Alexandre Tharaud in Vancouver

Just before his recital in Vancouver last evening, pianist Alexandre Tharaud played nearly the same programme at Carnegie Hall, New York, where critic Vivien Schweitzer was less than complimentary. I must say I disagree with the distinguished writer of the New York Times, for I thought Tharaud gave us a well thought-out programme as well as a thoughtful, and always interesting, concert.

I thought that Tharaud was courageous to have used the score throughout the evening. With over a century of “tradition” of playing from memory, it takes a pianist of some daring to use have the music in front of him for a performance. Playing with the music should be just a matter of preference, not a moral choice, since conservatory, competitions, and piano examinations have, since the beginning of the 20^th century, stressed playing from memory, and some music teachers and conservatory professors treat playing from the score as some kind of mortal sin. I have noticed that more pianists, including Richard Goode, Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Peter Serkin, are using the score when performing.

The pianist opened his recital with Mozart’s justly famous Sonata in A Major, K. 331. In the first movement, Tharaud, I believe, seek to bring out the individual characteristic of each variation, rather than trying to blend the music from one variation to the next. His Mozart playing is one of full tone and rich colours, scintillating rather than beautiful. Tharaud’s approach to Mozart reminded me of Glenn Gould’s Mozart sonata recordings, but without the extremes in Gould’s Mozart interpretation and tempi choice. The playing in the third movement was bold and exuberant, certainly bringing out the “Turkish” flavor in the music.

Tharaud went on to give us an unmannered and dignified playing of a Chopin group – the Nocturne in E-flat Major, Op. 9, No. 2, Nocturne in C-sharp Minor, Op. posth., and the great Fantasy in F Minor, Op. 49. I appreciated how he handled the many shifts in mood, sound, and texture in the Fantasy, and how he conveyed the organic unity of the large musical canvas. The pianist’s interpretation was, however, hampered by the rather dull and wooden sounding piano. This was especially apparent in the performance of the Fantasy, where he tried hard to coax as much colour and sound out of the instrument as possible, not always successfully. This experience certainly went against the adage that “there are no bad pianos, just bad pianists.” Last evening, the pianist was just fine, but not the piano.

Schubert’s 16 German Dances, D. 783 contain some of the composer’s loveliest musical thoughts, and Tharaud’s interpretation was as musical, charming and infectious as can be. When pianist Fou Ts’ong included a set of Schubert dances in one of his Vancouver recitals, a local pianist complained that he was playing “student pieces”. No, performing these dances are far from being child’s play, and it takes a true musician to bring out the lilt and grace each of these miniatures call for. They are certainly worthy for inclusion in more recital programmes.

I felt that Tharaud’s performance of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 31 in A-flat Major, Op. 110, was highly successful. It was a beautiful, cohesive performance that effectively conveyed the overall architecture and emotional landscape of the great work, which is no small accomplishment. Over time and, perhaps, with age, the pianist would draw us more into the inner world of this late work, and bring out the other-worldly beauties of this incredible music.

Upon the urging of the audience, Tharaud gave us two delicious morsels, a Scarlatti sonata with all the fleetness and incredible finger work the music calls for, and Chopin’s Waltz in A Minor, Op. posth., underscoring the French salon flavor of this music, and utterly lovely and charming from first note to last.

We are blessed in this city to have organizations like the Vancouver Chopin Society and the Vancouver Recital Society to keep the tradition of the solo recital alive, and for brining us artists like Alexandre Tharaud. After the wonderful recital by Emmanuel Ax just a couple of weeks earlier, and with pianists like Steven Osborne, Paul Lewis and Sir Andras Schiff to look forward to in the next few months, 2015 is certainly off to a very good start!

Now if the Canadian dollar would only go back up…

An Afternoon with Emmanuel Ax

It had been many years since I heard Emmanuel Ax perform, so it was with great anticipation that I attended his solo recital yesterday at Vancouver’s only good full-size concert hall, the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts.

The programme, a French-based programme of Bizet, Rameau, Debussy and Chopin (one mustn’t forget that Chopin spent his adult life in Paris, and that his father was French), really showed Ax’s capacity for growth as a musician and artist, and his refusal to be “type-casted”. It was truly a lovely afternoon of wonderful music making by a great musician.

I only knew of Georges Bizet’s Variations Chromatiques de Concert through a recording by Glenn Gould - coupled at the time with Grieg’s E Minor Sonata. In Gould’s own words, this set of variations is, “one of the very few masterpieces for solo piano to emerge from the third quarter of the nineteenth century; its almost total neglect is a phenomenon for which I can offer no reasonable explanation.”

I was grateful to Ax for including this work in his recital. To my ears, Bizet’s Variations is very much a child of its time, with hints of influence by Chopin, Schumann (very much so), and Liszt. As I listened to it, it reminded me of another unjustly neglected work, Grieg’s Ballade in the Form of Variations on a Norwegian Folk Song, Op. 24, a piece structurally and stylistically very much in the same vein as the Bizet. I do not know whether this is a new work for Ax, but it sounded just ever so slightly less assured as the rest of his programme. Nevertheless, we should be grateful to the artist for introducing us to this lovely work.

I was also unfamiliar to the next item on Ax’s programme, Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Suite in G Major/Minor from Nouvelles Pièces de clavecin. Much of the writing for the keyboard is reminiscent of the Sonatas of Scarlatti. Ax’s playing was beautiful, and totally musical, with all the grace and lightness the music calls for. His playing certainly makes a strong case for playing music conceived for the harpsichord on the piano – not that a case ever needed to be made.

With the rest of the recital programme, the audience is on very familiar territory. Ax gave us incredibly lovely playing in his performances of Debussy’s Estampes, Hommage à Rameau, and the finger-breaking L’Isle Joyeuse – “Happy Island”, as a teacher of mine used to facetiously call it. It is perhaps no accident that Ax attended Columbia University in his youth and majored in French, for he obviously has an affinity for the music. The sound he conjured from the piano was magical, with pianissimos as gorgeous as Gieseking, but with a greater range of tone and colour than the legendary German pianist.

I could think of no greater technical and musical challenge than to negotiate all four of Chopin’s Scherzi, which was what Ax did after the interval. Vladimir Horowitz said that to successfully play Chopin’s Scherzo No. 1, the pianist needed to have both demonic and angelic qualities. Ax does not need to apologize for lacking in any of these qualities, and he certainly rose to the occasion in his technically impregnable performance of the first Scherzo. What stayed in my ears long after the concert, though, was the beauty he conjured from the piano in the middle section, taken from the Polish Christmas carol Lulajże Jezuniu (Sleep, Little Jesus). The second and fourth Scherzi received similarly convincing interpretations.

To my ears, Ax’s interpretation of the Scherzo No. 2 was more convincing than Perahia’s last year. I thought that his playing of the Scherzo No. 4, the most difficult one technically, was simply breathtaking. I had only a slight quibble with the tempo he took in the Scherzo No. 3 in C-sharp minor. To me, the quick tempo he adopted actually takes away some of the tension, and the tempestuous quality of the music.

Upon the urging of the audience, Ax ended his performance in Vancouver quietly, with Robert Schumann’s Des Abends, from his Fantasiestücke, Op. 12. It was a completely satisfying afternoon of great playing of great music.

We await Mr. Ax’s next return to Vancouver, when he will, to be sure, share the joys of his musical discoveries with us.

Anguish and Triumph

In the crowded field of Beethoven biographies, any addition to this body of literature must be outstanding in order to merit our attention. Composer and historian Jan Swafford’s, Beethoven - Anguish and Triumph, a mammoth new biography of the composer, warrants the effort of our careful study and thought. Casual readers should stay away from this thick volume, but those with a desire to deepen their understanding of this iconic figure would find their efforts amply rewarded.

Written in the spirit of Thayer’s voluminous Life of Beethoven, Swafford succeeded in giving us as complete a portrait of the composer as history allows us, separating the facts from the myths and legends that had been building up during the composer’s life and, especially, after his death.

Born into a Europe still reeling from the spirit and atmosphere of the Sturm und Drang movement, one that created the period that came to be called Romantic. Swafford stresses quite emphatically that Beethoven, from the earliest days, was a pianist rather than a harpsichordist. Beethoven himself gave conflicting reports of whether he heard Mozart play. If he did, he had only one comment about Mozart’s playing, “He had a fine but choppy way of playing – no legato”, which is interesting (if true) considering, Mozart’s own admonition that his music should be played “like oil”.

When he was almost twenty-two, Beethoven left Bonn for Vienna, the musical capital of Europe then as now, to study under the great Haydn. Emperor Franz II, conservative and fearful of change, had made Vienna a virtual police state. The police, however, could find no grounds to censor instrumental music, and music thus became the one thing in which the nobility and the aristocrats show their good taste. From the beginning, there was no love-loss between Beethoven and the Viennese. Yet, Vienna was to be the home for him for his professional, a place where he was to find fame and, to a lesser extent, fortune. Throughout his life, he would think of Bonn as his true home.

Swafford details Beethoven’s relationship with his many admirers and patrons, friends, colleagues, and love interests, many whose names are known to us only because of their association with certain works of Beethoven. Beethoven’s life was his work, his composition, and Swafford’s narration certainly centers around the evolution of Beethoven as composer. The author gives us quite detailed analysis of certain landmark works, the Missa Solemnis and the Symphony No. 9 each receiving its own chapters.

What makes intriguing reading is the author’s discussion of the psychology behind discussion of the structural, motivic (crucial in understanding Beethoven’s work), harmonic, and key-relationship of many compositions, as well as the importance and meaning of certain keys in Beethoven’s works. In the appendix, there is a section titled “Beethoven’s Musical Forms”, with explanations of the technical names mentioned in the text. All this makes for fascinating but certainly not casual reading.

According to Swafford, Beethoven also had a very complex relationship with Joseph Haydn. Many biographers had stated that Beethoven began studies with Haydn, but that the two had a falling out with each other. We can all see and hear the unmistakable influence Haydn’s music had on the younger composer. Beethoven’s formal lessons with Haydn only lasted until 1793, but “there would be contacts and consulting between them in the coming years, and now and then they appeared in concerts together.” Never was there a formal break between the two. Haydn had been patient and generous with Beethoven, and Beethoven was circumspect enough not to openly insult the foremost composer of Europe. Haydn even took Beethoven to Esterházy Palace to introduce this young talent to his former employer. When Haydn heard the premiere of the 24-year old Beethoven’s fiery C Minor Trio, he “had to sense that he was the past and this youth was the future.”

Beethoven was often jealous of Haydn’s great success and the adulation he receives. Haydn’s anthem, God Protect Franz the Kaiser, was so successful that it became the unofficial Austrian national anthem. The fact that “Haydn and not Beethoven had written such an anthem would burn in him until his own last years.” Beethoven admired and was influenced by Haydn’s The Creation, but it wasn’t until Haydn’s death in 1809 that Beethoven, knowing that he “was the only peer of Haydn alive,” begins to speak with unreserved admiration of Haydn.

No biography of Beethoven would be complete without a discussion of the possible identity of the “immortal beloved.” Swafford did not suggest any one woman to be the chosen one, but gives us the evidence available. Like a medieval knight with his idea of courtly love, Beethoven idolizes certain women in his life, mostly young and beautiful piano students from a much higher social class than a freelance composer and pianist. All but one of these attempts would end in rejection and bitterness (on his part), either by the lady herself or by her family.

In some ways, Beethoven’s relationship with women is similar to his dealings with those around him – friends, patrons, and family, especially his problematic nephew Karl, the one person who gave him no end of grief in his later years. Swafford discusses Beethoven’s solipsism, his complete inability to deal with the world beyond music, often with disastrous consequences. I feel that perhaps Leonore, the heroine of his opera Fidelio, represents an idea of his ideal woman – utterly loyal, and willing to risk even her own life to rescue her husband from the clutches of evil. What woman can measure up to that?

It is an amazing fact that in spite of all his difficulties, Beethoven attained success quite early on and maintained his popularity with the fickle Viennese. With the writings of E. T. A. Hoffman, early music theorist Adolph Bernhard Marx, and Franz Grillparzer, Beethoven becomes, after his death, a towering figure, a Romantic demigod, and a myth, one that persists to this day.

In his wonderfully readable book, Jan Swafford has successfully given us a picture of the man behind the myth, certainly the man behind the music. As with most great men, Beethoven was neither angel nor demon, but a man who had given us some of the most moving, passionate, and soul-stirring music of any time.

At the end of the book, I realized that even in this crowded field of Beethoven biographies, we must make room on our shelves for this one magnificent volume.

The Five

Nationalism, a sense of pride in one’s heritage, art, music, and literature, has been the impetus for not only political movements, such as the unification of Italy and Germany, but the inspiration for many of our greatest artistic works. Of course, the spirit of nationalism has, in various times in history, been used as excuses for some of the most grievous crimes against humanity.

In music, nationalistic movements in one form or another, came to a fore in the middle to late 19^th century, in many cases as a reaction to the dominance of Austro-Germanic composers. Composers such as Dvorak, took the rules and forms laid down by “foreign” composers, to create music that has a uniquely Czech voice and identity. There were also composers who rejected, or tried hard to reject, any influence of established forms and styles, who tried to create works of art unique to their cultural heritage, free from any foreign influence.

Music historian Stephen Walsh’s new book, Musorgsky and His Circle, A Russian Musical Adventure, is part social history, part musicology, and part biography. Namely, he chronicles the development of Russian art music from Mikhail Glinka and Alexander Dargomïzhsky, to the focus of his book, the work of the circle of composers known in the West as The Five, and ends with a discussion of its influence on subsequent Russian and Soviet composers. Within Walsh’s book, there are also detailed discussion and analysis of the works of these composers. It is an ambitious undertaking, and the result is a book that is not meant for casual reading, but detailed study.

The term, commonly known as the Five, is also referred to as the Mighty Little Heap (moguchaya kuchka), is a group of composers that include Mily Balakirev, César Cui, Alexander Borodin, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, and Modest Musorgsky, the most important figure in the group, according to the author. The circle could be extended to include Vladimir Stasov, a lawyer-critic who served as inspiration and advisor for the composers and chronicler of Russian art and music, and Alexander Serov, a some-time composer, but one of the most feared music critic in St. Petersburg.

Walsh takes his reader through the relationships between these composers, how their friendships and alliances were formed, and broken. These composers, none of which had formal training in composition, played their works for each other, supported each other’s creative endeavours, and provided each other with ideas for creative projects. On the other hand, they were also marked by violent disagreements, professional jealousy and envy, and sometimes betrayal, and would vehemently reject any work or composer whose works or associations do not fit within their musical and aesthetic ideas. In many ways, César Cui, perhaps the least talented and most small-minded of the group, could be scathing in his critique of works of friends or enemies. By the 1870’s, when members of the circle were all involved with their own projects, the identity of the group had already begun to blur.

Battle lines were most clearly drawn between the Five, and pianist-composer Anton Rubinstein. By the mid 19^th century, Rubinstein, who came from a family of converted Jews, was already famous throughout Western Europe as a touring virtuoso. In 1855, Rubinstein published in a Viennese music journal an article, “The Composers of Russia”, that was widely read in St. Petersburg. The article was a genuine attempt by Rubinstein to introduce European music lovers to the musical scene in Russia. The composers of the Five, however, objected to Rubinstein’s statement that he finds in Russian folk song, in spite of its distinctiveness, “a persistent lugubriousness and melancholy that infect every aspect of its melody and rhythm.” To use such material for an entire opera, says Rubinstein, would be “scarcely endurable, especially for foreign audiences”. To Glinka, composer of the operas A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Lyudmila, as well as to the composers of the Five, it was a declaration of war. The Five was also stung by Rubinstein’s statement that anyone who “writes a single romance, however primitive and inept… can call himself a composer”, even though Rubinstein never specifically named any one person.

The response of the Five, as well as critic Vladimir Stasov, also reflects the latent anti-Semitism of Russian society at the time. Echoing Wagner’s infamous Judaism in Music, Stasov states that Jews (even a converted one like Rubinstein), while acquainted with European languages and culture, are not capable of anything but “a superficial understanding of their inner workings.” What Rubinstein refers to as amateurism, Stasov adds, is actually a “natural Russian distaste for the stultifying effects of Western academicism.” Verbal battles were fought between Rubinstein’s Russian Musical Society (RMS) and the St. Petersburg Conservatory, and the Free Music School (FMS), an organization that reflects the philosophy of the Five.

Although battle lines were drawn between the two parties, things were not quite so clear-cut. Rubinstein’s RMS, generously, one might add, regularly presented works of the Five, as well as musical works of Western European composers. When Rubinstein resigned as director of the conservatory and as conductor of the RMS, the board of the society was in favour of appointing Balakirev to conduct the concerts in the coming season. It was only when Grand Duchess Yelena Pavlovna (patroness of Rubinstein and the RMS) vetoed their choice that Balakirev had to share the podium with Hector Berlioz. In 1871, Rimsky-Korsakov was invited to be the director of the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Some members of the Five considered this a betrayal. Musorgsky writes, “Artistic truth can’t tolerate predetermined forms” as a jibe to Rimsky-Korsakov’s “defection” to academia.

Such is the background against which composers of the Five were operating. Walsh covers a lot of ground in his book, detailing the chronology of each composer’s major compositional efforts, large and small – Cui’s many efforts at writing operas, Musorgsky’s chronology of writing Night on Bald Mountain, and the many revisions of Boris Godunov, as well as his efforts at Khovanshchina, and Borodin’s efforts at Prince Igor, to name just a few examples. The discussions always center around Musorgsky, perhaps because of the five composers, he was “the most inclined to ignore the normal rules and procedures of textbook composition” and the most original. 

Other than the relative handful of compositions that has become part of our musical canon – Borodin’s String Quartet No. 2 and Prince Igor, Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov, Night on Bald Mountain, and Pictures from an Exhibition, Balakirev’s finger-breaking Islamey, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio espagnol, Sheherazade, and Russian Easter Festival Overture (all written late in the composer’s life) – audiences outside of Russia, except perhaps the most ardent Russophile, would most likely be unfamiliar with many of the composers’ other works.

Were composers of the Five “geniuses”? Perhaps not, not in the sense of Schubert or Mozart or Beethoven, in whose music one finds a sense of inevitability, both in their conception and progression. This group of five men, as much as they loved music, really treated music as, forgive the use of the word, hobby. They would begin a work with great enthusiasm, but would then leave it for days or months or years, because of their other professional or personal commitments, or because they simply lost interest in the project.

While it is all too easy to dismiss the other efforts of the Five as mere dabbling by amateurs, we should be reminded that the history of Russian and Soviet music would be very different without their pioneering efforts. In the penultimate chapter of the book – Heirs and Rebels – Walsh discusses the legacy and influences of the group. According to the author, we can find in works of composers as diverse as Debussy, Janáček, Stravinsky (a private pupil of Rimsky’s), and Shostakovich, influences of composers of the Five.

After the work on Russian music history by Richard Taruskin (acknowledged by the author throughout his volume), Stephen Walsh has done a real service here, and has done a balanced, fair-minded, English language study of this watershed period in Russian music history. As Walsh points out, some of the studies of the Five carried out during the Soviet era were subjected to interpretation that suits the socialist reality of the time. Even with the detailed musical analysis that filled many pages (fascinating reading in their own right), I do find this book quite an engrossing read, and had learnt much from it. The cultural milieu of Russia at the time, vignettes of the lives of the five composers, their interactions with each other at various stages in their lives, and their struggling to write music in spite of their “day jobs” and other commitments, make the volume a very interesting one to read. I am certainly grateful to Walsh for filling in gaps in my knowledge of this fascinating period in European art music.