Downward to darkness, on extended wings

Chopin's health began to seriously deteriorate around 1842, and his final works have a valedictory quality. By the time he wrote the Barcarolle (one of his final works) in 1845-6 he surely knew that his death was near. Some of the brilliance of his earlier music is gone, though his special genius for writing piano music is still evident, even enhanced. His music is more refined, more concentrated, and his ornamentation more organic. Chopin's last works differ from each other, but each of them is somehow surprising.

The Barcarolle is an amazing work. Choppy waves on the Venetian canals gently rock Chopin's gondola, but this isn't a dreamy piece. His physical strength might have been ebbing, but there is still great power in this piece, and great virtuosity is required of the performer. Charles Rosen speaks of the piece's "long-range uninterrupted flow".

Above all the large-scale rhythm is worked out with an ease absolutely unique for Chopin’s time, and the final pages of the Barcarolle create a sense of triumph at once passionate and serene that has never been surpassed.

I listened to a whole bunch of great pianists playing this work: Perahia, Barenboim, Rubinstein, Argerich, Ashkenazy, Pollini, Rosen, Cortot, Lipatti. At one point I started to get sea-sick. While there are major differences between performances I'm not really sure what to make of them. Pollini's performance is taut, and Rubinstein's rather more leisurely.  At this level the real difference between these pianists is one of sensibility. One thing I learned for sure is that Jane Coop belongs in this company. Control, virtuosity, colour: everything is here in this smartly emotional performance.

So it goes in the whole disc, a re-release of Coop's 1999 recording. It's great that Skylark is re-releasing most of Coop's discs in 2016; though it was probably possible to buy any of these, now we can be sure.

When I listen to this music, I think of Sunday Morning, a poem by Wallace Stevens

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

Longing eased

The songs of Brahms are much less known than his orchestral, piano or chamber music, and I think also much less known than the lieder of comparable quality from Schumann, or even Beethoven and Mozart, not to mention Schubert. This is a shame, but of course it's easily remedied. There are many beautiful recordings of Brahms lieder out there, which I plan on investigating when I've had my fill of this one, which is to say after a good long time.

This new disc from Skylark has many advantages. The songs chosen include some of Brahms' best. Individual songs are chosen from collections, and this allows some quality skimming as well as the building of a varied programme in terms of key, stories and mood. Additional variety comes from the solo works provided by pianist Jane Coop. This seems to be a trend in art song recordings, and I hope it continues. The piano is after all an equal partner with the vocalist in Brahms' songs, and the op. 117 Intermezzo are some of the greatest pieces in the piano literature. Finally, there's more tonal variety in the two op. 91 songs, with the addition of a beautiful viola line. The first of these, "Longing Eased", helps to give this CD its title. It is so beautiful, and a great example of the great team Coop and Soprano Donna Brown make, with able support here from violist Yariv Aloni.


I'm unilingual, which is my shame many times over, as a Canadian who should be up on both of our Official Languages, and as a classical music fan, who should know at least German, French, and (in my particular case) Brazilian Portuguese. But it's easy enough when listening to these songs to take one's cue from the title and the musical sense of each song. That's because of the sheer beauty of Donna Brown's voice, and the sensitive accompaniment of Coop and Aloni. This 2014 recital, recorded in Vancouver's Pyatt Hall, is one I'll be listening to often.

Ducklings and violin sonatas

I'm interested in the idea of musical imprinting: based on an analogy with the idea, borrowed from psychology, "of any kind of phase-sensitive learning (learning occurring at a particular age or a particular life stage) that is rapid and apparently independent of the consequences of behavior". I have a special link with the music of the Dave Clark Five in the same way that the duckling has formed a special link with the poor cat in this animated gif:

For some reason most of the online discussions I've read on this topic so far talk about this issue in relation to popular music. My link with the Dave Clark Five is indeed special, since in all likelihood only those who were young teenagers when Glad All Over was a hit would have any kind of positive response to this music today. Thus you can bet that most DC5 fans nowadays are likely be sixty-somethings, like me.

But of course there's imprinting going on in classical music as well. In my late teens our mailman delivered a five-LP set of Beethoven's music every month, recorded by Deutsche Grammophon, in the Time-Life Beethoven Bicentennial Collection. Month after month (17 of them) of great music, even towards the end when I opened up an album of the master's Irish and Scottish Folk Song arrangements, which I've loved ever since.

This resulted in a weird bias towards Beethoven in my music history knowledge. Constantly repeated listening imprinted on me the particular performances. Today I'm likely to listen to Beethoven symphonies conducted by John Eliot Gardiner or Jordi Savall or Gustavo Dudamel, but the right sound, the proper sound for Beethoven's symphonies is Herbert von Karajan. I tend to dislike most of Karajan's music, and I quite despise him as a man. But when I think "Beethoven Symphony" in my mind, I hear the Austrian jet-setter recording this in the DGG studio in 1962:



So the piano sonatas are little ducklings running through my brain after Wilhelm Kempff. The string quartets template is by the Amadeus, the cello sonatas by Fournier & Kempff. And the violin sonatas, which I loved from the beginning, were from the 1970 recording by Wilhelm Kempff, again, and 2016's Centenary Boy Yehudi Menuhin. Listening to one sonata at a time this music might be revolutionary and dramatic, or vulgar and clever, or just heart-breakingly sad.  Listening to them all at once, from op. 12 no. 1 to op. 96, which takes four hours, is like watching a full season of The Wire, or reading The Golden Bowl.

Why the Trip Down Memory Lane before I talk about the album in question, the re-issue of Jane Coop and Andrew Dawes' 2001 Beethoven Violin Sonatas? Well, it's partly because the TDML is part of my schtick by now, but it's also to set up this: when I compared Coop & Dawes to Menuhin & Kempff, I often preferred them to the template in my head. When I preferred the earlier version, I could still admire the decisions the Canadian musicians had made. Music of this quality is as far as it can possibly be from a zero-sum game, so there's plenty of room for Perlman and Ashkenazy, or Kremer and Argerich, or many others. But to have a recording that's new to me push around one of those old imprints? Maybe the brain is indeed more plastic than we used to think. Maybe all that Sudoku is paying off!

I loved this re-release a lot. Hope I made that clear! Here's the first movement of the Spring Sonata, with leaves and blossoms bursting:



The sound of this recording is full, sounding of an open, reverberant space. It was recorded at the First Nations Longhouse at the University of British Columbia, an amazing building. I won't make any claims for a special spiritual connection between Beethoven and the Longhouse, but at the very least it's a space where two exceptional musicians made great music together.

The pain of unending longing

Just as Orpheus’ lyre opened the gates of the underworld, music unlocks for mankind an unknown realm—a world with nothing in common with the surrounding outer world of the senses. Here we abandon definite feelings and surrender to an inexpressible longing....

Only a week ago I was quoting E.T.A. Hoffmann's 1813 essay "Beethoven’s Instrumental
Music", in a review of a fine recording of Hoffmann's Symphony. But E.T.A. is at best only a minor composer; it's really in literature that he made his mark. The Beethoven essay is a landmark of music journalism because of its timing; it was an early appreciation of the cosmic significance of the Fifth Symphony. But the master of fantasy Hoffmann paints such a fantastic picture of why instrumental music is so romantic. Here's where he turns on the big guns:

Glowing rays shoot through the deep night of this realm, and we sense giant shadows surging to and fro, closing in on us until they destroy us, but not the pain of unending longing in which every desire that has risen quickly in joyful tones sinks and expires. 

Fifteen years ago Jane Coop rounded up a first group of especially romantic piano pieces, and CBC Records published it in their Musica Viva series. It's been a popular album since then (as was volume 2), and you can still order it from Amazon as a CD-R or on MP3. But on April 29, 2016, Skylark Music is re-releasing this disc, which is excellent news.

The music Coop has chosen comes from the gods of High Romanticism, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Brahms; the special god who perfectly distilled Romanticism, Debussy; and a late master who turned Romanticism up to 11, Rachmaninoff. Is there a more perfect piece to express "the pain of unending longing" than Brahms' A major Intermezzo, op. 118, no. 2? Nope; it always breaks my heart!



And is there a more perfect final quote from E.T.A. Hoffmann to end this review by letting everyone know how touched I am by Coop's playing? No, there isn't.

Romantic taste is rare, romantic talent even rarer, and perhaps for this reason there are so few who are able to sweep the lyre with tones that unveil the wonderful realm of the romantic.