"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis
Sunday, August 24, 2014
Ghost of Sunday Classics: "Baton Bunny" music with and without the Bunny, plus a treasure trove of overtures and, oh yes, "Gaudeamus igitur"
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In which we watch part of a cartoon, then listen
to an overture, and then another overture, and then --
can you imagine? -- drift off into other, er, stuff
A nice chunk of Chuck Jones's Baton Bunny (1959) -- from the confident-looking start, things deteriorate pretty quickly.
by Ken
As I mentioned most recently Friday night, New York City's Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, is currently hosting a grand exhibition devoted to one of the giants of animated film, Chuck Jones. And as I mentioned Friday night, this afternoon I hope to get to MoMI for this week's "Chuck Jones Matinee" (each week the same hour-long program is offered on Saturday and Sunday), to see -- in 35mm, on a large screen -- Duck Amuck, which I've already declared the greatest cartoon ever made, and What's Opera, Doc?, the famous Bugs Bunny classical-music extravaganza.
On my last weekend visit to the museum, the CJM program included a different classical-Bugs enterprise, one I didn't remember: Baton Bunny, from 1959. In it Bugs attempts to conduct Suppé's A Morning, Noon, and Night in Vienna Overture, and you can see some of it above.
We've heard our fair share of Suppé, entirely in the form of overtures. Yes, occasional efforts are made to revive some of his numerous operettas, but they don't stick. A dozen or so of his overtures do, however, for the simple reason that they're utterly wonderful, utterly gorgeous music, and among them are a couple -- I mean Poet and Peasant and Light Cavalry -- that I would listen to as happily as anything in the orchestral repertory.
When the poster of our Baton Bunny clip posted it, a rash of commenters were frantic to know what the music was. The question was answered in due course, of course, but we're going to answer it in our own way -- with three distinctly different performances.
FRANZ VON SUPPÉ: A Morning, Noon, and Night in Vienna: Overture
Sunday Classics preview: Here's the key -- or is it?
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Piano Trio: i. Allegro moderato -- opening
Arthur Rubinstein, piano; Jascha Heifetz, violin; 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.
Sunday Classics: Thinking of the "snorting and grunting" Brahms's "inwardly restless and propulsive" piano playing
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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
Sunday Classics preview: Brahms in snorting-and-grunting mode
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[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
Sunday Classics: Arthur Rubinstein offers compelling advice for young pianists
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"Many pianists perform at their concerts music which they do not understand or particularly like, only because these pieces are much in demand and recommended to them by their managers. . . . My long experience taught me that your only way to success, young pianists, is to pour out your own deep emotion into the music you really love and understand."
by Ken
I admit it's taken me till now to read Arthur Rubinstein's two volumes of autobiography: My Young Years (1973) and My Many Years (1980). But I often think the passage of some time gives us a better indication of the value of a piece of writing. (A slight caveat needs to entered about that word "writing" in the case of My Many Years, by which time the author had lost his sight. So the book was all dictated. Nevertheless, I have written, "Rubinstein writes," which seems to me a defensible liberty.)
I'm still only halfway through My Many Years (both of these are big books), but I've been sitting for a while on a passage from it so interesting that it cries out for sharing. We'll get to the full quote in a moment, but I've put the gist at the top, and I thought we would start with two pieces that could hardly be more different but that could both be counted on win audiences pretty much anywhere in the world over to his playing.
It should be noted that Rubinstein evolved enormously as a pianist, with a lot of the change which occurred at a surprisingly advanced age quite deliberate on his part, to fix what he had come to regard as a too easy approach to his playing, which relied on his natural musical instincts at the expense of close contact with the musical texts. We're going to hear performances "early" and late, though we need to be careful with that word "early"; his earliest recordings were made when he was in his early 40s.
DE FALLA: El Amor brujo: "Ritual Fire Dance" (arr. Rubinstein)
From the autobiographies we learn how much Rubinstein loved Spain and how much Spanish audiences, from the start, responded to his playing. With the composer's enthusiastic approval he made his own arrangement of the orchestral "Ritual Fire Dance" from Manuel de Falla's El Amor brujo. His Spanish audiences loved it, but so did audiences everywhere.
Arthur Rubinstein, piano. RCA-BMG, recorded in Hollywood, May 18, 1947
Arthur Rubinstein, piano. RCA-BMG, recorded in New York City, Mar. 23, 1961
CHOPIN: Barcarolle in F-sharp, Op. 60
Considering how revered Rubinstein eventually became as a Chopin player, it's interesting how long it took audiences to accept his way of playing Chopin. There were pieces he could always count on, though. We have the flashiest one, the A-flat major Polonaise, coming up. Apparently, though, his way with the Barcarolle rarely failed to melt audiences' hearts.
Arthur Rubinstein, piano. EMI, recorded in London, Apr. 18, 1928
Arthur Rubinstein, piano. RCA-BMG, recorded in New York City, Nov. 26-28, 1962
Sunday Classics: Remembering Rafael Kubelik, Josef Krips, and Rudolf Kempe
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BEDRICH SMETANA: The Bartered Bride:
Overture; Polka; Furiant; Dance of the Comedians
Philharmonia Orchestra, Rafael Kubelik, cond. EMI, recorded 1951
by Ken
With no particular rhyme or reason, as I explained in Friday night's preview, we're hearing snatches of treasures I found in an embarrassingly large order I just received from that indispensable repository of (mostly but by no means only) classical cut-out and overstock CDs and DVDs, the Berkshire Record Outlet. These particular snatches spotlight three "K" conductors. I'm especially fond of their solidly grounded musicianship, making music from the inside rather than imposing external "rules" or playing for crowd-grabbing "effects."
Friday night we heard orchestral excerpts by Berlioz and Hindemith from a four-CD "portrait" of the wonderful Czech conductor Rafael Kubelik (1914-1996, seen here around the time he was music director of the Chicago Symphony, 1950-53) drawing on his early recordings for EMI, Mercury, and Decca. I thought we'd start out today's wider sampling by listening to some of my favorite music, the Overture and Dances from Bedrich Smetana's comic opera The Bartered Bride (which in fact we already heard back in a November 2009 post, "It's not for nothing that Smetana was dubbed 'the father of Czech music'").
LONGTIME SUNDAY CLASSICS READERS HAVE HEARD A LOT
OF KUBELIK, AND ALSO OF JOSEF KRIPS AND RUDOLF KEMPE
Sunday Classics: Dvořák's "Slavonic Dances": a world, or 16 worlds, in 16 miniatures
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Probably the greatest Czech conductor (at least of the stay-at-home-Czech variety) of whom we have record, Václav Talich, conducts the Czech Philharmonic in Dvořák's Slavonic Dance No. 10 in E minor, Op. 72, No. 2 (a dumka), in this 1955 video.
by Ken
I've made this point before, but we need to make it again before proceeding to the Slavonic Dances, as promised in Friday night's preview (when we heard both the first of them in both the original piano-duet version and the composer's orchestration. Although it was obvious from the outset that Dvořák's Slavonic Dances were inspired by Brahms's Hungarian Dances, which proved a huge commercial success, what Brahms was producing was genuine trifles -- luscious trifles, but still (mostly) trifles, which doesn't seem to me at all the case with the Slavonic Dances.
I've also argued that the Hungarian Dances seem to me more effective, more atmospheric, in their original piano-duet form, where they really create a sound world of their own -- though necessarily a sound world limited by what you can get from four hands pounding a single piano keyboard.
An obvious example is the most famous of the Hungarian Dances. Note that the prevailing form in all these dances is our old friend A-B-A, most often either fast-slow-fast or slow-fast-slow, but in any case with a contrasting mood for the middle section.
BRAHMS: Hungarian Dance No. 5: Allegro
original version for piano duet: in F-sharp minor
Alfred Brendel and Walter Klein, piano. Vox, recorded 1956
orchestral version by Martin Schmeling: in G minor
Staatskapelle Berlin, Otmar Suitner, cond. Denon/Deutsche Schallplatten, recorded Aug. 28-Sept. 2, 1989
violin-and-piano version by Joseph Joachim: in G minor
Fritz Kreisler, violin; Carl Lamson, piano. Victor, recorded Feb. 17, 1916
Sunday Classics: Is the radiant A major the "sleeper" among Brahms's piano quartets?
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We've heard the fine pianist Ralf Gothóni accompanying baritone Jorma Hynninen in the opening song, "Gute Nacht" ("Good Night"), of Schubert's Winterreise (Winter Journey). Here he plays the first movement of the Brahms A major Piano Quartet (with the repeat) with violinist Ana Chumachenco, violist Ara Gregorian, and cellist Robert Cohen (whom I so enjoyed last month in his new role as cellist of the Fine Arts Quartet), at Helsinki Spring Light Chamber Music 2010.
by Ken
For those who missed Friday night's preview, "Sunny and mellow -- it's Brahms in the key of A," we're finally getting to the second of Brahms's piano quartets, the A major, which was my originally intended subject last September when I started out with a preview highlighting the contrast between it and the first, the G minor, but by Sunday's post had shifted to the G minor Quartet.
As you may guess from the consecutive opus numbers, 25 and 26, these piano quartets were actually conceived in the same outsize burst of inspiration, in another instance of a composer feeling it not only possible but necessary to vent consecutively or overlappingly or even simultaneously contrasting aspects of his musical personality. The classic case for me remains the pair of Beethoven symphonies I've described as musical "fraternal twins," the fatefully volcanic No. 5 and eco-inspirational No. 6 (the Pastoral).
The G minor was the first of the Brahms piano quartets that I came to really love, and I don't think I'm alone there -- though nobody has established himself as a more devoted fan of the piece than Arnold Schoenberg, whose orchestration, at once faithfully Brahmsian and over-the-top Schoenbergian, has understandably become an enormously popular concert piece, perhaps living up after all to his stated hope of conjuring with it a fifth Brahms symphony. I don't love the G minor Quartet any less than ever, but I noticed somewhere along the line that my top allegiance had gradually shifted to the more subtly arresting A major.
JUST TO RECAP . . .
In Friday night's preview we focused on the very opening of the A major Quartet, via four very different performances, from which we then heard the entire exposition section of the first movement from those same performances.
For today's recap I thought we would start by isolating the three principal themes.
BRAHMS: Piano Quartet No. 2 in A, Op. 26: 1st movement -- principal themes
Arthur Rubinstein, piano; Guarneri Quartet members (Arnold Steinhardt, violin; Michael Tree, viola; David Soyer, cello). RCA/BMG, recorded Dec. 27, 1967
Now let's hear how these themes fit into the expositio. (Actually, this is as much of this disappointing performance as I want to hear. I was never much of a fan of the Guarneri Quartet, though I came around a little in the quartet's later years. Certainly they didn't bring out the best in Arthur Rubinstein, in this marriage-made-by-record-company-contracts, and the set of the Brahms piano quartets has always seemed to me on the bloated and plodding side. While we're on the subject, immense as is my regard for the Brahmsian credentials of Isaac Stern, I would also advise steering clear of the Stern and Friends piano quartets, in good part owing to the relentlessly plodding piano-playing of "Manny the Butcher" Ax.)
1st movement exposition
[1st theme at start, 2nd theme at 1:52, 3rd theme at 4:26] Arthur Rubinstein, piano; Guarneri Quartet members (Arnold Steinhardt, violin; Michael Tree, viola; David Soyer, cello). RCA/BMG, recorded Dec. 27, 1967
Sunday Classics preview: Sunny and mellow -- it's Brahms in the key of A
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When you think of Brahms and the key of A major, it's hard not to think of the Second Symphony. Most of the gorgeous first movement is performed here by the Deutsch-Niederländiscshe Chamber Philharmonic conducted by Otis Klöber, in Emden, Aug. 17, 2008. (The movement is completed here, and the rest of the performance is also posted on YouTube.)
by Ken
No, we're not going to be listening to any more of the Brahms Second Symphony this week. We're turning our attention to another treasurable Brahms work in A major. And because it begins in strikingly unexpected fashion, we're going to start by hearing just the opening five bars, but in four very different performances.
[In the fifth bar, you'll note, the cello enters.]
Performances A, B, C, and D
The differences, especially among A, B, and C, are so clear that they hardly seem to require comment. A is fast, and I mean fast. And as lickety-split as A is, B is just as broad and spacious -- note the richness of just the little bit we hear of the cello entrance. On one point, though, the pianists of A and B generally agree: that the triplet notes between the strong downbeats remain generally separate. (To confuse matters, these notes are marked with slurs in some editions, like the one above, but not in others.). By contrast, the pianist in C really does slur the triplet notes -- and I don't think I'm giving away a state secret in revealing that as the string players join in, they do the same, as we'll hear in the click-through.
It's hard to divine any" label"-able interpretive quality to D. The piano-playing seems utterly simple and straightforward, not in the least show-off-y or fancily "expressive," and yet at the same time it's riveting -- inexplicably riveting. You may be surprised to find out who this pianist is. Or then again, you may not be.
Would it help to hear the four performance bits again? We can do that.
Sunday Classics: Which mainstay of the chamber music literature was first heard in 1855 in, of all places, NYC?
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Violinist Isaac Stern, cellist Leonard Rose, and pianist Eugene Istomin play the first 10 minutes of the opening movement of the Brahms B major Piano Trio, Op. 8; the last 1:10 of the movement is here. We're going to have the second-movement Scherzo in the click-through. (No, the sound isn't great. I would recommend keeping the volume level moderate.)
The noble B major Trio of Johannes Brahms . . . possesses the distinction -- alone among the acknowledged masterpieces of the standard chamber repertoire -- of having been given its world premiere not in Germany, not even on the Continent, but in the benighted backwoods: the United States.
It was 1855. Franklin Pierce was in the White House, and an unknown young lawyer named Abraham Lincoln had just been defeated in the Illinois senatorial race. And that November 27 the Brahms Op. 8 was given its first performance anywhere in a Manhattan auditorium called Dodsworth's Hall, on Broadway at 11th Street -- an area which was then the nerve center of New York musical life.
-- James Lyons, editor of The American Record Guide, in his liner notes for RCA's third volume of performances by the Boston Symphony Chamber Ensemble, published in 1969
by Ken
As James Lyons is quick to point out, though, "the Op. 8 introduced in New York was not quite the Op. 8 we know," and in the click-through we're going to have his explanation and description, and we're going to hear the version of Op. 8 that would have been heard in Dodsworth's Hall in 1855 along with the revised version Brahms produced some 36 years later, which has become a mainstay of the literature.
I know we still have musical storms to deal with, carrying over from last week's Sunday Classics post, and we'll get to that. (That too is turning out to be not as simple as I had imagined.) I felt a schedule adjustment was necessary following Friday night's "flashback" post, into which I slipped what I thought was a pretty swell bonus: a complete performance of Schubert's Trout Quintet, to add to the complement of recordings included in the January 8 Sunday Classics post on the quintet, from the early years of the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, established during the still-underappreciated music directorship of Erich Leinsdorf. It's a terrific performance, featuring the orchestra's string principals at the time (concertmaster Joseph Silverstein, violist Burton Fine, cellist Jules Eskin, and double bassist Henry Portnoi, with "guest artist" Richard Goode, early in his distinguished career. (He would have been about 25.)
As far as I know that recording has sunk without a trace, along with all three three-LP BSCP sets RCA produced in the period 1966-68. I could hardly fail to notice that this same set included a performance of an even mightier chamber masterpiece than the Schubert quintet: Brahms's Op. 8 Piano Trio -- again with Joseph Silverstein, Jules Eskin, and Richard Goode. Not having heard it in goodness knows how long, I decided to listen to it, and as long as I was going to listen to it I might as well make digital files of it -- and as long as I was making digital files of it, I thought the least I could do was share them.
So today's subject is none other than the Brahms Op. 8 Trio, and since I'm really going to have very little to say about the piece today, I think we might as well plunge right in, which is what we're going to do in the click-through, leading off with that Boston Symphony Chamber Players performance.
Sunday Classics: On second thought, let's start with Brahms's First Piano Quartet
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The start of the moody first movement of Brahms's First Piano Quartet is played by pianist Inon Barnatan, violinist Giora Schmidt, violist Teng Li, and cellist Nicholas Canellakis at the 2009 Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.
by Ken
Change of course here. As of when I posted last night's preview, I fully expected to be continuing today with the hauntingly beautiful second of Brahms's quartets for piano and strings, in A major, which as I noted last night was substantially conceived at the same time as the first, in G minor. However, for grueling technical reasons I'll explain some other time, what I want to do with the A major Quartet I'm just not able to do at this time.
And then it occurred to me that our hearing of the first movements of both of these wonderful quartets could equally well point us toward the G minor Quartet, which as I noted last night has become by a wide margin the most popular of the three Brahms piano quartets, which themselves have undergone a near-miraculous awakening in the last several decades, from works that were for a long time specialty items to works that are played all the time. In addition, on rechecking the earlier post in which I remembered we had sort of "done" the G minor Quartet, I discovered that all we "did" was the concluding "Gypsy Rondo."
So today's subject indeed is not the Second but the First Piano Quartet. Which offers us the additional opportunity of hearing an remarkable take from an unexpected source: Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg loved Brahms in general and this quartet in particular, which he regretted wasn't heard often enough. He hoped the orchestral version would give it more exposure, and at the same time effectively constitute a "Brahms Fifth Symphony." The orchestral dress that isn't really necessary, and sometimes overinflates the piece texturally, but on the whole not only testifies to Schoenberg's affection for the piece and does it proud. This version has understandably become a favorite of many conductors, managing to do honor to the original but also add a delicious layer of affectionately over-the-top commentary.
[UPDATE: Sorry about the defective original version of the above paragraph; it's more or less fixed now!]
Sunday Classics preview: Brahms vs. Brahms -- the Opp. 25 and 26 Piano Quartets
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The third movement, Andante con moto of Brahms's First Piano Quartet is played by pianist Brian Suits, violinist Kyung Sun Lee, violist Sheila Browne, and cellist Brooks Whitehouse.
by Ken
We've had frequent occasion, most recently in connection with the stark contrasts in the consecutive Beethoven symphonies starting with No. 3, the Eroica, to ponder how often -- and, really, unsurprisingly, composers need to give expression to dramatically different expressive content. Which seemed a natural enough segue into a piece I've been wanting to write about for some time now: the second of Brahms's three quartets for piano and strings, the A major, Op. 26.
Way back when, we heard some of the First Piano Quartet, which I think it would be safe to say has emerged as the general favorite among the set, along with the piano quartets' own emergence from what was for a long time hard-to-explain obscurity. (Nowadays you can hardly turn a street corner without bumping into at least one of them.) And I love it dearly. But somewhere along the line my special affection switched to the Second.
What's interesting about these two quartets, from our present perspective, is that they were largely conceived at the same time. And for tonight I thought it would be interesting just to sample them, in performances by the same team, so that's what we're going to do in the click-through.
Sunday Classics preview: Do we need a reason to listen to the radiant Andante sostenuto of Brahms's First Symphony?
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Theo Alcantara conducts the Andante sostenuto of the Brahms First Symphony at Festival Casals, San Juan, Puerto Rico, February 2005. (The whole performance is posted.)
by Ken
We've heard the radiant slow movement of Brahms's First Symphony, back in July 2009, though I see that that Karajan clip has been disappeared. Well, tonight we're hearing it again! I don't think we need a reason, but in fact we have one, which will become clear tomorrow night.
Sunday Classics: As promised, it's "Sunday Double Concerto Mania"
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Violinist Maxim Vengerov plays and conducts the searing slow movement of Mozart's Sinfonia concertante, K. 364, with violist Thomas Powers and the UBS Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra, at a Proms concert, Royal Albert Hall, Aug. 13, 2006. [Oops, sorry: The movement is completed here.]
by Ken
Maybe this'll work, maybe it won't. Let's start right out -- give or take -- with some music. (I didn't really mean to lead off in mono, but I couldn't resist the chance to offer the 31-year-old Itzhak Perlman in partnership with the great Mstislav Rostropovich in this live performance.)
NOBODY WHO'S BEEN HERE BEFORE WILL BE SURPRISED THAT WE'RE WORKING BACKWARDS
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BRAHMS: "Double" Concerto in A minor for Violin, Cello, and Orchestra, Op. 102: iii. Vivace non troppo Itzhak Perlman, violin; Mstislav Rostropovich, cello; London Symphony Orchestra, Kiril Kondrashin, cond. Live performance in Carnegie Hall, March 7, 1967
MOZART: Sinfonia concertante in E-flat for Violin, Viola, and Orchestra, K. 364: iii. Presto Josef Suk, violin; Thomas Kakuska, viola; Suk Chamber Orchestra, Josef Suk, cond. Supraphon/Vanguard, recorded November 1989
MOZART: Concerto in E-flat for Two Pianos and Orchestra ("Piano Concerto No. 10"), K. 365: iii. Rondeau: Allegro Vladimir Ashkenazy and Daniel Barenboim, pianos; Philharmonia Orchestra, Vladimir Ashkenazy, cond. Decca, recorded April 1972
Speaking of partnerships, the great Czech violinist Josef Suk's partner in his recording of Mozart's Sinfonia concertante, K. 364, Thomas Kakuska, was the violist of the Alban Berg Quartet (which we've heard a number of times, for example playing the second movement of Schubert's C major String Quintet) from 1981 until his death in 2005; in a moment we're going to hear Suk in collaboration with his longtime friend and colleague, the cellist of the Suk Piano Trio, Josef Chuchro. And in the Mozart Sinfonia concertante, K. 365, we hear Daniel Barenboim -- who preceded his longtime friend Vladimir Ashkenazy into the ranks of near-full-time conducting, graciously playing second piano and ceding conducting responsibility. (In the boxed set of Barenboim's second complete recording of the Mozart piano concertos, Teldec included a DVD of him playing the first part in Mozart's Two- and Three-Piano Concertos, with András Schiff playing the second part and conductor Georg Solti manning a keyboard in the Three-Piano Concerto.)
Now, as to the music, we heard the finale of Mozart's K. 364 in last week's Saturday-night preview, in the last of three recordings made by the only first violinist and violist the Amadeus Quartet had in its 40-year history, Norbert Brainin and Peter Schidlof (whose death in 1987) brought the quartet's remarkable history -- all that time with the same four members -- to an end. Then we heard the whole thing, many times over, in Sunday's main post, where I pointed out that K. 364 really has no counterpart elsewhere in Mozart's vast output, including even its seeming companion piece, another "double concerto" -- this one for two pianos, also in E-flat major, K. 365, of which we heard the first movement.
I talked briefly about the seeming oddity that "double" concertos are such a rarity, or at least really good ones are. Mozart makes it sound so easy in K. 364 -- why, you can distribute musical material to the two "soloists" separately or jointly, doing either similar or contrasting things with it. Piece of cake! The only thing is that after K. 364, setting aside the special case of Beethoven's "Triple" Concerto (for violin, cello, piano, and orchestra), the only real successor is Brahms's great A minor "Double" Concerto, for violin, cello, and orchestra, which we sampled last week and returned to in last night's preview.
Of course writing for two pianos is a wildly different proposition -- you're dealing with two essentially identical instruments, and it's almost easier to differentiate the two "soloists" by sight than by sound. I think, though, that consciously or otherwise even Mozart set significantly humbler musical goals in K. 365 -- more earth-bound than he set in K. 364 and Brahms did in his Double Concerto, and more earth-bound than he set in most of his solo-piano concertos (among which, I remind you, the multiple-piano concertos wound up being numbered, the Three-Piano Concerto as No. 7, the Two-Piano Concerto as No. 10).
MOVING BACKWARDS(ER) . . .
I think the differences are already audible in the concluding rondos of our three double concertos. The musical gap seems to me utterly unmistakable in the slow movements.
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BRAHMS: "Double" Concerto in A minor for Violin, Cello, and Orchestra, Op. 102: ii. Andante Josef Suk, violin; Josef Chuchro, cello; Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, Zdeněk Košler, cond. Praga, recorded live, 1976
MOZART: Sinfonia concertante in E-flat for Violin, Viola, and Orchestra, K. 364: ii. Andante Norbert Brainin, violin; Peter Schidlof, viola; English Chamber Orchestra, Benjamin Britten, cond. BBC Legends, recorded live, Nov. 27, 1967
MOZART: Concerto in E-flat for Two Pianos and Orchestra ("Piano Concerto No. 10"), K. 365: ii. Andante Vladimir Ashkenazy and Daniel Barenboim, pianos; Philharmonia Orchestra, Vladimir Ashkenazy, cond. Decca, recorded April 1972
FINALLY, MOVING ALL THE WAY BACKWARDS -- TO THE VERY BEGINNINGS
The basic reason I wanted to work backwards through our three concertos is that by Brahms's time the first movement of the concerto has expanded to such enormous size that it almost automatically dominates the later movements. Note that Brahms calls attention to the singularity of the double-concerto form by immediately introducing the solo instruments -- starting, note, with the cello -- in what are essentially written-out cadenzas, normally an end-of-movement feature.
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BRAHMS: "Double" Concerto in A minor for Violin, Cello, and Orchestra, Op. 102: i. Allegro Isaac Stern, violin; Leonard Rose, cello; Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, cond. Columbia/CBS/Sony
MOZART: Sinfonia concertante in E-flat for Violin, Viola, and Orchestra, K. 364: i. Allegro Daniel Majeske, violin; Robert Vernon, viola; Cleveland Orchestra, Christoph von Dohnányi, cond. Decca, recorded May 1991
MOZART: Concerto in E-flat for Two Pianos and Orchestra ("Piano Concerto No. 10"), K. 365: i. Allegro Vladimir Ashkenazy and Daniel Barenboim, pianos; Philharmonia Orchestra, Vladimir Ashkenazy, cond. Decca, recorded April 1972
(I wanted you to hear at least part of the Stern-Rose-Ormandy recording of the Brahms Double, first because it's a terrific -- and predictably, for these artists, much underappreciated -- performance, and second because, as I think I've mentioned, Isaac Stern seems to me to have had a striking affinity for Brahms.)
NOW MIGHT BE A GOOD TIME TO HEAR OUR THREE DOUBLE CONCERTOS FRONTWAYS
If I had it on CD, I would have offered EMI's early stereo recording of Mozart's Two-Piano Concerto, K. 365, by pianists Clara Haskil and Géza Anda, with Alceo Galliera conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra. Here's the first movement from that recording.
Even on CD I've still got a bunch of recordings of K. 364, like all of Mozart's masterpieces far too multidimensional to be encompassed by one or two performances, I'd love to share. I really love the later Cleveland recording, made 27 years-plus after the Szell version that more or less set off this whole exploration of K. 364), from which we just heard the first movement: taut, bracing, beautifully explored and finished. (I tend to forget how good it is because it's on a disc with what sounds like an unrehearsed once-through of Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik -- I imagine Maestro Dohnányi saying to the orchestra, "We all know this, ladies and gentlemen; let's just get it done"-- with, in addition, the Concerto for Flute, Harp, and Orchestra.)
Even if we decide to go with a perfomance from the famous 1950s Casals Festivals (held mostly in the French Catalan town of Prades, where Casals had relocated in 1939 (following the consolidation of fascist control of Spain), though the 1951 festival was held in nearby Perpignan), on grounds of relative unfamiliarity we could go with a 1953 live performance with the fondly remembered brother-and-sister soloists Joseph (violin) and Lillian (viola) Fuchs rather than the much-circulated 1951 recording with the about-to-turn-31 Isaac Stern and the great William Primrose. But I've listened to the latter a number of times over the last week. It's a bold, probing performance, and it's the one I've settled on for this slot.
MOZART: Sinfonia concertante in E-flat for Violin, Viola, and Orchestra, K. 364: i. Allegro ii. Andante iii. Presto Isaac Stern, violin; William Primrose, viola; Casals Festival Orchestra (Perpignan), Pablo Casals, cond. Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded July 5, 7, and 8, 1951
Our complete performance of the Mozart Two-Piano Concerto is the one from which we heard the first movement last week, from Murray Perahia's distinguished self-conducted series of the complete Mozart piano concertos, including both the Two- and Three-Piano Concertos. In this case, I think conductor Perahia is onto something in really keeping the piece moving.
MOZART: Concerto in E-flat for Two Pianos and Orchestra ("Piano Concerto No. 10"), K. 365 i. Allegro ii. Andante iii. Rondeaux: allegro Murray Perahia and Radu Lupu, pianos; English Chamber Orchestra, Murray Perahia, cond. CBS/Sony, recorded June 23-24, 1988
And finally we return to the wondrous Brahms "Double" Concerto. Especially in his American incarnation, and especially in his later years (he was 83 when he made this recording), Bruno Walter had a special feeling for the deep humanity of Brahms.
BRAHMS: "Double" Concerto in A minor for Violin, Cello, and Orchestra, Op. 102 i. Allegro ii. Andante iii. Vivace non troppo Zino Francescatti, violin; Pierre Fournier, cello; Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Bruno Walter, cond. Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded Nov. 20, 1959
MUSIC DOESN'T HAVE TO SCALE THE HEIGHTS TO BE ENJOYED -- BUT WE NEED TO NOTE THE DIFFERENCE
In talking about Mozart's great Sinfonia concertante, K. 364, I've carefully avoided mention of a work that might seem of the same genre, yet another written in the key of E-flat major: the Sinfonia concertante, K. 297b, for a "concertante" group of wind "soloists" -- oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon. Apart from the accident of nomenclature, the two works have no more in common than, say, Mozart's greatest piano concertos do with, say the generally much earlier, simpler, and more straightforward violin concertos, or most of with most of Mozart's concertos for wind instruments. (An obvious exception, or at least partial exception, would be the quite late Clarinet Concerto, K. 622.)
Here's the wind Sinfonia concertante.
MOZART: Sinfonia concertante in E-flat for Oboe, Clarinet, Horn, Bassoon, and Orchestra, K. 297b i. Allegro ii. Andante iii. Andantino con variazione Haakon Stotijn, oboe; Bram de Wilde, clarinet; Jan Bos, horn; Thom de Klerk, bassoon; Netherlands Chamber Orchestra, Szymon Goldberg, cond. Philips, recorded Dec. 6-10, 1960
Now this is, let me say quickly, an utterly delightful piece -- elegant, charming, compulsively listenable. Surely no one else could have written it, and we would be much poorer without it. I would say as much in general for Mozart's violin concertos and most of the wind concertos (the obvious exception being the much later Clarinet Concerto, K. 622). And I would say as much for Mozart's Three-Piano Concerto, much-loved of orchestral pension-fund concerts and other gala-type events because the solo parts are manageable by any moderately well-trained pianist, often including an orchestral executive or board member or two. But as I suggested last week, its musical ambitions are more earthbound even than those of the Two-Piano Concerto.
To further complicate, or perhaps simplify, matters, we're going to hear the Three-Piano Concerto in a reduction by the composer himself for two pianos.
MOZART: Concerto in F for Three Pianos and Orchestra ("Piano Concerto No. 7"), K. 242 (arr. for two pianos by the composer) i. Allegro ii. Adagio iii. Rondeau: Tempo di menuetto Leon Fleisher and Katherine Jacobson Fleisher, pianos; Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, Leon Fleisher, cond. Sony, recorded July 16-19, 2008
A REMINDER OF FRIDAY NIGHT'S FLASHBACKS
Friday night I added some live Traviata excerpts with Luciano Pavarotti to my earlier remembrance of Joan Sutherland, and also offered the soundtrack versions of the Mascagni excerpts heard in Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull.
Sunday Classics preview: Brahms takes a fiddle and a cello and . . .
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We already heard the monumental first movement of the Brahms "Double" Concerto last week, and we're about to hear the gorgeous slow movement. Jumping ahead, here is the spirited rondo finale, played by violinst David Oistrakh and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich with Kiril Kondrashin conducting.
by Ken
I think we'll put the continuation of our consideration of Cavalleria rusticana off another week, and for this week pick up on a thread from last week concerning "double" concertos.
This is what happens when you trust to memory of something you don't remember all that well and never cared about all that much. For years i've been remembering that the haunting slow movement of Brahms's "Double" Concerto was for many years the theme song for The Guiding Light, or failing that for Search for Tomorrow. Now I actually checked, and apparently it was used for a few years for The Secret Storm, and I barely even remember The Secret Storm. Well, life goes on.
Anyway, nothing fancy tonight. Working our way up to the concerto, we're going to hear two more Brahms slow movements, more or less -- the Allegretto quasi menuetto of the First Cello Sonata isn't really a "slow" movement, but it fills the function of a combined slow movement-and-minuet. (In the compression of the classical symphony's and string quartet's typical four movements to the concerto's and sonata's typical three, it's the minuet -- or later scherzo -- that's dropped.)
BRAHMS: Cello-Piano Sonata No. 1, in E minor, Op. 38: ii. Allegretto quasi menuetto Gregor Piatigorsky, cello; Arthur Rubinstein, piano. EMI, recorded in Paris, July 6, 1936 Mstislav Rostropovich, cello; Rudolf Serkin, piano. DG, recorded c1982
BRAHMS: Violin-Piano Sonata No. 3, in D minor, Op. 108: ii. Adagio Jascha Heifetz, violin; William Kapell, piano. RCA, recorded in Hollywood, Nov. 29-30, 1950 Henryk Szeryng, violin; Arthur Rubinstein, piano. RCA, recorded Dec. 30 and Jan. 3, 1969
BRAHMS: "Double" Concerto in A minor for Violin, Cello, and Orchestra, Op. 102: ii. Andante Jascha Heifetz, violin; Gregor Piatigorsky, cello; RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra, Alfred Wallenstein, cond. RCA, recorded in Hollywood, May 19-20, 1960 David Oistrakh, violin; Mstislav Rostropovich, cello; Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell, cond. EMI, recorded May 12-13, 1969
And since it was Henryk Szeryng and János Starker we heard play the first movement of the Brahms "Double" last week, here they are doing the Andante, and what the heck, the finale as well.
BRAHMS: "Double" Concerto in A minor for Violin, Cello, and Orchestra, Op. 102: ii. Andante
iii. Vivace non troppo Henryk Szeryng, violin; János Starker, cello; Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam), Bernard Haitink, cond. Philips, recorded September 1970
