"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis
Friday, July 26, 2013
Sunday Classics preview: A Leon Fleisher postscript
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Leon Fleisher plays a piece we've heard a lot (most recently endorsed by mezzo Susan Graham!),"Clair de lune" ("Moonlight") from Debussy's Suite bergamasque, from this July 1956 Epic Debussy-Ravel LP.
by Ken
No, no, Fleisher hasn't died -- at least not that I know. What I mean in the post title is a "postscript" to last week's post, in which we did a sort of hare-and-tortoise journey, "Adding Schubert's mighty Wanderer to our roster of musical fantasies," with the then-35-year-old Leon Fleisher as our "hare" and the ripely matured 78-year-old Arthur Rubinstein as our "tortoise."
I mentioned last week that Sony Classical has just put out a Complete Album Collection with little CD reproductions of all of Fleisher's LPs as well as CDs for Sony and its predecessor labels, Columbia Masterworks and Epic. And I mentioned that I was watching the mailbox for my copy.
It arrived Tuesday, by which time I had finished tinkering with Sunday's post. (If you haven't looked at it since last Sunday, you might want to take another peek.) In playing with the set, I was startled to realize that the 1963 record we were drawing on, a coupling of the Wanderer Fantasy with Schubert's A major Sonata, D. 664 was the last "normal" record Fleisher made at the eight-year mark of his association with Columbia and Epic. It wasn't planned that way, of course. But the loss of his use of his right hand put an end to that part of his career.
I was reminded too that Fleisher had begun his association with Columbia with an earlier Schubert LP, containing perhaps the grandest of the three immensely scaled breakthrough piano sonatas that turned out to be the composer's last, coupled with eight of the 12 tiny German dances of D. 790. (Until now the Ländler we've heard have mostly been the souped-up ones from Mahler's First and Ninth Symphonies -- see the December 2012 preview post "Do I hear a Ländler?")
SCHUBERT: Ländler (12), D. 790:
No. 1 in D [1:11]
No. 3 in D [0:34]
No. 4 in D [0:33]
No. 5 in B minor [1:07]
No. 6 in G-sharp minor [0:42]
No. 7 in A-flat [0:59]
No. 8 in A-flat minor [1:15]
No. 11 in A-flat [0:53]
Leon Fleisher, piano. Columbia-Sony, recorded July 27-39, 1954, and May 4, 1955
Sunday Classics: Adding Schubert's mighty "Wanderer" to our roster of musical fantasies
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Clifford Curzon plays the first two sections of Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy, in a 1949 Decca recording. You'll find the rest of the performance below.
by Ken
A couple of weeks ago we celebrated "Fantasy Week at Sunday Classics" with a fantastic roundup that included the Choral Fantasy (for piano, soloists, chorus, and orchestra) of Beethoven, the Hungarian Fantasia (for piano and orchestra) of Liszt, and the Scottish Fantasy (for violin and orchestra) of Max Bruch. Of course there are lots of other musical fantasies, or fantasias (as I pointed out, we distinguish between the two words in English, but it's a distinction that doesn't exist in the standard "musical" languages -- Italian, French, and German), but it occurred to me at the time that we were missing one obviously important one.
So this week we add to our fantasy roste Schubert's C major Fantasy, D. 760, more familiarly known as the Wanderer Fantasy, for piano solo (at least until Franz Liszt got his hands on it). It's a piece whose rhythmically driven opening, once heard, seems to me unlikely to be forgotten.
SCHUBERT: Wanderer Fantasy (Fantasy in C), D. 760:
Opening, part 1
Mikhail Rudy, piano. EMI, recorded c1987
But immediately Schubert turns the same material into something very different, and then returns to the original driven mode, and then back, and then . . . .
Sunday Classics preview: This is no happy wanderer Schubert presents to us
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SCHUBERT: "Der Wanderer" ("The Wanderer"), D. 493
Poem by Georg Philipp Schmidt von Lübeck
I come down from the mountains.
The valley streams;
the sea roars.
I wander, silent and joyless,
and my sighs always ask, "Where?"
Always "Where?"
[1:56-2:57] The sun seems so cold to me here,
the flowers faded and life old,
and what they say is empty sound.
I am a stranger everywhere.
Where are you? Where are you, my beloved land?
Sought for, dreamed of, but never known!
The land, the land, so green with hope,
the land where my roses bloom,
where my friends go wandering
where my dead rise up
the land where my language is spoken,
o land, where are you?
I wander, silent and joyless,
and my sighs always ask, "Where?"
Always "Where?"
In a ghostly whisper it calls back to me,
"There where you are not,
there is your joy!"
by Ken
We'll come back to the boldface highlighting in a moment. It happens to be our reason for listening to "Der Wanderer" this week, but it's a justly popular Schubert song in its own right, with a gravity that's beautifully captured by Gerald Moore in the above performance. This is not a happy wanderer.
Sunday Classics: Perusing Van Cliburn's legacy (and yes, we'll even get to "the Tchaikovsky")
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RACHMANINOFF: Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30: i. Allegro ma non tanto
Van Cliburn, piano; Symphony of the Air, Kiril Kondrashin, cond. RCA-Sony, recorded live in Carnegie Hall, May 19, 1958
by Ken
The Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto, as I've said, I love beyond qualification -- and we heard Van Cliburn play the first movement, with Fritz Reiner conducting, in the April 2010 post "In perfect balance -- Rachmaninoff's 2nd Piano Concerto, where everything comes together just right." As to the more ambitiously scaled Rachmaninoff Third Concerto, one of the supreme virtuoso challenges, well, I've just never come under its spell, though rehearing the first movement played live by the Cliburn-Kondrashin team (just a couple of days after the pianist's triumphant return from Moscow as winner of the first International Tchaikovsky Competition), I'm as close to being persuaded as I've ever been.
As I mentioned in Friday night's preview of this week's Cliburn remembrance, I got the copy of the Complete Van Cliburn Album Collection I mentioned having ordered in the brief post noting the pianist's passing.
We've had a generous helping of encores sprinkled through the Sunday Classics programs. I always thought that one of these weeks we'd take a neatly organized, carefully rehearsed tour through the kinds of music and musicians inhabiting the world of concert "bonuses." That could still happen, but probably not this week.
No, I happened to find myself staring at the volume from Les Introuvables de János Starker -- from EMI France's often-valuable Introuvables (literally "unfindables") reissue series -- which includes the 1958 pictured above, which seems to me not so much a "recital" as a collection of fairly short pieces mostly of the type we would generally consider encore material. (I can't believe Starker would ever have given a recital made up of this material. One tip-off -- not conclusive, but a strong hint -- is the number of selections with "arranger" credits.) Including stuff like, you know, this:
DEBUSSY: Préludes, Book I: No. 8, "La Fille aux cheveux de lin" ("The Girl with the Flaxen Hair") (arr. Feuillard)
SCHUBERT: Moment musical in F minor, D. 780, No. 3 (arr. Becker)
MUSSORGSKY: The Fair at Sorochinsk: Gopak (arr. Stutchevsky)
János Starker, cello; Gerald Moore, piano. EMI, recorded in London, June 4-7, 1958
Sunday Classics flashback, including Friday night Britcom harkback: Schubert's "Trout" Quintet and "Waiting for God" revisited
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Part 1 of "The Funeral," the third-season opener of Michael Aitkens's brilliant Britcom Waiting for God
by Ken
I explained the genesis of this post in my post earlier this evening, "Two personal markers in the Relentless March of Time (plus timeless words of wisdom from the Rev. Dennis Sparrow)." It all goes back to my Sunday Classics post a Sunday or two ago, "At 22, Schubert knew just where he was aiming in the irresistible Trout Quintet." As it happens, the Trout post was one of the not-that-frequent ones that left me feeling, well, if not satisfied, exactly, then at least feeling that I'd accomplished pretty much what I set out to.
Which is probably why I found myself listening again to the complete performance of the quintet I'd included both in the Friday night preview post (devoted to Schubert's song, "Die Forelle," which is to say "The Trout," and the theme-and-variations movement he concocted from it for the quintet to which it gave its name) and the Sunday main post, a French EMI recording by pianist Georges Pludermacher, the Trio à cordes Français (which is to say, French String Trio), and double bassist Jacques Cazauran. Once again I was really admiring this really pleasant performance, when I was shocked to notice that I had breeched a basic Sunday Classics principle by failing to credit the members of the trio. It wasn't much comfort to discover that they don't seem to be credited in my source for the recording, a 50-CD Schubert anthology assembled by French EMI. So? Normally I don't let malfeasances like that stop me.
It took me awhile to track the information down, but we'll come back to that later, when we'll re-present the recording, properly credited (I think) -- with, indeed, yet another, "bonus" complete Trout Quintet. But what set me off on tonight's tangent is that, as long as I had that Sunday post open, I ventured to watch the Waiting for God episode I'd found online and embedded for demonstration purposes, namely demonstrating the use made of a sensational recording of the finale of the Trout Quintet by the Nash Ensemble as the show's opening and closing theme music.
And, as I mentioned in that post earlier this evening, I was utterly delighted by the episode, with its eventually conjoined plotlines concerning the respective meltdowns of the vicar, the Rev. Dennis Sparrow (Tim Preece) and of the infamous daughter-in-law of of Bayview Retirement Home resident Tom Ballard (Graham Crowden). The sublime rediscovery for me in the episode was the indignant declaration made by the Reverend Sparrow -- known to Bayview resident Diana Trent (Stephanie Cole) as "Reverend Vulture" -- following his complete botch of the funeral of an 88-year-old former insurance salesman who had been resident at Bayview for a mere two days, just long enough for the sociopathically greedy, self-absorbed manager, Harvey Bains (Daniel Hill), to cash the check and then explain sadly to the bereaved family that he was prevented by terms of the contract from returning any of the money. Descending from the pulpit, Dennis declared: "It's not my fault. It's somebody else's fault.
Dennis, I was reminded, is offered shelter by Harvey (following his suspension as vicar after christening a baby "Ugly Baby Jones") at Bayview, where he's offered advice on how to ingratiate himself with the ladies by the unrelenting lecher of the superannuated Bayview set, Basil Makepeace (Michael Bilton), who quickly realizes the inappropriateness of such counsel: "Fancy me telling a vicar where to get his jollies. Coals to Newcastle."
It's in this same scene that, at table with Tom and Diana, Dennis tries to explain his paralyzing crisis of faith. Tom, however, as is often the case with him, isn't quite following, leading to the following exchange:
DIANA: I think we're on the Damascus Road here. THE REVEREND SPARROW: Yes, in a perverted sort of way, it is the Damascus Road. But instead of, like St. Paul, looking up and seeing the blinding light of faith, I have looked up and seen the outer darkness, the empty chasms of the soul, the snakes rising in the bowels of Hell. TOM: Is he talking about Glasgow?
And I had forgotten that this is probably the ultimate episode for Tom's hapless son Geoffrey (Andrew Tourell), surely a finalist in any World's Dullest Human competition. There's that gorgeous scene where he's dragged the near-catatonic Marion to his beloved DIY store, where he fondles specimens of kitchen shelving made from a newly arrived supply of Norwegian pine --
GEOFFREY: It's beautiful, Gavin. It sort of adds a whole new dimension to the concept of pine shelving. It'd be an honor to have this in one's kitchen. Every time you put a mug on it you'd hear the echo of the Norwegian lumberjack calling for his loved ones at the frozen fjord.
utterly oblivious of the fact that Marion has snapped out of her spell long enough to all but ravish a hapless shop clerk right in front of him. When he's finally forced out of his obliviousness by cold, hard reality, he takes a classically Geoffrey-like stand: "Marion, please, this is shelving and plasterboard!" It's worth recalling that Geoffrey's father noted the coincidence that Marion lapsed into her "state" right after Geoffrey assured her that he would always be there for her.
Anyway, I just thought I would make it as easy as possible for you to watch the whole of this episode. We've got a repeat of part 1 up top, and here's the conclusion.
Part 2 of "The Funeral"
NOW AS TO THE TROUT QUINTET
What proved surprisingly difficult to ascertain in my quick research -- shockingly so, I thought, for such a long-lived ensemble -- was whether the membership of the Trio à cordes Français had changed during its 32-year run, which began in either 1959 or 1960, depending on whether you go by the bare-bones French Wikipedia bio of violinist Gérard Jarry or the English-language Wikipedia bio of violist Serge Collot (strangely, much expanded over the French one! but then, cellist Michel Tournus doesn't rate even a bare-bones bio in either language). I'm pretty confident about Jarry and Collot and think we're okay with Tournus for 1974, when the Trout recording was made. If anyone can confirm or correct this information, I would be grateful.
Meanwhile, here's the recording again, now correctly (I think) credited.
SCHUBERT: Quintet for Piano and Strings in A, D. 667 (Trout): i. Allegro vivace ii. Andante iii. Scherzo: Presto iv. Theme and Variations: Andantino; Allegretto v. Finale: Allegro giusto
Georges Pludermacher, piano; Trio à cordes Français (Gérard Jarry, violin; Serge Collot, viola; Michel Tournus, cello); Jacques Cazauran, double bass. EMI, recorded April 1974 [audio link]
AND NOW, AS PROMISED ABOVE, WE'VE GOT A BONUS TROUT
It suddenly occurred to me that I've got a recording I totally forgot when I was combing my collection for Trout Quintets. It's buried in one of the three three-LP sets that RCA made in the late 1960s with the then-new Boston Symphony Chamber Players. The string players are all BSO principals of the time, and a splendid group they are, while of course the pianists heard in this series are necessarily "guest artists." In the first two sets the guest artist was the distinguished pianist Claude Frank, then in his 40s. For this third set, Frank gave way to the already-accomplished young (25-ish) Richard Goode, a splendid musician of whom quite a lot has been heard in the decades since. (Perhaps needless to say, the photo is not from 1968.)
I went ahead and made audio files of the BSCP Trout, cleaning up the surface noise of my ancient LPs as best I could with my lame technical skills. I think it's a terrific performance, quickish but almost achingly songful and at the same time envelopingly warm -- no more "definitive" than the Pludermacher-Trio à cordes Français-Cazauran one, but like the latter wonderfully successful in following through on its own interpretive quite plausible outlook. The principals of a symphony orchestra are poised somewhere between ensemble players and soloists -- they really have to be both -- and this is kind of the way Schubert's part-writing in the Trout Quintet works. (One performance note: If you remember the "9-minute/13-minute" rule for the first movement, you can tell from the BSCP's 8½-minute timing that the repeat isn't taken.)
It seems a shame that such a fine performance should have vanished from sight, and perhaps I should have saved it for some grander occasion. But what would a grander occasion at Sunday Classics be? Without further ado, then, I present the Boston Symphony Chamber Players. (I've already redone one movement, which had a major skip, after a more thorough cleaning of the LP. Come to think of it, I don't believe I even cleaned the LPs for the original dub; I really only meant to listen to the performance. I probably should redo the other movements as well. But I've already lost one night's sleep over it.)
SCHUBERT: Quintet for Piano and Strings in A, D. 667 (Trout): i. Allegro vivace ii. Andante iii. Scherzo: Presto iv. Theme and Variations: Andantino; Allegretto v. Finale: Allegro giusto
Boston Symphony Chamber Players: Richard Goode, piano (guest artist); Joseph Silverstein, violin; Burton Fine, viola; Jules Eskin, cello; Henry Portnoi, double bass. RCA, recorded c1968 [audio link]
NOTE: If you have trouble getting the 2nd movement (that's the revised file) to play, as I've been having, try the "audio link" -- the thing seems to play fine onsite. Sigh. UPDATE: Okay, so I made a whole new file, which seems to play correctly here as well as on the server site. It seems a shameful waste of resources, not to mention confusing (there's no way I know of to delete the previous file), and a waste of my time and energy, but sometimes you just do what you gotta do. Arg.
Sunday Classics: At 22, Schubert knew just where he was aiming in the irresistible "Trout" Quintet
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This is the first half of the third-season opener, "The Funeral," of the great Britcom Waiting for God, which used a sensational performance of the finale of the Trout Quintet by the Nash Ensemble for its theme music. (You can find the conclusion of "The Funeral" here.)
by Ken
I should probably be thinking of a way to "sell" this post, which -- as I assume you figured from Friday night's preview -- simply deals, one movement at a time, with one of the best-loved pieces of music ever written, Schubert's Trout Quintet. Well, as you'll see if you click through, there's a bit more to it than that.
Unfortunately, I have no brilliant promotional jabber to offer, so let's just listen once again to the song version of "The Trout" and then get down to work.
Tenor Robert Bullington sings Schubert's song "Die Forelle" ("The Trout"), accompanied by pianist Kristin Ditlow.
Well, maybe one last note before we get to work. If you click through, you'll find that there's a pile of, um, stuff there. In case it isn't obvious, it isn't necessarily meant to be all absorbed in a single gulp -- though I'd like to think you can if you want to. But you can pick and choose, dip in and out, skip ahead and/or go back, all at will. You can go straight to the music if you like. I'd like to think you might have reason to want to return to the post in the future.
Sunday Classics preview: The best-known of all musical swimmers, Schubert's "Trout"
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Schubert's "Trout" gets a robust, energetic performance by baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, matched by an especially adroit, buoyant account of the piano part by Gerald Moore. The maker of the video clip, FiDiTanzer528, helpfully rigged it out with the original German text by Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart and an English translation.
by Ken
We've actually covered some of this territory before, but I think that was when we were at the mercy of found musical clips, and it's been my intention to do at least a somewhat more proper job of it.
"Die Forelle" is perhaps the simplest of the best-loved Schubert songs, and even underplays the dark turn it takes in the third and final stanza. The composer dressed it up elaborately when he repurposed it into the Theme and Variations movement of the quintet we know as the Trout, for piano, violin, viola, cello, and double bass, written when he was 22, but he didn't try to inflate the song's emotional scale.
Sunday Classics: The old minor-to-major switcheroo as practiced by Schubert, Mahler, and Donizetti
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Luciano Pavarotti as Nemorino sings "Una furtiva lagrima" in Act II of Donizetti's Elixir of Love, with Nicola Rescigno conducting at the Met in 1981. The first-stanza major-mode switcheroo -- on the line "M'ama, sì, m'ama" ("She loves me, yes, she loves me") -- comes at 1:50.
A furtive tear welled up in her eye. Those carefree girls she seemed to envy. Why should I look any further? She loves me, yes, she loves me. I can see it, I can see it.
To feel for just one moment the beating of her dear heart! To blend my sighs for a little with hers! Heavens, I could die; I ask for nothing more. I could die of love.
-- English translation by Kenneth Chalmers
by Ken
If you were here for Friday night's preview, you know what we're up to: three celebrated instances of composers -- specifically, Schubert ("Gute Nacht," the opening song of the cycle Winterreise), Mahler ("In diesem Wetter," the last of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder), and Donizetti (the tenor aria "Una furtiva lagrima" from The Elixir of Love) -- making strategic use of an unexpected switch from minor to major mode.
Yes, I'll have a little something to say about each of our selections, but really we're not going to hear any music we didn't hear Friday night. Basically we're hearing an interesting (I hope) assortment of performances.
But first, I think we can still use a little curtain-raiser, and since we've already jumped ahead to L'Elisir d'amore, I can hardly think of a more inspiriting starter than its adorable little prelude. (Note that it doesn't have a formal ending since it leads directly into the opening chorus.) As with great comedies generally, L'Elisir seems to me worth taking seriously, a lot more seriously than it usually is. But that's a story for another time (possibly including the opera's connection to the spring term in college when I just plain stopped going to classes for what turned out to be the rest of the trimester).
We're hearing the Prelude from a Covent Garden L'Elisir that's also the source of the performance of "Una furtiva lagrima" by José Carreras which we'll be hearing in the click-through.
DONIZETTI: L'Elisir d'amore: Prelude
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, John Pritchard, cond. Live performance, Jan. 7, 1976 [audio link]
Sunday Classics preview: It's the old minor-to-major switcheroo -- courtesy of Mahler, Schubert, and Donizetti
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For the final stanza of "In diesem Wetter," the last of the Kindertotenlieder, Mahler switches from minor to major Thomas Hampson, baritone; Vienna Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG, recorded live, October 1988 [audio link]
In this weather, in this storm, in this bluster, they're resting as if in their mother's house, not frightened by any storm, by God's hand protected, they're resting as if in their mother's house.
[We'll hear the complete Hampson-Bernstein performance of "In diesem Wetter" in the click-through.]
by Ken
Above all, what we have tonight is some incredibly beautiful music. After a week spent working on this preview and Sunday's main post, I have ineradicably engraved in my head the solo-horn reiteration of the last three lines of Mahler's "In diesem Wetter" (at 2:21 of the Hampson-Bernstein audio clip above).
The relationship between Gustav Mahler and his wife Alma is one of the more complex and controversial chapters in musical history, but it's not hard to grasp that Alma was deeply shaken when her husband set to music five of Friedrich Rückert's poems on the death of children. Rückert had written his poems (428 in all!) in frenzied response to the death of his own children from scarlet fever, but at the time Mahler composed his Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children) his and Alma's children were all still healthy. (Is it necessary to recall that a series of tragedies were waiting in the wings?)
The climax of Mahler's cycle comes in the last song, "In diesem Wetter" ("In this weather"), when suddenly and unexpectedly, after four stanzas safely in minor mode, conforming to the conventional expectation that "minor = sad" and "major = happy," the music shifts into the major. If there's a more devastating moment in music, I can't think of it. But Mahler hardly invented this harmonic trick. (For the record, we've heard "In diesem Wetter" before, sung by Maureen Forrester.)
We're not out to prove anything this week. We're just going to take note of this and two other of the more famous musical minor-to-major switches, by Schubert and Donizetti, which we'll hear in the click-through along with the complete Hampson-Bernstein performance of "In diesem Wetter."
Sunday Classics: Schubert's Octet may stretch our endurance but also stretches our delights
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The (eventually) ebullient finale of the Schubert Octet, played by Chen Halevi, clarinet; Radovan Vlatkovic, horn; Sergio Azzolini, bassoon; Janine Jansen and Julia-Maria Kretz, violins; Maxim Rysanov, viola; Jens Peter Maintz, cello; and Stacey Watton, double bass -- from an undated AVRO (Dutch) telecast
by Ken
I don't think it's terribly controversial to suggest that Beethoven deliberately tried to limit the musical "difficulty" level in his Septet, with a view toward winning a larger audience, which would explain why he came to resent the piece's popularity. It's fine for what it is -- sort of an extension of established entertainment forms like the divertimento and serenade, which tended to jumble a whole bunch of movements together and then aim to provide agreeable diversion rather than excessive stimulation. But it hardly represented Beethoven's real musical ambitions even at the time it was written.
Of course even at that reduced level of musical invention Beethoven couldn't keep himself from stretching the forms he used, and when Schubert accepted his friend the clarinetist Ferdinand Troyer's challenge to write a successor piece, even though I think he too was trying to keep his musical ambitions in check, in Schubert's case this was an even more hopeless ambition. One result is that the piece is huge, pressing the hour mark. Its six movements are too ambitious to string together as casually as the movements of a divertimento. This means the musicians not only have to solve the six movements but find some sort of "through line" that holds the piece together.
It's the Schubert Octet we've been aiming toward, having heard both Beethoven's and Schubert's minuets and scherzos Friday night and their andante variations movements last night. In the click-through we start -- where else? -- at the very beginning.
Sunday Classics preview: More of the Beethoven Septet and the Schubert Octet -- two Andantes
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The start of the fourth-movement theme and variations of the Schubert Octet played by Chen Halevi, clarinet; Radovan Vlatkovic, horn; Sergio Azzolini, bassoon; Janine Jansen and Julia-Maria Kretz, violins; Maxim Rysanov, viola; Jens Peter Maintz, cello; and Stacey Watton, double bass -- from an undated AVRO (Dutch) telecast; we're going to hear more of this performance tomorrow.
by Ken
Last night we heard the minuets and scherzos that (in flip-flopped order) bracket the theme-and-variations fourth movements of the Beethoven Septet and the Schubert Octet. As promised, tonight we hear those theme-and-variations movements.
I suggested that the two works, for virtually identical ensembles. (Schubert simply added a second violin to Beethoven's lineup of clarinet, horn, bassoon, violin, viola, cello, and double bass) are connected. This isn't hypothetical.) The composition of Schubert's Octet was in fact prompted by a suggestion from clarinetist Ferdinand Troyer, hoping to have another work to play which might tap into the popularity of Beethoven's Septet.
Sunday Classics preview: Beethoven and Schubert try to play it simple(r)
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The rollicking Tempo di menuetto (third movement) of the Beethoven Septet is played by Jacques Meertens, clarinet; Jacob Slagter, horn; Gustavo Nunez, bassoon; Liviu Prunaru, violin; Michael Gieler, viola; Gregor Horsch, cello; and Thomas Braendstrup, double bass -- in Amsterdam's Concertgebouw, November 2007.
by Ken
This week we ponder the musical questions:
(1) What happens when you have a clarinetist, a horn player, a bassoonist, a violinist, a violist, a cellist, and a double-bass player in the same place?
(2) And if there's another violinist as well?
The answer to (1) is: They play the Beethoven Septet. And the answer to (2) is: They play the Schubert Octet, which was written in 1824, some 24 years later, and consciously echoed the Beethoven, which was one of the composer's most attention-getting works in the early part of his career. Tonight and tomorrow night we're going to hear snatches of these two pieces -- and then Sunday the complete Schubert Octet.
Sunday Classics: String-quartet encores, Part 3 -- Schubert and the spell of musical compulsion
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The Amadeus Quartet (Norbert Brainin and Siegmund Nissel, violins; Peter Schidlof, viola; Martin Lovett, cello) plays Schubert's Quartettsatz at Aldeburgh, 1977.
I don't think I'm imagining that there was, once upon a time, an RCA LP of string-quartet encores by the Guarneri Quartet which included the single movement that bears the lofty designation of Schubert's Quartet No. 12, clearly intended as the first movement of a quartet that Schubert for reasons known only to him chose not to pursue. It's more commonly known by the German designation Quartettsatz, which simply means "quartet movement." My (currently unsubstantiated) recollection is that it was via this mysterious Guarneri LP, of which I haven't found a trace, including even my presumed own copy (could I have disposed of it simply because I wasn't much of a fan of the Guarneri?), that I began listening compulsively to the piece, over and over (and over).
In this clip you can view the score for the Quartettsatz while listening to the (unidentified) performance.
Sunday Classics: Can't we hear the leap Schubert made in the "Unfinished" Symphony?
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Violinist-conductor Sándor Végh and the Camerata Academica of the Salzburg Mozarteum take us through Schubert's Unfinished Symphony.
by Ken
In Friday night's preview, I mentioned the wrinkle in the now generally accepted numbering of Schubert's eight symphonies: that there is no No. 7, and so we know the seventh and eighth symphonies as Nos. 8 and 9. As I noted, once upon a time it was believed there was a "missing" symphony, and a big and important one, between what we have come to know as Nos. 6 and 8 with attendant speculation about what it was and where might happened to it.
Now it's quite possible that Schubert contemplated writing a symphony between Nos. 6 and 8. Probably he contemplated a whole bunch of symphonies. Like most of us, he was a big-time contemplator. He went further, abandoning an astonishing number of works that had gone beyond contemplation to composition, often with whole movements, even several of them, completed before he simply abandoned them, without explanation.
MUSICAL INTERLUDE "A": Symphony No. 2
I still have a fair amount of yammering to do before we get to hearing any of the Unfinished Symphony, and you would rather hear music. Well, we have unfinished business of our own in the form of the three symphonies we've sampled: Friday night the first movement of No. 2 and the second movement of No. 6, and last night the first two movements of No. 5.
For variety, we're going to flip-flop our performances of Nos. 2 and 6: Sir Charles Groves instead of Otmar Suitner in No. 2, vice versa in No. 6.
SCHUBERT: Symphony No. 2 in B-flat, D. 125: i. Largo; Allegro vivace ii. Andante iii. Menuetto: Allegro vivace iv. Presto vivace
English Sinfonia, Sir Charles Groves, cond. IMP, recorded March 1991
Schubert's habit of abandoning substantially composed works -- often after taking them even farther than the music world's next-best-known serial abandoner, Claude Debussy -- has proved a source of limitless exasperation to succeeding generations that, since his untimely death at age 31 (see the January 2009 post asking "How did so much music of such beauty come from one mind, and in such a tragically short time?"), have been understandably given to Schubert worship. (There's an irony in this veneration, given that its object, our first true professional composer, died in poverty. He had achieved a certain recognition, but it was hardly commensurate with his eventual reckoning as one of the supreme creative imaginers in the documented history of the human race. It's not an entertaining irony, however, and I don't think we're going to go there.)
How dare the master, posterity has seemed to say, just abandon all those tantalizing musical hulks, some of them filled with music that is manifestly wonderful? What a gyp!
There may have been special circumstances in the case of each such abandonment, but the general answer seems to have been that the composer decided, "Nah, I don't think so," and moved on to other projects.
MUSICAL INTERLUDE "B": Symphony No. 5
I'm assuming, or at least hoping, that you'll want to hear more of the performance of this symphony (of which we heard the first half last night) from Günter Wand's final concerts, in late October 2001. Here's the whole thing.
SCHUBERT: Symphony No. 5 in B-flat, D. 485: i. Allegro ii. Andante con moto iii. Menuetto: Allegro molto iv. Allegro vivace
North German Radio (NDR) Symphony Orchestra, Günter Wand, cond. BMG, recorded live, Oct. 28-30, 2001
We do have, as I mentioned, sketches for the start of what was intended to be a third-movement Scherzo for the B minor Symphony we know as the Unfinished. We don't know why Schubert abandoned the project, though we do know that it wasn't because -- as in the case of, say, Mahler's unfinished Tenth Symphony -- he died, because he did go on to compose the whole of the sublime "Great C major" Symphony. I don't know that there's any more explanation, or any more explanation needed, than that he just had no more music to add to the two completed movements of the B minor symphony, and a headful of ideas bubbling to be channeled into, hmm, how about a C major one?
Whatever Schubert may have thought about those two left-behind movements (and as far as I know, we don't know what he thought about them), music-lovers have hardly felt deprived in the hearing of the truncated symphony they form. And at this point we need to go back to that mysterious gap between the Sixth and Eighth Symphonies.
Shouldn't we wonder why it was so easy to believe that there was a somehow-lost symphony in between them? And a pretty big, ground-breaking one at that. Isn't it clear that we perceive a gulf between the symphonies we know?
MUSICAL INTERLUDE "C": Symphony No. 6
Once again, after hearing Sir Charles Grove's second movement on Friday, now we hear the whole symphony as conducted by Otmar Suitner. Note the first appearance in a Schubert symphony of a scherzo in place of a menuetto.
SCHUBERT: Symphony No. 6 in C, D. 589: i. Adagio; Allegro ii. Andante iii. Scherzo: Presto iv. Allegro moderato
Staatskapelle Berlin, Otmar Suitner, cond. Denon, recorded June 23-26, 1986
Maybe what we have isn't so much a gulf as a leap, the very sort of leap to which creative geniuses are prone, when stuff just comes together in their heads.
With Symphony No. 6 still fresh in our ears, let's listen just to the opening of our No. 8. I had the bright idea of making a clip of just the introduction, leading into The Tune (taught by professional Musical Appreciators to generations through my mother's with the words: "This is the symphony that Schubert wrote but did not finish"). I realized, unfortunately, that the editing software I use (sort of) won't open a file as long as the whole movement, so instead I'll suggest you listen to just the first minute and a half of this clip.
SCHUBERT: Symphony No. 8 in B minor, D. 759 (Unfinished): i. Allegro moderato
Camerata Academica of the Salzburg Mozarteum, Sándor Végh, cond. Capriccio, recorded live, Feb. 25 and 27, 1994
[0:00] cellos and basses sound a mysterious, questioning theme (8 bars) [0:19] violins enter with a scurrying stuttering-16th-note figure, over pizzicato in the rest of the strings, at first seeming to rise toward, well, something for 2 bars, then droppng back to where it was and starting over, for another 2 bars, until [0:26] at bar 13 the string chattering turns out to be an accompaniment for and oddly questioning, possibly mournful theme sounded in unison by the 1st oboe and 1st clarinet (a very odd-sounding combination -- it's not easy to pick out what exactly the instrumentation is), which in the 8th bar is punctuated by a sharp, then retreating outburst from the two horns, two bassons, and bass trombone, and then sure enough -- [0:43] they do sort of the same thing again, though not quite the same, and after 4 bars -- [0:50] begins building toward a climax, finally arriving at -- [1:08] involving the full orchestra (including, finally, the timpani), except the three trombones, which shortly thereafter add their voices to the gathering storm, out of which -- [1:13] the wonderful combination of the paired horns and bassoons mellows the proceedings, setting the stage for -- [1:20] 2 bars of an oddly off-the beat rhythmic figuration, with the downbeats sounded by pizzicato double basses and the syncopated accompaniment figure sounded by the curious combination of the two clarinets and the violas, until -- [1:24] the cellos, over that same continued rhythmic figuration (plucked double basses on the downbeats, clarinets and violas manning the syncopated accompaniment) finally sing The Tune, whose "normal" 8 bars are stretched out to 9 to prepared for -- [1:41] the takeover of The Tune by the 1st and 2nd violins, an octave apart, with horns and bassoons now joining the syncopated accompaniment figure
The net effect, it seemed to me as I was getting to know this music, was a special and wonderful adventure in mysteriousness, or rather mysteriousnesses -- a tiny chunk of music that proceeds in what seem to be the most "normal" musical units (note all those 4- and 8-bar chunks), and always seems to be signaling where it's headed, but constantly winds up somewhere else.
I can't define for you the leap that Schubert made in this symphony. The obvious thing to say is that it's written on a larger scale, and in some sense it is, but it's not strictly speaking a matter of length. For example, the opening movement of No. 2 runs 14-minutes-plus and 15-minutes-plus in our two performances; the opening movement of the Unfinished runs 14-minutes-plus and 15-minutes-plus in our two movements. Similarly, the slow movements of Nos. 2, 5, and 6 fall right around the 10-minute mark, pretty close to the framework of the Unfinished's.
Still, isn't it clearly audible just from these opening couple of minutes that something different is happening in the Unfinished? We've heard three of the earlier Schubert symphonies, and they're wonderful works all. Yet isn't it already plain that the Unfinished is taking us into a different imaginative world?
I should also point out that what I've been calling another of Schubert's much-loved "slow introductions" to a symphonic first movement really isn't either slow or an introduction. The tempo marking "allegro moderato" refers to the whole movement; as much as the music seems to change when the stage is set by the horns and bassoons, and then the double basses, clarinets, and violas, for The Tune, there is no tempo change whatsoever indicated (doesn't it seem to change, though?). What's more, the "introduction" turns out to be clearly part of the official "exposition" of the movement. Notably, it will quite explicitly and dramatically sound the "recapitulation" section of the movement.
I think even less needs to be said about the gorgeously singing second movement. In fact, I don't think I'm going to say anything, except perhaps to note the "con moto" ("with movement") in the tempo marking. The first movement had its "allegro" tempo "moderated" ("allegro moderato"), and now the second movement has its "andante" tempo given just a bit of a nudge. (As we'll see in a moment, he did the exact same thing with the first two movements -- substituting "non troppo," "not too much," for "moderato" -- of the Ninth Symphony.) Anyway, let's just listen to it.
SCHUBERT: Symphony No. 8 in B minor, D. 759 (Unfinished): ii. Andante con moto
Camerata Academica of the Salzburg Mozarteum, Sándor Végh, cond. Capriccio, recorded live, Feb. 25 and 27, 1994
I should say that I had good reason for choosing this performance, conducted by Sándor Végh (1912-1997), probably better known to most music-lovers as a violinist and one of the great chamber musicians of the 20th century -- first with the celebrated Hungarian Quartet and then, from 1940 and for the next 30-plus years, the first violinist of the great Végh Quartet, and also a much-favored chamber colleague of the likes of the great cellist-conductor Pablo Casals.
A couple of years ago it dawned on me that it had been an awfully long time since I'd had that sense of breathless mystery in the opening of the Unfinished. I went through performances by legions of great conductors, many of them musicians for whom I have the highest regard, and that opening minute and a half was sanely and soberly dispatched, and that was about it. I gave up the search, pretty discouraged, and then one day happened to put on the performance in the Decca Schubert symphony cycle of István Kertész, and suddenly, voilà! More recently I happened to stumble across this Capriccio coupling of live Végh-conducted performances of the Unfinished and Schubert Ninth Symphonies. At $5, it exceeded my powers of resistance (which aren't all that strong to begin with). I like it so much that in a moment we're going to hear a bit of the Ninth Symphony as well.
I assume it's just a coincidence that the magic of this music is captured by two Hungarian conductors. In any case, I thought you might enjoy hearing the Kertész Unfinished.
SCHUBERT: Symphony No. 8 in B minor, D. 759 (Unfinished)
i. Allegro moderato ii. Andante con moto
Vienna Philharmonic, István Kertész, cond. Decca, recorded November 1963
Finally, as promised, I'm going to tantalize you with half of the "Great C major" Symphony. Since we've been focusing on Schubertian first and second movements, that's what we're going to hear. I'm not going to say much more than that we're clearly in that opened-up imaginative world that Schubert had opened up in the Unfinished, only moreso. The symphony as a whole is one of the glories of the repertory, and one of the great challenges for any conductor with pretensions to seriousness. Note that this first movement clearly does have a "slow introduction," lasting almost a full four minutes in our performance, and it's one of the most beautiful spans of music I know.
SCHUBERT: from Symphony No. 9 in C, D. 944
i. Andante; Allegro non troppo
ii. Andante con moto Camerata Academica of the Salzburg Mozarteum, Sándor Végh, cond. Capriccio, recorded live, March 26 and 28, 1993
Sunday Classics preview: Now we hear a first and a second movement from the same Schubert symphony
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"Music expresses what cannot be put into words yet is impossible to leave unsaid."
-- conductor Günter Wand (1912-2002)
by Ken
Among the six symphonies Schubert wrote before the Unfinished, I think there's general agreement that the standout is No. 5, and since we're focusing at the moment on first and second movements of Schubert symphonies (last night we heard the first movement of No. 2 and the second movement of No. 6), in anticipation of contemplating the two amazing movements Schubert composed of the symphony we know as No. 8 (though it's really his seventh symphony), what could be more logical for tonight than to listen to the first two movements of Schubert's Symphony No. 5.
The performance we're hearing is from the last set of concerts conducted by that fine old-Germanic-tradition conductor Günter Wand, who after decades of honest toil at his craft somehow blossomed into celebrityhood in his final decades. I'll bet it surprised him more than anyone.
Maestro Wand wasn't much more than two months removed from his 90th birthday at the time of these concerts, in Hamburg at the end of October 2001, with the North German Radio (NDR) Symphony Orchestra, with which he had been closely associated for a couple of decades. The maestro made it to that 90th birthday, but not much beyond. He died on Feb. 14, 2002.
When I first heard this performance of the Schubert Fifth, which apparently followed the mighty Bruckner Fourth Symphony (Wand had become much heralded as a Bruckner conductor) on that final program, I was blown away. Wand was known, not for blazing musical inspirations or revelation of heretofore unknown musical depths. He was known for balance, poise and deep musicianship -- a sure inner sense of the way a piece of music moves. And this Schubert Fifth seems to me simply to bubble effortlessly with life.
One curiosity of the Schubert Fifth is the very opening. As we've had occasion to note, already Haydn and Mozart loved to sometimes preface their traditionally quick symphonic first movements with a slow introduction, and Beethoven loved to do it to, sometimes, Schubert did it with all eight of his symphonies, taking the slow introduction to quite sublime heights in the two final symphonic masterpieces, the Unfinished (though I admit we'll have to talk about what I'm calling the "slow introduction" to the Unfinished, which arguably isn't either slow or an introduction) and the "Great C major" Symphony (so called to distinguish it from the "Little C major," No. 6 -- the German word gross means both "big" and "great"). The Schubert Fifth does have an introduction, but it's a mere wisp, albeit an exhilarating wisp, of how-de-do.
Speaking of symphonic multiples, Schubert's Symphonies Nos. 2 and 5 are in B-flat major. I just mention it.
SCHUBERT: from Symphony No. 5 in B-flat, D. 485
i. Allegro
ii. Andante con moto
North German Radio (NDR) Symphony Orchestra, Günter Wand, cond. BMG, recorded live, Oct. 28-30, 2001
Now that we've laid our groundwork for Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, tomorrow's the day. Plus we'll do some filling in on some other Schubert symphonies we have touched or will touch on.
For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."
