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No. 63 • January 2020 • £5.99 www.international-piano.com

INSIDE

1 8 PAGES OF

FREE SHEET MUSIC

EXPERT ADVICE FOR EVERY PIANO ENTHUSIAST

JONATHAN

BISS

Scaling the heights of Beethoven’s 32 sonatas

GREAT POET

Beethoven’s journey from dazzling virtuoso to towering composer

EQUAL SCORES

Do piano transcriptions still serve a purpose?

PLUS

Steven Osborne unlocks a late Beethoven masterpiece Key international summer schools for pianists

Piano Trio Voice Wind Quintet Oboe Trumpet Piano Percussion Viola Clarinet Flute Violoncello Bassoon Trombone Harp French Horn Piano Duo String Quartet Violin Double Bass Organ Guitar

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Prizewinners piano duo 2015

September 5 to 13, 2020 Piano solo First prize 10,000 €

August 30 to September 8, 2021 Piano duo First prize 12,000 €

Aoi Trio 1st prize piano trio 2018

September 2 to 10, 2022 Piano trio First prize 18,000 €

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5 EDITORIAL Celebrating Beethoven

6 LETTERS Your thoughts and comments

BENJAMIN EALOVEGA

CONTENTS

9 NEWS & NOTES Giltburg announces ‘Beethoven 32’ project ••• Innovative soundboard to transform digital pianos ••• Schimmel replaces flagship upright model

12 ONE TO WATCH German pianist Elisabeth Brauss

14 IN BLACK AND WHITE Don’t be afraid to trust your instincts as an interpreter

18

16 ILL-TEMPERED CLAVIER Is it possible to admit a dislike for music by revered composers?

34 GOING TO EXTREMES Saleem Ashkar on Beethoven’s late piano masterpieces

36 PERSONAL TOUCH Howard Shelley performs Beethoven’s five piano concertos

38 EDUCATION AT ITS FINEST

23

Chetham’s International Piano Summer School and Festival

41 ESCAPE TO THE SUN The best summer courses in 2020

41 84

47 KEY NOTES How closely should performers follow the score?

SHEET MUSIC 51-59 REPERTOIRE FOCUS

51 Masterclass by Steven Osborne 53 Listen online 54 Know the score

61 PIANO RARITIES Beethoven arranged by Balakirev

69 NEW MUSIC 250 piano pieces for Beethoven

L-ACOUSTICS

Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in E major Op 109: I Vivace, ma non troppo

SPECIAL FEATURES 18 ARC OF CONTINUITY

27 HEIGHTENED CLARITY

Live concerts, CDs, DVDs, hi-fi, books and sheet music

Jonathan Biss completes his nine-year Beethoven odyssey

How piano transcriptions reveal the intricacies of Beethoven’s music

90 MUSIC OF MY LIFE

23 PATH OF DISCOVERY

31 EXPERIMENTAL THINKER

Beethoven’s journey from dazzling virtuoso to towering composer

Performing Beethoven’s concertos on fortepiano

77-88 REVIEWS

Antonio Pompa-Baldi reveals the recordings that transport him to another world

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EDITOR’S NOTE

Celebrating Beethoven

B

eethoven is arguably the most popular composer of all time. His music consistently tops the annual Hall of Fame poll conducted by Britain’s Classic FM radio station, clocking 21 chart positions out of 100 at the most recent count. He is a ubiquitous presence in concert halls around the world and editions of his music run into the hundreds, if not thousands. Does such a musical colossus need an even greater share of the limelight than he already enjoys?

It’s a pertinent question as we head into 2020, which marks the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth.

Classical music marketeers at recording labels, venues, publishing houses and tourist boards are already in full swing promoting ‘Beethoven 250’, but what will be the real benefits for music lovers? Is there anything new we can hope to learn about Bonn’s musical genius during this year of celebration?

The answer is a resounding ‘yes’ because it presents an opportunity to step back and consider the byways of Beethoven’s legacy that sometimes get overlooked. In this issue of IP, we showcase the art of transcription and examine lessons that can be learnt from hearing Beethoven’s symphonies and string quartets played on the piano (page 27). Our sheet music rarity is also a transcription: Balakirev’s rendering of the Allegretto from Beethoven’s second Razumovsky Quartet Op 59/2 (page 61).

Meanwhile, two contemporary composers offer their creative responses to Beethoven in pieces from an ongoing 10-volume series entitled 250 piano pieces for Beethoven (page 69).

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Owen Mortimer, Editor

International Piano offers a rich mix of inspiration and guidance to pianists and piano fans around the world, from dedicated amateurs and students to professional pianists, teachers and aficionados.

Celebrating the piano in all its forms, including the fortepiano and digital keyboards, each edition of our magazine is packed with interviews, features, news and reviews showcasing the top artists of today and yesteryear.

Practical advice for players runs the gamut from articles on technique and repertoire to learning resources and study courses, plus the latest developments in piano technology.

Our goal is to draw together the fascinating strands that make the piano such a popular instrument, enhancing every reader’s knowledge and supporting those who strive to master its challenges.

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EDITORIAL

EDITORIAL BOARD

Other highlights in this issue include articles by two distinguished contributors: American composer and author Jan Swafford traces Beethoven’s journey from dazzling virtuoso to towering composer and considers his influence on the development of the piano (page 23), while British pianist Steven Osborne shares his insights on interpreting the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in E major Op 109 (page 51).

In case this feels like overkill and makes you want to take a break from Beethoven, turn to our summer schools diary on page 41, where you’ll find details of leading piano courses in 2020 that cater for players of every standard. Several destinations combine musicmaking with sunshine and good food in rural settings – pastoral delights indeed…

PUBLISHING Phone +44(0)20 7738 5454 Publishing Director Owen Mortimer Director of Marketing & Digital Strategy Luca Da Re Marketing Manager John Barnett Group Institutional Sales Manager Jas Atwal Production Director Richard Hamshere Circulation Director Sally Boettcher Managing Director Paul Geoghegan Chief Operating Officer Jon Benson Chief Executive Officer Ben Allen Chairman Mark Allen

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LETTERS Write to International Piano, St Jude’s Church, Dulwich Road, London SE24 0PB, email international.piano@markallengroup.com or tweet @IP_mag. Star letters will receive a free CD from Hyperion’s best-selling Romantic Piano Concertos series

VIENNA SEXTET

In his obituary of Paul BaduraSkoda, Rob Cowan refers to a ‘Viennese Troika’ of BaduraSkoda, Friedrich Gulda and Jörg Demus. I had never heard that term before. In postwar Vienna where I grew up, and particularly in the 1960s when I was a compulsive concertgoer, there were not three but six major pianists – the others being Alfred Brendel, Walter Klien and Alexander Jenner. Gulda was aloof and a star, and Badura-Skoda, although he recorded duets with Demus, was actually heard rarely in the city. It was the other four who apparently got along well and gave numerous concerts, such as a joint all-Schumann series in which they divided the repertoire between them. It is

true that Brendel and Klien were not born in Vienna (Demus was born in nearby Sankt Pölten), but they were certainly considered Viennese by the public. I believe Klien, Demus and Jenner also stayed on, whereas the others pursued more international careers. Klien especially, a superb artist who died too soon, should not be forgotten.

Bruno H Repp, via email

NE’ER SO RARE

I was more than delighted to see Jeremy Nicholas’ article on William Vincent Wallace, including music by the composer, in your November issue (Impromptu en Forme d’Étude, page 59). However, having traversed Wallace’s vast output for piano over five recordings, and performed it in

around 50 concerts to date, I can guarantee that Nicholas’ doubts are unfounded when he questions whether ‘Wallace’s name has featured on any formal piano recital programme for more than a century’. Since and before giving the first official performance in the William Vincent Wallace Millennium Plaza in Waterford, the city of Wallace’s birth, in 2001, I have featured the composer’s music in concerts and festivals in Ireland, the UK, Denmark, France, SE Asia, New Zealand and Australia; not to mention his two works with orchestra, duets and duos with conductor/pianist Richard Bonynge, and a duo with Irish pianist Una Hunt, who has herself programmed his salon music.

Rosemary Tuck, via email

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FORGOTTEN GREATS

I noted with interest the article on Paul Wee by Bryce Morrison (IP November 2019, page 76).

There was much written about Alkan’s Concerto and various other performances of this composer’s works. However, I was amazed to see no mention of Ronald Smith (1922-2004) known as the ‘Alkan man’ and a great proponent of the music of Alkan.

I also noted with interest that Paul Wee is planning to record the Henselt Piano Concerto Op 16. This work is finally starting to receive its just place in the repertoire with Daniel Grimwood having played it twice in Germany in November.

Gillian Beattie Davis, via email. Hon. President of the International Henselt Society

Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra presents

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January 2020 International Piano

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CHAN 20038

Louis Lorre completes his survey of Saint-Saëns’ piano concertos with Nos 3 &5 the ‘Egyppan’, along with the Rhapsodie d’Auvergne & Allegro appassionato.

NEWS

NOTES

SASHA GUSOV

Giltburg announces ‘Beethoven 32’ project I sraeli pianist Boris Giltburg will mark the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth in 2020 by learning all 32 of the composer’s piano sonatas, the majority of which are not currently in his repertoire. Giltburg’s performances will be filmed to share at regular intervals throughout the year with a global audience via Apple Music and his own YouTube channel. He has also launched the dedicated website Beethoven32.com to host supporting written material and video content.

Giltburg said: ‘The 32 Beethoven Sonatas are widely regarded as one of the pinnacles of piano music, and I am excited about the huge challenge as much as the ensuing journey of discovery. I have played nine of the sonatas so far, so 23 will be completely new, including some of the most challenging.’

By choosing to learn and film the sonatas in chronological

Boris Giltburg

order, Giltburg hopes to follow the composer on his original path of development. ‘I will attempt to view each sonata as the highest point of what Beethoven could achieve at that time,’ he explains, ‘which makes every sonata interesting in itself, not only for its position in the cycle.’

Giltburg will perform the cycle on Fazioli Pianos, with filming taking place at the company’s concert hall in Sacile, Italy and their London showroom, Jacques Samuel Pianos. The project will be shot by filmmaker Stewart French of Fly on the Wall Productions.

Alongside this landmark project, 2020 sees the completion of Giltburg’s recording cycle of Beethoven’s piano concertos with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under Vasily Petrenko, plus performances of all five concertos over three consecutive days at the Flagey Piano Festival, Brussels, in February. beethoven32.com

G

erman piano manufacturer Schimmel has unveiled a new upright piano to replace its flagship C120 model – the C121.

This latest addition to the Schimmel Classic range features several design enhancements, including a reduced-mass bridge originally developed for Schimmel’s premium Konzert range. The new bridge transmits the strings’ vibrations more efficiently, resulting in richer tonal colours and greater sustaining power.

www.international-piano.com

The C121 is available in five different model variants: Tradition, Elegance Manhattan, Royal, Royal Intarsie Flora and Tradition Marketerie. Each is available in a range of veneers and finishes.

The Schimmel Classic collection comprises three grand and five upright pianos, manufactured using traditional materials and craftsmanship at the company’s factory in Braunschweig, Germany.

Schimmel Pianos was founded in 1885 and by the mid-20th

century had become Germany’s best-selling piano brand.

Schimmel instruments have won more awards for design and performance than any other piano produced in Germany. schimmel-piano.de

SCHIMMEL PIANOS

Schimmel replaces flagship upright model

Schimmel’s C121 Tradition Marketerie

International Piano January 2020

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NEWS & NOTES

I

MATTEO DE STEFANO

talian soundboard manufacturer Ciresa has launched a new product called Resonance Piano – an innovative soundboard that can be used to amplify any digital piano.

Launched at last year’s Cremona Musica trade fair, Resonance Piano consists of two wooden soundboards and associated electronics, housed in a traditionally shaped case that can be placed horizontally on legs, or mounted vertically on a wall. It is described by Ciresa as ‘an instrument capable of bridging the two worlds – digital and acoustic – without compromise’.

The system is compatible with every digital piano, stage piano and 88-key keyboard. When a digital instrument is plugged into Resonance Piano, its output is fed to transducers on the soundboards, rather than being played through speakers. The resulting sound is closer to that of an acoustic instrument, with the wooden soundboards imparting a more natural character to the digital

signal. Volume changes and equalisation can be controlled via a touch panel, which also serves as a mixer for other external audio sources.

‘Each soundboard is designed to create the best possible acoustic sound,’ says Ciresa CEO and Resonance Piano inventor, Fabio Ognibeni.

‘Even if you exchange digital instruments, the sound is quite the same. Of course, it cannot be 100 per cent exactly the same because the soundboard is a natural element, but all the soundboards are designed to produce the best acoustic sound possible, regardless of which digital instrumental source.’

Enrico Ciresa s.r.l. is located in Tesero, northern Italy. The company has been making soundboards using local spruce since the 1970s. Around 190,000 pianos feature Ciresa soundboards, including top brands such as C. Bechstein, Blüthner, Förster and Fazioli. resonancepiano.com

NEWS IN BRIEF KAUPO KIKKAS

Innovative soundboard to transform digital pianos

British pianist Martin James Bartlett (pictured, above) has won first prize at this year’s Young Concert Artists International Auditions in New York. His prize package includes access to a minimum of three years’ management services, publicity and career guidance, plus opportunities to perform at leading venues across the US. The 23-year-old Bartlett was crowned BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2014 and has recently been signed to Warner Classics.

He was described as ‘a pianist of rare poise and command’ in IP’s review of his Warner debut album, Love and Death, which features works by Bach, Liszt, Granados and Prokofiev. martinjamesbartlett.com Resonus Classics has announced a major new series of French piano music, featuring solo and orchestral recordings with the acclaimed British pianist Mark Bebbington. ‘French music has always been close to me since studying with Aldo Ciccolini in Paris,’ says Bebbington, ‘so I look forward to exploring the familiar, but especially the less familiar riches of the glorious French piano repertoire.’ The first release in the new series includes Poulenc’s Concert champêtre for harpsichord in its less familiar piano version, coupled with the composer’s Piano Concerto in C-sharp minor.

Bebbington performs with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Jan Latham-Koenig. markbebbington.co.uk

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January 2020 International Piano

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ONE TO WATCH

CHRISTOPH HÖHMANN

Serving the music

Elisabeth Brauss blew the critics away with her debut album, showing herself to be a pianist of maturity well beyond her years. Josephine Miles spoke to the German rising star

U

‘For pianists, everything is chamber music – you have to find the right way for the voices to communicate’

12

nlike many young artists, it was not a major competition win that brought Elisabeth Brauss to international attention, but her debut CD. Recorded when Brauss was 21, the album won overwhelming critical acclaim from Gramophone and led to her being selected as a BBC New Generation Artist: after listening to the recording, Emma Bloxham, editor at BBC Radio 3, invited Brauss to an audition in London at five days’ notice. Within a month, she was chosen for the 2018-20 programme.

‘It really has been one of the greatest experiences and a fantastic journey,’ says Brauss, ‘especially because of all the concert opportunities – not only solo concerts but a lot of chamber music, collaborations with conductors, and of course recordings with the BBC.’ The busy schedule and travelling do not faze her – and the maturity and graciousness with which she speaks of her career reveal a refreshingly pragmatic outlook.

Born in Hannover in 1995 to professional musicians (her father is the conductor and pianist Martin Brauss; her mother a viola player), Brauss was destined to become a pianist: ‘One of my earliest childhood memories is lying under the piano listening to my father play through symphonies or operas. He introduced me to the whole world of piano playing. Making music was always the most natural thing and I knew, from the very beginning, that I wanted to play the piano professionally.’

The Levit family, hailing from the same city, played a large role in Brauss’ formative years. Igor Levit’s mother,

January 2020 International Piano

Jelena, was her first teacher, and Igor something of an icon: ‘I wanted to be like him when I was younger, and still to this day! What he can do with his hands and his mind is incredible. It’s something very special.’ But her father remains her most important influence. From him, she learnt how to craft her own understanding and interpretation of music – and through him she developed her love of Mozart, the composer most dear to her.

Beethoven and Schubert are also firm favourites. ‘I have a very strong connection to German music because it is literally my language. For example, when I play Schubert I can imagine the words he had in mind, like a song, so I understand the structure.’ French and Russian music (she cites Rachmaninov in particular) do not yet feature so heavily in her repertoire, but she will be performing a selection of Debussy Préludes at the Snape Maltings Festival in February. ‘With French or Russian music, it’s just a different kind of approach – which can be even more enriching because you don’t know the end of the journey.’

She is keen to bring more contemporary works into her repertoire, pairing them with classical pieces to build a ‘healthy connection’ with contemporary music; she included Michael Denhoff ’s Étude de couleurs in her debut CD alongside Beethoven’s Sonata No 7 Op 10/3, Chopin’s Second Sonata Op 35 and Prokofiev’s Second Sonata Op 14. For Brauss, connections should lie at the heart of all programming: she chose the Chopin and Prokofiev sonatas to follow the Beethoven because these later composers ‘are still kind of classical in terms of structure,

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ONE TO WATCH

form and even harmony, but they develop the whole idea of the sonata. All the sonatas have four movements and they all compare in different ways.’ She will perform the Beethoven and Prokofiev with Mendelssohn’s Variations sérieuses at her Wigmore Hall solo debut next June, where tonal connections will also be apparent: ‘This programme is all based around the key of D!’ Alongside solo performances, chamber music is an integral part of Brauss’ professional life. She has collaborated with 18-year-old Dutch violinist Noa Wildschut for the past year-and-a-half, and 2020 sees them tour to major European venues as part of the European Concert Hall Organisation (ECHO) Rising Stars programme. It’s clear that Brauss thrives from communicating with other musicians – ‘it’s just the best working process’ – helping her learn more about her own musical ideas. She points out that, as a pianist, ‘everything is chamber music in the end, because you have so many voices and notes, and it’s always important to find the right way for the voices to communicate with natural phrasing and articulation. You have to care about every single note.’

Commitment to each and every note is the root of Brauss’ philosophy on music and her role as performer. She does not actively set out to produce new

interpretations of the repertoire; she simply wants to ‘come as close to the music as possible’. Knowledge of the composer and historical period, combined with a sheer love of music, is what enables her to share the message of each piece with her audience. With self-assuredness she affirms that ‘just through being myself, my playing will naturally be different from other musicians.’

Her unwavering focus on the music alone also explains her lack of social media presence. Unusually – and refreshingly – for a young artist today, Brauss has chosen not to engage with social media: ‘It seems that the artist often becomes more important than the music itself. I’m sceptical about the whole idea of social media – I find it a little narcissistic.’

As to future plans, alongside performances in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the UK (including concertos with the BBC Philharmonic), Brauss wants to spend time working on herself as a musician and pinpointing where her true specialities lie.

‘I know I’m still young, but I’m really trying to find out where I can best serve the music.’ IP Elisabeth Brauss will make her Wigmore Hall solo debut on 15 June 2020 with a recital of works by Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Prokofiev. elisabethbrauss.com

PIANO AT SIBELIUS SUMMER ACADEMY 8.-13.6.2020 Come experience the Finnish Summer and the Sibelius Academy, Uniarts Helsinkis Piano Department with our esteemed faculty, including professor Tuija Hakkila and professor emeritus Erik T. Tawaststjerna.

Piano at Sibelius Summer Academy offers insights in the magic of piano music of Ludwig van Beethoven and his contemporaries in one of the world’s top ranking music universities (QS World University Rankings by Subject).

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International Piano January 2020

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IN BLACK AND WHITE

Playing by the book?

Joseph Laredo underlines the importance of trusting our instincts when interpreting music

I

magine you have a friend who is a composer, and she has just sent you a new piece and asked you to give its first performance. She is not a pianist so she can’t make a recording of it herself. All she says is: ‘Everything you need to know is on the page’.

How do you feel? Excited at the prospect of giving a world premiere? Eager to start working out how you think the piece should go? Or daunted by the fact that there is no existing recording of it, that there is no one to tell you how to interpret the score?

I would guess the former. And yet, when we decide to perform a piece by Mozart or Chopin, or even Alkan or Zelenka, we are all too often inclined to go straight to a benchmark recording or a recognised teacher to find out how it ‘should’ be played. Why? Do we feel a weight of tradition bearing down on us, which we must somehow ‘absorb’ before daring to present our own interpretation? Do we think that professional pianists must know more about it or have greater insights into its ‘meaning’ than us?

Or do we simply lack confidence in our own ability to interpret the information that is in front of us, in our own experience of playing and listening to other music, in our own instincts and tastes?

Of course, there are people who can trace their pedagogical lineage to Ravel and even to Beethoven or Bach, but is this a reliable source of information about the ‘truth’ of their music? Do all of Teacher A’s students sound alike and play in a similar way? No. So where is the ‘truth’? Can we even say that it exists?

Contemporary accounts of the way music was performed in the composer’s day can provide fascinating insights (Malcolm Bilson’s Knowing the Score is essential reading in this regard), but are we performing on

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January 2020 International Piano

Recordings reveal that Ravel often approximated his own compositions

an instrument of the period, to an audience that knows nothing of music written subsequently? No. So we must find a way of making the music meaningful to today’s listeners on today’s instruments, which may have little to do with period practice.

Can the composer’s own performances ever be taken as gospel? Judging from accounts of Beethoven’s and Brahms’ playing and recordings by composers such as Debussy and Ravel: no. In many cases, they only presented approximations of their own compositions.

As performers, we inevitably rely on what we see on the page – assuming that we have taken the trouble to obtain a reliable edition, ie one that makes clear distinctions between what the composer actually wrote (if known), what appeared in the first edition and what subsequent editors have changed, enabling us to make informed decisions

about what to observe and what to ignore.

We must bear in mind everything we know about other music by the composer and their contemporaries, and of developments that came after the composer’s time, such as writing ppp or employing the sostenuto pedal.

Finally, and crucially, we must trust our instincts. When the composer marked cresc, how much of a crescendo did they have in mind? How detached should that staccato be for the music to make sense? How much pedal sounds right here? Provided we are making a crescendo, playing staccato or using the pedal, as marked, we cannot be wrong. We may be criticised for any number of things – playing with too much or too little legato, giving too much or too little emphasis to a particular voice, playing too fast or too slow – but we cannot be accused of violating the composer’s intentions if we have given them due consideration and translated them into sound to the best of our ability.

Most importantly, though, we will be giving a unique, personally felt performance, rather than a standard, imitative or studied one. No one expects or wants us to sound like Richter, Lipatti, Argerich or Trifonov; they want us to sound like ourselves, to give a fresh, expressive, impassioned, even surprising or provocative interpretation – especially of a piece that they (think they) know. We are not in the business of tribute performances: we are in the world of creativity, originality, spontaneity and integrity.

So next time you take out a Mozart sonata or a Chopin nocturne, make sure that what you play is your view of the music, your feelings about it, your response to it – not anyone else’s or some kind of dutiful continuation of a performing tradition.

Make sure it sounds as if it has just been written for you and you are giving its world premiere. Won’t that be exciting? IP

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chopin - reklama 94x273 mm Piano

The

Ill-Tempered Clavier

Do you dare to admit disliking composers whose music is universally revered?

Charivari considers the pros and cons of the Western musical canon

S

ome years ago, I was dining with a distinguished music critic, a man whose writing and opinions have graced numerous journals and newspapers. We were talking about the pianists and composers we liked and disliked. Admittedly, we had taken drink, but were still conversing coherently and lucidly – well before we started mumbling.

We had more or less agreed on our favourite pianists and those held to occupy the lower tiers in the pantheon. We agreed that we could both live the rest of our lives without hearing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons again. Or the Blue Danube (except in the Schulz-Evler transcription). And possibly Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. Then my friend raised the stakes. ‘You know what?’ he said. ‘I would not mind in the slightest if I never heard another note of Beethoven.’

I stirred uneasily. ‘I’d be sorry not to hear the G major Piano Concerto again.’ ‘OK,’ my friend conceded. ‘I’ll give you that. And maybe the Appassionata.’

I was reminded of this conversation recently when talking to an elderly friend from New Zealand, a passionate and discerning pianophile. ‘I know you’ll think I’m a complete Philistine, but I have never got on with Schubert’s piano sonatas. I just don’t get them. And as for Richter and his interminable tempos in the G major and the great B-flat – sorry I can’t take it.’

It’s difficult owning up to a dislike of a major composer, one who is generally loved and revered. Mozart and Chopin, for example.

On BBC Radio 3 a few weeks ago, young Jess Gillam (saxophonist and radio presenter) was talking to her guest, South African cellist Abel

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January 2020 International Piano

Johann Sebastian Bach: Greatest composer of all time?

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THE ILL-TEMPERED CLAVIER

Selaocoe: ‘I have to admit, until recently, I wasn’t the world’s biggest Mozart fan.’ Result?

Sharp intake of breath and incredulous laugh from the cellist, this listener and probably most of her audience.

Wagner is different: a Marmite composer with an ugly personality and a virulently antisemitic wife. Brahms is another: ecstasy and profundity for many; stodgy, laboriously Teutonic for others (including Tchaikovsky: ‘What a giftless bastard!’ he wrote in his diary in 1886). Other major composers are routinely dismissed by a certain kind of music lover without fear of opprobrium: for instance, Liszt, Saint-Saëns, Mendelssohn, Puccini. ‘Britten to Shostakovich: I think [Puccini’s] operas are dreadful. Shostakovich to Britten: No, Ben, you’re wrong. He wrote marvellous operas. It’s the music that’s dreadful’ (quoted by the Earl of Harewood in his autobiography).

Just when I was concluding these thoughts, along comes the latest issue of the BBC Music Magazine. Their inspired idea was to ask 174 living composers whom they considered to

be the greatest composers of all time, ordered 1 to 5. You think some of the views expressed above are stupid? Just wait till you read the BBC poll results. Of course, these listings are designed to be controversial, get a debate going and, ahem, sell more copies of the magazine. But I really wonder if this particular one has any merit whatsoever.

While, like me, you will not have heard of most of the composers asked to name their Top Five Greatest, some of their choices reveal just how removed they are from the world of the average classical music lover.

Having totted up all the votes, this list of the 50 Greatest Composers rates Rachmaninov a lowly 50, Robert Schumann an also-ran at 49, while Pierre Boulez is in the top 50 at 48.

The list continues on its bizarre course with Stephen Sondheim (43), Lutosławski (30) and Ligeti (6).

Here are some of the nominations for Greatest Ever (and remember, those questioned had the options of Bach, Beethoven et al had they so desired): Morton Feldman, Pérotin,

Kate Bush [sic], Mouse on Mars [electronic duo], Björk [2 votes], Julian Eastman (no, I hadn’t either), Mikolai Stroiuski (ditto), Peter Sculthorpe and Chevalier de St George.

Nominations also included Kaija Saariaho, Gesualdo, Cage, Knussen, Reich and Varèse.

Well, you might say, everyone is entitled to their opinion. Really? When all of the above were at the expense of the following composers, all of whom were excluded from the Top 50: Palestrina, Handel, Mendelssohn, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Saint-Saëns, Liszt, Paganini, Berlioz, Smetana, Dvořák, Grieg, Bruckner and Johann Strauss II. The top four of the BBC poll? Mozart (4), Beethoven (3), Stravinsky (2) and, at number one, Johann Sebastian Bach. An uncontroversial winner? Not entirely. I know several people for whom ‘The Great Bach’ is not JS but another Bach who did not receive a single vote from any of the BBC’s contemporary composers: CPE, a far more adventurous and innovative composer, they say, than his father. IP

International Piano Oct2019.ai 1 03/09/2019 10:54:33

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BENJAMIN EALOVEGA

BEETHOVEN 250

Arc of

continuity Jonathan Biss’s landmark Beethoven cycle gives equal weight to all 32 sonatas while revealing some surprising connections with other pieces by the composer. The result, says Stephen Wigler, builds on the illustrious discographies of great pianists of the past

W

hen Artur Schnabel was only a few years older than Jonathan Biss is now (39), the Austrian pianist embarked on the odyssey that resulted, roughly 10 years later, in what is arguably his crowning achievement: the first recorded cycle of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas. Schnabel completed this mammoth project in 1935, following his performances of four cycles of the sonatas in Berlin (1927 and 1932), London (1933) and New York (1934).

Biss has recently accomplished a similar feat in roughly the same amount of time. His project to record the complete Beethoven piano sonatas over the course of nine years has culminated in the release of Volume 9 (Opp 10/3, 31/3 and 111), and the box set is due out this spring.

When I ask Biss to name the pianist who most influenced his Beethoven recordings, the answer is prompt. While he admires the Beethoven playing of several other pianists – among them, Rudolf Serkin and Leon Fleisher, with whom Biss began studying when he was 17 – ‘it was,’ he says, ‘the Schnabel recordings that continue to have the most impact upon me.’

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January 2020 International Piano

He is more hesitant when pressed to say what has been the most difficult part of his Beethoven journey. Although keen to avoid appearing immodest, he admits that at some level he found it easy. ‘Life with Beethoven is not a matter of choice,’ he tells me, speaking by telephone from Philadelphia, where he teaches at the Curtis Institute. ‘The personality [of Beethoven] is so overwhelming that you cannot help but be drawn into it. I knew I wanted to record Beethoven before I was four – when I heard my mother [the celebrated Romanian-born, Israeli violinist, Miriam Freed] rehearse one of Beethoven’s Opus 23 sonatas. Being engaged with Beethoven has always made me feel more alive.

Engagement with his art leads to ever greater engagement.’

By the time he reached his early twenties, Biss had scored major successes with some of the most important pieces

by Beethoven’s predecessors (Mozart’s final concertos) and successors (Chopin’s late masterpieces, Schumann’s Fantasy and Debussy’s Estampes.) Nevertheless, he recognises that his decision to devote so much time to Beethoven has made him ‘miss a lot of pieces’ by other composers he might otherwise have played. ‘But what I’ve missed is

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BEETHOVEN 250

nothing compared to what I’ve gained,’ he says. ‘Everything before him leads to Beethoven and – with the possible exceptions of Chopin and Debussy – he leads to every composer who follows him. Beethoven’s music demands laser-like focus and total abandon, which prove useful in nearly everything in the [piano’s] repertory.’

Beethoven’s sonatas are generally thought to become harder as the opus numbers increase, but Biss disagrees: ‘Most people would argue that the final sonata triptych [Opp 109, 110 and 111] is much greater and more difficult music than the first triptych [the F minor, A major and C major sonatas of Op 2] and, therefore, a greater interpretive challenge. But I never would say that. In fact, the Opus 2 sonatas are as remarkable and innovative in their way as Opus 109, 110 and 111.’ Without doubt, he adds, ‘the last movement of 111 takes listeners to heights no composer before or after Beethoven has ascended, but that it is greater than the four movements of Opus 2 No 2 is not a position I would ever take. Beethoven’s greatest challenge is his unceasing energy in pursuing diverse directions throughout his entire compositional career.’

Even what seem like lacunae to other interpreters are things Biss finds fascinating. ‘Consider,’ he says, ‘what comes before and after 1805. In the three years leading up to and including 1805, Beethoven confidently writes six sonatas, including some of the most celebrated – not only the Appassionata (1805), but also the Tempest (1802) and Waldstein (1804).’ By comparison, the subsequent five years saw Beethoven complete only three sonatas, just one of which gets performed frequently – Les Adieux

(1810). The other two – Nos 24 and 25 (both 1809) – are scarcely ever played.

‘What is going on?’ asks Biss, launching at once into his own pet theory: ‘After the successfully heroic forms of the Waldstein and Appassionata, Beethoven found himself at a loose end. He spent time searching to find a new form – experimenting with the two-movement Opus 78 and the somewhat miniaturised Opus 79. It’s only in 1814 – nine years after the Appassionata, in the two-movement Opus 90 – that Beethoven begins to find his way. The insistently hammering first movement of this piece anticipates the opening movement of the Hammerklavier, while its twomovement structure (the second movement especially) looks forward to Opus 111.’

Considerations like these inform Biss’s performances throughout his cycle, giving the 32 sonatas an arc of continuity that other interpretations rarely achieve. Make no mistake, Biss plays the familiar sonatas in the cycle superbly: his trills in the Waldstein and second movement of Op 111 are impeccable; his voicing in the fugues of Opp 101, 106 and 110 is invariably intelligent; the explosions of drama in the Appassionata are always governed by subtlety and timing; his stamina in the unprecedented, near 50-minute duration of the Hammerklavier is never strained. But other pianists do just as well in these pieces.

It is because Biss finds Beethoven so endlessly fascinating that makes his interpretations special. He has a knack for making less familiar works such as Sonata No 25 sound ‘great’ (‘It’s because they are great,’ Biss declares) and finding connections which other pianists either neglect or

LUIS LUQUE

‘Beethoven’s music demands laser-like focus and total abandon’

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International Piano January 2020

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ORCHID CLASSICS

BEETHOVEN 250

‘Beethoven’s greatest challenge is his unceasing energy in pursuing diverse directions’

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fail to see. For example, his recording of Sonata No 24 in F-sharp major Op 78 is preceded on the same CD by the Fantasy in G minor Op 77.

‘Beethoven was one of music’s greatest improvisers and Opus 77 is an example of that quality,’ says Biss. ‘But if you look at the first page of the manuscript, it clearly suggests Opus 77 was intended as a partner piece to Opus 78 – not only because they were published together, but because when you perform them sequentially, you understand how the formal properties of the Sonata emerge from the improvisational qualities of the Fantasy.’

‘I think Beethoven was aiming for a fantasy-and-sonata format like those occasionally found in Mozart, such as the Fantasy in C minor (K475) and the Sonata in the same minor key (K457),’ he continues. ‘It’s an experiment in form that is not repeated in the 32 sonatas. Yet if you look at Opus 80 [the Choral Fantasy for solo piano, orchestra and chorus], you hear the same idea brought to fruition.

The form of the second part, which combines the forces of the solo instrument, the orchestra and the chorus, clearly emerges out of the gigantic, improvisatory solo cadenza for the solo piano that opens the piece.’

COURSERA

BEETHOVEN 250

V

ery little in Beethoven’s 32 sonatas seems to have escaped Biss’s notice. His cycle, for example, is one of the few recent ones in which the so-called Sonatas Nos 19 and 20 (Op 49 Nos 1 and 2) are taken seriously. There is general scholarly agreement that these two pieces, which were written in the mid-1790s and published by Beethoven around 10 years later as his Op 49, are often ignored in performances of the cycle, not only on record, but also in the concert hall – as they were, for example, by Maurizio Pollini in his well-known cycles.

This is not, however, Biss’s practice. He has joined the ranks of such illustrious predecessors as Samuil Feinberg, Sviatoslav Richter and Daniel Barenboim, all of whom have performed and recorded the two sonatas. ‘If Beethoven consented to having them published as his Opus 49, then we are obliged to consider them as such,’ says Biss.

Such considerations are among the distinctions that make Biss’s cycle essential listening for music lovers.

Important recorded cycles appear approximately every 25 years or so. The first was Schnabel’s in 1935 and his should have been succeeded in the mid-1950s by Solomon’s, which was cut short in 1956 by two devastating strokes that left the British pianist without the use of his left arm. Roughly 20 years after Solomon’s career-ending strokes, the second and most significant of Alfred Brendel’s three recorded cycles appeared, and was succeeded, after another 20 years,

by Richard Goode’s. Now, called into existence almost as if it was scheduled, comes that of Biss.

This is not to say Biss’s cycle is superior to those by Claudio Arrau, Maria Grinberg, Maurizio Pollini, or any of the more than two dozen distinguished recordings since Schnabel’s, only that I suspect it will come to be heard as a landmark akin to those of Solomon, Brendel and Goode.

Aside from performing and recording Beethoven, Biss has done other things over the past decade too. There

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is his important teaching career at his alma mater, the Curtis Institute, whose faculty he joined in 2011. He holds the Neubauer Family Chair in Piano Studies at Curtis, where his students include Eric Lu, winner of the 2018 Leeds International Piano Competition. Since 2018 he has also served as co-artistic director (with Mitsuko Uchida) of the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont. And then – as an extension of his teaching career – there’s his celebrated (and free) online video course, Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas, which has reached almost 200,000 students in more than 185 countries.

‘Teaching is a privilege for many reasons,’ says Biss. ‘For one thing, you learn as much from doing it – or probably even more – than your students. Moreover, because it forces you to become aware of and to nurture the talents of young people, I think it’s the highest calling in music.’

Now that his Beethoven odyssey has ended, what else does Biss have in the pipeline? ‘It’s always hard to predict the future,’ he says. ‘I’ll certainly return to the other composers I love. But I’m also hopeful that I have at least one more Beethoven sonata cycle left in me. That’s a body of work in which I’ll always find more to say.’ IP

‘Teaching is the highest calling in music’

Volume 9 of Jonathan Biss’s Beethoven sonatas cycle is available from Orchid Classics (ORC100109). The 9-disc box set will be released in spring 2020. jonathanbiss.com Biss’s free online masterclass series, Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas, can be viewed at coursera.org/learn/ beethoven-piano-sonatas

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Piano Professor Keyboard

Job reference number: 322-19 Closing date: 9am Friday 31 January 2020 Interview date: Friday 21 February 2020 Salary: Grade 8, £51.38 per hour.

Piano Professor Keyboard

Job reference number: 322-19

The Royal College of Music (RCM) is one of the world’s greatest conservatoires.

Our excellence was recognised by the 2019 QS World University Rankings, in Closing date: 9am Friday 31 January 2020 which we ranked as the top institution for performing arts in the UK for the fourth consecutive year. The RCM also achieved an overall rating of gold for its Interview date: Friday 21 February 2020 outstanding teaching and learning provision for undergraduates in the first ever Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF).

Salary: Grade 8, £51.38 per hour.

To cope with growing demand and our increasingly global perspective, the Royal College of Music is seeking to engage a distinguished piano professor to join its The Royal College of Music (RCM) is one of the world's greatest conservatoires. Our excellence was international team. We are looking for candidates with the following attributes: recognised by the 2019 QS World University Rankings, in which we ranked as the top institution for performing arts in the UK for the fourth consecutive year. The RCM also achieved an overall rating of gold

its outstanding teaching and learning provision for undergraduates in the first ever Teaching Excellence • You should be a widely recognised and highly respected practitioner,foreither as a performer or teacher.

Framework (TEF).

cope with growing demand and increasingly global perspective, and, the Royal College of Music is • You will be teaching, to an exceptionally high level of technical and To musical proficiency, students atour undergraduate, postgraduate in some cases, doctoral seeking to engage a distinguished piano professor to join its international team. We are looking for level, so relevant teaching experience at this level is required. candidates with the following attributes: • You should be a widely recognised and highly respected practitioner, either as a performer or • You should have a global perspective and significant international contacts. teacher.

• You should understand the particular demands of the music profession• whilst striving to helptoeach student reach of their potential.

You will be teaching, an exceptionally highthe levelfullness of technical and own musical proficiency, students at undergraduate, postgraduate and, in some cases, doctoral level, so relevant teaching experience at this level is required.

This post is offered on a part-time, hourly basis and is available from September 2020 •

You should have a global perspective and significant international contacts.

For full details of this position please read the Applicant Information Pack, available to download from the RCM website: www.rcm.ac.uk/jobs •

You should understand the particular demands of the music profession whilst striving to help each student reach the fullness of their own potential.

To apply, please complete our 1) Application form and 2) Equal Opportunities form (available to download from the RCM website) and submit in Word or PDF This post is offered on a part-time, hourly basis and is available from September 2020 format by email to recruitment@rcm.ac.uk

For full details of this position please read the Applicant Information Pack, available to download from the

CVs without an application form will not be accepted. Please ensure that include the Job Reference Number when submitting your application.

RCMyou website: www.rcm.ac.uk/jobs

To apply, please complete our 1) Application form and 2) Equal Opportunities form (available to download

The RCM is committed to being an equal opportunities employer and from to promoting a diverse and inclusive environment for all our staff, students and visitors. the RCM website) and submit in Word or PDF format by email to recruitment@rcm.ac.uk

CVs without an application form will not be accepted. Please ensure that you include the Job Reference Number when submitting your application.

The RCM is committed to being an equal opportunities employer and to promoting a diverse and inclusive environment for all our staff, students and visitors.

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BEETHOVEN 250

Path of

SONJA WERNER

discovery eethoven s relationship to the eyboard is central to understanding his career. issatisfied with the pianos of his own day, he campaigned tirelessly for richer and more robust instruments. Jan Swafford traces his journey from dazzling virtuoso to towering composer

T

he musical repertoire is so saturated with the presence of Ludwig van Beethoven that history has tended to neglect the significance of the piano in his career both as composer and performer. Though he played harpsichord and clavichord in childhood, he was essentially one of the first generation of musicians to grow up as pure pianists. From his prodigy childhood onwards he intended to be a composer/pianist.

When he left his hometown of Bonn for Vienna in 1792 at age 21, he was already one of the leading virtuosos in the world, and it was on keyboard that he first established his reputation in the European capital of music.

When Beethoven was 10, Christian Neefe, his new teacher in Bonn, announced this sullen, grubby, nearly friendless child as a potential successor to Mozart, though Neefe was mostly thinking of his precocious keyboard skills. That year Beethoven produced his first known work, a little set of variations for piano on a theme by Dressler, charming and effective but nothing like what Mozart was doing at that age. In general, in his teens Beethoven was neither as prolific nor ambitious a composer as the

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young Mozart. The reason is that in those years he was concentrating more on piano playing than composing. He recalled that in his teens he practised ‘prodigiously,’ often far into the night.

His teacher Neefe was largely an organist and harpsichord player rather than a pianist. Piano technique requires a different touch than either of those instruments, and since there were no real piano teachers available, Beethoven essentially had to teach himself.

During a tour with the Bonn court orchestra when he was 20, a connoisseur heard him and wrote, ‘His style of treating his instrument is so different from that usually adopted, that it impresses one with the idea that by a path of his own discovery he has attained that height of excellence whereon he now stands.’

In Vienna, Beethoven quickly established himself as one of the stars of local musical salons, presided over by aristocrats who were sophisticated cognoscenti. Above all, he dazzled listeners with the unprecedented fire and imagination of his improvising, which could leave audiences gasping and weeping. As an example, in 1804

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BEETHOVEN 250

‘Improvisation was Beethoven’s prime creative engine, music flowing directly from his imagination into his fingers’

Beethoven in his study, from a painting by Carl Schlösser

the painter Joseph Willibrord Mähler was brought to meet Beethoven at his flat. Beethoven told him that he had just finished a new symphony and began to play the finale on piano. It was the Eroica, the movement a series of variations not on a theme as usual, but on a bare bass line. Mähler recalled that Beethoven played through the movement and then kept going, improvising variations on the bass line for two hours with unflagging imagination.

Improvisation was Beethoven’s prime creative engine, music flowing directly from his imagination into his fingers. Much of his work began that way, then was refined on the page and in his head. His student Carl Czerny said that Beethoven had two modes of improvisation.

One was laid out in a standard genre, like variations or a sonata, in which his extempore playing sounded like a published piece. The other style was a free-form fantasia, in which he produced an astonishing variety of ideas. The quasi-improvisation that opens the Choral Fantasy (which

Beethoven improvised at the premiere) is a surviving example of his rhapsodic style.

Czerny is relevant to Beethoven and the future in another sense. For all Beethoven's power as a pianist, observers said that he sat still at the keyboard and did not throw himself around, that his fingers seemed to rest on the keys, barely moving. That is to say that Beethoven had found for himself a quite modern keyboard technique, and he taught it to his students including Czerny, who went on to create the finger exercises that have trained generations of students ever since.

So, Beethoven established himself in his early 20s as one of the handful of supreme pianists in Vienna. Only then did he begin to issue his first opus numbers, most of them involving the piano either as solo or part of a chamber work, such as the Op 1 Piano Trios and Op 2 Piano Sonatas. In the course of his career, Beethoven produced three synoptic bodies of work, each of them an enormous technical and emotional journey that seems to examine the full depth and breadth of what a medium can do, and beyond that, the depth and breadth of what music itself can do. Those bodies of work are, of course, the nine symphonies, 16 string quartets and 32 piano sonatas.

The sonatas have a remarkable variety of colour and texture, from the sombre harmonies that announce the Pathétique, to the pounding intensity and concluding ecstasies of the Waldstein, the kaleidoscopic colours of the Appassionata, and the throbbing chords that open the Op 31/3 Sonata in E-flat. Each time Beethoven began a piano sonata, it is as if he were not just looking for new themes – he was rethinking the instrument itself. He did not get going on a sonata until he had found a colour and texture unique to that piece.

B

eethoven's relationship to the piano was steady through his career beginning to end – but with a caveat. In 1802 he had a breakdown captured in an unsent letter to his brothers that we call the Heiligenstadt Testament. It had finally come down on him that the growing deafness that had already afflicted him for years was only going to get worse, and that his chronic and painful digestive disorders were never going away.

In the Testament he wrote that he had contemplated suicide, but ‘It was only my art that held me back. Oh, it seemed impossible to me to leave this world before I had produced all that I felt capable of producing, and so I prolonged this wretched existence.’ He vowed to defy fate and physical suffering for the sake of his art, which at that point took a leap into what we call his Second Period. Yet there is one element of Beethoven's despair that he does not mention in the letter, but was certainly on his mind: deafness was going to end his playing career. Piano was half his identity as a musician and more than half his income, because then as now, you could make money far more readily by playing music than writing it.

Beethoven understood that before long he was going to be entirely a composer, no longer a virtuoso. To that disaster he responded with the force of his enormous

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courage and determination. In the next six years his output was stupendous, an outpouring of great works surely unprecedented in history in such a short period. But if he was no longer a virtuoso in public, he continued to improvise on his own, because that was ingrained in his creativity.

There are few sadder images in music than Beethoven in his later years improvising for hours on an out-of-tune keyboard, playing music he could hear only in his head.

In regard to Beethoven as a pianist, there is another dimension: in his time the instrument was in a period of transition from early towards modern instruments.

Today there are a few leading manufacturers who have a recognised quality and sound, Steinway the most familiar. But over the past century, expectations have led to standardisation. This was not the case in Beethoven's time. It is not accurate to say the piano was ‘evolving’ because there was nothing unified about its development.

Rather each region had its preferred styles in terms of touch and sound, as did each maker. In general, British pianos were noted for being robust and rich-sounding instruments, Viennese pianos for a lighter touch and sound, French keyboards roughly in between.

Beethoven was intensely involved in the piano and followed every new development in its design, colours, technique and manufacture. Being Beethoven, he tended to be dissatisfied with all of it. He pressed piano makers for louder and more robust instruments, with a wider range. During a tour in 1796 he wrote to the manufacturer Streicher: ‘There is no doubt that so far as the manner of playing it is concerned, the fortepiano is still the least studied and developed of all instruments; often one thinks that one is merely listening to a harp.’

That is a good description of the light-sounding AustroGerman pianos of the time, on which Beethoven wrote his first mature works. For that kind of piano he wrote the Moonlight Sonata. The score directs the murmuring first movement to be played with the sustain pedal down the whole time. That is impossible on modern pianos, with their far longer sustain, but on the keyboards of Beethoven's time it is a subtle and haunting effect.

Then in 1803 he received a French Erard, louder than any he had encountered, with a stiffer touch. The effect on his piano writing was dramatic: soon followed two of the supreme works in the repertoire, the Waldstein and Appassionata Sonatas, the first dynamic and exciting, the second darkly tragic, both of them unprecedented explorations of piano colour. The Appassionata, in particular, explores the qualities of each register on instruments of those days. With their wooden frames, the bass tended to be rich and a little boomy, the middle mild, the high register quite bright. The registers of today’s pianos are more homogenised, so that effect is partly lost.

On a period piano, the manic end of the Appassionata sounds almost like it is tearing the instrument apart. On a modern piano, which is elegantly loud in all registers, it is hard to create the intended violence.

Still, being Beethoven, he was not satisfied with his Erard and had the keyboard redone twice. He wanted the

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DAVID ERTL

BEETHOVEN 250

light touch of Viennese pianos with a big French sound. It never worked, but he continued to compose at the Erard for around a decade. Towards the end of his life he owned some bigger, louder instruments from Graf and the British maker Broadwood, but by then he could hardly hear them.

Nevertheless, they influenced the still-evolving colours of the late piano music. All this is to say that in terms of his relationship to the piano, Beethoven wrote idiomatically for the instruments of his time even as he campaigned for richer and more robust models.

The presence of the piano in Beethoven's art began at the fundamental level of his creative imagination, leading to the first great body of piano music in the sonatas.

This in turn contributed to his historic influence on the development of the instrument and the technique of playing it. Beethoven was not just a towering composer, he was a supreme musician in every aspect of the art, and in all those respects he changed music once and for all. IP

Beethoven’s 1825 Graf piano, pictured at the Beethoven-Haus Bonn

Composer and writer Jan Swafford is the author of the critically acclaimed biography Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (Faber & Faber 2014). janswafford.com

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Alfred Brendel KBE Patron Sir András Schiff President Marios Papadopoulos MBE Artistic Director

info@oxfordphil.com oxfordphil.com

Oxford

Philharmonic

Orchestra

Oxford Piano Festival 1 – 9 August 2020 2020 Faculty Nelson Freire Richard Goode Alain Lefèvre Elisabeth Leonskaja Paul Lewis Nikolai Lugansky Marios Papadopoulos Menahem Pressler

BEETHOVEN 250

Heightened

clarity

Piano transcriptions of Beethoven’s symphonies and string quartets give listeners intimate access to the composer’s processes by laying bare the intricacies of his music, writes Jonathon Brown

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TULLY POTTER COLLECTION

B

eethoven was undoubtedly one of the most innovative artists of all time, up there with Plato, Donatello and Picasso. He paid little heed to making his music performable, but thanks to the efforts of composers such as Liszt and others who followed in his footsteps, the symphonies and quartets were popularised through piano transcriptions for two and four hands, well before radio broadcasts and recordings became commonplace. These transcriptions live on in their own right, even though we now enjoy unprecedented access to performances of the originals.

The interest in transcriptions is more complex than meets the ear. True, they served to disseminate music in a world without phonograph or wireless. Yet they also served as a didactic tool, facilitating the study of how a symphony might be composed. And they served to supply an inevitable element of sheer showmanship – I’m an orchestra! – as well as handy income for composers and performers. Nowadays, especially since around 1970, when we are ever richer in conventional orchestral recordings and performances, they have come to be esteemed for their own intrinsic interest. Early LPs such as Glenn Gould’s 1968 Fifth Symphony or Roger Woodward’s 1977 Eroica, for all their gladiatorial momentum, insisted upon the musical rather than the merely historical interest of the notes delivered, not without a few rolled eyebrows.

The didactic interest is especially true of the symphonies, in which Beethoven’s harmonic intricacies can be a shade obscured by orchestration. Moreover, I feel that’s arguably part of the point of an orchestra, especially with the likes of Boulez conducting. The effect should not always reveal the means. Meeting the means via the naked piano then has an overwhelming effect, especially in the acoustic of a small venue. Perhaps the most famous champion of this is Wagner, who in his youth had taught himself by writing transcriptions of the Beethoven symphonies; this intimate access to Beethoven’s processes – especially with the late quartets – never left his creative energies. He enjoyed

nothing better than an evening of Beethoven’s symphonies or quartets on the piano after dinner, sometimes as a duet with Anton Rubinstein or Liszt, and usually followed by a grand pronouncement such as this, on the String Quartet in C-sharp minor Op 131: ‘As I said, it was a point of honour for a musician to write a fugue.’

Numerous composers known and unknown felt the need – didactic, commercial or fanciful – to create transcriptions of Beethoven’s music, and did so in bewildering variety. There are versions for solo piano, piano duet and two pianos, as well as weird combinations of other instruments. Some versions seek heightened clarity, paring down the original to essentials (not least so as to be playable by amateur music-lovers), while at the other extreme there are fanciful paraphrases such as Liszt’s Fantasie on themes from The Ruins of Athens – popular with other composers for its Turkish march.

The Fifth Symphony alone exists in over 50 transcriptions. Hummel – of whose transcriptions Liszt wrote, ‘It is sad to see the ideas of the masters so

Ludwig van Beethoven, painted in 1820 by Joseph Karl Stieler

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TULLY POTTER COLLECTION

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Franz Liszt (left) was critical of Friedrich Kalkbrenner's ‘scribbled’ transcriptions of Beethoven’s symphonies

distorted’ – wrote a version for flute, violin, cello and piano, while Léon Grisez offers one for two clarinets, Jacques Larocque for saxophones and percussion, and Antonio López Villanueva for guitar, lute and two bandurrias (to go with his Moonlight Sonata transcription for the same forces). Perhaps, on top of practical motives and didactic aims, we must add sheer novelty value. As a lucrative market it was also competitive: Liszt said of his undertaking to do the transcriptions that he had done so ‘rightly or wrongly’, but was adamant enough to say of Kalkbrenner’s ‘scribbled’ transcriptions that Kalkbrenner ‘would do better to arrange his wig’. The quartets, on the other hand, clearly seen as more serious stuff, are only rarely transcribed for novel groups – the Adagio of Op 131 can be heard for two flutes and two clarinets – and piano versions are the norm.

‘The pianist can make points that might at best be heavy-handed for a conductor’

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he recorded repertoire of Beethoven symphony transcriptions opens with all sorts of oddities, including piano rolls, some even ‘conducted’ by the likes of Artur Bodanzky. Early complete cycles of Liszt’s transcriptions set down by Cyprien Katsaris and Idil Biret are still estimable. I personally prefer Biret’s rounder tone while Katsaris is capable of a dash of madness, a panache that is ever-present also in Leslie Howard’s set, contained within his vast and lavishly documented recording of the complete piano works of Liszt on Hyperion. Perhaps the sheer status and showmanship of a transcription allows irreverent licence that a hallowed oeuvre such as a sonata

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deters? Howard, by the way, offers Liszt’s earlier versions of Symphonies Nos 5-7.

Without all the distractions afforded by those pesky instruments of the orchestra, the pianist can make points that might at best be heavy-handed for a conductor. Take Gould’s bewitching 1968 account of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. Gould insists upon a mesmeric regularity of rhythm which, with a conductor, would likely be condemned as stodgy if not perverse, but which on the piano reveals a sort of trance-like devotion to the Eastern ideas with which the composer flirted. It may be significant that Gould only played Symphonies Nos 5 and 6 and the Allegretto of the Seventh, which are the most disposed of all towards repetitive yet accumulative rhythmic stasis.

There are individual curiosities, as you would expect.

I treasure the under-rated Leonard Hokanson's 1972 account of the Eighth Symphony (via Liszt), not least for the other side of the LP – Hermann Prey at his most mellifluously magical, singing words from various poets including Schiller, Uhland and Kerner, set by one Friedrich Silcher to melodies drawn from Beethoven’s sonatas and symphonies. Without the glorious Prey one might drift from ‘transcription’ to ‘travesty’, but it offers a delightful velvety glimpse into the 19th-century parlour. Or, in a characteristically intelligent coupling, the late Paul Badura-Skoda paired Liszt’s transcription of the Fifth Symphony with Schubert’s Sonata in C minor D958, one of those mature sonatas in which Schubert clearly has the magnitude of Beethoven in mind. Admirers of BaduraSkoda’s clipped intonation will be very happy here.

The Ninth Symphony, in which the pianist or pianists have to make do with no singers, is an interesting case. How does it work? Even Liszt hesitated. Perhaps

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BEETHOVEN 250

the audience ‘hears’ Vickers or Hotter or Ludwig or Schwarzkopf, abstracted via memory? Or perhaps they do without? (At least they are immune from dim-witted nonsenses such as replacing ‘joy’ with ‘freedom’.) I strongly suspect that we do ‘hear’ Schiller, which in itself raises fascinating questions about the role of memory and accumulated experience in music appreciation. The same could be said of the plaintive straggle from the oboe at bar 300 in the first movement of the Seventh Symphony: when played on the piano, do we still ‘hear’ an oboe? Answers will differ; the process is rich.

Another oddity, recorded by Richard and John Contiguglia in 1973, is a transcription for piano duet

by Liszt of his own Festival Cantata, originally scored for soloists, chorus and orchestra and premiered at the 1845 Beethoven memorial in Bonn. The piece – a good half hour long – climaxes with a re-working of the slow movement of the Archduke Trio. A booklet note by the brothers says that while the transcription ‘deprives us of the orchestral effects praised by Berlioz, it mercifully spares us from the banality of O L B Wolff ’s text.’

Interestingly, their recording came nearly 30 years before a recording of the full score.

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have been looking at transcriptions that are reductions, not at aberrations such as Weingartner’s upward transcription of the Hammerklavier Sonata for orchestra.

One rationale for piano transcriptions might be to suggest that Beethoven, having been a great virtuoso, was always

‘really’ writing for the piano. After all, he himself wrote a version for piano duet of the terrifyingly contrapuntal Grosse Fuge Op 133, originally for string quartet. On the other hand, Weingartner’s rationale was to call into question the adequacy of our beloved box of strings and hammers to do justice to the colossal music of Op 106. The value of his experiment, I contend, is in its failure, and moreover in the interesting counter-experiment we can conduct by listening in our imagination to an orchestra playing a symphony as if it is playing a transcription of a piano sonata. Bernstein’s revival of the Toscanini/Mitropoulos tradition of giving orchestral strings the parts of a late Beethoven quartet, while related to the Weingartner thesis of inadequate forces, also suggests that classical music has two audiences that don’t always overlap – the symphonic and the chamber.

These conductors add to the didactic dimension.

Pianists tend to play transcriptions of the symphonies rather than of the quartets. I can see why – apart from the issue of showmanship, the clarity the piano might lend is already manifest in a quartet – yet I would relish hearing the late quartets the way Wagner did, from inside. This cuts both ways: I wish too there were a transcription of the Hammerklavier for string quartet, or Op 110, since, to push the slightly daft thought-experiment, you might say Beethoven seems more likely to be rightly accused of ‘really’ writing for the quartet than for anything else.

Parlour game nonsense, no doubt. But transcriptions are at home in the parlour, which is what makes them invariably fun and entertaining. IP

TULLY POTTER COLLECTION

Gould insists upon a mesmeric regularity of rhythm in his 1968 recording of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony

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International Piano January 2020

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MARCO BORGGREVE

BEETHOVEN 250

Experimental thinker Ronald Brautigam is a rare breed of pianist, as accomplished on the fortepiano as on the modern grand. Simon Mundy caught up with the Dutch virtuoso about his new disc of Beethoven piano concertos recorded on historic instruments

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t was the day after his 65th birthday when I met Ronald Brautigam in the café of Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw to talk about Beethoven and early pianos. He is wearing well, though like his contemporary Simon Rattle, the mop of unruly hair is now white. Brautigam is an undogmatic player, who sees virtue in performing music in all sorts of conditions and on all sorts of instruments, finding excitement in experiment rather than theory.

He is one of the very few pianists to be equally at home on all stages of the fortepiano and the modern grand, but he says that ‘more and more people are interested in playing both. It’s no longer a choice you have to make. It’s just a possibility.’ He admits, ‘you have to work so hard – much harder – on fortepiano. On the other hand, you get rid of a lot of sounds you don’t need.’ There are limits, however.

‘In reality, and especially in today’s halls, the fortepiano is much more suited to solo and chamber performances.

Already in Beethoven’s time Czerny was refusing to play with full orchestra because the balance was wrong.’

For his new set of Beethoven piano concertos, with the Cologne Academy and Michael Alexander Willens on the BIS label, Brautigam swaps instruments after the

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Third. Moving from a reconstruction of an 1805 Anton Walther to one of an 1819 Conrad Graf, the development in the sound is immediately clear. The Third Concerto is evidently on the cusp of needing a more substantial response. ‘If Beethoven had owned a modern Steinway he would probably have been even wilder, even more revolutionary.’ The Walther instrument has ‘pedals’ nestling just beneath the keyboard to be engaged with the knees, which illustrates the hard work necessary. Proper pedals must have been a welcome innovation.

The Walther and Graf are Brautigam’s two favoured instruments on many of his Beethoven recordings, including the discs of the complete variations, bagatelles and piano pieces made between 2011 and 2016 (BIS-2403 SACD). He has also played on reconstructions of a 1792 Walter and a 1788 Johann Stein for Haydn and Mozart.

They were all made by the American craftsman, Paul McNulty, at his workshop in the Bohemian countryside

‘You have to work so much harder on fortepiano’ International Piano January 2020

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MARCO BORGGREVE

BEETHOVEN 250

Ronald Brautigam: ‘I like to play the music through in my mind.

That’s how I can explore what I want to say’

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south of Prague, and McNulty was on hand during the recording process to make sure the old-fashioned mechanisms behaved themselves. He also made the copy of the 1830 Pleyel for Brautigam’s intriguing complete cycle of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words (also on BIS).

As for upcoming projects, Brautigam is ‘dipping into Schubert and Weber’ and looking to continue his association with the Cologne Academy by recording the five piano concertos of Johann Wilms, the Amsterdam composer five years younger than Beethoven who gave the Dutch premiere of some of Beethoven’s concertos.

Wilms was also involved in the early history of Felix Meritis, the magnificent building on Keizersgracht which contained (and still contains) the city’s first purpose-built concert hall. Its oval shape is similar to Edinburgh’s St Cecilia’s Hall and the model, a century later, for the recital room in the Concertgebouw.

Despite having recorded vast swathes of late Classical and early Romantic music on fortepiano, Brautigam

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often performs on Steinways with modern instrument orchestras. Stylistically, he says he has always thought of Artur Schnabel as a hero, and the influence of his teacher is still strong. ‘I always feel that Rudolf Serkin is standing behind me, looking over my shoulder.’ With Riccardo Chailly and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra he made albums for Decca of concertos by Frank Martin, Hindemith and Shostakovich. He also occasionally strays into contemporary music and found ‘Sally Beamish so good to work with’ on her concerto. If he has one work left as an ambition: ‘I would love to play the Busoni concerto, but,’ he grimaces, ‘that would cost me so much effort and time.’

He is not these days the most assiduous of practice fanatics. He sees little point or reward in playing six or eight hours per day, even when learning repertoire. ‘I do enough to keep my fingers fit but mostly I like to play the music through in my mind – just sit still and perform it in my head. That is how I can explore what I want to say.’

He has two pianos at home in Amsterdam, one ancient, one modern. ‘I used to have two fortepianos but I found I just wasn’t playing one of them, so I let it go. I have one big Steinway and the fortepiano has five and a half octaves which is enough for everything up until the Appassionata.

I’m not one of those who needs a whole collection.’

If his practising regime is as mental as it is physical, his recording methods are deliberately tough. ‘There should always be a feeling of spontaneity. The music has to have life, so I only stop if it feels wrong. For example, I recorded the Diabelli Variations in three whole takes – that’s long.’ Brautigam is relaxed about how he approaches performances. ‘Music should be kept very simple – beginning, middle, end – and I’m not sure I have an interpretation, nor do I believe that what is written on the page is necessarily what has to be followed exactly. For example, in the Hammerklavier there are some ridiculously fast metronome markings in the first movement but it is only marked Allegro – who knows what Beethoven’s metronome was doing at the time. I rather agree with Anner Bylsma [the Dutch cellist who died in July 2019], who said that Bach wrote down what the audience should hear, not always what we should play.’

For much the same reasons, he never listens to his own recordings once the first editing sessions are out of the way.

‘That was then. It is behind me. Between the time when it is recorded and released, I’ve changed and think differently.

There are so many factors that will keep changing. Most of all I find I want to keep seeing if it is possible to make more space within the music without making it longer. In a way it’s the only sort of improvisation left.’ IP

Beethoven – The Piano Concertos by Ronald Brautigam and the Cologne Academy is now available from BIS Records (BIS-2274 SACD) ronaldbrautigam.com

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BURKARD SCHLIESSMANN Recipient of Goethe-Prize 2019 of Frankfurt/Main, Germany Global Music Awards 2018: 2 Gold Medals “Awards of Excellence” (Schumann) Global Music Awards 2018: 3 Silver Medals “Outstanding Achievement” (Bach) Global Music Awards 2017: 3 Silver Medals “Outstanding Achievement” (Chopin)

“A fantastic Bach recital all around, and in an SACD recording that projects the piano right into your listening space with a three-dimensional effect that spreads the keyboard in front of you from left to right and the full length of Schliessmanʼs Steinway concert grand from front to back. This earns the strongest of recommendations.”

Jerry Dubins, Fanfare

“I rank this Chopin among the best available. With both the technique and intellect to do just about anything he wants, Schliessmannʼs strength is in the lyrical, legato melodies that make Chopinʼs music such a cornerstone of the piano repertoire ...”

James Harrington, American Record Guide

“Schliessmannʼs playing is representative of the best of the modern school ...”

Harold C. Schonberg, The New York Times

www.schliessmann.com

| divine art

LIUDMILA JEREMIES

BEETHOVEN 250

Going to extremes A combination of earthly force and a sense of the sublime give Beethoven’s music its power, says the Palestinian-Israeli pianist Saleem Ashkar. Owen Mortimer reports ‘

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herever you go, even if people know nothing about classical music, they have heard of Beethoven,’ says Saleem Ashkar.

‘It’s really amazing.’

Ashkar has recently performed several Beethoven sonata cycles in cities across Europe, including Gateshead, Prague, Duisburg and Berlin. He has two more cycles coming up in early 2020 (Copenhagen and Milan), and is in the middle of recording all 32 sonatas for Decca.

This deep immersion in Beethoven’s music has prompted Ashkar to think deeply about the composer and his work.

‘There is something about him that has captured the popular imagination,’ he says. ‘He is a man who struggled and fought, was a revolutionary and suffered, but ultimately overcame or transcended these challenges. It’s a very hopeful and inspiring image – and very Romantic.’

Each of Ashkar’s cycles spans eight longish concerts, averaging four sonatas per recital. ‘It’s a huge emotional undertaking,’ he explains, ‘because the music is psychologically very demanding. Beethoven is not a composer who lets you go: he grabs you by the throat.

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Everything is on a knife edge. I find his music among the most difficult repertoire to play. It’s absolutely unforgiving.’

This may sound exhausting, but Beethoven’s music offers ample compensations that make the effort worthwhile. ‘It’s music that is so deep but soars very high,’ says Ashkar. ‘There’s a constant sense of tension between these extremes. With Beethoven, even when I’ve prepared and thought deeply, it feels open-ended. The question always remains: how do I navigate this music and strike a balance between its contrasting demands?’

Ashkar’s three Decca recordings to date reflect this deep thinking, in particular his reading of Sonata No 32, whose closing bars transport the listener to a near-metaphysical realm. This extraordinary moment is the end of a long journey that has taken us to extremes. It has the power to move because it offers ‘a combination of earthly force and sense of the sublime,’ says Ashkar. ‘The trills in the last movement of Opus 111 are like the vibrations of the universe before we existed.’

The sound of Ashkar’s playing is also very distinctive, not least because he has chosen to record his cycle on

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a C Bechstein D 282 concert grand – the company’s flagship instrument, employing all the latest advances in technology, materials and craftsmanship. It’s a decision he thinks Beethoven would have endorsed, given the composer’s openness to playing different pianos in his pursuit of the ideal sound for his music. The challenge, however, is to convince audiences to open their ears to novelty. ‘When Beethoven received his Broadwood from London, he loved it,’ says Ashkar, ‘but the public in Vienna hated it. The audience there was used to a brilliant, Viennese sound, and did not appreciate the Broadwood’s other qualities – strength and depth. Challenging such expectations really takes courage. It’s not just about finding a sound that you as an artist like: you also have to consider the audience, critics and venues. If you present something different, they don’t know what’s what.’

Ashkar also says he is taking ‘a principled stance against monoculture’ in the piano world. He worries that despite the range of options available there is a tendency to limit ourselves, which has a detrimental effect on creativity. ‘If you look back at the history of piano-playing, there used to be a huge variety in terms of instruments, which fostered strong relationships between composers, pianists and manufacturers. Today, that dialogue between musicians and instrument-makers is virtually nonexistent. In the past, it was central to the development of many compositions.’

His relationship with Bechstein began after a performance which prompted Ashkar to contact the company and suggest some improvements. ‘Maybe they saw in me someone who was open to communicate,’ he explains. Several years later, he was invited to try their latest instruments and ‘was very impressed by the development they had achieved.’ In particular, he loves the mellow sound of the D 282, which he describes as ‘woody’. This, says Ashkar, makes it ideal for performing Beethoven – though ‘it’s very difficult to choose a single piano for all the sonatas because they are very different, and Beethoven’s language evolves so much.’

Does his work in Israel also have a political agenda?

No, says Ashkar, swiftly rejecting this suggestion. ‘I don’t think music has a political function. Rather, it has social and political value. I see it as an important responsibility to offer equal access to music education for everybody – that’s what has political meaning. Not just the act of playing together.’

Returning to the idea that Beethoven’s music combines ‘earthly force’ with a ‘sense of the sublime’, Ashkar is awed by the power of music to connect with each individual’s humanity while recognising its limited value as a force for good. ‘Music has an incredible human power. You can sit next to someone at a concert who is very different from you but has a similar emotional response, triggered by the feelings of the composer who lived more than two centuries ago. That’s an extraordinary pan-human experience which proves there is a common humanity. Yet music can also be used in very different ways. You only have to look at history to see how music has been appropriated.’

While there is certainly a case to be made for using music as a humanistic tool, Ashkar says ‘one has to be clear-headed and realise it has been proven it can do the absolute opposite. There are people who are incredibly sensitive and have felt music profoundly, yet are racists and murderers. Humans seem to be capable of such profound psychopathy. That’s the mystery of this stupid animal called Man: we are constantly contradicting ourselves.’ IP

‘I don’t think music has a political function.

Rather, it has social and political value’

shkar was born in Nazareth, Israel, where despite his family owning a piano, music was not initially part of daily life. That all changed when he was around seven years old: ‘My father acquired some piano records because I was so interested, and they really grabbed me. I couldn’t play but felt a deep desire to connect physically with the music. The first thing I did was to create choreographies to go with the music, as a game. It was clear I needed to play the piano.’

His interest was so infectious that Ashkar’s younger brother was prompted to take up the violin and went on to become a member of Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. The brothers now run a music education initiative together in Galilee. ‘We have a conservatory and music outreach project for schools. There’s even a small chamber orchestra. As a family we’ve brought about a classical music renaissance in Arabic society. I am very moved by this’.

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LIUDMILA JEREMIES

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Saleem Ashkar is recording Beethoven’s complete piano sonatas for Decca, the first three volumes of which are now available. His upcoming appearances include two cycles of the Beethoven sonatas in Copenhagen and Milan, and a recital at London’s Southbank Centre as part of this year’s International Piano Series. saleemashkar.com

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PERSONAL TOUCH

High five Beethoven’s piano concertos are a bridge between the Classical and Romantic eras that also traces the composer’s battle with deafness, writes Howard Shelley

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LONDON MOZART PLAYERS

o a d he ey find it ve y i e atin to di ect these o s om the ey oa d

hen the London Mozart Players (LMP) asked me to suggest a way we might celebrate the dubious milestone of my 70th birthday together, I found myself drawn to some sort of specially themed event. With the Beethoven 250th anniversary in the same year, it soon occurred to me that directing his five piano concertos from the piano in one extended event would be the perfect answer. We could present these fabulous works, which the LMP and I have performed together many times over the years, chronologically in one afternoon in three linked concerts. I had already agreed a version of this with the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra for later in the year.

These five concertos have always seemed to me to be a perfect embodiment of the transition from the Classical to the Romantic era, a sort of Giant’s Causeway between the styles, bringing the piano into its adulthood and establishing the paradigm of the heroic individual versus a larger force, which underpins all the great Romantic piano concertos that were to follow. These works confirm Wagner’s contention that ‘From Haydn and Mozart it was possible and necessary for a Beethoven to arrive: the genius of music demanded it, and without delay he was there’.

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I think it is no accident that the first mature piano concerto Beethoven wrote, now confusingly known as the second, is in the same key as Mozart’s last, K595.

The opening of Beethoven’s concerto is not only very Mozartian, but also appears to quote the notes of the opening theme from Mozart’s work.

One could write this off as coincidental or serendipitous, but I am convinced it is not. Apart from anything else, Beethoven employs the exact same process with his First Symphony. This is in the key of C major and Mozart’s final Jupiter Symphony is in C; what’s more, the start of the Allegro is extraordinarily similar to Mozart’s opening motif. As a further indicator that Beethoven felt himself taking up Mozart’s baton, he starts his second movement with the same series of notes and rhythm as the slow movement of Mozart’s penultimate and muchloved Symphony in G minor.

Thus, Beethoven seems to be picking up the threads of Mozart’s last works, adding some of Haydn’s more daring and mischievous characteristics into the mix, and weaving it all together with his own huge and fastdeveloping musical personality and intellect.

I personally feel that his first three concertos, while quite different in character from each other, all maintain a dialogue with specific Mozart piano concertos, coming to a peak in the Third Concerto, where Beethoven becomes obsessed by Mozart’s Concerto in C minor K491, which we know he rated highly and performed, along with Mozart’s only other minor key concerto, the D minor K466. I will explain at St John’s Smith Square, as I did on a spoken track in my recording, why I believe this to be the case, and how the third note of Mozart’s concerto, an A-flat, seems to have roused, emboldened and inspired Beethoven, both in his melodies and key relationships, throughout all three movements of his C minor Concerto.

In addition to the bridge from the Classical to the Romantic style, the five concertos also reflect the progress of Beethoven’s battle with deafness and the associated psychological and isolating influences it forced on him.

They were written when the composer was between the ages of 23 and 39, and the only one he did not premiere in public, because of the advanced state of his deafness, was the Emperor.

His first two concertos establish him as a young man with boundless energy and strength to bring to both his composing and playing – sforzandos become commonplace, for example. And whereas Mozart’s concertos need to sound like there is air under every note,

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LONDON MOZART PLAYERS

PERSONAL TOUCH

Beethoven’s seem very definitely rooted on firm ground, more solid and toughly argued, although the gorgeous slow movements are already very Romantic.

When we come to the third of his concertos, the only one in a minor key, there is a gritty stress underlying the piece from its first notes. Given that he had just written the ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’, where he talks of contemplating suicide, and the cruel fate that he, of all people, should suffer from deafness, one has to wonder whether it is a reflection of these grim thoughts.

The Fourth Concerto has a dreamy, peaceful calm at its core, as if its composer had found a heaven on the other side of this tragedy – the only remaining stress revealing itself in the extraordinary bipolar slow movement where his newly-found inner calm, characterised by the solo piano, fails to be upset by the noisy and stressful outer world which the orchestra tries to perpetuate.

Beethoven’s final concerto takes us into yet another entirely different world, the final stepping-stone to the Romantic era, where the piano plunges in with its powerful cadenzas right at the beginning of the work, truly taking control of proceedings. This music perhaps reflects Beethoven’s inner conviction of his own extraordinariness, as he seemed to suggest when he said: ‘Power is the morality of men that stand out from the rest, and it is also mine’.

I find it very liberating and a great thrill to direct these works from the keyboard because one gets the chance to

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tell the story from the very beginning. Some of the greatest books begin with a phrase that sets the tone and whets the appetite for the ensuing pages, for instance Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness’. So it is with a great piece of music – the very first notes need to reach out and draw the audience in, take them by the hand, set just the right mood, and give them the confidence to lose themselves in the performance.

Normally, for pianists playing concertos, particularly Classical concertos, the first long minutes, as the orchestra plays the opening pages, are spent sitting in silence while the hands get colder. So I love the visceral excitement of conducting the orchestra from the opening moment, the ‘once upon a time’ moment, which is so important to the cohesive arc of an interpretation. It is also an exciting communal act of ensemble for those of us on the platform, where each member of the orchestra has to lock in directly with you and respond, with splitsecond precision, to what you are doing. At best, that can create an edge-of-the-seat dynamic which is tangible to the audience.

Thank you, LMP, for this wonderful birthday present! IP

he ey conducts the ondon o a t aye s at t ohn s mith ua e

Howard Shelley will celebrate his 70th birthday with performances of Beethoven’s complete piano concertos at St John’s Smith Square on Sunday 8 March londonmozartplayers.com/concert/celebrating-with-beethoven

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SUMMER SCHOOLS

Education at its finest HELEN TABOR

hetham s nternational iano ummer chool and estival offers orld class tuition and recitals in a truly inclusive atmosphere, catering for youngsters, adult amateurs, teachers, concert pianists and observers alike. Colin Clarke spent a ee end at the course

Murray McLachlan and Kathryn Page

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ow in its 19th year, Chetham’s International Piano Summer School and Festival is the largest event of its type in Europe devoted exclusively to the piano. The twin powerhouses behind the Summer School are Murray McLachlan, artistic director and head of keyboard at Chetham’s, and Kathryn Page, the ever-helpful administrator who also presides over the young persons' workshops.

Founded in 2001, the Summer School and Festival extends over 100 practice rooms and performance spaces in the heart of Manchester. Pianos are everywhere, thanks to a grant from the National Lottery which helped McLachlan’s predecessor acquire a fleet of Yamahas. An on-call piano tuner, Pete Lyons, ensures the standard of the instruments. Additional pianos are provided by Forsyth Music Shop, which also has a permanent stand in the communal area.

In the first year of the course, 92 people came – ‘basically people we know,’ says McLachlan. Now it has expanded to some 250 students per week, and 65 staff in 2019. The principal concerts take place at the Stoller Hall, located opposite Manchester’s Victoria Station and accessible directly from Chetham’s.

January 2020 International Piano

After the main evening concerts, there are opportunities to hear short, late-night recitals by participants. It is a pity these were sparsely attended on the evening I stayed, as some fascinating repertoire was performed ( for example, a rare Léon Roque arrangement of Saint-Saëns’ ‘Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix’ from Samson et Dalila, sensitively played by the young James Quinn). On-site catering offers an immersive experience: you do not need to exit the complex except to sleep.

The event is split into two weeks, with a changeover of teaching staff and composers-in-residence (Adam Gorb and Philip Martin in 2019) halfway through. Anyone can observe the lessons, which take place in three two-hour segments throughout the day. Over one weekend, I sat in on lessons by eight teachers: Benjamin Frith, Leslie Howard, Leon McCawley, Murray McLachlan, Mark Tanner, Martino Tirimo, Joseph Tong and Ashley Wass (out of an available 41, including Peter Frankl, Peter Donohoe and Carlo Grante). To cap it all, there was the sixth Manchester International Concerto Competition, comprising 18 young pianists aged 22 and under. Eric Lu, winner of the 2018 Leeds Competition, gave a guest performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto No 23 with the Manchester Camerata on the evening of the Finals.

Elsewhere, adult workshops offer opportunities for group work, while ‘Moving with Period Music’ (led by Bethan Rhys William) provided the opportunity to try out the Mazurka and Polonaise dances in week one of the course, and Baroque dance in week two. Tai Chi is offered every morning (outdoors if the weather permits)

by Philip Smith.

The atmosphere at the Summer School is vibrant and unremittingly positive. Everyone is encouraged to participate. One might feel there is a risk of overload, but instead I heard pianists say they were heading off to practise after Angela Hewitt’s inspirational Goldberg Variations (reviewed in IP November 2019, page 74).

Enthusiasm is everywhere.

J

ust as there is variety in repertoire, there is variety in the ability levels of the participants. Whether beginner or advanced, everyone is nourished. Leslie Howard was gentle and coaxing with a student challenged by Beethoven’s Op 14/2 finale. Martino Tirimo worked with advanced students, stressing the importance of the arm, not only the fingers, and of vocal line in Mendelssohn’s Rondo capriccioso, while also extolling research

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into various editions of a piece and discussing the ramifications for interpretation.

Ashley Wass taught Schumann’s Carnaval with another advanced student. Commandingly eloquent, his lesson was a real treat to observe (not least because Wass’ room boasted a comfortable leather couch). A nugget of wisdom to his pupil: ‘Don't be immune to the surprises in the music we play.’ He talked, too, about the importance of physical gesture since people ‘listen with their eyes’.

Gesture was a strand taken up by Philip Smith in one of his adult amateur workshops, where everyone was invited to walk to the piano, take a bow, improvise, then take a bow. It's an important part of the performer's art all too often neglected. Smith's other strength was pinpointing what would maximally help his pupils in a short space of time.

Those workshops, held in the Whiteley Hall (again, part of the Chetham's complex) had a fabulous atmosphere. Here, it was a Schimmel grand that did the honours. It helped that both hosts exuded different strains of bonhomie; the sheer wit of Philip Fowke cannot pass unacknowledged. Fowke clothed gems of wisdom in language that had the audience guffawing. He explored the challenges of relearning a piece and rewiring yourself, then relapsing when it goes wrong: ‘You can't unbake a cake.’ Fingering: ‘The Associated Board twist’; the ‘myth of legato’. Amazing, and stimulating.

What of future plans? ‘Things often happen by themselves,’ says McLachlan. ‘Philip Smith suggested Tai Chi, for example. We're about as big as we can possibly get in terms of numbers, but it would be wonderful to stream concerts, to have associations with broadcasting organisations. There's still a lot to be done in terms of publicity.’ Yoga and Dalcroze (a multi-dimensional approach to rhythm) are to be added to the programme.

There are people that come every single year: ‘That kind of loyalty is very touching.’

I hardly needed to ask participants' views – it shone in their eyes, in their energy. Surely this is education at its finest. Alexia Daphne Eleftheriadou, who played Bach charmingly in the late-night event, talked of the ‘incredible teachers and faculty, all so different; so many points of view,’ while Madeleine Brown, who had provided a fabulous first movement to Beethoven’s Op 2/3 Sonata in a lesson with McCawley, finds it stimulating to be in contact with ‘so many renowned teachers; a huge variety of ideas’.

And for future reference, as McLachlan says, ‘You don't need to be a fully enrolled participant to come along and observe and to go to the concerts.’ So next summer, why not make a trip to Manchester? IP The Chetham’s International Piano Summer School 2020 begins on 8 August with the new Junior Academy.

The main Summer School and Festival runs from 14 to 26 August. pianosummerschool.com

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HELEN TABOR

SUMMER SCHOOLS

Top: Gems of wisdom: one of Philip Fowke’s witty and stimulating adult workshops Above: Renowned teacher: Leon McCawley in action

International Piano January 2020

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THE THOMAS SCHULTZ SUMMER PIANO SEMINAR AT STANFORD

Be etho ven original

AUGUST 17 – 22, 2020 FOR THE ADVANCED PIANIST/ YOUNG ARTIST Study and perform both traditional and new repertoire Application deadline: May 1 Scholarships available: contact thomasschultzpianoseminar@stanford.edu

PRESENTED

BY THESCHOOL STANFORD THE SUMMER DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC WITH SUPPORT FROM THE FOHR FOUNDATION FOR PIANISTS

CHETHAM’S INTERNATIONAL PIANO SUMMER SCHOOL 2020 Artistic Director:

Murray McLachlan Stowe School, Buckingham, UK 15th – 21st August 2020 TUTORS: Graham Fitch; Daniel Hill; Karl Lutchmayer; Ann Martin-Davis; Christine Stevenson

The friendliest piano summer school in the world!

NEW FOR 2020 – Junior Piano Academy 8–13 August 2020 A new exciting addition to CIPSS, the Junior Piano Academy is in four sections and is only open to under 18s.

The Summer School for Pianists has moved to a glorious new home at Stowe!

An exciting week of masterclasses, tutor recitals, presentations and student concerts. One of Britain’s friendliest courses! Ample practice facilities at this All-Steinway school. Accommodation in single en-suite bedrooms on site.

For further details contact: Dr Brian White Telephone: +44 (0)1622 756660 Email: info@pianosummerschool.co.uk Website: https://www.pianosummerschool.co.uk/

The Summer School for Pianists is a charitable incorporated organisation, registered charity number 1174674.

14–20 August 2020 | CIPSS Part 1 20–26 August 2020 | CIPSS Part 2 Choose from over 12 different courses – open to all (under 18s must be accompanied by a parent/guardian at all times)

Faculty to include: Dmitri Alexeev, Peter Donohoe, Christopher Elton, Margaret Fingerhut, Norma Fisher, Philip Fowke, Peter Frankl, Grigory Gruzman, John Lenehan, Joanna MacGregor, Wolfgang Manz, Noriko Ogawa, Ronan O’Hora, Steven Osborne, Pascal Nemirovski, Jason Rebello, Martin Roscoe, Graham Scott, Craig Sheppard, Martino Tirimo

Booking opens 10 January 2020

www.pianosummerschool.com

SUMMER SCHOOLS

Escape

to the sun IP previews some of the best summer courses for pianists in 2020

EUROPE Chetham's International Piano Summer School and Festival Manchester, UK

8 to 26 August 2020 Europe’s largest summer school dedicated exclusively to the piano expands in 2020 with a new Junior Academy, offering four courses – from elementary to young artist – for pianists up to the age of 18. Courses run 8 to 13 August (Junior Academy), 14 to 20 August (CIPSS Part 1) and 20 to 26 August (CIPSS Part 2).

Eligibility: Junior Academy ages 8 to 18; grade 1 to diploma+ | CIPSS any age; grade 6+ (players of grades 1 to 5 can attend the Adult Amateur course) Tuition offered: Individual lessons and group performance workshops alongside lectures and recitals. Further courses include duets, improvisation, musical analysis, sight reading, composition, Alexander Technique and Dalcroze Faculty: Includes Dmitri Alexeev, Peter Donohoe, Norma Fisher, Benjamin Frith, Eugen Indjic, John Lenehan, Joanna McGregor, Murray McLachlan, Noriko Ogawa, Steven Osborne, Martin Roscoe and Martino Tirimo

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Fees: Junior Academy resident £620; non-resident £420 | CIPSS resident £580 to £1,440; non-resident £405 to £510 | Further options and observer entrance available Application deadline: 8 June 2020 pianosummerschool.com

James Lisney’s piano courses take place at the charming Le Vert hôtellerie in southwest France

Nelly Ben-Or Piano Courses Watford, UK

Music Holiday Italy

14 to 19 July 2020

Montefalcone, Italy

7 June to 5 September 2020 Gil Jetley’s week-long piano courses run throughout the summer at Montemuse, a rural farmhouse in Italy’s picturesque Marche region. Jetley is a guest artist for the Chopin Society in Warsaw and has a wealth of international teaching experience.

Eligibility: Amateur pianists of all ability levels from beginner to diploma+ Tuition offered: Four hours of one-on-one personal tuition every day for solo pianists or two pianist colleagues Tutor: Gil Jetley Fees: One-on-one coaching €3,100; one-onone for two pianists €2,500; guests €1,700.

Fees include tuition, accommodation and meals Application deadline: N/A musicholidayitaly.com

Nelly Ben-Or has taught piano and Alexander Technique at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama since 1975.

Through applying the basic principles of the Alexander Technique to piano playing, she teaches pianists how to prevent tensions or injuries when practising and performing.

Tuition offered: Daily Alexander Technique sessions and individual piano lessons covering various aspects of piano playing, such as improving freedom, velocity and fluency, learning and memorising new scores, and improving listening skills Tutor: Nelly Ben-Or Fees: Participant £350; observer £230 (or £50 per day). Accommodation not included. Scholarships are available Application deadline: N/A pianocourseswithalexandertechnique.com

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Did you know that Polish composer Mieczysław Weinberg was called “One of the most outstanding composers of today”

by Shostakovich?

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Karsten Scholz plays all Beethoven Piano Sonatas

Listen to Beethoven Piano Sonatas 5 –11

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SUMMER SCHOOLS

Sibelius Summer Academy Helsinki, Finland

8 to 13 June 2020 The Sibelius Summer Academy is a newly established study programme offered by the University of the Arts Helsinki. 2020 sees the addition of the piano course, which will focus on the music of Beethoven’s contemporaries.

Tuition offered: Personal lessons with Sibelius Academy teaching staff and international guests Faculty: Includes Tuija Hakkila and Erik T Tawaststjerna Fees: Participant €300 (accommodation and meals not included) Application deadline: TBC sibeliussummeracademy.fi

Piano courses with James Lisney Mauroux, France

23 May to 5 September 2020 Taking place at the Le Vert hôtellerie in southwest France, participants at James Lisney’s week-long summer courses will enjoy luxurious accommodation, food from a renowned local chef, and opportunities to play Steinway and Yamaha grands.

Eligibility: All ability levels; age 18+ Tuition offered: Three masterclasses with a minimum of 30 minutes per student, three individual 45-minute lessons, lecture-recitals and presentations, ensemble playing Tutor: James Lisney Fees: Participant €1,450 to €1,650; guests €650. Fees include tuition, accommodation and meals Application deadline: N/A pianowithjameslisney.com

Tutor: Graham Fitch Fees: Participant €1,150 to €1,400; participating partner €800 to €900; nonparticipating partner €550 to €650; single supplement €250. Fees include tuition, accommodation and meals Application deadline: N/A bygad.biz/Development/vision/ piano-pot-pourri-2020

St Mary's Music School Piano Summer School Edinburgh, UK

9 to 14 August 2020 St Mary’s Summer School is an intensive week designed to improve technique, confidence and playing ability while having fun. Open

to just 10 participants, the course ensures a personalised approach for each student.

Activities also include a concert at the Edinburgh International Festival.

Eligibility: Ages 13 to 19; grade 6+ Tuition offered: One-to-one lessons, performance classes, duo coaching with another instrumentalist, lesson observation, yoga, Alexander Technique, concert opportunities Faculty: Richard Beauchamp, Helena Buckmayer, John Cameron, Elena FischerDieskau, Margaret Wakeford, James Willshire Fees: Resident £750; non-resident £550 Application deadline: 30 April 2020 stmarysmusicschool.co.uk

Summer School for Pianists Stowe, UK

15 to 21 August 2020 Running for over 40 years, the Summer School for Pianists takes place at Stowe School in Buckinghamshire, where participants can enjoy the facilities at the all-Steinway music department. The theme for 2020 is ‘Byways of Beethoven’, inviting participants to explore the composer’s lesser-known works.

Eligibility: Age 18+; masterclass participants should be grade 4 to diploma+ standard Tuition offered: Three masterclasses with 30 minutes per student, private lessons, piano accompaniment class, tutor presentations, recital opportunities

Piano Pot-Pourri Rieux-Volvestre, France

14 to 20 July 2020 Led by pianist, teacher and writer Graham Fitch, the Piano Pot-Pourri summer course offers eight participants the chance to improve their playing in a supportive and noncompetitive atmosphere. The course is held at Saint Laurent, a refurbished farmhouse in southwest France, where facilities include two grand pianos and a swimming pool.

Eligibility: Intermediate to advanced level Tuition offered: Masterclasses, workshops, lecture-recital, individual tuition, student concert, duet opportunities

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tudents at t a y s umme

choo enefit om duo coachin

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SUMMER SCHOOLS

Faculty: Graham Fitch, Daniel Hill, Karl Lutchmayer, Ann Martin-Davis, Christine Stevenson Fees: Piano masterclass participants £899; observers attending classes, activities and concerts £799. Fees include tuition, accommodation and meals Application deadline: N/A pianosummerschool.co.uk

ead ains o d ives a maste c ass at the aco s choo o usic umme iano cademy

USA PianoTexas International Academy & Festival Fort Worth, Texas

31 May to 28 June 2020 PianoTexas was founded in 1981 during the 6th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition and has since evolved into an academy and festival of world renown.

Three programmes are offered: Juniors, Young Artists and Teachers & Amateurs.

The Young Artists programme, which includes a concerto competition, attracts aspiring concert pianists. The 2020 edition of PianoTexas will celebrate the anniversaries of Beethoven and Chopin.

Eligibility: Juniors ages 6 to 18 | Young Artists born on or after 1 July 1992 | Applicants are required to submit video or audio recordings Tuition offered: Masterclasses, private lessons and conversations with guest artists, recital opportunities, chamber music sessions Faculty: Yoheved Kaplinsky, Harold Martina, Pascal Nemirovski, John O’Conor, John Owings, Andrey Ponochevny, Igor Resnianski, Victor Rosenbaum, Christopher Taylor, Dang

Jacobs School of Music Summer Piano Academy Bloomington, Indiana

20 June to 11 July 2020 Established in 1986, the Jacobs School of Music Piano Academy at Indiana University has earned a reputation as one of the most prestigious pre-college piano summer schools. Guest teachers in 2020 include Edward Auer and Arnaldo Cohen.

Eligibility: Entry via audition comprising YouTube recording of two contrasting pieces, list of repertoire studied in the past two years, and recommendation from principal teacher Tuition offered: Two individual lessons per week, daily group classes, guest lectures, lecturerecitals and presentations, piano duet and chamber coaching, theory classes, Feldenkrais Method classes Faculty: Melinda Baird, David Cartledge, Matthew Gianforte, Christopher Harding, Ruth Morrow, Meeyoun Park, Daniel Schene, Gregory Sioles, Karen Taylor, Gregory Wang, Tony Weinstein Fees: Resident $3,875; non-resident $2,536; financial aid and scholarships available Application deadline: 13 April 2020 music.indiana.edu/precollege/summer/piano

Thai Son, Chen Sa, Tamás Ungár, Jan Jiracek von Armin, Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra Fees: Juniors performers $750 to $1,000; observers $250 to $500 | Young Artists full tuition scholarships provided; observers $500 to $850 | Teachers & Amateurs performers $850 to $1,100; observers $250 to $550 | Accommodation and meal costs TBC Application deadlines: 2 March 2020 (performers); 1 May 2020 (observers) pianotexas.org

DAVID FRICK

hu an e o min in the conce to com etition at the iano e as nte nationa cademy estiva

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January 2020 International Piano

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KEY NOTES

Historical perspectives on piano technique

BY MURRAY MCLACHLAN

FIDELITY TO THE SCORE

M

usic competitions in the UK differ from those in other countries in one crucial respect: the use of sheet music. I am not referring to the competitors’ performances (most of which are given by memory) but rather the use of music by judges. It is not uncommon for jury members in UK-based competitions to be seen turning pages of scores while performers play – something which rarely happens in competitions in Italy, Belgium, Australia, the States and elsewhere.

This reflects different approaches to listening, and leads to questions about the impact and necessity of following instructions (or guidelines?) in the editions of works we play and study. Just how important is it to be reverential to the composer’s markings in a score? Does following the music during a performance shift the listener’s perspective and alter what they hear? In any case, what is the most important thing to prioritise – literal reproduction of the score, or a subjective ‘opinion’ of what the music means to a particular individual? Should the markings in a score be seen as instructions (rather like directions in a recipe book) or indications of the composer’s aesthetic and feelings? These are all big questions way beyond the scope of a modest article such as this, but for the beginnings of answers it is interesting to compare and contrast music from different historical periods, and fascinating to note ways in which performers from different eras and schools have tackled these issues.

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Pianists today are fortunate to be working in a culture that has benefitted from the laudable work of the historical performance movement. We are used to excellent editions and revelatory performances from artists who have researched and studied source material and writings. Thanks to the scholarship of musicians of the calibre of Robert Levin and Paul Badura-Skoda, there are many fantastic examples of good practice to inspire us.

This column has frequently mentioned the necessity of reading CPE Bach’s Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments, but there are other texts which can similarly help to enhance our understanding, including Howard Ferguson’s Keyboard Interpretation from the 14th to the 19th Century and Thurston Dart’s The Interpretation of Music.

Editions of keyboard music published prior to 1800 cannot be considered to present more than 50 per cent of the musical material necessary for realisation, exploration and exposition. The 18th-century aesthetic demanded executants to contribute significantly to the music they performed.

The interpreter was expected to add a tremendous amount to the printed page in terms of ornamentation, improvised cadenzas, links and decorations at cadences, fermatas and bridge sections. Arpeggiation, ‘filling in’ textures (so that single notes or pairs of notes become chords) as well as the employment of rubato is expected not only in JS Bach, Handel and Scarlatti, but also the French harpsichord masters ‘Les Clavicinists’, CPE Bach, JC Bach

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and – in totally different ways – Mozart, Clementi and early Haydn.

If an 18th-century score itself does not provide all the information we need, perhaps performers should also consider other available source material as ‘the score’.

Writings on performance practice, research, recordings, alternative editions, manuscript facsimiles and accounts from letters of the period are invaluable. So too is the experience of listening to and playing harpsichords and fortepianos. We are being parochial and stuck in our own time if we think we can use the score as a ‘road map’ to navigate our way through compositions of this era. In fact, we owe it to ourselves to venture much further as we gather evidence, data and inspiration for study and consideration.

Of course, total authenticity in performances of music written over 250 years ago is neither possible nor desirable.

We can never ascertain exactly how Bach would have performed his Fugue in D major from book one of The Well-Tempered Clavier (Example 1, below), and we have no way of exactly replicating the lighting, heating, or acoustical qualities of rooms where music was performed during 18th-century court spectaculars. In any case, do we really want to do this? Pianists are not in the business of cloning interpretations. The art of interpretation is a subtle combination, a synthesis that involves channelling source material via the sweat and perspiration of hours and hours of practising. Eventually, 3

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International Piano January 2020

47

KEY NOTES

the fruits of this labour will be evident in performances that require active listening by an audience – the final link in the chain that starts with the composer’s inspiration.

It is possible to play Bach’s fugue subject totally ‘straight’, counting four semiquavers evenly for every beat. Alternatively, you could embrace the Baroque performance aesthetic of double-dotting and choose to emulate the spirit of the French Overture style. Try celebrating the quasi-Handelian grandeur and monumental majesty of the subject by adorning it in the most florid ornamentation possible (as can be heard in Bernard Robert’s recording on Nimbus). Or you could seek to emulate an organ, harpsichord or string quartet. By comparing and contrasting performances by numerous leading artists (in addition to Roberts, try Richter, Hewitt, Tureck, Schiff, Gould and Edwin Fischer) we can immediately see that textual fidelity is as variable as handwriting. Conviction and integrity come from the manner of delivery.

Beethoven provides much more information on the printed page for the performer to consider. Whether or not one chooses to perform from memory, the ability to remember and replicate such detailed instructions (so-called ‘aural photography’) is an extremely beneficial and laudable ability.

But it is not the end of responsibility for the performer: we still have to decide what type of staccato, legato, accent, ritardando, accelerando, etc to use. Our dynamics are relative, and we need to find the soundworld of the music we are recreating. This can readily be seen at the opening of Beethoven’s Les Adieux Sonata Op 81a (Example 2, below).

It would be dry and somewhat challenging to replicate every phrase marking and dynamic indication provided here by Beethoven. Indeed, it is far more exciting – and equally thorough – to ‘orchestrate’ this music. The opening three notes evoke a distant horn. Breathe the phrasing as you

would if you were a brass player. The C minor chord at the start of the first full bar could be heard and ‘reproduced’ as the string section of a symphony orchestra in hushed mode.

When the dotted rhythm enters in the right hand you could imagine a clarinettist. The horn notes could be played deeply into the keys with rounded fingers, the string chord equally deeply but perhaps with flatter fingers, while the clarinet figure could have somewhat shallower articulation and a thinner sound. Equally, you may choose not to hear this extract orchestrally but rather emulate the soundworld of a string quartet throughout. The choice is yours, but the approach is always via reverence and respect to Beethoven’s text.

‘The art of interpretation involves channelling source material via hours of practising’ With the Romantic repertoire, one could argue that the text is of less literal importance than in Beethoven, though it is still vital to observe dynamic suggestions and avoid distortion. Editors have had a huge, sometimes rather biased influence on the text of many Romantic works, so it is essential to know when the composer leaves off and their editor takes over. For example, Emil von Sauer’s laudable edition of the works of his teacher Franz Liszt contain pedalling that is often excellent, but not necessarily

by Liszt. Fortunately, we live in an era where urtext editions are commonplace, so it is easy to check performance traditions against markings present in the source material of particular works.

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January 2020 International Piano

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As in the 18th-century repertoire, it is not enough in the Romantic literature to be merely reverential. In Chopin, for example, there has to be an awareness of dance rhythms, particularly those of the mazurka.

There has to be an understanding that dotted notes are not necessarily counted literally, and that if you have a dotted quaver followed by a semiquaver in the right hand against three triplet quavers in the left, you could opt to play the semiquaver simultaneously with the third triplet quaver.

Minute rhythmic inflexions and approaches are the life force of music. These are impossible to notate exactly and require sensitivity and understanding that comes from feeling the music in one’s bones. Delaying or accenting the second or third beats in a mazurka will not necessarily give a performance conviction, but awareness of this possibility is a good starting point. Besides, Chopin is a special case, as there are instances of completely different versions of the same piece in his hand (eg the celebrated Fantaisie-Impromptu), so one realises that any published piece by a Romantic composer may be a long way from what they considered the ‘definitive’ version.

With post-1900 repertoire, we see a huge range of approaches from different composers.

Some, such as Busoni in his late music, are extremely spartan in their demands, leaving much to the discretion of the player. But as the era of the superstar Romantic virtuoso waned and the world of total serialism, Boulez and Stockhausen beckoned, many composers began to desire less ‘personality’ and more reverence from interpreters.

Messiaen was a stickler for detail: his scores are pasted throughout with information. Not only do his dynamic and articulation markings require reverence and respect, but his rhythms are extremely complex and razor-sharp in their specificity. Woe betide the player who is rhythmically loose and approximate in the likes of ‘Traquet stapazin’ from Catalogue d’oiseaux.

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KEY NOTES

Cultivating the necessary discipline for much of the post-1900 repertoire can be a tiring and time-consuming process. Even the simplest Bartók scores are saturated with instructions, as can be seen in the opening of his first Romanian Folk Dance (Example 3, below). But we should always remember that composers are human and that even in the music of apparently strict figures such as Bartók, textual fidelity is not always what it seems.

Bartók’s approach was so detailed that he frequently went as far as notating durations of movements at the end of pieces, with timings down to the last second. Yet when playing his own music, recordings reveal that he often contradicted his published markings – he could be far freer as an interpreter than as an editor!

There is always much more to interpretation than reverential respect

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for the score. We may be amused at the contrast between competition juries who follow the music and those who don’t, but both approaches have their place.

Invariably, I stop looking at the text if I am listening to captivating playing: inspirational performances always take you away from reality. Peak experience in the concert hall stops listeners from turning pages and makes them listen exclusively. IP

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INTRODUCING

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International Piano January 2020

49

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MASTERCLASS

BENJAMIN EALOVEGA

Steven Osborne discusses the deceptively complex first movement of Beethoven’s Sonata in E major Op 109 INTERVIEW BY JESSICA DUCHEN

T

here’s a danger with the late Beethoven sonatas: if you try to make them sound ‘great’, you may miss the point. This is particularly true of the first movement of Op 109. It involves quite some complications, but the initial effect is unassuming.

This piece of music wasn’t originally written for a sonata but for a piano tutor book. When Beethoven was commissioned to write some sonatas, a friend suggested he could use this; the tutor book hadn’t yet been published, so he took the piece back. This happy accident sets the tone for all three final sonatas: the first movements of each are quite short.

In Beethoven’s manuscript the tempo marking is vivace; subsequently he added ma non troppo, so it’s interesting that it was modified from something lively. It begins on an upbeat, but to the listener it can’t help sounding like a downbeat – and avoiding that impression would require so much effort that it could almost destroy the simplicity of the character. I wonder if he does this to make the diminished seventh (bar 9) more surprising: it seems to arrive in the middle of the bar.

The combination of this brief first subject with a much longer section in a totally different tempo is a weird gesture. It probably derives from his experience of improvising: in these late works he’s always experimenting with ways to bring improvisation into the constructions. It’s tricky, though, to relate the first and second subjects so that they don’t seem disjointed. There isn’t a right answer. I like the idea that the first theme could easily continue, but something rips across it and then we’re in a different world.

It’s interesting, too, that in the development section there’s no sign of the second subject.

For a start, it would be hard to combine the two ideas; plus, we’ve had so much of the second idea that it makes sense to work on Steven Osborne: ‘So much depends on how you ee the e and o o the music

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International Piano January 2020

51

MASTERCLASS

the first. I think this helps in understanding the work conceptually: so much depends on your concept of it, and how you feel the ebb and flow of the music. Look at it away from the piano – on the sofa with a cup of tea – to see what it says to you.

One problem with the second idea, the adagio espressivo, is that it can easily sound in six. In a slow tempo it might ‘sit down’.

Keep your ear on the top line, keep it in three, and then the phrasing becomes more natural. Here, as often in Beethoven, there’s a crescendo followed by a drop to p – a forward impetus that is immediately withdrawn.

I always make things easier when I can, so I divide the big arpeggios (bars 12-13) between the hands. Some teachers insist you must play it exactly as written – but you’re trying to make the music sound as good as possible, and frankly playing the piano is hard enough as it is…

This section involves several different kinds of pace. In the arpeggios the beats disappear: I would stop counting and feel the gesture, which is one chord. See how long it wants to be, without trying to control it. Then at the triplets in bar 14, the rhythm and metre salvages itself – it becomes a grouping of two rather than three, as if in 6/8 rather than 3/4.

It’s very subtle writing.

In the first subject it’s not clear how much space there should be in the textures or how equal the semiquavers should sound. I personally like a sense of space, so these lower notes (in the left hand) aren’t loud. This does make the development ( from bar 16) tricky: here the middle notes need to sound melodic, although the ear is naturally drawn to the higher pitches.

Next, we encounter one of the longest phrase marks that Beethoven ever wrote: it’s a challenge to keep it going. At bar 22 the quality changes, with the melody written in crotchets and continuing through the off beat sfps. Here you’ve got to fool yourself that you’re playing legato. It’s physically impossible to play these chords legato with the hand only; you need the pedal. So you have to listen to how the notes connect and convince yourself you can do it with the pedal. Practise slowly, listening for anything that intrudes on that sense of legato.

The sfps from bar 33 are peculiar – though Beethoven often takes a gesture and carries it much further than you expect. This is

52

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unconventional, but here I pedal with each sfp to help keep the sense of line. It may sound blurred at the piano, but further away people don’t really notice. Another challenge comes at bar 52: the theme in the left hand is lovely, but it’s difficult to make it sing. There’s also a big jump from the extremities to the middle, plus a change in dynamic level, which can feel physically awkward.

‘In his late works, Beethoven is always experimenting with ways to bring improvisation into the construction’ In the next improvisatory episode, the long flourish of sextuplets in both hands (bar 63), it’s important to be secure in your fingering because it’s quite complicated; find what works for you. It helps to be aware of which notes are on the beats: crucial moments for the fingering patterns. This will make it feel more solid in your hands.

Sometimes in these improvisatory passages, Beethoven’s indications seem not to be literal, but an indication of a gesture. For instance, he writes ritardando at the end of the first slow section where the demisemiquavers change to semiquavers (bar 15): I don’t think the change of note values is literal, but a way of showing the music getting slower. Similarly, in bar 65, he uses the group of five as a way to indicate a small flourish that floats upward and gains a little extra momentum. At bars 84-85 there’s no ritardando, but it sounds ridiculous played strictly in time. So it’s about what the music’s saying to you, and what you feel is natural for it. Doing something just because it’s written that way is not a good enough reason; it’s got to be about feeling.

The passage of chords (bar 78) is tricky – it needs real strength of intention and it’s physically uncomfortable. It’s not easy to find justification for why Beethoven writes this. There’s something about arresting the semiquaver flow, then starting it again – a sense of returning. Perhaps a certain ambiguity surrounds the first theme but here is something clear, almost like a moral. It’s part of a subtle

emotional complexity in this movement, even though the style looks carefree.

The ending rises to the stratospheres, getting louder as well. There’s always something persistent about it. Markings mean different things according to context: I can only imagine the sfz at bar 97 means something expressive, not harsh. And it’s on a weird beat – in the sixth bar of the rising passage. For all the relaxed surface, there’s considerable underlying complexity. Even the last chord is on an off beat.

Working out fingering is crucial. Sometimes the most immediately obvious fingering creates little tensions in your hand, so I always try to notice when something doesn’t feel comfortable, then look for a better solution.

We sometimes hear that you shouldn’t put your thumb on black notes, but some things become easier when you break those kinds of rules. Coordination isn’t only about which finger plays when; it’s also about what your mind focuses on. Once it’s comfortable, listen for what you want to hear.

Slow practice is useful: notice when the coordination of the fingers suddenly seems unsure, then clarify what the problem is. It takes time, but you develop a strong physical connection to what you’re doing. Essentially, if something doesn’t feel comfortable, go slower.

I learned a great deal from Alfred Brendel’s recordings in terms of ebb and flow. He makes enormous fluctuations, but they sound completely natural because they serve the music’s character. Improvising ( for many years) has also helped me: it gives you a direct connection to the music’s sense of flow. I started seeing things related to improvisation in the compositions I was playing, almost as if the emotion came out of the way that time flowed. If I could hear anything in music history, it would be Beethoven improvising. IP

Steven Osborne’s recording of Beethoven’s Sonata Op 109, along with the Sonatas Opp 110 and 111, is available from Hyperion Records (CDA68219) stevenosborne.com

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MASTERCLASS

Benchmark recordings A kaleidoscope of delights awaits music lovers who listen online to Beethoven’s Sonata Op 109. Colin Clarke reports eethoven composed his Op 109 sonata in 1820. Coming after the ground-breaking Hammerklavier, Op 109 offers a surface change in expression and an insight into Beethoven’s inner world. The first movement can be understood in sonata form, but with intense juxtapositions demarcated through its tempo indications. The development section focuses on the first theme, leading to an impassioned restatement of the opening at a much higher pitch; that theme also recurs in the coda as if from afar. We experience a world of emotions allied to structural complexities that test the musical intelligence of any interpreter.

How to approach the contrasts – whether to soften or celebrate them – is key to successful interpretation. As always, YouTube offers a kaleidoscope of delights. Charles Rosen, the great writer on Beethoven, provides a dramatic, spacious reading. Hearing Edwin Fischer is to experience a sense of structural awareness mixed with insight of Furtwänglerian depth.

Pitch stability in the transfer may not be 100 per cent, but younger pianists could learn from Fischer’s near-orchestral command of tone, his tracing of the movement’s contours, voicing and declamations. The more objective Serkin is heard in an airless recording but is nonetheless persuasive; his heart has melted somewhat in his later 1987 account.

Dohnányi, going for dramatic gesture, gives one of the most interesting historical performances. Brendel’s Vox recording is highly impulsive, almost manic at times, but at its heart lies characteristic intelligence. The shallow piano sound comes from the original LPs, but you can still hear his emphasis on the music’s linear workings. There are similarities to Schnabel, whose deep understanding of flow is apparent; something also present in Brendel’s radiant later account, which shares much in intent with Kovacevich’s superb performance.

Wisdom is central to the older readings, nowhere more so than in Horszowski’s beautiful account which seems to stem from Beethoven himself. Feinberg, too, finds a superhuman combination of fantasy and

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TULLY POTTER COLLECTION

B

occupies a category all her own, reflecting the quality of her performance.

The epitome of modern objectivity in interpretation is Maurizio Pollini, whose careful sculpting is reminiscent of Backhaus. Of more recent performances, McCawley’s live Wigmore account is a lesson in intelligence and gentilité, approaching the transcendent. Uchida is radiant, Levit magnificent. And for a brilliant, heartfelt performance, try James Rhodes.

Various masterclasses make fascinating viewing too – look out for Jonathan Biss as both student and teacher. IP

LISTEN ONLINE Remarkable control of colour: Annie Fischer

wisdom. There is a sovereign sense of knowing to Kempff (1961) that was present even in his earliest, 1936 reading.

Though recorded in 1977/8, Annie Fischer was a pianist of another era, wisdom ever in balance with sensitivity. Her control of colour is remarkable, and she finds the fantastical slant of the Adagio at the heart of the Vivace – an extraordinary link. Hess is another lady with worlds of colour at her fingertips, and her reading glows from within.

Barenboim’s performance is remarkable for its sheer beauty – intimate, with crystal-clear delineation of multiple running lines. Arrau, masterly on black-and-white film, is another classic, individual in a different way. Burnished and incapable of playing an ugly sound, there are several lifetimes’ worth of experience here.

Firkušný exudes patrician elegance.

So, to the Russians. Late Gilels is deeply considered and objective, yet more than anyone else he takes us to the Elysian fields.

The most harrowing reading is undoubtedly Richter, captured live in 1991; his 1972 account is more intimate.

Gould is, like Beethoven himself, unpredictable and manically frenetic.

Leonskaja forges a link between the greats of the past and today. Her command is total: she

Arrau Backhaus Barenboim Barenboim (masterclass) Biss (masterclass) Brendel (Vox 1958) Brendel (1996) Dohnányi Feinberg Firkušný Annie Fischer Edwin Fischer Gould Hess Horszowski Gilels empff empff Kovacevich Leonskaja Levit McCawley Pollini (1975) Pollini (1995) Pollini (1998) Rhodes Richter (1972) Richter (1991) Rosen Schnabel Serkin (1952) Serkin (1987) Uchida

y2u.be/koqAdGcty3k y2u.be/fS4tojSJYmA y2u.be/1ZUZ76IU8pw y2u.be/ybqki3TR32c y2u.be/5xp5POs0tXw y2u.be/YB3-z2cDOqw y2u.be/RsY9faIxryU y2u.be/gp7-ZkFIUI8 y2u.be/cbAkHB5j5iM y2u.be/CwOzS1wBLpk y2u.be/o0x-8ZZ9_hE y2u.be/kmdB1-upYq8 y2u.be/NcgjzMzcURo y2u.be/WKo-xDYqCEY y2u.be/O-bVKA2CVlk y2u.be/DnA68jnSaSQ y2u.be/Yeftyk6-scc y2u.be/wKoXXkpxOBg y2u.be/z6327JuNnhM y2u.be/feOUBUMrNXg y2u.be/WeNej4IB9es y2u.be/-uJ4MMiKfvI y2u.be/z2x_aHqyfqE y2u.be/npl0vMcni6Q y2u.be/Hbn71iXKK7Y y2u.be/27btQJaXCsE y u.be e ffx y2u.be/989aVWlAbpM y2u.be/L6fjbdVKAjs y2u.be/5eKGHvoh93M y2u.be/qFKT6eyPNVs y2u.be/MEeO8uULTKY y2u.be/bbMBhuHYJBE

International Piano January 2020

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International Piano January 2020

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Beethoven arr. Balakirev

Allegretto String Quartet No 8 in E minor Op 59/2

BY JEREMY NICHOLAS

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any readers will be familiar with Mily Balakirev’s piano music through Islamey and the Piano Sonata. Two of his transcriptions hover on the brink of the repertoire: Reminiscences on Glinka’s opera ‘A Life for the Czar’, and the ingenious arrangement of the Larghetto (Romanza) from Chopin’s Piano Concerto No 1. To most, the fact that he made any transcriptions of Beethoven’s music will come as a surprise.

Equally surprising is that the two works which attracted him were movements from string quartets. One is of the celebrated Cavatina from Op 130. The other is the piece reproduced here: the Allegretto (third movement) from String Quartet No 8 in E minor Op 59/2.

Mily Balakirev (1837-1910)

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The Cavatina transcription was first published in 1859. The Allegretto, though it did not appear in print until 1954, was written during Balakirev’s first visit to the Caucasus in the summer of 1862. It was a pivotal period in his life – he returned the following year and in 1868, noting down folk melodies that would have a profound effect on his subsequent career as a composer.

So why Beethoven? We know of Balakirev’s lifelong love of the music of Chopin and Glinka, yet these were but two of the composers with whose works he became thoroughly familiar due to his early patron, the wealthy Alexander Ulybyshev. The leading musical figure in Nizhny Novgorod (where Balakirev studied as a teenager) was not only a biographer of Mozart and Beethoven but the owner of a vast musical library to which Balakirev had free access.

Aged 15, he was allowed to lead rehearsals of Ulybyshev’s private orchestra in Beethoven’s First and Eighth Symphonies.

And why this quartet movement? Op 59 is the second of the Razumovsky Quartets written between 1805 and 1806 (shortly after the Eroica Symphony) and commissioned by Count Razumovsky, the Russian ambassador to Vienna. The late American critic and musicologist Joseph Kerman wrote, ‘It is probably not too much to say that Op 59 doomed the amateur string quartet.’

Razumovsky was an able second violinist in his own quartet; its first violinist was Beethoven’s friend and inspiration Ignaz Schuppanzigh.

Such accomplishment encouraged Beethoven to push the technical and musical boundaries of the quartet medium to give it ‘the heroic discourse of the symphony’.

That is certainly true of this movement with its unstable rhythm and unsettling syncopation. The structure of the Allegretto (really the Scherzo) is ABABA, alternating between minor and major. The key is E minor,

Count Andrey Razumovsky, who commissioned Beethoven’s Op 59 string quartets

the opening phrase a permutation of the arpeggio that begins the first movement.

The Trio (in the major) is a tip of the hat to Razumovsky – we hear a Russian theme, Glory to the Sun. This theme first appeared in a collection compiled by the polymath Nikolay Lvov and composer Ivan Prach, and was later used by Musorgsky in Boris Godunov and by Rachmaninov in his Six Morceaux Op 11. IP

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67

250

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for BEETHOVEN

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250 piano pieces for Beethoven contrasting middle section. The end of the dream remains open…

Drechsel’s pianistic training began with his mother, the concert pianist Ruth DrechselPüster. He majored in piano at the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne, where he studied with Roswitha Gediga-Glombitza and Pavel Gililov.

He completed his musical education by participating in masterclasses by Karl-Heinz Kämmerling, Peter Feuchtwanger and the Alban Berg Quartet.

Drechsel is a member of the Köln-Weimar Piano Trio with Dagmar Spengler and Gernot Süßmuth. He also enjoys collaborations with harmonium player Christoph Lahme (‘Liaison extraordinaire’) and as a duo partner of bassoonists Andreas Herkenrath and Berthold Große, Drechsel is a two-time winner (1997 and 2007) of Germany’s International Sieburg Composition Competition. In 2013, he was awarded a special prize from the Friends of Engelbert Humperdinck for his Hänsel und Gretel-Fantasy for cello duo. His compositions are mostly published by Verlag Schottstädt and Edition Dohr. IP

BY NIKOLAS SIDERIS

50 piano pieces for Beethoven is an ongoing project led by pianist Susanne Kessel from Bonn, Germany. Kessel has invited 250 composers to mark the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth in 2020 by writing pieces inspired by his music, philosophy and life.

Louis Sauter’s Tristan im Mondschein is a musical fantasy that merges Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata Op 27/2 with Wagner’s Tristan. Beginning in the same tonality as the Beethoven and with similar rhythmic figures, Sauter makes use of chromatic themes and harmonies that lead to the arpeggiated Tristan chord which concludes the piece.

Sauter was born in the USA but has lived most of his life in France. He is a musician and communications engineer who began his career doing research in signal processing and multimedia, later moving towards management and consulting. His engineering work has included several projects in the field of music, notably serving on the Scientific Committee of IRCAM in Paris, and as a consultant for the creation of a national opera house.

Largely self-taught as a musician, Sauter has benefitted from advice from great artists.

He met Olivier Messiaen several times, and sharply remembers one of the composer’s musical analysis classes focusing on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

As a pianist, Sauter especially enjoys playing chamber music and accompanying singers. He has sung tenor with the Pasdeloup and Orchestre Colonne Choirs and given performances in the Salle Pleyel, Chartres Cathedral and Palais Omnisports de Bercy, as well as appearing on French TV and several recordings. Sauter has composed over 50 works for solo instruments, voice, chamber ensembles and orchestra. His compositions have been performed internationally.

Olivier Drechsel’s Dreaming of E is a longing, lovelorn waltz setting of the opening

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MAGGIE PARLASKA

2

Inspired by Beethoven: composers Louis Sauter and Olivier Drechsel

melody from Beethoven’s bagatelle ‘Für Elise’ WoO 59. When the original turns to hopeful C major, Drechsel introduces a secondary theme from Beethoven’s love song Zärtliche Liebe (Tender Love) WoO 123, which forms the short

Volumes 1-8 of 250 piano pieces for Beethoven are available from Editions Musica Ferrum. Tristan im Mondschein appears in Volume 4; Dreaming of E can be found in Volume 6. Volumes 9-10 will be published in 2020. musica-ferrum.com

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CONCERTS • REVIEWS

i tuosity and efined ud ement ancesco iemontesi

UK

LONDON Wigmore Hall Francesco Piemontesi 3 November Royal Festival Hall Daniil Trifonov 31October; Steven Osborne 6 November

S

teven Osborne has long made Messaien’s Vingt regards his calling card, but his performance of it at the QEH was transcendent: playing the whole 127-minute work without a break, he held a full house spellbound.

Checking up afterwards on how his approach differed from that of the other top contender, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, I found the contrast stark: the French pianist’s account seemed clinical in comparison with Osborne’s mighty conjuring-up of emotional soundworlds.

He himself talks about his ‘almost childish pleasure in playing both extremely quietly and crashingly loud’, but his artistry went infinitely further than that. The way the ‘God theme’ emerged from pastel shades of pianissimo at the start was magical in itself, but the journey

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he then took us on encompassed ecstatic realms which no words could describe. The giant fugue, the awestruck evocations of the divine, the intense silences, the explosions of volcanic energy, the chirpy Gershwin insertions – everything was flawlessly delivered, with Osborne like a priest supervising a rite, the conduit for heavenly mysteries.

Daniil Trifonov’s recitals are always unpredictable events, and his International Piano Series recital ran true to form. He added a couple of Borodin pieces at the last moment, made the most unlikely segue, and – as he has done so often – bored us rigid with a rambling Rachmaninov encore which seemed to go on for ever. But he exhibited an astonishingly relaxed virtuosity in a series of Scriabin Études followed by the Black Mass Sonata, ringing the changes between hurtling tempestuousness and bated-breath poetry. As Trifonov explained to me in an interview for IP last October, he uses his whole body when he plays, an approach vividly demonstrated here by his various physical contortions, sometimes standing to hammer the keyboard with his fists. But his segue from the Black Mass to Beethoven’s Opus 110 in effect diminished both works. His interpretation of

Opus 110 was novel: most pianists present its progression towards serenity via ariosos and fugues as the gradual lifting of an emotional burden, but in Trifonov’s hands it became light as a feather – not, one suspects, what Beethoven intended.

Having just released a superb recording of Schubert’s last three piano sonatas (see review on page 78), Francesco Piemontesi brought other Schubert works to Wigmore Hall – the D899 Impromptus and the Gasteiner Sonata D850. Even the opening chord of the first impromptu brought us up short, being huge and lingeringly resonant. As was the rest of the piece – I’ve never heard it so spaciously conceived. The turbulent excitement of the second movement, the muted tenderness of the third, and the disarming simplicity of the fourth were all small revelations. As was the sonata: after an opening Allegro vivace, which impetuously smashed its way through the modulations, came a sweetly singing Con moto, an exuberant Scherzo and a whimsical finale whose ticking-clock theme expanded gloriously like a great oak from an acorn. This unassuming Swiss pianist possesses a winning combination of virtuosity and instinctively refined judgment. IP

International Piano January 2020

77

REVIEWS • CDs

Critic’s choice

BY BRYCE MORRISON

by its whimsy and caprice), Melnikov is deft in the abrupt scales of the Allegro strepitoso and sinks gratefully into temporary repose in the Andante tranquillo. These are personal and affecting readings, though with too little sense in No 7 (the second of the so-called War Sonatas) of, in Richter’s words, a world shorn of reason and equilibrium.

Prokofiev Piano Sonatas Nos 4, 7 & 9 Alexander Melnikov (pf) Harmonia Mundi HMM902203 Volume 2 of Alexander Melnikov’s Prokofiev sonata cycle consists of Nos 4, 7 and 9, with 1, 2 and 5 still to come. Intent on modifying the composer’s sardonic nature, he gives us Prokofiev with a human face, less armed with a porcupine’s quills and spines. You won’t hear Richter’s remorseless drive in the Fourth Sonata’s finale, with its strained gaiety and abandon, and you miss the dark and heavy tread in the Andante assai. There is a softening of impact, too, in the Seventh Sonata’s finale, Melnikov insufficiently menacing in his refusal to treat it as a virtuoso vehicle.

Greater success comes in the Ninth Sonata.

If this remains the most unloved of the sonatas (many are bewildered rather than bewitched

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ALBUM OF THE MONTH

Luminous pianism: Arcadi Volodos

78

January 2020 International Piano

Versailles Works by Rameau, Visée, Royer, Anglebert, Couperin, Duphly, Lully and Balbastre Alexandre Tharaud (pf) Erato 9029538642 Alexandre Tharaud’s disc of French Baroque composers is full of ever-surprising delights.

Sadly mis-cast in late Beethoven, Tharaud returns to home ground, offering what he calls a ‘bouquet’ of widely varying composers. As

he relays in the accompanying booklet, such music is rarely played on modern instruments and much of it has never been recorded.

For Tharaud, it is impossible to interpret Saint-Saëns, Debussy or Ravel without reference to Couperin and Rameau. He reminds us that Chopin played Rameau and that Royer’s La Marche des Scythes anticipates Chabrier’s exuberance.

Such verbal insight and enthusiasm are mirrored in superb performances of the music, be they frisky or plaintive, poetic or pungent, gloriously dismissive of convention or expectation. In Rameau’s Gavotte et doubles he employs the widest variety of touch and colour, revelling in the resources of a modern piano, while in the same composer’s Viens, Hymen he is joined by silvery-voiced Sabine Devieilhe. Elsewhere he pays tribute to Marcelle Meyer, who first inspired his love of this magical corner of the repertoire. Finely recorded and presented, this is an elusive but ideal Christmas gift.

‘Volodos conjures a light and shade beyond the reach of virtually any other pianist’

A

rcadi Volodos’ visits to the studio are rare. Here, revisiting Schubert after virtuoso flights at once sky-rocketing and cool-headed (his dizzying Horowitz and Cziffra transcriptions, not forgetting other less worldly recordings of Brahms and Mompou), he now reveals that he possesses what is surely the most refined and spectacular technique of any living pianist.

Listeners will be lost in wonder at the finesse he draws from Schubert’s great A major Sonata No 20, representing a seachange also heard in his London recital earlier this year, where his pianissimo was so fragile it scarcely passed the front row. Pyrotechnics are now replaced with extreme inwardness and confidentiality. For

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CDs • REVIEWS

Trio). Even in a crowded field of celebrated recordings, Piemontesi’s performances are wholly exceptional, enlightening if exhausting at every level. They are crowned by Pentatone’s beautifully natural sound.

Schubert – Last Piano Sonatas PIano Sonatas Nos 19, 20 & 21 Francesco Piemontesi (pf) Pentatone PTC 5186742 Here is confirmation that Francesco Piemontesi belongs to a small elite: he is a pianist that other pianists go to hear. In this ultimate musical challenge, the daunting scale of his playing constantly reminds you of a desolation and despair never far from the surface of Schubert’s lyricism. Not even the exuberant codas of the A major and B-flat Sonatas (Nos 20 and 21) erase an awareness of the shadow of the grim reaper; this is particularly notable in the massive spans of the C minor Sonata (No 19), where Piemontesi’s focus and intensity are unwavering, never more so than in the finale’s menacing danse macabre.

He is awesome and speculative in the A major while in the B-flat he achieves greatness without recourse to idiosyncrasy or extremes. He gives us the first movement repeat, contradicting Brendel’s admonition, and his Scherzo is gloriously rapid and elfin (though with a darker note sounded in the

some, such quality will seem less dramatic and direct than Piemontesi’s reading, more artfully applied in its endless scope of nuances and rainbow colours. When you witness the palpable stillness Volodos conjures from the opening of the Andante, and when you hear his chiaroscuro, a light and shade beyond the reach of virtually any other pianist, you feel above all compelled to marvel at Schubert’s genius.

In the Three Minuets, only superficially slight encores, Volodos’ alchemy and luminous pianism creates its own extraordinary ambience. His ghostly tread in D600 makes this performance among the most eerie on record. Sony’s sound does Volodos proud, capturing every tint of his unique dynamic range.

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Destination Rachmaninov – Arrival Rachmaninov: Piano Concertos Nos 1 & 3; The Silver Sleigh Bells (arr. Trifonov); Vocalise (arr. Trifonov) Daniil Trifonov (pf) DG 4836617 With this disc, Daniil Trifonov completes his cycle of Rachmaninov’s works for piano and orchestra. A mix of surprises – many breath-taking, a few regrettable – he has you blowing hot and cold. Riding high on the crest of adulation he is a mercurial, unpredictable pianist.

Trifonov’s prodigious dexterity is compromised by DG’s sound which takes the edge off his playing, making it sound less eloquent and glittering than it should.

His performance of the First Concerto, audaciously slow in the central Andante,

Schubert Piano Sonata No 20; Three Minuets – D334, 335 & 600 Arcadi Volodos (pf) Sony 19075868292

is less urgently committed than expected, particularly when compared with his 2018 album of the Second and Fourth Concertos (DG 483 5335). Rachmaninov’s own recordings apart, Richter in No 1 (with French horns that sound like saxophones) and Horowitz-Reiner, Gilels and Cliburn (his 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition triumph) in No 3 carry greater, less idiosyncratic distinction – and we cannot forget Stephen Hough’s visceral thrills in his live Dallas performances (Hyperion 2004).

As is now customary, Trifonov chooses the fuller cadenza in No 3, where with muscles bulging and rippling he is let loose with a vengeance. His arrangement of Vocalise is overladen, but he dazzles in his arrangement of ‘The Silver Sleigh Bells’ (part one of The Bells choral symphony Op 35) – a burst of joyous brilliance.

Encores Works by Gluck, Purcell, Scarlatti, Stojowski, Paderewski, R Strauss, Grieg, Rubinstein, Scriabin, Rachmaninov, Shostakovich, Granados, Mompou and Albéniz Nelson Freire (pf) Decca 4850153 Issued to celebrate Nelson Freire’s 75th birthday, this recital of encores – a gratifying mix of the familiar and unfamiliar (though surprisingly without music from Freire’s beloved Brazil) – shows this legendary pianist evoking a dreamworld in playing of rare poetic delicacy. His days of high-flying virtuosity may be past, but have been exchanged for gentler virtues.

In his selection of Grieg’s Lyric Pieces, Freire, like Gilels before him, explores a whole world of intimate feeling and a melancholy at the heart of Grieg’s indelibly northern nature (‘At your feet’ is a musing on unrequited love if ever there was one). What quiet, unforced beauty he finds in two Rachmaninov Preludes (Op 32 Nos 10 and 12) while Mompou’s ‘Jeunes filles au jardin’ from Scènes d’enfants could hardly step more lightly or sing more seductively. This enchanting recital comes with photographs of the pianist taken over the years and includes a warmly affectionate essay by Alain Lompech.

International Piano January 2020

79

REVIEWS • CDs

Beethoven round-up

BY COLIN CLARKE

finale Kodama is more sensitive than Vetter.

Her Eroica Variations are considered and the Triple Concerto joyous. The sound is full dynamic, so pianissimi really are quiet (try the opening of the Triple Concerto). Superb.

Beethoven Piano Concertos Nos 0-5; Rondo in a o Eroica Variations r on r o Mari Kodama (pf); Deutsches SymphonieOrchester Berlin/Kent Nagano; Kolya Blacher (vln), Johannes Moser (vc) Berlin Classics 0301304 – 4 CDs Complementing her Beethoven sonata cycle on Pentatone, Mari Kodama now presents the Beethoven concertos alongside the Rondo Wo0 6, Eroica Variations and Triple Concerto.

She is certainly a musical player: the Rondo is far more charming and eloquent than Boris Giltburg’s. Poise is her keyword, and in Nagano she has a comrade-in-arms. While Kodama’s musicality is a natural fit for the Fourth Concerto, the success of her Emperor, in a performance of utmost integrity and warmth, is perhaps surprising. There is strength to Kodama’s finale, bathed in bright sunshine.

The First Concerto offers true orchestral lightness; in response, Kodama is magnificently crisp, while the Largo is warm and glowing. Similar traits inform No 2, with the finale particularly alive to period style.

Kodama understands that the Third Concerto represents a departure in scale, yet maintains the characteristic detailing of this set, descents neatly dovetailing, the cadenza poised. The Largo exudes gentle loveliness, while the wind solos project a sense of restrained drama.

Kodama is certainly truer to the spirit of the Fourth than say, Lisiecki, in a performance that never feels rushed, the finale light as air; her Emperor has a controlled resplendence.

But it is in the fillers that Kodama shines, offering a magical Concerto No 0 (with improvised cadenza in consultation with Martin Galling). In the Hungarian-tinged

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Beethoven Piano Concertos Nos 1-5 Jan Lisiecki (pf/dir); Academy of St Martin in the Fields DG 483 7637 – 3 CDs Beethoven Piano Concertos Nos 2 & 5 Martin Helmchen (pf); Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin/ Andrew Manze Alpha Classics 555 Following his brilliant Beethoven Night at the 2019 Proms, Andrew Manze confirms his affinity with the composer in this recording of two piano concertos with Martin Helmchen (whose star is very much rising). Together they present a dynamic Second Concerto, wherein even the slow movement breathes youthful optimism. The highpoint of Helmchen’s Second is a radiant, commanding cadenza, Beethoven deliciously exploratory, Helmchen’s response multifaceted and fabulously coloured. That central Adagio, too, speaks of curiosity, but attains profound peace in its final, ultra-pianissimo moments.

Helmchen’s sense of colour is abundantly present in his performance of the Emperor, an account noteworthy for its responsiveness to Beethoven’s structural adventurousness. The musicians revel in Beethoven’s transcending of expectations; Helmchen’s technique is more than equal to Beethoven’s trickiest demands. The performers capture the essence of the central movement without recourse to extremes of tempo, and the finale is particularly wide-ranging.

These are excellent performances – the interpretative gold is undeniable. This is the first volume of a set of complete concertos.

Refreshing, uplifting Beethoven on a label that is defining itself by its fine A&R.

Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki’s recordings for DG have revealed a musician of the highest calibre, but directing all five Beethoven concertos from the keyboard is still quite an ask for this young artist (born 1995). He opts for the longest cadenza in the First Concerto, crowning a first movement that can sag occasionally.

The orchestra does not sound fully engaged, though the central Largo is better in this respect. There is plenty of suave phrasing to the finale; but again, it could be more unbuttoned.

The orchestra plays with more vigour in the Second Concerto’s opening, but Lisiecki reveals a tendency to overbeautify, and in doing so can sound false.

The leanness of the orchestra in the Third Concerto is matched by Lisiecki’s transparency. The recording favours the piano in that the ASMF’s strings seem lacking in depth, even harsh up top. More successful is the central Largo, the piano’s initial statement sonorous, beautiful and profound – though even here there is a loss of tension.

Concerns with lack of body to the orchestral sound recur in the Fourth, undermining the lyric impulse and, in the second movement, lessening the contrast between strings and piano.

Lisiecki’s low-pedal approach has some advantages in the finale, but ultimately it fails to take off. The Emperor is the finest performance of the set, but again the orchestral contribution can be harsh and distracting.

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CDs • REVIEWS

Beethoven ano on r o o n ra n o o n a o Sophie-Mayuko Vetter (pf/fortepiano); Hamburg Symphony Orchestra/Peter Ruzicka Oehms Classics OC 1710

Beethoven Piano Concertos Nos 1 & 2; ondo o Boris Giltburg (pf); Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/Vasily Petrenko Naxos 8.574151

The main interest in this release lies in the pieces outside of the established canon, plus the use of a fortepiano for the Piano Concerto No 0.

In Vetter’s account, part of the Concerto No 6 fragment is similar in style to the quirky Op 77 Fantasy. The orchestral contribution is lovely but the acoustic too boomy; one also remains aware of the amount of filling in this undeniably pleasant piece.

Written in his early teens, Beethoven’s Concerto No 0 feels perfect on a 1906 Broadwood fortepiano, and therefore complements rather than challenges Kodama’s reading. The slow movement here is an absolute dream. The freshness of both fortepianist and orchestra is remarkable.

If the Second Concerto is somewhat more workaday, it does include some nice decorations from Vetter.

Worthwhile for the less familiar pieces.

Another sensible coupling of the early Rondo WoO6. Giltburg is more traditionally muscular in his Beethoven than Kodama, giving this piece real gravitas.

There is much to admire about these performances of the first two concertos, particularly as the RLPO are in such fine, lean form under Petrenko. The central Largo of the First Concerto is laudably taken at a tempo that moves, and Giltburg is at his most eloquent (as is a fine clarinettist). The orchestra’s contribution to the finale is vital and alive, both pianist and orchestra paying great attention to detail, especially those rhythmically destabilising accents. A pity the woodwinds are slightly distanced.

If the Adagio and the Rondo of the Second do not quite settle, Giltburg nevertheless gives clean, middle-of-the-road readings of the two early concertos. The ‘bonus’ Wo0 6 is the most enjoyable item.

SERGIO VERANES

Integrity and warmth: Mari Kodama

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Beethoven o ar a on a a a r Ronald Brautigam (fortepiano) BIS SACD 2410 – 6 CDs

and

While BIS’s box set is almost slimline, its contents most definitely are not. Brautigam’s fortepiano survey is magnificent, comprising four full discs of variations (including Eroica and Diabelli), the complete bagatelles, rondos and other miscellaneous pieces.

This is far more than a tidying exercise.

Exploring the byways of Beethoven’s output and listening to, for example, the early bagatelles next to the great later ones, is an educational activity in itself. To hear ‘lesser’ Beethoven is to fill out the picture, not reveal weaknesses. Brautigam clearly lives and breathes this music, and hearing the pieces on fortepiano brings us closer to them (damper effects are more pronounced, for example). He plays a reconstructed 1819 Graf fortepiano for the Eroica Variations, offering a darker timbre, but favours an 1805 instrument for the earlier pieces (both built by Paul McNulty).

Brautigam laudably lavishes just as much love on the six rondos, the charmingly simple Ecossaises WooO83 or the cruelly under-rated Op 77 Fantasy as he does on the Diabellis.

The bagatelles offer examples of both ends of Beethoven’s output. Disc 1 begins with a charming rendition of the Op 33 set followed by a tranche of pieces dating mainly from the 1790s; the late sets Opp 119 and 126 are delivered with a sense of simplicity that can only come from depth of knowledge.

The Diabelli Variations are performed on McNulty’s big-toned Graf, Brautigam’s performance initially letting us hear the variations as just another set – until Beethoven shows us otherwise. Perhaps this wisdom comes with Brautigam’s obvious affinity for Beethoven’s way with variations: listen to the finely wrought set on ‘God Save the King’, for example.

The recording, configured for 5.0 stereo, is exemplary.

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REVIEWS • CDs

BY BENJAMIN IVRY

B

eethoven’s symbolic significance is an inextricable part of his music. The theme of freedom in Fidelio and the Ninth Symphony, among other works, resonates deeply with performers and listeners alike.

In 2016, the Turkish pianist Fazil Say (born in 1970) was awarded an International Beethoven Prize. That same year, his conviction by an Istanbul court for ‘publicly denigrating the religious values of a section of the population’ for his postings on Twitter was definitively overturned, and Say was acquitted of blasphemy charges.

Decades earlier, his father, the musicologist Ahmet Say, was jailed repeatedly for opposing a Turkish military coup. In Turkey, where poets, journalists and others are still imprisoned for speaking against regimes, Beethoven’s association with liberty is especially cherished.

Speaking to Der Spiegel in 2008, Say summarized the increasingly repressive atmosphere in his homeland by wondering about the future: ‘Will I still be able to play Beethoven?’

Despite this intense identification, Say received critical brickbats for his 2005 CD of selected Beethoven sonatas (Naïve V5016).

Lapses in taste included a tendency to aspire to an automaton-like hyper-velocity, with intermittent keyboard banging.

This new set, recorded in 2018-2019, avoids some of these flaws. Say’s renditions are generally strongest, because best behaved, in the early Haydnesque sonatas. Indeed, Say’s 2007 album of Haydn sonatas (Naïve V5070) remains among his more notable releases.

Beethoven’s Sonata No 1 in F minor is dispatched in a courtly, civilised manner.

This and the Sonata No 2 in A major are among the highlights of the set, where vitality

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Vivacissamente, is played truculently. As a farewell, it resembles an obstreperous houseguest who breaks all the crockery before departing.

An overall absence of aesthetic superego may be heard in these performances. As a young student, Say lost his major keyboard mentors prematurely. His compatriot Mithat Fenmen (1916-1982) died suddenly when Say was 11, and the American David Levine (1949-1993) perished not long after teaching Say in Düsseldorf.

While admirers may relish a pianist’s histrionics unrestrained by wiser counsel, it may lead to vaingloriousness. In booklet notes for this release, Say announces that with these sonatas, he intended to ‘give the world a great gift… [and] create one of the greatest interpretations of one of the greatest composers. I hoped to give future generations, piano students and young undergraduates, renditions that would be among the most important “reference” recordings of the 21st century.’

Doubts are raised about Say’s appreciation of past references when he cites an ‘edition by the famous pianist Arthur (sic) Schnabel, featuring his own annotations. [Schnabel] was one of the first to record Beethoven’s sonatas, and I learned a lot from him.’

Spelling Artur Schnabel’s first name wrong in the original Turkish language version of the notes – an error repeated here in all translations provided of the notes, including in German – is a minor flaw. IP

Visceral dynamism: Fazil Say

MARCO BORGGREVE

Beethoven Complete Piano Sonatas Fazil Say (pf) Warner Classics 0190295380243 – 9 CDs

does not lead to exceeding stylistic limits, and excessive percussive effects are avoided.

By Sonata No 4 in E-flat major, however, crashing, bashing and loud singing become obtrusive. Say has cited Glenn Gould as an early influence, but he transforms piano sonatas into vocal works even more than the eccentric Canadian.

A straightforward version of the Sonata No 10 in G major captures an aptly grotesque melodic line in the final movement, marked Scherzo: Allegro assai. The Funeral March Sonata No 12 in A-flat major features ardent lyrical playing.

The Waldstein Sonata in C major Op 53 responds well to Say’s approach, possibly because its hyperactive beginning corresponds to an emotional urgency that he identifies with Beethoven. Some of the delicacy applied to the earlier sonatas is retained, without sacrificing the visceral dynamism that Say’s fans relish.

Even here, however, cacophony intrudes in the picture. The opening of the Moonlight Sonata No 14 in C-sharp minor is sluggish and dogged, and the final movement, marked Presto agitato, is rife with slamming noises, as is the Appassionata Sonata in F minor Op 57.

Sonata No 15 in D major (Pastoral) conveys a certain bonhomie, but as elsewhere in this project, nary a smile is communicated. Even where a glint of humour might be expected, as in the Cuckoo Sonata in G major Op 79, there is uninterrupted earnestness instead.

The final movement of the Sonata in E-flat major Op 81a (Les Adieux), marked

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DVD • REVIEWS

R

ight at the end of this thoughtful and illuminating documentary, we hear the voice of Charlie Chaplin, friend and neighbour of the subject of this film. ‘I have known three geniuses in my life,’ he says. ‘One is Winston Churchill. Another is Albert Einstein. The other is Clara Haskil.’ It is quite a claim, even if made by someone who himself was a genius.

An immense amount of time and thought has gone into this project – and it shows in every aspect of its presentation. Its stated aim is to ask what makes a musician a great interpreter (the film’s title is oddly translated as: ‘The Performer’s Enigma’). During the course of the film and a supplementary DVD of bonus material, this question is addressed by many of the contributors. But really it is a chronological account of Clara Haskil’s career told through her own words (using her diaries and letters) and those who knew her. Co-directors Pierre-Olivier François, Prune Jaillet and the late Pascal Cling have assembled an enormous amount of visual material to tell the story, working with one disadvantage: there is no known film of their subject playing the piano (there is but one known recording of her speaking, which we shall come to later). For a musician of her eminence, this is quite extraordinary, yet the more we hear of her life and personality, the less surprising the omission becomes.

Haskil has achieved legendary status among her peers. She merited two volumes ( four CDs) in Philips’ multi-label monumental Great Pianists of the 20th Century series and contributors to the film take delight in describing her unique gifts – the light touch, fabulous tone, exceptionally fluent technique,

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TULLY POTTER COLLECTION

Clara Haskil – Le mystère de l’interprête Subtitles: French, English, German Audio: French, German Louise Productions & Seppia Film – 2 DVDs + 1 CD

taste, intelligence and profundity. All regret that they were not recognised fully until late in her life. In reality, Clara Haskil tasted real success for little more than 10 years.

She was born in Bucharest in 1899. A child prodigy, she had her first lessons when she was three and made her public debut aged eight playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto in A major K488 accompanied by a second piano. Lessons with Cortot, Lazare Lévy and Madame Giraud-Letarse followed in Paris, culminating in the premier prix from the Conservatoire aged fifteen. But her career never really took off, not helped by the scoliosis which led to her spending the entire period of the First World War in isolation.

Throughout the thirties, when in some years she played fewer than a dozen concerts, she was supported financially by wealthy patrons, especially the Princesse de Polignac who, as the DVD’s booklet has it, ‘welcomed her to her brilliant musical soirées… While her talent was admired in this milieu, [Haskil] remained a pianist for the happy

few, unrecognised by the larger public, and neglected by concert organisers.’

Haskil’s career difficulties, we learn, were partly of her own making. Reserved and shy, she suffered from stage fright, ‘exaggerated self-criticism’ and ‘ferocious self-doubt’, sometimes fleeing the concert hall to avoid speaking to anyone after recitals at which she felt she had not played well. She discouraged agents from representing her by refusing to accept commercial terms. Yet, when you hear any of her 33 studio recordings, whether it be in her adored Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven and Schumann, there is a special quality that not only bewitches but is completely emotionally involving.

Her memory is perpetuated by the Concours International de Piano Clara Haskil, founded in 1963, which takes place every two years in Vevey, Haskil’s home on Lake Geneva after 1942. Footage from the 2015 competition provides a framework for the film (unfortunately, this was one year in which no first prize was awarded, a somewhat deflating moment when announced.)

The DVD has a cornucopia of bonus film material including archive interviews with Haskil’s sister and Nikita Magaloff, Martha Argerich talking about Haskil in an informal post-concert interview, and with the two ladies responsible for the plaque at Brussel’s train station marking the spot where she met her end, falling down a flight of stairs in December 1960.

But there is more. A separate CD contains seven valuable unpublished Haskil performances: Chopin’s F minor concerto with Giulini from 1960, and a Columbia test pressing of Liszt’s Gnomenreigen. Most unexpected of all, an historic document unearthed by Chaplin’s son Eugène: Kinderszenen (minus No 3 ‘Haschemann’), Daquin’s Le coucou, two Scarlatti sonatas and the largo movement from Beethoven’s Sonata Op 10/3 recorded in 1953 by Charlie Chaplin on a reelto-reel recorder in his home. He sets up the microphone as Clara settles at the piano. ‘Will it hear my voice now?’ she asks.

Nearly 60 years after Haskil’s death, this release comes as a properly considered and loving celebration of a great artist. IP

BY JEREMY NICHOLAS

Clara Haskil (1895-1960)

International Piano January 2020

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REVIEWS • HI-FI

Spatial effects Rafael Todes introduces a new range of immersive listening experiences from innovative audio engineering firm coustics

O

‘

cean’ is a new sound space comprising 18 loudspeakers and 18 subwoofers embedded in the walls a large room. Each channel contains different information, offering great nuance and detail. Altogether, it’s an illuminating experience that transcends the domain of traditional stereo.

The company behind this product, L-Acoustics, was founded in 1984 by Dr Christian Heil, a PhD in particle physics.

L-Acoustics has its roots as a pro-audio company that built complex and sophisticated sound systems for live events, starting with Supertramp (their first major client) and going on to work with Radiohead,

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‘We are all familiar with the sensory hyper-reality of experiencing a Hollywood film in modern cinemas, but this is even more intense’ Peter Gabriel and Sting, to name but a few. The trademark L-Acoustics banana-shaped line array speakers you see at venues replaced the previous wall of sound technology and became the industry standard.

Then the idea occurred to Heil, why couldn’t such pro-audio systems be made available to domestic users? The resulting sound spaces provide a much greater connection to the listener,

January 2020 International Piano

akin to the immersive experience of hearing a live performance.

During a visit to the L-Acoustics Creations studio in Highgate, north London, I was treated to a demo of the large 23.1 Channel version, as well as a smaller media room concept called ‘Island’ – a bed or sofa surrounded by 18 speakers and two subwoofers.

The afternoon began with a recent recording of Mahler’s

Third Symphony. Standing in the centre of Ocean’s rectangular room, almost big enough to fit a chamber orchestra, there was a sense of the sound coming from all around. I was struck by the massive dynamic range of the system. The soundscape vista is that of the conductor, rather than a member of the audience, so you feel like you’re standing on the podium. This is achieved by spot miking individual instruments, with a processor for mapping the sounds into a 3D space. In a way, it’s like Dolby Atmos raised to a higher level. We are all familiar with the sensory hyper-reality of experiencing a Hollywood film in modern cinemas, but this is even more intense.

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HI-FI • REVIEWS

Having been blown away initially by the power and sheer detail of the system, I tried to pinpoint the physical location of each instrument in the orchestra.

This led to a few surprises, including the realisation that by spot miking individual players, the front-to-back depth present on good stereo reproduction isn’t reproduced as accurately as one might expect. Hopefully, this can be sorted out in future.

Moving to the smaller bedroom-based system, Island, I heard Chopin’s Nocturne in B-flat minor Op 9/1 and ‘La cathédrale engloutie’ from Debussy’s first book of Préludes, lovingly played by the British pianist Jeremy Brown. Both pieces had been specially recorded using multichannel techniques developed by L-Acoustics. Unlike most recordings in which the piano is captured normally, square on, an array of seven microphones had been used, running the full length of the keyboard above the hammers.

This has the effect of letting us experience what the pianist, as opposed to the audience, usually hears. The Debussy was particularly impressive, providing a sense of the keyboard’s huge physical space. Individual notes

were heard from different speakers, making the piano sound like a huge orchestra.

The texture of the different registers in this piece took on a dimension I’ve not previously heard. Debussy’s clear narrative intent and graphic representation of church bells struck me much more intensely than usual. It’s the sort of privileged presentation available to few, giving the piece a greater sense of depth and sonority than traditional stereo recordings.

The L-Acoustics Creations catalogue is currently small: six ‘Bubbles’ (glass pebble-like objects) house an RFID that triggers play. Three collaborations with François Xavier-Roth conducting Les Siècles in Stravinsky’s Firebird and The Rite of Spring plus Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé are particularly impressive, each packing a substantial punch.

It is early days for this budding technology, but there are many pathways that such a system will open up. Both Ocean and its smaller sibling Island provide a remarkable glimpse into the future of spatialised recordings and their significant benefits for music lovers. IP l-acoustics-creations.com

If music is your passion,

TCU is your school.

The TCU School of Music is pleased to welcome Dr. Cecilia Lo-Chien Kao, Assistant Professor of Professional Practice and Collaborative Piano Artist to the faculty.

For more information about the collaborative piano opportunities at TCU, please visit our website.

www.music.tcu.edu

NELLY BEN-OR London Piano Courses

incorporating The Alexander Technique for pianists, teachers & advanced students

January 3rd - 8th 2020 & July 7th - 12th 2020 Daily sessions at the piano and individual Alexander sessions, both aiming at new ways of learning and preventing disturbing tensions

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Fine array: L-Acoustics uses seven microphones to capture spatialised piano recordings

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To find out more, please contact the Title Manager on 020 7333 1741 edward.croome@markallengroup.com

Beethoven Complete Sonatas for Pianoforte Edited by Jonathan Del Mar Bärenreiter BA 11840

B

eethoven’s 250th anniversary year sees his piano sonatas available in numerous editions from prestigious houses. When considering which version of these famous texts to own, an authentic editorial approach and clear presentation of Beethoven’s intentions are essential requirements for most customers.

The word ‘urtext’ (original text) is a sign of reassurance to many, and it graces the covers of the most recent editions from the ABRSM, G Henle Verlag and Weiner Urtext. These are all glorious, reliable and multifaceted editions; no one will be disappointed if they buy one instead of another.

So why do we need another version of the sonatas? Well, you can’t get enough of a good thing, and Bärenreiter’s Beethoven is always that. This elegant, scholarly and lucid three-volume set from the outstanding Beethoven scholar Jonathan Del Mar triumphantly brings together many years of work. Del Mar has edited the orchestral and chamber repertoire for Bärenreiter, always with freshness of purpose, integrity and clarity for musicians and listeners alike. Del Mar’s Beethoven Sonatas have been gradually appearing one by one – to wide acclaim from critics, teachers and performers – so it is gratifying in this anniversary year to have all the sonatas in one place. The three volumes are not heavy and can be ordered together in one package.

The first point of note is that Del Mar, like Barry Cooper (editor of ABRSM’s revelatory 2007 edition), includes three early sonatas in the series, making the total number 35 rather than 32. Many musicians will find this surprising, but Beethoven apparently never indicated that he wrote only 32 sonatas; his

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pupil Carl Czerny circulated the notion of that smaller number of works, and by the middle of the 19th century it seemed to be universally agreed that there were only 32, the earlier works being classified as ‘sonatinas’.

But these early sonatas are certainly as substantial as the Op 49 pair, and they deserve wider currency. In his DG set of performances from the 1980s (DG 4776360, left incomplete), Emil Gilels included the fiery and intensely characterised F minor Sonata WoO 47 No 2, showing it to be a worthy recital piece.

Both Cooper and Del Mar are world-class musicologists, and we are fortunate to benefit from their razor-sharp, sensitive and patient work. In extensive commentaries, they outline their sources, methodologies and conclusions. They often make the same decisions, so the key differences between the ABRSM and Bärenreiter editions relate to presentation and layout style.

Cooper is never shy to include radical and opposing options in the main text – this can be seen in the numerous accidentals scattered throughout the cycle, which seasoned pianists and pedagogues will instantly find shocking. There are always justifications for his decisions, but Del Mar’s approach is more discreet. On the other hand, there are times when Del Mar is just as direct as Cooper, such as the

January 2020 International Piano

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

added accidental to the low G in bar 164 of the first movement of the E minor Sonata Op 90. Go to the old 1980 Henle edition (edited

by Bertha Antonia Wallner) and you will see the standard G-natural as a minim followed by a crotchet G-sharp, which is what Barenboim, Brendel, Schnabel and many others play in their recordings.

The Del Mar edition differs most strongly from the Cooper (and the reinvented Henle and Weiner Urtext editions) in its lack of editorial fingering. Henle, Weiner Urtext and ABRSM use the word ‘urtext’ in a specific way, allowing for the addition of fingering. With the new Henle editions, we have the privilege of studying fingerings from Murray Perahia. With Weiner

Urtext, a distinguished team of outstanding players offer digital guidance, including Alexander Jenner and Gerhard Oppitz.

ABRSM has excellent advice for fingering from David Ward. Del Mar’s edition looks much more spartan than any other – it is truly an ‘original text’. If you are looking for exemplary scholarship with no ‘help’ on how to play these quasisacred notes, then look no further. All credit to Bärenreiter for having the courage to produce editions with none of the ‘extras’ that many potential customers (especially amateur pianists who do not have regular lessons) will crave.

I would have no hesitation in owning and cherishing this edition, and it would take pride of place in my library next to Henle, Wiener Urtext and ABRSM. But I would also want to possess performance editions, especially those from Schnabel (wonderful musical insights and fascinating fingering), Heinrich Schenker (deeply revelatory), Hans von Bülow (terrible text but extraordinarily helpful fingering) and Kendall Taylor (an extremely practical and useful performance edition). Just as we can never have only one performer for all of Beethoven, so we should never have only one edition. But Del Mar makes a great starting point for those who do not yet own their complete set of the sonatas.

Strongly recommended.

MURRAY McLACHLAN

The new Bärenreiter Urtext Edition of Beethoven’s complete piano sonatas is also available in three separate volumes: Vol I – WoO 47 to Op 14 (BA 11841); Vol II – Op 22 to Op 53 (BA 11842); and Vol III – Op 54 to Op 111 (BA 11843). baerenreiter.com

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TULLY POTTER COLLECTION

REVIEWS • SHEET MUSIC

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REVIEWS • BOOKS

BY BENJAMIN IVRY

T

his is one of the most informed and thought-provoking books about piano playing and education to have appeared in recent years. Bolivian-born Walter Ponce, a pupil of Sascha Gorodnitzki at Juilliard, is former director of keyboard studies at UCLA. Ponce has much bad news about keyboard teaching to communicate in this densely argued polemic, but first the good news.

Ranging over his lengthy career and personal experiences, he praises piano masterclasses given by Karl Ulrich Schnabel, Claude Frank, Leon Fleisher, Richard Goode and Murray Perahia for their ‘magnificent musicianship, honesty, and compassionate behaviour’.

They are the antithesis of the masterclass as ‘narcissistic vehicle of self-promotion’ – the kind given by some other performers.

Ponce’s teaching ideal is based upon individual self-realisation for each student, with no set philosophy, but rather choices adaptable to suit personal requirements.

He advocates educational freedom as described by the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and is perplexed by the high reputations of the late Leonard Shure of the New England Conservatory of Music and Aube Tzerko of UCLA, whose didactic approaches were characterised by ‘unrestrained negativity and humiliation’.

Even today, such traditional 19th-century teaching ‘rooted in fear persists practically

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of which is damage to cognitive ability – the functions of the mind — and to the enjoyment of music… Studying Hummel’s exercises has all the attractiveness of self-flagellation.’

Ponce concedes that it may help any student to work on a ‘few’ of Czerny’s studies ‘on a limited basis,’ but then move promptly on to ‘more substantial repertoire’. It would be illadvised to afflict pupils with ‘years of Czerny, as many teachers do even today; it is not music a student looks forward to with enthusiasm’.

If such time-honoured studies were to be abandoned, what would be the replacement?

Ponce recommends having students play the ‘music they love’, citing examples from Leopold Godowsky and Heinrich Neuhaus to Sviatoslav Richter who learned by playing through scores of operas, symphonies and vocal music.

Expanding faculties at conservatories in the USA and elsewhere results in crowds of graduates with inadequate performance skills or teaching ability: ‘Lifeless performers with limited talent upon graduation will develop, out of necessity, inordinate aggressiveness.’

Ponce reminds teachers and pupils alike that no set method is applicable to masses of students, and accepting this notion would be the first step to a more humane and effective world of keyboard instruction. IP TULLY POTTER COLLECTION

The Tyranny of Tradition in Piano Teaching: A Critical History from Clementi to the Present Walter Ponce McFarland; 261 pages

unchecked in some parts of the world, most notably in South Korea, some areas of China, and numerous clusters in the former Soviet republics (Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, etc)’.

Ponce alerts readers that hanging around famous teachers for years in a subservient manner is no way to develop individual abilities for expressing one’s own musical universe. To solve this issue, he suggests that fewer advanced degrees in performance studies should be granted, and only to highly accomplished student pianists at the most reputable schools. Major conservatories should require all students to work ‘not with one “major” teacher, but with many, in a rotating system that will encompass several piano teachers – a different teacher each semester.’ Students would thereby learn to ‘confront and accept disparities’.

The goal would be to receive advice and opinions from a variety of musicians, instead of one guiding light presumed to be infallible.

This and other solutions were arrived at during what might be termed Ponce’s own ‘school of hard knocks’.

Of his own years at Juilliard, Ponce recalls that Gorodnitzki’s teaching ‘was based on pure emulation. His constant demand that I “photocopy” his playing, going even into the smallest of mannerisms, made my lessons with him difficult and frustrating.’

Even earlier, Ponce was subjected to didactic compositions written by musical mediocrities of yore. He notes: ‘Practicing something dull for an extended period of time induces and causes the brain to enter into a dormant state, thus training the student to carry over the same quality when transferring to something of beauty… Bottom line: To play well Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Bartók, Messiaen, or any other great composer, practising Clementi, Hummel, Czerny, Hanon, Pischna, Philipp, or any of the hundreds other books of studies and exercises is a waste of time.’

To those who retort that Horowitz made memorable recordings of Clementi’s Gradus ad Parnassum, and that the Italian pianists Vincenzo Vitale and Alessandro Marangoni (the latter on Naxos) have made plausible cases for Clementi’s set of pedagogical exercises, Ponce explains that while exceptional pianistic talents can conquer all, such is not the case for the vast majority of keyboard tyros.

He emphasises, ‘Practicing Hummel studies – or similar works – for any length of time is destructive in many ways, the most important

Leonard Shure: a didactic approach characterised by ‘unrestrained negativity and humiliation’

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British virtuoso Benjamin Grosvenor has been praised for his ‘lyrical voice and aristocratic distinction’ in repertoire ranging from Scarlatti to Morton Gould. We meet to discuss his new album of Chopin concertos

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Should we reject the work of artists who hold dubious personal and political views? Benjamin Ivry considers the life and work of errant pianists

PEDAL POINTS

What can pianists learn from playing the organ?

FIENDISH FINGER-WORK Norma Fisher on Debussy’s first Étude

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MUSIC OF MY LIFE

INTERVIEW BY JEREMY NICHOLAS

Prophetic

playing

Antonio Pompa-Baldi reveals the recordings that transport him to another world

A

ldo Ciccolini was my former teacher and one of my most important influences. His recording of the Franck solo pieces, which I had on cassette, was an unbelievable listening experience. The Prélude, Choral et Fugue was one of my favourite works and Ciccolini always had an organ-like quality to his sound. Later, when I studied with him – I was 18 or 19 – I noticed he played more like an organist, technically speaking, relying on finger substitution and legato notes. So, with this music and that sound I found myself transported to a big cathedral. Especially in the Prélude, it’s like a tormented soul seeking redemption. You hear the wrath of God but also the most satisfying catharsis in the end.

It was really a spiritual experience. I have listened to that recording hundreds of times.

When I was growing up in my hometown [Foggia, Italy] we had no classical music store and my teacher would only allow us to listen to two pianists: Michelangeli and Pollini. Pollini was a superlative pianist but Michelangeli was superhuman. He was like a mythological figure to a child. The custodian at my local library befriended me and, seeing how passionate I was, made me an illegal copy of Michelangeli playing the Ravel concerto for my cassette player. There was also Rachmaninov’s Fourth, but it was the Ravel that enchanted me, especially the second movement. I don’t think anyone has ever come close to playing it as well as Michelangeli. I have played the concerto many times since and I understand his incredible physical control of the keyboard. Time really does stand still when you hear this recording.

Talking of Rach 4, I discovered this next recording much later. Cassettes had disappeared so I heard it on CD. Michelangeli’s

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January 2020 International Piano

performance of Rach 4 was technically perfect as always, but it fails to capture the passionate side. Vásáry’s playing represents – how can I say this? – the triumph of the common man. Although Vásáry is a lesser artist than Michelangeli, he is nevertheless an excellent pianist. His tempos are much slower than usual, making you feel every twist and turn, every modulation, and all the lyricism. He has the sound to go with it, too. I find his performance very moving, especially the second movement.

Now I know the Glenn Gould Goldberg (his first recording, not the second) is an obvious choice, but I didn’t know it till I was about 18.

I went to a summer camp near Rouen and met kids my age who were more sophisticated and knowledgeable than me. One of them lent me Gould’s 1955 recording. I had a portable CD player and listened to it in my room. It electrified me – I found it shocking to the core. I could not sleep that night and missed my lesson the next day. I could not believe my ears! Its sheer perfection and energy are astounding. It reminds me of ice sculptures – not because it is devoid of emotion but because everything is so transparent.

Dominique Merlet is a fantastic artist: a pianist and organist who taught at the Paris Conservatoire. He won first prize at the Geneva Competition in 1957 with Martha Argerich when he was 19 and Martha 16. I didn’t know any of this when I went to Paris in December 1998 to compete in the Marguerite Long Competition. I went to FNAC on the ChampsÉlysées and this CD of Merlet playing Fauré

had just been released. I heard a bit of it in the store, and I bought it and fell in love with it.

The first track is the solo version of the Ballade.

I have never heard it played so beautifully. It is a perfect balance of the emotional and the intellectual, or the spiritual and the learned.

He’s completely unaffected, never sentimental, but expressive in the simplest way, revealing that mystery and wonder. A prophet for this music. It’s like what Cortot once said of Schumann: ‘Question the future’. IP Franck Prélude, Choral et Fugue Aldo Ciccolini Warner Classics 7645612

Ravel Piano Concerto in G major Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli; Philharmonia Orchestra/Ettore Gracis Warner Classics 2435672382

Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No 4 Tamás Vásáry; London Symphony Orchestra/Yuri Ahronovitch DG 4793631

JS Bach Goldberg Variations Glenn Gould Sony 88697806062

Fauré Ballade Op 19 Dominique Merlet Mandala MAN 4933

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