Sunday Classics chronicles: Remembering Charles Rosen (1927-2012)

Charles Rosen -- not only a pianist but perhaps
the most illuminating writer on music in our time

He was a lot of fun in snark mode, but it made me think about separating the desire for truth from the need to be right. The most beautiful element of Charles, for me, was after all this learning and accumulation, the smile with which he would play some beloved modulation, or demonstrate some trick of pedalling: suddenly again a child, innocence meeting knowledge at the end of the road. When I played Schumann's Davidsbündlertänze for him, he showed me how releasing the pedal in the middle of a held chord actually creates a crescendo in the bass -- in the middle of a sustained note eerily an unnoticed voice comes alive. When I got the effect he wanted, he beamed with real pleasure, aesthetic pleasure, and the pleasure of having communicated something precious -- the kind of pleasure that life should be all about.

-- pianist Jeremy Denk, in a December 18 newyorker.com
"Culture Desk" post, "Postscript: Charles Rosen"

by Ken

I won't try to calculate how many hours I spent preparing Friday night's chronicles preview post, only afterward stopping to think that it contained a grand total of less than four minutes. It occurred to me that one thing I might have done simply enough was to provide some context for the new clips I made of Charles Rosen playing the two pairs of pieces from Robert Schumann's great piano suite Carnaval by replaying the versions we heard in the September 2012 post "Taking a closer look at Schumann's Carnaval."

Here, for example, is the pair of musical caricatures of the commedia dell'arte Pierrot and Harlequin -- with, again, Charles's comments from his Nonesuch booklet notes, and now with the additional performances.

A QUICK NOTE ABOUT MY SHOCKING CHEEK
IN REFERRING TO THE MAN AS "CHARLES"

After all, I never met the man. But I know so many people who did know him, and who always refer to him that way, that I have difficulty reverting to "Rosen."

SCHUMANN: Carnaval, Op. 9:
2. Pierrot: Moderato (2/4)
3. Arlequin: Vivo (3/4)

2. "Pierrot" (Moderato) is a revolutionary work of pure instrumental music in its use of the grotesque. It is a character piece: relentless, deliberately monotonous, but with sudden jerky movements like the personage of the commedia dell'arte; it makes no pretensions to beauty or charm. The drama arises from the cumulative crescendo towards the end with a final and very original pedal effect, as the penultimate chord gradually frees itself of all the heavy pedal sonority.
3. "Arlequin" (Vivo) is also a grotestque character piece, with sudden changes of dynamics, and with a dancing charm.

Charles Rosen, piano. Nonesuch, recorded in the Netherlands, c1981

Nelson Freire, piano. Decca, recorded in Lugano, Dec. 18-22, 2002

Yevgeny Kissin, piano. BMG, recorded in Freiburg, 2001


CHARLES THE WRITER -- ON RAVEL

Greg Waldmann gives a nice retelling on Open Letters Monthly of the famous story of how Charles's writing career was launched.

Sunday Classics chronicles preview: Remembering Charles Rosen (1927-2012)

Cézanne's "Pierrot and Harlequin" (1888)

SCHUMANN: Carnaval, Op. 9:
2. Pierrot: Moderato (2/4)
3. Arlequin: Vivo (3/4)

2. "Pierrot" (Moderato) is a revolutionary work of pure instrumental music in its use of the grotesque. It is a character piece: relentless, deliberately monotonous, but with sudden jerky movements like the personage of the commedia dell'arte; it makes no pretensions to beauty or charm. The drama arises from the cumulative crescendo towards the end with a final and very original pedal effect, as the penultimate chord gradually frees itself of all the heavy pedal sonority.
3. "Arlequin" (Vivo) is also a grotestque character piece, with sudden changes of dynamics, and with a dancing charm.

Charles Rosen, piano. Nonesuch, recorded in the Netherlands, c1981

by Ken

Charles Rosen, the American pianist and cultural polymath, died on December 9, and it's been on my mind how to pay tribute. It's still on my mind. But meanwhile, as we're rummaging through the Sunday Classics archives, I thought we could at least hear a little bit of his playing and read an even littler bit of his remarkable writing.

This goes back to another project that's stuck in the "on my mind" stage, and has been September's "Preview: Preparing for a close-up look at Schumann's Carnaval" and "Taking a closer look at Schumann's Carnaval" posts. Back then we actually heard the whole of Rosen's later recording of Carnaval, and we're going to hear it again Sunday.

What's new is that in September we first heard some snippets from Schumann's great piano suite with Rosen's brief annotations but with other pianists' performances. For tonight's post I've reedited the clips so we can hear his own performances -- first of the pair of commedia dell'arte caricatures we heard above, "Pierrot" and "Arlequin," and then the characterizations of the composer's own imagined dual identities, "Eusebius" and "Florestan."


MOVING ON TO "EUSEBIUS" AND "FLORESTAN"

Taking a closer look at Schumann's "Carnaval"

Cézanne's "Pierrot and Harlequin" (1888)

by Ken

We began listening to Schumann's great piano suite Carnaval Friday night, listening to contrasting pairs -- the composer's dual self-portraint in "Eusebius" and "Florestan" and the "Noble Waltz" and "German Waltz" plus the rousing conclusion, the "March of the League of David Against the Philistines."

We're not going to go as far into Carnaval as I expected Friday night, for various reasons. Partly it's because I've just acquired a couple of recordings I didn't have, and have a number of others on order. But partly it's because exquisitely crafted miniatures can go by so quickly that we can scarcely taken them in, and so I want to slow these down -- sort of the way we did back in January 2011 with the exquisitely crafted miniatures that make up Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, which spread over two previews and two main posts ("We begin our walk-through of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition" and "Concluding our walking tour").

So today we're going to focus just on the beginning and the end of Carnaval, building on the portions we've already heard. And we're going to start with another contrasting pair, the first numbers in the suite following the "Préambule," Schumann's portraits of two stock commedia dell'arte figures.

SCHUMANN: Carnaval, Op. 9:
2. Pierrot: Moderato (2/4)
3. Arlequin: Vivo (3/4)
[A]

[B]


I can tell you that our performers are two members of our Carnaval "team," which is shaping up to consist of:

Claudio Arrau
Alicia de Larrocha
Nelson Freire
Wilhelm Kempff
Yevgeny Kissin
Leonard Pennario
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Charles Rosen
Arthur Rubinstein

BEFORE WE HEAR "PIERROT" AND "ARLEQUIN"
AGAIN, HERE'S A NOTE BY CHARLES ROSEN