For these distracted times

The Long 17th Century: A Cornucopia of Early Keyboard Music

Occasionally an artist will construct a programme for a concert or a recording project that illuminates and instructs at a very high level, providing an aesthetic and scholarly experience that rivals the performance itself. Pianist Daniel-Ben Pienaar has provided just this in his new two-disc album of music from the "Long 17th Century." "Perhaps a sensibility informed by the combined push-and-pull of present and past", he says, "is fundamental to finding common ground with the music of the 17th century now; that is, as a departure point for making the music familiar but also contemporary to us – and not a mere theme-park visit to a distant world."

Variety is one of the key concepts here: Pienaar has chosen for his Cornucopia 36 works by 36 different composers. But it's the common ground within this broad musical array that allows Pienaar to build a programme of similarly-sounding music written in the period from the last three decades of the 1500s, the entire 1600s, to the beginning of the 1700s. His version of the "Long 17th Century" is thus analogous to popular music in the 1950s extending into the pre-Beatles Sixties: the motto of Spielberg's American Graffiti was "Where were you in '62?"

A number of these composers are at least fairly well-known - Peter Philips, Matthew Locke, Georg Muffat, Giles Farnaby, William Byrd, Dietrich Buxtehude, John Bull. But there are also many names that are completely new to me: Pablo Bruna, John Coprario, Juan Bautista Cabanilles, Antonio Correa Braga, Gaspard Le Roux. Pienaar draws a parallel between the modernizing tendencies of the 17th century and his own adaptations of the music for the modern piano, referring to "the pragmatic and free-spirited tradition not only of the 17th century but also of our own time." This project is a model for scholarly presentation, but it has the freshness & verve of a couple of long sets in a jazz club.

Thomas Tompkin's "A Sad Pavan for these distracted times" is a sad little piece with a perfect title, which echoes back and forth through the centuries. It made me think of T. S. Eliot's Burnt Norton:

Neither plenitude nor vacancy.  Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before time and after.

This album can act as a soundtrack for 2020, as we all dodge the distractions of our over-busy lives and our over-watched screens. It might help, or so one hopes, to bring meaning and the consolations of true art to our lives, "whirled by the cold wind."

This album will be released on February 7, 2020.

A brilliant musical partnership

Palimpsest: Music for marimba & clarinet by Bach, McKinley, Piazzolla, Ravel & Zorn

Darius Milhaud introduced the marimba into the classical orchestra with his extraordinary 1947 Concerto for Marimba and Vibraphone, and composers from Leoš Janáček to Steve Reich were quick to introduce the striking colours this marvellous instrument can add to chamber and orchestral works. This new disc from marimbist Mike Stoltzman and her husband, clarinettist Richard Stoltzman, provides a great overview of various styles ("from Bach to Zorn" is a great way to talk about a wide range of music!)

Mika Stoltzman's own adaptation of Bach's perfectly adaptable Chaconne, from his D minor Partita for Solo Violin, shows the musical and emotional range of the instrument, as well as her own brilliant playing. Ravel's Pavane pour une infante défunte is another work that's made its way into many, many arrangements, and Richard Stoltzman's version for marimba & clarinet sounds exotic and familiar at the same time, in other words, just right for this kind of music.

For me the highlight of the album was the John Zorn piece which provides the title of the project. Richard Stoltzman describes the work in the liner notes:

Mika begins by playing quite tonal music, and then the clarinet jumps in with something abstract and arrhythmic, with crazy leaping intervals, almost as if Ornette Coleman had stepped into the room, and it keeps in conflict with the steady metre of the “old manuscript” underneath Mika’s part. It’s really fun to play, and it has been a surprise hit with audiences.

So many of the pieces here (including the Bach arrangements) are jazz- and blues- inflected. The Piazzolla works seem so natural, partly because the great composer from Argentina worked in his own jazz/classical idiom, but also because of the groove that the Stoltzmans and bandoneonist Pedro Giraudo are in throughout.

Mika and Richard Stoltzman play John Zorn's Palimpsest

À la recherche du temps perdu

Brahms: Piano pieces op. 76, 79, 116, 117, 118, 119

The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity.  He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain.  He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly’s bloom.
- Virginia Woolf

Woolf's reference to Proust is relevant to Brahms's late piano music not only in its synthesis of sensibility and tenacity, but also as an extended contemplation of the composer's past music and life. As Proust himself wrote, "Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals." Brahms's passions - music, friendship and love of a lifetime - are written in this music in such a vital way.

The eight Klavierstücke Op.76, from the 1870s, look backward to Schumann, and farther back, to Schubert. In pianist Charles Owen's words, "I feel that the spirit of Schumann dominates these Op.76 pieces more strongly than in anything else that I know by Brahms." Owen plays this music with the vigour of the young Brahms exploring new worlds with his friend Schumann, saving his more muted tones for the wistful music to come.

With the two Rhapsodies, Op. 79 from 1879, we move to a sadness that's still too intense for the nostalgia of his last works. But this is sadness drained of all anger, and played by Owen with a concentrated severity. In Owen's words, "If people say that late Brahms is ‘autumnal’, the G minor Rhapsody is much more of a winter piece reminding me of a bleak Caspar David Friedrich painting of a ruined abbey and graveyard surrounded by skeletal trees with their leaves all fallen."

Caspar David Friedrich, Monastery Graveyard in the Snow, 1810

With the Op. 116 Fantasien from 1892 we enter the true Proustian world of Brahms's final period. So many of the last 20 pieces he wrote for piano are heartbreakingly sad, and it's only natural that one think here of Clara Schumann, his muse and constant friend and lost love. "I think Op.118 is about reminiscence", says Owen. "Possibly it’s the recollection of a whole life. There’s passion, there’s love, and autobiography." Owen saves his best playing for these pieces, and especially the last 4 Intermezzi, Op. 119. Proust spoke of "that translucent alabaster of our memories," and I've convinced myself that I can hear a translucence in Owen's performance: colours overlaid with colours, tones with overtones, memories with remembered dreams. Such a moving album!

James Jolly recently talked with Charles Owen about Brahms's late piano music on the Gramophone Podcast.

I wrote such beautiful music

Rautavaara: Fantasia; Szymanowski: Violin Concerto no. 1; Ravel: Tzigane

Anne Akiko Meyers brings her awesome technique and even more awesome instrument to bear in this beautifully romantic program. The disc includes a very fine performance of the first violin concerto of Karol Szymanowski, which is quite well represented on disc, but I was more interested in the opening work by Einojuhani Rautavaara that gives this CD its title. Fantasia, commissioned by Akiko Meyers, was one of the composer's final works completed before his death, a year ago in July. I love her stories about visiting the Rautavaara in his home to play through the work:

"After I played Fantasia, he looked at me and repeatedly said, 'I wrote such beautiful music!'"

This is, of course, the World Premiere recording of this piece, which I expect will soon become popular on the concert stage. With a significant encore in Ravel's own orchestral version of his Tzigane, this outstanding disc - and especially Rautavaara's Fantasia - will regularly show up in playlists on my computer and phone.

Here is the trailer from Avie Records:


To be released on October 6, 2017.