Do we dare let Schubert's Gastein Sonata nudge us into the question of what we're looking for in music?

NOTE: THE POST IS STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION, BUT AT A MORE ADVANCED STAGE (THERE'S LOTS TO LISTEN TO NOW)


dba "Schubert in a happy place, part 2"  [continued from "Schubert in a happy place: More on our mystery 'Con moto,' part 1"]

Historical Events
"New Faces of 1956" opens at Barrymore Theater NYC for 221 performances
Famous Birthdays
• Fred Funk, American golfer (The Tradition 2008, 10; US Senior Open 2009), born in Takoma Park, Maryland
• King Diamond [Kim Petersen], Danish heavy metal musician (Merciful Fate; King Diamond), born in Copenhagen, Denmark
• Sam Irvin, American director and producer (Guilty as Charged), born in Asheville, North Carolina

-- with thanks to onthisday.com

SCHUBERT: Piano Sonata No. 17 in D, D. 850 (Gastein):
ii. Con moto [With movement]

iv. Rondo: Allegro moderato

Sviatoslav Richter, piano. Praga, recorded live in the Rudolfinum, Prague, June 14, 1956

by Ken

No, on the evidence of Onthisday.com, June 14, 1956, doesn't seem to have been a day of great historical moment -- unless we count what we know happened in the Rudolfinum in Prague that day. I'd like to say "that evening," since it was after all a Thursday (finding out that it was a Thursday was what led me to Onthisday.com in the first place), and we can hear at the end that there was indeed an audience present, but can I say for sure that it happened in the evening?

As I've explained (see "What effect (if any) does this 32-second audio clip have for you?," Sept. 26, in which we heard four pianists play the movement, and that day's follow-up post, "Our four pianists revealed"), and last week's "Schubert in a happy place: more on our mystery 'Con moto,' part 1"), it was the Con moto from the Richter performance that day in Prague -- from which we've now heard the opening movement of the sonata as well -- that so forcefully grabbed hold of me and got me listening to and pondering the sonata.


WELCOME TO THE GASTEIN SOUNDWORLD!
LET'S PLUNGE RIGHT IN -- WE CAN CHAT LATER!

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

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

Preview: Down in the basement with Beethoven

In a state of grace, Claudio Arrau plays the first part of the first movement of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, with Riccardo Muti conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra. (The rest of the movement is here.)

by Ken

Last night I related how Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto intruded on my musical consciousness, thanks to the inclusion of the concluding Rondo on RCA's Arthur Rubinstein compilation LP Heart of the Piano Concerto. It was by far my favorite of the six movements from favorite concertos featured. (One of these weeks we'll come back to the six concertos that were included.)

Today it's Beethoven's Fourth Concerto. How it happened that I hadn't been exposed to the Fourth Concerto despite my already-formed attachment to at least the Rondo of the Third Concerto, is a silly story for another time. It had to do with endlessly agonizingly weighing the economics of RCA's Rubinstein-Krips Beethoven concerto cycle on five LPs vs. Epic's Fleisher-Szell and London's Backhaus-Schmidt-Isserstedt ones on four, and American Decca's Kempff-van Kempen one in mono but on only three! I was paralyzed.


SIT BACK, FOLKS, IT'S TIME FOR AN ANCIENT FAMILY STORY