MARC-ANDRÉ HAMELIN Plays the Composer-Pianists Alkan
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MARC-ANDRÉ HAMELIN plays The Composer-Pianists Alkan . Busoni Feinberg . Godowsky Hamelin . Medtner Rachmaninov Scriabin Sorabji HE RELATION between musical effect and the technical ‘encore’ repertoire; less convincingly as regards the latter half means necessary for its creation or recreation is apt to of a recital, which at one time might have been entirely Tbe one of opposites. The ‘Representation of Chaos’ with devoted to the type of confection indicated above. However, it which Haydn embarked on The Creation, for example, could can be said that the present offers the best of all liberal worlds, not have succeeded without a conspicuously well ordered in which deeply serious artists may leaven but not demean the compositional technique, nor could the percussion- and intellectual and spiritual weight of their mainstream reper- timpani-based anarchy of Nielsen’s Fourth and Fifth toire by restoring to public attention the full variety and zest of Symphonies or, indeed, the ‘controlled chance’ of more a once discredited milieu. In this connection the abstract recent, aleatory trends. A true chaos of means leads only to nature and importance of ‘pianism’ itself should be empha- incoherence, whereas an intended one of expressive ends may sized: for the serious performing artist the purely physical, be likened to the birth of a universe: explosive, precipitate, callisthenic dimension in Tausig, Rosenthal, Schulz-Evler, seemingly beyond all elemental control, and yet achieved with Scharwenka, Hoffman, Godowsky and others illumines the the pinprick accuracy of some infinitely magnified snowflake, nature of the instrument, and of the art itself, in myriad and defying our later scrutiny to find in it mere accident rather idiosyncratic ways. In all such cases, as with others to be than purposeful divinity. encountered on this disc, profound insights can proceed from A comparable dichotomy can be identified in certain areas the manner in which extreme ‘difficulty’ yet embodies ele- of musical performance. Extreme virtuoso demands in the gance rather than ungainliness, being a glove perfectly and nineteenth and twentieth centuries may at times have been lovingly tailored to the requisite virtuoso hand, not a freakish conceived with a conscious intention to convey visceral gift to the man with an extra finger on each. Recent remarks excitement through an audience’s pleasurable apprehension by Marc-André Hamelin may substantiate this. Listeners may of risk: the solo performer, in particular, may be seen more find it hard to believe his memorable disclaimer, “I don’t like and more to succeed in such territory the nearer he or she playing difficult music”, to which the present writer could seems to come to being unseated, though preferably without respond only “How do you know?”, but once one accepts the ever quite ‘going over the edge’. This requires not an actual notion that apparently fearsome technical demands may fraying of the edges of physical control, but the knowing through the composer-pianist’s insight become perfectly projection of an illusion born of the player’s absolute security. attuned to specialized physical means, it is hard to identify any Despite all this, however, the heyday of romantic virtuosity, of the music heard here as espousing ‘difficulty’ purely for its and in particular its ‘paraphrase’—transcription or purpose- own sake. By its very nature the highly developed virtuosity of designed ‘encore’ repertoire—, offers an alternative view. all these works, including that of Hamelin’s own Etudes, Here technical difficulties might seem to exist out of all cannot fail to be justified on purely expressive grounds, and proportion to whatever poetic vision they were summoned to therefore commends itself to the serious student of pianism in convey. Who then would wrestle with such monsters, unless so all its many forms, even in a case where high pianistic formidably equipped that no monsters were actually to be sophistication goes knowingly hand in hand with composi- found? Such works have understandably acquired the tional and stylistic mischief (vide notes on Hamelin’s Etude metaphorical designation ‘calling cards’, so explicitly do they No 9). Such is pre-eminently the case, Hamelin has said, with set out their exponents’ virtuoso credentials. Medtner, a deeply serious composer-pianist whom he reveres Nowadays it seems widely thought that the artistic climate as attaining a perfect harmony of expressive intent and of an earlier epoch of recital-giving has made a full return. physical means superior even to that of Chopin. Alongside This is not wholly true: the case can be argued in respect of such intricacy of conception we meet here forms of 2 simplicity—such as that in the Alkan Esquisses—which maninov, unlike them Alexander Scriabin died before the somehow mark themselves out as the products of an infinitely onset of Revolution. Reputedly a formidable pianist, he none- sophisticated compositional and pianistic intelligence. If theless suffered from a form of nervous hypertension which virtuoso composer-pianists never write ‘difficult’ music, this rendered performance draining to the point of occasionally seems to tell us, nor does artless simplicity of manner spring literal prostration, and his keyboard writing in itself conveys from a comparable innocence of the imagination. something of a sense of the ‘fault line’ between lyrical According to received wisdom, Leopold Godowsky’s imaginative freedom and strenuous kinetic activity. His early recorded legacy fails to do justice to his true stature as a works are dominated by the spirit of Chopin, not least the pianist (well attested by the close circle of colleagues and Chopin of the Twenty-four Preludes, where seemingly impro- friends who heard him at private gatherings). Though his visatory melodic grace goes hand in hand with concentrated hectic life can hardly be described as reclusive and his brevity and with the use of pianistic figuration as a unifying personality appeared exceptionally genial, his uneasy force in itself. Scriabin’s debt is acknowledged openly in his relationship with both recording studio and concert hall titles (Mazurka, Impromptu, Nocturne, Etude) and also in suggests a reticence possibly related to that of Alkan and the marked preponderance of solo-piano music in his output Sorabji. Born in the old Lithuanian capital of Wilno, at (though less single-mindedly than in Chopin’s case). How- eighteen months Godowsky lost his father in a cholera ever, the mature Scriabin emerges very much as sui generis epidemic. His formative years were penurious and he lacked through his idiosyncratic harmony and its capacity to spawn true luck and opportunity both in Europe and in the USA transient melodic or rhythmic motifs. Scriabin’s theosophist (where he was initially at a linguistic disadvantage). It was only leanings developed in due course into something close to after a sensational Berlin debut in 1900 that he tasted success. megalomania (readily detectable in his orchestral works and From the onset of the Great War until his death he lived in the in such commentaries as he offered on his later piano USA, arriving there a homeless refugee with his family. His sonatas). However, while the shorter piano solo works came to final years were afflicted by the ravages of a stroke, the loss of inhabit an ever more rarefied interior world, their tendency to his wife and son (the latter a suicide), and effects of the Wall vacillate between fragile dragonfly ephemerality and a sort of Street Crash of 1929. He died a shadow of his former self, volatile, incendiary rhetoric merely extends a thread running despairing at the clear imminence of another war. through Scriabin’s output as a whole. Godowsky’s piano music epitomizes technical difficulty of The Tragic Poem was written in 1903, a significant year an acutely subtle and refined order, being both perfectly made which saw also the appearance of the transitional Fourth for the requisitely gifted pair of hands and, consequently, often Sonata in two linked movements. Although the Poem is many times more challenging than those hands may make it reminiscent both texturally and harmonically of that work’s appear. The Toccata, subtitled ‘Moto perpetuo’, was included tumultuous final pages, hinting too at certain declamatory in its composer’s recital programmes in Chicago during 1898 wide melodic intervals in the more radical Fifth Sonata, there and again at the Beethoven Saal in Berlin on 16 January 1901, is a sense also of harking back to the strenuous pathos of this last following upon the triumphs of the previous year and much earlier pieces such as the last of the Etudes, Op 8. therefore exerting a very different effect upon the public. The two Poems forming Opus 71 date from 1914 and are Against stereotypical expectation the Toccata is a filigree among Scriabin’s last compositions, though written without conception of distinctive delicacy, abjuring the ‘obligatory’ premonition of impending extinction. Marked ‘Fantastique’ in thunderous ending in favour of a quiet restraint. the published score, the first is effectively an archetype of the A contemporary and compatriot of Medtner and Rach- composer’s late manner, its voice as instantly recognizable as 3 anything in his output. Its brevity is a necessary facet not of tions before the onset of another thematic statement. elusive fragility but of claustrophobic concentration, weirdly lit Etude No 10 (1987) is written in the enharmonic as if from within by sudden harmonic excrescences above the equivalent minor key to its G flat model, namely F sharp middle register of the instrument. The title ‘Dark Flames’, minor. This suggestion of the obverse side of a coin prompts a used soon after in Scriabin’s Opus 73, seems to apply equally veiled and intermittently sinister excursion (marked well here. By contrast the second Poem, ‘En rêvant, avec une Tenebroso), whimsically designated ‘pour les idées noires’ grande douceur’, conjures a mellifluous remoteness, seeming (for ‘black thoughts’, rather than merely ‘black keys’).