viola-and-piano evening this Tuesday, which I'm going to, and a final solo-piano program on Thursday.)

The quote was from a letter written to Brahms by the pianist Elisabeth von Herzogenberg shortly after the composer gave the first public performance of this sonata in Vienna with the artist for whom it was written, Robert Hausmann, the cellist of the great violinist Joseph Joachim's string quartet and an enthusiastic exponent of Brahms's First Cello Sonata, writtten more than 20 years earlier. (The solo parts of the great Double Concerto were written with Joachim and Hausmann in mind.) Von Herzogenberg had herself been playing the sonata with Hausmann, and this portion of her letter was included in the little book containing program notes for all 14 concerts. Since the introduction, and only the introduction, is credited to Paul Griffiths, I'm assuming that all the annotations are by Professor Hobson, but I don't see any credit to that effect, so I'm referring to the author as "Ian Hobson Annotator" (IHA).

IHA tells us that just over a week after the Vienna premiere, on November 24, 1986, von Herzogenberg wrote to Brahms "with an appreciation that is valuable not least for what it tells us about the composer's piano playing":

The piece is so greatly compressed; how it surges forward! The concise development is so exciting, and the augmented return of the first theme is such a surprise! Needless to say, we reveled in the beautiful warm sounds of the Adagio, and especially at the magnificent moment when we find ourselves again in F-sharp major, which sounds so marvelous. I'd like to hear you yourself play the scherzo, with its driving power and energy (I can hear you snorting and grunting in it!). No one else would succeed in playing it as I imagine it: agitated without rushing, legato, yet inwardly restless and propulsive.

I ACTUALLY MEANT TO TALK ABOUT A WORK ON
A LATER PROGRAM, THE C MINOR PIANO QUARTET

Preview: Brahms in snorting-and-grunting mode

Note: I don't know how I managed to not schedule this post for posting last night, when it appeared on DownWithTyranny, but here it is. -- Ken


[A]

[B]

[C]


"I'd like to hear you yourself play the scherzo, with its driving power and energy (I can hear you snorting and grunting in it!). No one else would succeed in playing it as I imagine it: agitated without rushing, legato, yet inwardly restless and propulsive."

-- from a letter to Brahms by pianist Elisabeth von Herzogenberg,
who had been playing the composer's new piano-and-cello sonata

by Ken

The music is the third movement of Brahms's Second Cello Sonata in F, Op. 99, and the quote from Elisabeth von Herzogenberg's letter to the composer comes from the program notes for Ian Hobson's 14-concert New York series (which concludes this week) of the complete Brahms solo and chamber works involving the piano. More from the letter and from and about the sonata and the Hobson series in this week's Sunday Classics post.

As the annotator who quoted von Herzogenberg's letter notes, it's "valuable not least for what it tells us about the composer's piano playing." And I thought that you might enjoy listening to tonight's performances "cold," to see how our three very different pianists stack up against our letter-writer's imagining of the way Brahms would have played this music. (Not to worry, the performers will all be identified in a moment.)


WONDERING WHO OUR PIANISTS (AND CELLISTS) ARE?
HERE THEY ARE AGAIN, NOW PROPERLY IDENTIFIED

Sunday Classics' Great Moments in Music History: Arnold Schoenberg, the movie mogul, and the mogul's "boys"

Schoenberg, seen in a 1910 self-portrait
(Yes, he was also a painter)

by Ken

Or we could call this installment of Great Moments in Music History: "The Day Arnold Schoenberg's career as a Hollywood film composer began and ended."

As I mentioned last week, I've been reading the second part of Arthur Rubinstein's autobiography, My Many Years. And as I also mentioned, Rubinstein seems to have known just about everybody in the world of the arts (not just music) through most of his career.

In October 1939, with Poland already fallen to the German Blitzkrieg that set off World War II, placing Rubinstein, his wife Nela and their children (just two at the time) in a dangerous status as Polish nationals, and with France already taking on an alarmingly anti-Semitic tone, the family advanced by several weeks their planned departure from their home in Paris for a U.S. tour. At Nela's urging, Arthur pulled strings to secure very limited space aboard a U.S. ship sent as "a rescue boat for their citizens in France."

In the course of their New World stay, which came to include a South American tour and then one in Mexico, the Rubinsteins watched with mounting horror as events in Europe unfolded and they knew that returning home would be impossible for at least the duration of the war. The family wound up settling in Los Angeles, where of course large numbers of European émigrés had found their way, many of whom were already acquaintances if not friends of the pianist.

Rubinstein takes note of the plight of the composer Arnold Schoenberg, who had been living in L.A. since 1934, for both political and health reasons. Schoenberg, Rubinstein notes, "gave us musicians quite a lot of trouble."

He was left without money after his dismissal from the University of California, simply because of his age. I joined a group of musicians who decided to help him. The best way was to obtain a commission for him to compose music for films. We were lucky to persuade one of the moguls of the cinema to receive the great composer and offer him a contract. Schönberg was not only willing to do it but became interested in the project. It became common knowledge how the interview ran:

The mogul says: "Professor, I have a film right up your alley. You will write the best music of your life for it."

Schoenberg says quietly: "I would like to settle the financial question first. I need fifty thousand dollars for my music."

The mogul raises both hands in the air. "But, Professor, we've never paid more than ten thousand to our composers.,"

Schoenberg protests: "It takes me a year to composer my music and this is the least I can ask for it."

"But, Professor," laughs the mogul, "why a year? You can write a few tunes and my boys will arrange it for the orchestras and they will do whatever you want."

"Your sons?" asks Schönberg.

"No. We have, at the studio, fellows who finish up the music overnight, arrange it for orchestra or other things. They know what they're doing."

The two men separated without understanding each other. His worried friends were of the opinion that he should have accepted the ten thousand, but the master made this sublime reply: "I cannot commit suicide by making a living on ten thousand dollars."

The moment I dearly wish there'd been cameras there to record is the one when, at least in Schoenberg's mind, the mogul's sons enter the discussion. I'm having more fun than I can tell imagining the "professor" asking, "Your sons?"


HERE ARE SOME TUNES SCHOENBERG COULD
HAVE TURNED OVER TO THE MOGUL'S "BOYS"


The first of the Two Piano Pieces, Op. 33 (1938-41)


IN THIS WEEK'S SUNDAY CLASSICS POST

Uh, dunno, not sure. Most of the ideas percolating would require quantities of either work or thinking (or, heaven help me, both), commodities that have been in short supply for me for, oh, I dunno, the last couple of decades?

But I'm thinking maybe we could ease into a closer look at the poor comédienne Nedda in Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci (which we've looked at parts of pretty closely, notably the baritone's remarkable Prologue, in the February 2010 post "The Prolgoue to Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci entreats, 'Consider our souls' "), the victim half of one of the theatrical literature's more explosive relationships. It's her successive scenes with the opera's two baritone characters which I want to get to, and that's one of those deals that's going to require abundant work and thought. Still, we might be able to ease into it, maybe by setting up the relationship with her theater-troupe director husband, Canio.

Or . . . my friend Conrad L. Osborne has latterly published a piece in Opera News about Enrico Caruso, unlike anything you've read about Caruso, even if you've read everything there is, or was, to read about Caruso. I had this idea that we could poach some of that and interlace it with the actual recordings he cites as a sort of value-added enrichment. This takes care of a lot of the "thinking" problem, since C.L.O. has done most of that (all I'd have to figure out is how to poach it), but doing the audio clips and assembling texts and whatnot . . . I get tired just thinking about it. Meanwhile, as of now you can still read the piece -- which combines meaningful description of how that amazing voice worked and how its workings varied over time with a powerfully personal appreciation of the artistry that technique was put at the service of -- for free on the magazine's website.

UPDATE: It's Pagliacci!

#

Arthur Rubinstein offers compelling advice for young pianists

"Many pianists perform at their concerts music which they do not understand or particularly like, only because these pieces are much in demand and recommended to them by their managers. . . . My long experience taught me that your only way to success, young pianists, is to pour out your own deep emotion into the music you really love and understand."

by Ken

I admit it's taken me till now to read Arthur Rubinstein's two volumes of autobiography: My Young Years (1973) and My Many Years (1980). But I often think the passage of time gives us a better indication of the value of a piece of writing. (A slight caveat needs to entered about that word "writing" in the case of My Many Years, by which time the author had lost his sight. So the book was all dictated. Nevertheless, I have written, "Rubinstein writes," which seems to me a defensible liberty.)

I'm still only halfway through My Many Years (both of these are big books), but I've been sitting for a while on a passage from it so interesting that it cries out for sharing. We'll get to the full quote in a moment, but I've put the gist at the top, and I thought we would start with two pieces that could hardly be more different but that could both be counted on win audiences pretty much anywhere in the world over to his playing.

It should be noted that Rubinstein evolved enormously as a pianist, with a lot of the change which occurred at a surprisingly advanced age quite deliberate on his part, to fix what he had come to regard as a too easy approach to his playing, which relied on his natural musical instincts at the expense of close contact with the musical texts. We're going to hear performances "early" and late, though we need to be careful with that word "early"; his earliest recordings were made when he was in his early 40s.

DE FALLA: El Amor brujo: "Ritual Fire Dance" (arr. Rubinstein)

From the autobiographies we learn how much Rubinstein loved Spain and how much Spanish audiences, from the start, responded to his playing. With the composer's enthusiastic approval he made his own arrangement of the orchestral "Ritual Fire Dance" from Manuel de Falla's El Amor brujo. His Spanish audiences loved it, but so did audiences everywhere.


Arthur Rubinstein, piano. RCA-BMG, recorded in Hollywood, May 18, 1947

Arthur Rubinstein, piano. RCA-BMG, recorded in New York City, Mar. 23, 1961

CHOPIN: Barcarolle in F-sharp, Op. 60

Considering how revered Rubinstein eventually became as a Chopin player, it's interesting how long it took audiences to accept his way of playing Chopin. There were pieces he could always count on, though. We have the flashiest one, the A-flat major Polonaise, coming up. Apparently, though, his way with the Barcarolle rarely failed to melt audiences' hearts.


Arthur Rubinstein, piano. EMI, recorded in London, Apr. 18, 1928

Arthur Rubinstein, piano. RCA-BMG, recorded in New York City, Nov. 26-28, 1962


NOW LET'S HAVE THE COMPLETE QUOTE

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 . . . .

Preview: This is no happy wanderer Schubert presents to us

SCHUBERT: "Der Wanderer" ("The Wanderer"), D. 493

Poem by Georg Philipp Schmidt von Lübeck

I come down from the mountains.
The valley streams;
the sea roars.
I wander, silent and joyless,
and my sighs always ask, "Where?"
Always "Where?"

[1:56-2:57]
The sun seems so cold to me here,
the flowers faded and life old,
and what they say is empty sound.
I am a stranger everywhere.

Where are you? Where are you, my beloved land?
Sought for, dreamed of, but never known!

The land, the land, so green with hope,
the land where my roses bloom,
where my friends go wandering
where my dead rise up
the land where my language is spoken,
o land, where are you?

I wander, silent and joyless,
and my sighs always ask, "Where?"
Always "Where?"

In a ghostly whisper it calls back to me,
"There where you are not,
there is your joy!"

by Ken

We'll come back to the boldface highlighting in a moment. It happens to be our reason for listening to "Der Wanderer" this week, but it's a justly popular Schubert song in its own right, with a gravity that's beautifully captured by Gerald Moore in the above performance. This is not a happy wanderer.

HERE'S A NOTE FROM WIKIPEDIA

The symphonic Mozart and Beethoven open in minor mode

They look so simple, these eight notes, but they form one of the most striking and readily identifiable motifs in all of music -- the opening of one of Beethoven's two minor-key symphonic first movements.

by Ken

In Friday night's preview we listened to all of the first movements among Mozart's 40 or so symphonies which are in minor keys. That's right, both of them, which happen to be in the same key, G minor.

Partly this was out of abiding affection for the masterpiece among them, the great Symphony No. 40, and partly it was as a springboard to listening to the two first movements among Beethoven's nine symphonies which are in minor keys, Nos. 5 (C minor) and 9 (D minor). It seems clear to me that these movements have something in common, something that sets them apart from all their major-key brethren -- and something that even sort of applies to the littler Mozart G minor Symphony, No. 25.

Let's listen again to the Mozart G minor opening movements.

MOZART: Symphony No. 25 in G minor, K. 183:
i. Allegro con brio

Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Bruno Walter, cond. Columbia, recorded Dec. 10, 1954 (mono)

Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam), Josef Krips, cond. Philips, recorded June 1973

MOZART: Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550:
i. Molto allegro

Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Bruno Walter, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded 1959

Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam), Josef Krips, cond. Philips, recorded June 1972


I DON'T WANT TO MAKE THIS SOUND MORE
MYSTERIOUS THAN IT ACTUALLY IS

Van Cliburn (1934-2013)

SCHUMANN (arr. Liszt): "Widmung" ("Dedication")

Van Cliburn plays the Liszt arrangement of Schumann's exhilarating song "Widmung" ("Dedication"), c1970.

by Ken

I want to put off doing a proper memorial to pianist Van Cliburn until I get the copy of RCA's newly released Van Cliburn: The Complete Album Collection which I ordered as soon as I saw that it exists, not realizing at the time that he had in fact just died.

The easy way to go would have been with the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto, the piece that became so identified with him when he rocketed to fame in 1958 (at age 23) with his grand-prize win at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. Instead I thought we'd lead with a solo piece we heard played by Arthur Rubinstein in the November 2011 Sunday Classics post "And then came 'Widmung' " -- and then the following week played by the great American Romantic Earl Wild.

I think we hear here the basic Cliburn virtues: the beautiful, clean, effortlessly full sound and the wholesome extrovert temperament.

Compare:

Encores, part 1 -- Three legendary pianists

It makes a nifty encore too! Leonard Bernstein conducts his Overture to Candide, kicking off this December 1989 concert performance of the complete musical with the London Symphony Orchestra.

by Ken

As you may have guessed from Friday's preview ("Encore, encore!"), when we heard the great cellist János Starker play three prime encore pieces -- all, as it happened, arranged for cello and piano from other instrumental configurations. I didn't have a very clear idea Friday where exactly this post was headed, except that it would be all encores.

Okay, we're stretching a little with the above video clip, in which Leonard Bernstein conducts his Candide Overture at the start of a concert performance of the piece. But for easily understandable reasons, countless conductors -- including Lenny himself, as memory serves -- used the Candide Overture as a peerlessly rousing encore.

The thing about encores is that they often represent the artist at his/her most personal, whether they're designed to rouse, seduce, charm, or just plain ravish. It's such a large subject, however, that after initially deciding that we would deal only with instrumental encores, leaving the vast subject of vocal ones for another time, I decided to narrow it down even further, to piano encores, at least once we get to the click-through, where we're going to hear sets of encores from three of the 20th's century's greatest pianists-- two of them actual sets of encores from actual concerts, the third a selection of favorite encores of his made by the artist to fill out an LP side.

Before we go there, though, I though we might hear another encore-suitable piece, an arrangement of a traditional Catalan carol for cello and orchestra, which aims to stir listeners in a very different way.

CASALS (arr.): El Cant dels ocells (The Song of the Birds)


Prades Festival Orchestra, Pablo Casals, cello and cond. Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded 1950


TO HEAR TODAY'S SELECTION OF ENCORES FROM
THREE LEGENDARY PIANISTS, CLICK THE LINK

In perfect balance -- Rachmaninoff's 2nd Piano Concerto, where everything comes together just right

This is the first part (of three) of longtime pals Martha Argerich (born 1941) and Nelson Freire (born 1944) playing Rachmaninoff's delightful Second Suite for Two Pianos. (We last heard Argerich and Freire, separately, playing Schumann.) We'll hear more of the performance below.

by Ken

Friday night we heard the first movement of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2, as played by Arthur Rubinstein and Fritz Reiner -- the way I first encountered the music on RCA's Rubinstein Heart of the Piano Concerto compilation LP. Last night we detoured to make a quick run through Rachmaninoff's "other" piece for piano and orchestra -- other than the four concertos, that is -- the wonderful Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Today we're back to the Second Concerto.

It's not Rachmaninoff's most ambitious concerto, which would be the Third. I know people who are nuts for the Third Concerto, but I've never warmed to it nearly as much as the Second, which seems to me not only one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written, but one of the most amazingly well-balanced, in terms of its movements, in the classical literature.

NOW THIS ISN'T WHAT MAKES IT A MASTERPIECE

Preview: A peek at the "fifth" Rachmaninoff piano concerto

Paganini started it all, with the theme that every composer wanted to write variations on -- as if Paganini (1782-1840) hadn't already done it himself in the 24th Caprice for solo violin. We've got a proper violin performance below, but here guitarist Eliot Fisk plays his own transcription.

by Ken

Last night we sampled the second of Sergei Rachmaninoff's four piano concertos, in anticipation of our look tomorrow at the entire piece. In addition to the four formal concertos, Rachmaninoff's piano-and-orchestra output includes a remarkable set of variations, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, on "the" Paganini tune. It's one of his most inspired and loved creations, and I don't know of any better way to illustrate the richness of his imagination than to make a tactical leap from the early variations to the most famous of them, the 18th (of 21).

To go back to the beginning, here's what Paganini actually wrote, as played by the young Itzhak Perlman.

PAGANINI: Caprice No. 24 in A minor


Itzhak Perlman, violin. RCA/BMG, recorded March 1965

Preview: Heart of the piano concerto, Part 2: Rachmaninoff's 2nd

The opening movement of Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto works even if the soloist (Arkady Volodos here) doesn't have all that much imagination. Fortunately the movement (not quite complete -- these aren't exactly speedsters, and that introductory piffle runs the clock down) is nicely conducted by Riccardo Chailly.

by Ken

I explained recently how I was first exposed to Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto: via an RCA compilation LP called Heart of the Piano Concerto, which consisted of single movements from Arthur Rubinstein's then-most-recent RCA recordings of six popular piano concertos. It was the biting, driving Rondo finale of the Beethoven concerto that was included, and that had won my heart by the 50th or 60th playing.



MY SECOND-FAVORITE PIANO CONCERTO MOVEMENT WAS
THE OPENING OF RACHMANINOFF'S SECOND CONCERTO