A Year in Classical Music: 1926, vol. 12

Just as Mark Twain had been the first writer to create an indigenous American style in literature — the first American author who wasn’t just a transplanted European — Charles Ives was the first composer to create an indigenous American style in classical music. His music is experimental and aggressively Modernist, so it’s not as immediately agreeable as Duke Ellington or Aaron Copland, but it evokes the American experience with an eloquence and candor that few other classical composers have matched, and none have exceeded. Ives’ most productive years had been from 1902 (just after he completed his Second Symphony) until 1916 or ’17 (when he completed his Fourth Symphony). After that, with the exception of a number of songs, the Orchestral Set no. 3, and the Three Quarter-Tone Pieces for Two Pianos of 1924, he abandoned any further efforts to conceptualize and begin new works. Into the ’20s Ives spent his composing time revising and improving upon scores he’d begun years earlier. Then, towards the end of 1926, Ives came downstairs from his study with tears in his eyes and told his wife he was no longer able to compose music. “Nothing went well” anymore, he told her. “Nothing sounded right.” The last composition Ives finished was his 1926 song Sunrise, for voice, violin, and piano. Sunrise is a great example of the composer’s late “sublime style”: ethereal, reflective, tranquil. The poem is by Ives himself, set to music that includes light writing for the piano and a violin part that spends much of its time providing an ostinato for the voice. I think mezzo-soprano Tamara Mumford makes a strong case for the piece with her recording on Naxos, on volume 5 of their cycle of Ives’ songs. Ives himself was unhappy with the piece, though. He wrote self-critical remarks in the score: at the end he says, “not a good job — the words are no good, but better than the music.” It was soon after he finished Sunrise that he told his wife he couldn’t compose anymore. Was he right to be so self-critical, or by the age of 52 had he simply lost the intellectual capacity to conceive complex music? The other of Ives’ pieces that belongs in a discussion of his work in 1926 is the Orchestral Set no. 3. Ives had started work on it in 1919, and of his three orchestral sets it’s the only one that he conceived as a cohesive three- movement piece from the beginning. Ives never completed the Orchestral Set no. 3, but very likely it’s what he was working on the day he told his wife he couldn’t compose anymore. The first of its three movements he had mostly finished by ’26, but the second and third movements had to be completed by two Ives scholars: David Gray Porter and Nors Josephson. Their work allowed Naxos to recorded a world-premiere realization of the piece, on a 2008 album by the Malmö Orchestra of Sweden with conductor James Sinclair. It’s a very exciting album for Ives enthusiasts, containing all three of Ives’ orchestral sets, and the realization of the Orchestral Set no. 3 is good, it sounds like it belongs with the other two sets. All three sets use a slow-fast-slow construction in three movements. In the Orchestral Set no. 3 the two outer movements have much the same atmosphere as the Sunrise song, in the vein of Ives’ late-period “sublime style,” and the middle movement contains a good deal of the popular tune collage and rowdy cacophony that’s familiar in Ives’ orchestral music. My favorite composer of this sort of music (by which I mean highly dissonant, free-form orchestral tapestries) is Henri Dutilleux. Dutilleux came two generations after Ives, and while I’ve found no indication that Ives directly influenced him, we can certainly view Ives as a pioneer, and Dutilleux as the inheritor of a well-developed and established genre that Ives had helped to create. So Ives and Dutilleux were to this kind of music what Haydn and Brahms were to the symphony. That’s how I hear it: a Dutilleux piece like Timbres, Espace, Mouvement “La Nuit Etoilée” is more intricate and complex than an Ives orchestral set, and I would say more sophisticated, but the Ives is steeped in the creative energy and joy that come with the first explorations of a new territory in music.

England had first recognized Gustav Holst as a major composer in 1918, with the premiere of his now-famous orchestral suite The Planets. In those days he had divided his time between composition and teaching, as the director of music at Morely College in downtown London, and at the St. Paul Girls’ School at Hammersmith, just west of downtown. But in the early ’20s, as he reached the age of fifty, Holst had been forced to become less active so as to look after his health, which had begun to decline. In 1925 he retired from most of his teaching, which left him more time for composing. Holst’s 1926 composition project was The Golden Goose, which he described as a “choral ballet.” The Golden Goose is a Brothers Grimm fairy tale in which a young man who does a good deed is rewarded with a goose whose feathers are made of pure gold. Other people try to pluck feathers from the goose but are magically stuck to it, and to each other. The young man goes about his business with the goose under his arm, without paying any attention to the people who are stuck to it and have to follow him around. Eventually the young man leads them all to the city where the king lives. The king has a daughter who has such a serious attitude that no one has ever been able to make her laugh. So the king has promised her hand in marriage to the man who can make her laugh, and when she sees the procession of people stumbling along, stuck to the golden goose, she laughs until she cries. The young man marries her, inherits the kingdom, and everyone lives happily ever after — except, possibly, for the golden goose and all the people who are stuck to it… we never find out if they get un-stuck. In any case, the story was adapted and turned into a ballet, for which Holst composed the music. He was pleased with his score, pleased enough that he began to have it performed as a concert piece, without the dancers. Holst had always followed his imagination wherever it led him, not worrying about satisfying the appetites of the public who, understandably, wanted to hear more music like The Planets from him. The Golden Goose sounds nothing like The Planets. By the 1920’s Holst had moved away from the heavy and powerful Wagnerian style, which had been so much a part of the inspiration for The Planets. The Golden Goose is simpler stuff, in the style of English folk music. Listen to the recording by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Richard Hickox. It was the last recording Hickox made before he died; it’s a fine album in its own right, but it’s especially dear to fans of the prolific champion of British classical music. As for The Planets, though, Holst conducted a recording of the work in 1926 that’s still available today. These podcasts are generally concerned with music composed in a certain year, not recorded then; but in this case Holst’s work as a conductor and recording artist are of interest. Holst had first conducted a recording of the The Planets in 1923, when the recording technology was all mechanical, using big sound-catching cones. His 1926 recording of The Planets was captured with new, state-of-the-art electronic recording technology, with its newfangled microphones, speakers, and mixing consoles; it was one of the earliest electronic recordings ever made. Electronic recording improved recorded sound quality, but it also reduced the playing time of the discs. So to fit the music onto the records in 1926 Holst had to use faster tempos than he had in 1923. If you’re interested, I’ve put links to both the ’23 and ’26 recordings up at ayicm.com. The sound quality is definitely much better on the ’26 recording, but it’s still a long way from the high-fidelity recordings we’ve been used to the last fifty or sixty years. Still, with either the ’23 or ’26 recording, it’s interesting to hear Holst interpret his own music.

We opened the program with Charles Ives, who lived in in 1926 — also living in New York at the time was . Rachmaninoff had been born into the landed Russian aristocracy in 1873. His grandfather had been a skillful pianist and composer, having studied with Chopin’s predecessor, the Irish pianist and composer John Field. Both of Rachmaninoff’s parents were amateur pianists, and Rachmaninoff himself, of course, became one of history’s greatest pianists. But after 1917 the Bolsheviks confiscated the Rachmaninoff family property, after a good deal of looting and destruction at the family estates in the violence of the revolution. Rachmaninoff was then made to join the collective, forced to attend the mandatory committee meetings, forced to carry a rifle and stand on guard duty at night. He fled with his family to America at the first opportunity, adding his name to the long roster of “white émigrés.” These were the “white” rather than “red” Russians, those who did not support the Bolsheviks, fleeing into a Russian diaspora. The White Russians made for a mass emigration that included scores of artists and intellectuals, an emigration from which even today has perhaps not fully recovered. Rachmaninoff eventually settled in New York. To make a living in the very different American economy, he had to focus less on composing and more on his performing career as one of history’s great concert pianists; and just as it had for Glazunov, the end of the Old World in Russia made Rachmaninoff’s cultural identity into an anachronism and derailed him as a composer. He would complete only six more original compositions in the remaining twenty-five years of his life. The first piece Rachmaninoff completed after this decade of silence was his Fourth Piano Concerto in G Minor of 1926. Rachmaninoff had written sketches for the piece in 1914, but set it aside at the onset of the First World War. In ’26 he took his sketches back out again, taking time away from piano practice so that he could have it ready for the American concert season that fall. (By the way, before we get into the Rachmaninoff Fourth, do remember from earlier podcasts what the other piano concerto written in New York in 1926 was? If you answered the Aaron Copland Piano Concerto, you were correct.) The Fourth has been neglected amongst Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos. Its melodies aren’t as memorable as the ones that helped propel his Second and Third concertos to their legendary status, and its aesthetic concerns are more Modernist, having less to do with the yearning Romanticism of Rachmaninoff’s other works for piano and orchestra. Another problem has been that when Rachmaninoff returned to his old sketches to write out the full score, he second-guessed himself. He balked at the length of the piece, writing to a colleague that it would have to be performed on separate nights like Wagner’s Ring cycle. This is puzzling because the original score only lasts about thirty minutes, which is hardly excessive for a Romantic or Modernist concerto. But for whatever reason — for whatever doubts he had in himself, for however much the critics’ cold response to the piece furthered that self- doubt, for however disoriented he’d become as a Romantic composer in the Modernist age — Rachmaninoff would eventually cut more than one hundred bars from the 1926 version of the piece. These cuts affected the last movement most of all: the last half of it is almost completely different than in the original. So Rachmaninoff’s revisions have left us with three recorded versions of the Fourth Piano Concerto. First there’s the 1926 original, which was not available in print until the year 2000, when the Rachmaninoff Estate authorized its publication. The original ’26 version has been recorded three times (that I know of), the best of these being Yevgeny Subdin’s 2008 performance with the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra and Grant Llewellyn — the conductor who has even more L’s in his last name than I do. Subdin is lithe and agile. You might ask for a bit more muscle than Subdin and North Carolina bring to the recording, but the phrasing is always well-shaped and appropriate from one passage to the next, and it lends the music a sense of continual development where other performers sap its momentum. Subdin’s album comes with a really interesting pairing, too: the Second Piano Concerto of Nikolai Medtner, which was finished in 1927, just the year after Rachmaninoff finished his Fourth. The second of the three versions of the Rachmaninoff is from 1927, after the first round of cuts the composer made to the Fourth. This version has only been commercially recorded only once, by pianist William Black and the Iceland Symphony under Igor Buketoff. Buketoff knew Rachmaninoff personally. He based this performance on extensive discussions they had about the piece, which lends an authenticity to his reading that you have to take seriously. Lastly, we have the final 1941 version of Rachmaninoff’s Fourth, with further cuts and revisions to both the piano part and the orchestration. The best loved of them has been Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli’s 1957 reading with the , under Ettore Gracis. The full album pairs the Rachmaninoff with Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, and is widely considered one of the greatest concerto recordings of all time. The passion and energy Michelangeli brings to this performance are really incredible. He tackles the score aggressively, with very quick tempos but with a style and panache that set his reading above even Earl Wild’s, who’s technically just as impressive. And it may be that an up-tempo approach is best for this paired-down 1941 revision; it may be that slower tempos and introspective efforts to reflect on the music’s architecture don’t work as well with this final version of the score. Some performers and critics have commented that with all the material Rachmaninoff removed from the original with the ’41 version, it doesn’t make nearly as much sense structurally. Stephen Hough’s 2004 recording of the ’41 version is slow and introspective, and I don’t think it works next to Michelangeli’s. This gives you Evgeny Subdin in the ’26 version, William Black in the ’27 version, and Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli in the ’41 version. Which of these three is best? I don’t think you can choose between them. The fact is there’s no consensus on which of the three versions of the piece is best. Some think Rachmaninoff got the Fourth Piano Concerto right the first time, but the composer didn’t think so, so if you like the ’26 version best you have to say you’re a better judge of the piece than Rachmaninoff himself was. Some think that the second version, the 1927, is the weakest of the three, that it sounds the most “cut,” but Black’s performance of that version made the strongest first impression on me, the first time I listened through all the different recordings of the three versions of the piece. And as for the final 1941 version, most performers respect Rachmaninoff’s final verdict and still use it today, even with the two early versions having recently become available; but maybe Rachmaninoff did get it wrong when he tried to improve this music. Maybe second-guessing and revising the Fourth Concerto years later was as misguided as George Lucas second-guessing and revising the original Star Wars films years later, adding a bunch of CGI aliens and making Greedo shoot first. In the end, I think you have to take each of the three versions of the piece on its own, like you have to treat Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings books and Peter Jackson’s movies as different things. So you get Subdin’s album, Black’s album, and Michelangeli’s album, and you enjoy each of them for their own merits. Rachmaninoff also composed Three Russian Songs, for chorus and orchestra, in 1926. He dedicated the score to , who premiered it with Rachmaninoff’s favorite orchestra, the , the next year. Now, if the Fourth Piano Concerto is about Rachmaninoff wrestling with Modernism, questioning the relevance of the old school Romanticism of his earlier and more famous concertos, the Three Russian Songs are just the opposite. Three Russian Songs is Rachmaninoff looking back with longing and nostalgia to the Old World in Russia, tipping his hat to it by arranging and orchestrating three Russian folk tunes. Three Russian Songs isn’t often heard because it requires a huge choir and orchestra, which is expensive. So we don’t have a long list of acclaimed recordings to sort through, but I’ll recommend the recording of Three Russian Songs by the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra under Vladimir Ashkenazy to you. It’s a tighter and more driving performance than the one by the St. Louis Symphony with Leonard Slatkin, with a more dramatic reading by the choir that’s better balanced with the orchestra. I’ve always loved the Concertgebouw Orchestra. They’ve been my favorite recorded orchestra for almost as long as I’ve been listening to classical music — over and over they’ve delivered performances as expressive and powerful and technically polished as any orchestra’s, but in a dry, balanced, Apollonian tone that I find fascinating. They can play any repertoire, too: they can play Bach and Mozart as well as the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields and they can play Mahler and Stravinsky as well as the Chicago Symphony. Their reading of Rachmaninoff’s Three Russian Songs is right up there, too, it’s dark and gripping. Now, having said all that, the 1973 performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra under is definitely just as good. It’s more theatrical, and the orchestral sound on the recording is richer. But the Temple University Singers use an English translation instead of the Russian originals, which is why I prefer the Ashkenazy. One of my favorite of all movie scenes is from The Shawshank Redemption, with Morgan Freeman’s monologue about the Italian language in the recording of the duet from Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro that Tim Robbins’ character plays over the prison loudspeakers. Freeman says he has no idea what the two Italian women were singing about, that he likes to think it’s something so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words — which it isn’t, by the way, because the two sopranos are only writing a letter to Count Almaviva to expose his philandering. But the point here is, there’s something to be said for listening to classical singing in other languages. Not knowing what the words mean takes the rational ideas of the text away. It makes the words into part of the music, makes them abstract like the music. Of course to completely understand what the composer is up to you need to know what the words mean, but in much of the English language vocal music I’ve heard, I’ve found the rational ideas the words present to be a distraction: you stop listening to the music so that you can think about the meaning of the text. So for as good as Ormandy’s Three Russian Songs is, I get more out of the piece listening to Ashkenazy’s Russian language performance, then reading the translations of the poems in the booklet afterwards. The Ashkenazy album pairs Three Russian Songs with an equally fine reading of The Bells, which Rachmaninoff considered his best work.