Three neoclassical symphonies

Simone Menezes: Music by Prokofiev, Villa-Lobos & Poulenc

The up-and-coming Brazilian conductor Simone Menezes has matched three symphonic works in an album about neoclassicism, one of the most interesting and important components of the modernist revolution in the music of the first half of twentieth century. As a musical lens neoclassicism offered a new way to look at the past, sharpening and bringing into focus at times, distorting at others. But more important is what it illuminates about the modern world and the composers that lived in it.

The revolution of the new, modern music of Stravinsky, Debussy & Ravel was just as frightening as the fractured visual arts ushered in by Picasso & Braque. It's no wonder that in 1917 both Sergei Prokofiev and Heitor Villa-Lobos should throw a lifeline back to 18th century Vienna to help keep their bearings as they wrote their music of the future. Prokofiev's model was Haydn's symphonies, while Villa-Lobos looked to Mozart's operatic music. The former created a masterwork in his "Classical" Symphony, while Villa's First Sinfonietta, "In Memory of Mozart" has made much less of a stir in the century since. It's a nice little piece, a clever piece, which shows how quickly the Brazilian composer could pick up an entirely new musical vocabulary thousands of miles away from its Parisian epicentre. Villa-Lobos spent years playing the cello in the pit of the Rio de Janeiro opera house, and his Sinfonietta is a deconstruction of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro and the Magic Flute. But Villa had a different European forebear; his true personal voice didn't emerge until he came to terms with the music of Bach.

Simone Menezes has been pondering the similarities between the Classical Symphony and the Sinfonietta #1 for quite a while. Here's a video from back in 2018 where she explains how similar the two works are, though one was written in Rio, the other in St. Petersburg/Petrograd:

The Sinfonietta of Francis Poulenc, meanwhile, was written thirty years later, in 1947. A decade younger than Villa-Lobos & Prokofiev, Poulenc was actually more closely aligned with the musical avant garde, writing modernist works beginning in the late 1910s. As the post-WWII era began, his own neoclassical symphony adds a second layer of looking back: to the 18th century Viennese masters, but also to the younger Poulenc himself, writing such works as the Concert champêtre for harpsichord & orchestra in 1928. His Sinfonietta is suffused with nostalgia, but unsentimental in nature. Earlier I called neoclassicism a lens; in this work Poulenc is using it as a kaleidoscope. Scenes shift, and the ostensibly trivial work becomes a sophisticated compendium of earlier times. As Simone Menezes says in her excellent liner note essay, "... the work transcends its apparent lightness, approaching a symphonic dimension not through development, but through accumulation and contrast."

This recording is greater than the sum of its three parts; each symphonic work is enhanced by its relationship with the others, and the place of each in musical history makes listening as instructive as it is enjoyable.

The cover design is by Jimena Estíbaliz.

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!