WRECKED BY THE NAZIS
Why we never hear the music of Franz Schmidt
The world’s best-selling classical music magazine 150th anniversary special
How Mussorgsky achieved the perfect marriage of fine art and glorious music
How the French composer invited us to welcome mortality
Also in this issue… The joys of the mixtape with Dalia Stasevska
Creating a musical world for Tudor epic Wolf Hall
100 reviews by the world’s finest critics
Recordings & books – see p72
Pick a theme… and name your seven favourite examples
Pianist
Frank Dupree
selects the best examples of piano concertos that have been inspired by jazz
Born in Rastatt, Germany, pianist Frank Dupree is a devotee of new music and has collaborated with contemporary composers such as Péter Eötvös and Wolfgang Rihm. He is also passionate about music that treads the boundary between classical and jazz –in addition to the piano, he plays jazz percussion, and has championed the music of Nikolai Kapustin, a composer who blends classical structures with jazz harmonies and rhythms. On 18 and 19 December he performs Kapustin’s Piano Concerto No. 4 with the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican.
George Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue/ Piano Concerto in F Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue is the reason I fell in love with jazz. I played it for the first time when I was 13, and I still remember the feeling of those blue notes in my fingers: part sweet, part cheeky. Gershwin was the first person to bring the worlds of jazz and classical music together, and Rhapsody in Blue is one of his best-known pieces. But I see it as a rehearsal for his Piano Concerto in F, another jazz-infused work which he wrote a year later, and which I think is an even better piece: more symphonic, clearer in form and altogether wiser.
Maurice Ravel Piano Concerto in G
In the late 1920s, Ravel spent four months in the US, where he met Gershwin, heard his Rhapsody in Blue and also heard Duke Ellington in concert. Then he returned to France and composed the Piano Concerto in G. With its French harmonies and Spanish-influenced melodies, it is characteristic of Ravel, but with many jazz elements. In fact, the harmonies of impressionistic music and those more
commonly associated with jazz are very similar in terms of their richness, so they complement each other well. It’s French music with a little more rhythm than usual.
Nikolai Kapustin
Piano Concerto No. 2
Kapustin grew up in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and composed jazz at a time when even saying the word ‘jazz’ on the street was prohibited. But he had access to a radio and transcribed the jazz he heard on it, weaving its soundworld into his compositions. In his Piano Concerto No. 2, that jazz influence is obvious: it sounds like Oscar Peterson might have played with an orchestra – but three times more difficult.
Leonard Bernstein
Symphony No. 2, ‘The Age of Anxiety’ When WH Auden wrote the 1947 poem that inspired this
piece, he summed up the psychology of a generation living through the Second World War: attempting to live a normal life with constant interruptions by anxiety-inducing broadcasts from the radio. Bernstein’s piece for solo piano and orchestra hops between crazy jazz outbursts and something much darker and scarier. It really captures the mindset of someone who is desperately struggling, and failing, to forget the present.
Dana Suesse
Concerto for Combo and Orchestra
Although we’re now trying to recognise female composers, we still haven’t really discovered the American composer Dana Suesse. Although she was often referred to as ‘the Gershwin girl’ and wrote in a style that was reminiscent of Gershwin, who was ten years her senior, hers was a distinctive approach to blending the worlds of classical and jazz: very structured. Sometimes she even includes a fugue!
New World A-Comin’
While many pieces on this list were written by classically trained composers, it’s fascinating to hear a fusion of classical and jazz from a real jazz musician. Duke Ellington composed so many jazz songs and played with his jazz band for decades. But later in life he became very interested in classical music, as shown in his jazz versions of The Nutcracker and Peer Gynt. In New World A-Comin’ he draws on blues and spiritual gospel. This is old-school jazz.
Taking inspiration from the 1920s player piano, this piece takes us on a whiteknuckle ride through a century of music. You hear jazz, yes, but also the likes of Rachmaninov and Paderewski. What binds it together is John Adams’s minimalist style: circling rhythmical passages, like the repetitive motion of piano rolls. You feel like you’re on a train going through a tunnel of shifting colours. There is no right turn, no left: only straight ahead. And it’s exhilarating.
On the 150th anniversary of its composition, Mussorgsky’s much-loved Pictures at an Exhibition is admired by Jessica Duchen, who takes us on a guided tour of this piano masterpiece
To misquote Tolstoy, happy composers are all alike; every unhappy composer is unhappy in his or her own way. Among the latter, Tolstoy’s compatriot and contemporary Modest Mussorgsky would be a worthy subject for a great novel. Prodigiously gifted, with a style of ‘realism’ that makes a visceral impact, he enjoyed a brief, brilliant flowering, only to die raddled by alcoholism aged just 42.
Mussorgsky’s only solo piano masterpiece, Pictures at an Exhibition, is a cycle in which ten ‘pictures’ are linked by ‘promenades’: a walk around a gallery in which we enter into the atmosphere of each image, along with the viewer’s response to it. It embodies everything most striking about the composer’s personal voice, including the qualities for which he has been most unfairly criticised.
His mother, herself a musician, gave him his first piano lessons at the family estate in the Pskov region. He was playing pieces by Liszt (some of the easier
ones) by the age of seven and, aged nine, gave a private performance of a concerto by John Field. Although he was destined to go into the military, as was the family tradition, his father did not discourage his musical bent. Aged ten, Modest was sent to school in St Petersburg, where he was able to study music with Anton Gerke, later a professor at the St Petersburg Conservatory. His first piece, a polka, was published at his father’s expense. He then entered cadet school at 13.
Mussorgsky’s military training brought him into contact with some of those who most closely shaped his art. Composer Alexander Borodin left a joyous picture of him at 17, the two having met when serving in a military hospital in St Petersburg: ‘There was something absolutely boyish about him; he looked like a real second-lieutenant of the picture books … a touch of foppery, unmistakable but kept well within bounds. His courtesy and good breeding were exemplary. All the women fell in love with him … That same evening we were invited to dine
with the head surgeon of the hospital … Mussorgsky sat down at the piano and played … very gently and graciously, with occasional affected movements of the hands, while his listeners murmured, “charming! delicious!”’
After 1858, he left the military to devote himself to music. At the salon of Alexander Dargomyzhsky, he got to know more of the composers with whom in the 1860s he joined forces in ‘the Mighty Handful’. Besides Borodin, the others were César Cui, Mily Balakirev, officially their leader, with whom Mussorgsky began to take lessons, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the most influential of all (not least, he taught Stravinsky). Together, ‘the Five’ sought to
‘I feel a certain regeneration; everything Russian seems suddenly near to me’
shake off European influences – Italian opera, German counterpoint et al – and, following in the footsteps of Glinka, to create a distinctively Russian art music, rooted deep in the country’s folksong and the music of the Orthodox Church.
They took a very different direction from Tchaikovsky, who blended Russian influences with the impact of European composers. Their respective progress mirrored long-standing differences in
Russian attitudes towards western Europe; Peter the Great had created St Petersburg in aspirational European style, while Moscow was thought more genuinely ‘Russian’. If Tchaikovsky was the musical equivalent of St Petersburg, Mussorgsky was Moscow.
He had indeed turned towards Russian nationalism after his first visit to Moscow in 1859, when he told Balakirev: ‘I feel a certain regeneration; everything Russian
seems suddenly near to me.’ Yet it was less nationalism that inspired him than Realism. He wanted to capture life in all its aspects, the hideous besides the beautiful, the violent as well as the tender, the destruction alongside the creativity.
The closest model for Pictures at an Exhibition is Robert Schumann’s piano cycle Carnaval, highly characterised pieces forming portraits of individuals and situations. The direct inspiration, however, was much darker, haunted by Mussorgsky’s increasing preoccupation with death (which caught up with him seven years later).
Part of Mussorgsky’s problem was poverty, the last of the family fortune having evaporated after the freeing of the serfs by Alexander II in 1861. After quitting the army, he took a job as a civil servant, but still struggled with debt. Another issue was loneliness. He had lived with his mother until her death in 1865; he never got over her loss. He lived for a while with his brother, then shared lodgings with Rimsky-Korsakov until the latter’s marriage. The young poet Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov seems to have been a crucial attachment, inspiring two song cycles, Sunless and Songs and Dances of Death, but again he lost this companion to marriage. His alcohol dependence worsened, and a further blow came with the death in 1873 of another friend, the artist Viktor Hartmann, aged just 39.
We’re shaped by every encounter –but should also open our ears and become our own teachers
As she releases the complete works for the violin by Busoni, a composer hardly known for the instrument, Dego tells Charlotte Smith why it’s vital always to keep an open mind
PHOTOGRAPHY: DAVIDE CERATI
Francesca Dego has a knack of finding the musicality in works labelled glib and technically ‘showy’. For a long time, her name was inextricably linked to that of Paganini – a composer who instantly conjures visions of fiendishly difficult passagework for long-suffering violinists. As the youngest finalist – and a female one at that – at Genoa’s prestigious ‘Premio Paganini’ Competition in 2008, she was awarded the Enrico Costa Award, and with it, significant attention in her native Italy. A recording of the composer’s 24 Caprices inevitably followed, released on Deutsche Grammophon in October 2012 – but the project was not an easy one.
‘The association with Paganini has at times been despite me,’ she admits.
‘Studying the Caprices, and eventually recording them aged 22, I was going absolutely crazy for a time. I don’t consider myself to be the most immediate Paganini performer, unlike some players who just seem to have the right facility for his music. But I work at it, and it helped that I was studying with Salvatore Accardo, who had produced his own editions, after going back to the original sources.’
Accardo told Dego that if she wasn’t ‘having fun’ studying Paganini, perhaps she shouldn’t be playing his music at all. And what might initially have seemed an infuriating observation sparked an important realisation: ‘You shouldn’t do something just to prove that you can.’
Looking beyond the obvious pyrotechnics, Dego understood, ‘I was always attracted to Paganini’s musical language, and not just the virtuosic aspect.’ Indeed, her love of Rossini opera could help her tap into the composer’s emotional complexities. So, by the time the opportunity to perform and record on Paganini’s own ‘Il Cannone’ Guarneri ‘del Gesù’ violin presented itself in 2019, she was already a distinguished interpreter of his music, having
Composer of the Week is broadcast on Radio 3 at 4pm, Monday to Friday. Programmes in December are:
2-6 Dec Luise Adolpha Le Beau
9-13 Dec A Latin American Christmas
16-20 Dec JS Bach
23-27 Dec A Latvian Choral Christmas
30 Dec – 3 Jan Schubert
Orchestration
Although Schmidt was strongly influenced by the orchestral virtuosity and versatility of late-Romantic composers such as Richard Strauss and Mahler, his approach to the orchestra has a very distinctive, almost organ-like sonority, particularly at the big climaxes – for example, in the Finale of his Second Symphony.
Variations Like Max Reger (above), Schmidt was particularly adept at writing imaginative sets of variations. Perhaps the best example of his ingenuity in this respect occurs in the Allegretto middle movement of the Second Symphony, where he interlinks a set of slow variations with an extended scherzo, all the material being derived from an extremely simple opening melody.
Counterpoint As with his great predecessor Bruckner, Schmidt builds up fantastic musical edifices through a great mastery of counterpoint which, despite occasionally featuring clashing individual lines, maintains the same degree of logic that you’d find in, say, Wagner’s Prelude to Die Meistersinger. Hungarian flavour There’s a lush and somewhat exotic flavour to some of Schmidt’s extended and heartfelt string melodies, which relates back to the composer’s Hungarian origins and is heard to mesmeric effect in the Intermezzo from the opera Notre Dame and the poignant second idea in the Fourth Symphony.
A cataclysmic decision in his final year led to this masterful late-Romantic symphonist being cast out into the cold, explains Erik Levi
ILLUSTRATION: MATT HERRING
Although highly regarded in his native Austria as one of the last great composers of the late-Romantic era, Franz Schmidt’s substantial achievements have been recognised only fitfully elsewhere. There are various explanations for this neglect. His reluctance to self-promote his music as aggressively as some of his contemporaries doubtless counted against him, as perhaps did his failure to secure the imprimatur of influential performers who could have helped to make his works better-known abroad. But more uncomfortably, his long-term reputation has inevitably been tarnished by an ill-fated willingness,
and received only one performance after the score had been completed by one of his pupils, its mere existence did irreparable harm to Schmidt’s reputation following the end of the Second World War. But arguably the most important factor that prevented Schmidt from establishing a more secure place on the musical map relates to the turbulent environment he faced during his lifetime. In the Vienna of the early-20th century, Schmidt’s music was competing for attention with the works of a host of hugely important Austro-German composers that included Richard Strauss, Mahler, Reger, Schreker, Zemlinsky, Schoenberg
Deutsche Auferstehung ’s mere existence did irreparable harm to Schmidt’s reputation
towards the end of his life, to allow his music to be appropriated by the Nazis.
In his final year, Schmidt regrettably accepted an official commission for a choral work entitled Deutsche Auferstehung (German Resurrection) featuring a text celebrating the 1938 Anschluss (the Nazi incorporation of Austria into Greater Germany) – the work is rounded off with a shouted ‘Sieg Heil!’. Though, like many Austrians, Schmidt had sincerely supported this political objective ever since the end of World War I, he entirely repudiated Nazi anti-Semitism and continued to maintain close friendships with Jews. What’s more, in 1943 his first wife, Karoline Perssin, would be euthanised by the Nazi regime on account of her mental illness. Nonetheless, although Deutsche Auferstehung remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1939
and the precociously gifted Korngold. Then, following the fall of the AustroHungarian Empire in 1918, he faced a rather different landscape, dominated on the one hand by radical composers from independent Eastern European countries (Bartók, Szymanowski, Enescu, Janáček and Martinů), and on the other by neo-classical and modernist AustroGerman figures, including members of the Second Viennese School, Hindemith and Kurt Weill. Although by no means unresponsive to the changes in style pioneered by some of these, his dogged adherence to long-standing musical principles branded him, perhaps unfairly, as being irredeemably old-fashioned. Born in December 1874 into a family of mixed German and Hungarian origin in the formerly Hungarian city of Pozsony (or Pressburg – today the Slovakian
Cover versions of your favourite songs don’t always go down well. Though in classical music, when isn’t a new release a cover in one way or another? This month, a selection of artists take things a step further, with songs and arias by the likes of Vivaldi, Purcell and Handel performed by a jazz band (see Jakub Józef Orliński’s #LetsBaRock), solo cello takes on tunes by Jimi Hendrix and Nirvana (Giovanni Sollima’s Folk & Ba-Rock Cello) and Bach’s Goldbergs for string ensemble (courtesy of the Philharmonia Orchestra). Whether they’re a shock to the system, or an example of just how timeless these classics really are, is up for debate. And there’s plenty more to tantalise, including accordion concertos, a multi-piano ensemble, art song from Africa and at least two new operas! Michael Beek Reviews editor
This month’s critics
John Allison, Terry Blain, Kate Bolton-Porciatti, Geoff Brown, Michael Church, Christopher Cook, Martin Cotton, Christopher Dingle, Misha Donat, Jessica Duchen, Rebecca Franks, George Hall, Katy Hamilton, Malcolm Hayes, Claire Jackson, Michael Jameson, Stephen Johnson, Berta Joncus, John-Pierre Joyce, Nicholas Kenyon, Ashutosh Khandekar, Erik Levi, Jon Lusk, Andrew McGregor, David Nice, Freya Parr, Ingrid Pearson, Anthony Pryer, Paul Riley, Suzanne Rolt, Jan Smaczny, Jo Talbot, Anne Templer, Sarah Urwin Jones, Kate Wakeling, Alexandra Wilson
KEY TO STAR RATINGS
HHHHH Outstanding
HHHH Excellent
HHH Good
HH Disappointing
H Poor
RECORDING OF THE MONTH
– A Celebration of Women’s Voices
I Holst: Welcome Joy and Welcome Sorrow; G Holst: Two Eastern Pictures; Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda etc; Poston: An English Day-Book; plus works by Judith Weir, Hilary Campbell, Olivia Sparkhall, Gemma McGregor and Shruthi Rajasekar
Louise Thomson (harp); Corvus Consort/Freddie Crowley
Chandos CHSA 5350 82:21 mins
Under its founder-director Freddie Crowley, Corvus Consort is always full of fresh thinking. Here we have a collection of works spanning a century up to the present day, composed for female voices and solo harp. Gustav Holst was a champion of this combination
of forces, and three of his works provide a framework for ten compositions by women, introduced by his daughter Imogen Holst’s Welcome Joy and Welcome Sorrow, a setting of six Keats poems inspired by the poet’s love of Devon. Like her father, Imogen Holst was a tireless advocate for women’s education, and these three-part works provide a textbook of musical styles, from jaunty folk ditties to elegiac ruminations on pastoral England.
Elizabeth Poston emerges as a composer of originality and substance, more avant garde than her well-known Christmas music might suggest. Commissioned for the Farnham Festival in 1966, her An English Day-Book was intended to complement Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols and showcases her powers as a brilliant miniaturist. The work unfolds in 11 vivid scenes from a day in the life of an English village, busy with clocks, bells, birds and bees, all brought to life around a meditative Interlude for solo harp.
Also featured in the collection are influential women composers of more recent times, including Judith Weir, Gemma McGregor, Olivia Sparkhall and Hilary Campbell, all contributing short commissions inspired by the 14th-century female mystic Julian of Norwich. Sparkhall’s Lux Aeterna for double choir, makes simple but effective use of the spatial separation of the singers, setting the serene beauty of women’s voices in a spiritual dimension.
Gustav Holst’s intense study of Indian culture gave rise to several works for female voices on mythological themes. His Two Eastern Pictures are orientalist rhapsodies on spring and summer, while settings of hymns from the ancient
Hindu Rig Veda refract Indian musical modalities through Holst’s distinctly European prism. These exotic forays provide a springboard for two new works by Indian-American composer Shruthi Rajasekar, specially commissioned for
Corvus Consort sing the complex textures with delicacy and pinpoint accuracy
the album. Corvus’s grasp of a more authentic classical Indian musical style in Ushās –Goddess of Dawn is impressive, with convincing pronunciation of the Sanskrit texts.
The 12 superb sopranos and altos of the Corvus Consort sing the complex, close-knit
What works so well about the combination of harp and voices?
Immaculate
textures of these works with delicacy and pinpoint accuracy.
Louise Thomson’s immaculate, virtuosic harp playing conjures scenes that take us from scented gardens to sun-baked landscapes and haunted moonlit forests. The vocal/ instrumental balance is wellnigh perfect in Chandos’s clear, nuanced recording.
This dazzling collection has been put together with help of leading arts and education charity Multitude of Voyces, who have supported many of the commissions here. The palette may be restricted, but Crowley and his young singers have opened up a jewel-box of glinting, shimmering choral gems, shining anew.
PERFORMANCE HHHHH RECORDING HHHHH
I think the sound of an upper voices choir is beautiful, and the harp complements it really nicely, because in order for it to complement the higher frequency sound of the upper voices it helps to have something a bit richer and lower. The harp provides that without overpowering it; even when it’s playing at its most fulsome and sonorous, it’s still within the same sort of box as the singers, which makes it easy to balance and really fun to perform. Tell us about the role of the charity Multitude of Voyces… They were set up a few years ago to publish the work of historically neglected composers, which invariably means music by women. They recently acquired the rights for the whole of Elizabeth Poston’s estate, so they are embarking on this huge task to try and publish all of her unpublished work. An English Day-Book was one of the first to be made available, and it was really exciting to get first use of this new edition.
And what about the new commission for this album?
We wanted to create a response to Holst’s Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda, and Shruthi Rajasekar was brilliantly positioned to write it – she has training in both the western choral tradition and as a Carnatic singer. She wrote a piece in Sanskrit (Ushās), then she created Priestess, based on a text about these all-female bacchanalia gatherings in ancient Rome. It’s her way of creating a soundworld about a culture that she’s imagining herself in as opposed to being part of, much as Holst did with his Rig Veda hymns.