Let's Dance!

Unexpected America: music by Paul Schoenfield, William Bolcolm, Camargo Guarnieri, Aaron Copland, Mike Mower

Put on your dancing shoes for a well-chosen mix of South and North American music for violin and piano, from violinist Oscar Bohórquez and pianist Frank Braley.

The programme begins with a suite of Four Souvenirs for Violin and Piano, by the Detroit-born composer Paul Schoenfield, written in 1990. An opening Samba, with a slow interlude at its centre, is followed by a sultry Tango. As often happens at a dance, when a slow song comes up, things get steamy! The ghost of George Gershwin is then brought out for Tin Pan Alley. This is top rank pastiche; I definitely use that word in a positive sense! Schoenfield's finale is Square Dance, one of the most lively bits on this album. It's sad to learn that Schoenfield died just under a year ago, in April 2024, at 77 years of age. This wonderful performance makes for an elegy and remembrance of a fine composer.

William Bolcolm's lovely ragtime "Graceful Ghost" is a standout. Bolcolm really shows as well as tells; this is as graceful as any piece I've heard. The themes are so lovely, which is important in this form. With so many repetitions in a ragtime,  each of the tunes must be embraced on its return. Bolcolm's six minute piece never wears out its welcome; this is salon music of the highest level.

Mozart Camargo Guarnieri's Violin Sonata no. 4 is a substantial work in a standard classical music form, but even here one feels the built-in rhythms of the choros, the urban popular music of Brazil. Written in 1956, while his (and every other Brazilian composers') master, Heitor Villa-Lobos, was still alive, Guarnieri's Sonata looks back to Villa's three violin sonatas of the early 1920s, which made such a stir at the Semana de Arte Moderna in Sao Paulo in 1922. The typically Brazilian version of nostalgia - saudade - is evident in the lovely Intimo slow movement, though Guarnieri really lets loose in the raucous Allegro appassionato finale, which has Villa's fingerprints all over it. By the way, Mozart was really Guarnieri's given name; his brothers were Bellini, Verdi and Rossine. A tough act to follow, on top of the Villa-Lobosian elephant in the room, but Guarnieri never seems to have lacked for self-confidence. His music always displays complete self-assurance and equanimity.

Aaron Copland's Nocturne, from 1926, is another slow dance in a modernist idiom. Perhaps it's the context of this programme, but this American music heard through a Parisian lens, with Nadia Boulanger's fingerprints this time, very much feels at home in South America as well. Copland made many personal and professional connections among Latin American musicians through his involvement in Nelson Rockefeller's Good Neighbor initiative of the WWII years, but that was still in the future.

The last work on the disc is the beguiling Bossa Merengova from the British composer Mike Mower's Sonata Latino, from 1994. This clever mix of the Brazilian bossa nova and the Cuban merengue shows the underlying connections between the various dance traditions of Latin America. Again with a wistful element to go with the sprightly rhythms, this is a wonderful way to end a wonderful programme.

Bohórquez plays a Guarneri del Gesù violin on which he produces a beautiful tone; his familiarity with the various musical traditions of Latin America results in completely idiomatic performances. He and pianist Frank Braley really swing this music when required; it's important to stress the folkloric component of this music, especially in a work like the Guarnieri Violin Sonata, with its erudite, academic, component.

Sad stories about death and dying

Shostakovich: String Quartet no. 8; Schubert: String Quartet no. 14

A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token.

 - Mark Rothko

Masterpieces meet at Sothebys: Rothko's Untitled (Yellow & Blue), 1954 and Van Gogh's L'Allee des Alyscamps, 1888
📷 Mary Turner, 2015

Matching two or more works from different eras is a tried-and-true programming trick for concerts or recordings, which works often enough that I would never want to see it fall out of favour. A stellar example is the Aris Quartett's new disc, with sparks flying back and forth between Shostakovich and Schubert, both of whom show an intensity of feeling belied by the often calm surfaces of their string quartets. The one work calls to the other, like a Rothko and a Van Gogh hung together, yellows reflecting off each other, and blues pulling each together. The concept works best, of course, with two masterpieces masterfully played. The Aris players, quite correctly, I think, play the Shostakovich first. It's a harrowing mash-up of all sorts of horrors: historical (it's dedicated to the "victims of fascism and the war"), political (coming after the composer's humiliating forced membership in the Communist party), and personal (he had recently experienced the first symptoms of what was eventually diagnosed as ALS). In spite of all of this the 8th Quartet is one of Shostakovich's best known and popular works, both in its original form and in Rudolf Barshai's transcription for string orchestra as the Chamber Symphony op. 110a. The 14th Quartet of Schubert, named for his song "Death and the Maiden" was also written in response to a health crisis, and Schubert's own knowledge of his impending death, and it too contains music of surpassing beauty.

The intense feelings of both of these works create both tensions and release, within each piece and between the two. Set in this frame, these fine musicians tell us incredibly sad stories about death and dying in the 19th and the 20th centuries. I felt privileged to hear these stories again and again as I listened to this album, every time hearing new facets of sadness, anger and the comforts of beauty and love. This is a significant achievement for Genuin and the Aris Quartett.

In the middle of it

In an illuminating essay that's part of the liner notes for this new Genuin double CD, the members of the Asasello Quartett come up with an analogy for their involvement with Schoenberg's four great quartets:

Immersion is actually a pretty good word for it. The work on the Schoenberg string quartets was not unlike scuba diving: stay calm and breathe steadily as you move along the reefs, marveling at the colorful world-in-miniature. The little coral trees with tiny fish flitting through their branches; then turn your head to gaze into endless blue as a majestic Napoleon fish glides by. Microcosm/macrocosm, it is all happening at once and there is too much of everything because that is how life is, and you feel you could burst with joy and passion but you manage to keep your cool, maintain the balance, stay on top of things as you store the impressions for always. You resurface knowing you would been down there as a guest; you have “felt the force”, seen the indescribable beauty, and are thankful for having been a part of it for a short while. Nature being what it is, no matter how often you repeat the dive, it is always slightly new and different. The wonder, however, remains unabated. Luckily, so does the awe: in deep waters any inattention or recklessness is hazardous.

I thought immediately of a favourite passage in John Eliot Gardner's great book about Bach, Music in the Castle of Heaven:

Imagine ... what it feels like to stand chest-deep in the ocean, waiting to snorkel. What you see are the sparse physical features visible to the naked eye: the shore, the horizon, the surface of the sea, maybe a boat or two, and perhaps the bleached outline of fish or coral just below, but not much else. Then you don your mask and lower yourself into the water. Immediately you enter a separate, magical world of myriad tints and vibrant colours, the subtle movement of passing shoals, the waving of sea anemones and coral – a vivid but wholly different reality. To me this is akin to the experience and shock of performing Bach’s music – the way it exposes to you its brilliant colour spectrum, its sharpness of contour, its harmonic depth, and the essential fluidity of its movement and underlying rhythm. Above water there is dull quotidian noise; below the surface is the magical world of Bach’s musical sounds. But even once the performance is over and the music has melted back into the silence from which it began, we are still left with the transporting impact of the experience, which lingers in the memory. 

That these two descriptions should be so similar is a sign that the shared experience of music-making can have deep connections. That Gardner's magical Bach experience should be so similar to that of the young musicians of the Asasello Quartett belies the common perception of Schoenberg as a systematic destroyer and bringer of what Max Weber called "the distinctive injury of modernity: disenchantment (Entzauberung)". Of course there is magic in this music, and not only in the richly romantic 1st quartet, which reportedly intrigued but puzzled Mahler. More importantly, these performances are full of this magic. This is emphasized by their presentation of the quartets in reverse chronological order, rather than a more conventional move from the richly neo-romantic to the revolutionary systematic, to the cerebral and ascetic style of Schoenberg's maturity. As Gardner says, “...in order to present it with full belief and conviction, I try to convey what it feels like to be in the middle of it.” With this important project the Asasello Quartet and soprano Eva Resch have pulled that off.

A strong program for strings and guitar

I've sometimes thought of certain composers as soldiers of fortune, but always in a metaphorical way. Antoine de Lhoyer (1768 - 1852) was literally both. He was an "elite member of Gardes du Corps du Roi, a Knight of the Order of St John and a Knight of the Order of St Louis", as Wikipedia tells us, though I have no idea how impressive that actually is. I wouldn't place him in an elite category as a composer, but he seems to have been quite a virtuoso on the guitar. Based on the evidence of the work included on this very good disc, the first recording by the Basel-based Chamber Orchestra I TEMPI, Lhoyer had a way with melody, and he writes a light and transparent orchestral accompaniment to allow his sometimes virtuosic solo part to shine through. For some reason, though, Lhoyer only wrote two movements in his Guitar Concerto. It seems to be standard practice to insert the Adagio movement from his A major Duo concertante, with one of the guitars discarded. Here it fits well, though I prefer Lhoyer's original version (all three of his Duos are worth listening to). The main competition for this version of the Concerto is a 2004 Naive disc, with guitarist Philippe Spinosi and the Ensemble Matheus conducted by his brother Jean-Christophe. I prefer the new disc for its stronger string sound and clearer, more focussed recording, and for guitarist Stephan Schmidt's excellent playing.

The competition for the remaining pieces on the disc - the Dvorak E minor and Elgar Serenades - is much, much stronger.  In an old Parlophone disc Charles Mackerras and the English Chamber Orchestra present the Dvorak as a perfect Watteau painting, ripe with youthful verve and nostalgic sorrow, and always perfectly beautiful. Gevorg Gharabekyan gets a more than competent performance from his young musicians, but the final layer is missing. Gharabekyan rushes through all three movements of the Elgar; this is excellent playing, but I'd rather hear Barbirolli's more serious, more romantic (though sedately romantic, to be sure) version with the Sinfonia of London, which is just this side of self-indulgent. Again, this is on an even older Parlophone disc, which I once had on LP. Parlophone wasn't just for the Beatles, you know!