Music from a year of crisis

1923: music by Bartok, Krenek, Toch & Weill

The year 1923 was a year of crisis in Germany; inflation was heating up and far right-wing parties were jockeying for power. In October, the first broadcast of public radio in Germany took place from the "Berliner Funkstunde" station on Potsdamer Platz. This provocative new disc from the Choir and Symphony of Bavarian Radio includes four works written a hundred years ago by a group of innovative composers who all made use of the new, disruptive technology of radio.

Kurt Weill's Frauentanz is a suite of seven medieval songs, scored for soprano, flute, viola, clarinet, horn and bassoon. Weill helped to create the familiar soundtrack for Weimar Berlin, and this performance by Anna-Maria Palii and the fine instrumentalists of the Bayerischen Rundfunks orchestra provides the authentic feel of a society that was becoming increasingly decadent and hysterical in 1923 and beyond.

Ernst Toch's Dance Suite is another clever and imaginative piece with interesting orchestration: flute, clarinet, violin, viola, double bass and percussion. The Berlin sound is also evident here, something a bit harsh and raw, in contrast with the softer-focussed, more lyrical and pastoral modernism of Paris.

The Ernst Krenek work is a bit of a surprise: his 3 Choruses for a cappella choir . The 'antique' sound of these pieces remind me of two of my favourite works: Vaughan Williams' G minor Mass, from 1921, and Heitor Villa-Lobos's Missa São Sebastião, from 1937. All three provide old wine in new bottles: ancient cadences with a modernist twist.

The final work on the disc is probably the best known: Bela Bartok's Dance Suite for Orchestra. This is an orchestral showpiece, a kind of try-out for his Concerto for Orchestra written more than two decades later. Both pieces treat orchestral instruments in a solistic, virtuosic way. The source material might be folkloric, but this is definitely written in a modernist idiom.

Inflation, far right-wing agitation, disruptive technology: yes, we're talking about 1923, not 2023. And the music on this disc is as fresh and forward-looking as some of the best music written today.

 

Bartok String Quartets in a masterful recording

Dennis Stock's photograph of the Juilliard String Quartet;
undated, but it looks to be from the mid-50s

I'm listening to more of The Juilliard String Quartet's 15 CD set The Early Columbia Recordings 1949-56. What a marvellous project this is!

In two New York concerts, on February 28 and March 28, 1949, the Juilliard Quartet performed the six string quartets of Béla Bartók, to enthusiastic audiences. This was less than a year after Columbia Records unveiled the Long Playing record - the LP - at a press conference in the Waldorf Astoria on June 21, 1948. Soon thereafter, the ensemble was in the 30th Street Studio recording all six of these wonderful works, producing fine records but also setting the stage for the many comprehensive sets of the LP era. To market the three individual discs as a set, the three LPs shared a single, excellent but uncredited liner note essay, and three wonderful album cover designs by Darrill Connelly. And all three LPs (three double 78rpm albums as well) were released the same day: August 14, 1950.

Though Olin Downes gave a very positive review in the New York Times of those first two concerts, already by 1952 the Times reviewer R.P. wondered, in a review of a second Juilliard Bartok cycle concert series, whether "the playing could have been a trifle over-refined." 

The precision of ensemble was wonderfully exact. the balance of tone and the blending of timbres was exemplary, and there was fine integration in the approach of the four men. But for one listener the note of human passion sounded a little thin.

This criticism will, I'm sure, come up many times before we finish all 15 of these CDs. I would normally be a bit skeptical of this, but in the Bartok case I think it's at least partly apropos. In their second recording from 1998, the Takács Quartet, which I know the best in these works, doubles down on the "human passion", emphasizing Bartok's folkloric sources. The Juilliard, by contrast, focus more on Bartok's hard, streamlined modernism. Both are obviously contained within the score; this is a matter of emphasis only. These are still excellent versions, and remarkable for both interpretation and recorded sound, not just for 1950, but today.

A thought-provoking & satisfying first album

Can Çakmur: piano music by Beethoven/Liszt, Haydn, Schubert, Say, Sasaki, Bartok

After the artificial rigours of the international piano competition world, Can Çakmur (who won in Glasgow in 2017, and in Hamamatsu in 2018) now has a chance to build an interesting, exciting programme for his first recording. His opener is an inspired choice: Franz Liszt's arrangement of Beethoven's song Adelaïde, an arresting piece that alternates between sentiment and all-out flash. Of course we want virtuosity in this situation, and it's here in spades, but in the long-term we're on the look-out for musical intelligence, style and staying power. On the evidence of this album we should be listening to the Ankara-born pianist for a very long time.

Çakmur plays Schubert's E-flat major Sonata D. 568, from 1817 when he was only 20, with wit and delicacy. He doesn't add any anachronistic darkness to the slow movement - the bulk of the composer's agonies are years ahead at this point - but lets the simple sad post-adolescent clouds drift through in their quiet way. The more sophisticated and brilliant F minor Variations by Haydn seem at first deceptively slight, but they are the centrepiece of the album; this is a profound work that Çakmur gives a suitable gravitas and quiet dignity. Fazil Say's Black Earth adapts a folk song by Turkish minstrel Aşık Veysel, complete with the sound of the lute-like instrument the bağlama, approximated by pressing on the piano strings while playing notes on the keyboard. This is an arresting piece that combines piano technique and folklore in an appealing way. Çakmur stays in the world of imitative folk music with Bartok's percussive Out of Doors, and brings his first album to a moving conclusion with Fuyuhiko Sasaki's Sacrifice. This is a complex work with references to Christian theology, to the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, to Bach's St. Matthew Passion, and to Andrei Tarkovsky's final film, The Sacrifice, from 1986. What a thought-provoking and satisfying first album!

Profound music from a teenage prodigy

Martha Argerich: The Successful Beginning: Ravel, Bartok, Chopin, Liszt, Prokoviev, Brahms, Schumann, Beethoven, Mozart

A new bunch of important historic recordings is being released by Profil's Edition Günter Hänssler on August 19, 2018, including a promising David Barenboim release, which I'll be reviewing soon. But I'm most excited about this 4-CD set of music by a talented teenager from Buenos Aires, Martha Argerich. Argerich shot to worldwide fame when she won the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 1965, at age 24. But she was already a star-in-the-making when most of these recordings were made in 1960 and 1961, having won both the Geneva International Music Competition and the Ferruccio Busoni International Competition in 1957, at 16 years of age.

As a pupil of Friedrich Gulda - Argerich went to Vienna in 1955 to study with him - one would expect something special from her Mozart, but the performances of two great middle-period sonatas are quite astounding. The first movement of the A minor sonata K. 310 begins briskly, but Argerich soon draws back a curtain to show the composer working out dramatic themes that will soon blossom into The Abduction from the Seraglio and then his other great stage works. Argerich's control here is exemplary; she doesn't tip her hand too early, but she's ready to turn up the temperature when required. And the final section of the slow movement is played with a delicacy that rivals her teacher. The B-flat major sonata K. 333 has the same calm surfaces with hidden depths, but at a higher pitch. The slow movement of this work is a miracle: like a Watteau painting it seems at first to be something of exquisite prettiness, but it is soon exposed as something so much greater: the most perfect and awesome beauty.

Of the two concertos included, it's again the Mozart that impresses, and luckily Argerich here has the stronger support of the two, from the Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester under Peter Maag, a favourite conductor of mine who showed up a lot on disc in those days. This is also from 1960, so Argerich is still a teenager, but she sparkles throughout, and makes this great concerto about so much more than glittering runs and soft-focus pastoral scenes from Elvira Madigan.

Argerich has the huge advantage of being teamed up with the great Ruggiero Ricci, the Centennial of whose birth we've celebrated this month. Ricci was in his prime when these Bartok, Sarasate and Beethoven works were recorded (which made him 41 or 42, if my calculations are correct). While the violinist has the spotlight on himself in the Sarasate, the other two works are more balanced, and Argerich definitely doesn't let down her partner. This is the beginning of a great career as a chamber music player, to go along with an equally great one as a soloist.

Naturally the last disc in the set is largely Chopin, and everything we've heard from her Chopin in later years is present in embryo at least. A 1955 Buenos Aires Etude has dreadful sound - the only really bad sonics on the disc - but even there you can hear Argerich's power and control and delicacy. What a great opportunity to be in at the beginning of this marvellous pianist's Odyssey!

Eavesdropping on something special

From November 2, 2010:

Fans of recorded music have always talked about the sense of being more or less in a concert hall, listening to music as real as a live concert. The sound from this disc is so vivid and lifelike that I had a more privileged, intimate feeling. I could imagine that I was present at the recording, one of a handful of hangers-on allowed to sit in Geneva's lovely Victoria Hall while the recording took place, experiencing the creation of something special.

I don't have the high-end system or the high-end ears of a true audiophile, but this feeling of the musicians' presence enhanced my enjoyment more than I thought it could. The outstanding quality of Arabella Steinbacher's performance of these two pieces (the second of which tops my list of the greatest 20th century violin concertos) was just as apparent to me when I listened to the MP3s on my iPhone, as was the musicality Marek Janowski brought out from the Suisse Romand Orchestra. But this Hybrid Multichannel Super Audio CD is at the intersection of the highest levels of creation, interpretation, and technology. Watch for this disc to show up on many "Best Of" lists to come!