"[These three] extraordinary slow movements in the key of E major . . . share an almost out-of-body quality, and it’s inspiring to wonder what this beautiful tonality must have meant to Beethoven."
-- David Finckel, in "Making the most out of chamber music coaching,"
(1) from the Piano Trio No. 2 in G, Op. 1, No. 2:
ii. Largo con espressione (Largo with expression)
Suk Trio (Josef Suk, violin; Josef Chuchro, cello; Josef Hála, piano). Supraphon-Denon, recorded in the House of Artists, Prague, April 1984
[NOTE: Volume on this clip is a bit low -- you might nudge your level up.]
Isaac Stern, violin; Leonard Rose, cello; Eugene Istomin, piano. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded in CBS 30th Street Studio, July 11 & Dec. 18-19, 1969
(2) from the String Trio in G, Op. 9, No. 1:
ii. Adagio ma non tanto e cantabile (Adagio but not too much and cantabile)
Jascha Heifetz, violin; William Primrose, viola; Gregor Piatigorsky, cello. RCA, recorded in Radio Recorders Studios, Hollywood, Mar. 27, 1957 (mono)
Trio à cordes français (Gérard Jarry, violin; Serge Collot, viola; Michel Tournus, cello). EMI France, recorded 1970
(3) from the String Quartet No. 8 in E minor, Op. 59, No. 2 (Rasumovsky No. 2): ii. Molto adagio. Si tratta questo pezzo con molto di sentimento (This piece is to be treated with much feeling)
Brandis Quartet (Thomas Brandis and Peter Brem, violins; Wilfried Strehle, viola; Wolfgang Boettcher, cello). Harmonia Mundi France, recorded November 1986
Borodin Quartet (Ruben Aharonian and Andrei Abramenkov, violins; Igor Naidin, viola; Valentin Berlinsky, cello). Chandos, recorded in the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, March 2003
by Ken
Yes, yes, we have many important projects afoot, and during the long silence I've been toiling away at them. All I can say is, watch this space. Then, as part of my daily online dose of The Strad, that invaluable publication that takes as its brief everything and everyone having to do with string instruments, I found myself immersed in the above-referenced piece by cellist, professor, and general music administrator-impresario David Finckel offering an overview of one of his favorite and at the same time most demanding musical activities: coaching chamber music.
"Teaching chamber music has been one of the greatest pleasures of my professional life. Students who seek my guidance garner my utmost admiration for their pursuit of expertise in one of the highest forms of art ever devised by humankind. I cannot possibly encourage them enough.
AN APOLOGY: This is really inexcusable. There's no good reason why I couldn't have gotten this "FLASH" up Monday, but here it is Sunday (well, actually, Monday again by the time this is posted), and .*nbsp. . . In one source I saw something like "On demand through February 29, but I didn't know if that was a legit cutoff date for free access. I dithered. The good news is that the 2009 and 2016 interviews shouldn't be going away anytime soon. Sorry!
by Ken
For once, I heard that clock ticking and punched up the 2009 Seiji-Berlin Elijah right away, and watched the whole thing. It took me a long time to come to grips with the piece, but I did, and it occupies a special place in my affections. I was especially happy to discover how strong Matthias Goerne's performance of the title role is, because without a strong Elijah the piece kind of doesn't make a lot of sense. But there's still a serious burden on the conductor, because a fair amount of the piece really does need a major effort of motivation-defining, and this is the sort of thing Seiji was so good at: helping his co-performers feel the importance of what they're performing in the moment and how it relates to a piece's grand design.
There's also some important history embedded in the Elijah performance, as I came to understand from watching the 2009 and 2016 interviews in the Digital Concert Hall archive. Onsite they're described as "conversations," and they truly are -- with a member of the orchestra, sometimes even in English, and always with subtitles even if they aren't. It turns out that the Elijah, owing to what I recall him describing in the 2016 "conversation," with his countryman Daishin Kashimoto, as "my mysterious illness" (all week I've been thinking I should really rewatch the 2016 conversation to pin down his exact words; this'll have to be close enough), would be his last Berlin appearance until he was finally able to return in 2016 to conduct an all-Beethoven second half of a concert that began with a conductorless performance by elite winds of the Berlin Phil of Mozart's stupendous Gran Partita Serenade, K. 361.
Part 1: We've got a really terrific performance to hear [UPDATE:] two really terrific performances, actually!
GENERAL UPDATE (MONDAY EVENING): There's updating scattered through the post, now that I've been able to look at it and listen to some of the music in context. (Importantly, the clip of the Symphonic Dances from "West Side Story" is fixed, so that it now plays the whole thing, not just track 1!) -- Ed.
"Everyone tells a story differently, and that story should be told compellingly and spontaneously. If it is not compelling and convincing, it is without value."
MOZART: Piano Concerto No. 19 in F, K. 459:
iii. Rondo: Allegro assai
Radu Lupu, piano; Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, David Zinman, cond. Live performance in the Sophiensaal, Munich, July 12, 1990
[UPDATE: Not to worry, we're gonna hear the whole concerto -- which you can watch here. And by the way, note (especially if you look at the video) the average age of the poised German Chamber Philharmonic players playing their young hearts out! -- Ed.]
by Ken
Say, in our clip above (and the linked complete video), is this Radu Lupu being playful in the rondo finale of Mozart K. 459? Playful? Radu Lupu?
I guess we need to back up. We're supposed to be talking about Kurt Moll and Massenet's Werther -- unfinished business from last week's "We're going to be hearing Kurt Moll in his famously 'Unexpected French Role' -- so curtain up!," April 20, and " 'I don't know if I'm awake or if I'm still dreaming' (Do those poets know how to make an entrance?)," April 24. But, well, while progress is being made, that has bogged down a wee bit. And meanwhile I've found myself thinking about -- and listening to -- the Romanian-born pianist Radu Lupu, who died April 17 at 76.
I hadn't taken much notice of Lupu's passing. While I certainly have no lack of respect for a musician of his professional skills and career accomplishments, he wasn't exactly a favorite pianist of mine. I don't think he would crack my Top 50 list -- even a Top 50 list of pianists I've actually heard in performance. Actually, the live performances of his I recall attending were kind of, um (how to put this delicately?), stultifying. After the last of those, I kind of tended to pay less close attention to his career.
At some point, quite possibly a point when I meant to be plowing forward with matters relating to Werther and Kurt Moll, I happened upon a piece by The Guardian's Andrew Clements,
"Radu Lupu: Five key performances," which begins:
We have the Leeds Piano Competition to thank for first showcasing the unique poetry of Radu Lupu’s playing: the young Romanian pianist won first prize there in 1969. That success launched his international career, but as the years went by he became a more and more reticent performer, both in the concert hall and on disc. Yet every rare opportunity to hear him was a reminder of just how special a pianist he was, in a repertory that extended from Mozart and Beethoven to Bartók and Janáček, and who was quite peerless in Schubert, Schumann and Brahms. Here are just a few examples of his art.
Ooh, there's that word: "poetry." Somehow a legend came into being that Lupu was a "poetic" performer. Maybe that made me curious to see which performances Andrew C was commending to Guardian readers. Which made me curiouser, because I was unfamiliar with most of the performances, and although I'm still in the midst of processing it all, I can say I'm enjoying taking a new look at, or listen to, Lupu. There's an abundance of interesting music-making here, and I may even be getting some sense of why performances that don't hold great interest for me may please other listeners.
The project unquestionably got off to a great start, because --
TUESDAY MORNING UPDATE: Now comes with a box at the end: "(SPOILER ALERT!) THE PATH TO BRAHMS 1: The series so far"
Hungarian-born George Szell (1897-1970) was past 40 when he first recorded the Brahms D minor Concerto -- in 1938, with no less than the great Artur Schnabel! We see him here c1965, after his recordings of the concerto with Leon Fleisher and Clifford Curzon but before his second recording of it (the one we've been hearing) with Rudolf Serkin.
by Ken
I've left you hanging (from Thursday's "pre-post") with those unidentified Performances A, B, anc C -- plus two "bonus" performances -- of the enormous and enormously complex first movement of the Brahms First Piano Concerto, into which we crashed at the start of our look at the composer's enormously difficult path to the creation of his First Symphony. The young Brahms, you'll recall, flush with the excitement of his "discovery," notably via the gushing seal of approval delivered by Robert Schumann (and now enjoying the warm support of both Robert and Clara Schumann), thought he was on the way to nailing the symphony that would be expected of any touted successor to the line of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and of course Schumann himself.
Somewhere along the line, alas, during the hopeful repurposing-into-a-symphony of a sonata for two pianos of which he'd composed three movements, he found himself faced with an impasse: a first movement growing to supersize which his inner voices told him he couldn't make a symphony of. It doesn't seem to have taken him long, though, to conjure up a Plan C: not a sonata for two pianos, not a symphony, but . . . .
MAYBE, JUST PERHAPS, A PIANO CONCERTO?
Say, can you do this in a symphony?
Emil Gilels, piano; Berlin Philharmonic, Eugen Jochum, cond. DG, recorded in the Jesus-Christus-Kirche, June 1972
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
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
Homero Francesch is the piano soloist in this performance of Beethoven's Choral Fantasy with Leonard Bernstein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic and Vienna Jeunesse Choir.
by Ken
We have a great musical fantasy coming up Sunday -- Max Bruch's Scottish Fantasy for violin and orchestra, so I thought tonight we would review the two wonderful fantasies we've already heard.
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
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).
No less than Van Cliburn introduces the piano-playing Serkins, Rudolf (1903-1991) and Peter (born 1947), playing Schubert's four-hand Military March in G, D. 733, No. 2, on the occasion of Serkin père's 85th birthday in 1988, from a 1988 concert featuring 26 pianists, issued by VAI.
"Rudolf Serkin was once asked, jokingly of course, if Beethoven had composed the Choral Fantasy for Marlboro. The piece has everything Marlboro could have wanted for its final concert: an orchestra in which everyone could play; solos within the orchestra; ensemble playing among various instruments; piano solo; and a chorus for everyone else in the Marlboro community. Rudolf Serkin responded, with his characteristic smile, 'No, Beethoven didn't compose it for Marlboro.... But he approves.'"
What Christopher Serkin, a distinguished law professor, discreetly doesn't mention here -- though his last name is certainly suggestive -- is that Rudolf Serkin, a co-founder of the Marlboro Music Festival who was for decades its presiding artistic spirit -- was his grandfather, and Peter Serkin, whom he later mentions conducts the Choral Fantasy performance included in this Marlboro anniversary issue, is his uncle. (Peter Serkin, while a dramatically different sort of musician from his father, established himself at an early age as one of the leading pianists of his generation. It's kind of weird, for me at least, to think that young Peter is now in his 60s.)
No less than Van Cliburn introduces the piano-playing Serkins, Rudolf (1903-1991) and Peter (born 1947), playing Schubert's four-hand Military March in G, D. 733, No. 2, on the occasion of Serkin père's 85th birthday in 1988, from a 1988 concert featuring 26 pianists, issued by VAI.
"Rudolf Serkin was once asked, jokingly of course, if Beethoven had composed the Choral Fantasy for Marlboro. The piece has everything Marlboro could have wanted for its final concert: an orchestra in which everyone could play; solos within the orchestra; ensemble playing among various instruments; piano solo; and a chorus for everyone else in the Marlboro community. Rudolf Serkin responded, with his characteristic smile, 'No, Beethoven didn't compose it for Marlboro.... But he approves.'"
What Christopher Serkin, a distinguished law professor, discreetly doesn't mention here -- though his last name is certainly suggestive -- is that Rudolf Serkin, a co-founder of the Marlboro Music Festival who was for decades its presiding artistic spirit -- was his grandfather, and Peter Serkin, whom he later mentions conducts the Choral Fantasy performance included in this Marlboro anniversary issue, is his uncle. (Peter Serkin, while a dramatically different sort of musician from his father, established himself at an early age as one of the leading pianists of his generation. It's kind of weird, for me at least, to think that young Peter is now in his 60s.)
Not many serious music people take the Choral Fantasy seriously, and for a long time I didn't get either. At some point the pieces fell into place, and that was thanks mostly to Rudolf Serkin's recordings. However, I was unaccountably unaware of something Christopher Serkin points out in his comment: "For almost 40 years, the Choral Fantasy was the last piece in the last [Marlboro Festival] concert of the summer." He goes on:
Especially in recent years when Marlboro has been exclusively a chamber music festival, the Choral Fantasy was the one time during the summer when all of the chamber musicians would come together into an orchestra, and the results were invariably magical. In any given year, the orchestra would include a mixture of some of the great luminaries of the musical world playing alongside brilliant younger musicians -- soloists and chamber musicians briefly forming an orchestra. For that one moment, it could be the greatest orchestra in the world. . . .
Despite all of the remarkable Choral Fantasy performances over the years, this CD marks the first time that a Marlboro recording of the piece has been released. Whatever one's view of the work itself, it represents Marlboro to many of us who have spent summers there.
[Note: You know where Amazon asks, at the end of each "customer review," "Was this review helpful to you?" When I looked, "27 out of 28 people found the following review helpful." I made it 28 out of 29. I'm wondering what the deal is with the person who didn't find this review helpful.]
We're going to talk more about the piece later. For now, let's just plunge into Serkin's first recording, made in 1962 as the second-side LP filler for his new recording of the Beethoven Third Concerto with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic.
BEETHOVEN: Fantasy in C for Piano, Chorus, and Orchestra, Op. 80
The most obvious observation to be made is that the Choral Fantasy of 1808 (thus at roughly the time of the Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral is a dry run for the monumental finale of the Ninth Symphony, which culminates in a setting of Schiller's Ode to Joy including four vocal soloists and chorus, composed more than a decade later. As in the finale of the Ninth, Beethoven takes us through a winding, surprise-filled landscape before we reach the unexpected choral destination. Wikipedia has German and English texts in a pleasantly sympathetic article on the Choral Fantasy. Here's Decca's translation:
Enticingly fair and lovely sound
the harmonies of our life,
and from a sense of beauty arise
glowers that bloom forever.
Peace and joy flow hand in hand
like the changing play of the waves;
what was crowded together in chaos and hostility
now shapes itself into exalted feeling.
When music's enchantment reigns
and poetry's consecration speaks,
wondrous things take shape;
night and storm change to light.
Outer peace, inner bliss
are the rulers of the happy man.
But the spring sun of the arts
causes light to flow from both.
Great things that have penetrated the heart
blossom anew and beautifully on high,
and the spirit that has soared up
is always echoed by a chorus of spirits.
Take them, then, you noble souls,
gladly, these gifts of noble art.
When love and strength are wedded together
mankind is rewarded with divine grace.
Rudolf Serkin, piano; Westminster Choir, New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded May 1, 1962
THERE'S SOMETHING SPECIAL ABOUT
BEETHOVEN'S FIVE PIANO CONCERTOS
It may be with his five piano concertos that Beethoven's link to Mozart feels most direct. They were written more than anything for the composers' own use, as exceedingly public demonstrations of what they could do. The concerto we know as Beethoven's Second could be one that Mozart never lived to write.
(Let's get the numbering straight: No, I'm not concerned about the earlier concerto or two Beethoven wrote. The "canon" is appropriately five concertos. But the first two have come down to us numbered wrong. The one we know as No. 2, which could pass for a concerto Mozart never lived to write, was composed first, and then "No. 1," the mighty C major Concerto, which recalls Mozart's grandest concerto, No. 25, also in C major, and expands it yet another step.)
The C major Concerto is thought to have been written in 1798 and revised in 1800, whereupon Beethoven seems to have set to work almost immediately on a companion piece in C minor, which also has an illustrious antecedent in Mozart's No. 24. We've already heard the finale of Beethoven's C minor Concerto. Let's listen now to the whole thing, in what I'm calling an "all-Rubinstein performance," assembled from his first three recordings of the piece. (I didn't consider using the fourth, from his third and final Beethoven concerto cycle, from 1975, with his young keyboard colleague Daniel Barenboim conducting, which I actually quite like, for all the evidence of Rubinstein's advancing age. But I don't have it on CD, which I guess says something about just how much I like it, at least relative to the earlier versions.)
BEETHOVEN: Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37
ALL-RUBINSTEIN PERFORMANCE
i. Allegro con brio
Arthur Rubinstein, piano; Symphony of the Air, Josef Krips, cond. RCA/BMG, recorded April 1956 ii. Largo
https://archive.org/embed/BeethovenPianoConcertoNo.3LargorubinsteinLeinsdorf Arthur Rubinstein, piano; Boston Symphony Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. RCA/BMG, recorded Apr. 5-6, 1965 iii. Rondo: Allegro
Arthur Rubinstein, piano; NBC Symphony Orchestra, Arturo Toscanini, cond. RCA/BMG, recorded live, Oct. 29, 1944
ABOUT THE THIRD CONCERTO'S LINEAGE
You don't have to take my word -- listen for yourself. It seemed obvious to go with hour honorees Rubinstein and Serkin (and then, which of their recordings?), so I just picked one of each.
MOZART: Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K. 491:
i. Allegro
Rudolf Serkin, piano; London Symphony Orchestra, Claudio Abbado, cond. DG, recorded October 1985
BEETHOVEN: Piano Concerto No. 1 in C, Op. 15:
i. Allegro con brio
Rudolf Serkin, piano; Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa, cond. Telarc, recorded Oct. 5, 1983
Here, then, is an "all-star" performance of the Third Concerto.
BEETHOVEN: Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37
ALL-STAR PERFORMANCE
i. Allegro con brio
Murray Perahia, piano; Concertgebouw Orchestra, Bernard Haitink, cond. CBS/Sony, recorded c1985 ii. Largo
Sviatoslav Richter, piano; Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Kurt Sanderling, cond. DG, recorded Sept. 28-30, 1962 iii. Rondo: Allegro
Rudolf Firkusny, piano; Philharmonia Orchestra, Walter Süsskind, cond. EMI, recorded c1958
We've already talked about the remarkable opening of Beethoven's Fourth Concerto, in last night's preview, so why don't we just go right into it? Note that the scale of the concluding Rondo has grown conspicuously over its predecessor, but between these mammoth outer movements, Beethoven chose to go short with the slow movement, which is nevertheless a piece of considerable emotional weight. Our "all-Schnabel performance" consists of one movement from each of Since Artur Schnabel's three recordings (about which more in a moment).
BEETHOVEN: Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58
ALL-SCHNABEL PERFORMANCE
i. Allegro moderato
Artur Schnabel, piano; London Philharmonic Orchestra, Malcolm Sargent, cond. HMV/EMI, recorded Feb. 16, 1933 ii. Andante con moto
Artur Schnabel, piano; Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Frederick Stock, cond. RCA/BMG, recorded 1942 iii. Rondo: Vivace
Artur Schnabel, piano; Philharmonia Orchestra, Issay Dobrowen, cond. HMV/EMI, recorded June 5-7, 1946
Schnabel's 1932-35 Beethoven concerto cycle remains a recording landmark, not just historically but musically, and again -- as with the Pearl transfers of the equally legendary Beethoven sonata recordings -- my piano maven Leo tipped me off to one transfer from the 78s that's so far superior to any other he's heard as to make it an all-or-nothing proposition. This one, however, is readily available: It's Naxos's, done by Mark Obert-Thorn.
THE LATER SCHNABEL BEETHOVEN CONCERTOS
In 1946-47 EMI had the excellent idea of rerecording Schnabel in the Beethoven concertos, taking advantage of all the improvements in recording technology, and two concertos were recorded each year. (In 1942, as we know, Schnabel had rerecorded No. 4 with the Chicago Symphony under Frederick Stock. They also recorded No. 5, the Emperor. Schnabel never did rerecord No. 1.)
Even though Schnabel was still Schnabel -- and it should be said that, while he put up with it, he hated the recording process -- and two very good conductors, Issay Dobrowen and Alceo Galliera, were engaged (though Galliera, who was brought in for the 1947 Emperor, was only 37, and possibly more influenceable if anyone had wished to influence him), not many music lovers have ever been wildly enthusiastic about the remakes, which objectively seem like Schnabel performances but just don't seem to have the inner life of the real thing. (This sounds horribly pat coming so soon after my vicious attack on Walter Legge for systematically draining outstanding musicians' recorded performances of the connective tissue that made their real performances sound so different, but the symptoms do seem to fit. Do I have to tell you who produced those 1946-47 recordings?
With that, let's have one final go at the Fourth Concerto:
BEETHOVEN: Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58
ALL-STAR PERFORMANCE
i. Allegro moderato
Leon Fleisher, piano; Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell, cond. Epic/CBS/Sony, recorded Jan. 10, 1959 ii. Andante con moto
Wilhelm Kempff, piano; Berlin Philharmonic, Ferdinand Leitner, cond. DG, recorded July 1961 iii. Rondo: Vivace
Emil Gilels, piano; Philharmonia Orchestra, Leopold Ludwig, cond. EMI, recorded Apr. 26-May 1, 1957
THE LINE ENDS WITH THE EMPEROR
After the Fourth Concerto, Beethoven did return to the piano concerto once more, to produce the grandest and most majestic of the series, the Emperor. It's possible that this is as far as he could have taken the concerto form, but we'll never know, because although his voluminous musical sketchbooks do contain sketches for a sixth concerto, it was never written, and apparently for the simplest of reasons: The composer's hearing had deteriorated to the point where public performance with an orchestra was no longer a realistic possibility.
His most remarkable music was yet to be written, and in a quantity that seems astonishing under the circumstances. But it was increasingly music that he heard only in his head, and not surprisingly his gaze turned increasingly inward. He also had increasingly less need of a form that enabled him to express harmony, however hard-fought, with the universe.
TO RETURN FINALLY TO THE CHORAL FANTASY
Though its opus number is higher, the Choral Fantasy was written shortly before the Emperor, and while it can seem like a wild hodgepodge, to its admirers its wildness is one of its glories.
I'm not going to attempt a detailed analysis. Wikipedia's article, as I noted earlier, does a surprisingly effective job of it. I'm just going to suggest a way of listening to it, focusing on the hysterically overwrought piano solo that occupies roughly the first four minutes.
I think it's important to recognize that it is overwrought. I've just been listening to Vladimir Ashkenazy's self-conducted recording, which rounds out the Beethoven concerto cycle from which we heard the first movement of the Fourth Concerto last night. Ashkenazy plays the music with the utmost beauty; I'm quite sure I've never heard it played with this roundness and finish of tone. He makes it all sound quite logical, quite reasonable, and really rather unintersting, even pointless. Not surprisingly, his performance really has nowhere to go from there.
I don't want to suggest anything quite as extreme as "parody," but there is definitely the sense of a grand orator, a rhetorician trying desperately to express matters too grand and important to be readily within reach, at least at this particular moment, and coming off as maybe slightly hysterical. I'm not sure I would go so far as to suggest that it's even "humorous," but surely there is something going on in the innards of this solo, which doesn't seem able to figure out where it's trying to get let alone how to get there. The word "ironic" comes to mind, or maybe better "laconic."
And here we're in terrain where Rudolf Serkin ruled. I know I'm risking accusations of gross ethnic stereotyping, but I don't think of Germans as being an especially humorous people. Oh sure, there are funny Germans, but by and large it doesn't seem to be a trait that comes quite naturally. But irony, laconic-ness (laconicity?), a sense of the wry -- this is something that is far from uncommon among cultured Germans, and this I sense Serkin had a large supply of. Attitudinally, in other words, I think he was born to champion the Choral Fantasy.
BEETHOVEN: Fantasy in C for Piano, Chorus, and Orchestra, Op. 80
Rudolf Serkin, piano; Nan Nall (s), Beverly Morgan (ms), Shirley Close (ms), Gene Tucker (t), Sanford Sylvan (b), David Evitts (b), Marlboro Festival Chorus and Orchestra, Peter Serkin, cond. Sony, recorded live, Aug. 9, 1981
When the orchestra finally makes its relatively inconspicuous entrance, there's a sort of sense that it's extending a hand, trying to guide the piano gently back from the precipice. And sure enough, with a little working out the piano is able to get it together enough to announce, now with some confidence, the simple, charming little ditty that will eventually provide the grand vocal finale in the way that the dittylike "Ode to Joy" tune later would in the finale of the Ninth Symphony. Whereupon the orchestra takes up the tune for a set of quite charming variations, at first with minimal contribution from the piano, which eventually rallies to make its own contribution.
As I mentioned last night, there is now a fourth commercially issued Serkin recording of the Choral Fantasy, with Orfeo's release of the Beethoven concerto cycle he did in 1977 with Rafael Kubelik and the Bavarian Radio Symphony, which included the Choral Fantasy. Now that I know it exists, I'll be watching for a copy that falls within my "cheapskate" price range, but for the moment you're spared.
We do have one last recording, though, and this one has the best singers and chorus.
BEETHOVEN: Fantasy in C for Piano, Chorus, and Orchestra, Op. 80
Rudolf Serkin, piano; Faye Robinson (s), Mary Burgess (s), Lili Chookasian (c), Kenneth Riegel (t), David Gordon (b), Julien Robbins (bs); Tanglewood Festival Chorus, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa, cond. Telarc, recorded Oct. 2 and 4, 1982
REVIEWING THIS WEEK'S PREVIEWS
Friday:Beethoven and the "heart of the piano concerto"
Rondo from Piano Concerto No. 3 played by Arthur Rubinstein, with the Symphony of the Air under Josef Krips); also by Krystian Zimerman (video, with the Vienna Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein) and by Evgeny Kissin (with the London Symphony under Sir Colin Davis). Plus Rubinstein "Beethoven bonus": Moonlight Sonata.
Saturday:Down in the basement with Beethoven
1st movement of Concerto No. 4, played by Artur Schnabel, with the Chicago Symphony under Frederick Stock (1942); also by Claudio Arrau (video, with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Riccardo Muti), by Arthur Rubinstein (with the Symphony of the Air under Krips), and by Vladimir Ashkenazy (also conducting the Cleveland Orchestra). Plus Schnabel "Beethoven bonuses": Sonata No. 27 in E minor, Op. 90; Bagatelle, Für Elise.
