Shiny new Mendelssohn

Mendelssohn: Piano Concertos 1 & 2; Works for Piano Concertante

I was excited when I saw that Ronald Brautigam was making a new recording of Mendelssohn's piano concertante music for BIS. I loved the recording he made in 1995 with Nieuw Sinfonietta Amsterdam under Lev Markiz, also for BIS, but I knew that performance styles have changed in the past 25 years, and that Brautigam has been working long enough with Michael Alexander Willens and Die Kolner Akademie to create a special partnership. Their Mozart piano concertos series for BIS is really outstanding.

As it turns out there isn't as big an interpretation gap between the two versions as I presumed would be the case, which goes to show how far ahead of his time Brautigam was at the end of the last century. These are bright and light and bouncy, but also as passionate and romantic (rather, Romantic) as Mendelssohn's mature music should be, but we could hear this in the earlier recording as well. Rather, there's a new polish to this music; it shines just that bit brighter. I've always wondered why these two concertos weren't more popular, and this new BIS CD has me even more puzzled. Very highly recommended!

Top Drawer Recording of Middle School Mozart

The final album in the great BIS series of Mozart Piano Concertos with Ronald Brautigam and Die Kolner Akademie under Michael Alexander Willens contains Mozart's least important works, but it says so much about the players that there's so much to enjoy in this release, due on October 14, 2016. These four concertos from Mozart's pre-teen years are pastiches of sonata movements written under the guidance of Dad, but they show a real flair. Let's not forget that the keyboard concerto was in its infancy. There's a natural dramatist working with this mainly banal material, punching up contrasts and adding zest and heart to galant stereotypes. I'm sure Papa helped join the dots, but there's little evidence of a natural dramatist in what I've heard of Leopold Mozart's published works.

I've always liked another very fine disc with the fortepiano, on Decca with Robert Levin and the Academy of Ancient Music under Christopher Hogwood. But I know this music best as played by Murray Perahia on a piano, and conducting the English Chamber Orchestra. I used to have an audio-cassette of this, and played it in my car in the days before we could get CBC Radio2 in Red Deer. Listening to it now, though, was a major disappointment; compared with the light and grace of both Levin and Brautigam, I found Perahia bloated. The Andante from the 2nd Concerto K.39, based on a lovely movement from a violin sonata by Schobert, has always been my favourite piece from this set. Here's Perahia's version:



Both Levin and Brautigam play this music as a somewhat brittle precursor to the slow movement of K. 467, written 14 years later. But Perahia adds a bit too much weight, I feel, perhaps more than the slight music can bear. By the way, in the later concertos I'd cheerfully listen to Perahia; his concerto series is awesome, but with this one exception.

Levin or Brautigam? I'll choose Brautigam here, by a bit. He makes the most of this charming music. So much of the credit goes, of course, to Willens and Die Kolner Akademie. Their thoughtful, musicianly partnership has made the BIS series a joy from start to this marvellous finish.

Singing the Songs Without Words

The first volume in Ronald Brautigam's series of Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words for BIS was highly praised for the singing quality of Brautigam's playing, and I'm happy to say there's more beautiful singing, more beautiful playing, on the second disc, to be released June 24, 2016. While we wait for the new album to come to Spotify, here's a track from the first disc which gives one an idea of the sound of the replica of the 1830 Pleyel fortepiano, and the singing quality Brautigam coaxes from it.

In John Eliot Gardiner's Music in the Castle of Heaven, the great conductor talks about the early experiments in playing Baroque music in a style that scholars felt was a good approximation of what Monteverdi or Bach might have known.

Then suddenly we hit a brick wall. The fault was neither theirs nor mine, but that of the instruments we were using – the same as everyone else had been using for the past hundred and fifty years. However stylishly we played them, there was no disguising that they had been designed or adapted with a totally different sonority in mind, one closely associated with a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century (and therefore anachronistic) style of expression. With their wire or metal-covered strings they were simply too powerful – and yet to scale things down and hold back was the very opposite of what this music, with its burgeoning, expressive range, calls for. 

If this is true for the music of the Baroque, how much more important is it for a Romantic composer like Mendelssohn.  It's true that control is an important part of the pianist's art, but scaling down and holding back the power and range of a Steinway grand piano surely goes against the grain. E.T.A. Hoffmann was there at the invention of Romanticism in music, which he describes in his 1813 essay "Beethoven's Instrumental Music":

Only with this pain of love, hope, joy—which consumes but does not destroy, which would burst asunder our breasts with a mightily impassioned chord—we live on, enchanted seers of the ghostly world!

When the pianist plays a "mightily impassioned chord" by Mendelssohn, and there is much passion in this music, he's holding back on a Steinway, but letting go on a Pleyel. The common perception that Historically Informed Performance is careful and cerebral and timid is all wrong; the best HIP artists are physically engaged in, viscerally linked to, impassioned about the music. That's certainly the case with Brautigam and his Mendelssohn. This music was not written to play in front of hundreds or thousands; rather it is intimate music, written in and for the restrained, classical Biedermeier rooms of the comfortable German middle class. But it is not limited in emotional range; it is truly Romantic. When things get stormy, we hear the storm the way Mendelssohn heard it in his head, and played it for his sister Fanny. In quieter moments, like the first song from Book 6, there's a natural sound, an authenticity, that escapes any pianist on a modern piano. This piece couldn't be more beautifully played than in Daniel Barenboim's classic 1974 set. It's polished to a bright shine, but it's missing a whole level of regret and loss that comes out in Brautigam's performance. The whole emotional range is here, but sounding as it might have in Mendelssohn's parlour. The lover of Mendelssohn, or of fine piano playing, should not miss out on Brautigam's Songs, now complete on two discs.

Light and alive; tasteful and thoughtful

The Mozart piano concertos are, along with Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, my absolute go-to music. I play them when I'm feeling low, or when I'm especially happy. Or when I'm feeling somewhere in between; you get the picture! Few cycles have given me as much pleasure as the one which is only now coming to a close. It began in November 2010, when BIS recorded fortepianist Ronald Brautigam and Die Kölner Akademie conducted by Michael Alexander Willens in their first disc of the series. The series was front-loaded, with the best concertos already recorded by the end of last year. This penultimate disc, released this week, and the final disc which I presume will come this fall, are bound to be a trifle anti-climactic. But early Mozart has its charms, and this repertoire has an extra interest I'll get to in a moment. This isn't profound music, but it has a very real, if slightly superficial, appeal.

The numbering of the piano concertos is a bit complicated. The two- and three-piano concertos are included in the standard list of 27, and numbers 1-4 are actually arrangements by Mozart of contemporary piano sonatas by other composers. Those four, by the way, will be included in the final disc in the BIS series. The current disc thus includes the first piano concerto Mozart actually wrote, number 5, K. 175. It's a marvellous trumpets-and-drums romp with a flashy solo part Mozart wrote for himself. One of the things that impresses me the most about this work is its effortless distillation of opera buffa into a concert work. Comedy, they say, is hard, but for a 17-year-old to make such a comic soufflé without it collapsing: astounding!

Of course Brautigam and Willens and the Cologne musicians have their part to play in keeping things so light and alive. They shine as well in the sixth concerto, K.238, which is much less flashy and a trifle more erudite. This is a tasteful and thoughtful performance of a work which begins to show the more serious side of Mozart's music.

Finally we come to three intriguing pasticcios, as they were termed, arrangements of three solo sonatas by a close musical mentor of Mozart's in London, Johann Christian Bach. These are not the arrangements I mentioned before, and they have no official numbers in the series of 27, but their Köchel number of 107 gives an idea of where they fit in Mozart's catalogue. They have considerable charm, and it's worth listening to both the originals and Mozart's arrangements.  Back in 2007 Hanssler Classic released a disc with pianist Gerrit Zitterbart that combined the three concertos and sonatas, making it easy to compare the music. Brautigam easily out-classes Zitterbart, by the way, though I regret the loss of the "Scotch snap" in his version of the Theme and Variations second movement of the G major concerto. I've always loved hearing that Hibernian lilt in English music of the 18th century.

One of the things I discovered when I listened carefully to the J.C. Bach sonatas was the high quality of this source material. These are important works, just below the level of Haydn, and deserving careful attention from pianists and listeners. It's no wonder Mozart wanted to rework this music to make an impression with connoisseurs. I recommend both Sophie Yates on Chandos and Rachel Heard in a new Naxos CD in this repertoire (Mozart arranged number 2, 3, and 4 of Bach's six sonatas). Here's Heard with the Scotch snap!