The Great Romantics

In programming for orchestral concerts, there are composers whose works go especially well together. I feel that the combination of Mozart and Richard Strauss always has the making of a fine programme.

The young musicians of the University of British Columbia’s Symphony Orchestra under Jonathan Girard played just such a programme last night, with Strauss’s youthful Don Juan, Op. 20 and Mozart’s Symphony No. 36 in C Major, K. 425, “Linz”, coupled with a performance of Tchaikovsky’s ever-popular Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35, with faculty member David Gillham. The concert was given the title "The Great Romantics".

In August of 1887, young Richard Strauss visited his Uncle George Pschorr, where he met Pauline, the daughter of a certain General de Ahna. According to Norman del Mar in his biography of Strauss, the young composer was completely captivated by the young woman. The effect of this love affair, according to del Mar, “was electrifying, for he quickly translated the experience into musical terms, composing his first love music. “ And what beautiful love music he wrote in Don Juan!

Norman del Mar went on to comment that Strauss had chosen, “as a vehicle for the expression of his sexual desire,” the greatest lover and erotic subject of all time, the Don Juan legend. This music, for me, is as much a portrait of young Strauss as it is for the legendary lover – from the swagger of the opening theme, to the ardent, even erotic, love music, and to the grand and heroic theme for the horns, every measure of this music is a reflection of a young man in love for the first time.

For me, there is nothing more scary for violinists than the opening measures of Don Juan, with its upward sweeping theme. The violinists acquit themselves extremely well in this extremely exposed passage. The principal subject, itself a composite theme to be isolated and extensively developed throughout the work, presents the figure of Don Juan, with all his passionate glory and lust for life. I felt that perhaps the players leaned into the strings a little too much in this passage, and that they could have played this incredible theme with a little more lightness. The beautiful love music was played by the entire orchestra with great warmth and beauty, and the horn players of this young ensemble played the heroic theme with great confidence, even panache. In the great climax of the piece, I feel that the brasses could have been toned down a shade, so that the colours of the string writing could have been better heard. The musicians certainly responded to the youthful ardor of Strauss’s score, and gave a performance that excites as well as moves.

It is so wonderful and daring for Jonathan Girard to give his young players the opportunity to play a Mozart symphony. Again, the talented players of this orchestra rose to the challenge and played this, one of Mozart’s greatest symphonies, with the grandeur and majesty that the music calls for. Girard used a large body of strings for the performance, but kudos to the players for not falling into the trap of making the music ponderous, so easy to do with a “big band” performance of Mozart.

When listening to any performance of a performance of Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto, I always try to erase from my mind the sounds of past performances of this work and listen to it with open ears and mind. David Gillham certainly rose and surpassed the very considerable technical challenges laid down by the composer. For me, what was missing in last night’s performance was richness in the sound of the solo instrument, especially when the music was written in the lower register of the violin. I also miss a sense of daring that the music calls for. This is as much a piece for the conductor as it is for the violinist. Jonathan Girard was an impeccable accompanist. If he had “pushed” the soloist a little more, perhaps the performance would have really sizzled.

The orchestra played this piece extremely well, and Girard’s timing was perfect. I very much enjoyed how Jonathan Girard brought out the beauty of the colours of the writing for woodwinds in the Canzonetta movement.

So, bravo to the UBC Symphony Orchestra! And bravo to great music, and to youth. What a great gift and privilege it is for young musicians to play these great scores, and for us to be recipients of their love and effort.

Behzod Abduraimov

When pianist Behzod Abduraimov first appeared in Vancouver, he was apparently so well received by the audience that he was immediately re-engaged. And so Abduraimov, only 24 years old (and looked younger), appeared on the stage of Vancouver’s Chan Centre for the Performing Arts yesterday afternoon.

Abduraimov opened his recital with Beethoven’s Sonata in A-flat Major, Op. 26. Well played as it was, I could not help wondering if this was a new work in the pianist’s repertoire. The sound was, from where I sat, unfocused, and there could have been a far greater range in dynamic as well as tonal palette. To my ears, it sounded like the young pianist is still in the process of assimilating the work – by assimilating I do not mean learning the notes, but really getting into the core of the musical and emotional essence of the work. Of course, with any great work of art, interpretation is always a work in progress. I would love to hear him play the same work again in a few years.

I enjoyed very much his playing of Chopin’s Fantasie in F Minor, Op. 49. Abduraimov has a natural feeling for this music, and he beautifully conveyed the somber as well as the impetuous qualities in this great work. With Chopin’s large-scale works, there is always the danger of the music becoming an unrelated series of beautiful episodes. I therefore really appreciated the sense of unity, of an organic whole, that Abduraimov brought to the work.

The first half of the recital ended with a stunning performance of Saint-Saens’ Danse Macabre, as arranged by Liszt and Horowitz. According to David Dubal, author of Evenings With Horowitz, Mr. Horowitz never wrote down any of his arrangements and transcriptions, so Abduraimov must have learned the work by ear. As much as I never really enjoy such pianistic acrobatics, it was a stunning and sensational performance. Abduraimov tossed off the work, with its super-human technical demands, as if it was child’s play, and gave it a truly glittering, spectacular performance. In return, he received a well-deserved ovation from the near capacity audience.

After intermission, the young artist shared with us his interpretation of two Schubert Impromptus, Op. 90, No. 3, followed by No. 2 from the same set. In the Impromptu in G-flat Major, Op. 90, No. 3, Abduraimov played the melodic line beautifully, giving us the sense that the music is floating. I do, however, feel that the inner accompaniment figures in the right hand, which provide the harmony for the work, was far too unclear. For me, part of the incredible beauty of this work lies in the clarity of the middle voice. As it was, the music became only two-dimensional. The E-flat Major Impromptu, Op. 90, No. 2 was given an exciting, forward-moving performance, but I again feel that the opening section was a little over-pedaled, robbing it a bit of its clarity, and perhaps lightness.

Abduraimov ended his recital with a stunning performance of Ravel’s tone poem for piano, Gaspard de la nuit, with ravishing sounds and incredible pianism. I did feel that he could have made more of the dramatic possibilities of the Scarbo movement. Pianistically, the playing was perfect, and I appreciated the fervor he brought to this justly popular work.

Even with a justly deserved ovation from the enthusiastic audience, Abduraimov declined to play any encores. Perhaps he wanted to leave us to savor the frightening tonal visions that Ravel had given us. Behzod Abduraimov is a very gifted pianist with great potential, perhaps still, like many young artists, still in the process of “finding his way”. I hope that he will be able to set aside time to work, to think, to search, and to continue to find his way.

Rather to be still finding his way than to take the easy way out.

The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev

In Lina & Serge - The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev, Simon Morrison, a music historian at Princeton, tells the sad, strange, but compelling tale of Lina Codina, known to us as the wife of Serge Prokofiev, one of the 20^th century’s most original and brilliant composers.

At risk of sounding like an advertisement, I can truly say that I could not put this book down once I began reading it. Morrison succeeds in making this book both scholarly and readable, a difficult balance. Through Serge Prokofiev Jr., the composer’s grandson, the writer had access to letters, documents and photographs from Prokofiev’s estate as well as memories of several acquaintances of Lina Prokofiev. I am certain such a book would not have been possible during the days of the Soviet Union, when access to information about the Stalinist purges would not have been possible. Holding this book and reading it is to relive a dark and terrible period in our recent history.

Lina was born on October 21, 1897 in Madrid. Her parents, Juan Codina and Olga Nemïsskaya, were both professional singers with modest careers. Because of various circumstances, Lina grew up living in Spain, Switzerland, Cuba and the United States at different times in her young life, and Lina often thought of her “peripatetic upbringing” as one big adventure. Because of her mother Olga, who came originally from Odessa, Ukraine, Lina could speak, read and write Russian, a skill that stood her in good stead in the Russian émigré circles in New York. Lina met Serge Prokofiev on February 17, 1919, after a solo piano recital by the composer at Aeolian Hall. According to Morrison, Lina was “mesmerized by Serge’s phlegmatic demeanor and blistering technique at the keyboard.” Throughout their stormy and oft-interrupted courtship, Lina had always been the one to push for commitment from Serge who, though attracted to Lina, did not want to commit himself. It was not until Lina became pregnant with Serge’s child that they married on October 8, 1923.

In 1925, when Lina was 28, Anatoliy Lunacharsky, the head of cultural affairs, under orders from The Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party and, I’m sure, with Stalin’s tacit approval, began an intense campaign to reestablish cultural relationship with the West as well as to lure émigré Russian artists to return to the Soviet Union and add luster to its odious regime. The Soviets pulled out all the stops to attract Prokofiev, with attractive commissions for new works, as well as high profile performances of existing compositions with generous royalties. The target of their campaign included Lina, a trained singer struggling to carve out a musical career, and playing upon her desperate need to be accepted as a musician. They appealed to her vanity as the wife of the “great composer” and offered her performing opportunities as well.

After a few highly successful visits, including a stunning performance in Leningrad of Prokofiev’s opera The Love for Three Oranges, a performance reportedly far superior to the one given by the Chicago Lyric Opera (who commissioned the work), Prokofiev decided to make the permanent move back to the Soviet Union, one that would turn out to be the biggest mistake of his life. It was then that the doors of the Iron Curtain began to be (slowly) closed. At first, the couple was still able to travel outside the Soviet Union – their sons had to be left behind as “hostages”. Eventually, travel beyond the Soviet bloc was not permitted. At the end, Prokofiev was a broken man, in health as well as in spirit, and one of the 20^th century’s most original geniuses was reduced to churning out hackwork for the Party. Ironically, Prokofiev died of a massive stroke on exactly the same day as Stalin, in 1953.

As for Lina, her life began to become a living hell when the harsh realities of Stalinist Russia sank in, when the Party began to tighten the screws on both her and Serge. Things became even worse when Prokofiev fell for a much younger woman, Mira Mendelson. Mendelson, according to Morrison, “wrote talentless poems, as she herself realized, and imagined that she might become a librettist.” When they met, she was a member of the Komsomol (Communist Youth League), and was on her way to joining a Communist Party, a real mark of distinction in that society. Like her parents, she was a true believer of Communism and its dogma, and “she had imagined nothing more for herself than a dull-grey existence in the service of the state before the colorful Serge entered her life.” Eventually, Prokofiev left Lina and their two children, while Moscow was under siege from Hitler, and later divorced her and married Mira. 

Then, on February 20, 1948, Lina heard the knock on her door, a knock dreaded by so many Soviets at the time. She was first detained at the Lubyanka, then at Lefortovo prison, for a total of nine and a half months, before being sent to the Gulag on trumped-up charges, the most serious of which included “her persistent efforts to leave the Soviet Union with the aid of foreign embassy workers.” This did happen, but there is a big difference between wanting to visit her mother in Paris to defection. During her initial detention, her tormentors would beat her, deprive her of sleep and warmth, her limbs were bound “in excruciating positions. Once she thrown into a cell filled with ice.” She was held in captivity at various prison camps for eight years until being released after Stalin’s death.

After being released, she was somewhat “rehabilitated” by the regime to the extent of being invited to the world premiere of Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto shortly after her release, and was even assigned a modest apartment. The life she lived within the Soviet Union was certainly a far cry from the life she first envisioned when the Prokofievs made the fateful decision to return to the country.

Lina Prokofiev did eventually receive permission to leave the Soviet Union, and she ironically became the guardian of the Prokofiev legacy. She attended fashionable performances of his works, and even narrated a performance of Peter and the Wolf in New York. For the rest of her life, however, she would live in the shadows of her days in the Gulag: She had a fear of being picked up on the street, she jumped whenever a car passed close to her, and she would relive the nightmarish days of prison camp in her sleep.

In 1988, Lina visited Bonn, then the capital of West Germany, but fell seriously ill there. Her younger son Oleg arranged for her to be transferred to the Churchill Clinic in London where she died on January 3, 1989, aged ninety-one.

To borrow from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, there “never was a story of more woe” than the life of Lina Prokofiev (née Cordina), one of many victims who fell prey to the Soviet regime. Author Simon Morrison, in a masterful way, weaves this sad but fascinating tale of Lina Prokofiev.  Those who would like further information, or further reading into the subject, could do worse than referring to the detailed notes at the end of the book. Morrison is also the author of The People’s Artist, a book about Serge Prokofiev’s career after his return to the Soviet Union. If this current book is any indication, I am sure The People’s Artist would be a very interesting (I am not sure if “enjoyable” would be the appropriate word) read as well.

I am grateful to Simon Morrison for telling this compelling human drama, one that should be told, and leaving us shocked and saddened by the very long and very dramatic life of this colourful (albeit minor) figure in the annals of 20^th century music.

Impressive Debut

Founded in 1999, the Ébène String Quartet is a relatively new voice in the chamber music world. The youthfulness of this quartet extends to their repertoire, with works from the core repertoire, contemporary music, jazz and pop music. A quick search on Youtube reveals the ensemble performing music from the film Pulp Fiction as well as a tune by the Beetles.

This talented ensemble made their debut in Vancouver last night under the auspices of the city’s Friends of Chamber Music, in an intense and rather dark-hued programme of quartets by Haydn, Bartok, and Mendelssohn.

In his Quartet in F Minor, Op. 20, No. 5, Haydn establishes the F Minor tonality right at the outset of the work, and this rather dark key colour extends to the Menuetto as well as the fugue of the final movement. Rather unusually, there isn’t much relief in the Haydnesque humour that we so often find in his quartets, symphonies and piano sonatas, but the composer does give us a brief respite from the intense emotion in the beautiful Adagio movement, with its lovely solo for the first violin. In the 4^th movement, Haydn, again unusually, gives us a fugue, thereby taking us away from the 1^st violin-dominated texture of the other three movements. The young quartet played this work with impeccable tightness in ensemble and poise, and the intense and difficult 4^th movement fugue was carried off with panache, leaving the audience breathless from this intense conversation between the four instruments.

It is a blessing that the six quartets of Bartok have now really become a core of the string quartet repertoire. The Ébène gave us the relatively short but intense Quartet No. 3, Sz 85, composed in 1927. The four “movements” are played without interruption, and the effect is that of an uninterrupted stream of consciousness. In some ways, the denseness and brutality of the final section serve as a relief, a catharsis from the tension that had been building from the first notes. The players rose to the technical, musical, and emotional challenges of the work, and gave us a performance that moved as well as stunned the audience.

As much as Felix Mendelssohn is considered a “great” composer, there are so many of his compositions that are not often performed. We can think of the first two symphonies, many of his piano pieces and chamber works, as well as the oratorios, music that never really made it into the standard repertoire of orchestras and solo players. I am grateful to the Ébène Quartet for giving us a beautiful performance of the composer’s Quartet in A Minor, Op. 13. Reading the Quartet’s website, I found out that the players have been championing the quartets of Mendelssohn, both Felix and Fanny. They recorded Mendelssohn’s Op. 13 and 80 Quartets, as well as the only string quartet composed by Fanny Mendelssohn, the composer’s beloved sister.

In spite of the string writing that is typical of Mendelssohn - delicate and fleeting runs for especially the violinists - we find in works such as the scherzo movements of his Qctet and the incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream; this is a highly serious work, emotionally as well as musically. I believe that the most telling sign of a great performance is the silence of the audience between movements. Last night, it seemed that the audience did not even dare to breathe during the pauses. At the end of the fourth movement, when Mendelssohn recalls the musical material of the Adagio movement, there was a brief silence before the applause and ovation commenced. The musicians accepted the plaudits graciously, but did not grant us an encore, perhaps feeling that the mood of the three quartets performed would have been broken with an additional work.

As ever, there were empty seats throughout the small hall last night. Where were all the young people in the city who are taking music lessons? Those who missed last night’s concert, perhaps not knowing the name of the ensemble, certainly deprived themselves of a very special musical experience.