EWEARL WILD In Concert 1973-1987 EARL WILD EWIn Concert The live recording gives the illusion of “actually being there.” It’s an experience that is not always assured in a recording studio, at which no audience is allowed. In one sense, a performance in a studio is a contradic- tion in terms. Like the proverbial tree falling in the forest: did it even exist if it wasn’t heard? There is a beguiling honesty about the live recording. A live-recording boom in the early 1970s, when the first wave of bat- tery-operated recorders emerged, enabled enthusiasts to record everything from passing trains, rivers, and parades, to grandpa snoring and cicadas courting. With similar devices musicologists have been able to record on-site countless forms of impromptu and improvisational folk music and instru- mental performances. Harvard University, for example, houses the Archive of World Music, which holds vast field recordings of, among other things, Indian and Turkish music, Chinese and Bulgarian songs, Byzantine and Orthodox music, Indonesian music, and male polyphony from Iceland. The archive ensures easy access to live music at distant times and places. – 3 – The growing interest in live recordings of historic performances has become a sign of our own times. The legacy of the bel canto revival of the 1950s and 1960s, for instance, has been preserved for modern audiences through the remarkable live recordings of singers like Maria Callas, Montserrat Caballe, Beverly Sills, Joan Sutherland, and Leyla Gencer. Likewise, all of Mr. Wild’s performances on this disc are worthy of “historic preservation.” In a real sense, no live recording can replace the actual experience. But with a live recording the ambience, the acoustics, and the atmosphere sur- rounding a performance become a tangible part of that performance, pin- pointing a recordable moment at a particular time and place. Not all pianists have appreciated audiences. The reclusive Glenn Gould, for instance, said that “to me the ideal artist-to-audience relationship is one to zero.” And the Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter coped with stagefright by playing on a darkened stage (except for a reading lamp on the piano) before an audience in full light, thus conjuring the illusion of invisibility. Mr. Wild, by contrast, clearly loves audiences. The intimacy of performer and audience–when things are going well–is like the achievement of an imaginary union. As the British actor Ian Holm has said, “There is brilliant intellectual clarity, a sense of boundless, inex- haustible energy as the chambers of the brain open up… Your whole exis- tence is lit up by a dazzling sense of potential.” Mr. Wild once said in an interview, “Sometimes my interpretation is affected by the lighting, some- times by the atmosphere, whether cold or warm, and sometimes by the – 4 – instrument itself. If you have that flexibility, the audience feels the ease at which the music is coming out.” You will enjoy the pieces on this disc! Von Weber’s Rondo Brilliante, com- posed during the summer of 1819 while he was convalescing in Hosterwitz, has frisky and frolicsome rondo sections, with vivacious twists and turns even in the intermediate sections, and sparkling passages with daunting par- allel writing. Composed specifically for Weber’s own use in public perfor- mances, the piece displays Mr. Wild’s formidable technique from one end of the keyboard to the other. Dubbed “La Gaité,” it is a brilliant opener to this program. A mazurka is a Polish dance in triple meter. Chopin (1810-1849) wrote fifty-one of them, achieving a remarkable variety within their simple texture. The first one heard here, the Mazurka in C, Op. 56, no. 2, enjoys dotted rhythms that give it a rustic and even coquettish feel, by turns saucy and sweet. Defining cadences punctuate the dance throughout, and there is a brief canon–a chase–toward the end. Commentators say that “Chopin him- self played [the Mazurkas] in a swing rhythm resembling a dance with two or four beats and with accents not indicated in the music.” We certainly hear these accents in this performance. Mr. Wild plays the three mazurkas as a set. Chopin’s Mazurka in C-sharp minor, Op. 63, no. 3, has a single melody, wistful and melancholy, that appears in every measure of the piece (apart from a brief contrasting section based upon it), but its clever reaches into a variety of keys ensures the interest of its modest means. – 5 – Composed during the summer of 1842, Chopin’s episodic Mazurka in C-sharp minor, Op. 50, no. 3, the longest of those recorded here, begins with a dark, unaccompanied line whose freedom at Mr. Wild’s hand brilliantly avoids the tyranny of the triple beat. Appearing again in the middle and at the end with some resemblance to recitative, it contrasts with a couple of extroverted chordal statements and light-hearted dance-like sections in a prominent three, the last of which ranges into splendidly ear-opening keys. Its snappy final cadence contrasts with everything that went before. The composer Eugen d’Albert (1864-1932), whose father was French- Italian and his mother English, was of Scottish birth but lived primarily in Germany. A pupil of Franz Liszt, he was a piano virtuoso, his performing career attaining its height in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century. He composed a symphony, several concertos, two string quartets, lieder, and many operas and piano works, and is perhaps best known for his opera Tiefland and his transcriptions of the music of Bach. The Scherzo in F sharp, Op. 16, no. 2 features dazzling arpeggiated runs, with the hands plummet- ing up and down the keyboard, repeated chords absolutely driven in their resolve, and long trills underlying legato twirls. The slow middle section, hinted at earlier in the left hand, is withdrawn but surprisingly vast, even cinematic, and leads to a repeat of the opening section. The sheer velocity with which Mr. Wild performs this piece is stunning. A solemn and dignified work, the Pavane pour une infante défunte, of Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), is full of pathos without sentimentality, and retains the courtly elegance of its sixteenth-century Italian predecessors. – 6 – Composed in 1899, when Ravel was studying composition with Gabriel Fauré, the piece was not intended for any real-life princess, but merely cap- tures the mood of the pavane. The work brought Ravel to wide public atten- tion and he orchestrated it in 1910. Its sturdy parallel octaves (after the influence of Chabrier), and the arpeggiations leading to dissonances, add to its freshness. Ravel complained that the work was usually played too slowly (It’s a “Pavane for a Dead Princess,” not a “Dead Pavane for a Princess,” he quipped). Ravel would surely applaud Mr. Wild’s tempo on this disc. If roy- alties are any indication, Ravel is France’s most popular composer. The origin of the eight volumes of Lieder ohne Worte (Songs without words) by Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) is clouded in mystery. They may have emerged from a game that Mendelssohn played with his sister Fanny, in which they added words to piano pieces. Some have argued that the con- cept originated with A. B. Marx, who saw music as a higher form of com- munication than words. Similarly, Mendelssohn once wrote that “[words]” seem to me so ambiguous, so indefinite, so open to misunderstanding in comparison with real music, which fills one’s soul with a thousand better things than words.” Robert Schumann speculated that Mendelssohn com- posed the lieder with texts which he then suppressed. In the Spinning Song in C, Op. 67, no. 4, the very notion of the spinning wheel calls to mind cir- cular figures and repetitious patterns, and these we hear at the outset of the work, and indeed throughout, so that the circle and the wheel never leave our attention, though the real melody of the work lies subtly beneath. The painter Frederic Leighton has painted, and the composer Arnold Schönberg – 7 – has also composed Songs without words. Originally a folk song of Venetian gondoliers, barcarolles are almost always in a moderate 6/8 or 12/8 time. The Barcarolle in G-flat major, Op. 42, no. 3 (1885), one of thirteen by Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924), the master of French mélodie, is in 6/8, with its first section in six flats and its second in six sharps. The piece combines a romantic tunefulness with a relaxed drift- fulness, but in Mr. Wild’s rendering the lines are always tautly drawn, in the service of an exquisite freedom, and the more intense and dramatic sections are played rather more intensely and more dramatically than we often hear from other hands. The ravishing charm of this “water music” makes it diffi- cult to believe that “Fauré was not interested in piano writing as such.” Indeed, his barcarolles are among the most impressive in the repertoire. A German composer and conductor of Polish descent, Moritz Moszkowski (1854-1925) also enjoyed a reputation as a brilliant pianist. Ignaz Paderewski declared that “after Chopin, Moszkowski best understands how to write for the piano.” He is best known today for his fifteen Études de Virtuosité, Op. 72. Etincelles, Op. 36, no. 6, certainly lives up to its translat- ed name ‘sparks’. It ends almost as soon as it begins. It flashes about with never a moment’s diversion from its glittering patterns. Chopin’s Barcarolle in F-sharp major, Op. 60, one of his most harmoni- cally daring works, and his only contribution to this genre, is in 12/8 meter, unlike Fauré’s setting in 6/8.