Benjamin Baker Daniel Lebhardt
' 1942'
‘1942’
COPLAND – POULENC – PROKOFIEV
Benjamin Baker violin
Daniel Lebhardt piano
Aaron Copland (1900–1990) Sonata for Violin and Piano
Allegretto giusto [7:15]
Francis Poulenc (1899–1963) Sonata for Violin and Piano
tragico
Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) Violin Sonata No 2 in D major
Allegro con brio [7:37]
Young Classical Artists Trust (YCAT) has been at the forefront of international artist development since 1984 – nurturing and launching some of the most significant careers on the world stage, including Ian Bostridge, Alison Balsom, the Belcea Quartet, and Delphian artists Sean Shibe and Philip Higham.
Released in August 2020 and already the subject of great acclaim both in the UK press and internationally, recorder player Tabea Debus’s recital album Ohrwurm inaugurated a partnership between Delphian Records and YCAT which the two organisations have specially tailored to offer precious recording opportunities for the most promising young artists. The collaboration unites YCAT’s mission of developing careers at a world-class level with Delphian’s twenty-year reputation for bold, considered programming. From initial concept planning, through recording and editing to the final packaged and digital product, the scheme reflects and enhances both Delphian’s and YCAT’s commitments to nurturing their musicians’ artistic development and long-term careers.
Following on from Tabea Debus, LSO principal oboe Olivier Stankiewicz, longstanding violin/piano duo Benjamin Baker and Daniel Lebhardt, and accordionist Samuele Telari join the Delphian family with releases in spring/ summer 2021, with five more YCAT artist releases to be announced across the following two years. The complete collection will offer audiences around the world an engaging and varied series of albums, covering repertoire from the fourteenth century to the present day.
Delphian and YCAT are indebted to the generosity of Alastair and Liz Storey that supports this partnership.
www.ycat.co.uk
Recorded on 11-13 August 2020 in The Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh
Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter
24-bit digital editing: James Waterhouse
24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter
Piano: Steinway model D, 2015, serial no. 599478
Piano technician: Norman Motion
Artist photography © Kaupo Kikkas
Design: John Christ
Booklet editor: John Fallas
Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK
www.delphianrecords.com
In 1942, German forces occupied great swathes of continental Europe while their Imperial Japanese allies swept through much of East and Southeast Asia. In France, the Vichy Republic fell. Gas started to be rationed in the United States, but Bing Crosby warmed many a hearth singing ‘White Christmas’ in Holiday Inn. The Beveridge Report advised the British government to consider supporting citizens from cradle to grave through a new innovation – the welfare state. Meanwhile, in a hospital in Pennsylvania, a certain Joseph Robinette Biden was born.
chronology so interesting, in the view of Benjamin Baker and his duo partner Daniel Lebhardt. ‘The common date was a surprise to us,’ says Baker:
in effect we stumbled upon the concept. But that was part of what was fascinating about it – to take three different composers, three different ways of communicating conceived in three different parts of the world and see how they reflect on the state of things.
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Through it all, men and women fought and died. Families struggled, criminals schemed … and composers composed. Some carried images of all this accumulated violence and loss into their music. Others, whether through instruction or inclination, did not. This album brings together three works whose first notes were committed to paper in 1942, and it includes examples of both. For Copland and Poulenc, the war was coloured by personal loss, with national humiliation thrown in for the latter. For an evacuated Prokofiev, the war brought greater expressive freedoms and the perfect conditions for creativity.
The stylistic, aesthetic and narrative inconsistency between these three violin sonatas is what makes their common
It’s a timely notion – for if the global crisis that rocked a more joined-up world in 2020 taught us anything, it’s how differently so many of us experienced it.
Still, Paris is a city all three composers have in common. Aaron Copland went to the French capital to study with the fearsome Nadia Boulanger. He learned two lessons from her that would shape every piece he’d write. The first was a vital technicality: the usefulness of ‘keeping instruments out of each other’s way’. The second was the importance of finding and remaining true to your own voice and instincts. For Copland, the latter felt born of the former. His use of clean, open harmonies would come to be associated with the forging of an American sound – spacious, simple and idealistic, yet lined with a sense of loss in the face of modernisation.
His music was equally effective in the concert hall and in the cinema. So, as he started work on his only violin sonata in Oakland, New Jersey, Copland was called to Los Angeles to score the film The North Star. Copland later recalled:
During the frequent periods when I had to wait for the studio to move ahead, I played through the piano parts of violin sonatas from various periods. I had little desire to compose a dissonant or virtuosic work, or one that incorporated folk materials. Nevertheless, certain qualities of the American folk tune had become part of my natural style of composing, and they are echoed in the sonata.
Nonetheless, the piece would prove one of Copland’s boldest and most unsettling – one that demonstrates the depth of the singular style he had cultivated. His hallmarks are ever-present, but stretched and distilled in the creation of music that is sparse and stringent. His usually simple chords are refracted and splintered, his beloved open intervals forced into a terse counterpoint of two voices. There is a new darkness in Copland’s normally idealised vision of beauty. Suddenly his landscapes are less innocent, less optimistic. This is hardly surprising. The pacifist composer was deeply troubled as America was drawn further and further into the conflict on two continents, and as European
colleagues faced grave dangers on a daily basis. War was on Copland’s mind, but it was only after finishing the sonata that he heard of the death of his friend Harry H. Dunham, a pilot shot down on active service in the South Pacific. Dunham was the antithesis of a 1940s military man – a bisexual and aesthete referred to by David Diamond, a violinist who advised Copland on bowings and fingerings during the sonata’s genesis, as ‘the most adorable, goodlooking boy’ Diamond was the first violinist to play the sonata through, but the official premiere was given by Ruth Posselt, with Copland at the piano, at the Town Hall in New York on 17 January 1944.
‘I suspect it is one of its author’s most satisfying pieces,’ posited Virgil Thomson in the New York Herald Tribune the following day, describing the sonata as ‘irresistibly touching’. Time has proved it even more affecting than that. There is loneliness at the heart of the work, sprung from Copland’s spatchcocking of common chords across uncommonly wide spans that traverse the violin’s range – familiar harmonies, lost in space The first movement’s main theme, built from simple fourths, is dislodged by the piano’s recherché chords, then returns to remind us of the tragic essence even after the apparent catharsis of the rhythmically finale. ‘As a violinist you are faced with unprecedented challenges here,’ says Baker –
a crotchet is still a crotchet but in Copland’s hands its different: there is a constant change in the viscosity of the melodic line, as if you are winding helixes around a central message.
In between those two movements comes a Lento imagined as a curious dialogue between the instruments in counterpoint. ‘It took great courage from Copland to spin this web with no more notes than he thought absolutely necessary,’ says Baker.
Francis Poulenc came to maturity in a Paris alive with satire, parody and good humour, its music scene fertilised by the meeting of café (and nightclub) culture with concert music that was determined to be leaner, meaner and altogether less sentimental than before the most recent bout of statesponsored international carnage. During this next one, the occupation of France by the Nazis more or less destroyed that spirit of stubborn nonchalance and jocular vitality, setting Poulenc’s music on a different course without necessarily changing its linguistic principles. The very existence of a violin sonata from the composer’s pen demonstrates this; he had once claimed to dislike violins ‘in the singular’, and was far more inclined towards solo works for wind instruments, in which it was easier to bypass sweetness and sentiment.
Poulenc had already started and aborted two violin sonatas. Still, he was cajoled into starting over by the violinist Ginette Neveu. In preparation, the composer studied the violin sonatas of Brahms, surprising even himself in his admiration for them. Turning to his own work, he conceived a piece that would stand in defiance of the occupation of France and would, accordingly, be dedicated to the memory of Federico García Lorca, shot dead by fascists in 1936 (Poulenc had already set a number of Lorca’s poems). The plan was for a central slow movement as a sort of ‘shrine’ to the Spanish poet.
That was written first, after which Poulenc ‘imagined as a finale a Presto tragico, whose lively rhythmic élan would suddenly be broken by a slow, tragic coda’. A ‘fiery first movement’ was to set the tone. The score was finished at Poulenc’s home in Noizay on Easter Sunday 1943, and Neveu and Poulenc gave the first performance, in Paris, on 21 June.
Poulenc felt compelled to strike a new, dynamic balance between the two instruments, one he felt had been sorely lacking in the many nineteenth-century French sonatas in which the violin carries the melodic line. Writing to the ethnomusicologist André Schaeffner, he observed that ‘one cannot achieve a proper balance between two such
instruments as the piano and violin unless one treats them absolutely equally’, and concluded that in this regard his own attempt was ‘not too bad’. Still, Poulenc remained acutely aware of the difficulties he had experienced writing the score, and harboured thoughts of revising it. On 28 October 1949, an Air France flight from Paris to New York crashed into a mountain after two failed attempts to make an emergency landing on the Azores. All of its passengers, Ginette Neveu among them, were killed. Poulenc returned to his sonata, creating a revised version with an extended, funereal ending in memory of the piece’s instigator.
It is an intense and poignant work – unusually so for the composer – over which dark clouds frequently drift. Baker again:
So much of it feels uncharacteristically heart-onsleeve, with such extremes from violence to wit to tenderness, all of it turning on a dime. It’s a challenge for both of us to capture it all in such quick succession, but when you do it right there is this mosaic-like effect which forms a bigger picture … It’s extraordinary writing.
Poulenc, however, wasn’t altogether done with gameplay. Among his acts of defiance was to distribute fragmentary quotations from the outlawed American jazz standard ‘Tea for Two’ across each movement – a veiled protest against Nazi occupation. Another was to pit
a cabaret-style theme against a heavy quote from the letter scene of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin in the first movement. The symbolism at the end of the final movement is starker: two fff notes on the piano are said to depict Lorca’s shooting, bringing reminiscences of the boisterous frivolity of Poulenc’s former self crashing down, and the sonata to a close.
As German forces began an onslaught on Soviet territories, the authorities in Russia were keen to ensure that high-profile artists were as far from danger as possible. Many were evacuated to the Ural Mountains –Sergei Prokofiev among them, but not before he had travelled to the central Asian city of Alma-Ata (now Almaty, Kazahkstan) to work with the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, scoring his picture Ivan the Terrible. Mirroring Copland’s activities in Hollywood, Prokofiev used his downtime between bouts of film work to write a concert piece: in this case, a sonata for the French flautist Georges Barrère, an old friend from the composer’s Paris years.
Prokofiev wanted his sonata ‘to have a classical, clear, transparent sonority’, a temperament ‘perhaps inappropriate at present, but pleasant’. According to plan, the sonata turned out very pleasant indeed: genial, witty, and with a tunefulness seemingly unperturbed by world events. Like the composer’s ‘Classical’ Symphony, the piece
Whether or not the violinist David Oistrakh knew of the Handelian underpinning, he became convinced, on hearing the sonata on the flute, that the work was strongly suited to the violin. Prokofiev duly arranged the score with Oistrakh’s assistance, leaving the piano part unchanged but adapting the flute part to better meet the capabilities and idiosyncrasies of a stringed instrument – specifically one in Oistrakh’s hands, famous for their apparently effortless legato. ‘I do wonder if the speed at which it was made into a violin sonata as well is a sign of how suitable it was,’ says Baker. On 17 June 1944, Oistrakh gave the first performance of the violin arrangement, with the pianist Lev Oborin accompanying.
Despite what has been described as a gentle, classical style, there is something else to this piece – something Oistrakh described as ‘profound and significant’. That comment was prompted by Prokofiev’s own declaration that the violin’s first-movement scales should sound ‘like the wind whispering over a churchyard’. The passage in question forms
just one part of a varied colour palette, from the acerbic wisecracks of the Scherzo to the hesitant song of the Andante and the impulsive changeability of the lively finale.
‘It does feel as if Prokofiev could have written this sonata at any time,’ says Baker; ‘you could go looking for things, but maybe this piece is more about Prokofiev than it is about 1942.’ Perhaps … But there is a sure sign in this final movement of the connections that bound so much music of the period together. So sweet was the melody Prokofiev used in the central interlude of the finale, that Poulenc borrowed it for his own Oboe Sonata, dedicated to Prokofiev’s memory.
© 2021 Andrew Mellor
Andrew Mellor writes journalism and criticism for publications across the Nordic and Baltic regions, and is Scandinavian correspondent for eight international music and opera magazines. is harmonically straightforward, using clear shapes and melodies that interlock with their accompaniments. Prokofiev wrote to his wife that he had taken Handel’s D major violin sonata as both musical inspiration and structural model (hence the slow–fast–slow–fast structure).
Biographies
Since winning 1st Prize at the 2016 Young Concert Artists International Audition in New York and 3rd Prize at the 2017 Michael Hill Competition in New Zealand, Benjamin Baker has established a strong international presence. ‘The fine violinist Benjamin Baker […] brought virtuosity, refinement and youthful exuberance to a daunting program,’ wrote The New York Times after his debut at Merkin Concert Hall in February 2018. Much sought after as both soloist and chamber musician, he has made regular appearances at Wigmore Hall and on BBC Radio 3, while other recent highlights include his debuts with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (at the East Neuk Festival) and with the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra in his native New Zealand.
He has undertaken tours of the USA, Colombia, China and Argentina, participated in the Al Bustan Festival in Lebanon and the Sanguine Estate Music Festival in Australia, and in 2021 launches his own festival – At the World’s Edge – in Queenstown, New Zealand. Also scheduled for 2021 are solo appearances with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, the Fort Worth Symphony and the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
He has made solo appearances in recent seasons with the Philharmonia Orchestra, RTÉ Concert Orchestra, Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar de Venezuela, Krasnoyarsk Philharmonic, Albanian Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra, Royal Northern Sinfonia, London Mozart Players, Long Bay Symphony, the National Children’s Orchestra of Great Britain, Sinfonia Cymru, Orchestra Sinfonica Abruzzese and the Maui Pops Orchestra. In 2017 he collaborated as soloist with the Royal New Zealand Ballet.
Benjamin studied at the Yehudi Menuhin School and then at the Royal College of Music, where he was awarded the Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother Rose Bowl. He was a prizewinner at the 2013 YCAT International Auditions in London and a Fellow of the Steans Music Institute, the Ravinia Festival’s professional training programme for young musicians, in Chicago in 2016 and 2017.
Benjamin plays on a Tononi violin (1709) on generous loan from a private individual. He is grateful for support from The Carne Trust.
www.benbakerviolin.co.uk
Daniel Lebhardt won 1st Prize at the 2014 Young Concert Artists International auditions in Paris and New York. A year later he was invited to record music by Bartók for Decca, and in 2016 he won the award for ‘most promising’ participant in the Sydney International Piano Competition.
March 2020 saw Daniel make his debut with The Hallé, performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 5 – a work he has also performed at the Barbican, London and Symphony Hall, Birmingham. The last two concert seasons have also witnessed recital debuts in Dublin and Kiev, and at the Aldeburgh, Lucerne International and Tallinn International festivals. He has received reinvitations to Wigmore Hall, London and to Merkin Concert Hall in New York. Other recent highlights include a return to Paris for a recital at L’Église Saint-Germaindes-Près, as part of the festival ‘Un week-end à l’Est’, and an appearance as soloist in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 21 at the Royal Festival Hall, London.
Born in Hungary, Daniel studied at the Franz Liszt Academy with István Gulyás and Gyöngyi Keveházi, then at the Royal Academy of Music, and with Pascal Nemirovski at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, and was selected for representation by Young Classical Artists Trust in 2015 He currently lives in Birmingham.
